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Home  / Genres & Artists  / Performance Art

Performance Art

Performance Art

Photo: Roberto Fortuna, Hotel Pro Forma

Performance Art

By Erik Exe Christoffersen

The “murder” of the little mermaid in Copenhagen was performed in 1964.  Her head was sawed off and disappeared.  It was said to have been a criminal act, allegedly committed by the artist Jørgen Nash. Only later was the act seen as a piece of art, a performance, or an anti-Romantic art happening.  It was also in 1964 that the Beatles broke onto the international stage, demonstrating a new sort of “hysterical,” corporeal relation between performer and audience.


Slaying of a horse
Performance art develops as specific actions acquire metaphoric meaning.  One example is the slaying of a horse by Bjørn Nørgaard and Lene Adler Petersen on a snow-covered field with a mystical-religious and topical reference to the Vietnam War (Hesteofring [Horse Sacrifice], 1970).  The horse was later placed in 199 glass jars to be displayed at an art museum. The Santa Claus Army (1974), performed by Solvognen [The Sun Chariot], was action theatre in which an army of 70 Santa Clauses committed a series of good deeds, including giving away books from a department store in Copenhagen. They were arrested by the police for their action.   Solvognen was awarded a prize by the Danish Arts Foundation but also found guilty of disturbing the peace.  Performance art goes back to the culture of the 1960s and 1970s: Fluxus, the Situationists, and the political theatre movement, as well as the Experimental Art School (the Ex-School).  Since 1978, it has been K.I.T. (Copenhagen International Festival) that has primarily brought international performance art and techniques from the US, Japan and France (among others) in the form of festivals – with the Festival of Fools acting as the catalyst in  the beginning of the 1980s.

Goldfish, plane and ice
More recent performance art shifts between provocation, bursting artistic boundaries, and various forms of political action. Marco Evaristti’s (b. 1963) installation of live swordtails, Goldfish in a Blender (2000), was reported to the police for cruelty to animals, because a museum patron turned on the blender with an ensuing bloodbath.  The artist and the museum were acquitted.  Artist Simone Kærn (b. 1969) landed her little plane in Kabul (Crossing Line, 2002) despite a military ban, in order to fulfil a young Afghan woman’s dream of flying. Kirsten Justesen (b. 1943) has experimented with every conceivable form of performance art, body art and installation. A recurring feature is the staged photographic tableaux in which the artist’s body is often an element in her sculptural idiom.  Meltingtime/Smeltetid 1-13 (1980-) are installations that deal with metamorphosis and ephemerality as they appear in nature, the body and art.

Performance art and contemporary art
Performance art is a part of contemporary art that will not be separated from reality but considers it the job of art to intervene and process it.  This applies to the materials themselves, particular spaces, bodies, situations, modes of experience, traditions, forms of thought, and the conditions for artistic expression.   Performance art views art as an actual event in reality and, therefore, often breaks out of the autonomous space of art to create social and political relations in and outside of art.  Sometimes, it has been seen as a threat to art, but we can also speak of an expansion of art, since performance art is not species-specific but art in general. Performance art complements traditional art and tests the boundary between art and non-art.  Performance art is an international phenomenon – Jerzy Grotowski at the end of the 1960s and Robert Wilson, whose mind-blowing 24-hour performance of The Life and Time of Joseph Stalin in 1974 at Det Ny Teater in Copenhagen helped foster inspiration.  The Cantabile 2 Theatre (1984), a regional theatre in Vordingborg run by Nullo Facchini, has the only functioning international theatre school for modern visual performance theatre.  The theatre also holds an international theatre festival, Waves, every other year in Vordingborg.  Facchini is also the director of a number of notable place-specific performances, such as Helvede [Hell] (1992) and Hamlet (1995).

The Odin Theatre in Holstebro
The dream of a theatre that can be understood directly through the senses was the background for the Odin Theatre, established by Eugenio Barba (b. 1936) and some young Norwegian actors in Norway in 1964.  In 1966, the theatre was invited to make its home in the city of Holstebro, which had a vision of art and the direct significance art has for growth.  The Odin Theatre called itself a theatre laboratory - using no text, costumes or stage as a starting point.  With courses, workshops, conferences, and guest performances, the theatre laboratory has been a vital source of inspiration and meeting place for anyone who is interested in theatre.  The actors themselves create the material for the performances, assembled by the group’s artistic director Eugenio Barba. Most of the approximately 60 performances the Odin Theatre has mounted over 40 years have focused on the themes of the journey, alienation and the nomadic as the conditions of the 20th and 21st centuries.  Each performance tests the relationship between the actors and the audience as a part of the work and the staging.  The stage, whether indoors or outdoors, is surrounded by audience members as a sort of mental and physical circle around the theatre.  This creates maximum energy and space for “Disorder.”  

