When Performance Art Became Professional

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 255, ‘Performance’

For better or worse, what may today be called ‘performance art’ spills beyond that category’s remit into dance, theatre, opera, lectures, readings and even fashion shows – often emptying out the original term completely. And it is fleeing to more traditional institutions – like theatres and opera halls – which are perhaps better equipped than museums, galleries and project spaces to attend to its ever-expanding, ever more specific and technical requirements. Recent trends within performance art (even the term feels anachronistic) turn away from the purely conceptual, visual or gestural towards other, historically institutionalized performing arts, with inflated productions that obscure its explicit delineation from formal theatrical structures.

Take, for example, artist and choreographer Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’s Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin) (2025), developed in a multi-institution co-production, including with Gropius Bau in Berlin, and premiered at Vienna's Tanzquartier Wien. Among the cast are known performers – Mickey Mahar has performed extensively with Anne Imhof; Shade Théret has her own established choreographic practice – styled in costumes resembling a typical get-up for a night out in a European metropole in 2025 (with the addition of a top hat). It is the near indistinguishability between the performers and audience that leads the viewer not only to identify with the dancer, but perhaps even to believe that they could be one of the dancers, too.

It could be argued that this is a democratization of the stage, facilitated by the museum’s undefined spaces and the audience’s receptivity to artistry without clear formal limits. Really, this is a fact of performance post-Imhof, whose loose constellations of actors within art spaces often produce a dispersed quality and an uncanny relation with audience members, who cannot be easily differentiated from those ostensibly ‘on stage’. Since her Angst II (2016) at the Hamburger Bahnhof, performance has more fully absorbed features such as dance, text (and thus narrative), music (and thus linear temporality), lighting design (and thus a focused gaze) and generally more elaborate scenographies. These do little to elevate the choreography – the actual dancing in Malign Junction was not especially virtuosic – or to drive a narrative or affective arc. Instead of contributing to the work itself, they serve more to declare the work’s authorship.

This is perhaps one way of coming full circle, back to the performance art of old: artists doing things in front of confused audiences. It is also a move towards institutionalized performance without the requisite techniques and resources that make theatre, dance or opera productions of a certain scale and complexity possible. Baczyński-Jenkins is an example of someone who almost makes it work, since Malign Junction has been transposed between dance institutions and the museum with little friction. Its elaborate technical apparatus – sound, lighting and set design – conveys a certain kind of professionalism, whereby the work's institutional setting would appear largely irrelevant to its reception. But this necessarily entails budgets that are simply not available to most artists mounting performances in museums, which are usually planned as an appendage to a primary, more static exhibition and therefore afforded resources conducive to more technically uncomplicated live formats like artist talks and readings.

Performances never needed to be so complicated. The most compelling work in performance is being done by artists whose apparently desultory improvisations use the fact of their embodiment as a way of exploring what exactly technique is – and usually it has something to do with labour. Dana Michel’s three-hour durational performance MIKE had its Austrian premiere at mumok in Vienna as part of the 2024 ImPulsTanz festival. The work offered its audience a confrontation with the action of labour as something at once repetitive, mindless and banal. With props including cardboard boxes, a vacuum cleaner and ill-fitting trousers, the performer moved through the space slowly but meticulously, suggesting a practical aim that was usually as irrelevant to the audience as it was to anything like a story. As a performance, the seemingly unskilled nature of the work binds the artist’s subjectivity to our spectatorship, to ask: why doesn’t (the) work perform itself? The moment that performance questions its own situation would also be the ideal point to reflect upon what exploiting an institution’s resources ever really amounts to.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 255 with the headline ‘Bring Down the House’

^{Main image: Anne Imhof, Angst II (detail), 2016, performance documentation, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Courtesy: the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York; photograph: Nadine Fraczkowski}