Performance art: an introduction Helina Boatwright 3/25/26

 Performance art: an introduction by The Art Assignment and Dr. Virginia B. Spivey 

“Throughout the mid-20th century, performance has been closely tied to the search for alternatives to established art forms, which many artists felt had become fetishized as objects of economic and cultural value. Because performance art emphasized the artist’s action and the viewer’s experience in real space and time, it rarely yielded a final object to be sold, collected, or exhibited.” 

Performance art is controversial because it doesn't lead to something tangible that can be hung up in a gallery. So it's hard for some people to accept performance art as art because there is no physical object, and it seems like something anyone can create and doesn't really have to have any actual drawing talents. It's hard for some to realize that acting/performing is a talent just like art and that you're using your body in real time to create it. 

“Shifting attention from the art object to the artist’s action further suggested that art existed in real space and real time.” 

When doing that, it turns it from just being an art piece to a performance piece where people are allowed to interact and ask questions about what they are doing and why they choose to do it. It also lets us see the process of how the peach can be, instead of just being there. 

Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance | The New Yorker

“Not long before leaving Sarah Lawrence, Ono published in a campus newspaper a short story called 'Of a Grapefruit in the World of Park.” It’s about some young people trying to decide what to do with a grapefruit left over from a picnic. The allegory is a little mysterious, but it’s clear what the grapefruit represents. The grapefruit is a hybrid, and so is Yoko Ono.”

The grapefruit is used to inspire creativity and have the reader look at the world in new ways. I think she wants the reader to see the world how she does and understand that you don't have to do things the traditional way to get where you want to, because sometimes that way could just be a waste of time which is why she left school, because to her it just seemed to be making her do things that she felt she had no use for/ already knew.

“In 1960, Ono found a loft at 112 Chambers Street and rented it for fifty dollars and fifty cents a month. It was a fourth-floor walkup, without heat or electricity, and the windows were so coated with grime that little light got in, though there was a skylight. “She organized a series of concerts and performances.”

She bought this building that was run down and old, and instead of tearing it down and trying to rebuild, she cleaned it up and used it as it was to create an area for artists to perform their work. She let them use the loft for two nights each. This building, which most people would have seen as a project that was too much work to take on, was turned into a place that occasionally held two hundred people who came to see these art performances hosted by Onos. I think the repurposing of the building can be seen as art in itself because instead of discarding the building, it was given a new meaning and was able to stand longer because of the creativity that was allowed to happen within it. 

Text book 

“The United Farm Workers thought creatively about the relationship between labor tactics and their own unique material and cultural context and came up with something innovative, and most important, æective. As artistic activists, we need to do the same.”

We need to do more than just think about how we create something, and we need to see things through and plan how to change it from being a regular piece of art to something that will inspire others. We mostly create from inspiration and forget to try to add our own spin to things, and that leads to a mere copy of your inspiration. 

“They countered negative stereotypes, not by directly refuting them, but instead by appropriating “positive” symbols and associating these with their movement. Their march on the Capitol drew on symbols of white feminine purity and respectability and on Victorian middle-class ideals of “true womanhood.” 

Instead of screaming and fighting, which would have given the Capitol more ammo for their negative remarks about the movement. They represented themselves in a dignified way that automatically turned the negative attention the capital was throwing their way into positive attention. They were also able to make people see how the capital was in the wrong for their bashing of the movement with how delicately they handled the situation, and it became one of the most memorable spectacles staged in the country. It was written about in the New York Times, and it still takes place about 7 years later.