(In)visible Art of Performance

Performance art, various art actions and interventions are commonly considered a part of performance art as a form. Performance, in its basic parts, can be defined as the action of an individual or group at a particular place and in a particular time who create an artwork.

Performance usually involves the presence of the performer's body or the presence of the performer's medium that relates to the audience or public sphere where it takes place. 

It is an ephemeral act, which means it is determined by a temporal frame – so in the context of the museum collection, performance art is hard or even impossible to preserve.

Although performance can be recorded and documented in various media, and can conceptually exist as a video-performance, usually some parts of a performance remain unrecorded, undocumented and invisible to those that weren’t there to see it live. For this reason, the museum keeps artefacts and documents of specific performances. Most of this documentation has the status of an artwork with the artists’ authorization.

Performance art is one of the main art forms used in new media art practice since the late 1960s. Conceptual and post-conceptual art questions this visibility/invisibility duality of the performance act within its political and social contextual framework. 

Particularly relevant examples of performance art in the art history of the ex-Yugoslavia region and beyond can be found in the collection of Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina.

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  Čedomir Drča, Slobodan Tišma

  Gallery-Examples of Invisible Art / Primjeri nevidljive umjetnosti, 1976
  

  Black and white photograph

  12 x (18x24.2cm)

  © Muzej savremene umetnosti Vojvodine, photo Marko Ercegović

   

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  Balint Szombathy

  Flags 2 / Zastave 2, 1995
  

  Photograph

  © Muzej savremene umetnosti Vojvodine, photo Marko Ercegović

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  Milica Tomić

  One Day, instead of one night, a burst of machine-gun fire will flash, if light cannot come otherwise / Jednog dana umjesto noći, bljusnut će rafal iz mitraljeza kada drugačije svjetlost ne može doći, 2009
  

  Action-intervention in public space. Photograph 5 x (64 x 43 cm).

  Video 10'

  © Muzej savremene umetnosti Vojvodine