- Book Chapter
1
- 10.4324/9781003309987-1
Introduction
- Sep 26, 2023
- Performance
- Hanna B Hölling + 2 more +2
Can performance be conserved, and if so, how? And what does it mean to conserve performance? Performance works-ephemeral, sensitive to site, embedded in his tory 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. 1 Employing diverse disciplinary, professional and personal per spectives, they both set and examine the conditions of possibility for the con tinuation of performance works. Being of limited duration and involving human and non-human bodies, perfor mance challenges the common assumptions that a work of art can be fixed, static and "conservable"-an object easily constrained by established systems of doc umentation and archival powers. Because performance often refuses any enduring material manifestation, to pursue its conservability may seem paradoxical. More over, the relatively short temporal timeframe in which performance materializes is complicated by the very notion of traditional conservation. Accustomed to perpe tuating object-based artworks, traditional conservation has too often disregarded the intangible aspects of heritage conveyance: the transmission of memory, skill, technique and knowledge that are crucial to the sustenance of performance. Indeed, Western institutions of art and culture have long discredited or actively suppressed the practices of oral history, body-to-body transmission and ritual inheritance that are so crucial to performance's longevity. Yet at the same time, as contemporary art has grown to require more complex care, conservation has also grown as a discipline, developing new discourses and
Read more