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Definition: performance art from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate(R) Dictionary

(1971) : a nontraditional art form often with political or topical themes that typically features a live presentation to an audience or onlookers (as on a street) and draws on such arts as acting, poetry, music, dance, or painting

performance artist n


performance art

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Type of modern art activity presented before a live audience, and combining elements of the visual arts and the theatrical arts, such as music, video, theatre, and poetry reading. Performance art developed in the 1910s, but flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It often overlaps with other avant-garde forms of expression, particularly body art, happenings, and fluxus art. The term happening is sometimes used synonymously with performance art, but happenings are often more informal and improvised than performance art, which is usually carefully planned. The history of performance art has been varied and colourful. The Futurists and the Dadaists often promoted their work in the 1910s with humorous or outrageous events and publicity stunts. The surrealists carried on this tradition in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the 1950s the works of the French artist Yves Klein included dragging naked women smeared with paint across a canvas on the floor of a gallery, to the accompaniment of one…
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Full text Article Performance art

From Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable
An art form combining elements of theatre and music with the visual arts. It dates from the late 1960s and has involved a wide range of expression, from self-inflicted discomfort and humiliation to surreal whimsicality. An example of the latter was staged in 1975 when the three-man Ddart Performance…
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Full text Article Performance Art

From Encyclopedia of American Studies
Documentation of Tehching Hsieh's third one-year...
Although performance art was part of avant-garde art movements in Europe during World War I, performance art in American culture primarily dates from the post—World War II era. In particular, performance art in American culture is tied to 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s counterculture, including protest…
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Full text Article performance art

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
multimedia art form originating in the 1970s in which performance is the dominant mode of expression. Perfomance art may incorporate such elements as instrumental or electronic music, song, dance, television, film, sculpture, spoken dialogue, and storytelling. Its roots lie in early 20th-century…
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Full text Article performance art.

From The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Acting
Performance art is a conceptual, interdisciplinary mode of performance that often rejects traditional dramatic narrative and foregrounds the presence of the performer/artist as a primary point of focus. As commonly used, the term encompasses a variety of theatrical genres and traditions from the…
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Full text Article performance art

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Type of modern art activity presented before a live audience, and combining elements of the visual arts and the theatrical arts, such as music, video, theatre, and poetry reading. Performance art developed in the 1910s, but flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It often overlaps with other…
| 396 words
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A contemporary, radical hybrid art form , closely associated with conceptual art , often combining distinct elements of theater , music , dance , and various visual arts, in which the performing artist becomes not only a participant in her own art, but on occasion also its corporeal subject matter. …
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Full text Article performance art/art performance

From The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance
These two terms, and the more general term ‘Performance’, emerged in the early 1970s to describe international contemporary work which straddled the boundaries of the performing and visual arts. (In this entry the word ‘Performance’, when capitalized, is intended to convey the category of work…
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Full text Article PERFORMANCE ART

From 100 Ideas that Changed Art
Performance art typically consists of a live performance involving the artist, which is presented to an audience, who may be invited to participate. Although performance emerged as an avowed art form in the West only in the later twentieth century, the idea of performance in art has much deeper…
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Full text Article Performance Art

From If the Paintings Could Talk
Performance Art
JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY . AN EXPERIMENT ON A BIRD IN THE AIR PUMP, 1768 What is going to happen to the white cockatoo in Wright's painting of An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump? Will it live or die? The 'scientist' has pumped out the air from the glass globe in which the bird is trapped, and is…
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Full text Article FEMINIST PERFORMANCE ART

From The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World
Feminist performance art is an important area of women's creative bodily expression and has been a continuing force for more than 50 years, as women have sought ways to challenge patriarchy artistically with the “personal as political.” Feminist performance artists embrace rather than ignore their…
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