Last week in celebration of women and in protest of their treatment, at times unfair, at times oppressive, at times unethical, immoral, and downright evil and in opposition to the Trump regimes assault on them, Women's Marches were held all over the United States from NYC to Houston to San Francisco. These marches were part celebration, part protest, part performance art. In the photo essay Signs of Creative Resistance at the 2018 Women's March, Hyperallergic's co-founder Hra

Performance 11: On Line/Trisha Brown Dance Company Performance art, as formalized by artists in New York City in the 1970’s, largely explored how the body, normally used as an instrument in canvas painting and sculpture, could be seen as a material, an instrument, and a work of art in and of itself. Its differences between the performing arts were subtle in many ways, especially when seen alongside choreographers and musicians who were working in NYC at the same time. Choreog

Performance art is a complex activity. As with all complex activities, it resists the type of reductive, qualitative analysis that employs a numerical rating scale to simplify and standardize its assessment. The type that plays out with: 1 = good; 10 = bad; 5 = half good & half bad. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be defined or that curators, practitioners, and audience members can’t pass judgement on a performance or come to an agreement as to whether it’s good or bad. It in

Performance art is born of interdisciplinary thinking. It’s the art of the mashup, mixed media, switched rolls. It violates the sacred 4th wall that protects the spectators and keeps them safe. Boundaries between art, artists, and audience disappear, allowing them to intertwine, coalesce, unify. To fuck and fuck up. The practice of performance art deconstructs high society and low, making them its medium, taking them as targets. It aims to unsettle, to get under its audience