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Saburo Murakami
Born
Passage, 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, Tokyo, 1956
A painter running his body through stretched sheets of kraft paper sounds simple, but Murakami's paper-breaking turned the act of making into the artwork itself, years before New York had a word for it. The torn frames were the leftover; the burst was the piece. He was working inside the Gutai group in postwar Japan, and the idea reportedly came from watching his toddler son crash through a paper sliding door at home. What survives is mostly a handful of striking photographs of the 1955 and 1956 versions, which is why so many people know the image without knowing the name.
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Allan Kaprow
Born
18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Reuben Gallery, New York, 1959
Kaprow had coined "happening" in a 1958 essay, and this is the piece that put the word into circulation. He split a loft into three rooms with semi-transparent plastic walls and ran six parts with three events each, all at once, so nobody could see everything. Visitors were handed three cards telling them where to sit and when to change rooms at the sound of a bell, which made the audience part of the score rather than spectators. The work lives on through Kaprow's score, photographs and later re-doings, including one at Haus der Kunst in Munich in November 2006, which he authorized shortly before his death.
More about Allan Kaprow3
Yves Klein
Born
Anthropometries, 1960
Klein staged painting as a public ceremony: nude models covered in his signature blue paint pressed and dragged their bodies across canvases, while an ensemble played his Monotone Symphony and an audience in formal evening wear looked on. He directed rather than touched the surface, which raised a question the rest of this list keeps asking, about who the artist really is when other bodies do the work. Unlike most entries here, it left objects behind as well as photographs: the body prints hang in museums such as the Centre Pompidou. The same year he published Leap into the Void, a photomontage of himself leaping into empty space, with the tarpaulin his friends held to catch him removed from the final image.
More about Yves Klein4
Yoko Ono
Born
Cut Piece, Kyoto, 1964
Ono sat still on a stage with a pair of scissors in front of her and invited the audience to come up, one at a time, and cut away pieces of her clothing to keep. She said nothing and did nothing; every choice belonged to the people holding the scissors, which is exactly what makes the piece so uncomfortable and so widely taught. First staged at Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto in July 1964, it reached Carnegie Recital Hall in New York in March 1965, where Albert and David Maysles filmed it. That film is the version most people see. A 2003 Paris performance reframed it, asking participants to send their fragment of cloth to someone they loved.
More about Yoko Ono5
Carolee Schneemann
Born
Meat Joy, Paris, 1964
Where Klein's models were directed from a distance, Schneemann's nine performers in Meat Joy acted for themselves, rolling together, painting one another's bodies and rubbing raw chicken, fish and sausage across each other. It was a deliberate argument for pleasure and the body as material, made by a woman at a time when that body was usually the subject rather than the author. First performed in May 1964 at the Festival of Free Expression in Paris, it went on to London, where police raided the event, and to Judson Memorial Church in New York that November. The New York version was restaged in a television studio so Pierre Dominique Gaisseau could film it, and that film is how it is mostly seen now.
More about Carolee Schneemann6
Valie Export
Born
Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema), with Peter Weibel, 1968
EXPORT strapped a small box, a miniature movie theater with a curtain over the front, to her bare upper body and went out into the street, while Peter Weibel used a megaphone to invite passersby to reach in and touch. It flipped cinema's usual arrangement: instead of watching a woman's body on screen in the dark, the "viewer" had to make physical contact in public, face to face with the person they touched. It was performed in several European cities, including Munich and Vienna, between 1968 and 1971. The original box was destroyed; the one shown today is a 1999 replica made by the artist, alongside photographs and short videos. EXPORT died in Vienna in May 2026, aged 85.
More about Valie Export7
Gilbert & George
The Singing Sculpture, 1969 onward
Still students when they made it, Gilbert & George covered their heads and hands in multicolored metallic powders, stood on a table and moved slowly to a recording of Flanagan and Allen's "Underneath the Arches," at times for a whole day. They called themselves living sculptures, and this is the piece that made the claim stick: the artists themselves became the object on the plinth, refusing any separation between the work and their everyday lives. It was performed at the National Jazz and Blues Festival in 1969 and at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery in 1970. Where Klein put other bodies to work, this is the opposite move, and the pair have lived the idea ever since.
More about Gilbert & George8
Adrian Piper
Catalysis series, early 1970s
Piper took performance out of the gallery and gave it an audience that never agreed to be one. She rode the bus, the subway and the Empire State Building elevator with a towel stuffed in her mouth, walked around in clothes soaked in vinegar, eggs, milk and cod liver oil, and wore freshly painted white clothes with a "Wet Paint" sign. Nobody was told it was art. The point was to test where strangers draw the lines of acceptable dress, sanity and public behavior, and to make the artist the object of their reactions. Later she pushed the idea further as the Mythic Being, a male alter ego in a wig and mustache. With no stage and no ticketed crowd, the series is known through photographs and Piper's own accounts.
