Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance art and the performing arts 207
who visited the exhibit.^6 If this is a work of performance art, and not an
amateurish attempt to replicate the television program Big Brother , this is not
because of the different institutional contexts in which the events took place
but because of the point of what the performance artists were doing and the
way in which this point was articulated through the performance.
But the idea that works of performance art are simply particular
performance-events that are artworks in their own right but not work-per-
formances conflicts in at least two ways with our antecedent classification of
artworks. First, it would make free jazz improvisations works of performance
art. Second, it would exclude accepted works of performance art that are them-
selves performable works admitting of multiple performances – for example,
works by Robert Wilson and Laurie Anderson – and foreclose in an arbitrary
fashion on the status as performance art of many of the puzzling examples given
above. The pieces by Young, Naumann, and Yoko Ono, for example, seem to be
multiply performable at least in principle. Some, indeed, have sought to restrict
works of performance art to non-repeatable events. Alan Kaprow, for exam-
ple, so restricted the use of the term “happening” which he coined to describe
performances carried out in the 1950s and 1960s. But artistic practice does not
endorse this restriction, and neither should we.
Given these difficulties, it is perhaps better to identify works of perform-
ance art through their relation to certain historically situated traditions of
artistic making, traditions from which they emerge or by reference to which
they define themselves. This is the approach taken by two prominent writers
on this issue, RoseLee Goldberg (2001), who has authored an authoritative
history of performance art, and Noël Carroll (1986), who situates perform-
ance art in relation to theoretical and practical innovations in the visual and
theatrical arts in the latter half of the twentieth century. Both authors resist
the invitation to define “performance art,” on the grounds that the phenom-
ena we seek to capture under that label are too diverse. Goldberg stresses
that much twentieth-century performance art stems from artists’ dissatis-
faction with more established artistic practices, and with working within
the limitations of particular artistic media (2001, 9). Performance artists
often draw in a single work upon different art forms and different media –
literature, poetry, theater, music, dance, architecture, and painting, as well
as video, film, slides, and narrative. They deploy these resources in ways that
by their very novelty defeat any attempt at definition. All that can be said is
that performance art is “live art by artists.” But, as we have seen, this is at
best a necessary condition for being performance art in the accepted sense.
And it is by no means necessary that a performance by a performance artist
be presented live to an audience. Acconci’s Following Piece , if this is indeed a
work of performance art, would demonstrate this, as would his other pieces
that are available to us through film but that were performed privately. (They