Women in Performance Art

The most frequently asked question about Performance Art has got to be What is it? And that, admittedly, is a tough question to answer. Generally, Performance Art is a category that many artists find themselves in if they are unhappy with the idea of working in only one traditional medium. Performance Artists are often interested in exploring several artistic disciplines and producing work that may cross traditional media boundaries such as works that include aspects of theater, music and the visual arts including video. Many performance artists are also interested in crossing the perceived boundary between art and life such as thinking of everyday activities in an artistic manner.
The history of Performance Art is just as hard to pin down as the definition. If you are interested in its history, a good book to start with would be Roselee Goldberg's Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. It provides a good overview of the relationship between Performance and European Art in the 20 Century. However, it is a bit limited if you are interested in interdisciplinary work that was made earlier in history or work that was made in non-western cultures.
Women have always played an important role in Performance Art. Many women turned to this new form because they felt that more traditional media such as painting and sculpture had long been dominated by male artists and wanted to explore fresh territory. There are, of course, many important male Performance Artists such as John Cage (http://newalbion.com/artists/cagej/) and Allan Kaprow. Both Cage and Kaprow were innovative artists and influential teachers and many of the women listed below studied with them. But women have proven to be true pioneers in Performance Art, making work that is brave, innovative, risky and just plain good!
Probably the most well-known Performance Artist is Laurie Anderson. She emerged during the 70s and her work explores the relationships between people and technology. Her works usually involve spoken text, music, projected slides and videos. She is known for using an array of synthesizers to create sonic soundscape and a vocoder to alter the sound of her voice as she tells stories about life in the late 20th Century where lap top computers and ghosts exist side by side. Anderson is a real tinkerer. She has created a neck tie that can play music, a talking violin and a pair of sunglasses equipped with a microphone that can turn her head into a percussion orchestra! She has produced a number of CDs of music from her performances and also has a couple of videos and an interactive CD-ROM called Puppet Motel all dealing with the idea of how machines and people live and work together and how the spiritual can interact with the mechanical.
Another artist who is known for creating interdisciplinary theater pieces is Meredith Monk (http://www.lovely.com/bios/monk.html and http://www.otherminds.org/Monk.html). Monk is a composer who deals with innovative vocal techniques. She also makes videos and is a choreographer and dancer. Her work is very poetic and abstract in nature. She often creates pieces that freely mix elements and images that donUt seem to logically relate to one another. Yet it is the combination of these seemingly unrelated elements that creates unique content. A recent piece, Volcano Songs, deals with memories of childhood and the experience of growing older. A video piece, Book of Days, is about a young girl in Middle Ages who has visions of the future and sees people flying in planes and using cameras. Another video, Ellis Island, is about the experience of immigrants entering America in the 19th Century......
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