Performance art can be demonstrated in many ways and is usually linked to theatre and the fine arts. However, performance has changed since the turn from modern to the post-modern, and artists are thinking of new ways to illustrate their ideas with their bodies. Happenings are loosely scripted shows where the artist controls the reigns and the audience becomes part of the piece. Shoot, by Chris Burden in 1971, is the perfect piece to compare to a Happening because while it was scripted, it did not go as planned.

Chris Burden described this performance by saying “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” In Burden’s plan, the bullet was supposed to merely graze his arm; however, as you can tell from the picture above this was not the case. Burden’s “friend” (who would shoot their friend) aimed too closely and from 15 feet away shot through his arm. This may not be the case as Burden may have flinched when the shot rang out, but honestly either of the two could have easily happened. Taking into context, this was during the later years of the Vietnam War. This was the first war Americans were able to watch on television and one year after draftees destroy their draft cards in Washington, D.C.. Burden is commenting on the Vietnam War. Thousands of young American men were being drafted and being shot at in Vietnam, simply because they weren’t pursuing a higher education. Nonetheless, the American Government was sending people to get shot at.

Now I move to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and Femen, a feminist group that often go topless or nude into public space and protest religious, political, sexist, national and international topics. These women protest everywhere from political rallies to church courtyards on the Sabbath day. Many are beaten, and arrested, they even staged a kidnapping of a Clergyman (or at least I think it was staged….).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbyQorX9IXQ

Now compare this to Shoot. Shoot was scripted, something could have gone wrong (and did), and it had a purpose. When Femen made this video, they had a plan (or script), there were chances for something to go wrong (Police arrest namely), and they had a purpose. The purpose being to comment on the people who go missing in Ukraine simply for being political activists and trying to raise awareness about corrupt government.

Both of these acts are related to the Happenings of New York because of the loosely scripted act and the engagement of the audience. Chris Burden had his friend, a member of the audience, literally shoot him (insane), and Femen kidnapped a Clergyman outside of what seems to be a church in daylight with people around; both these cases show a great importance of audience. While Happenings don’t require the use of the body, performance art is strengthened by the body, creating a human to human connection.

In Leo Steinberg’s Other Criteria: The Flatbed Picture Plane, he first discusses the printing press and uses it to characterize the the changed content of a pictorial surface by its resting angle with respect to human posture.  In other words, historically, the top of the plane is where a humans head would be and the bottom towards his or her feet.  Looking back to Renaissance paintings, this vertical positioning is essential to their style. 

Now fast forward a few centuries to the 1950s in New York and you see the work of Robert Rauschenberg.  Rauschenberg set out to change the experience of art by promoting the flatbed or work-surface picture plane.  He was not only changing the angle of imaginative confrontation, meaning he was changing the way the viewer looks at art and therefor changing the context completely, but in a Greenbergian sense creating art for art’s sake.

With Pilgrim (1960), Rauschenberg incorporates a chair into the painting.  This is not only abstract expressionism, but it changes the picture plane by making it three-dimensional.  The other dimension he adds does not have nor does it add context to the painting; but its simply a chair with stripes that match the pattern of the painting but are not the same color making the chair and painting [collectively] fall under Greenberg’s idea of art for art’s sake.  While it doesnt have so much to do with the active movements and brushstrokes of the artist like a Jackson Pollock painting, it does take the context away and insert the viewer into something they may not be completely comfortable with receiving.  Rauchenberg created a picture plane that is not relatable to anything before it and is a cross of abstract, representational, pop and modern art all collated into one magnificent genre.

However the most relatable aspect of Rauchenberg’s work is the expulsion of the medium into the third dimension and this inclusion of pieces people use on a day to day basis.  While these everyday pieces still lack context for the most part, it does add to the connection of the viewer to the artist creating a bridge between the two and allowing the viewer to be included in the artwork by adding their own imaginative confrontation.

Modernist art can be traced back to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in which technological changes created cultural changes for much of the West. Postmodernist art was designed to contradict modernism, critique social norms and entice revolution, breaking apart the capitalist, democratic and industrial ideas brought about by modernism. Terry Barrett even says that “Postmodernism does not merely chronologically follow modernism, it reacts against modernism, and might better be called anti-modernism.” Postmodernist criticize modernity claiming that it shepherds ideas of oppression of people even though there is a promise of freedom and equality with modernism.

The split between modernism and postmodernism is truly a split between art which is considered aesthetically pleasing and art which often reaches the borders of what art actually is.  For instance, if looking at a painting from the enlightenment period, there is definitive evidence it is a painting and it looks beautiful. But then you look at a Happenings from the 1960’s in Andy Worhol’s studio and question what the word beautiful means and if it can be interpreted objectively, only to come to the conclusion it cannot.  Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder and that is one thing postmodern artists strive to do; break down the barrier between aesthetics and beauty, showing they are not related.

Postmodernism also brought about artists like Jackson Pollock and with Pollock art became more of an act than a final piece; thats not to say his works aren’t worth thousands of dollars. With the rise of Jackson Pollock’s popularity came what is known as abstract expressionism. Pollock said his paintings were not made to beautiful, but he made them to express how he was feeling, and this expression was the art. Furthermore when looking at the concept of “art for art’s sake” which was brought up by Greenberg and was aimed at taking the context out of art and straying as far away from it as possible and tying it back to postmodernism there is a simple link.  This goes back to the idea of postmodernist art breaking down modernist art by not looking at the final piece, but at the artist and the extension of the artist into the work or the artist making the work an extension of themselves.