Performative art follows painting’s footsteps. The case of Vanessa Beecroft

Allan Kaprow, who invented the “happening” in 1954, said that this phenomenon was inspired by action painting.1 1  - Allan Kaprow, “In Response,” in Happenings and Other Acts, ed. Mariellen R. Sandford (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 219-220. CaroleeSchneemann, who is generally associated with Meat Joy (1964), compared her use of animal flesh to painting.2 2  - Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, (New Paltz: Documentext, 1979), 62.  These two performance artists, along with others who founded the discipline in the 1960s, did not reject the idea of painting — they rather took their inspiration from it. Yet, even today, their works are often considered to be at the opposite extreme of painting. They are seen as part of a performance history that lies on the fringes of the modernist paradigm, and whose origins can be traced back to the theatrical performances of Marinetti and the Zurich Dadaists.3 3  - For a history of performance art, see Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art. From Futurism to the Present (Paris: Thames & Hudson, 2001). They are “immaterial,”4 4  - Performances are only preserved in records, which provide a necessarily partial view and create the idea of immateriality, although the performances themselves are eminently physical and material for those who experience them. transitory, and associated with immanence, in contrast to the transcendence, self-sufficiency, and eternity of paintings,5 5  - Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 28. created to be owned and looked at for a long time.

The contrast has not, however, set these two disciplines at opposite poles, as Amelia Jones illustrates through the major influence that Pollock has had on performance art since the 1950s and 1960s.⁶ 6 - Amelia Jones, “The ‘Pollockian Performative’ and the Revision of the Modernist Subject,” in Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 53-102.  A quintessential figure of modernist painting, Pollock paved the way for performance art through his action painting, which saw his body “dancing” on the canvas as he applied the paint. In the words of Régis Michel, “This strange choreography is so familiar to us that we’ve lost all measure of its newness. The dripping dance marks a major departure from the age-old system of Western painting, based on the mastery of gesture, which created the myth of the artist as supreme subject, a true demiurge.”⁷ 7 - Régis Michel, La peinture comme crime ou La part maudite de la réalité (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), 260. (Our translation) In turn, performance artists have drawn on Pollock’s action painting technique, critiquing and expanding its inherent discourse on the heterosexual male body to include the other (women, homosexuals).