Performance art temporalities: relationships between Museum, University, and Theatre

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the places performance art occupies and how the variable futures of this art form are influenced by different practices of preservation. The temporal inscription of performance artworks has repercussions in the relationship this art form has with the physical and conceptual spaces it occupies, and in the management of art collections that include them. Analysis of performance art's temporalities will lead to a discussion of the spaces this genre has been occupying in artistic institutions. This article explores the values held by these spaces, and proposes new ways of understanding them, especially in the relationship between university, museum, and theatre. This triad discussed by Jan Nederveen Pieterse in 1997 will serve as an analogy to reflect upon issues related to presenting and preserving performance art. In this context, performance art pieces, artistic projects, and curatorial programmes from the Portuguese panorama will be presented as example.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance art
• preservation
• museum
• university
• theatre
• transmission

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the artists Vânia Rovisco and Manoel Barbosa for their availability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Cláudia Madeira is a professor and researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the New University of Lisbon (FCSH/NOVA). She holds a postdoctorate on Arte Social. Arte Performativa? (Social Art. Performative Art?) (2009–2012) and a PhD in Sociology on Hibridismo nas Artes Performativas em Portugal (Hybridity in Performative Arts in Portugal) (2007), from the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. In her doctoral thesis, she developed an in-depth analysis of new Portuguese dance and theatre, dedicating a chapter to the history of Portuguese performance art. She is the author of Híbrido. Do Mito ao Paradigma Invasor (Hybrid. From Myth to Invasive Paradigm) (Mundos Sociais, 2010) and Novos Notáveis: os Programadores Culturais (New Dignitaries: The Cultural Programmers) (Celta, 2002). She has also written a number of articles about new forms of hybridism and performativity in the arts. She teaches degree and master's courses in Performing Arts and Communication and Arts at the Department of Communication Sciences at FCSH/NOVA. Furthermore, she was the Scientific Coordinator of International Symposium “Portuguese Performance art: 2 cycles for 1 archive?” at the Berardo Collection Museum, 20–22 July 2016; and is responsible for Performance art and performativity in the arts at CASHA-IHA/NOVA arts.

Daniela Salazar completed her MA in Museology in 2013, at FCSH-NOVA University of Lisbon. She is currently a PhD candidate at the same University, developing a research about exhibiting performativity and the place of performance in the curatorial context.

Hélia Marçal (b. 1988) received her master degree in Conservation and Restoration from Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 2012. Her final dissertation versed on an ethnographical and psychological approach to the study of performance-based art and methodologies to its preservation. She is now finishing her PhD dissertation at the same University, where her research focuses on the preservation and presentation of post-colonial performance-based artworks created in the 1970s by Portuguese artists. She has published articles and chapters on conservation theory and ethics, having also edited a book on the intangibilities of tangible heritage (forthcoming) and a Special Issue in a peer-reviewed journal about Portuguese performance art (2017). She is the Coordinator of ICOM-CC's Theory and History of Conservation Working Group since 2016, and Assistant to the Director of the Contemporary History Institute (FCSH-NOVA) since 2017.

ORCID

Cláudia Madeira http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2346-6885

Daniela Salazar http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9661-6306

Hélia Marçal http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0476-5233

Notes

1. It is important to mention that these authors’ perspectives come from the fields of visual culture (Auslander) and art history (Amelia Jones). Other important authors such as Judith Butler, whose work departs from a linguistics perspective (namely from Jacques Derrida's and Gilles Deleuze's work) are not referred in this exploration.

2. The discussion of performance art as public art and in streets, although pertinent, falls beyond the scope of this paper. For more on this subject, please consult, for example, Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, edited by Jan Cohen-Cruz (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

3. The Tate London, for example, has been collecting performance art, and intensively researching about how to preserve and present these artworks. Its focus tends to be, however, in delegated performances (Bishop 2012), or performances that do not rely on the artist's presence.

4. Regarding the documentation of Marina Abramović's Seven Easy Pieces, for example, a work where the artist re-enacted five works from other artists, R. Blackson considers it a possible act of appropriation that could ultimately jeopardise the authenticity of the re-enacted works. He states that it challenged and reassigned ‘the authorial agency of the (re) performed works,’ and that the artist ‘has taken steps to potentially eclipse the works she re-enacted in Seven Easy Pieces by meticulously documenting each of her performances’ (Blackson 2007, 39).

5. In the catalogue of the exhibition Anos 70: Atravessar Fronteiras (1970s: Crossing Borders), the curators A. Ruivo and R. H. da Silva discuss the difficulties of presenting Luís Vaz 73 (see Ruivo 2009; Marçal, Nogueira, and Macedo 2017 for more details). This exhibition presented many performance artworks. Besides Luís Vaz 73, however, no performance artworks were showed as performance.

6. Here, we must not forget that performance art practice is intimately linked, in various ways, to the social performance and is often a resource in the research and transmission of these contexts and social, political, and cultural conjunctures (Madeira 2012, 2016, 2017).

7. One important exception is the newly formed post-graduate course in performance by the faculty of fine arts from Porto University.

8. Other cultural centres, which do not qualify as theatres, are also worth mentioning: Culturgest, which has been exploring theatre's formal frontiers with many events in its agenda. The show Enquanto Vivermos, for example, created by Pedro Gil (July 2012), explored the idea of script and the impossibility of repeating actions by showing a video recording of a past performance while performing the same action. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was also a hub of artistic exploration in the 1980s with the ACARTE (see Vieira 2014 for more details). As referred by Madeira (2007, 2012), the generation that followed ACARTE, more inclined to what has been called new dance, did not recognise the early generations of performance artists nor their artworks, mostly due to an absence of inscription of these early experiments in art history. Alkantara festival also explored other artistic formats very much associated with performance art. These institutional explorations, however, inasmuch as what happens with Maria Matos Theatre, are more focussed on new creations, instead of historical or artistic re-enactments, among other devices for remembering past artworks.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (SFRH/BD/90040/2012 and PD/BD/105900/2014).