Caring for Performance: Recent Debates (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
PERFORMANCE: THE ETHICS AND THE POLITICS OF CARE — # 1. Mapping the Field
SNSF Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, 2021
This is a two-day colloquium gathering leading voices in the field of performance theory and care. --------This event aims at advancing the knowledge on this topic within the discipline of conservation on the one hand, while, on the other, locating the discourse of conservation within a broader field of the humanities disciplines concerned with the theories and practices of performance— performance studies, anthropology, art history, curatorial studies, heritage studies and museology. ---------We propose to contest the common-sense understanding of performance as a non-conservable form and ask questions concerning how, and to what extent, performance art and performance-based works can be conserved. ---------Keynotes: Prof Rebecca Schneider (Brown University), Prof Pip Laurenson (Tate/Maastricht University), Prof Gabriella Giannachi (University of Exter), Prof Barbara Büscher (University of Music and Theatre Leipzig). --------Speakers: Hélia Marçal, Kate Lewis, Lizzie Gorfaine, Ana Janevski, Martha Joseph, Erin Brannigan, Brian Castriota, Farris Wahbeh, Louise Lawson, Rachel Mader, Siri Peyer, Sooyoung Leam, Karolina Wilczyńska, Iona Goldie-Scot, Claire Walsh and Ana Ribeiro. -------The colloquium will feature two performance interludes by artists Frieder Butzmann (May 29) and Gisela Hochuli (May 30). We invite you to contribute to Gisela Hochuli’s performance by May 22 (please see the PDF for instructions). ------This colloquium is a part of the ongoing research project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at Bern University of the Arts. The project focuses on the questions of conservation of performance-based works, their temporal specifics, the involvement of the human and non-human body, the world of their extended trace history, memory, and archive. Explored are notions of care, the ideals of traditional conservation and their relations to tacit or explicit knowledge, skill and technique. Taking as a starting point the necessity for conservators to access and deepen this area of study, and unlike queries that situate these questions within other disciples, in this project, we approach performance as a necessarily conservable form.
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.
Introduction: Caring for Performance
Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Vol. 1, Routledge , 2023
Can performance be conserved, and if so, how? And what does it mean to conserve performance? Performance works—ephemeral, sensitive to site, embedded in history and often tied to the body of the artist—have long been considered beyond the reach of conservation and restoration, which have traditionally focused on objects, rather than moving bodies. And yet, situating conservation next to performance offers an intriguing point of entry for theoretical and practical investigations. Examined through the lens of conservation, what is performance, and what might it become? What might this new disciplinary lens reveal about performance—and what about conservation? As an evolving practical-theoretical paradigm and a way of theorizing and bringing objects to conscious attention, how does conservation itself change vis-à-vis these new “objects”? Is conservation sustainable, as an imperative, principle and category, or do performative works necessitate distinct modalities of care? Our book begins with these questions. The authors in this volume investigate performance and performance-based artworks (henceforth abbreviated to “performance”) as material and conceptual entities through the lens of conservation. Employing diverse disciplinary, professional and personal perspectives, they both set and examine the conditions of possibility for the continuation of performance works.
Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Care – 1. Mapping the Field // May 29–30, 2021
2021
This colloquium aims at advancing the knowledge on this topic within the discipline of conservation on the one hand, while, on the other, locating the discourse of conservation within a broader field of the humanities disciplines concerned with the theories and practices of performance— performance studies, anthropology, art history, curatorial studies, heritage studies and museology. We propose to contest the common-sense understanding of performance as a non-conservable form and ask questions concerning how, and to what extent, performance art and performance-based works can be conserved. Keynote talks will be by Rebecca Schneider (Brown University) , Pip Laurenson (Tate and Maastricht University), Gabriella Giannachi (University of Exeter), and Barbara Büscher (University of Music and Theatre Leipzig).
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.
