Issue%2026

Historically, performance art was an activity that largely eschewed the mechanisms of the art market and throughout its development – especially
during the 1960s and 70s – was driven by radical political protest. Anti-government and anti-capitalist, many artists personified the popular
phrase of the time, ‘the personal is political’. The slippery nature of the medium has meant a great deal of significant early performance art works
transpired outside institutional contexts – in studios, public spaces, commercial and artist-led spaces. Ephemera, personal accounts, video and
photographic documentation have since been utilised to write performance into mainstream art history (and therefore into the collections of large
institutions) but until recently the live encounter has been absent.
Performance art has become increasingly visible internationally.
Contemporary art galleries such as Tate Modern in London and New York’s
Museum of Modern Art have been instituting Performance Art departments,
hosting symposia and acquiring performance works for their collections since
the late 1990s. A number of Australian institutions, whilst not having
dedicated collecting policies for performance, have also increasingly engaged
performance artists in their programs1. Klaus Biesenbach, co-curator of 13
Rooms and director of MoMA PS1, cites the responsibility of museums to
conserve and historicise as a reason for initiating these departments at
museums. Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director, proudly described purchasing
Tino Sehgal’s This Kiss as “one of the most elaborate and difficult acquisitions
we’ve ever made.” Formerly a peripheral activity in the object-centred world of
contemporary art, artists and institutions are now wrestling with the
complexities of buying, selling and exhibiting performance, exploring how the
transaction of an embodied, time-based form can be negotiated. Since artists
have been experimenting with performance for over forty years, why the
sudden interest? Twenty years ago it would be impossible for most museums
to fathom collecting performance at all.
1. Just like those Che Guevara t-shirts
Art historian RoseLee Goldberg identifies a number of early examples of
artists utilising the frame of the market in their work – ‘selling performance’
– long before Sehgal’s lawyers got involved. Yves Klein’s Zone de Sensibilité
Picturale Immatérielle [Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility] (1959–62),
offered the experience of an empty space in exchange for gold, and Piero
Manzoni’s Artist’s Breath (1960) and Artist’s Shit (1961) both marketed the
corporeal output of the artist as a commodity – either exhalation into a
balloon or excrement into a can. These works each stretched and subverted
the boundaries of artist-market relations in a context where the future of
rampant capitalisation wasn’t certain. Needless to say, times have changed,
and economic contexts of artistic and political gestures have markedly
different implications. Now, free-market capitalism has erupted, labour is
increasingly flexible and precarious ideas are key objects of economic
exchange. Where previously political subversion critiqued its own very
participation in the market, we now operate in a subsumptive capitalism,
where “nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV” (Mark
Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
2. Flexibility reiGns
Museums are increasingly finding new ways of integrating performance,
along with discursive projects and publications, into their core activities.
Curator Alex Farquharson calls this phenomenon ‘New Institutionalism’,
where “exhibitions no longer preside over other types of activity … The
‘new institution’ instead places equal emphasis on a range of other
functions … This results in a redistribution of its resources, expressed both
spatially and temporally in terms of how institutions’ hardware (their
buildings) and software (their schedules) are apportioned.” It was sparked
by a disparate cohort of independent curators, who, having previously
produced various exhibitions and biennales independently, put down roots
as directors of a number of key European institutions in the early 2000s. 2
This new approach decentralises the hierarchies of object over idea and
presentation over production, setting in motion the construction of a new
conceptual space for performance to exist within the museum context.
3. We heart outsourCinG
In the 1990s, a new genre of performance art emerged – what art historian
Claire Bishop describes as “‘delegated performance’: the act of hiring
non-professionals or specialists in other fields to undertake the job of being
present and performing at a particular time and a particular place on behalf
of the artist, and following his/her instructions.” Often relying on ethnic,
social, physical or cultural specificities in performers, these works rely on a
contract or artist’s instructions, and the availability of suitable participants.
Like re-enactment, which is similarly being explored by artists and curators
attempting to grapple with this ephemeral form, Bishop argues that these
forms have accelerated the institutionalisation of performance art, and
facilitated its collectability.
In an economy of ideas, where physical objects are secondary to experiential,
transformative and knowledge-based offerings, selling performance is
anything but counterintuitive. It becomes a somewhat irrelevant chickenor-the-egg
question then, to consider whether the changing nature of art
affects the market or vice versa. Australia is blessed and cursed by an
invisible hand at play – the state and federal government funding bodies that
keep the arts afloat. And we’ve been selling performance to them, in a way,
for years. Perhaps the question is not why or how to sell performance, but
who are we selling it to? It is the responsibility of artists to decide if their
work should or should not be for sale, and making an income from art is just
as important for performance artists as painters. But a painting doesn’t
change colour once you decide to sell it. The immediacy and subversive
potential of early performance art revelled in issues that are now being
side- stepped, both by artists and collectors, in pursuit of a performance art
that is less provisional than enduring. But to galvanise the marketplace into
gambling on the value of a social exchange as if it might be a Pollock
painting? Seems almost as crazy as buying a can of Manzoni’s shit.
1. local positioning Systems, curated by performance Space at the Museum of contemporary art
in 2012, was a program of seven live art and performance projects and power to the people curated
by hannah Mathews at the australian centre for contemporary art Melbourne in 2011 included
performance works as a key, ongoing element of the exhibition.
2. Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans at palais de tokyo, paris and charles esche and Maria lind
at the Witte de With, rotterdam are key examples.
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Agatha Gothe-Snape
Every Artist Remembered
with Barbara Campbell 2011
Posca pen on arches paper,
180 x 140 cm
Image courtesy the artist and
The Commercial Gallery, Sydney
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