When we admire a famous artist from the past, we may wish to know every­thing about their lives—their pri­vate loves and hates, and the inner worlds to which they gave expres­sion in can­vas­es and sculp­tures. A biog­ra­phy may not be strict­ly nec­es­sary for the appre­ci­a­tion of an artist’s work. Maybe in some cas­es, know­ing too much about an artist can make us see the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal in every­thing they do. Fri­da Kahlo, on the oth­er hand, ful­ly invit­ed such inter­pre­ta­tion, and made know­ing the facts of her life a neces­si­ty.

She can hard­ly “be accused of hav­ing invent­ed her prob­lems,” writes Deb­o­rah Solomon at The New York Times, yet she invent­ed a new visu­al vocab­u­lary for them, achiev­ing her most­ly posthu­mous fame “by mak­ing her unhap­py face the main sub­ject of her work.”

Her “spe­cial­ty was suffering”—her own—“and she adopt­ed it as an artis­tic theme as con­fi­dent­ly as Mon­dri­an claimed the rec­tan­gle or Rubens the cor­pu­lent nude.” Kahlo treat­ed her life as wor­thy a sub­ject as the respectable mid­dle-class still lifes and aris­to­crat­ic por­traits of the old mas­ters. She trans­fig­ured her­self into a per­son­al lan­guage of sym­bols and sur­re­al motifs.

This means we must peer as close­ly into Kahlo’s life as we are able if we want to ful­ly enter into what Muse­um of Mod­ern Art cura­tor Kirk Varne­doe called “her con­struc­tion of a the­ater of the self.” But we may not feel much clos­er to her after read­ing her wild­ly-illus­trat­ed diary, which she kept for the last ten years of her life, and which was locked away after her death in 1954 and only pub­lished forty years lat­er, with an intro­duc­tion by Mex­i­can nov­el­ist Car­los Fuentes. The diary was then repub­lished by Abrams in a beau­ti­ful hard­cov­er edi­tion that retains Fuentes’ intro­duc­tion.

If you’re look­ing for a his­tor­i­cal chronol­o­gy or straight­for­ward nar­ra­tive, pre­pare for dis­ap­point­ment. It is, writes Kathryn Hugh­es at The Tele­graph, a diary “of a very par­tic­u­lar kind. There are few dates in it, and it has noth­ing to say about events in the exter­nal world—Communist Par­ty meet­ings, appoint­ments at the doctor’s or even trysts with Diego Rivera, the artist whom Kahlo loved so much that she mar­ried him twice. Instead it is full of paint­ings and draw­ings that appear to be dredged from her fer­tile uncon­scious.”

This descrip­tions sug­gests that the diary sub­sti­tutes the image for the word, but this is not so—it is filled with Kahlo’s exper­i­ments with lan­guage: play­ful prose-poems, wit­ty and cryp­tic cap­tions, free-asso­cia­tive hap­py acci­dents. Like the visu­al auto­bi­og­ra­phy of kin­dred spir­it Jean-Michel Basquiat, her pri­vate feel­ings must be inferred from doc­u­ments in which image and word are insep­a­ra­ble. There are “nei­ther star­tling dis­clo­sures,” writes Solomon, “nor the sort of mun­dane, kitchen-sink detail that cap­ti­vates by virtue of its ordi­nar­i­ness.” Rather than expo­si­tion, the diary is filled, as Abrams describes it, with “thoughts, poems, and dreams… along with 70 mes­mer­iz­ing water­col­or illus­tra­tions.”

Kahlo’s diary allows for no “dreamy iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with its sub­ject” notes Solomon, through Insta­gram-wor­thy sum­maries of her din­ners or wardrobe woes. Unlike her many, gush­ing let­ters to Rivera and oth­er lovers, the “irony is that these per­son­al sketch­es are sur­pris­ing­ly imper­son­al.” Or rather, they express the per­son­al in her pre­ferred pri­vate lan­guage, one we must learn to read if we want to under­stand her work. More than any oth­er artist of the time, she turned biog­ra­phy into mythol­o­gy.

Know­ing the bare facts of her life gives us much-need­ed con­text for her images, but ulti­mate­ly we must deal with them on their own terms as well. Rather than explain­ing her paint­ing to us, Kahlo’s diary opens up an entire­ly new world of imagery—one very dif­fer­ent from the con­trolled self-por­trai­ture of her pub­lic body of work—to puz­zle over.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fri­da Kahlo’s Pas­sion­ate Love Let­ters to Diego Rivera

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life and Work of Fri­da Kahlo

Vis­it the Largest Col­lec­tion of Fri­da Kahlo’s Work Ever Assem­bled: 800 Arti­facts from 33 Muse­ums, All Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

If you asked me to define per­for­mance art, I’d prob­a­bly stum­ble into a cou­ple of clichés—you know it when you see it, you kind of have to be there, etc. Such vague cri­te­ria could mean vir­tu­al­ly any event can be called per­for­mance art, and maybe it can. But the prece­dents set in the art world over the course of the 20th cen­tu­ry nar­row things a bit. PBS’s The Art Assign­ment primer above tells us that per­for­mance art is “a term used to describe art in which the body is the medi­um or live action is in some way involved.”

Still, this is mighty broad, encom­pass­ing all the­ater, dance, musi­cal, and rit­u­al per­for­mance through­out human his­to­ry. And that’s kind of the point. Per­for­mance art is some­times seen as an intru­sion of a for­eign body into the art world.