More about Adrian Piper9
Chris Burden
Born
Shoot, F Space, Santa Ana, California, 1971
On November 19, 1971, a friend of Burden's stood about 15 feet away and fired a .22 rifle at him, intending a non-lethal wound; the bullet hit his left arm. That is the whole work, and its reputation far outstrips its few seconds. Shoot is the landmark of risk as a medium: the audience was not watching a depiction of danger but a decision, and had to live with having watched. It also shows how much performance depends on its record. Almost everyone knows it from an eight-second piece of 16mm film and a few photographs, which is a useful reminder of how a short act can become a long-lasting image.
More about Chris Burden10
Vito Acconci
Born
Seedbed, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, 1972
Visitors walked up a ramp built across the gallery and found nothing to look at, only Acconci's voice through a loudspeaker. He was hidden underneath, masturbating and describing his fantasies about the people walking above him. Seedbed is on this list because it reversed the gallery's sightlines: the artist could hear the audience but they could not see him, and every visitor's presence fed the work whether they liked it or not. It is a frank, uncomfortable piece, and its legacy is that question of consent and complicity. With so little to see, it is known through photographs of the empty ramp, a short silent Super 8 recording and Acconci's published notes.
More about Vito Acconci11
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Touch Sanitation, New York, 1979 to 1980
Ukeles spent almost a year shaking hands with more than 8,500 New York City sanitation workers, telling each one "Thank you for keeping New York City alive." It grew from her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, which asked who picks up the garbage on Monday morning after the revolution, and from 1973 performances at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford in which she cleaned the museum's entrance steps. The shift here is quiet but huge: the audience is a workforce, the gesture is respect, and the city is the venue. She mapped her conversations and recorded workers' stories, and has served since 1977 as the unsalaried artist in residence of the city's Department of Sanitation.
More about Mierle Laderman Ukeles12
Ana Mendieta
Born
Silueta Series, 1973 onward
Mendieta made the outline of a female body in the land, in mud, sand and grass, with materials ranging from leaves and twigs to earth, gunpowder and blood. Many of the best known were made in Mexico between 1973 and 1977, and the series continued for years after. The films and photographs are the work as most people will ever meet it, which makes the Siluetas a turning point in how performance relates to its record: the action is brief and private, the image is what lasts. They also form a bridge between body art and land art, with ritual influences drawn from Santería. If you want to see performance that is gentle, elemental and intensely personal, start here.
More about Ana Mendieta13
Marina Abramović
Born
Rhythm 0, Studio Morra, Naples, 1974
Abramović laid 72 objects on a table, among them a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, olive oil, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet, and told the audience they could use any of them on her as they wished while she took full responsibility. For six hours, from 8 pm to 2 am, she let them do so without consequences. Rhythm 0 matters less for what was done to her than for what it showed about an audience handed total permission: the artist became the object and the viewers became the authors. It is known through photographs, her written instructions and her own later accounts of the evening, so treat the most dramatic retellings with some care.
More about Marina Abramović14
Joseph Beuys
Born
I Like America and America Likes Me, René Block Gallery, New York, 1974
Beuys landed at JFK, was blindfolded, wrapped in felt, laid on a stretcher and taken by ambulance to a gallery on West Broadway in SoHo. There he shared a partitioned room with a live coyote called Little John for three days, eight hours a day, repeating ritual actions with felt, a wooden staff like a shepherd's crook and stacks of that day's Wall Street Journal. He left as he had arrived, on a stretcher and wrapped in felt. The piece is a reconciliation ritual and a critique of the country at once, and unusually well recorded: Helmut Wietz's black-and-white film, just over 39 minutes long, and Caroline Tisdall's photographs are both widely shown.
More about Joseph Beuys15
Carolee Schneemann
Born
Interior Scroll, East Hampton, New York, 1975
At the Women Here and Now show on August 29, 1975, Schneemann entered wrapped in a sheet, undressed, struck figure-drawing poses on a table and read from her own book. Then she slowly drew a folded paper scroll from her vagina and read it aloud: a parody of male critics who had dismissed her films for their "personal clutter" and "persistence of feelings." It is the clearest statement in this list of the body as a source of knowledge and speech rather than an image to be looked at. She performed it again at the Telluride Film Festival in 1977. Photographs of the 1975 performance, including a well-known print that pairs two of them with the scroll's text, are how the piece is usually seen.
