Sitting at a bus stop.

What makes something performance art?

The tired old argument comes to mind: are we performing every day? Is life a performance?

The more I am exposed to performance art, the more I am convinced that it is just the snippet of the living of a life, compressed and planned with an audience in mind. It is just living, with the motive to create art.

We watched videos of Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic and so on. I tried to read into the origins of performance art, and came across names like Marta Minujin and Kaprow. I read about the concept of "happenings", Kaprow's performance with a city of ice and the general idealogy that performance art should mimick real life as closely as possible.

This still left me with no ideas in relation to our actual task: to create and perform a work of art.

I finally narrowed down on some basic concepts I wanted to express, and tried to think about how I'd express these ideas using my body and some objects as my medium.

I worked with two classmates and we came up with a performance we made to strange bystanders at the bustop nearby. We traced our faces on sheets of paper we placed over our features blindly, and traced our own faces over the drawings of each others faces. Each sheet of paper, ultimately, held the blind drawings of all three of our faces. The pictures were of all three of us, represented our mental view of our selves: and yet looked nothing truly like us.

This was our concept note:

You are you, and I am me. This we are sure of, with complete certainty, from the time we learn to remember our names.
Our perception of self is built on a concept of identity that we have adopted from the earliest years of our childhood, and our perception of "others" goes hand in hand. Us, and them. You and I.
Identity is a transient, fluid thing. It is a product of pure chance, a selection from seas and seas of individual souls, and to a great extent, convenient assumption. Our mental images of our selves are just direct products of our ability to see, to think, to feel. Blind us, gag us, and we may not know who we are.
Time and life and people pass by us, as other individual souls in an endless sea. Identity forms a blob, morphing, mutating, a never-ending metamorphosis. Either we become each other, and we are everyone, or we never never anyone to begin with. We form a process that never ends, not even when we die.
And yet we are sure of this: you are you, and I am me.