performance art and the performing arts 201
7 that at least some work-performances are themselves performance-works. I
also looked at the conditions that must be satisfied for this to be the case.
In this chapter, we shall consider some performances that occur in artistic
contexts but whose status as artistic in either of the above senses is moot. Some
performances in artistic contexts are obviously not artistic in either sense
because they play no part in articulating the artistic content of an artwork.
The stage hands who entertained Berthold and Magda in the provincial theater
clearly put on a performance. They were consciously guided in their actions
by expectations as to how these actions would be judged by their intended
audience. But they presumably lacked any intention that their actions articu-
late a content in the way that artworks do, and they were not soliciting from
their audience the kind of regard that artworks demand. Similar considera-
tions would apply to the performance of a gallery guide who prides himself on
his ability to “put on a show” for the punters, liberally interlacing information
about the paintings with anecdotes, theatrical asides, and similar devices.
In other cases, however, there is clearly both a performance, or a prescription
for a performance, and a clear intent to articulate, through that performance
or prescription, an artistic content of some kind, yet the status of the perform-
ance as artistic in either of our senses is unclear. These performances are usually
classified as “performance art,” and are exemplified in the works of artists like
Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, and Joseph Beuys. We need to clarify how such
performances are to be understood and whether they are rightly viewed as fall-
ing within the performing arts. It will be helpful, here, to consider a range of
examples, and then to ask how they stand in relation to one another.
2 Some Puzzling Cases
We can begin with an example of a kind familiar to us from the discussion of
improvisation in Chapter 8:
(1) “A series of five scales, each to be played as long as the soloist wishes until
he has completed the series.”^2
This description, by Bill Evans, of Miles Davis’s piece “All Blues,” obviously
requires further elaboration ( which series of five scales?) in order to fully
identify the piece. As argued in Chapter 8, it seems most plausible to view
this as a thin performable work designed to be a framework for improvi-
sation. A canonical recorded performance of this piece by the Miles Davis
Quintet is on the album Kind of Blue.
(2) A B and an F sharp tone – a perfect fifth – “to be held for a long time.”