Influential Performance Artists

Why This Matters

Performance art sits at the intersection of nearly every concept you'll encounter in this course—liveness, presence, the body as medium, audience-performer relationships, and the blurring of art and life. When you study these artists, you're not just learning names and famous works; you're building a vocabulary for understanding how performance challenges traditional art boundaries, questions institutional power, and transforms both performer and witness. These figures pioneered techniques and theoretical frameworks that continue to shape contemporary performance practice.

You're being tested on your ability to identify how these artists embody key performance studies concepts—endurance, participation, documentation, ephemerality, and the politics of the body. Don't just memorize who did what; know why their approach matters and what larger ideas each artist represents. When an exam question asks about audience complicity or the body as site of resistance, you need specific examples ready to deploy.

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Endurance and the Limits of the Body

These artists use duration and physical extremity to investigate presence, vulnerability, and the performer's relationship to time. By pushing bodily limits, they make visible what is normally invisible—the passage of time, the weight of existence, the threshold between safety and danger.

Marina Abramović

• Pioneer of durational performance—her multi-hour and multi-day works establish endurance as a primary medium for exploring presence and consciousness
• "The Artist is Present" (2010) demonstrated the power of sustained eye contact, with over 750,000 visitors witnessing her sit silently for 736 hours at MoMA
• Audience as essential participant—her work insists that performance is incomplete without the witness, making spectatorship an active, transformative act

Chris Burden

• Extreme risk as artistic material—works like "Shoot" (1971), where he was shot in the arm, forced audiences to confront violence, consent, and the ethics of witnessing
• Critique of institutional safety—his performances exposed how galleries and audiences become complicit in potentially harmful acts
• Physical vulnerability as confrontation—Burden's work asks whether the body in danger creates a more "authentic" or urgent form of presence

Tehching Hsieh

• Year-long durational works collapse the boundary between performance and life, making existence itself the artwork
• "One Year Performance 1980-1981" (Cage Piece)—living in a sealed cage for a year without reading, writing, or speaking explored confinement, labor, and temporal experience
• Radical commitment to liveness—his work cannot be separated from lived time, raising questions about what counts as performance when there's no audience present

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The Body as Political Site

These artists deploy the body—particularly the gendered, racialized, or sexualized body—as a medium for challenging social norms and power structures. The body becomes both canvas and argument, making visible what dominant culture renders invisible or taboo.

Carolee Schneemann

• Feminist reclamation of the female body—her work insists women can be both subject and object of their own gaze, challenging the male-dominated art world
• "Meat Joy" (1964) combined bodies, raw fish, and paint in an ecstatic ritual exploring sensuality, liberation, and collective physicality
• "Interior Scroll" (1975)—extracting and reading a text from her vagina literalized the idea of women's knowledge emerging from the body

Ana Mendieta

• Earth-body works merged her physical form with natural landscapes, exploring exile, belonging, and feminine connection to the earth
• "Silueta" series (1973-1980)—silhouettes carved, burned, or traced into soil addressed displacement, cultural identity, and the body's impermanence
• Cuban-American diaspora experience informed her exploration of rootedness and loss, making her work deeply political without being didactic

Vito Acconci

• Private acts made public—his work exposed the tension between intimacy and voyeurism, comfort and discomfort
• "Seedbed" (1972)—masturbating beneath a gallery floor while narrating fantasies about visitors above forced audiences to confront their own complicity in the performance
• Language and the body intertwined—Acconci's spoken-word elements made the voice itself a physical, intrusive presence

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Audience Participation and Instruction

These artists decentralize authorship by inviting—or requiring—audience action. The viewer becomes co-creator, and the artwork exists only through collective engagement.

Yoko Ono

• Instruction-based performance—her "Instruction Pieces" (beginning 1960s) provide prompts that anyone can execute, democratizing art-making
• "Cut Piece" (1964)—inviting audience members to cut away her clothing explored vulnerability, aggression, and gendered power dynamics
• Conceptual art pioneer—her work insists that the idea is the artwork, anticipating later developments in participatory and relational aesthetics

Joseph Beuys

• "Social sculpture" concept—Beuys believed art should reshape society, and that creative thinking is a universal human capacity
• Symbolic materials like felt and fat (referencing his mythologized WWII rescue) carried personal and political meaning about healing and transformation
• "Everyone is an artist"—this democratic philosophy challenged elite art institutions and expanded performance into pedagogy and activism

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Technology, Media, and Storytelling

These artists integrate technology and multimedia to expand what performance can be, exploring how mediation shapes experience and communication.

Laurie Anderson

• Technology as performance tool—her use of synthesizers, projections, and invented instruments (like the tape-bow violin) made technology itself a performer
• "United States" (1983)—an eight-hour multimedia epic combined music, spoken word, and visuals to explore American identity and communication breakdown
• Narrative and voice—Anderson's storytelling approach bridges performance art and theater, making her work accessible while remaining conceptually rigorous

Yves Klein

• The body as paintbrush—"Anthropometries" (1960) used nude models covered in his signature blue paint to create works, staging the creative act as public spectacle
• International Klein Blue (IKB)—his trademarked pigment became a conceptual statement about ownership, immateriality, and artistic signature
• Performance as documentation—Klein understood that the event of creation could be as significant as the resulting object, anticipating later concerns about ephemerality

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Self-Check Questions

1. Which two artists most directly explore duration as medium, and how do their approaches to audience differ?

2. If asked to discuss feminist reclamation of the body in performance art, which three artists would you cite, and what distinguishes each one's approach?

3. Compare Ono's "Cut Piece" and Acconci's "Seedbed"—both involve audience-performer tension. What does each reveal about power, vulnerability, and complicity?

4. How does Beuys's concept of "social sculpture" differ from traditional notions of performance? What would you pair it with if asked about art as social transformation?

5. An FRQ asks you to analyze how performance artists challenge the boundary between art and life. Which artist provides the strongest example, and why?