What is performance art, and why should it matter to writers?

Where sentences move us, and where we need to move to find meaning

“I have climbed my mountain, but I must still live my life.” —Tenzing Norgay

The perfomance art movement was influenced by surrealism, conceptualism, the anti-art of Dada after World War I, and action painting in which one throws or drips or sprays paint in a way that is as much the art as the painting itself.

Conceptual art is about an idea. Performance…