A significant form of contemporary art is a performance art that may take place in a gallery, a café, by the street, or in any other environment. According to Marina Abramović, performance art is the very psychological and physical structure into which the artist enters.

At the beginning of each performance, the energy exchange commences and from that point on whatever may take place within the time-space brackets of the performance should be included as part of the work.

The exercise through which an object is selected for performance art and theatre is one of the most important aspects of art. To select an object, one has to take into account multiple considerations such as shape, function, and capabilities. During a performance, when the work is being created, the artist mostly ponders the visual and pragmatic traits of a certain shape, maintaining that the strata underneath the object, the psychological strata, will appear to them automatically. In other words, during a performance, the artist touches the basic objecthood of objects: a chair is a chair and no efforts are made by the artist to symbolize it as something else. From that point on, it depends on the participant to make up their mind about what sort of interpretation they want to derive from this image.

In fact, the artist’s purpose is to address the participant’s subconscious, not their awareness as to the symbolic and representative value of objects and images. Of course, I believe that the exercise of object selection by the performer should be capable of building on the psychological strata, beyond the functionality of the objects. The objects selected by the performer draw a perimeter around their performance, defining its boundaries, and the audience may make whatever use of the object as they desire.

The fundamental trait of each object, based on the performer’s purpose may or may not be ignored. For example, as we see during the performance of ‘the Seven Easy Pieces’ by Marina Abramović, the artist uses a metal bench and some lighted candles to convey her intended concept and create her desired image. Perhaps she could have used fire instead, or other heating elements, or torches, but she had selected a few candles, for the effects candle may leave on the audience’s mind. The metal bench could have been a plastic bench or a rubber one, or wooden one, and although the artist could have used such substances and neglected the details in the selection process she consciously decided to go with metal.

In another work by the same artist, named ‘Rhythm 0,’ the performer sits on a chair, telling the audience, ‘you may do to me anything you desire,’ considering that there was a table nearby, placed on it objects such as sews, blades, scissors, chains and so on.The audience used the objects on her so harshly that at the end of the day, the artist was not able to stand on her feet.

The objects used in this performance all shared a torture motif, and so they were used, without the audience being told what use they could have made of such objects. The point to be made here clarifies the process in which objects are selected because the audience could send the objects away from the whole performance space and it was totally their decision what to do with them.

This process is also seen in the theatre of objects. For example, a performer while acting out his scene with a utility knife counts on the audience’s decision-making and creativity as to whether the knife should be used for a function beyond its appearance and not necessarily cutting other objects or not.

A performance artist named Martin Burton often performs in darkness. In his performances, objects are being thrown down from a height, parts, and bits of a design, and an image is suddenly flashed out of the darkness for a moment and then disappears quickly, or sometimes something happens that no human being apparently taking part in it. In one of his performances, a rocking chair is moving to and fro without anyone sitting on it, emerging before the audience for a short moment and then bursting into flames suddenly as the performance goes on. In such performances, it is the objects that form the performance and the performers are actually the crew behind the scenes. Based on this implementation method one may come to the conclusion that although the performer is not visible during the performance they are actually present on the scene through the object selection process as the performer of the theatre of objects. This intensifies the similarities between performance art and theatre.

Since both theatres of objects and performance art depend on objects and the performer’s mutual relationship then the process of object selection is of great significance in both of them and quite interwoven throughout the whole performance. Both are considered contemporary arts and based on the earlier performances, the performers have been eager to share their political and social viewpoints with the audience whether directly or in an implicit manner. The artist, selecting their desired objects, conveys ideas to the audience because they know to select the objects without enough care and forethought may have unintended effects on the audience’s connection with the work for image making and concept creation. The direct use of objects, for their significant role in our daily life, eliminates the borders between the performer and the audience. I believe this is why many performers now pay much heed to their objects because with one single object in hand, they may convey messages to the audience that go beyond verbal messaging and this is the very characteristic that in some cases may give political and social connotations to the work.

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