For nearly three months in the spring of 2010, Marina Abramović sat motionless in a wooden chair in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She sat for seven hours a day, six days a week, staring silently at whoever sat in the chair opposite her. No talking. No touching. Just eye contact. Over 750,000 people came to watch. Some visitors sat for minutes, others for hours. Many wept. The piece was called "The Artist Is Present," and it became one of the most talked-about artworks of the 21st century — despite the fact that it involved no paint, no canvas, no objects, and no technology. The artwork was simply a woman sitting in a chair, being fully present.
Performance art is one of the most radical and misunderstood forms of contemporary art. It uses the artist's body — its movement, endurance, vulnerability, and presence — as the primary medium. There is no object to buy, no painting to hang, no sculpture to install. The artwork is the action itself, and when it ends, it exists only in memory, documentation, and the lasting impact it had on those who witnessed it. This impermanence is not a limitation — it is the point. Performance art insists that the most meaningful artistic experiences cannot be commodified, collected, or owned.
This article explores the history of performance art, its key practitioners, and why this challenging form continues to push the boundaries of what art can be.
What Is Performance Art?
Performance art is a live art form in which the artist's body, actions, and presence in time constitute the artwork. It emerged as a distinct practice in the 1960s, though its roots stretch back to Futurist and Dada provocations in the early 20th century. Unlike theater, performance art typically has no script, no narrative, no characters, and no clear distinction between performer and audience. Unlike dance, it does not necessarily involve choreographed movement or trained bodies.
Performance art can take many forms:
Endurance pieces — The artist subjects their body to prolonged physical or psychological stress (sitting still for days, fasting, remaining silent).
Body art — The artist uses their own body as a canvas or sculptural material (painting on skin, altering appearance, testing physical limits).
Participatory performance — The audience is invited to interact with or act upon the artist.
Instructional performance — The artist provides instructions that others carry out.
Durational performance — The piece unfolds over extended time — hours, days, weeks, or even years.
Origins: Futurism, Dada, and the Avant-Garde
Performance art's earliest precedents come from the early 20th-century avant-garde. The Italian Futurists staged provocative "serate" (evening events) in theaters and cafés, combining poetry, music, and confrontation with audiences. At the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, Dada artists Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, and Tristan Tzara performed absurdist poetry, noise music, and costumed actions designed to shock bourgeois sensibilities and challenge the very concept of art.
These events established a crucial precedent: art could be a live action, not just an object. The artwork was the event itself — unrepeatable, ephemeral, and inseparable from its moment in time.
The 1960s–1970s: The Golden Age of Performance Art
Fluxus and Yoko Ono
The Fluxus movement, active from the early 1960s, blurred the boundaries between art, music, and everyday life through "event scores" — simple instructions for actions that anyone could perform. Yoko Ono was a central Fluxus figure. Her "Cut Piece" (1964) invited audience members to approach her one at a time and cut away a piece of her clothing with scissors. The piece was a profound meditation on vulnerability, trust, gender, and the power dynamics between performer and viewer. It remains one of the most influential performances in art history.
Marina Abramović, the pioneering performance artist whose endurance-based works have redefined the boundaries of art. Image: CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Viennese Actionism
In Austria, the Viennese Actionists — Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler — pushed performance art to its most extreme. Their "actions" involved paint, bodily fluids, animal carcasses, and acts of self-harm, intended to confront postwar Austrian society with the repressed violence beneath its surface. While controversial and often deeply disturbing, their work established the body as a site of artistic and political contestation.
Joseph Beuys and Social Sculpture
German artist Joseph Beuys expanded the definition of performance art by declaring that "every human being is an artist" and that art should be a form of social transformation. His performance "I Like America and America Likes Me" (1974) saw Beuys spend three days in a New York gallery locked in a room with a live coyote, wrapped in felt and carrying a walking stick. The piece was a symbolic negotiation between European and Indigenous American cultures, conducted entirely through gesture and presence rather than words.
Marina Abramović: The Grandmother of Performance Art
No artist has done more to bring performance art to mainstream attention than Marina Abramović. Born in Belgrade in 1946 to Yugoslav partisan parents, Abramović has spent over five decades testing the physical and psychological limits of the human body in performances of extraordinary courage and intensity.
