ABSTRACT

Performance and performance art emerged during the 1970s and 1980s as major cultural activities in the United States, 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, its very ubiquity and popularity have made it very difficult to define. This chapter discusses the general parameters of this diffuse field and of some of the most prominent of its features and practitioners. In the '70s, performance art was primarily a time-based visual art form in which text was at the service of image; by the early '80s, it had shifted to movement-based work, with the performance artist as choreographer. An element of performance art since the 1980s has been set off from the traditions that inspired it by a modern ironic and reflexive consciousness of the performing act and closely and consciously related to the traditions of circus and clowning.