ABSTRACT
The beginnings of performance art Performance and performance art emerged during the 1970s and 1980s as major cultural activities in the United States as well as in Western Europe and Japan. So complex and varied has been such activity and so popular has it proven with the public and the media that, like postmodernism (a product of the same historical culture), its very ubiquity and popularity have made it very difficult to define. What will be attempted in this chapter, therefore, is a discussion of the general parameters of this diffuse field and of some of the most prominent of its features and practitioners. Perhaps it would be best to begin in the early 1970s, when the terms "performance" and "performance art" were just coming into vogue in the American artistic community, and to see what concerns in the art world encouraged such activity and what interests and felt needs among theatre theorists encouraged critical speculation upon this activity.
