Tate performance Art and Tate Tanks

Tate website is an amazing resource for everyone. It is clear and has lots of really inspirational links. We all await the opening of the Tanks spaces, in the summer of 2016, although they were open briefly in Summer 2012; they are reclaimed spaces set aside for performance related works. Its interesting that the Tanks are species that held oil, the fuel of the power station! Performance is the fuel for much Contemporary works! I’ve copied the site’s Performance Art chapter, its useful to have all in one place! I’ve split it into three parts and will add to each part as my work progresses.

Performance art is art for which the artist uses their own body as the medium and performs an action or series of actions which become the artwork

Mona Hatoum, 'Performance Still' 1985, printed 1995 — Mona Hatoum
*Performance Still* 1985, printed 1995 © Mona Hatoum

View the main page for this artwork

Introduction to performance art

Performance art is sometimes carefully planned and scripted but can also be spontaneous and random. Although it often takes place in front of an audience and may involve audience participation – or the orchestration of other participants by the artist – it can also be an action performed privately by the artist.

Performance art has origins in futurism and dada, but became a major phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s and can be seen as a branch of conceptual art.

Further resources

Explore the relationship between photography and performance in Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern. In the short film below, curator Simon Baker talks about key works from the show which includes the documentation of art happenings of the 1960s and today’s trend for selfies.

http://players.brightcove.net/1854890877/default_default/index.html?videoId=4767204754001

At the heart of performance art is a strong social critique. It asks important questions about how we perceive the world around us and our place within it.
Frank Skinner

Comedian and art enthusiast Frank Skinner explores performance art from its origins through to Yoko Ono and Joseph Beuys:

Performance art in America

An important influence on the emergence of performance were the photographs taken by the photographer Hans Namuth in 1950 of the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock making his so-called action paintings. Performance art had its immediate origins in the more overtly theatrical happenings organised by Allan Kaprow and others in New York in the late 1950s. By the mid 1960s this theatrical element was being stripped out by early performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman.

Performance art in Europe

In Germany and Austria performance art is known as actionism, though this term is usually specifically applied to the Vienna-based group Wiener Aktionismus, founded in 1961, whose deliberately shocking performances were intended to highlight the endemic violence of humanity. The German artist Joseph Beuys was a hugely influential pioneer of performance art, making a wide impact with his ‘actions’ from 1963 on. These were powerful expressions of the pain of human existence, and explored complex social and political issues through a focus on man’s relationship to nature. In Britain the artist duo Gilbert & George made highly original performance works from 1969.

A major problem for early performance artists was the ephemeral nature of the medium. Right from the start performance pieces were recorded in photography, film and video, and these eventually became the primary means by which performance reached a wide public.