performance art

The first time I experienced a work of performance, I was a student sitting in a classroom. We were looking—collectively—at the documentation of works by the feminist pioneers of performance in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s: Carolee Schneemann, Ulrike Rosenbach, VALIE EXPORT, Hannah Wilke, and others. Performance was probably not even called performance yet, but instead action, gesture, happening, body art. The stories and the myths around these works were as compelling as the images—oral history and art history conflated into one narrative. In fact, many of these historical positions are transmitted to us through documents, whether in the form of audio, photographic, or video documentation, written reports, storytelling, scores, scripts or instructions, and other records. From the very outset, through the conceptualization of performance through its documents, liveliness and embodiment have, for me, been connected to their abstraction: disembodied and distilled. Enactment, re-enactment, performance, re-performance, live, static, documentation, experience, non-experience, the body, transgression, music, scores, the voice, choreography, movement, notation, staging, gestures, scripts, theatricality, the politics of place, the politics of space, the white cube and the black box, performing gender, performing politics, labor, history… These are a number of terms to which we kept returning as we discussed what this issue of Stedelijk Studies should envelop—quite a lot, basically. Since the striking performance of De Keersmaeker recollected by Sophie, the choreographer has staged her work, in duration, in the white cube space of Wiels (Brussels) in 2015; it is one sign amidst many of the current cross-fertilization of choreography and visual art. Hendrik’s recollection of historical performances presented to him through photographic and video records, as well as other documents that either precede or emerge from a live act, raise the issue of performance documentation in its many forms, in addition to the question of how the history of performance requires being perpetually rewritten anew, as we envisage how to navigate through the field of performance today. By and large, the 2000s saw a shift from historicizing performance to the museification of performance. Alongside large-scale monographic exhibitions of historical figures (Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art, for example), a number of prominent museums appointed curators of performance and/or live art. Some of these museums developed specifically designed spaces for performance (The Tanks, Tate Modern), while others increasingly devoted large multifunctional spaces to the programming and commissioning of performance (Stedelijk Museum). Within this context, much discourse became devoted to institutional questions: the acquisition and conservation of performance pieces became an important topic, in addition to questions pertaining more widely to the collecting and presentation of performance, and to the conflation of white cube and black box. Several conferences and publications since then have been dedicated to these issues. This present issue of Stedelijk Studies is, by contrast, less devoted to these institutional questions than to bringing together and exploring artistic and art historical positions regarding performance today and, in part, shifting the focus away from the predominant European-American (institutional) narrative. We chose, as a title for the issue, The Place of Performance , in order to bring these positions to the fore. Indeed, “place” not only evokes the geographic, spatial, and temporal parameters of performance, it is also an invitation to explore the disciplinary place or non-place of performance amidst dance and choreography, theater, public space, visual art, and political activism. Moreover, we see it as an invitation to explore the places of performance within art history. The authors who responded to the call for pa