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This book investigates the practices of reconstructing and representing performance art and their power to shape this art form and our understanding of it.
Performance art emerged internationally between the 1960s and 1970s crossing disciplinary boundaries between performing arts and visual arts. Because of the challenge it posed to the ontologies and paradigms of these fields, performance art has since stimulated an ongoing debate on the most appropriate means to document, preserve and display it. Tancredi Gusman brings together international scholars from different disciplinary fields to examine methods, media, and approaches by which this art form has been represented and (re)activated over time and its transnational history reconstructed. Through contributions and case studies spanning various countries, regions and artistic fields, the authors outline an innovative theoretical-methodological framework for capturing the processes and strategies for transmitting the tangible and intangible heritage of performance art.
This book will be of great appeal to students, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies as well as Visual Arts and Art History, who have an interest in performance art, its history and presence in the contemporary artistic and cultural landscape.
List of contents
AcknowledgmentsContributor BiosDisclaimerIntroduction:
On the Present of Past Performance: Investigating the Practices of Reconstructing and Representing Performance ArtTancredi Gusman
PART I:
Reframing the Past: Histories and Historiographies of Performance Art1. Mapping the Emerging Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe
Amy Bryzgel
2. The '68 Aesthetic and Political Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde
Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman
3.
Collective Memory and Live Art:
The Methodology of Performance Chronicle BaselSabine Gebhardt Fink
4. The Historical Roots of "Performative Theater": The Italian Post-Avant-Garde
Lorenzo Mango
PART II:
Unfolding the Action: Media and Documents of Performance Art5. How Records and Documents Become Art: The Role of Documentation in the Preservation, Exhibition and Experience of Performance Art
Gabriella Giannachi
6. Performance Documentation: Ephemerality, Temporality, Authenticity
Philip Auslander
7. Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History
Barbara Büscher
8. Listening to the Histories of Performance Art
Heike Roms
PART III:
Representing Performance: Information, Collection, Reactivation9.
Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art: The Joan Jonas Knowledge BaseBarbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton
10.
On the Long Road to Becoming a Matter of Course:
Collecting Live Performances in Museums and Other Art CollectionsWolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader
11. Making Movement Memorable:
Tino Sehgal and Boris Charmatz at Tate ModernSusanne Franco
12. Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta:
Where Is Performance?Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley
Index
About the author
Tancredi Gusman is Assistant Professor in Theater and Performance Studies at the Department of History, Humanities and Society, University of Rome Tor Vergata. From 2017 to 2019 he led the EU Horizon 2020 project "Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977" at the Freie Universität Berlin and was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the International Research Center "Interweaving Performance Cultures." He is currently co-convenor of the Historiography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). His research investigates the politics of representation and spectatorship, and the histories of performance art, performance documentation and theater criticism.
Summary
This book investigates the practices of reconstructing and representing performance art and their power to shape this art form and our understanding of it.
