Narrative path Contemporary Art. The Performance

As youth protests erupted across Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, many artists adopted a strong critical stance against the Western art system and market, revolutionising the concept of artwork. They argued that artworks should not be perceived as unique and precious objects with economic worth—i.e. trading commodities. Consequently, their material aspect was 'dematerialised' and ultimately eliminated, and artworks were replaced by ephemeral and provocative artistic actions. In this context, the body emerged as the favourite medium for creative expression, and various methods were employed, ranging from happenings (spontaneous and improvised acts involving public participation) to performances (structured acts created by the artist and staged in front of an audience). Bodily experience, along with gesture and the spoken word, became the foundational components of a new artistic language aimed at forging an intensely sensory and emotional connection with the audience. 

The preliminary investigation into the body's expressive potential for creative and performance art originated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as demonstrated by the avant-garde work of Piero Manzoni, who used the nude bodies of models and signed them as though they were painted artworks.  Simultaneously, Yves Klein, in his work Anthropométrie (1960), coated the naked bodies of female models in paint and used them to create impressions on large canvases. 

Furthermore, the concept of the body as a specific medium in contemporary art was strengthened by the growth of movements advocating for women's rights. Performance Art, which focused on physical and social provocation, became the favoured medium among many female artists. Moreover, a considerable number of them, in their quest for a new identity, assigned a political and "self-aware" role to the female body, which was now seen as the subject of the work rather than merely an aesthetic object for men to admire. 

In 1974, art historian Lea Vergine made a significant theoretical and critical contribution to Italian historiography on Performance Art in her book Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language, which comprises texts and stories from male and female artists who worked with the body, including Gilbert & George, Rebecca Horn, Trisha Brown, and Günter Brus, alongside an iconographic section of photographs and video stills taken during ephemeral performance acts.

Edited by Tiziana Serena, with the collaboration of Caterina Caputo

On the cover: Palazzo Strozzi, Photograph of a gallery in the exhibition "Marina Abramović. The Cleaner," at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2018-2019. 

Permission from Palazzo Strozzi, Florence