Key Works
"Rhythm 0" (1974) — Abramović placed 72 objects on a table (including a rose, a feather, a scalpel, a loaded pistol, and a bullet) and invited the audience to use any of them on her body for six hours. She stood passively as participants became increasingly aggressive — cutting her clothes, drawing blood, and at one point holding the loaded gun to her head. The piece exposed the dark potential of group behavior when all consequences are removed.
"The Artist Is Present" (2010) — Her three-month sitting piece at MoMA (described above) stripped performance art to its absolute essence: two people, two chairs, eye contact. The simplicity was deceptive. The emotional intensity was overwhelming. Visitors reported life-changing experiences from simply sitting across from another human being in complete silence and attention.
"Rest Energy" (1980) — Performed with her then-partner Ulay. They stood facing each other, holding a taut bow and arrow between their bodies, the arrow pointing directly at Abramović's heart. Microphones amplified their accelerating heartbeats. The piece lasted four minutes and ten seconds — an eternity when a slip could be fatal. It is one of the most viscerally tense artworks ever created.
Why Performance Art Matters
Performance art challenges fundamental assumptions about what art is and how it creates meaning:
It cannot be bought — In an art market driven by investment and speculation, performance art resists commodification. You cannot hang presence on a wall or store endurance in a warehouse. This gives performance art a radical independence from market forces.
It is unrepeatable — Each performance exists only in its specific moment. Even if an artist "re-performs" a piece, the experience is never identical. This ephemerality gives performance art an existential honesty — it confronts the same impermanence that defines human life.
It collapses the distance between art and life — When the artist uses their own body as the medium, the distinction between art and lived experience disappears. The pain is real. The exhaustion is real. The vulnerability is real. This directness creates an emotional impact that mediated art forms (painting, film, photography) struggle to match.
It empowers marginalized voices — Performance art requires no expensive materials, no gallery representation, no institutional permission. A body and an idea are sufficient. This accessibility has made it a powerful tool for feminist artists, queer artists, artists of color, and artists from the Global South who have been excluded from traditional art world structures.
Performance Art Today
Performance art continues to evolve in the 21st century. Contemporary practitioners include:
Tino Sehgal — Creates "constructed situations" using live performers in museum spaces. His works involve no objects, no documentation, and no photographs — visitors experience them only through direct encounter.
Pope.L — Known for his "crawls," where he crawled on his belly through the streets of New York in a Superman suit, confronting racial stereotypes and the invisibility of Black bodies in public space.
Ragnar Kjartansson — Creates durational performances that test the limits of repetition and sincerity, such as "The Visitors" (2012), a nine-channel video installation of a musical performance spread across a crumbling mansion.
The rise of social media and live streaming has also created new possibilities for performance art, allowing artists to reach global audiences in real time. But it also raises questions about whether mediated performance can retain the essential quality of presence that defines the form.
How to Experience Performance Art
Be present — Put your phone away. Performance art demands your full attention. The artwork is happening in front of you, in real time, and it will not happen again exactly this way.
Stay longer than you think you need to — Durational performances unfold slowly. Give yourself time to settle into the rhythm. The experience deepens over time.
Notice your discomfort — If a performance makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is likely intentional. Ask yourself why. What boundary is the artist testing? What assumption is being challenged?
Reflect afterward — The impact of a strong performance often hits hours or days later. Give yourself time to process what you witnessed.
Final Thoughts
Performance art is the most human of art forms. It strips away everything except the one thing that cannot be reproduced or commodified: the living presence of another human being. In a world increasingly mediated by screens, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, the raw directness of one person standing before another, offering their body, their time, and their vulnerability as art, feels more radical and more necessary than ever.
Whether you find performance art profound or bewildering — and it is okay to find it both — it asks questions that all art ultimately asks: What does it mean to be present? What can a human body express? What happens when we truly pay attention to another person? The answers may be uncomfortable, but they are never unimportant.
Explore more contemporary art forms: read about installation art, or discover why art matters in society and the brain.
