In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or via media; the performer can be present or absent. It can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body, or presence in a medium, and a relationship between performer and audience. Performance art can happen anywhere, in any venue or setting and for any length of time. The actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work.

Visual arts, performing arts, and art performance[link]

Performance art is an essentially contested concept: any single definition of it implies the recognition of rival uses. As concepts like "democracy" or "art", it implies productive disagreement with itself.^[1]

The meaning of the term in the narrower sense is related to postmodernist traditions in Western culture. From about the mid-1960s into the 1970s, often derived from concepts of visual art, with respect to Antonin Artaud, Dada, the Situationists, Fluxus, Installation art, and Conceptual Art, performance art tended to be defined as an antithesis to theatre, challenging orthodox art forms and cultural norms. The ideal had been an ephemeral and authentic experience for performer and audience in an event that could not be repeated, captured or purchased.^[2] The in this time widely discussed difference, how concepts of visual arts and concepts of performing arts are utilized, can determine the meanings of a performance art presentation (compare Performance: A Critical Introduction by Marvin Carlson, P. 103,2-105,1).

Performance art is a term usually reserved to refer to a conceptual art which conveys a content-based meaning in a more drama-related sense, rather than being simple performance for its own sake for entertainment purposes. It largely refers to a performance presented to an audience, but which does not seek to present a conventional theatrical play or a formal linear narrative, or which alternately does not seek to depict a set of fictitious characters in formal scripted interactions. It therefore can include action or spoken word as a communication between the artist and audience, or even ignore expectations of an audience, rather than following a script written beforehand.

Some kinds of performance art nevertheless can be close to performing arts. Such performance may utilize a script or create a fictitious dramatic setting, but still constitute performance art in that it does not seek to follow the usual dramatic norm of creating a fictitious setting with a linear script which follows conventional real-world dynamics; rather, it would intentionally seek to satirize or to transcend the usual real-world dynamics which are used in conventional theatrical plays.

Performance artists often challenge the audience to think in new and unconventional ways, break conventions of traditional arts, and break down conventional ideas about "what art is". As long as the performer does not become a player who repeats a role, performance art can include satirical elements (compare Blue Man Group); utilize robots and machines as performers, as in pieces of the Survival Research Laboratories; or borrow elements of any performing arts such as dance, music, and circus.

Some artists, e.g. the Viennese Actionists and neo-Dadaists, prefer to use the terms "live art", "action art", "actions", "intervention" (see art intervention) or "manoeuvre" to describe their performing activities. As genres of performance art appear body art, fluxus-performance, happening, action poetry, and intermedia.

Origins[link]

Performance art activity is not confined to European or American art traditions; notable practitioners can be found in Asia and Latin America. Performance artists and theorists point to different traditions and histories, ranging from tribal to sporting and ritual or religious events. In an episode of In our time broadcast on Thu, 20 Oct 2005, 21:30 on BBC Radio 4, Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Warwick; Miriam Griffin, Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford; and John Moles, Professor of Latin, University of Newcastle discussed with Melvyn Bragg the idea that Antisthenes and Diogenes in ancient Greece practiced a form of performance art and that they acquired the epithet of cynic which means "dog" due to Diogenes behaving repeatedly like a dog in his performances.

There are also accounts of Renaissance artists such as itinerant poets putting on public performances that could be said to be ancestors of performance art.^{[citation needed]}

Western cultural theorists often trace performance art activity back to the beginning of the 20th century, to the Russian constructivists, Futurists and Dada. Dada provided a significant progenitor with the unconventional performances of poetry, often at the Cabaret Voltaire, by the likes of Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara. Russian Futurist artists could be identified as precursors of performance, such as David Burliuk, who painted his face for his actions (1910–20) and Alexander Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova.

According to the art critic Harold Rosenberg in the 1940s and 1950s Action Painting gave artists the freedom to perform - the canvas as "an arena in which to act", thereby rendering the paintings as traces of the artist's performance in his/her studio. Abstract expressionism and Action painting preceded the Fluxus movement, Happenings and the emergence of Performance Art.

