This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A painting waits. It hangs on a wall whether or not anyone is in the room, unchanged by the visitor's arrival or departure. Performance Art refuses that condition outright. Its medium is the artist's own body acting in real time before witnesses, which means the work exists only for the duration of its own performance and only in the specific version of it a given audience happened to see. Marina Abramovic's Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she stood motionless for six hours while gallery visitors were invited to use any of seventy two objects, including a rose, a feather, a gun and a single bullet, on her body however they chose, could not exist as a painting or a sculpture at all; its entire meaning depends on the accumulating, unscripted choices a specific audience actually made across those six hours, choices that grew markedly more aggressive as the evening wore on and no consequence followed. This is what performance theorists mean when they say liveness is not a delivery method for the work but the work's actual material. A video recording of a performance documents it the way a photograph documents an event, but does not reproduce it, because the recorded audience is not present, is not choosing anything, and cannot change what happens next. That absence of a stable, repeatable object is precisely what performance art asks its audience to accept in place of one: not a thing to look at, but an event to have been part of.