ABSTRACT
By 1970, several artists in both California and the East had taken up performance art—whether as a deliberately chosen alternative to the static object-commodity or as an inevitable outcome of the shifting directions and premises and the expansion of boundaries that had occurred in modern art. In any case, it was not long before museums were hosting performances, as they had eventually presented happenings; and galleries were selling to museums and schools the films and video tapes which artists had made, sometimes as a record of the event, but more often as the art work itself. Video is particularly desirable as a medium for performance art because, unlike films, it allows the artist to see and criticize his/her work during the process of making it. Performance and body art evolved not only from happenings (and their ancestors), but also from Abstract Expressionism or Action Painting in respect to the idea of the art work as event and as the result of the artist’s whole body action and identification with the work. The physical body and autobiographical subject matter and content that pervaded the arts of the seventies reflected overall cultural concerns familiar to everyone—whether or not they joined a consciousness-raising group, came out of the closet, took up yoga, ate health foods, jogged, or just went swimming.