Performance art was anticipated, if not explicitly formulated, by Japan's Gutai group of the 1950s, especially in such works as Atsuko Tanaka's "Electric Dress" (1956) [1].

Yves Klein had been a precursor of performance art with the conceptual pieces of Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility) 1959–62, and works like the photomontage, Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void). In the late 1960s Earth artists as diverse as Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer and Carl Andre created environmental pieces that predict the performance art of the 1970s. Works of conceptual artists in the early 1980s, like Sol LeWitt, who converted mural-style drawing into an act of performance by others, were influenced by Yves Klein and the Earth artists as well.

1960s[link]

In the 1960s a variety of new works, concepts and the increasing number of artists led to new kinds of performance art.

Prototypic for the artform later explicitly labeled "performance art", were works of artists like Yoko Ono with her Wall piece for orchestra (1962); Carolee Schneemann with pieces like Meat Joy (1964); Wolf Vostell with his Happening YOU ^[3] (1964 in New York); Joseph Beuys with How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965); Yayoi Kusama, with actions such as a naked flag-burning on the Brooklyn Bridge (1968) and Allan Kaprow in his many Happenings.

Kaprow had coined the term Happening describing a new artform, at the beginning of the 1960s. A Happening allows the artist to experiment with body motion, recorded sounds, written and spoken texts, and even smells. One of Kaprow's earliest was "Happenings in the New York Scene," written in 1961 as the form was developing.^[4] Notably in the Happenings of Allan Kaprow, the audience members become performers. While the audiences in Happenings had been welcomed as the performers, it is only sometimes and often unwittingly that they become an active part in a Performance. Other artists who created Happenings besides Kaprow include Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, and Wolf Vostell: Theater is in the Street (Paris in 1958).

Hermann Nitsch in 1962 presented his "Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries" (Orgien- und Mysterien Theater), a precursor to performance art, close to the performing arts.

Andy Warhol during the early 1960s beginning to create films and video, in the mid-60s sponsored the Velvet Underground and staged events and performances in New York, like the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966) that featured live Rock music, exploding lights, and film.

Indirectly influential for art-world performance, particularly in the United States, were new forms of theatre, embodied by the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Living Theatre and showcased in Off-Off Broadway theaters in SoHO and at La MaMa in New York City. The Living Theatre chiefly toured in Europe between 1963 and 1968, and in the U.S. in 1968. A work of this period, Paradise Now was notorious for its audience participation and a scene in which actors recited a list of social taboos that included nudity, while disrobing.

The work of performance artists after 1968 often showed influences of the cultural and political events of that year. Barbara T. Smith with Ritual Meal (1969) was at the forefront of the feminist body-, and performance art of the 1970s; among others including: Carolee Schneemann, and Joan Jonas. Schneemann and Jonas along with Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Allan Kaprow, Vito Acconci, and Chris Burden pioneered the relationship between Body art and performance art.

1970s[link]

Artists whose work already before tended to be a performance art, as well as new artists, at the beginning of the 1970s began to present performance art in a stricter form.

New artists with radical performances were Chris Burden, with the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters, and Vito Acconci in the same year with Seedbed.

The book Expanded Cinema, by Gene Youngblood, marked a shift in the use of media by performance artists. The first book considering video art as an art form, mentions Jud Yalkut as a pioneering video artist. Since 1965 he had collaborated in dozens of intermedia performances throughout the United States, also with Nam June Paik, who beginning of the 1960s already had been a fluxus performer on the way to become a media artist. As to the art of Paik, Youngblood refers to works of Carolee Schneemann and Robert Whitman from the 1960s, which had been pioneering for performance art, becoming an independent artform at the beginning of the 1970s.^[5]

The British-based pair Gilbert and George, already in 1970, had documented actions of themselves on video, and created their "living sculpture" performance, being painted in gold and singing "Underneath The Arches" for extended periods. Joan Jonas began to include video in her experimental performances in 1972.

