Abstract

This paper aims at highlighting some changes in the meaning of certain traditional aesthetic concepts used in analyzing performance art events. We consider that Nietzsche’s philosophy of life as well as the phenomenological analysis of perception and the bodily involvement in the world described by M. Merleau-Ponty light the way to a better understanding of this contemporary art. Associated terms, such as artist-spectator, subject-object, art-nature, art-culture or concepts as perception, culture, time, space, presence, self-referentiality, constitutive acts, artistic ‘aura’ or art as a way of “sculpting people” will be analyzed, considering the fundamental condition of bodily-being-in-the-world. In our opinion performance art succeeds in keeping its autonomy not only because of its institutional evaluation, but also because of the cumulative cultural meaning of these events. The performance artist succeeds in the “transfiguration of the commonplace” in a symbolic action, using his body not only as an object, but also as the human way of being-in-the-world.