Despite dipping into RoseLee Goldberg, mentioning conceptual art and quoting Roddy Hunter and Andre Stitt, Libby Brooks seems to have missed the point that art is not necessarily something to hang on your wall. She saw, it seems, only two performances at Span2. I took my four-year-old to see Julie Bacon, Stuart Brisley and Tara Babel. He is still talking about them.
Delpha Hudson
Cornwall

While I was at Leeds Polytechnic, where performance art developed in Britain, budgies were lined up and shot, a performer ate glass, a student took out a razor and cut his chest until it turned red with blood, two others beat people up and called it art. I printed on paper using Tampax blood. All this and a lot more took place in the first half of the 1970s.
Mari Peacock
lecturer in art and media, West Herts College

Despite excellent points, Libby Brooks tends to reinforce the popular conception of performance art as a high street "nutter" with a hostage audience. Performance art is so much more than being self-obsessed or annoying, and shades into avant-garde theatre, punk, video and private acts that only exist in the minds of other people through documentation. One of the aims of the futurists was for art and life to become indistinguishable. I am sure more people reflect on their own lives after watching a TV soap than after seeing some bloke down the shopping centre with a stocking on his head.
Michael Beecher
Buxton

Performance art is about the promotion of tolerance. There is little money to be made. So, in spite of the "endless cash- flow palaver" that Libby Brooks supposes, we don't stab each other in the back for market dominance. I have been a performance artist for almost 40 years. I am currently exploring the connections between performance and a-functional behaviour (or "madness").
Roland White
Sheffield

I read Libby Brooks's article with interest having started my career in art with performances. My first performance was about making people feel paranoid which was projected via the use of an imaginary language which nevertheless managed to communicate a certain feeling. As far as I and the audience were concerned it had worked. It was satisfying to a certain point but my next goal was the opposite a somewhat more satisfying undertaking to make people happy. Unfortunately it is a lot more difficult to get people to relax take a deep breath fill with excitement and feel blissfully happy, if that was the case I am sure that performance art would be very different from what it is.

I hadn't read about performance for a long time but there was nothing new to be said about it, it was still working on the same shock tactics. My own work took me more into the realm of the theatre, theatre of the absurd perhaps at the best of times a similarity between Beckett was being proclaimed, at that time I hadn't read any Beckett, but was familiar with his name. What was important to me was perhaps not so much a narrative but gaining the audience's attention through other ways then shock even if that boils down to entertainment. As long as my work throws up some questions and makes an audience think I am happy.
Marcus Bastel
London

It was interesting to note how difficult it was for Libby Brooks to respond to the art (beyond squirming or admiration of nerve) although it does "provoke" her into asking interesting questions about the nature of art and how we perceive it. If, through enactment, the work only challenges how we see art rather than how we see life, then it is, if I may coin a term, "Performance Criticism" not Performance Art (or else. . . maybe it's "a nutter with tights on his head".)
Lyndall Davey
Winchelsea

Is performance art valid? The answer has to be yes. However, it is far more interesting to ask if performance art can hold or develop the personal or cultural imagination as effectively as a novel, a painting, music, good journalism or a poem? A lot of contemporary thinking in art asks us to read into all aspects of human creativity the function of art. Is performance art, then, asking us to operate on this spiritual level of artistic integrity? Shocking us into this state can have value yet all human behaviour cannot be classified as art because of its ability to shock. Should we compare performance art to the theatre, reclassify it or compare it to, say, the body of work produced by painters such as Uglow and Balthus? Let's reclassify it.
David Bliss
Witney