Abstract

Both process philosophy and performance art are significant contributions to the 20th-century philosophical thought. They are based on a new perspective on perceiving reality and art. Both are centered on the notion of process as actual, ongoing action. Both are also based on immediate experience. In our contribution, we will focus on certain notions of process ontology as developed by A.N. Whitehead in his Process and Reality. We will try to explore their relevance in contemporary art, especially in performance and installation art. Among Whitehead’s well-established notions, we will revisit as follows: actual entity, nexus, concrescence, feeling, extensive continuum, potentiality as continuity, actuality as atomist determination; the role of the human body within the vague perception of a nexus, the body whithness. The corpuscular characteristics are present in the human society as Whitehead mentioned, playing a role in the communication between the artist and the spectator encountered in performance art. One of the subjects of debate in our work refers also to the role of the symbolic reference in performance art. Our thesis supports the idea that the process ontology provides a better method to analyze contemporary art, especially performance art and, generally speaking, arts based on action. We will also point out a certain connection between Whitehead’s philosophy and Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, especially the role of the body as part of the relationship between man and nature.