Performance Art - 1970s

1970s

Artists whose work already before tended to be a performance art, as well as new artists, at the beginning of the 1970s began to present performance art in a stricter form.

New artists with radical performances were Chris Burden, with the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters, and Vito Acconci in the same year with Seedbed.

The book Expanded Cinema, by Gene Youngblood, marked a shift in the use of media by performance artists. The first book considering video art as an art form, mentions Jud Yalkut as a pioneering video artist. Since 1965 he had collaborated in dozens of intermedia performances throughout the United States, also with Nam June Paik, who beginning of the 1960s already had been a fluxus performer on the way to become a media artist. As to the art of Paik, Youngblood refers to works of Carolee Schneemann and Robert Whitman from the 1960s, which had been pioneering for performance art, becoming an independent artform at the beginning of the 1970s.

The British-based pair Gilbert and George, already in 1970, had documented actions of themselves on video, and created their "living sculpture" performance, being painted in gold and singing "Underneath The Arches" for extended periods. Joan Jonas began to include video in her experimental performances in 1972.

In 1973 Laurie Anderson performed Duets on Ice, on the streets of New York City. Marina Abramović, in the performance "Rhythm 10", conceptually included the violation of her body.

Since 1973 the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles had a formative impact on the wave of performances with feminist background.

Carolee Schneemann work in 1963, Eye Body, already had been a prototype of performance art. Schneemann in 1975 drew on with innovative solo performances, like Interior Scroll, showing the female body as an artistic medium.

Performance art, because of its relative transience, by the 1970s, had a fairly robust presence in the avant-garde of East Bloc countries, especially Yugoslavia and Poland.