Live bodies became art when Dada mocked the theater upstairs
Performance art puts the artist inside the work—time, space, body, presence, and public reaction. The label spread in the 1970s, though futurist cabarets and 1916 Dada at Cabaret Voltaire already staged anti-art actions. It defines itself against conventional theatre's scripts and characters.
Unlike entertainment spectacle, performance art is usually content-driven conceptual work presented live or through documents, often in galleries yet able to occupy any site. John Perreault credits Marjorie Strider with coining the term in 1969. Mid-1960s to 1970s practice drew on Artaud, Dada, Situationists, Fluxus, installation, and conceptual art, chasing ephemeral authenticity rather than repeated roles. Landmark experimenters range from Schneemann and Abramović to Burden, Beuys, Paik, Hsieh, Mendieta, Nitsch, and Klein, each probing duration, ritual, or risk in different ways.
Western theorists root the lineage in early twentieth-century constructivism, Futurism, and Dada. Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened Zürich's Cabaret Voltaire for experimental evenings that mocked the theater below; Tristan Tzara helped drive an anti-system, anti-eternal-beauty ideology. Futurism began as a 1909 literary push before painting, sculpture, music, and film joined until World War I checked it. Bauhaus Weimar's 1919 workshops probed body, space, sound, and light; Black Mountain College carried that experiment into America. Action painting—Pollock's live traces, Klein's Anthropométries—let critics such as Harold Rosenberg treat the canvas as a stage of doing.
Related currents include 1960 Nouveau réalisme, Japanese Gutai happenings from 1955 Kansai, Viennese Actionism, and neo-Dadaists who prefer live art or intervention. Genres branch into body art, Fluxus performance, happenings, action poetry, and intermedia; Survival Research Laboratories even stage machines. The polysemy of performance keeps confusion alive: scenic performance and performance art share vocabularies yet often stand in antagonistic relation. What unites the narrower sense is refusal of tidy linear fiction—artists may satirize, ritualize, or borrow dance and music without becoming actors repeating a play.
Source: Performance art
