206 performance as art
an imaginary map on a real street. Are these simply unperformed (or unper-
formable) performable works, analogous to the newly discovered Eighth
Symphony of Sibelius hypothesised in Chapter 2? There is at least one reason
to question whether this is the right way to view such pieces: it isn’t clear
in what ways an actual performance would bear upon their appreciation.
Recall, here, that we defined a performable work in terms of the role that
actual performances play in its proper appreciation.
Finally, Cage’s work raises problems of a different kind. It seems fairly
clear this is a performable work – indeed, it has been performed on a
number of occasions. Some have questioned, however, whether it is a musical
work, since the performer is not required to produce an ordered sequence
of sounds.^5 He is, perhaps, prescribed to permit a series of ambient sounds
to be audible, but that is a different matter.
3 What is Performance Art?
We shall return to these examples in the following section, where we shall
try to determine which of them are rightly categorized as falling within the
performing arts. First, however, we need to say something about the general
idea of “performance art.” Acconci, Beuys, and Burden are usually described
as “performance artists,” but this term is a very difficult one to pin down. In
attempting to locate works of performance art in the more general context
of the performing arts, the most obvious strategy would be to identify them
with particular performance-events that are artworks in their own right
but are not also performances of independent works. This certainly seems a
plausible way in which to view Beuys’s Coyote and Hatoum’s Negotiating Table.
If we wanted to argue that these performances should count as artworks ,
we might point to the ways in which they seek to articulate their contents,
as specified above. The use of exemplification, relative repleteness in the
range of properties playing a content-determining role, and the hierarchi-
cally ordered way in which content is articulated, meet the conditions laid
down in Chapter 1 for a content to be articulated “artistically.”
These kinds of criteria also seem relevant if we consider the possibility
of performance “counterparts” analogous to the counterparts celebrated in
writings on the visual arts. The latter are not themselves visual artworks
but share with particular visual artworks all of their manifest properties. An
example would be a snow shovel of ordinary mass manufacture that shares
all the perceptible properties of Duchamp’s “ready-made” In Advance of the
Broken Arm. Consider the following example of such a counterpart in the
realm of performance. In April–May 2007, the Chinese performance artist
Hai Rong Tian Tian and a fellow performance artist sealed themselves in
rooms behind glass walls for a month so as to expose their daily lives to those