Life, liveliness, liveness versus performativity in action art
Life, liveliness, liveness versus performativity in action art

Summary/Abstract: In my article I try to highlight the relations between life and art. I suggest looking at this problem through the perspective of history and the notion of performance (as radical and declarative connection of art and life), and refer it to performative efficiency, which is believed to be the constitutive trait of cultural performance. My intention is also to elucidate two dubious questions of the relations between art and life: 1. To what extent the presence of a living subject guarantees the performative character of an action; 2. How much is the significance of the subject’s presence being reduced in order to efficiently perform through art. It seems that the art of performance offers us an enlightening lesson in art-life rhetoric, which has – possibly – replaced the slightly devalued notion of aestheticization. The point is that the history of performance not only clarifies how art can come into relations with life, but it also elucidates the metaphorical ways of their description as liveliness or vitality. It also explains the conditions of liveness, when something exists and is being perceived as “live”.

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