Performance art in the 1980s

Art form that incorporates live performance alongside other aesthetic modes

Performance art continued some of the practices of earlier generations in the 1980’s. However, young artists, reared in a culture saturated with media, adopted new, sometimes marketable forms. As a result peformance art sometimes blurred together with video art, cabaret, and mass cultural forms.

Performance art of the 1980’s built upon the avant-garde developments of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Older performance artists pushed their experimentation, while a raft of young practitioners defined themselves as only performance artists. Multidisciplinary collaborations, changes in available technology, new venues, and evolving relations with art institutions gave the decade its particular flavor. Performance art explored many themes, such as autobiography, identity, and the body, as well as such political issues as AIDS, homelessness, and multiculturalism. Many works sought to question and perhaps to bridge the gulfs between art and life, as well as those between high art and mass culture.

Definitions and Origins

Precise definitions of performance art are difficult, especially in the 1980’s. It is generally live art. It may, however, be improvisational work by a single artist presented only once, or it may be a large collaboration of actors, dancers, musicians, and visual artists with casts, scripts, and sets that are repeated in many nearly identical offerings. Some pieces were lost after their presentation; others were intensely documented, and many continued to exist in video form. Some artists defied the art market’s desire to commodify their work, while other artists “cashed in” on their rising fame. The origins of late twentieth century performance art are to be found in the often outrageous works of the avant-garde during the early part of the century. The Futurists and the Surrealists, especially, set the parameters many later artists obeyed. The period of the late 1960’s and 1970’s is sometimes called a “golden age” of performance: During this period of activism, artists drew on and contested modernism and conceptual art. “Identity politics”—especially some forms of feminism—found expression through performance art, and much of that work (especially in the 1960’s) was polemical in nature.

Performance Art in the 1980’s

Unlike the artists of earlier generations, who had created performance art by rejecting the confines of traditional arts, artists of the 1980’s frequently defined themselves as performance artists throughout their careers. They created bodies of work that evolved and developed over time. They also sought recognition and a livelihood from this work. Many of the artists coming of age in the decade were thoroughly familiar with mass cultural forms such as television and rock music, and many were comfortable with evolving computer and video technologies. They used these mass culture elements, deliberately blurring the lines between high art and popular culture. As a result, some artists moved into film, and some performance art developed into “standard entertainment.” Still other work retained its political and outrageous edginess.

The decade culminated in the 1989 congressional debate over censorship and funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Among the artists precipitating the NEA crisis were two performance artists, Karen Finley and Tim Miller. The performance art of such controversial artists was often confrontational, responding to and targeting public ignorance and entrenched institutions, including the government that sometimes funded the work. As engaged in by significant artists of color, performance art of the 1980’s acted out multiculturalism, joining in a broader cultural conversation taking place in literature and the academy as well.

In addition to taking on institutions, performance artists of the 1980’s found themselves negotiating their own institutionalization. On one hand, performance art was recognized as a valid art form by museums, resulting in numerous shows and even retrospective exhibitions. Specialized performance publications were created, art critics analyzed performance, and art schools incorporated it into their curricula. Artists in the process of denying the separation of high art from mass culture had to determine how to respond to the decision of artistic institutions to label their work as art.

On the other hand, performance art also remained in the sphere of mass culture, as it was institutionalized through the market as well. New performance venues were created to showcase the form and to make its production lucrative. Special performance art galleries appeared; performance clubs or cabarets presented monologue artists; and large-scale operatic performances and works combining sound, video, and live performers played on traditional stages. Symptomatically, at the beginning of the decade, Laurie Anderson was signed to a recording contract with Warner Bros., and her performance song “O Superman” rose to number two on the British pop charts. The Blue Man Group, which in the 1980’s began as three street performers, developed into a worldwide enterprise with a long-term contract to appear at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

Impact

Performance art both expressed and rejected the culture of the 1980’s. It addressed topical social and political issues, exploited new electronic technologies, and participated in the exuberant art market of the decade. It also blurred the distinctions between high art and popular culture, at a time when the broader movement of postmodernism was beginning to reject those very distinctions.

Bibliography

Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Rev. ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988. First attempt to place the contemporary practice of performance art in historical context; significant bias toward New York-based performances.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Performance: Live Art Since 1960. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Goldberg concentrates on modern developments. Unlike in her earlier work, she is comfortable here with theorizing and analyzing recent developments. Useful appendixes include a chronology of performance events and artists’ biographies.

Roth, Moira. “A History of Performance.” Art Journal 56 (Winter, 1997): 73-83. Included in a special issue on performance art, this is not actually an article but a syllabus for Roth’s exhaustive course on modern and contemporary performance art. Valuable for its many sources for additional exploration.