Performance Art in the Age of Trump
- Democracy Chain
- Sep 22, 2025
- 4 min read
by Liz Goldner
August 30, 2025
When Rocky Balboa, AKA Sylvester Stallone, enters the stage at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center (possibly renamed by then) this December to receive an award for his “lifetime artistic achievements,” the event will be part of another performance by the former reality TV star, Donald Trump.
In fact, much of Trump’s life has been performance. As James Greenberg wrote in his Substack, August 17, 2025, “The comedy of manners in American life has long featured the self-made man trying to break into an upper-class world, lacking the polish or education to ever fully belong … a tragicomic figure chasing the trappings of aristocracy without its culture.”
Before life in the United States became dystopian once Trump reassumed the presidency, his behavior at rallies, interviews and impromptu appearances, along with his dicta, were often so bizarre that they were regarded as performances.
Witness his 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape incident at which he said, with the camera filming him, "I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Or on his 2004 to 2017 TV show, “The Apprentice,” at which he gleefully exclaimed at the end of each episode, to one desperate contestant, "You're fired!" Or his rally with Kristi Noem in Pennsylvania on October 14, 2024 when a medical emergency in the audience turned the event into a music and love fest with Trump and Noem swaying on the stage to his favorite popular music.
Trump has turned our country into a maelstrom of Orwellian performances with his June 14 Flag Day Military Parade, with the National Guard increasingly invading our cities (now openly carrying weapons), and with the FBI’s recent raid on former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s Bethesda, Maryland home.
Yet before Trump’s antics invaded the airwaves, a more relevant form of performance art — live presentations featuring a wide variety of art forms, including acting, music, poetry and installations, presented by individuals or groups striving to convey their heartfelt and sometimes imploring messages — existed since the early 20th century, before earning that name in the early 1970s.
In Southern California, the performance group, “Asco: Elite of the Obscure” (active from 1972 to 1987), a Chicano collective made up of Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez, used performance, public art, and multimedia to respond to social and political turbulence in Los Angeles and beyond. Often dressing up glamorously with costumes from thrift shops, Asco addressed the conditions of the Mexican American community, the depravity of the Vietnam War and the disproportionate number of Chicanos drafted and shipped to Southeast Asia during that war, among other issues. Their performances also included “Day of the Dead” celebrations, “Instant Murals,” in which an Asco member (usually Valdez) was duct-taped to a wall, and “No Movies,” still photos of glamorous characters from made-up movies. Asco is the Spanish slang word for disgust or revulsion.
In 2017, the UCLA Hammer Museum’s exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985” presented the work of 100-plus women artists, representing 15 countries. The decades covered by the exhibition were a time of repression in many Latin American countries, oppressed by military dictatorships. Their citizens were forced to survive civil war, imprisonment, exile, torture, political violence, and censorship.
Among performances documented in that show was a 1975 film of Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta. She explored violence, exile, identity and her own naked body in her work. The film presented her lying in a part grave/part womb cavity dug on top of a rock, which was filled with crimson liquid. Also in the show, a 1978 film by Afro-Peruvian poet Victoria Santa Cruz revealed her yelling vociferously, “Black” to her audience, followed by a chorus of women responding, “Black, black, black, black, black, black!” Santa Cruz had appropriated the denigrating taunt of being called “Black” as a young child by white classmates, and turned that insult into part of her identity and hurled it back at her audience.
As Trump and his minions increasingly and often illegally mount violent and slanderous performances, our main form of retaliation — itself bordering on performance — occurs at our country’s thousands — literally thousands — of protest rallies. As Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin recently remarked, “A protest a day keeps the fascists away.” As an attendee at some of these rallies in Orange County, I exult in being part of group chants, at which hundreds of people yell out, “This is not Normal,” “Power to the People,” and “Alone I am a single drop of water. Together we are a flood.” I’m also impressed by the creativity of the signs at these rallies.
But there’s more to come. Journalist Carolina Miranda wrote in the Washington Post on July 15 that at a small anti-ICE rally in downtown L.A. a Mexican norteño band and a local act, “founded by day laborers in the 1990s, were performing on the back of a truck,” while volunteers distributed anti-ICE fliers to onlookers.
As we live in unprecedented repressive, authoritarian times, the gravity of which few of us have ever witnessed, I believe that the unbridled creativity that so many of us possess is about to burst forth into a variety of performances, as it did with Asco and with the feminist art movement a half century ago, and now at protest rallies.
Liz Goldner is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.
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