ABSTRACT
In order to understand how performance art has both defined and challenged the “canon,” it is necessary to first explicate what it means to call something “performance art” as well as what it means for performance to challenge the canon, since performance art has always drawn upon a variety of sources, particularly dance and theater. Roselee Goldberg, who authored the first introductory text on the history of performance art in 1979, defined performance as “a way of bringing to life the many formal and conceptual ideas on which the making of art is based.”1 Goldberg began performance art history with the theatrical experiments of the Futurists and Dadaists and included experimental theater and dance, manifestos, puppetry, cabaret, painting, and, in the two most recent editions, a chapter on the media generation: video and film performances.2 For Goldberg, performance art challenged the canons of fine art, dance, and theater by mixing the disciplines and introducing elements that were extrinsic to these art forms. She was not interested in the use of performance for social activism, although the 1988 edition did include coverage of feminist artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Laurie Anderson, and Karen Finlay. Notably absent, however, are discussions of artists and collectives who have used performance to challenge social injustice. For example, the 2001 edition included Vanessa Beecroft but not the activist performance artist Suzanne Lacy. Goldberg’s pioneering history has been expanded upon by several important exhibitions and surveys, including Henry Sayre’s The Object of Performance (1989), Paul Schimmel’s Out of Actions (1998), and Amelia Jones’s and Tracey Warr’s The Artist’s Body (2000).3 These three texts acknowledge the activist, anti-establishment roots of performance art and situated it within the context of avant-garde studio art, the anti-institutional politics of the 1960s and 1970s, the waves of civil disobedience that coursed through Western Europe and the U.S. during those years, and the aesthetic language of
conceptualism, with its anti-object emphasis on ideas and processes. Important to all three texts is the emphasis on the intersection among performance, politics, and identity politics, particularly in terms of feminism, race, and ethnicity.
