One of the great questions of our time seems to be
"What is Live Art?"!
Live Art is not easily contained within a pat definition because the work is invariably exploratory and seeks to investigate existing conventions, evolve new concepts, engage with an experimental practice and draws freely on the widest range of references, influences and disciplines. That said, Live Art events do frequently contain a range of distinguishing characteristics which together assist towards a working definition: work that broadly embraces ephemeral, time-based visual and performing arts events that include a human presence and broaden, challenge or question traditional views of the arts.
Other attempts at working definitions can be found via theLIVEARTDiscussion List, and by contributors toLive Art, edited byRobert Ayers and David Butler, AN Publications, 1991, some of whose quotes are reproduced below:
"Live art is an impossible term. It indicates activities which ask questions unbroachable in other art forms. But perhaps all I can be certain about is that is involves human interaction."
Anna Douglas
"Live Art is in the eye of the beholder."
Bush Hartshorn
"At the cutting edge of ideas and expression, live art is a rejection of single artform practice and a challenge to received ways of seeing, thinking and doing. Live art poses questions of not only what art is and can be, but where it is and what it is doing there."
Lois Keidan
"Live art is an idea, becoming a piece of work, presented by an artist, worth no more or less than any other artform, and commanding equal respect."
Anne Seagrave
"Live art is one that does not hang on walls easily and falls off plinths."
Mike Stubbs
"Live Art is... a theatre without a script. That's it. It's a theatre without a script."
SuAndi
"Live art is art just for the moment itself, for direct experiences and does not leave any traces whatsoever. It is as the ceremonial sand drawings of the Navajo only meant to exist during the ceremony to be blown away by the northern winds afterwards."
Tjebbe van Tijen
"Live Art is being...nothing more, nothing less."
Michael Scheirer
"Live Art is simply a journey in experimentation."
Mark Ware (1997)
"Live Art is living each bit of time in an idealized human state - hyperalive, awake, active even standing stark still, deer in headlights awake, discovering the next form, thought, feeling, in essence, sense."
(1997)
"Performance art is primarily a solo form made on the body of the performer."
Bonnie Marranca quoted in "A Cosmography of Herself: The Autobiology of Rachel Rosenthal", p. 59 in "Mythologies of Theater: Essays at the Century Turning" (John Hopkins U.P.1996)
"Live Art is the contemporary theatre of presence/dwelling."
Otiose(1998)
"Live Art is the marriage of three shifts of thinking into the post modern position.
1. The Artist as God(dess). Art is the creation and not the representation of creation.
2. The faltering of the definition of art as being 'non-functional'. Kaprow and Gablik type examples attempt to bring about real change. Live Art can have significant immediate and long range impacts.
3. The broadening of the definition of art and artists via modernism to being - that art is the stuff made by artists and artists are those ones who are making art. It can only remain that everything that I do as an artist either is or at least holds the potential to be regarded as art. Live Art."
Kerz Kinetic (1998)
"Art (visual art, conceptual art, whatever kind of art) which has a live element. Probably people doing something live. Something you can't just call theatre, because it's too much like art, and you can't just call art because it's... live. First comes the work, then you looks for words to describe it. The question is actually something like: 'What should I go and see if I want to see something people choose to call live art?' - 'Who is live art?' not 'What is live art?'"
Michael Blass, Private Thoughts in Public Places, Amsterdam (1998)
"Live Art... is art, imitating life, imitating art. It is an improvisation that has no beginning and no end... only created for the sole purpose of being... art. That never ceases to be."
Nicola Anne Jones (2001)