In 1973 Laurie Anderson performed Duets on Ice, on the streets of New York City. Marina Abramović, in the performance "Rhythm 10", conceptually included the violation of her body.^[6]

Since 1973 the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles had a formative impact on the wave of performances with feminist background.

Carolee Schneemann work in 1963, Eye Body, already had been a prototype of performance art. Schneemann in 1975 drew on with innovative solo performances, like Interior Scroll, showing the female body as an artistic medium.

Performance art, because of its relative transience, by the 1970s, had a fairly robust presence in the avant-garde of East Bloc countries, especially Yugoslavia and Poland.

1980s[link]

Until the 1980s, performance art had been demystifying virtuosity. Now it began to embrace technical brilliance.^[7] In reference to Presence and Resistance^[8] by Philip Auslander, a performance art critic, Sally Banes writes “… by the end of the 1980s, performance art had become so widely known that it no longer needed to be defined; mass culture, especially television, had come to supply both structure and subject matter for much performance art; and several performance artists, including Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Willem Dafoe, and Ann Magnuson, had indeed become crossover artists in mainstream entertainment.”^[9]

Despite the fact that many performances are held within the circle of a small art-world group, RoseLee Goldberg notes, in Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present that "performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium, especially in the 1980s, stems from an apparent desire of that public to gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its distinct community, and to be surprised by the unexpected, always unorthodox presentations that the artists devise.”^[10]

Among the performance art most discussed in the art-world of this decade were a performance by Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh between July 1983 and July 1984, Art/Life: One Year Performance (Rope Piece), and Karen Finley’s I'm an Ass Man 1987.

Until the decline of the European eastern block during the late 1980s, performance art by most communist governments had actively been rejected. With the exception of Poland and Yugoslavia, performance art was more or less banned in countries where any independent public event was feared. In the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Latvia it happened in apartments, at seemingly spontaneous gatherings in artist studios, in church-controlled settings, or covered as another activity, like a photo-shooting. Isolated of the western conceptual context, in different settings it could be like a playful protest or like a bitter comment, using subversive metaphors to express dissent with the political situation.^[11]

Hedwig Gorski before 1982 came up up with the term performance poetry, to distinguish her text-based vocal performances from performance art, especially the work of performance artists, such as Laurie Anderson, who worked with music at that time. Performance poets relied more on the rhetorical and philosophical expression in their poetics than performance artists, who arose from the visual art genres of painting and sculpture.

1990s[link]

While the Soviet bloc disintegrated, formerly repressed activities of performance artists like György Galántai in Hungary, or the Collective Action Group in Russia, became better known. Young artists from all over the former Eastern bloc, including Russia, turned to performance. Performance art at about the same time appeared in Cuba, the Caribbean and China. Chinese performance artists like Zhang Huan had been performing underground since the late 1980s. Beginning of the 1990s chinese performance art already was acclaimed in the international artscene.^[12]

"In these contexts performance art became a critical new voice with a social force similar to that found in Western Europe, the United States and South America in the 1960s and early 1970s. It should be emphasized that the eruption of performance art in the 1990s in Eastern Europe, China, South Africa, Cuba, and elsewhere should never be considered either secondary to or imitative of the West."^[13]

In the western world in the 1990s, even sophisticated performance art became part of the cultural mainstream: performance art as a complete artform gained admittance into art museums and became a museal topic.^[14]

2000s[link]

In the second half of the decade, computer-aided forms of performance art began to take place.^[15]

From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Marina Abramović's work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA's history.^[16] During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed "The Artist is Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.^[17] A support group for the "sitters," "Sitting with Marina," was established on Facebook.^[18] The performance attracted celebrities such as Björk and James Franco and received coverage on the internet.^[19]

Gallery[link]

• 

  Performance artist Joseph Beuys in 1978: Jeder Mensch ein Künstler — Auf dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus - Every person an artist — On the way to the libertarian form of the social organism

