Influential Performance Art Pieces

Why This Matters

Performance art sits at the heart of Performance Studies because it makes visible the core questions the field asks: What counts as a performance? Where does the performer end and the audience begin? How does the body communicate meaning? These works aren't just art history—they're case studies in liveness, presence, risk, and spectatorship. When you analyze these pieces, you're practicing the same critical skills you'll need for any performance analysis, whether it's a protest, a ritual, or a TikTok video.

You're being tested on your ability to identify the mechanisms that make performance work: how artists use duration, the body, audience participation, and transgression to create meaning. Don't just memorize titles and dates—know what concept each piece best illustrates. If an exam asks about the ethics of spectatorship or the body as medium, you need to pull the right example instantly.

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Duration and Presence

Durational performance tests the limits of attention, endurance, and human connection. By extending performance across hours, days, or even years, these artists force audiences to confront time itself as material.

Marina Abramović's "The Artist is Present" (2010)

• 736 hours of silent sitting—Abramović faced museum visitors one at a time, creating intimate encounters through sustained eye contact alone
• Presence as medium: the work stripped away all theatrical elements to isolate the raw exchange between performer and spectator
• Emotional contagion became visible as visitors wept, trembled, or sat frozen—demonstrating how bodies communicate without language

Tehching Hsieh's "One Year Performance" Series (1978–1986)

• Extreme durational commitment—each piece lasted exactly one year, including punching a time clock every hour ("Time Clock Piece") and living outdoors in Manhattan
• Labor and existence became indistinguishable; Hsieh transformed daily life into performance, questioning where art ends and survival begins
• Documentation as proof: the time-stamped photographs and punch cards serve as evidence, raising questions about what constitutes the "work"—the act or its record?

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The Body at Risk

Some performers use physical danger or transgression to shock audiences into awareness. Risk forces the question: What are we willing to witness? What does our spectatorship make us complicit in?

Chris Burden's "Shoot" (1971)

• Literal violence as art—Burden was shot in the arm with a .22 rifle, collapsing the distance between representation and reality
• Ethical crisis for spectators: the audience couldn't intervene, forcing them to confront their role as passive witnesses to harm
• Art world boundaries were tested; the piece asked whether physical injury could be aesthetic material and who bears responsibility

Carolee Schneemann's "Interior Scroll" (1975)

• The vagina as source of knowledge—Schneemann extracted and read a scroll from her body, reclaiming female anatomy from objectification
• Feminist intervention: the text critiqued male critics who dismissed her work as merely "personal," asserting the body as a site of intellectual authority
• Visceral discomfort became political; audiences confronted their own squeamishness about female bodies as a form of internalized misogyny

Vito Acconci's "Seedbed" (1972)

• Hidden body, audible presence—Acconci masturbated beneath a gallery floor while narrating fantasies about visitors walking above
• Voyeurism inverted: spectators became unwitting participants in an intimate act, blurring the line between public and private space
• Sexuality as confrontation challenged the gallery's supposed neutrality, exposing the erotic undercurrents of spectatorship itself

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Audience as Participant

These works dissolve the fourth wall entirely, making spectators into co-creators—or co-conspirators. Participation shifts responsibility; the audience can no longer claim innocence.

Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece" (1964)

• Audience-driven destruction—spectators cut away Ono's clothing piece by piece until she sat nearly naked, passive and vulnerable
• Gendered violence made visible: the piece exposed how easily people enact aggression when given permission, particularly against women's bodies
• Escalating tension revealed group dynamics; as more fabric disappeared, each new participant faced the choice to stop or continue the violation

Allan Kaprow's "18 Happenings in 6 Parts" (1959)

• The birth of "Happenings"—Kaprow coined the term for this scripted-yet-unpredictable event combining movement, sound, and audience instruction
• Spectators received task cards directing them to move between rooms, making them performers whether they wanted to be or not
• Art and life collapsed: Kaprow rejected the idea of passive viewing, arguing that meaning emerges from participation, not observation

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Symbolic and Ritualistic Action

Some performers use objects, animals, or sustained symbolic gestures to create meaning that operates more like ritual than theater. These works draw on anthropological ideas about performance as transformation.

Joseph Beuys' "I Like America and America Likes Me" (1974)

• Three days with a coyote—Beuys was wrapped in felt, transported to a gallery, and lived with a wild coyote without ever touching American soil outside the space
• The coyote as symbol: sacred to Indigenous peoples but exterminated by settlers, the animal embodied America's repressed violence and wildness
• Healing as artistic goal; Beuys framed the encounter as shamanic reconciliation between European and American consciousness

Yves Klein's "Anthropometries" (1960)

• Living brushes—nude models covered in Klein's signature blue paint pressed their bodies against canvases while an orchestra played and an audience watched
• The artist as director: Klein never touched the canvas himself, raising questions about authorship, labor, and whose body does the work
• Spectacle and critique intertwined; the piece both celebrated the female form and commodified it, making viewers complicit in the display

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Multimedia and Narrative Performance

These works expand performance beyond the body alone, incorporating technology, storytelling, and multiple art forms. They anticipate contemporary performance's integration with digital media.

Laurie Anderson's "United States" (1983)

• Eight-hour multimedia epic—Anderson combined violin, synthesizers, projected images, and spoken word to dissect American culture and technology
• The voice as instrument: her use of a vocoder to pitch-shift her voice created an androgynous, robotic persona that questioned identity itself
• Accessible experimentalism brought avant-garde performance to mainstream audiences; her single "O Superman" became an unlikely pop hit

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Quick Reference Table

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Self-Check Questions

1. Which two works best illustrate durational performance, and how do they differ in what duration reveals about the performer-audience relationship?

2. If an FRQ asks you to analyze audience complicity in performance, which piece would you choose and why? What specific mechanism makes spectators complicit?

3. Compare and contrast how Ono's "Cut Piece" and Kaprow's "18 Happenings" use audience participation. What does each work suggest about the ethics of spectatorship?

4. Which works would you cite to argue that the body itself is a medium in performance art? How does each artist use the body differently?

5. Beuys and Klein both use bodies other than their own in their performances. What questions about authorship, consent, and exploitation do these works raise, and how do they answer them differently?