Siluetas - Bodies in movement

For Seven Easy Pieces Marina Abramovic reenacted five seminal performance works by her peers, dating from the 1960’s and 70’s, and two of her own, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The project confronted the fact that little documentation exists from this critical early period and one often has to rely upon testimony from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given performance.

The term Viennese Actionism describes a short and violent movement in 20th century art that can be regarded as part of the many independent efforts of the 1960s to develop “action art” (Fluxus, Happening, Performance, Body Art, etc.). Its main participants were Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. As “actionists”, they were active between 1960 and 1971. Most have continued their artistic work independently from the early 1970s onwards.

Dubious of performance art? Break into a cold sweat when you realize it’s about to begin? There’s a reason. Here we present you with a brief history of performance art and attempt to sway you to its potential charms. Video by The Art Assignment.

John Cage performing “Water Walk” in January, 1960 on the popular TV show I’ve Got A Secret. At the time, Cage was teaching Experimental Composition at New York City’s New School. Eight years beyond 4′33″, he was the most controversial figure in the musical world at that time. His first performance on national television was originally scored to include five radios, but a union dispute on the CBS set prevented any of the radios from being plugged in to the wall. Cage gleefully smacks and tosses the radios instead of turning them on and off.

Black Mountain College was a highly influential school founded in North Carolina, USA, in 1933 where teaching was experimental and committed to an interdisciplinary approach.

The Journal of Black Mountain College Studies is a peer-reviewed open-access digital publication of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC). The Journal seeks to host diverse works by writers and artists of varied backgrounds. Journal number 10 explores the legacy of the Black Mountain College’s dancers and performers and embraces chance in poetry, essays, performances and more.

Tate Talks “The place of the performance in the museum”: A series of curators and artists examine the ‘place of performance’ within the twenty-first-century museum.

Moma Learning: Body in the Arts – Discover how artist represent and use the body to investigate their relationships to gender and identity.

Jonah Westerman examines the history of the term ‘performance’ since the mid-twentieth century and considers how the category has come to encompass so many kinds of artistic production. He challenges notions of performance that seek to define it as a medium or genre and argues instead that performance is an interrelated set of questions concerning how art relates to its audiences and the wider social world.

Reccomended bibliography