THIS IS PERFORMANCE ART

This list was made in January 2014 in relation to a previews list/manifesto written by Marilyn Arsem for the context of Infraction festival in 2011.
  

THIS is Performance Art

- Performance art is in progress
- Performance art is a-live  
- “Art is what makes life more interesting than art” Robert Filliou
- Performance art is not only the moment, because the moment is made of past and future encounters constantly influencing and reshaping the present
- Performance art is not against theater but it is very distinct from it
- Theater have the responsibility of the rehearsal
- Performance art can be very irresponsible when uses excessively the excuse of the moment to produce work

- Performance art can use fiction
- Reality and fiction are two inseparable concepts
- Performance art needs a live audience
- Most of the times the experience of a performer is distinct from the experience of the audience
- Performance art lives beyond the moment e.g. “Its in the people who have seen it, in their consciousness” Alastair Maclennan
- Performance art is not documentation
- Documentation have its own life, outside the performance
- Documentation builds performance art values and notions of history
- Documentation influence what we think about performance, and what we think about performance is what we project on our own works and the works of others

- Performance art should be more than performance art for the sake of performance art
- What is performance art? Is it a dead question?
- What can performance art do?
- Performance art can be a vehicle for communicating any kind of individual or collective phenomena
- Performance art can be about the self
- Performance art can be about the other

- Performance art is not an investment object.
- The etymology of the word curator is taking care of
- It makes sense to curate performance art when we take care of people instead of taking care of things
- Although the work and the maker are inseparable, most of the times the maker doesn't fully understand the present doing
- Repeating a performance art work doesn’t make the work theater
- Memory is made of repetition, life is made of repetition
- Repetition can be a plus and not always a minus

- Today performance art new lexicon includes the terms: Acquisition, Collection and Repository
- Performance art is not fully framed by academia like other performing arts
- Performance art discourse is made by the same ones who produce performance works – the artists
- Artists should be responsible for thinking performance art outside conventions, outside its own box
- Artists should do the effort to agree or disagree about Acquisition, Collection and Repository by re-thinking performance art

- Performance art is ephemeral
- “The insistence on performance’s ontological ephemerality constitutes a missed opportunity to use performance in interrogating, and destabilizing, the archive itself” Cecilia Aldarondo on Rebecca Schneider
- Performance art is ephemeral and only becomes embodied knowledge through continuity
- Performance art is now
- Experimental Psychology argues that the now is something as well projected in the future
- Now can be 2014.
- Although there is a lot in common, 2014 is not 1970 or 1910
- The ephemeral cannot be archived. Yet, through the archive I am aware of performance art history
- The History of performance art with a capital H (from futurism to the present moment), is senile
- Today is clear that performance art is not only from Europe or North America
- Performance art is everywhere
- The notion of Everywhere changed Performance Art

List by Márcio Carvalho


The list above was made in relation to a similar list made by the artist Marilyn Arsem.
The attempt is to open discussion about the ways we think and produce performance art works.