page_title: Performance art
section_title: The technique of performance art
hierarchical_section_title: Performance art / 1980s / The technique of performance art
caption_attribution_description: English: View of photographic installation and record of Tehching Hsieh's "One Year Performance 1978–1979" (Cage Piece). This was exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2009. photo credit: vhf victor felder some rights reserved, license CC-BY-SA
context_page_description: Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be live, through documentation, spontaneously or written, presented to a public in a Fine Arts context, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance art, also known as artistic action, has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant garde art.
  It involves four basic elements: time, space, body, and presence of the artist, and the relation between the creator and the public. The actions, generally developed in art galleries and museums, can take place in the street, any kind of setting or space and during any time period. Its goal is to generate a reaction, sometimes with the support of improvisation and a sense of aesthetics. The themes are commonly linked to life experiences of the artist themselves, or the need of denunciation or social criticism and with a spirit of transformation.
context_section_description: Until the 1980s, performance art has demitified virtuosism, this being one of its key characteristics. Nonetheless, from the 1980s on it started to adopt some technical brilliancy. In reference to the work Presence and Resistance by Philip Auslander, the dance critique Sally Banes  writes "... by the end of the 1980s, performance art had become so widely known that it no longer needed to be defined; mass culture, especially television, had come to supply both structure and subject matter for much performance art; and several performance artists, including Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Willem Dafoe, and Ann Magnuson, had indeed become crossover artists in mainstream entertainment.". In this decade the parametres and technicalities built to purify and perfect performance art were defined.
caption: Tehching Hsieh Exhibition in the Modern Art Museum of New York where the artist made a daily self-portrait
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