Performance Art in the 80’s? A drift towards music?

The creation of an art market in Portugal in the 1980s had an impact on the field of Portuguese performance art. In the 1960s and 1970s, some of the precursors of performance art in Portugal no longer followed this option and devoted themselves to other professional fields or a more object-based art, such as painting, sculpture etc. – and even talked of a kind of "death of performance art". Yet, at the same time, new agents and groups emerged that still had a connection with performance art, including Homeostética and Happy the Faith. Some of them moved in the direction of alternative music with a strong satirical base. This article will seek to examine the specificities and the intergenerational points of contact, continuity and difference among these groups in relation not only to their predecessors but also to the positions held by some of their members in the field of contemporary art and to the "social places" that performance art occupies today in the national and international scene.