Performance art is surprisingly difficult to define. It requires that an artist perform an action over time (even if very brief), either in a public or a private place, with or without an audience present, which may or may not be documented photographically or by other means. Performance art thus lacks the stylistic continuity of such avant-garde artistic movements as abstract expressionism or pop art. Nevertheless, performance in one form or another has appeared in relation to every post-1945 avant-garde movement (critic Harold Rosenberg even referred to the abstract expressionist’s canvas as an arena). It has included participatory multimedia events such as Allan Kaprow’s “happenings” of the late 1950s and Carolee Schnee-man’s erotic rituals of the 1960s. Extreme events include Chris Burden having himself shot in the arm and Vito Acconci masturbating while hidden under a gallery floor, in the early 1970s, and Karen Finley’s impassioned feminist theatrical monologues of the 1980s. There are also more familiar events, such as versions of dance or stand-up comedy which have been incorporated into art contexts.

In the American art world, performance art was most influential in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some performance artists were concerned with the reintroduction of ritual into aesthetic experience; some used performance to bring art and activism together.

Others developed from minimalism an interest in experience as embodied, and from both minimalism and conceptual art a concern with the production of meaning as a participatory process. In this regard, performance art appeared as a critical response to formalist, modernist orthodoxy, which required that art seek autonomy from social reality The strongest work from the period, by feminist artists and others including Acconci and Burden, brought into question normative assumptions about relations between public and private realms of behavior. At the same time, these boundaries were being tested by the counterculture, the women’s liberation movement, the continuation of the civil rights struggle and protests against the Vietnam War.