But the his­to­ry above implies that the real anom­aly is the recent ten­den­cy to think of art pri­mar­i­ly as a sta­t­ic visu­al medi­um that excludes the body. The term “per­for­mance art” only took on mean­ing when it had an antag­o­nist to rebel against. Some of those ear­ly rebels includ­ed the Ital­ian Futur­ists, who staged noise con­certs and chaot­ic the­ater pieces to shake things up.

Dada, Bauhaus, Antonin Artaud’s The­ater of Cru­el­ty, the work of John Cage, Mer­ce Cun­ning­ham, ambi­tious Japan­ese per­for­mance pieces, action paint­ing, hap­pen­ings, Fluxus…. In just its first half, The Art Assign­ment video cov­ers the key move­ments using per­for­mance to con­fuse, amuse, offend, and chal­lenge audi­ences. In the 60s and 70s, per­for­mance art became more explic­it­ly polit­i­cal, and more direct­ly con­fronta­tion­al. It also became far more dan­ger­ous for the artist.

In Yoko Ono’s 1965 Cut Piece, for exam­ple, the artist sits motion­less and expres­sion­less on stage, as audi­ence mem­bers are invit­ed to come up one by one, pick up a pair of scis­sors, and cut away any part of her cloth­ing that they want­ed. Most par­tic­i­pants were well-behaved, but one man made men­ac­ing ges­tures with the scis­sors before cut­ting away his piece.

Oth­er artists have gone much further—performing death-defy­ing stunts and real acts of rit­u­al or sym­bol­ic vio­lence on them­selves. (Watch Chris Bur­den get shot for the sake of art below.) Per­for­mance artists “want­ed to make art that could not eas­i­ly be bought or sold,” says the nar­ra­tor of the short intro­duc­tion from the Tate, fur­ther up. “The term per­for­mance came to define art that had a live ele­ment and was wit­nessed by an audi­ence.”

Although we have hours of footage doc­u­ment­ing per­for­mance art pieces through­out the 20th and 21st cen­turies, we real­ly do have to be there, because as part of the audi­ence, we are part of the piece. In some way, if you’ve nev­er par­tic­i­pat­ed in per­for­mance art, you’ve also nev­er real­ly seen it.

This vagary might bring us back to the ques­tion that inevitably arose when per­for­mance was no longer avant-garde: “What isn’t per­for­mance?” The adjec­tive “per­for­ma­tive” cov­ers broad­er ter­ri­to­ry, nam­ing aspects, for exam­ple, of pho­tog­ra­phy, film, sculp­ture, or oth­er media that sim­u­late or stim­u­late action with­out actu­al­ly being live per­for­mance them­selves.

But we should not get lost in abstrac­tions when talk­ing about a type of art—or a way of doing art—that relies on the utmost speci­fici­ty: the irre­ducible con­crete­ness of moments nev­er to be repeat­ed again. This is the nature of work from the most well-known per­for­mance artists, among them Mari­na Abramović—who end­ed up per­form­ing her famous “The Artist is Present” in a pro­found, unex­pect­ed reunion with her for­mer part­ner Ulay in 2010 (fur­ther up).

Ger­man artist Joseph Beuys test­ed his audi­ences’ resolve in absur­dist actions like 1965’s How to Explain Pic­tures to a Dead Hare, in which the artist lit­er­al­ly walks around a gallery with a dead rab­bit, his head cov­ered in hon­ey and gold foil, whis­per­ing to the ani­mal’s corpse while doing a sort of tor­tured dance. The audi­ence watched this through the win­dows of the gallery for three hours. Then they were let in to watch Beuys hold the dead hare with his back to them. Not only do we get but a tiny frac­tion of the per­for­mance, less than a minute in the clip above, but we also see it in a way we nev­er could have if we were there.

A less dis­cussed, but crit­i­cal, aspect of per­for­mance art is the stag­ing. The block­ing and chore­og­ra­phy of live per­for­mance pieces not only induce effects in the audience—discomfort, anger, anx­i­ety, dis­gust, or sheer bewilderment—but are also, in a sense, the very mate­r­i­al of the piece. Per­for­mance pieces aim to shock and con­found expectations—they are nev­er coy about it. But to see them only as out­landish ploys for atten­tion or elab­o­rate pranks, though they can be both, is to lose sight of how they go about upset­ting or oth­er­wise mov­ing peo­ple.

Jen­nifer Hartley’s Last Sup­per uses high­ly expres­sive, the­atri­cal move­ment in a piece designed, the artist her­self writes, as “a dis­cus­sion on opu­lence and the giv­ing of one­self as an act of auto can­ni­bal­ism.” If we take a cue from this descrip­tion about how we might expe­ri­ence the per­for­mance, we could ask, what is the vocab­u­lary of this dis­cus­sion? What are its key phras­es and recur­ring themes, enact­ed through the move­ments of the artist’s body? Or would we even know them if we saw them? Can we rec­og­nize and appre­ci­ate art that doesn’t look the way we are taught art is sup­posed to look?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mari­na Abramović and Ulay’s Adven­tur­ous 1970s Per­for­mance Art Pieces

Per­for­mance Artist Mari­na Abramović Describes Her “Real­ly Good Plan” to Lose Her Vir­gin­i­ty

Watch Chris Bur­den Get Shot for the Sake of Art (1971)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness