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 conservators,
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 thus 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.
Table of Contents:
List of figures
List of contributors
Introduction: Caring for performance
HANNA B. HÖLLING, JULES PELTA FELDMAN AND EMILIE MAGNIN
PART I
Care: Theoretical entanglements
1 Charisma and desire in the conservation of performance art
PIP LAURENSON
2 Not, yet: When our art is in our hands
REBECCA SCHNEIDER AND HANNA B. HÖLLING
3 Vitality and the conservation of performance
HÉLIA MARÇAL
4 Conserving the un-conservable: Documenting environmental performance for the twenty-first century
GABRIELLA GIANNACHI
5 Innovation and preservation: Shadreck Chirikure on the performance of heritage—A conversation with Hanna B. Hölling
PART II
The politics and institutions of care
6 An experimental acquisition: Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold Room (2014)
at the Walker
IONA GOLDIE-SCOT
7 In the shadow of the state: Collecting performance at IMMA and
institutions of care in the Irish context
BRIAN CASTRIOTA AND CLAIRE WALSH
8 Towards a performance continuum: Archival strategies for
performance-based artworks
FARRIS WAHBEH
9 Peeling the paint off the walls: Kelli Morgan on Black performance
and racial justice in Western Institutions
HANNA B. HOLLING, JULES PELTA FELDMAN AND EMILIE MAGNIN
10 Performing the “Mask”: Kongo Astronauts (Eléonore Hellio and
Michel Ekeba) on postcolonial entanglements
HANNA B. HOLLING, EMILIE MAGNIN, VALERIAN MALY AND JACOB BADCOCK
PART III
Living conservation
11 Knowledge has to live: Dread Scott on Slave Rebellion
Reenactment (2019)
JULES PELTA FELDMAN
12 Conserving a performance about conservation: Care and
preservation in Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s maintenance art
KAROLINA WILCZYN´ SKA
13 Living materials: Ethics and principles for embodied stewardship
CORI OLINGHOUSE AND MEGAN METCALF
14 Precarious movements: Contemporary dance as contemporary art
ERIN BRANNIGAN AND LOUISE LAWSON
15 Potential afterlives: Cauleen Smith on the relation of film to
performance
HANNA B. HÖLLING AND JULES PELTA FELDMAN
Index
