Performance The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Volume II (2024)

The Challenges of the Ephemeral: Conserving Performance Art

It is clear that art institutions are constantly changing, and in the past few years quite radically. Museums are now becoming places of direct engagement with artworks and artists and not just for contemplation. Some institutions have shifted their frameworks to be able to accommodate video, large-scale installations, new media art and performance art. Early in the 20th century, artists started to get involved in performances to defy the object centred art of the time. Since then, performance art has been present in the art world as a valid medium of expression. However, many museums and galleries were overlooking the significance of this type of art mainly because of the difficulty of integrating it in the traditional museum structure. One of the issues of performance is the absence of a solid material/de-objectification and its transitory and ephemeral characteristics. Nevertheless, performance art is reaching a much more prominent position within the contemporary art museum in the last few years. Therefore, we must question what changes ought to be done to engage performance art within the foundations of the art museum. Being the art institution the ideal place to conserve, collect and present art, how can an ephemeral art form such as performance be conserved? This paper will be aiming at the performative arts field, more specifically to performance art, and will demonstrate the challenges that this brings to the art museum. Conservation and collection methods are the main focus, although other points will be referred.

Performance The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Volume I

Routledge , 2023

This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seen through the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the larger theoretical debates about whether and how performance remains. Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance, Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1) brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object of study, experience, acquisition and care. In so doing, it presents both theoretical frameworks and functional paradigms for thinking about-and enacting-the conservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance is undertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the art market and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse on how to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering con servators, curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longterm care of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizes their work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needs of conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject is sorely needed. This interdisciplinary book implements a novel rethinking of performance that will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history, theater, performance studies, heritage studies and anthropology.

The Living Process of Conserving Performance: Theory and Practice in the Conservation of Performance-Based Artworks at Tate

Studies in Art, Heritage, Law and the Market, 2023

2. Collecting Performance-Based Art: New Challenges and Shifting Perspectives

Performativity in the Gallery

Collecting Performance-Based Art: New Challenges and Shifting Perspectives

Performativity in the Gallery. Staging Interactive Encounters. , 2014

Research Festival and Exhibition "Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation," Tanzhaus Zürich, Aargauer Kunsthaus, ADC Geneva, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, Dampfzentrale Bern, and HKB Bern, September 14-29, 2024

Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, 2024

This is a first glimpse into the schedule for our long-awaited research festival and exhibition, "Conserving Performance: Performing Conservation," which is currently in its final planning phase. The events, which also mark the conclusion of our research project, will take place in venues across Switzerland from September 14 to September 29, 2024. Please save the dates and join us this fall in Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne, Aarau, and Bern! Can performance be conserved, and if so, how? And what does it mean to conserve performance? Examining performance through the lens of conservation, this research festival and exhibition celebrates performance in its social, material and epistemic networks by bringing together practitioners of performance, dance, museums and conservation with researchers across disciplines.

The Institutionalization of Performance Art in the 21st century

2015

The 21st century has witnessed a resurgence of performance art, causing a corresponding change in art institutional practices, and unprecedented curatorial discussions of the institutionalization and commercialization of this art form. In recent years, there has been a steep increase in the number of artists working with performance, broadening its definition to other disciplines such as dance, theater and music, and characterized by an emphasis for action within institutions and a total inclusion of the audience. By examining closely the artistic practice of artists such as Tino Sehgal and Marina Abramovic, the thesis will underline the main elements that enable museums, biennials and galleries to collect, conserve and sell contemporary performance. Precisely, this study will explore how contemporary artists have incorporated the notion of reproducibility within their works, which supports their institutionalization. In addition, it will investigate how the shifting role of institutions from places of contemplation to sites for active physical engagement has led to fundamental structural changes, and will demonstrate how the new performance format emerging in the 21st century fully embraces its institutionalization. By focusing on museums, biennials and galleries, this study will cover the three major types of art institution, and I will analyze their developing practices and strategies in relation to performance art.

On the ‘State’ Of Performance Art and What It Is

To look at Performance art privileging an anthropoetic approach means also to focus on what is the actual evidence contained in the term ‘performance art’. Instead of hazarding poignant definitions that, thus seductive, as a pure product of the mind, in many cases they end to be just sentences and definitions per se, to continue considering this practice ‘open’ as much as possible, as all art ought to be, is what counts the most. As a matter of fact, definitions are always perilous somehow, as they may confine and devaluate in a square grid a practice (here specifically the practice of Performance art), which instead is in constant evolution and permutation, often enigmatic, which today is clearly contaminated by interdisciplinary modes, multiplicity of strategies, tactics, and a large variety of techniques.

From the Work to the Performance: Reflections on Performance Art in the Museum

Beiträge zur Erhaltung von Kunst und Kulturgut. Hg. vom VDR Verband der Restauratoren, 2017

This article investigates the fundamental question of how to define the characteristics that guarantee the identity of a work of performance art. In contrast to static and timeless concepts, the performance is understood as each individual presentation. The term emphasizes the nature of the event as its temporality, its dynamics and processual character. The term performance-based arts describes a broad-based development in the arts transcending (art) disciplines and focuses on the performance, presentation, enactment and process of generating the event. The emphasis on the processual nature of performance art has made the concept of 'work' dynamic. Difference gains central importance, rather than identity; not the materialization of an immutable object (the completed form of the work) but the inter-media networks and the temporality of such constellations and dramaturgies are the focal point. Museums, the authors argue, should avoid falling back to the notion of Aufführung in their collecting practice.

Performance, its Documents, and Audiences

Review of Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), and Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).