Performance and Protest: Questions on Art and Life

The paper addresses the critical potential of the body in performance art and in political protest, examining the relationship between an art form that aims to be indistinguishable from life and a socio-political practice that uses (appropriates) the performance art tactics, methods, and themes to articulate itself. The central problem our research addresses is related to the question of how various performance features, procedures, or techniques (for example, endurance, exposure, objectification, limits of individual agency) contribute to the articulation of protest practices, and whether these articulations turn political protest into a new kind of 'live art' that is more like life than art ever was.