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History of Performance Art investigates the international developments in performance after 1950. It considers the experimental strategies and ideological aims of artists who use bodies in action as the primary vehicle of expression, information, communication, and social change. Performance art has had the distinction of being the most censored art form, a significant social fact that draws attention to its disruptive aesthetic codes and materials: emphasizing presentation over representation; human bodies over inanimate objects; and temporality over spatiality. The course attends to principal theoretical debates, from the nature of presence and witnessing, to theories of physical embodiment, corporeality, and ability, to the construction of identity, subjectivity, and otherness.