Performance art typically involves the artist's live actions. It not only presents itself to the audience but can also invite partial or full participation. While public performance as an art form became prominent in Western society in the late 20th century, the concept of performative art has a long history within the art world.
Historically, performance has been linked to both religious rituals and popular entertainment. It also shares roots with art that engaged with the specific properties of inanimate objects. However, with the decline of religious ritual, the rise of industrialization, and the commercialization of art in Western society, the concept of performance art gradually evolved into a means for artists to express their personal insights and critique social structures. Through public performance, artists could connect directly with their audiences, much like actors. From the Futurist evenings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Italy in the 1910s, through a decade of agitprop performances in Russia, to the Dadaist gatherings and ceremonies at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during World War I, these events presented an eclectic mix of music, literature, poetry, and theater. They aimed for both political and artistic disruption. For example, Dadaist artists, often allied with the political left, aimed to disrupt bourgeois values and traditional artistic norms.
More broadly, artists transform various materials into art through a series of actions. Their creations can manifest a unique dynamism for viewers or participants. Even within public museums, viewers engage in a form of "performance" as they passively move through spaces or interact with artworks. From a more specialized perspective, art created from everyday life needs to be distinguished from typical museum displays or theatrical performances. Most African artworks, statically displayed in Western ethnographic museums, make it difficult to understand their original context and the evolution of their initial performative origins. Similarly, in Western tradition, performance art has also been selectively transmitted to ensure it retains its ritualistic and theatrical context. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, while various forms of performance existed, the medium of performance itself demonstrated an inclusive capacity for ritualistic and theatrical elements, even when different categories were not always clearly defined.
By the middle of the 20th century, the idea of painting as an activity extended into all forms of art. Hans Namuth's photographs of Jackson Pollock painting on the floor captured the ephemeral nature of the painting process, revealing a dynamic and process-oriented relationship between the artist and the work, rather than a static, isolated object. From the 1950s onward, video art and conceptual art began to explore new art forms. This led to the integration of performance art with traditional painting practices, as seen in the "Happenings" of artists like George Brecht and Allan Kaprow, who incorporated everyday objects and actions into their art.
New art forms were also being created. In the 1960s and 70s, politically-charged performance art flourished in the works of many artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow, whose individual performative works reached new heights. A more encompassing form of "Happenings" (a term coined by Allan Kaprow in 1959) was organized in public, outdoor settings. The artist Al Hansen defined it as a "theatrical form," and in many of his various performances, the audience was invited to participate. For many uninitiated audience members, these activities, unlike the song-and-dance routines of Dada cabaret, were often perplexing, and debates surrounding art and politics were common at the time. Despite initial incomprehension and controversy, these activities were eventually widely accepted, and their political significance became increasingly recognized. Performance art expanded aesthetic perceptions in the late 20th century, just as some became more interested in the actions artists performed or the objects created through those actions (or even more so in the actions themselves).