CAA 110th Annual Conference 2022 Chicago: Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation
College Art Association, 2022
Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation at CAA Chicago, March 3 Join us for a very exciting panel taking place ONLINE on Thursday, March 3, 4-5:30 pm Chicago / 11:00pm-00:30am CET at the College Art Association Chicago! Registration required. How can a work of performance – ephemeral, site- and time-sensitive, possibly tied to the body of the artist – be conserved? This question has long been answered by recourse to documentation and performance “relics,” the tangible, exhibitable and, above all, collectible remains of performances. Yet in the past decade, museums have begun to acquire live artworks and restage historical ones, lending urgency to the practical as well as theoretical problems of conserving works of art long considered too ephemeral to be conservable. As contemporary art has grown more demanding, conservation has also grown as a discipline, developing new discourses and practices that both revise and expand the conservator’s role. No longer confined behind the scenes, conservators are now routinely asked to consult on acquisitions, direct complex installations, or even creatively partake in the reinstantiation of conceptual and performance works. Conservators accordingly have a new consciousness of their influence on the work of art and thus the course of art history. This panel, which has been organized within a collaborative research initiative Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, examines performance as the object of conservation, seeking contributions from scholars, conservators, archivists, and others who address theoretical and practical questions related to the ongoing life of performance works in institutions and beyond, as well as explorations of the conservator’s role in bringing liveness into the museum. Presenters in order of appearance Denise Petzold, Maastricht University Megan Metcalf, Lauren Rosati and Limor Tomer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Paul Couillard, Toronto Performance Art Collective Ian Wallace, Graduate Center, City University of New York Introduction, discussion and chair: Jules Pelta Feldman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Bern University of the Arts Hanna Barbara Holling, Associate Professor, University College London / Research Professor, Bern University of the Arts ABSTRACTS Denise Petzold: Conservation as transcorporeal labour and play: An ethnographic study on calibrating classical musical works in bodies In the last decades, contemporary art has become increasingly diverse and thus challenging to conservators. In performance art, bodies – human as well as nonhuman ones – have come to play a key role in processes of conservation, for example through practicing, rehearsing, and re-performing artworks. One place in which bodies have been trained for centuries and still are trained to conserve artworks is the music conservatoire. By understanding the conservatoire as a place where musicians become expert maintainers of musical heritage, this paper turns to classical music to explore what insights contemporary art conservators might gain from how musicians learn to perform works. I show how students and teachers – rather than being mere ‘transmitters’ of artworks – actively engage in a conservation practice in which human bodies and nonhuman instruments intertwine in processes of transcorporeal labour and play. Drawing on a year of ethnographic research (observations and qualitative interviews) of three violoncello classes at the Conservatorium Maastricht, I examine how in bodies and cellos together the ambivalences and boundaries of the works’ identities are negotiated. Thereby, musical works become engrained into bodies as sets of individually choreographed, fine-calibrated motions, turning the musicians’ bodies and instruments into material archives through which musical memory and history are actualised. From this, I draw conclusions for contemporary art conservation about the role of human and nonhuman bodies in processes of conservation, conservation as a transcorporeal effort, and the idea of who or what a conservator can be. Megan Metcalf, Lauren Rosati, and Limor Tomer: The Future is Now: Digital Archives as Performance Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Last year, when the majority of live events around the world were put on hold due to the coronavirus, producers adapted quickly to organize performances for virtual spaces. What will be their legacy once this time of crisis is over? This presentation uses examples from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to explore the role of digital documentation in producing performances for virtual audiences and to speculate on what the future holds for preserving these experiences. It argues that, as these performances incorporate distribution and documentation into their conception, they disrupt conventional thinking about conservation that characterizes it as something after or outside the artwork—and places it at the heart of a work’s creation. As such, these projects extend ideas about documentation as critical to a performance’s ontology, introduced in the performance art of the 1960s and 70s, and give them new expression today in the digital sphere. The demand for virtual events at the Met prompted its curators, artists, and digital producers to experiment with new ways of thinking about “liveness,” which has implications