performance art and the performing arts 209
visual or verbal records or documentations of the performances. Carroll, like
Goldberg, stresses the awareness, on the part of those involved in the devel-
opment of “art performance,” of the earlier traditions of Futurism and Dada.
“Performance art,” in Carroll’s sense, developed out of traditional theater,
as a reaction against the idea that dramatic performance should be a vehicle
for a literary text. It stressed, rather, the performative aspects of group or
individual activity on a stage, and the values, such as spectacle, realizable
through such activity. The orientation of traditional theater towards repre-
sentation, spectatorship, and fidelity to the text was replaced by a concern
with the presentational, the participatory, and the visual and gestural. In
dance, this manifested itself in the interest in the body in motion explored
in the work of choreographers like Yvonne Rainer – something that echoes
the interests of the Futurists in the body as mechanism. Rather than the per-
former mediating between the audience and a character that she represents,
there is a focus on performativity, the unmediated interaction between the
performer and her audience. Recent work in “performance art” in Carroll’s
sense has generated, and in turn been influenced by, philosophically inflected
studies of performativity by those working in “performance studies.”^8
4 When Do Works of Performance Art Involve
Artistic Performances?
Goldberg and Carroll are surely right in thinking that the category of per-
formance art is to be understood in broadly art-historical and sociological
terms, rather than in terms of a distinctive medium employed by artists. In
this respect it resembles “street art” and differs from “cinematic art.” But our
interest in performance art is an interest in the ways in which at least some
performance artists use a particular medium for expressive purposes. More
specifically, we want to determine, with particular reference to the “puzzling
cases” identified earlier, whether, and if so when, works of performance art
fall within the scope of the performing arts as understood in the body of this
book. In Chapter 1, we characterized the performing arts as those practices
whose principal aim is the presentation of artistic performances. An artistic
performance, in turn, is one that serves as an artistic vehicle through which
an artistic content – the content of an artwork – is articulated. Whether that
content belongs to the performance itself – qua performance-work – or to a
performable work which it instantiates, it is the performance that serves as
the vehicle whereby that content is articulated.
This principle holds however bizarre the nature of the content and how-
ever bizarre the nature of the performance. For this reason, we should have
no problem identifying the performances by Beuys, Hatoum, and Burden as