What is performance art?
Performance art might be everything that doesn't fit into a frame or into a pedestal.
It's really almost the avant-avant guide.
Often it's called life art, so art that's happening life, it's happening in front of you.
It's that moment where the artist liberates the process from the product,
but there are many actions where the process is a performative act.
It's historically been done by very young artists, breaking ranks with what went before,
using performance to experiment with all kinds of ideas.
The question often comes up about performance, how gruesome it can be
or how unnerving or uncomfortable it makes the viewer.
If you actually go back and look at this history, there's an enormous variety
that's very much a reflection of the politics, the economics and other aesthetic concerns at the time.
It's also about very much responding to cultural shifts.
Performance is such an important part of the history of art
and therefore of culture and the way we express ourselves.
Performance has shaped the 20th century in very critical ways.
I think the exhibition is about where performance art comes from.
It's a portrait of the 20th century in a certain way.
Rosalie Goldberg and I thought that's a futurist manifesto in 1909 would be a good starting point.
The early 20th century was the first time that artists said we have to deal with all media.
I think 100 years is just basically a provoking question, it's not an answer.
It's always a draft to be added to.
I think the show in an ideal world is growing roots wherever it goes.
We take it to each venue and we add to it as we discover more material.
So over the next three months we have studio visits, we invited scholars and artists to add
and the end of the show is going to be double the amount of works.
It's always incomplete which is also wonderful, it's not a fixed exhibition.
We're not saying this is the only history, we're saying this is a fragment of that history.
You look at the pieces in 100 years and they're always pushing boundaries,
boundaries of pain, boundaries of endurance, boundaries of danger.
It's a work by Guido van der Wer where he's walking in front of an icebreaker.
We see Sigalit Landau who is playing hula hoop with a barbed wire.
For one year, 365 days, he puts himself in front of a time slot machine,
he puts his paper into the machine every hour.
Another piece I want to point out is Marina Braumovic and Ulay, framing a bow and arrow.
The exhibition is basically asking the viewer to participate like the Yoko Ono
where you have to basically hammer a nail into a canvas
or there's another participatory piece of Felix and Alice Torres
where you participate by eating a candy.
And Eve Klein doing this painting with fire
and then put that next to Yoko Ono in a famous work called Cut Piece
where she invites people to cut off her clothes which is symbolically and metaphorically
about violence against women.
I find it very interesting in this exhibition that you actually get more and more fascinated.
The more times you walk around it, how can we create an environment of looking at art in this way
that's not inviting you to come and see a series of film screenings
because everybody gets bored after the third film.
Many of these pieces go to the edges of human existence and human tolerance
and artists' life and artists' biography might be slightly different from somebody else's.
And to put all of this into an environment, it's an extraordinary way to grow
the next generation of artists in this country
but the real effect is going to be in hundreds of thousands of people's minds
as to what they feel now is possible.
