Flash Mob Performance Art

Mass performance art is a fascinating product of the Internet age. For the uninitiated a bit of background may be helpful. “Performance art” itself is defined as art created by the performance of one or more individuals. It began in the modern sense in the 1960s, Yoko Ono among the practitioners. For many it was a response to the question, What is art? Pop Art could make art using everyday objects and images, from Andy Warhol’s soup cans to Claes Oldenberg’s giant Typewriter Eraser, which stands in the National Gallery of Art sculpture garden in Washington, D.C.

Why, then, should not an artist mingle visual art and theater, often impromptu street theater, and produce performance art? A popular term from the time was a happening. Performance art often seems simply to happen spontaneously. At least that is the viewer’s perception. Often, however, the artist has given considerable thought and preparation to the creation of the performance moment, how it should look, and what it should mean. Performance art can incorporate all of the senses, using color, movement, music, and so on — or their opposites: stillness and silence. The “living statues” or silent robotic-type individuals one occasionally sees on the streets, usually with a basket for monetary contributions at their feet, are engaging in a form of performance art.

Flash mobs are a 21st century innovation on the performance art theme. They began about 2003, with Manhattan being credited as the first site. Indeed, flash mobs tend to be big city phenomena. Individuals communicate with one another over the Internet and often anonymously about what, where, and when a performance will take place. Some flash mobs engage in a short rehearsal before the actual event, but the unrehearsed form is as common if not more so. Also, as a performance unfolds observers sometimes join in and become performers themselves.

A number of examples can be found on YouTube. For example, a flash mob of about two hundred danced to “Do Re Mi” from The Sound of Music in the central railway station in Antwerp, Belgium. London boasts what organizers hope to be an annual winter “No Pants Subway Ride,” coordinated by Improv Everywhere. Their tagline is “We cause scenes.”

Performance art comes in all sorts of forms, and flash mobs demonstrate the mass creative power that can be unlocked through electronic communication.