Live art

Live art is a broad category that encompasses performance carried out by an artist or group of artists as a work of art in its own right, usually innovative and experimental in nature. The term is current above all in the British context and serves as an umbrella for practices that do not fit the traditional bounds of theatre, dance, visual or media art: actionism, body art, interactive events, durational performances, hybrid interdisciplinary acts. A defining feature of live art is the presence of artist and viewer in the same time and space — immediacy, ephemerality and the unrepeatability of the event. Its origins reach back to the Futurist and Dada evenings of the early twentieth century, the happenings of the 1960s and the body art of the 1970s. In live art the artist's body often becomes the principal material and carrier of meaning, while risk, endurance and real time acquire artistic weight. Such practices raise questions of identity, gender, power and corporeality, expanding the notion of what art can be at all.