for the collection and preservation of time-based media at the Met. This not only pressures the distinction between an artwork and its documentation, the museum and the archive, but also distinctions between curatorial departments, museum protocols, and professional competencies. Finally, lost performances from the Met’s history—both recent and in the distant past—provide insights into the stakes of conserving the productions of this unusual time. Paul Couillard: Conserving performance art: The materiality of the gesture Performing arts traditions tend to treat works as texts—scores, scripts, and choreographies—that endure by being reinterpreted by new performers. Visual art traditions seek to preserve objects crafted by their creators. Contemporary performance art practices, however, tend to view the unique temporal, spatial, material and relational conditions of a performance's production as the very "flesh" of the work. Consequently, historical exhibitions of performance art tend to focus on material remains: objects, recordings and other documentation that both come out of and stand in for a body of work. While Jones (1997, 2011), Auslander (2006) and others have argued that such documents are a vital part of performance art practice, and, indeed, are likely to transmit an artist's ideas to a much wider audience than any actual performance, it is little wonder that Phelan (1993) has argued that the ontology of a performance is to be found in its disappearance. Exhibitions of remains often have a feeling of Ian Wallace: An Ecology of Worth: The "Rediscovery" of Charlotte Posenenske, 2007–2019 The questions raised by the acquisition and conservation of Charlotte Posenenske’s Reliefs, Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes), and Drehflügel (Revolving Vane)— all of which were conceived in the mid-1960s to be sold, in unlimited series, at the cost of their production—lie at the center of a greater shift in museum acquisition policies whereby diverse materials have displaced the concept of an auratic, original object. While many museums have acquired Posenenske’s work in the past decade, there is wide variation in the material collected, from sketches and early studies (MoMA, New York) to aged particleboard prototypes (Tate Modern, London) and new refabrications (MMK, Frankfurt). This paper tracks recent curatorial approaches to Posenenske’s work through three key exhibitions that established what I call an “ecology of worth” around her work. 2007’s Documenta 12 situated her among a coterie of roughly-contemporaneous, international practices and paving the way for its reintroduction to the market. A few years later, a 2010 exhibition at New York’s Artists Space invited three contemporary artists to reconfigure Posenenske’s sculptures, retooling her emphasis on cooperation for the production of social capital. Most recently, Dia Beacon’s 2019 exhibition “Work in Progress” applied new standards of dating to demarcate new categorical hierarchizations within Posenenske’s oeuvre and to emphasize her works’ historical value. Through analyses of these exhibitions, I argue that the variable treatment of Posenenske’s work indicates a conflict between the artist’s intention of devaluation, the historical value of the performance “relic,” and art’s economic value as cultural property. https://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/conference2022/registration
Performance Conservation: A Condition Report, or a Para-Ethnography in Three Acts
Revolving Documents Narrations of Beginnings, Recent Methods and Cross-Mappings of Performance Art, edited by Sabine Gebhardt Fink and Andrej Mircev, 2024
In this experimental chapter, three members of the research team Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, 2020-24) set out to perform a condition report that considers performance and performance-based art (later abbreviated to performance). A condition report is a central document in conservation practice that details the condition of an artifact at a given time, supplemented by photographs and symbolic mappings, so that any changes in its material state are documented. But the condition report meant here concerns the very concept of performance and performance conservation. We ask: What would it mean to understand performance through the lens of conservation? And how, in its manifold (after)lives, does performance resist classifications along with the standard curatorial and conservation procedures? Merging critical sensibilities with different tactics and methods in an experimental conservation-conversation that does not adhere to the conventions of academic discourse, we dissect, from our individual perspectives, and map into this chapter, both performance and performance conservation as inherently mutable concepts. Responding to a set of questions that formally guide our writing process, we argue for the necessity of close looking, and sensing, when faced with questions about the performance’s continuing life. Importantly, midway through the project, we are less concerned with delivering ready answers, but rather, in pursuing a certain form of para-ethnography, in which collaborations are forged between distinct actors and expertise. We are keen, moreover, on expanding discussions we have held amongst ourselves and with the project’s guests since its beginning. This is, by default, also an extension of an invitation to the reader to think with us and ultimately enter our conversation.
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.