Performance art uses the artist's body as the medium. From Abramovic's endurance tests to Kaprow's Happenings, learn how live action became a visual art form.
In 1974, a young woman stood in a gallery in Naples for six hours. She had placed 72 objects on a table in front of her: a rose, a feather, a knife, a whip, a gun, a bullet, lipstick, a comb, scissors, honey, wine, and others. A sign instructed the audience to use the objects on her however they wished. As the hours passed, the audience escalated. They cut her clothes, pressed a knife to her neck, wrote on her body, and someone loaded the gun and placed it in her hand, pointing it at her head. When the six hours ended, she walked toward the audience, and they fled. The artist was Marina Abramovic. The performance was called Rhythm 0. It is one of the most famous performances in art history, and it demonstrated something that painting and sculpture could not: that art could involve real physical risk, real time, and a real relationship between artist and audience.
Performance art is art in which the artist's body, actions, and presence are the medium. Instead of making an object to be looked at, the artist does something, live, for an audience, and the action itself is the artwork. Performance art can include gesture, endurance, pain, duration, audience participation, ritual, and the use of the body as a canvas or a site. It emerged in the 1960s and has continued to the present, becoming one of the most influential forms of contemporary art. There is no object to sell, no canvas to hang, and often no documentation beyond photographs and video. The work exists in the moment of its performance and in the memory of those who witnessed it.
This entry covers what performance art is, how it emerged from Dada, Happenings, and the Fluxus movement, which artists defined it, and how a form that was once considered not-art-at-all became central to contemporary museums.
Performance art is a visual art form in which the artist uses their own body, actions, and time as the primary medium. It is distinct from theater in several ways. Theater presents a fictional narrative with actors playing characters, while performance art presents the artist as themselves, doing real actions in real time. There is no script, no fourth wall, and often no clear separation between performer and audience. The work is not a representation of something else. It is the thing itself.
Performance art can take many forms. Endurance performance tests the physical and psychological limits of the body over extended periods. Durational performance lasts for hours, days, or longer, making time itself the subject. Participatory performance requires the audience to act, not just watch. Ritual performance draws on ceremonial or spiritual traditions. Body art uses the body as a canvas, through cutting, tattooing, or other physical modifications. These categories overlap, and many performances combine several approaches.
In 2026, Abramovic is making history as the first living female artist to have a major exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. The exhibition, Transforming Energy, runs from May 6 to October 19, 2026, and places her work in dialogue with Renaissance masterpieces, including Titian's Pieta (circa 1575-76). Visitors are invited to lie on stone beds embedded with crystals, sit before colored panels for an hour each, and spend at least three hours experiencing the show without phones. Abramovic told The Art Newspaper: "It's really important that the public is not just a silent witness but an actual participator." Read the full interview at The Art Newspaper.
Performance art has roots in Dada, particularly the Cabaret Voltaire performances in Zurich in 1916, where Hugo Ball recited nonsense poetry in a cardboard costume. But the movement as we know it today began in the late 1950s and early 1960s with Allan Kaprow's Happenings and the Fluxus movement.
Kaprow, an American artist who had studied with John Cage at the New School for Social Research, organized the first Happening in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York. Called 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, it involved performers moving through three rooms, performing scripted actions that included painting, squeezing oranges, and playing a cello. The audience was seated in different sections and moved between rooms. Kaprow's 1958 essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" argued that after Pollock's action painting, the next step was to move the action off the canvas and into real space.
Fluxus, founded in the early 1960s by George Maciunas, was an international network of artists who produced performance events, publications, and objects that blurred the boundaries between art and life. Fluxus artists like Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and George Brecht created short, instructional performances called "event scores," such as Ono's Cut Piece (1964), in which the artist sat on stage while audience members cut pieces of her clothing off with scissors. Fluxus shared Dada's anti-art attitude but added a playful, Zen-influenced approach drawn from Cage's teachings.
In Vienna, the Actionism movement developed independently in the 1960s. Artists like Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler used the body in extreme ways, performing ritualistic actions involving blood, animal carcasses, and self-mutilation. Vienna Actionism was more violent and confrontational than American performance art, and it was frequently shut down by the police. The Albertina Modern in Vienna presented the first major Abramovic retrospective in Austria from October 2025 to March 2026, with daily re-enactments of her historic performances, connecting her work to the city's long tradition of Actionism. Read more at Albertina Modern.
