PERFORMANCE ART, an identified trend in Contemporary Art, is not what it used to be. Theater has always been with us. So what is different in this new species of visual art? The typical definition is that, now, the artist is a participant in the artwork. The focus is on the actor, not on the end product.
Having been re-born in the 1960s, performance art has a close parallel to the "happening," those spontaneous group events with either Dionysian or political overtones. However, performance art is said to be much more programmatic: planned and executed, a contained message of sorts.
This has required that a "performance" be documented, and that has usually meant a photograph or a film, and now video. One thinks of the French artist Yves Klein doing a swan dive off a building, a momentary act that was photographed in black and white to make it a form of art.
As an art student in the 1970s, I unsuspectingly was seeing the difference. At a local community college, an art event was held on the stage of an auditorium. There was all sorts of activity on the stage, ending in a television being set on fire. This was performance art, but it was actually more like a "happening," and reminded of the little skits the Dadaists did in Europe in the early 1900s.
Bottom line, then, performance art relies on photography and film to make its mark on the viewing public. And what art has not been co-opted by photos and videos. As one source says, performance art was "ranging from acts of self-mutilation to journeys through the landscape." No one was there, but we have a photo or film to document the event.
As much as traditional painting has distanced itself from Conceptual Art, more broadly, and Performance Art in particular, it has always had its versions. One might say that, going back to the old art workshops of master-and-apprentice, the master would "perform" a painting so the students could learn the process.
I recall black and white documentaries that showed Picasso executing a cubist chicken drawing from start to finish, and there's also the color movies of Jackson Pollack, outside his barn studio, dripping painting across a large canvas. This was Performance Art for painters. I suppose the difference is that neither Picasso nor Pollack were claiming there was a "conceptual" point to what they were doing—something contemporary Performance Artists and their critics insist upon.
Then came Bob Ross, who quietly shattered the silo in which contemporary Performance Art defined itself. He set up a camera in his studio and took viewers through a full painting, usually about an hour. His style was folksy and, according to his critics, his painting quite homely and "banal," as the modernist would say. Still, he shattered the barrier. After a decade on PBS television from 1984 to 1994, every painter with a video camera took his lead.
Ross is emblematic in another way, suggesting a kind of ego line that divides between instruction (“I am here to teach you)” and self-aggrandizement (“I am here to show you how good I am.”)
Today, with the rise of thousands of "instructional videos" on how to paint this or that, we now have painters who have entered the realm of Performance Art. And, like theater of old, many of the characteristics of "performance" are attached: drama, wit, virtuosity and good old fashioned showing off.
This has had up and down sides to it. On the former, with TV, video, and YouTube, everyone now has access to painting "demos" or short courses for free. It can't replace the hands on experience of a classroom or atelier, where there is give and take with the "master." But its convenience prevails. Brick and mortar instruction is being undercut by video instruction. And it’s a wave that thousands of painters are riding. Zoom has become the new atelier.
On this scale, we now see the possible downsides. As with all social media, there may be a socio-psychological toll being taken, at least according to scolds of our era. It is well documented now that young people who spend time on social media suffer depression. They see so much information about other people's purported happiness, success, and fame that they get downhearted. People compare, and with social media that comparison can be ubiquitous and rapid. Something normal has been undermined.
And so it might be with painters on social media. Instructional videos are one thing—a teacher instructing. Online performance by painters is another. It is both acting and marketing. It becomes a form of competition, though no online painter will admit it is so. The satisfaction is not the old fashioned one of completing an artwork. It comes in how many "likes," "wows," and "I wish I could do that" that are left on painters digital feed.
True, such performance has an aspect of "community" to it. Fellow painters cheer each other on with their likes and effusive praise of each other. But, how much can the mind of the painter take? If you see a few hundred painters on social media turning out remarkable "one shot wonders" day after day, it's easy to lose confidence in one's own artistic quest.
The best of the best rise in the social media ranking, and the rest ruminate on how they'll probably never get there. Too much performance—which is becoming a kind of norm—may have an unintended, deadening effect across the world of aspiring painters. Scholars of media already speak of the “digital divide” between rich and poor, and the same divide may arise amid the gradation—top, middling, and amateur—among artists.
That genie, for better or worse, is now out of the bottle.