PERFORMANCE ART QUOTES
quotations about performance art
Visual art is really great, but performance art is just as important. And they go together really well, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Peanut butter is fine by itself, and jelly is fine by itself. But when they come together, there's something new to be had.
MAGGIE BLANK
"'ID: Coming Home' brings pop-up art to North Carolina Study Center", Daily Tarheel, April 1, 2016
Performance art is the "unconscious" of theatre. Dreams and traumas are the content of this unconscious, and the performer's art is to externalize these and enlarge them, so that they become available, ultimately, to the gaze of the Other.
A. HOWELL
The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice
Talking about performance is such a strange thing because it's so immaterial. We are talking about soft matter. We are talking about something that is invisible. You can't see it. You can't touch it. You just can feel it.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
"Marina Abramovic Makes Sundance Shut Up", Interview Magazine
Because I did an event with Jay Z, she said I'd killed performance art. But who made these rules?
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Guardian, May 12, 2014
If you learn to be a psychoanalyst, and you're working as a psychoanalyst, your job is in that context. If you're a baker, making bread, you're a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you're not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you're an artist. So the context makes the difference. And my context is art.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
"Marina Abramovic Makes Sundance Shut Up", Interview Magazine
Performance art is a real-life, high-risk form of artistic expression.
ANDREW CASTO
"Graduate student presents performance art", Kansas State Collegian, April 11, 2016
Theatre is fake ... The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Guardian, October 2, 2010
Performance art is often treated as part of a subculture in which its practices operate only in a closed-off section of the cultural field. Yet, historically, subcultures often anticipate major changes in society.
THOMAS J. BERGHUIS
Performance Art in China
Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words.
LAURIE ANDERSON
Tomorrow night I'm giving a lecture on silence and invisibility. Don't be surprised if I don't show up.
JAROD KINTZ
Seriously Delirious, But Not All Serious
Whether staged in museums or commercial galleries, performance art comes with numerous challenges--to commission, to produce, to preserve, to historicize, and to sell--with both sides of the art world's church and state figuring out how to build on the medium's potential.
JULIE BAUMGARDNER
"How Performance Art Entered the Mainstream", Artsy, November 3, 2015
It can be kind of boring when you [perform] in front of people who are artists. I would much rather perform somewhere like Fayetteville than New York. People in big cities get to see art all the time. It's super fun to see how normal people react to stuff. You get a genuine reaction from people; you're going to find people who have never experienced [performance work] and they're going to get way more out of it. It's fun to try to convince people what you do has merit.
JORDAN WAYNE LONG
"Expanding Art: Inverse Festival turns performance upside down", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, April 15, 2016
It's totally acceptable to walk away from a performance. If it's not engaging, not doing what it's supposed to, it's completely OK to walk out from it, just like any piece of art. People walk by art in a museum all the time that doesn't touch them, and they stop and spend time with the ones that do, and performance art should be treated the same way.
JORDAN WAYNE LONG
"Expanding Art: Inverse Festival turns performance upside down", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, April 15, 2016
Performance art is very often the least understood mode of artistic production. It requires a performer and an audience, but the artist has explicit control in determining how that interaction is mediated. There are no rules in performance--there is no need for dialogue, repetition, recordings, props, lights. The inclusion (or absence) of each is entirely up to the artist and is what makes the performance.
LUCAS IBERICO LOZADA
"Indigenous and Acting Out", Santa Fe Reporter, April 25, 2016
All of the performances are very sensory, and that's what's beautiful about performance. They're about really taking in not just sight but sound and smell and really engaging in the space the actual artist is in.
CYNTHIA POST HUNT
"Performance Art Festival to Feature International and Local Artists", Free Weekly, April 13, 2016
Part of performance art is the unknown -- the unexpected. You can stop by and check one out, and then know that the next one is going to be completely different.
CYNTHIA POST HUNT
"Expanding Art: Inverse Festival turns performance upside down", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, April 15, 2016
I'm more interested in tackling other people's assumptions of what performance art and theater are and trying to muddle the lines between those assumptions.
CARLY BALES
"Baltimore artist, actor Carly Bales on blurring the lines between performance art, theater", The Hub at Johns Hopkins, October 27, 2015
Performance art is a medium complicated and challenging not only in its theoretical qualities, but in its practical ones, too. What exactly is it?
JULIE BAUMGARDNER
"How Performance Art Entered the Mainstream", Artsy, November 3, 2015
I realise the power of art that does not hang on the walls of galleries.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Guardian, October 2, 2010
What you're doing is not important. What is really important is the state of mind from which you do it. Performance.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Walk Through Walls: A Memoir