The rise of performance art

IN THE medieval town hall of the small Westphalian city of Münster, Alexandra Pirici, a young Romanian artist, prepares to tell a story. Word has gone out that she has something special to say; people have been queuing for hours to get in. As things get under way, her six performers give short occasional statements: how long since the shooting of a man crossing the Berlin Wall, how far to the edge of our galaxy. The actors use their bodies to create shapes reminiscent of collapsing monuments, commemorative sculptures and famous posters, moving among the rooms of the Rathaus, singing all the while. The audience is mesmerised. This is a piece of performance art at Skulptur Projekte Münster (SPM), a festival that takes place once a decade, designed to present cutting-edge contemporary sculpture, though this is not sculpture in the conventional sense. The artist describes the performers as “human search engines”.

This year SPM coincides with a series of other events that together provide a unique snapshot of contemporary art. Documenta, considered by many to be the critical centre of the contemporary-art world, takes place in Kassel every five years (this year it presented an early version in Athens in April). In 2017 art-lovers have also had the choice of the Venice Biennale as well as Art Basel in Switzerland, the most important modern and contemporary-art fair. All five shows this year are placing an emphasis on performance.

Performance art is over 100 years old. Until recently, though, it was a niche activity. In the early decades of the 20th century, the Italian Futurists saw their work as a way to reach a mass audience directly. The Dadaists borrowed heavily from popular culture, including cabaret and music-hall.

But performance art is most associated with the conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the idea was more important than the execution. And New York has been the centre of modern performance since those grungy beginnings, when Vito Acconci notoriously masturbated, heard but unseen, for eight hours a day under a wooden ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery.

Performa, a biennial festival in New York devoted to performance art, is now considered a must-see. Marina Abramovic, probably the most famous living performance artist after Ai Weiwei, hopes to set up a permanent teaching institute in upstate Hudson. It will fill a gap: few art schools teach performance. And the Shed, a centre for performance and other experimental art forms, will open in the Chelsea district in New York in 2019.

Early modern performance art was political—inspired by the Vietnam war, the civil-rights movement, the 1968 riots and a second wave of feminism. And many artists, especially those disillusioned with the art market, made it intentionally difficult. As Carolee Schneemann, an American feminist artist, wrote: “In 1963, to use my body as an extension of my painting-constructions was to threaten the psychic territorial power lines by which women were admitted to the Art Stud Club.”

But the work that propelled performance from minority to mainstream came out of that difficult tradition. In 2010 Ms Abramovic put on a piece called “The Artist is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. She sat motionless in a chair for seven hours a day and invited members of the public to sit opposite and gaze into her face. Fully 700 hours later, she had faced 1,400 people from minutes to whole days, while 500,000 more looked on. Millions have watched a video of the moment when her former lover, a performance artist named Ulay with whom she made many of her early works, turned up unexpectedly. Both struggled to contain their tears.

Historical parallels help explain the resurgent interest in performance. The Futurists and Dadaists were preoccupied with machines, while today’s artists focus on computers. Some also see comparisons between the turbulence of the 1970s and today’s instabilities. Documenta deals explicitly with such political themes. In Kassel a small group of visitors was roped together and instructed to communicate with a group in Athens while the rest looked on. Designed to make the participants think about “them” and “us”, power relationships and the difficulty of communication, it proved unexpectedly stressful for those inside the cordons.

Into the now

As performance art becomes more popular, it is changing. Many are embracing elements of dance, film, theatre and sculpture, even street theatre and rap music. “Performance art was stuck in the 1970s: protest, people cutting themselves,” RoseLee Goldberg, the founder of Performa, said last year. “Some years ago I wondered: why don’t we have visually dazzling, emotional and intellectually challenging performance? Why does everything have to be a single gesture performed on the Lower East Side?”

Since then Shirin Neshat, Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney and Ms Abramovic have all produced lavish, powerful works. In 2011 Ragnar Kjartansson, an Icelandic artist, presented “Bliss” at Performa. A re-enactment of the final aria of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” performed repeatedly by ten opera singers and a small orchestra for 12 hours, it cemented his reputation as an artist generating unusual excitement. One of the highlights of Basel this year was a work (pictured) by Than Hussein Clark, an emerging artist. The performance mixed theatre, dance, sound and poetry in a 1930s modernist church. Some visitors, enchanted, stayed for the full four hours.

Collecting, showing and restaging performance art is still difficult. Bob Rennie, a Canadian collector, needed 279 athletes to show Martin Creed’s Work No. 850 (“Runners”) for three months to the public in his private museum. But such art adds much-needed life and a social dimension to galleries and museums. Klaus Biesenbach, the curator who staged Ms Abramovic’s MoMA show, says that performance art looks different to younger people used to filming the world around them, and constantly posting and checking social media to see what else has happened. “It is one of the reasons that even at art fairs, performance-, participation- and time-based art has become part of the norm,” he believes. As artists explore the full range of possibilities—from single gesture to Wagner-style “total theatre”—a new, largely analogue medium has emerged to speak to today’s digital age.