Philosophy of the Performing Arts

208 performance as art
were performed privately partly because one of the issues that Acconci was
exploring in these works was the boundary between the private and the pub-
lic.^7 ) And the works of one of the most famous contemporary performance
artists, Matthew Barney, are made available to audiences in highly complex
cinematic presentations.
Goldberg traces the roots of performance art in the second half of the
twentieth century to such earlier movements as Italian Futurism, Russian
Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, and Bauhaus. In each case, she maintains,
the “object” works customarily associated with these movements come out of
an artistically revolutionary impulse whose initial, but now widely ignored,
expressions were in performance. This often involved theatrical perform-
ances that stressed provocation, interaction with the audience, and the rejec-
tion of the traditional theatrical idea that performance is work-performance.
Such performances drew upon such non-artistic practices as the circus,
vaudeville, cabaret, and puppet shows, and sought to relocate art in public
space rather than in galleries. The focus was not, as in theater traditionally
conceived, on the representation of action and the rendering of a text, but
upon the performers themselves and the visual aspects – the spectacle – of
the performance. The conjoining of different traditional artistic media in
such performances is well illustrated in the Bauhaus conception of the “total
art work,” something echoed in the “happenings” of the 1950s and 1960s and
also in later works by artists such as Robert Wilson.
Carroll takes avant-garde theater, as represented in particular by Artaud,
to be one of two sources of the interest in performance in the art of the
1970s and 1980s. He distinguishes between what he terms “art performance”
and “performance art.” The former originated in the 1960s as a reaction to
perceived problems with the ways in which visual artworks were presented
in galleries. The doctrine of “medium-purity,” promoted most forcefully
by Clement Greenberg, was seen as denying the relevance of the artist’s
“performance” in creating a work, as exemplified in the action painting of
Jackson Pollock. “Art performance” manifested itself initially in “happenings”
that rejected both the idea of the purity and autonomy of different artistic
media, and the focusing of artistic interest on formal properties of objects
divorced from the activities of artists. One of the most famous such perform-
ances took place at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1952, and
involved collaborations, under the aegis of John Cage, between musicians,
choreographers, poets, painters, and film-makers. Later exponents of “art
performance” included individual artists such as Acconci, who used his body
as a medium for exploring and expressing themes relating to human inter-
action, and Gilbert and George, who produced works of “live sculpture.”
While their artistic vehicles are actions, these works, like traditional visual
artworks, are made accessible to audiences in art galleries, but through the