![]() ![]() Another member of the group, Atsuko Tanaka, fashioned one of Gutai’s best-known works: Electric Dress (1956), a wearable amalgam of light bulbs and fluorescent tubes painted in primary colors that resembled an Atomic Age kimono. In Japan, the artists of the Gutai Art Association (founded in 1954) made physicality central to their art, as evinced by the movement’s name, a contraction of the Japanese words for “tool” and “body.” Two notable Gutai figures worked with canvases on the floor: Kazuo Shiraga, who swung from a rope to apply thick swirls of pigment with his feet and Shimamoto Shozo, who fired paintballs with a handmade cannon and threw pigment-filled bottles to create explosive splatter patterns. A group of fellow artists who were there to catch him with a tarp were elided out of the photo by combining two views-one with Klein, one without-into the iconic image we know today. Klein’s best-known work, Leap Into the Void (1960), was a photograph in which he appears to dive off the roof of a building with the empty pavement below. ![]() ![]() In France, Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries” (1960), a series of performance-cum-painting works, replaced Pollock’s paintbrush with nude female models who’d roll across a canvas in public while slathered in the artist’s patented International Klein Blue pigment. These images would come to influence artists associated with French Nouveau Réalisme and the Japanese Gutai group during the mid- to late 1950s. Image Credit: Courtesy Amagasaki Cultural Foundation.Īrguably, performance art after World War II began with performative approaches to painting-most conspicuously in Jackson Pollock’s “drip” compositions, which became nearly inseparable from photos of Pollock making them. Abstract Expressionism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Gutai.Read “The ARTnews Guide to Performance Art, Part One: 1700s–1920s” here. What follows, then, is a necessarily abridged account of this fascinating chapter in art history. The most salient development for performance art after 1950, though, was the sheer number of artists who embraced it. Moreover, by the 1990s, film and video had achieved production values commensurate with mainstream movies, which had the effect of turning performance art into another form of cinematic mise-en-scène disconnected from live action in front of an audience. The genre became increasingly bound up with photography, film, and video, which transformed a transitory medium into an art object after the fact. Performance before and after midcentury was also distinguished by its increasing reliance on the camera, first for documentation, and later as an element integral to the work. ![]() Moreover, these activities were confined largely to Europe and America before spreading worldwide after 1950. Its history divides into two periods: the first half of the 20th century, when performative practices by the avant-garde weren’t formally categorized as art, and the postwar era, when they eventually were. Between 19, performance art evolved from a fringe practice to a global divertissement. ![]()
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