ABSTRACT
By 1970, several artists in both California and the East had taken up performance art—whether as a deliberately chosen alternative to the static object-commodity or as an inevitable outcome of the shifting directions and premises and the expansion of boundaries that had occurred in modern art. Performance and body art evolved not only from happenings, but also from Abstract Expressionism or Action Painting in respect to the idea of the art work as event and as the result of the artist's whole body action and identification with the work. Bruce Nauman makes clear how the artist's awareness of his/her own body is communicated to the spectator in performance or body sculpture. Most artists working in performance, film, and video consider themselves as sculptors, it is particularly valuable to have one of them analyze what constitutes "sculpture" in that kind of work.
