Performance Art
A live, time-based action that photography can record as a trace or function as the work itself.
Performance Art is an artistic genre in which an individual or group carries out actions within a defined time and place, typically in the presence of an audience. Accounts commonly link its origins to early 20th-century avant-garde experiments (including Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, and Surrealism), while later histories emphasize its rise to prominence by the 1970s through Happenings and Fluxus practices that blurred art and everyday life. It is also framed as a response to the commodification of the art object, shifting attention toward dematerialized actions and ideas.
In photographic terms, Performance Art is inseparable from the problem of transience. Photography plays a pivotal archival role by granting later viewers visual access to unique events, procedures, and concepts that would otherwise disappear. Documentation ranges from intentionally deskilled, utilitarian snapshots that minimize aesthetic finish to emphasize idea over object, to highly aestheticized, monumental images aligned with tableau traditions. Performance may be staged specifically for the camera—sometimes without a live audience—so that the action is enacted to be recorded and the resulting image is the intended artwork (a photo-performance), or the photographic making itself may function as the performance, through photographic procedures and interventions that treat image-making itself as the action used to perform the work through the medium. Sequencing and chronophotographic strategies are often used to convey duration, repetition, or multiple attempts, while post-production work such as painting over the photographic record or altering the negative/print can convert the document into a unique object.
Debates around Performance Art in photography often hinge on liveness versus mediation: the photograph can be read as flattening a time-based event into a static record, yet it may also become the work’s most enduring form. This tension is sharpened by commodification, as limited-edition performance documents circulate as marketable prints despite the genre’s anti-object impulses. The term also intersects with Conceptual Art and Body Art.