Performance Art Quotes

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. ~ Mary Lynn Rajskub

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

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art. ~ Jack Bowman

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. ~ Regina King

Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower. ~ Ryan Kavanaugh

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. ~ Charlemagne Palestine

If you don't have shadows, you're not in the light. ~ Lady Gaga

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

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. ~ Yoko Ono

We're all so mauled by information, but it's recycled information. We need to shut it out. So, you've got to get bizarre. This is an artist's purpose - to break away from the recycled. Performance art can do that. ~ Jack Bowman

Zero dimensions! Have you seen such a thing done?" "No. We've only witnessed two-dimensionalization. We've never even seen one-dimensionalization. But somewhere, some Zero-Homers must be trying. No one knows if they've ever succeeded. Comparatively, it's easier to lower the speed of light to zero, so we've seen more evidence of such attempts to lower the speed of light past zero and return it to infinity." "Is that even theoretically possible?" "We don't know. Maybe the Zero-Homers have theories that say yes, but I don't think so. Zero-lightspeed is an impassable wall. Zero-lightspeed is absolute death for all existence, the cessation of all motion. Under such conditions, the subjective cannot influence the objective in any way, so how can the 'hour hand' be shifted past it? I think the Zero-Homers are practicing a kind of religion, a kind of performance art." Cheng ~ Liu Cixin

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

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.' ~ Lady Gaga

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

[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. ~ Kevin Spacey

Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it? ~ William Gibson

The parents are making threatening noises, turning dinner into performance art, with dad doing his Arnold Schwarzenegger imitation and mom playing Glenn Close in one of her psycho roles. I am the Victim.
Mom: [creepy smile] "Thought you could put one over us, did you, Melinda? Big high school students now, don't need to show your homework to your parents, don't need to show any failing test grades?"
Dad: [bangs table, silverware jumps] "Cut the crap. She knows what's up. The interim reports came today. Listen to me, young lady. I'm only going to say this to you once. You get those grades up or your name is mud. Hear me? Get them up!" [Attacks baked potato.] ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization. ~ Edmund White

Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience. ~ Jack Bowman

Great acting is as much about the choices a performer makes as it is about their ability. ~ Stewart Stafford

I'm interested in confronting police brutality and police abuse of cracking down on street performers and street artists, but also in valorizing street art as legitimate performance within the artistic sphere, where it's so often conflated with pan-handling and begging and not "successful" art. I want to change laws around street performance. ~ Kalan Sherrard

Recently, a judge of the prestigious 2014 British Forward Prize for Poetry was moved to observe that "there is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today," but we need education, because "we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music - that you can't expect to read it like a novel."

A few years ago, the New York Times published an op-ed of mine, about learning poetry by heart. The response to it confirmed that people of all ages think about poetry as a kind of inspired music, embodying beauty and insight. On one hand, poetry has always flowed from music, as rap and hip-hop remind us big-time. Rappers know how poetry walks and talks. So we have music, or deeply felt recitations of poems that belong to collective memory. On the other hand, we have overly instructive prose poems, as well as the experiments of certain critical ideologies, or conceptual performance art. These aspects seem to represent the public, Janus face of poetry. ~ Carol Muske-Dukes

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. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

When a person encounters his own statue and takes a hammer to it, performance art adds depth to greatness. ~ Bauvard

Any show that breaks the monotony works. If the end product is good, nothing can stop it from being successful. ~ Kunal Karan Kapoor

I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance. ~ Wayne White

The greatest artists express their inner self; an artist paints her rage; a writer pens his fear; a dancer expresses her sadness through movement; and a musician's loneliness echoes in his performance. ~ Gerard De Marigny

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. ~ Vaginal Davis

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. ~ James Marsters

In those first hours after he drowned, when the catastrophe was still confined to Calabash beach, and to Jake, Joe and me, its speed was impossible to reconcile with its scale. Nothing so big could happen this fast; it defied the laws of physics, it could not be true. Death is too much for the mind to register in a matter of minutes; the incalculable magnitude can only be absorbed by increment, day by day. As each day allows a new glimpse of its immensity, and the aftershock extends beyond the beach to reach hundreds of people all over the world, my comprehension slowly expands until its dimensions resemble a more accurate impression of the truth. But the bigger his death grows, the more inconceivable it becomes. It feels like an ambitious piece of performance art; a work of fiction, not real life. How strange that the truth of my own situation should be so much clearer to everybody else. ~ Decca Aitkenhead

I'm like a circus standing on two legs. ~ Nuno Roque

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. ~ Troy Garity

I am a she. The mask is a he, or is actually gender-neutral. People love the character. ~ K. Guillory

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. ~ Colson Whitehead

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

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. ~ Marina Abramovic

Performance art can be produced in a coffee house setting. ~ Jack Bowman

It's always been performance art, but now it's on a different level. ~ Mark Roberts

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater. ~ Roberta Smith

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. ~ Vincent Kartheiser

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. ~ John Leguizamo

Ii do not walk with alienation everywhere I go in the world. I have been to small taverns in rural Ohio, big city bars, San Francisco bath houses, and in all these have felt welcome and happy. But walking through that sunglassed throng, I felt like a Martian. I didn't hate the feeling - indeed, being a black woman in the academy, it wasn't new to me - but it was interesting. I kept wondering: where is the performance? When will the performance start? Is this the performance - me walking through this space without sunglasses with all these Nordic quasi-hipster white people in multi-colored, motorcycle cop sunglasses? ~ Gabrielle Civil