Hotel Pro Forma
Billedstofteatret and, later, Hotel Pro Forma (1985), like the Odin Theatre, tours in Denmark and abroad.  The theatre does not have a permanent acting company, but its artistic and administrative director is Kirsten Dehlholm (b. 1945), who collaborates with various authors, composers, and performers, depending on the demands of the production.  Hotel Pro Forma has mounted approximately 25 productions in which the artistic form and medium change and in which space, performers and themes are put together in new combinations. Hotel Pro Forma transforms fragments of reality (performer, space, text, music and objects) into art that challenges the viewer’s sense of sight and hearing by, for example, allowing the viewer to observe the stage from a vertical position, which alters the basis for perception and what it means to be art.

SIGNA
SIGNA is an artistic partnership formed by Danish performance-installation artist Signa Sørensen (born 1975) and Austrian performer and media artist Arthur Köstler (born 1972). Sørensen & Köstler are directors and performers, in a number of events such as 57 beds (2004), a performance installation with approximately 30 participants.
The Black Rose Trick Hotel (2005) was performed in a large building transformed into a mysterious hotel, where the audience was lodged for shorter or longer durations and could follow the hotel’s guests and an omnipresent military power in a bureaucratic universe in which systems and rules were constantly undermined and transformed.  For several days, the audience could explore the countless stories in the rooms of the hotel, where the boundaries between fiction and reality melted away.
The recent Seven Tales of Misery (2006) with a cast of 60 performers, was introducing a religious movement and their idea how to save the world from misery. Kilometres of old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape were running from floor to loft, along twisting corridors and through chambers, halls and stairways.Whispering voices and a plangent cello tone were flowing through the walls and the carefully chosen, dated old furnishings. It was the magnetic tape, which physically and as a soundscape, linked this shabby world together. A world inhabited by soldiers, scruffy gypsies, singing Russians, Arabian princesses and dancers dressed in bridal gowns.

Claus Beck Nielsen (1963-2001)
Along side performance theatre, there are individuals who vary artistic expression in a personal way. Claus Beck Nielsen (1963-2001), trained at Cantabile 2 and head of Das Beckværk at Gladsaxe Theatre since 2002, has examined in a multitude of ways how the relationship between art and reality and between role and the artist’s personality is unsettled. He assumes different forms of “Nielsen” as Claus Nielsen, the man with amnesia who, for a time in 2000, wandered around the streets of Copenhagen to disappear in the fall of 2001. To an increasing degree, “Claus Nielsen” became part of the artist’s reality, and the artistic project of self-annihilation also became a personal project in an extension of his own divorce.  Even though the author “disappears,” Nielsen performs as Bin Nielsen, who debates democracy on the Internet, and as Hans Christian Nielsen/Andersen in The National Brand (2005). Here, the actor tries to get a role as Hans Christian Andersen with Castorf, Lepage and Shen Shi-Zeng. The actor is thrown down stairs, rejected, banished, and ends up at Ground Zero in New York. Subjective, cultural and global identity merge into a common vanishing point and a common de-subjectivization, which is also the central feature in the production of Den sidste europæer, en terrormusical [The Last European, A Terror Musical] (2005), in which an attempt to tell Nielsen’s story of lost love is interrupted by the video project of the Englishman Ken Bigley, who is kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq and decapitated on live television.  Nielsen is present in writing (books, the Internet, the media) but also points to the body, which refuses to be annihilated or eradicated.
Common to these pieces is the fact that they cross boundaries between traditional theatre space and performance art without difficulty.

Reality from an art perspective
In a fundamental sense, performance art thematicizes the subject and the dissolution of art and creates real situations that are viewed from the perspective of art.  On the other hand, this means that the content of art is deprioritized in favour of the concrete relationship and a provocative, ritual or performative expression in the zone between art and reality.


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Erik Exe Christoffersen (MA). Lecturer of Aesthetics and Cultural Studies, Aarhus University.

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