Performance art gets a bad rap sometimes. It's the type of art that involves strange things like taking a dump on an American flag, or pulling paper scrolls out of bodily crevices and reading from them. It can be weird and uncomfortable. But it can also be extremely fun, accessible and awe-inspiring.
Blue Man Group and Cirque du Soleil are nothing if not performance art. But lying under a ramp and masturbating? That's a tough question. Once again, the thing that makes these acts art is that they are intended to be experienced as art.
And that's what makes the artistic space in performance art so interesting. Of all the mediums, the narrative space in performance art is the closest to infinite. It can, in theory, include all other media; artists might do live paintings, or read from specially composed books, play music, do weird things to their body, or half a dozen other things, and it's all part of the same piece. Dimensions available to the performance artist include color, light, sound, time, language, and a hundred others.
The one limitation performance art does have is that its duration is always finite. A performance happens, and then ends. It might happen again, but its existence in time is bound by a beginning and an end, just like music. Even if someone films the performance, the resulting document is not the piece itself, merely a recording of the piece. Some pieces, like Marina Abramovic's The Artist is Present cannot be recorded without missing their core essence.
These acts may seem strange, but I think it's hard to argue they aren't art. Every nuance of a performance piece is laced with intention, and influential pieces have pushed the boundaries of artistic space to its most absurd and fascinating lengths.
More commonly, however, performance art is at least half entertainment. I'm an open-minded guy, so I think you can have it both ways (though the Guggenheim crowd would probably disagree).
I vividly recall seeing the Blue Man Group at their show in Las Vegas, and I think it's hard to argue that what happened there was anything less than art. There was a particular moment in the show where each Blue Man had a stack of giant cue-cards, and they stood there flipping them over simultaneously (I tried to find video of this, but I couldn't, so you'll just have to bear with me). It was impossible to read all 3 cards before they flipped to the next one, but equally impossible not to try (I'm sure a speed-reader could do it easily, but I'm just an ordinary man). It messed with your brain. That kind of thing is hard to pull off, and it exists in an area of artistic space that only performance art can touch. Because even though the writing on the cards composed a coherent message (at least, each stack was coherent with itself), the method of delivery prevented the words from simply being a piece of writing. The simultaneous delivery raised it to the level of a performance, and combined two areas of artistic space to create something new.
With Blue Man Group, music is at least half the performance, but I'd say they are performance artists first, and musicians second. But there are some people who are musicians first, and blend performance art into their live shows.
One of the best examples from my formative years is the ever-controversial Marilyn Manson. His music was rarely more than adequate (and has fallen off sharply since 2003 or so), but the persona he adopted both live and in the media raised his work to another level. He was a walking embodiment of the darkest parts of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the fact that he rarely, if ever, dropped character made it a never-ending performance. Lots of bands have a bitchin' stage show, but Manson kept the stage show going all the way onto the Tonight Show. Adding that extra dimension of Artistic space brought him success that his music alone never would have.
I'm not sure if Marilyn Manson and the Blue Man Group think about "artistic space" or not, but their forays into strange, uncharted areas have raised their performances to a greater level. If they were accidents, they were happy ones. And maybe you don't have to make those choices consciously, but I think it's easy to see how deliberately playing in extra dimensions of artistic space gives you a greater chance of success. It's like anything, once you know about it, you can take control of it, and you might find you're capable of doing things you never dreamed of.
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