Performance

What is performance?

Performance is a form of art in which the artist does not reach for a brush but uses their own body, movement, voice or direct interaction with the audience as the primary medium. The process itself is the work, not a result hung on a wall. Nor is the viewer merely a passive observer: their presence, and sometimes their reaction, completes the work. And because it exists only in the moment of its happening, performance is essentially unsellable — once it ends, all that remains is documentation in the form of photographs or video, and the objects used during the event.

When and how did performance come about?

Performance was born in the 1960s, when artists began looking for a more immediate way of reaching an audience than a painting or a sculpture could offer. They often test their own limits in it, working with exhaustion, pain or nakedness in order to provoke an immediate, raw response from the audience. This is not effect for effect's sake, more a question of how far a person will go when face to face with another living body.

Who are the most important performance artists?

The key figure is unquestionably Marina Abramović. In her celebrated work Rhythm 0 she allowed the audience to do anything they liked to her body for six hours using seventy-two prepared objects, including a loaded gun, testing how far people are capable of going. The pioneers also include Hermann Nitsch's Viennese Actionism and the duo Marina Abramović and Ulay, whose joint actions became legendary. It is no accident that these are the names you find today in the world's most important museum collections.

How did performance develop in the Czech context?

Here performance developed mainly in the 1970s and was closely bound up with the unofficial scene. These were often unobtrusive, quiet actions that could be read as a form of subtle resistance to the regime of the day. Key figures include Jiří Kovanda, Milan Knížák and Zorka Ságlová, whose work is now recalled by galleries and collectors alike. Isn't it a beautiful paradox that the most fragile and most fleeting has managed to survive whole decades?

How do you trade something that passes?

Here lies the whole logic of the market in performance. Because the action itself passes, what is traded is what remains of it: photographs, video and the certificate of authenticity (a document confirming that this is an authorised record of a particular work). It is the documentation and the certificate that turn a fleeting moment into something a collector can hold. Performance may once have called the traditional art market into question, but today it operates within it perfectly well — it simply comes in by another door.

— Anna Pulkertová, founder of Art Part Club