Performance Art Quotes

Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

I'm extremely critical. I don't consider myself a performance artist. I balk at the term performance art.

Teaching is a performance art.

Politics with me isn't theater. It's performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake.

I try to see interviewing as performance art, and just take it as it comes.

Teaching is performance art.

I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.

Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words.

There's a real tension between it being a collaborative art process, which is almost like performance art of yourself, and, as we talk about the movie, it's kind of a mix between melodrama and cinéma vérité. This involves ideas about playing the role of yourself and the movie of your life and all these other things.

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn't exist without the performance-art element.

Right now anything made for the iPad is like performance art. I'm not interested in performance art. Comics are too hard to make to be done for such a passing blip. When it stabilizes, I'll look at it.

I started using film as part of live theatre performance - what used to be called performance art - and I became intrigued by film.

Just because you're wearing a goofy hat doesn't make it performance art.

First of all, to do performance art, you really have to give 100 percent. I only know that I have to give 100 percent and then what happens, happens.

When it comes to performance art, I am more interested in the failures then the so-called successes. I have never cared for entertaining anyone.

It was at a performance art space that's no longer around, Gusto House... All of these great performers from all over the country lived on the Lower East Side, and they would take somebody's living room that opened right onto the street, open the door and charge tickets and put up chairs.

[Washington, DC] feels like you're watching performance art. A lot of the time. I don't believe them, I don't believe what they say, I don't think they're being absolutely sincere. I think it's performance art. And most of them are bad actors.

I realized [using my own voice] is what creates the performance in the performance art and that's what helps creates the distance for the viewers, like the distance that I get when I step back.

We play different people - our art form is performance art - so unless you're playing the same type of person, I don't know if you could improve or make it worse.

I'd been used to this idea of destructive performance art instead of a slick, good-sounding show. So, I became frustrated as I felt I'd been doing the shows wrong. That sucked.

A lot of festivals can be a jumble of electronic music and rock and roll, and everything's all mixed up - some things are more performance art or light shows or dance parties, and then you'll have a singer-songwriter stuck in the middle to make the changeovers easier.

Writers are egotists. All artists are. They can’t be altruists and get their work done. And writers love to whine about the Solitude of the Author’s Life, and lock themselves into cork-lined rooms or droop around in bars in order to whine better. But although most writing is done in solitude, I believe that it is done, like all the arts, for an audience. That is to say, with an audience. All the arts are performance arts, only some of them are sneakier about it than others.

It would have to be connected with performance art somehow, either in the front of the house or the back. I was myopic about this from fourth grade on

I went to a performance-art high school, and a teacher there was signing me up for open-mic nights at the comedy club. I think about it now, and I think, 'Well, that may be inappropriate,' but it was great!'

I've worked with actors before where I was like, this is not working, and then I've seen their work on the screen and I've been like, Wow, that was a really great performance. Because there are a lot of elements with film. It's not like stage. It's not a kind of performance art anymore; it's a highly tuned kind of collaboration - a symphony.

For me, so much of my life has been this attempt to find my way back into my body. I tried various forms, from promiscuity, to eating disorders, to performance art. And I think it wasn't until I got cancer, where I was suddenly being pricked and ported and chemoed and operated on, that I suddenly just became body. I was just a body. And it was in that, in that finally landing in myself that I really discovered the world in my body.

I spent all of my childhood at a performance art camp. Putting on plays, it was more like commedia dell'arte. It wasn't career-oriented in any way. It was more fun and therapeutic, so I never really thought of it as something I would end up doing. I was more convinced I was going to be a painter.

We were doing performance art as far back as 1965, just not calling it that.

I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song 'Radio Gaga.'

I made my performance debut in New York City downtown on the Lower East Side in college doing awkward performance art as a go-go dancer at Lady Starlight's Party. And I never thought that my love for mediocre performance art and bad mime would ever come to use in my career as an actor. But my fantasies came true and I got to play Maureen in Rent.

The whole point of what I do - the monster ball, the music, the performance art aspect of it, I wanna create a space for my fans where they can feel free and they can celebrate because I didn't fit in in high school and I felt like a freak, so I like to create this atmosphere for my fans where they feel like they have a freak in me to hang out with and they don't feel alone.

From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the '70s, the general attitude - not just me, but also my colleagues - was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.

I went to art school for fine art and then I started doing performance art, and then I started making fun of performance art, and it turned into comedy.

Performance art is going to be the future. Plays on Broadway are so restricted. But performance art is like haikus, just one line thing. And it's more casual but more interesting.

Performance art is really about the sociology of the artist, where ideas come from, and the confluence of those ideas.

I'm trying to create flesh architecture. I aim to get a sculptural feel for groups of bodies, as well as create performance art.

My father was a painter and an anarchist, always getting in trouble for his performance art.

Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.

Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture. There is some discussion as to whether or not they are still cool but then they are calmed by the obscure location and the arrival of their kind. Keep the address to yourself, let the rabble fund it themselves. Wow, this crappy performance art is really making me feel no so terrible about my various emotional issues.

Because watercolor actually moves on the paper, it is the most active of all mediums, almost a performance art.

I found so much fun in the light shows and the multimedia shows of the hippies. That was when I was a student in the 1960s, and I was in New York, so I learned how to deal with writing, recording sound of other people, performance art - because that was a new territory, and I liked everything that was new and provocative. That interested me more than becoming anything specific.