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individuals and artists' groups, including Fluxus, which is dealt with
in greater detail below, the Vienna Actionists, Gustav Metzger and
his Destruction in Art symposium, John Latham, Valie Export,
Peter Weibel, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Gilbert
and George, COUM Transmissions and many others. As this very
partial list indicates, Performance Art encompassed many different
sensibilities and intentions, and to suggest any unifying tendency,
beyond an interest in performance itself in the broadest sense, would
be misleading. Some performance art was concerned with explicit
social critique. For example its capacity to engage with the corporeal
and the material presented artists concerned with questions of
gender with an ideal means of exploring such issues. Much perfor-
mance art was also deliberately confrontational, seeking to shock
audiences out of their complacency.
But whatever their individual content or treatments performance
works are united by a shared consideration of context and methods.
Central to any performance is the question of the space in which it
takes place and the means by which it is articulated, often centred
on the artist's body as both location and means. Such work concerns
the media, in the sense of that which mediates a communication,
and how that mediation affects the message. It is no coincidence
that modern Performance Art emerged at a time when electronic
media were initiating what the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo
describes as an 'society of generalized communication'.
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To some
extent Performance can be understood as a pre-emptive defensive
reaction, emphasizing the corporeal and embodied as well as the
ephemeral and the physically located, as a form of resistance to the
immateriality, ubiquity and virtuality of mass media and communi-
cations, which had taken over so much of art's role as the provider of
aesthetic solace and meaning. But Performance can also be seen as
rehearsing many issues that later become relevant to electronic and,
in particular, digital media. These included questions of interaction,
response, feedback, the relationship between the audience and the
