Last year I traveled to watch an evening of Performance Art in Los Angeles. A man climbed onto the stage and sang Glenn Fry’s The Heat is On from the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack. It was pitch-perfect. And I was pissed. This was the man’s idea of Performance Art? I was so disappointed.

But I wasn’t surprised. The Performance Art moniker has been endlessly appropriated by mainstream American artists who either aren’t aware that Performance Art has its own history that’s distinct from the histories of other arts, or else they just don’t give a damn and are looking for a cheap way to make bland poetry, music, dance, circus acts, and other “performing arts” sound more sexy.

Take this example—a flatulent work entitled ‘Performance Art Dance Piece’ in which three “dancers” attempt tired choreography that employs the same uninspired modern and contemporary dance vocabulary we’ve seen again and again. The men have little dance training, judging from their rickety turns, sloppy footing, poor spotting, lack of centers, Oompa Loompa groundwork, and newborn balance. But here’s the thing: if these unfortunate negatives had been taken to their extremes—if the dancers’ bad technique had been pushed to the forefront until the trio became abstract drunks trying to find their footing, or mentally challenged monks doing bizarre kung fu, or gods making an obvious attempt at reordering the dirt universe that the artists were mindlessly kicking up—this piece could’ve been transformed from bad dance into a unique Performance Art piece with its own internal structure and logic that demanded the audience “figure out” the spatial-movement-narrative language of the artists. But the movement, being so clearly Dance with a capital D, and choreographed with so many of the dance clichés we’ve all seen before, has left the “figuring out” pre-figured for us; we see the recognizable, codified movements and know instantly that this is Dance—which means the only mystery remaining for us is why anyone bothered to film the piece at all. There’s a fine line between bad art and good Performance Art, but this piece is simply proof again that the lazy fix for shitty art has become to label it Performance Art, then wait for someone to show up and clap.

Given its Dadaist, Anarchist, and anti-consumerist roots, I am all for Performance Art defying/defiling its own definitions and conventions, as it should—which is why the dilution of its name by arts that appear to be dying slow, painful deaths thanks to predictable, self-referential, and uninspired works makes me queasy.

I view definitions of Performance Art with suspicion—which is why it’s with a little self-loathing that I give you the Scotch Wichmann Performance Art manifesto, previously unpublished—and maybe it should’ve stayed that way.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Performance art, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.