Some of us still look at art in an elitist way. This is unsurprising given that we lived through centuries of discourse and practice that solidified that. The image of a “starving artist” fighting to make it in this cruel world has been romanticized and used as a sort of proof of the artist’s ambition and calling - a quantifier of how much one really wanted to make it as an artist. After all, if you really care about art for art’s sake, you won’t care about the money, right?
This type of thinking makes us appreciate and respect the work of artists who have spent their entire lives chasing outside recognition for their so-called genius, yet have never gotten a taste of popularity or fortune during their lifetime. It is only after their passing that their work gets coined as “some of the best in the world” to then be heavily commodified by other people who benefit from what these “starving artists” created, and then owned by some other people, who can enjoy being the only ones in the world owning what these “geniuses” have made.
In his book of art critique, Ways of Seeing,, John Berger describes this in detail using both visual and written essays to show how the way we view the world around us has been heavily manipulated through the rise of inventions such as oil painting, photography, and advertisement.
Through the practice of wealthy European men (the only ones who could afford such commodities) ordering paintings of what they possessed (ranging from fruit and cutlery to property and women), a specific visual corpus emerged in the Western world.
Often, very poor artists were commissioned to paint what their employers owned in order for them to celebrate their possessions and gain the ability to look at them whenever they desired. This is where the notion of high art partially stems from. Early art historians celebrated the “God-given gift” of artists, only increasing the value of their works to the satisfaction of those who owned them - a practice that continues to this day.
This is what gradually created the art market as we know it today - competitive, trends-based, and dominated by very rich people rather than accessible to the general public.
When print and photography allowed us to replicate works, as well as capture real-life moments, art was commodified even further. More and more people were allowed to acquire it and own it. Later on, through advertisement, we got increasingly manipulated into thinking we absolutely need to acquire things through which we can express ourselves - that these are elements of our own identity. This practice not only commodified art even more but used it as a tool to appeal to the masses and force them to buy things.
This turned us into consumers above all else. We want to consume and own things that shape our identity, that allow us to express parts of ourselves visually, for the outside world to see. The Oxford Dictionary defines art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power”.
When art is turned into products, the exclusivity of these products becomes their major selling point. Hence, money, power, status, recognition, and influence play a big part in how we relate to art and who is allowed to own it.
Why do I mention this in an article on performance art? Because performance art is not something you can really commodify, and that is one of the major reasons why some deny its value. Here, we see where capitalism and this elitist notion of “high” art come hand in hand as they validate what “real art” is - what can be sold and owned. Contrastingly to other art forms, performance art is rooted in the experience of it. You can’t pack it and sell it, which stands against the general capitalist practice. You can’t contain it in a frame, and you can’t reproduce it.
There is a lot of criticism around this elitist gate-keeping of what art is and who has the right to set its value. Hence, performance art can be a tool of rebellion against that, a tuning fork to other aspects of art that make it so powerful. Performance artworks use the body to create actions that can be spontaneous and/or scripted and may happen live and/or be recorded.
They can take the form of a singular experience, conceptual installation, or civil action. In the age of social media where performativity is a significant aspect of everyday life, performance art may offer solutions and prompts that can only come from real-life experience.
One of the most notorious and famous performance artists is Marina Abramovic, a Serbian conceptual artist who pioneered many branches of the art form. For decades, she has explored the boundaries between the body and the mind, their limits and possibilities. She created the Abramovic Method based on spiritual and cultural practices that help one further their consciousness and reach “superhuman sensibility”. It serves as an exploration of being present in both time and space in the form of exercises that focus on breath, stillness, motion, and concentration.
Her often dangerous and controversial performances - such as jabbing herself with a knife, or letting the audience use 72 tools on her with no responsibility for their actions - pushed what we knew art could even do. It made us ponder on who we are and what the human condition is without the use of words or images.
Another example of a performance artist who pushed the boundaries between art and transcendence is the German teacher, artist, and art theorist, Joseph Beuys. His work was centered on humanism, sociology, and anthroposophy, merging civil action with performance through social and shamanic practices.
One of his most notable inventions was the “social sculpture”, defined as an expanded form of art that includes human activity in order to reshape society - for example by motivating and organizing an entire village to plant thousands of trees. He saw his art as shamanic and psychoanalytic and his aim was to educate and heal the general public.
He believed that with humanity’s rise of rationality, we sought to eliminate emotions, which he deemed as a great source of energy and creativity. He saw humanity as being in an evolving state and as “spiritual beings” and that we are to use our individual emotions and thoughts to extract energy from. For Beuys, we should energize our thinking, linking our emotions to it as “our vision of the world must be extended to encompass all the invisible energies with which we have lost contact”.
Another important example that relates to this topic is the French poet, writer, and dramatist Antonin Artaud. Although not a performance artist per se, Artaud was a major figure of the European avant-garde and was mostly known as a bridge between theatre and transcendence, exploring themes of cosmologies of ancient civilizations, philosophy, occultism, and mysticism in the form of physical activity.
Although he led a rather miserable life, and eventually lost his mind and died amidst mistreatment in one of the many asylums he has been sent to, his work has inspired a range of writers, philosophers, and artists, such as Karen Finley, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jacques Derrida, to look at what is behind the form and how to relate to energy itself, “the body without organs” as the body in the virtual condition.
His work focuses mostly on movement and the existence of the body as a multi-dimensional form of energy, which pushed the development of experimental theatre, and later performance art. His work was a major component in redirecting performance away from language and rationalism into the practice of movement and its effect.
These are but a few examples of performance artists who revolutionized the way we think about art, body, and mind, and who inspired generations of artists from numerous disciplines to think differently about how we relate to each other, ourselves, and the world that surrounds us.
In an age where everything is commodified, owning something tangibly becomes less and less valued as we increasingly yearn for real-life experiences. When we own everything, ownership is not as attractive, the rare commodity is not a definite object anymore - it’s an indefinite experience.
It’s the weird that we’re looking for, something out of the ordinary, something that makes us feel something in a way that we cannot describe in words.
That is why the importance of performance art is more obvious and seems more necessary. It is through real-life action and experience that we seek to celebrate and explore life, rather than through collecting and acquiring things that we deem valuable.
