Overview

Live Art is now recognized as one of the most vital and influential of creative spaces in the UK. Live Art is a research engine, driven by artists who are working across forms, contexts and spaces to open up new artistic models, new languages for the representation of ideas and new strategies for intervening in the public sphere. Influenced at one extreme by late 20th-century Performance Art methodologies where fine artists, in a rejection of objects and markets, turned to their body as the site and material of their practice, and at the other by enquiries where artists broke the traditions of the circumstance and expectations of theatre, a diverse range of practitioners in the 21st century - from those working in dance, film and video, to performance writing, socio-political activism and the emerging languages of the digital age - continue to be excited by the possibilities of the live event. The term Live Art is not a description of an artform or discipline, but a cultural strategy to include experimental processes and experiential practices that might otherwise be excluded from established curatorial, cultural and critical frameworks. Live Art is a framing device for a catalogue of approaches to the possibilities of liveness by artists who chose to work across, in between, and at the edges of more traditional artistic forms. Disrupting borders, breaking rules, defying traditions, resisting definitions, asking awkward questions and activating audiences, Live Art breaks the rules about who is making art, how they are making it and who they are making it for. Live Art is on the frontline of enquiries into what our culture is and where it is located, who our artists are and where they come from, what an audience can be and how they can be addressed.