• Stelarc ArsElectronica97.jpg

  Stelarc "Parasite: Event for Invaded and Involuntary Body" (1997) Ars Electronica Festival

• 

  Marina Abramović: Seven Easy Pieces, 9. November 2005

• 

  Marina Abramović performing in "The Artist is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art, May 2010

See also[link]

• Classificatory disputes about art
• Danger music
• Flash mob
• Noise music
• New media art
• Living statue
• List of performance artists
• Survival Research Laboratories

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Carlson, Marvin (1996) Performance: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-13702-0, ISBN 0-415-13703-9
• Carr, C. (1993) On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-5267-4, ISBN 0-8195-6269-6
• Thomas Dreher: Performance Art nach 1945. Aktionstheater und Intermedia. München: Wilhelm Fink 2001. ISBN 3-7705-3452-2 (in German)
• Erika Fischer-Lichte: Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt: edition suhrkamp 2004. ISBN 3-518-12373-4 (in German)
• Goldberg, Roselee (1998) Performance: Live Art Since 1960. Harry N. Abrams, NY NY. ISBN 978-0-8109-4360-5
• Goldberg, Roselee (2001) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (World of Art). Thames & Hudson
• Gómez-Peña, Guillermo (2005) Ethno-techno: Writings on performance, activism and pedagogy. Routledge, London. ISBN 0-415-36248-2
• Jones, Amelia and Heathfield, Adrian (eds.) (2012), Perform, Repeat, Record. Live Art in History. Intellect, Bristol. ISBN 978-1-84150-489-6
• Rockwell, John (2004) Preserve Performance Art? New York Times, April 30.
• Schimmel, Paul (ed.) (1998) Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979. Thames and Hudson, Los Angeles. Library of the Congress NX456.5.P38 S35 1998
• Smith, Roberta (2005) Performance Art Gets Its Biennial. New York Times, November 2.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Performance art

Wikiversity has learning materials about Performance art

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Performance art

• Live Art Archives at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection
• Thomas Dreher: Intermedia Art: Performance Art (most articles in German)
• João Raposo (pt):

Marina Abramović
Abramović performing The Artist is Present, MoMA, May 2010
Born	(1946-11-30) November 30, 1946 (age 65) Belgrade, PR Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia
Field	Performance Art
Training	Academy of Fine Arts, Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb
Movement	Conceptual art
Works	Rhythm Series (1973–1974) Works with Ulay (1976–1988) Balkan Baroque (1997) The Artist is Present (2010)

Marina Abramović (Serbian Cyrillic: Марина Абрамовић; born November 30, 1946) is a Belgrade-born New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the "grandmother of performance art". Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.

Early life[link]

Marina Abramović's great uncle was Patriarch Varnava of the Serbian Orthodox Church.^[1] Both of her parents were Partisans^[2] during the Second World War: her father Vojo was a commander who was acclaimed as a national hero after the War; her mother Danica was a major in the army, and in the mid-sixties was Director of the Museum of the Revolution and Art in Belgrade.

Abramović's father left the family in 1964. In an interview published in 1998, she described how her "mother took complete military-style control of me and my brother. I was not allowed to leave the house after 10 o'clock at night till I was 29 years old. ... [A]ll the performances in Yugoslavia I did before 10 o'clock in the evening because I had to be home then. It's completely insane, but all of my cutting myself, whipping myself, burning myself, almost losing my life in the firestar, everything was done before 10 in the evening."^[3]

Abramović was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965–70. She completed her post-graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, SR Croatia in 1972. From 1973 to 1975, she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts at Novi Sad, while implementing her first solo performances.

From 1971 to 1976, she was married to Neša Paripović. In 1976, Abramović left Yugoslavia and moved to Amsterdam.

Selected early works[link]

[edit] Rhythm 10, 1973

In her first performance Abramović explored elements of ritual and gesture. Making use of twenty knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the Russian game in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of her hand. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had set up, and record the operation.

