Continuity And Change: Performance Art In Eastern Europe Since The 1960s Amy Bryzgel In Eastern Europe, performance art has a rich tradition dating back to the 1960s, yet its history has not yet been written. This article presents a consolidation of my research thus far on the history of performance art practices in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe since 1960, based on original primary source research and in-depth field work in each country in the region, which includes the former Soviet countries of Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and the Baltics); the Satellite countries of Central Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania); Yugoslavia; East Germany, and Albania. Since much of the region was closed off to the West during the Cold War, performance art traditions, namely, action art, body art and happenings, existed in relative isolation. Complete state control over official art (painting and sculpture) meant that performance developed unofficially, within closed circles; it also meant that no critical discourse on the subject was able to develop locally. Furthermore, lack of access by Western scholars meant that these traditions did not enter the discourse on performance art in the West. Despite this gap between scholarship and practice, artists in the region were well connected; some travelled West (Milan Knížák, Tadeusz Kantor, Paul Neagu, to name a few), yet Western artists also travelled East (Gina Pane, Chris Burden), a fact that makes the absence of literature on this history even more surprising. In the 1960s, performance art became a dominant genre in the West. Motivated by a desire to unite art and life, artists such as Allan Kaprow created happenings that expanded the limits of the painting frame as visual art events taking place in real time and space. Feminist artists, such as Carolee Schneeman, also used body art, but their motivation was to become active agents in the creative process, as opposed to passive bystanders. Because of this focus on ephemeral action, Amelia Jones has characterized performance art as indicative of a shift from modern to postmodern, insofar as it serves to “destabilize the Cartesian subject“, given its interactive nature and the fact that it gives visibility to the artist. Furthermore, in the 1960s, Lucy Lippard and John Chandler noted a shift from a focus on creating objects to the process of creation in minimal, conceptual and performance art in the 1960s.1 Insofar as artists were creating live works of art through the use of their bodies, which were dependent on the presence of and interaction with the audience, Western performance art was often aimed at escaping commodification.2 It was also in the 1960s that artists in communist and socialist East-Central Europe began to engage with performance art, but for reasons that often differed from those in the West, and which also varied throughout the region. For example, in the communist countries of Central Europe, instead of an art market, there existed varying degrees of state control over official art and exhibition spaces. Unlike in the West, rather than a critique of art institutions, the use of performance in the East was often a way of reclaiming one’s body, and the space around it, from the state. Instead of operating as an extension of painting, it often functioned as a free zone in which to experiment, as a new art form that offered seemingly limitless possibilities. Writing about performance art in North America in the 1960s and 1970s, Robyn Brentano recalls that “there was a sense in the air that art would contribute to social change by changing consciousness and by operating outside the institutional confines of the art establishment where it could reach a non-art public“.3 In this sense, performance appealed to artists on both sides of the divide for the new opportunities it afforded. In socialist Yugoslavia, however, where consumerism was encouraged and connections with the West