Abramovic is the most famous performance artist in the world and the person most responsible for bringing performance art into mainstream museums. Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, she began performing in the early 1970s. Rhythm 0 (1974, Studio Morra, Naples) is her most extreme early work. Rhythm 5 (1974, Student Cultural Center, Belgrade) involved her lying inside a burning five-pointed star made of wood, until she lost consciousness and had to be pulled out by audience members. From 1976 to 1988, she collaborated with the German artist Ulay, creating performances that tested the limits of their relationship. Imponderabilia (1977, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna, Bologna) required visitors to pass between the two naked artists standing in a doorway. The Great Wall Walk (1988) saw them start at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and walk toward each other for 90 days, meeting in the middle to end their relationship. Her 2010 retrospective at MoMA, The Artist Is Present, in which she sat silently across a table from visitors for 736 hours over three months, became a cultural phenomenon.
Kaprow coined the term "Happening" and organized the first one in 1959. His Yard (1961) filled the Martha Jackson Gallery's backyard with automobile tires, inviting visitors to climb over them. Kaprow's Happenings were loosely scripted events that blurred art and everyday life, and he insisted that they should not be photographed or documented, so that each occurrence was unique. His 1966 book Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings is the foundational text of the form.
Burden made some of the most physically dangerous performances in art history. In Shoot (1971, F Space Gallery, Santa Ana, California), he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22 rifle from a distance of about 15 feet. In Trans-Fixed (1974, Venice, California), he was nailed to the back of a Volkswagen Beetle in a crucifixion pose, with the car's engine revving for two minutes. Burden's work asked how far art could go before it became simply violence, and where the line between art and self-harm actually sits.
Schneemann used her body to challenge the male gaze and the exclusion of women's sexuality from serious art. Meat Joy (1964) involved performers, male and female, writhing in paint, raw fish, chicken parts, and paper. Interior Scroll (1975) involved Schneemann standing naked on a table, slowly pulling a long scroll from her vagina and reading from it. The text criticized the structural exclusion of women from art history. Schneemann's work was controversial and frequently censored, but it opened the door for feminist performance art that used the body as a site of political and personal expression.
Klein's Anthropometries of the Blue Period (1960) involved nude female models covered in his patented International Klein Blue paint, pressing their bodies against canvases and walls while a small orchestra played. Klein, dressed in a suit and bow tie, directed the performance but did not touch the models or the canvases. The work is an early example of performance as art, though it has been criticized for its objectification of the female body.
Performance art's first phase runs from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, centered on Happenings, Fluxus events, and the emergence of body art. This period is defined by experimentation, anti-institutionalism, and a refusal to produce salable objects. The second phase runs from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, when performance art became more focused on endurance, duration, and political content. Abramovic and Ulay's collaborations, Burden's danger pieces, and the rise of feminist performance art all belong to this period.
The third phase, from the 1990s to the present, is characterized by the institutionalization of performance art. Museums began collecting performance documentation, staging re-enactments, and commissioning new performances. Abramovic's 2010 MoMA retrospective was a turning point: it proved that a performance art exhibition could draw crowds comparable to a blockbuster painting show. The 2026 Venice exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia continues this trajectory, placing performance art in one of the most traditional museum settings in the world, alongside Renaissance altarpieces.
Performance art changed what counts as visual art. Before the 1960s, art was understood primarily as objects: paintings, sculptures, prints. Performance art established that an action, documented or not, could be art. This opened the door for action painting, video art, social practice, and participatory art. The idea that the artist's body and presence are legitimate artistic media is now taken for granted in contemporary art education and practice.
Performance art grew out of Dadaism, which introduced the idea of anti-art and live performance as a response to cultural crisis. It is closely related to action painting, which shifted attention from the finished painting to the physical act of painting. The Fluxus movement, which Kaprow and others were part of, shares performance art's emphasis on the event over the object. For more on the body as an artistic medium, read our post on the body as canvas.
Performance art is best experienced live. The Performa biennial in New York, held every two years, is the largest performance art festival in the world. The Venice Biennale regularly features performance work, including Abramovic's 2026 exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia. The Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York frequently commission and exhibit performance work. The Albertina Modern in Vienna has been a major venue for performance exhibitions, connecting contemporary work to the city's Actionist tradition.
If you want to understand performance art, you have to see it in person. Start with a Performa event in New York, visit the Venice Biennale in an even-numbered year, and check the programming at Tate Modern or MoMA for live performances. You will see why a form that produces no object to hang on a wall has become one of the most powerful ways artists have found to make work that feels urgent and alive. For more on the broader context, read our entries on Dadaism and action painting, or explore our post on the body as canvas.
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