After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging together past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body – the pain and the sounds of the stabbing, the double sounds from the history and from the replication. With this piece, Abramović began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. “Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do.”^[4]

[edit] Rhythm 5, 1974

Abramović sought to re-evoke the energy of extreme body pain, in this case using a large petroleum-drenched star, which the artist lit on fire at the start of the performance. Standing outside the star, Abramović cut her nails, toenails, and hair. When finished with each, she threw the clippings into the flames, creating a burst of light each time. Burning the communist five-pointed star represented a physical and mental purification, while addressing the political traditions of her past.

In the final act of purification, Abramović leapt across the flames, propelling herself into the center of the large star. Due to the light and smoke given off by the fire, the observing audience didn't realize that, once inside the star, the artist had lost consciousness from lack of oxygen. Some members of the audience realized what had occurred only when the flames came very near to her body and she remained inert. A doctor and several members of the audience intervened and extricated her from the star.

Abramović later commented upon this experience: “I was very angry because I understood there is a physical limit: when you lose consciousness you can’t be present; you can’t perform.”^[5]

[edit] Rhythm 2, 1974

As an experiment testing whether a state of unconsciousness could be incorporated into a performance, Abramović devised a performance in two parts.

In the first part, she took a pill prescribed for catatonia, a condition in which a person’s muscles are immobilized and remain in a single position for hours at a time. Being completely healthy, Abramović's body reacted violently to the drug, experiencing seizures and uncontrollable movements for the first half of the performance. While lacking any control over her body movements, her mind was lucid, and she observed what was occurring.

Ten minutes after the effects of that drug had worn off, Abramović ingested another pill – this time one prescribed for aggressive and depressed people – which resulted in general immobility. Bodily she was present, yet mentally she was completely removed. (In fact, she has no memory of the lapsed time.) This project was an early component of her explorations of the connections between body and mind, which later took her to Tibet and the Australian desert. Following Rhythm 2, she set to develop the rest of the series of rhythm projects, continually testing her endurance.

[edit] Rhythm 0, 1974

To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her.

Abramović had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.

Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained impassive) people began to act more aggressively. As Abramović described it later:

“What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.” ... “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”^[6]

Works with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen)[link]

In 1976, after moving to Amsterdam, Abramović met the West German performance artist Uwe Laysiepen, who went by the single name Ulay. They have the same birthday, in different years.

When Abramović and Ulay began their collaboration, the main concepts they explored were the ego and artistic identity. This was the beginning of a decade of influential collaborative work. Each performer was interested in the traditions of their cultural heritages and the individual’s desire for ritual. Consequently, they decided to form a collective being called “the other”, and spoke of themselves as parts of a “two-headed body”.^[7] They dressed and behaved like twins, and created a relationship of complete trust. As they defined this phantom identity, their individual identities became less accessible. In an analysis of phantom artistic identities, Charles Green has noted that this allowed a deeper understanding of the artist as performer, for it revealed a way of “having the artistic self made available for self-scrutiny.”^[8]

While some critics have explored the idea of a hermaphroditic state of being as a feminist statement, Abramović herself denies considering this as a conscious concept. Her body studies, she insists, have always been concerned primarily with the body as the unit of an individual, a tendency she traces to her parents' military pasts. Rather than concern themselves with gender ideologies, Abramović/Ulay explored extreme states of consciousness and their relationship to architectural space. They devised a series of works in which their bodies created additional spaces for audience interaction. In "Relation in Space" (1976) they ran around the room – two bodies like two planets, mixing male and female energy into a third component called “that self.” "Relation in Movement" had the pair drive their car inside of a museum for 365 laps; a black liquid oozed from the car, forming a kind of sculpture, each lap representing a year. (After 365 laps they entered the New Millennium.)

In discussing this phase of her performance history, Abramović has said: “The main problem in this relationship was what to do with the two artists’ egos. I had to find out how to put my ego down, as did he, to create something like a hermaphroditic state of being that we called the death self.”^[9]

To create this “Death self,” the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual's ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.