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!' ~ Margaret Cho

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

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

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

I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance? ~ Nicolas Cage

HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television. ~ Tom Stoppard

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. ~ Erika M. Anderson

Bit by bit, putting it together ...
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art.
Every moment makes a contribution,
Every little detail plays a part.
Having just the vision's no solution,
Everything depends on execution,
Putting it together, that's what counts. ~ Stephen Sondheim

Music is a performance and needs the audience. ~ Michael Tippett

I make art for the sake of art . . . and for my own selfish gratification, because I'm an artistic monster. ~ Lindsey Stirling

A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men to rise from a private station to that rank. And, on the contrary, it is seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have lost their states. And the first cause of your losing it is to neglect this art; and what enables you to acquire a state is to be master of the art. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Art then becomes a safety valve for the expression of individual and collective neuroses originating in the inability of coping with the environment. Its products serve as a retarded correction of perception braked by the system of conventions and stereotypes that stabilize society. They create a slightly updated system which, eventually assimilated by history, will require a new system and so on without end. Art objects serve as points of identification alienated from the consumer, requiring more sympathy than empathy. ~ Luis Camnitzer

Art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead. ~ John Green

I'm not in sympathy with Communism except for populations which are in a state of peasantry, actually hungry and starving. The ideal state for me is some form of Socialism, which doesn't yet exist, as far as I know, which doesn't repress the arts, or any race. Consequently I'm not a political person ... except that I'm a revolutionary. ~ Tennessee Williams

you cannot teach art - you cannot make a soul ~ John Geddes

Above all, remember that the door stands open. Be not more fearful than children; but as they, when they weary of the game, cry, "I will play no more," even so, when thou art in the like case, cry, "I will play no more" and depart. But if thou stayest, make no lamentation. ~ Epictetus

They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but ted hadn't found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond at moonlight, their bare feet digging in the carpet ... ~ Jennifer Egan

I am not a great cook, I am not a great artist, but I love art, and I love food, so I am the perfect traveller. ~ Michael Palin

The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone. ~ Nick Hornby

Finn said art isn't about drawing or painting a perfect bowl of fruit. It's about ideas. And you, he said, have enough good ideas to last a lifetime. ~ Carol Rifka Brunt

When we are bursting with some wordless experience, Art is our voice, the song of the heart. ~ Richard Schmid

The art of the writer, like that of the player, is attained by slow degrees. The power of distinguishing and discriminating comick characters, or of filling tragedy with poetical images, must be the gift of nature, which no instruction nor labour can supply; but the art of dramatick disposition, the contexture of the scenes, the involution of the plot, the expedients of suspension, and the strategems of surprise, are to be learned by practice. ~ Samuel Johnson

There is no such thing as a wrong note. ~ Art Tatum

Art is not just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be. ~ Paul Robeson

Art is a lie that reveals the truth. ~ Pablo Picasso

A dancer should learn from all the arts. Go to museums and look at the paintings. See how they balance things. Everything you do in the arts enriches you. ~ Alicia Alonso

Football is an art players paint with their feet. ~ Maswood Alam Khan

He sucked in his breath as his saw me, his eyes traveling from my toes to my hips, as if he hadn't seen it all before.
"Jesus," he whispered, gaze lingering everywhere. "I keep forgetting that you're art already." ... ~ Karina Halle

I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times. ~ Willie Nelson

When you view your world exclusively through the lens of science, your prescription will never be strong enough. ~ Jay Nichols

Art follows power. Just as soldiers hang medals from their uniforms, the rich hang paintings on their walls. ~ Hannah Rothschild

Original sin - the big lie. ~ Art Hochberg

O blessed bounty, giving ail content!
The only fautress of all noble arts
That lend'st success to every good intent.
A grace that rests in the most godlike hearts,
By heav'n to none but happy souls infus'd
Pity it is, that e'er thou wast abus'd. ~ Michael Drayton

Color is only beautiful when it means something. ~ Robert Henri

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art. ~ Jerry Saltz

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust. ~ Kingsley Amis

It's the only dish I serve my craziness for color in. ~ Josef Albers

In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Life itself today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to an amalgam of reality and fantasy. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It's not just about taking a pill, and your performance and your pain getting better. It's about our beliefs and expectations. It's about the cultural meaning of a treatment. ~ Ben Goldacre

It was Day Three, Freshman Year, and I was a little bit lost in the school library,looking for a bathroom that wasn't full of blindingly shiny sophomores checking their lip gloss.
Day Three.Already pretty clear on the fact that I would be using secondary bathrooms for at least the next three years,until being a senior could pass for confidence.For the moment, I knew no one,and was too shy to talk to anyone. So that first sight of Edward: pale hair that looked like he'd just run his hands through it, paint-smeared white shirt,a half smile that was half wicked,and I was hooked.
Since, "Hi,I'm Ella.You look like someone I'd like to spend the rest of my life with," would have been totally insane, I opted for sitting quietly and staring.Until the bell rang and I had to rush to French class,completely forgetting to pee.
Edward Willing.Once I knew his name, the rest was easy.After all,we're living in the age of information. Wikipedia, iPhones, 4G ntworks, social networking that you can do from a thousand miles away.The upshot being that at any given time over the next two years, I could sit twenty feet from him in the library, not saying a word, and learn a lot about him.ENough, anyway, for me to become completely convinced that the Love at First Sight hadn't been a fluke.
It's pretty simple.Edward matched four and a half of my If My Prince Does, In Fact, Come Someday,It Would Be Great If He Could Meet These Five Criteria.
1. Interested in art. For me, it's ~ Melissa Jensen

Art should stimulate the mind and soul ~ Rich DiSilvio