It’s the question that’s been asked since godfather-of-conceptual-art Marcel Duchamp showed up at a prominent New York art show with a second-hand toilet back in 1917. What constitutes art? Does it always need to be about the object, or can art take the form of a concept or idea? What does art actually do?

The first line of Claes Oldenburg’s age-stained artist statement puts it nicely: “I am for an art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.”

This is the thread that weaves through Art as a Verb. The exhibition is a fascinating time capsule of post-object art and documentation from the 1960s to today, featuring performance pieces, instructional works, manifestos and interactive props by Australian and international, historical and contemporary artists.

Jill Scott blurs the role of artist and artwork in a pair of videos depicting a woman taped to the wall of a gallery, while Eva Rothschild reveals how the audience can become the artwork in her 25-minute clip of young boys running amok in a gallery.

There are darker works, like Basim Magdy’s evocative and disillusioned 13 essential rules for understanding the world, and then the plain weird – cue Philip Gerner’s documented 1976 performance as a ‘human jam tasting medium’.

This exhibition won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but among the flickering films, scratchy sound recordings and dog-eared documents, we are shown that art has the capacity to question, critique, instruct, protest, mock, agitate – the list goes on – both itself and broader society. In short, it can do more than sit on its ass in a museum.

Art as a Verb continues at Flinders University City Gallery until Sunday, April 26.

Words by Amelia Pinna.