In Imponderabilia (1977, reenacted in 2010) two performers, both completely nude, stand in a doorway. The public must squeeze between them in order to pass, and in doing so choose which one of them to face.

In 1988, after several years of tense relations, Abramović and Ulay decided to make a spiritual journey which would end their relationship. Each of them walked the Great Wall of China, starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. As Abramović described it: “That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye.”^[10]

Abramović conceived this walk in a dream, and it provided what she thought was an appropriate, romantic ending to a relationship full of mysticism, energy and attraction. She later described the process: “We needed a certain form of ending, after this huge distance walking towards each other. It is very human. It is in a way more dramatic, more like a film ending … Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do.”^[10]

Abramović reported that during her walk she was reinterpreting her connection to the physical world and to nature. She felt that the metals in the ground influenced her mood and state of being; she also pondered the Chinese myths in which the great wall has been described as a “dragon of energy.”

[edit] Seven Easy Pieces, November 2005

Abramović performing Bruce Nauman's "Body Pressure." Guggenheim Museum, November 2005.

Beginning on November 9, 2005, Abramović presented Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. On seven consecutive nights for seven hours she recreated the works of five artists first performed in the 60s and 70s, in addition to re-performing her own "Lips of Thomas" and introducing a new performance on the last night. The performances were arduous, requiring both the physical and the mental concentration of the artist. Included in Abramović's performances were recreations of Gina Pane's Self-Portraits, which required lying on a bed frame suspended over a grid of lit candles, and of Vito Acconci's 1972 performance in which the artist masturbated under the floorboards of a gallery as visitors walked overhead. It is argued that Abramović re-performed these works as a series of homages to the past, though many of the performances were altered from their originals.^[11]

Here is a full list of the works performed:

• Bruce Nauman's Body Pressure (1974)
• Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1972)
• Valie Export's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969)
• Gina Pane's The Conditioning (1973)
• Joseph Beuys's How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)
• Abramović's own Lips of Thomas (1975)
• Abramović's own Entering the Other Side (2005)

[edit] The Artist Is Present, March–May 2010

Abramović performing in "The Artist is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art, March 2010.

From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Abramović's work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA's history.^[12] During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed "The Artist is Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.^[13] A support group for the "sitters", "Sitting with Marina", was established on Facebook^[14] as was the blog "Marina Abramović made me cry".^[15] In September 2011, a video game version of Abramović's performance was released by Pippin Barr.^[16]

Later life[link]

Marina Abramović purchased a theater two hours north of Manhattan in Hudson, NY, intending to establish a nonprofit organization, Marina Abramović Foundation for the Preservation of Performance Art. She will use the space to work and develop ideas with video and post-production equipment and there will be a second property to house resident artists.^[17]

In 2009, Abramović was featured in Chiara Clemente's documentary Our City Dreams and a book of the same name. The five featured artists – also including Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, and Nancy Spero – "each possess a passion for making work that is inseparable from their devotion to New York," according to the publisher.^[18]

Abramović is also the subject of an independent feature documentary movie currently titled "MARINA" that is based on her life and performance at her retrospective "The Artist is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. The film will be broadcast in the United States on HBO.^[19]

In January 2011, Abramović was on the cover of Serbian ELLE, photographed by Dushan Reljin.

Prizes and awards[link]

• Golden Lion Award, XLVII Venice Biennale, 1997
• Niedersächsischer Kunstpreis, 2003
• New York Dance and Performance Awards (The Bessies), 2003
• International Association of Art Critics, Best Show in a Commercial Gallery Award, 2003
• Honorary Doctorate of Arts, University of Plymouth UK, 25 September 2009
• Cultural Leadership Award, American Federation of Arts, 26 October 2011
• Honorary Doctorate of Arts, Instituto Superior de Arte, Cuba, 14 May 2012

See also[link]

