Visual & Performing Arts · 9th Grade · Performance Art and Interdisciplinary Practices · Weeks 28-36

Introduction to Performance Art

Exploring the history and concepts of performance art, focusing on body, time, space, and audience interaction.

• Common Core State Standards
• NCAS: Connecting VA.Cn11.1.HSProf
• NCAS: Responding VA.Re8.1.HSProf

About This Topic

Performance art uses the artist's body, actions, and presence as the primary medium, often in real time and without the possibility of exact repetition. Unlike theater, performance art typically dispenses with scripted narrative and character, making the artist's actual body and choices the subject of the work. The form emerged from Dadaism and Futurism, reached its fullest development in the 1960s and 70s with artists like Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, and Chris Burden, and remains a vital contemporary form.

US high school students often approach performance art with skepticism, asking whether actions that leave no permanent object can constitute art. This skepticism is worth taking seriously as the starting point for genuine inquiry into what art is and what it can do. Performance art's use of the body, time, and space directly connects to students' physical experience in a way that painting or sculpture does not, making it an unusually accessible entry point into conceptual art.

Active learning is central to understanding performance art because the work demands embodied experience. Students who design, perform, and critically analyze even simple durational or instructional actions develop insight into this form that documentation alone cannot provide.

Key Questions

1. How does performance art challenge traditional boundaries between artist, artwork, and audience?
2. Analyze the role of the artist's body as a medium in performance art.
3. Critique a performance art piece for its effectiveness in conveying its message or experience.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze the use of the artist's body as a primary medium in selected performance art pieces from the 1960s-70s.
• Compare and contrast the role of audience interaction in traditional theater versus performance art.
• Critique a contemporary performance art piece, evaluating its effectiveness in conveying its intended message or experience.
• Design a simple instructional performance art piece that utilizes body, time, and space.
• Explain how performance art challenges traditional notions of the artwork as a permanent object.

Before You Start

Elements of Art and Principles of Design

Why: Students need a foundational understanding of elements like line, shape, color, and principles like balance and emphasis to analyze how they are used in performance art.

Introduction to Modern Art Movements (e.g., Dadaism, Surrealism)

Why: Understanding the historical context and artistic philosophies of movements that influenced performance art provides crucial background for its development and concepts.

Key Vocabulary

Durational Performance	A performance art piece that unfolds over an extended period, emphasizing the passage of time and the artist's endurance.
Body Art	A genre of performance art where the artist's own body is the primary medium and subject, often involving physical endurance, transformation, or risk.
Conceptual Art	Art where the idea or concept behind the work is more important than the finished artistic object, often leading to performance or ephemeral forms.
Ephemeral Art	Art that exists only for a short time, such as performance art or land art, emphasizing process and experience over permanence.

Watch Out for These Misconceptions

Common Misconception

Performance art is just anything someone does in front of an audience, with no criteria for quality.

What to Teach Instead

Like all art forms, performance art is evaluated against criteria: Does the action generate meaning? Is the artist's intention legible? Does the performance use time and space in purposeful ways? Critics, curators, and artists have developed sophisticated frameworks for evaluating performance work, which active analysis of specific examples helps students engage with directly.

Common Misconception

Performance art cannot be collected or preserved, so it is historically insignificant.

What to Teach Instead

Performance art has generated extensive documentation (photographs, videos, artist scores, audience accounts), and instructions or props can be purchased by collectors. Many performances are legally re-performable according to the artist's specifications, and several major museums have active performance programs and collections.

Common Misconception

Performance art is always confrontational or shocking.

What to Teach Instead

While some performance art has used provocation for specific purposes, the form encompasses an enormous range of tones: gentle and meditative (Ono's instruction scores), politically urgent (Ana Mendieta's earth-body works), durational and contemplative (Abramovic's recent work). Students discover this range most vividly when introduced to diverse documented examples.

Active Learning Ideas

Instruction-Based Performance: Yoko Ono Score

Drawing on Ono's Instruction Paintings, students write a simple instruction score for an action (no more than three sentences) and perform it for the class. Each performance is documented in writing by two observers who note what they perceived versus what the performer intended.

45 min·Individual

Socratic Seminar: Can Action Be Art?

Students read a short excerpt from Abramovic's Artist is Present documentation and a critical response questioning whether endurance constitutes artistic merit. The seminar works toward a shared position on the question: what makes a performance succeed or fail as art?

35 min·Whole Class

Think-Pair-Share: Body as Medium Analysis

Students watch short documentation clips (4-5 minutes each) of two contrasting performance works -- one durational (Abramovic), one interactive (Tino Sehgal) -- and write three observations for each. Pairs then discuss: what does each artist seem to be testing or claiming about the body's capacity to make meaning?

30 min·Pairs

Gallery Walk: Performance Documentation

Photographic documentation of six to eight performance works from different decades is displayed around the room. Students respond to each with one word for how the image makes them feel, a sentence describing what the artist appears to be doing, and a question they would ask the artist.

25 min·Small Groups

Real-World Connections

• Choreographers for experimental dance companies, like those seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, often draw inspiration from performance art's focus on the body's expressive potential and spatial relationships.
• Museum curators specializing in modern and contemporary art, such as those at MoMA or the Tate Modern, are responsible for preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting performance art, often using extensive documentation and archival materials.
• Protest organizers and activists utilize performance art techniques to create impactful public demonstrations, using their bodies and actions to convey messages about social or political issues, as seen in global movements.

Assessment Ideas

Discussion Prompt

Pose the question: 'If a performance art piece leaves no physical object, how can it be considered art?' Facilitate a class discussion, prompting students to use vocabulary like 'ephemeral,' 'conceptual,' and 'process' to support their arguments, referencing specific artists discussed.

Quick Check

Present students with images or short video clips of two different performance art pieces. Ask them to write down one key difference in how the artist uses their body and one similarity in how they might engage the audience. Collect responses to gauge understanding of core concepts.

Peer Assessment

Have students briefly outline a simple performance art concept focusing on body, time, and space. Students exchange outlines and provide feedback using two specific questions: 'Is the use of body clear?' and 'How could audience interaction be more explicit?'

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between performance art and theater?

Theater is typically based on a script, performed by actors playing characters, with the goal of fictional representation. Performance art typically involves the actual artist (not a character), no fixed script, and a direct relationship between the artist's actions and their meaning -- rather than fictional narrative or dramatic illusion.

Why do performance artists use their own bodies as material?

The body is immediately present and real in a way that a canvas or sculpture is not. Using the body as material makes the artist's physical experience, vulnerability, and presence inseparable from the work's content. Many performance artists use this directness to address topics like gender, identity, endurance, and political power in ways that other media cannot.

How does active learning work for studying performance art?

Students who create and perform their own simple instruction-based actions develop an embodied understanding of what it means to treat time, space, and the body as artistic materials. Brief discussions comparing intended and perceived meanings immediately after each performance build critical vocabulary that analysis of historical works then extends and deepens.

How is performance art documented if it only happens once?

Artists use photography, video, written scores, audience accounts, and object relics to create documentary records of performances. The documentation itself sometimes becomes a separate artwork. Artists like Abramovic have worked with institutions to archive and re-perform significant works, raising productive questions about authenticity and repetition in art.