Communications in Humanities Research ISSN: 2753-7072
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Research Article

Investigating Sartrean Freedom in Post-1960s Performance Art and Its Social Influence

Yutong Han*
Nanjing Foreign Language School

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

This study investigates how three performance artworks made between 1973 and 1981 embody, challenge, and reshape Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist account of freedom. Sartre treats freedom as an unavoidable structure of consciousness expressed through choice, projection, and responsibility; political freedom, by contrast, concerns the concrete rights, recognition, and possibilities distributed through social and institutional arrangements. Using qualitative philosophical and contextual analysis, the essay compares Marina Abramović's Rhythm 0 (1974), Adrian Piper's The Mythic Being (1973–1975), and Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance (1980–1981) (also called Time Clock Piece ). The works were selected because they place freedom under three distinct but comparable pressures: interpersonal power and bodily vulnerability, racialized and gendered recognition, and the regulation of labor, immigration, and time. Read together, they show how performance art translates an abstract account of freedom into embodied situations while also exposing limits that an exclusively ontological account can obscure. The essay argues that these performances retain Sartre's emphasis on choice and responsibility but recast freedom as relational, politically conditioned, and unequally available in practice. The body consequently appears both as a medium of self-definition and as a site on which audiences, stereotypes, laws, and labor systems organize human possibilities.

Keywords: Sartrean freedom; existentialism; performance art; embodiment; social responsibility
Published: September 22, 2026
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/2026.37175
Volume: CHR Vol.120
pp. 224-233
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