• Avant-garde
• Experimental theatre
• Fluxus
• Richard Foreman
• Happening
• Dick Higgins
• Intermedia
• Allan Kaprow
• Elizabeth LeCompte
• Ontological-Hysteric Theater
• Performance art
• Richard Schechner
• Speculations: An Essay on the Theater
• The Flea Theater
• The Wooster Group
• Mac Wellman

Bibliography[link]

Works by Abramović and collaborators[link]

• Artist Body: Performances 1969–1998, artist, Abramović; authors Abramović, Toni Stooss, Thomas McEvilley, Bojana Pejic, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Chrissie Iles, Jan Avgikos, Thomas Wulffen, Velimir Abramović; English ed. (Charta, 1998) ISBN 978-88-8158-175-7.
• The Bridge / El Puente, artist Abramović, authors Abramović, Pablo J. Rico, Thomas Wulffen (Charta, 1998) ISBN 978-84-482-1857-7.
• Performing Body, artist Abramović, authors Abramović, Dobrila Denegri (Charta, 1998) ISBN 978-88-8158-160-3.
• Balkan Baroque, (Pierre Coulibeuf, 1999)
• Public Body: Installations and Objects 1965–2001, artist Abramović, authors Celant, Germano, Abramović (Charta, 2001) ISBN 978-88-8158-295-2.
• Marina Abramović, fifteen artists, Fondazione Ratti; co-authors Abramović, Anna Daneri, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Lóránd Hegyi, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Angela Vettese (Charta, 2002) ISBN 978-88-8158-365-2.
• Student Body, artist Abramović, vari; authors Abramović, Miguel Fernandez-Cid, studenti; (Charta, 2002) ISBN 978-88-8158-449-9.
• The House with the Ocean View, artist Abramović; authors Abramović, Sean Kelly, Thomas McEvilley, Cindy Carr, Chrissie Iles, RosaLee Goldberg, Peggy Phelan (Charta, 2004) ISBN 978-88-8158-436-9; the 2002 piece of the same name, in which Abramović lived on three open platforms in a gallery with only water for 12 days, was reenacted in Sex and the City in the HBO series' sixth season.^[20]
• Marina Abramović: The Biography of Biographies, artist Abramović; co-authors Abramović, Michael Laub, Monique Veaute, Fabrizio Grifasi (Charta, 2004) ISBN 978-88-8158-495-6.
• Balkan Epic, (Skira, 2006).
• Balkan Erotic Epic, as producer and director, Destricted (Offhollywood Digital, 2006)
• Seven Easy Pieces, artist, Abramović; authors Nancy Spector, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Sandra Umathum, Abramović; (Charta, 2007). ISBN 978-88-8158-626-4.

Critical and academic studies[link]

• Laurie Anderson, “Marina Abramović,” Bomb Summer 2003: 25–31.
• Patrick Anderson, "How to Stage Self-Consumption," So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. pp. 85–109.
• Klaus Biesenbach (ed.), Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, Exhibition Catalog with essays by Klaus Biesenbach, Arthur C. Danto, Chrissie Iles, Nancy Spector, and Jovana Stokić, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010
• Aline Brandauer,. "Marina Abramović: Double Blind." Sculpture, July/August 1995, pp. 23–27.
• A Daneri, et al., (eds.), Marina Abramović, (Charta, 2002)
• Jovan Despotovic, Marina Abramović, ’Fin de siecle’ – Balkans way, Borba, Belgrade, September 6–7, 1997, p. 17
• Jennifer Fisher, “Interperformance: The Live Tableaux of Suzanne Lacy, Janine Antoni, and Marina Abramović,” Art Journal 56 (1997): 28–33.
• Charles Green, “Doppelgangers and the Third Force: The Artistic Collaborations of Gilbert & George and Marina Abramović/Ulay,” Art Journal 59.2: 36–45.
• Shogo Hagiwara, “Art Hurts: Blood and Pain are Abramović’s Media,” The Daily Yomiuri April 1, 2004 p18.
• Janet Kaplan, “Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramović,” Art Journal 58:2 (1999):6–19.
• Zoe Kosmidou, “A Conversation with Marina Abramović,” Sculpture Nov. 2001: 27–31.
• Tom Lubbock, “Visual Arts: Caught In the Act; It’s Video But Not As We Know It,” The Independent September 2, 2003.
• Thomas McEvilley, “Performing the Present Tense,” Art in America April 2003: 114–117; 153.
• Thomas McEvilley, "Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramović and Ulay, Together & Apart," book, Documentext (McPherson & Company), 2010.
• Asami Nagai, “Art in Harmony with Nature,” The Daily Yomiuri July 24, 2003, p. 13.
• Anna Novakov, “Point of Access: Marina Abramović’s 1975 Performance Role Exchange,” Woman’s Art Journal Fall 2003/Winter 2004: 31–35.
• Jennifer Phipps, “Marina Abramović/Ulay/Ulay/Marina Abramović,” Art & Text 3 (1981).
• Theresa Smalec, “Not What It Seems: The Politics of Re-Performing Vito Acconci's Seedbed,” PMC: Postmodern Culture 17 (1) 2006^[21]
• “Writing Art,” Art Monthly 1999 230:13–17.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiversity has learning materials about Performance art

• Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present at MoMA
• Artfacts.Net profile with major exhibitions and public collections.
• Coulibeuf, Pierre. Balkan Baroque 1999 (video). "The autobiography, both real and imaginary, of Marina Abramović...."
• Interview with Bernard Goy for Journal of Contemporary Art, June 1990
• Marina Abramović, The Hero (for Antonio) – 2001. Vejer de la Frontera, Spain: NMAC Foundation.
• Marina Abramović, Human Nests – 2001. Vejer de la Frontera, Spain: NMAC Foundation.
• Marina Abramović Institute, San Francisco, California, USA.
• Marina Abramović: Seven Easy Pieces, November 9–15, 2005, 5PM to 12AM. New Way: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
• Mediateca Media Art Space documentary archive with biography, works, and references.
• Rosenberg, Karen. Provocateur: Marina Abramović (interview). New York magazine, December 4, 2005.
• Lisson Gallery Marina Abramović artist page. Including works, bio, exhibitions and catalogues
• Sean Kelly Gallery artist page with biography, works, press, exhibitions, and catalogues.
• Spector, Nancy. Marina Abramović, Rhythm 5, 1974, published 1994. Guggenheim collection online.
• "Marina" the feature documentary film
• Interview, March 2010, with Robert Ayers at A Sky filled with Shooting Stars.
• Arthur C. Danto, "Sitting with Marina", New York Times, 2010/05/23
• Vice magazine interview, November 2010.
• 2011 James T. Demetrion Lecture: "How Performance Art is Entering the History of Art", press release, March 9, 2011, Hirschorn Museum, Washington, DC, USA; lecture April 5, 2011.
• Conversation: Marina Abramovic, interview with Jeffrey Brown, PBS Newshour Art Beat, April 8, 2011; transcript and video. Link: The Hirshhorn conducted a Twitter forum with Abramovic in late March; Q&A here.
• Tate: Meet the Artist: Marina Abramovic The artist talks about her performance practice. January 29, 2009.
• | EAI Artist biography and list of video works.

Yoko Ono 小野 洋子
Yoko Ono at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, Brazil
Background information
Born	(1933-02-18) February 18, 1933 (age 79) Tokyo, Japan
Genres	Avant-garde, rock, pop, electronica, Shibuya kei, Fluxus, dance
Occupations	Artist, film director, peace activist
Instruments	Vocals, piano
Years active	1961–present
Labels	Apple, Geffen, Polydor, Rykodisc, Astralwerks, Chimera Music
Associated acts	John Lennon Plastic Ono Band

Yoko Ono (オノ・ヨーコ（小野 洋子）, Ono Yōko^?, born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese^[1] artist, author, and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon. Ono brought feminism to the forefront in her music which prefigured New Wave music and is known for her philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and AIDS outreach programs.