Áine Phillips’s reply to our projects: What is performance art? and Timeline of performance art

Áine Phillips, 2013-07-12

Performance art is the live expression of artistic ideals, concepts, aesthetic images, forms and action. It amalgamates form, meaning and subject matter so that it can become a structure addressing the audience, be it viewers or camera.

What is performance art?

The live expression can become a situation, a set of behaviours or an event. It can incorporate a process based method of expression that does not necessarily resolve itself into something that appears ‘finished’. The aesthetic function of the performance is forged both by its specific "language" and the body, gender, age, shape size, personality, objects, space, actions/gestures, and the wider socio-political context. I think of performance as embodying sense, texture and taste as well as material and abstract concepts.

I believe performance is embodied critical theory in the spirit of theorist Max Horkheimer who described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.” (Horkheimer 1982, 244) It is an artform through which an artist or collaboration of artists manifest ideas and theories founded upon systems of analysis, fault and merit recognition and (from the philosophical tradition) a methodical practice of doubt.

read more: ÁINE PHILLIPS What is performance art?

Timeline of performance art

My performance life began as a child growing up in an emotionally intense family locus caring for a severely brain damaged brother with extreme physical and medical demands as part of intimate domestic life. During the 1970’s and 80’s I witnessed the extreme (often abusive) conditions helpless non-abled people lived in psychiatric institutions in Ireland and the UK. I also saw acts and behaviour I judged ‘normal’, that others would consider ‘mad’ and I found that mad is normal and normal mad. I began to perform in school plays, and discovered the expansion of subjectivity consequential of performing. I saw Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s “The Kiss” at the age of 17 and I understood suddenly that eloquent, framed (performed) behaviour could be art and I began making performance art in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin from 1984 until the present day.

read more: ÁINE PHILLIPS Timeline of performance art?

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