More about Carolee Schneemann16
Tehching Hsieh
Born
One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece)
For a full year, Hsieh punched a time clock every hour, on the hour, day and night, and took a single photograph of himself each time. That is all, and it is crushing: the work is the year itself, with its broken sleep, measured out across thousands of frames. It made duration the medium and turned the artist's life into the material, a model for endurance work ever since. It is also one of the best-documented pieces here. The hourly photographs run together as a six-minute film, and the punch cards, film and photographs were shown together at the Guggenheim in 2009 and at Tate Modern in 2017. Hsieh made five of these year-long pieces in all, each with its own strict rule.
More about Tehching Hsieh17
Linda Montano
Born
Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece), with Tehching Hsieh
For a year, Montano and Hsieh were tied to each other by an eight-foot rope, together at every moment but forbidden to touch until the year was over. Where Time Clock Piece is about one person alone with time, Rope Piece is about two people who cannot get away from each other. Authorship is part of its story: Hsieh has said the idea was his and the work was meant to be shared equally, and that he was "a little angry" that many people think of it as Montano's. The rope itself, with photographs, audio tapes of their conversations and handwritten logs, is on view in Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 at Dia Beacon, running through 2027.
More about Linda Montano18
Ulay
Born
The Lovers (The Great Wall Walk), with Marina Abramović, 1988
Ulay set out from the Gobi Desert end of the Great Wall of China and Abramović from the Yellow Sea end. Each walked about 2,500 kilometers over roughly three months, and when they met in the middle they said goodbye, ending a partnership in life and art that had run since 1976. Getting permission from the Chinese government took eight years. The walk shows how far performance had moved from the gallery evening: a work could be a journey across a country, and a private ending its subject. It survives as 16mm film, shown as a two-channel video, and photographs of the journey. They met again in public in 2010, when Ulay sat across from Abramović at MoMA, in a widely shared video.
More about Ulay19
Coco Fusco
Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (The Couple in the Cage), with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, 1992 to 1993
Fusco and Gómez-Peña put themselves on display in a cage as natives of an undiscovered island in the Gulf of Mexico, with visitors able to pay to have a photograph taken with them or see them dance. It toured from Plaza Colón in Madrid and Covent Garden in London to the Australian Museum in Sydney and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The satire of human exhibitions is only half of it; the other half is the audience's reactions, which became the real subject. Paula Heredia's documentary The Couple in the Cage records those reactions and is the best way in.
More about Coco Fusco20
William Pope.L
Born
The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street, 2001 to 2009
Pope.L crawled the length of Broadway, about 22 miles from the Statue of Liberty end of Manhattan up to the Bronx, in a Superman costume with a skateboard strapped to his back, a few blocks at a time over several years. The title puns on Broadway's nickname, and the image of a Black man as a hero reduced to crawling along the city's main street is a pointed comment on race, power and visibility. It is the best known of the crawls he made across decades, starting with Tompkins Square Crawl in 1991, when he crawled through the park's gutters in a business suit. Because it happened in public over years, photographs and video carry it now. He died in Chicago in December 2023.
More about William Pope.L21
Tino Sehgal
This Progress, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2010
At the bottom of the Guggenheim's spiral, a child met each small group of visitors and asked what they thought progress was, then handed them on to older guides as they climbed, until an older adult took up the conversation near the top. The artwork was the exchange itself. Sehgal belongs on this list for his answer to the documentation question every other entry raises: his works may not be photographed, he publishes no catalogues, and sales are made by oral agreement alone. So the only record is memory, and the only way to know one is to be there. These Associations, with around 70 storytellers in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2012, works the same way.
More about Tino Sehgal22
Marina Abramović
Born
The Artist Is Present, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010
From March 14 to May 31, 2010, Abramović sat silently at a table in MoMA's atrium while visitors took turns sitting opposite her for as long as they chose: 736 hours and 30 minutes in all, with 1,545 sitters. The work is almost nothing, a chair, a gaze and time, yet it brought performance art to a mass audience and made the act of being looked at back the whole experience. It also showed a major museum treating live work as a centerpiece rather than a sideshow. The documentary Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, is the easiest way to see it today.
More about Marina Abramović23
Anne Imhof
Faust, German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2017
Imhof installed a glass floor 93 centimeters above the pavilion's own, had Doberman dogs walking inside a perimeter fence, and filled the building with performers in sportswear and dirty jeans who arranged themselves across the space through five-hour durational performances, passing cues to one another by phone. There was no stage in the usual sense: visitors walked over, around and among the performers and became part of the picture. Faust won the Golden Lion for best national participation and is the clearest recent example on this list of performance made as an environment, with the cool, screen-lit look of its decade. Photographs and visitors' own footage are how most people know it.
More about Anne Imhof
