30 November – 1 December 2018, Freie Universität Berlin
The issues of documentation and representation of past performance art have dominated the debate over this art form, both in scholarly and museum-related contexts, for several decades. In recent years, the discussion has undergone a crucial shift, in that no longer is it concerned with whether a performance may or may not be reproduced and documented, but how multiple materialisations and representations in effect re-produce an artist’s work over and over again in the course of its history. The symposium Re-Constructing Performance Art, while upholding this new approach, offers a new and original perspective within it. In three sections and one roundtable, international scholars will explore the practices of historicisation, documentation, exhibition, and archiving of performance art. The aim is not to evaluate specific techniques and methods for the preservation of this art form, but to examine how these practices construct its epistemic and aesthetic space. Thus, the question is not if or how performance art can be conserved but how different strategies of conservation and transmission shape its reception according to different agendas and strategies.
The first panel, Defining the Boundaries, explores modes of historicisation as enacted by artists, theorists, and scholars, both discursively and non-discursively, emphasising the deep interrelation between theorisation and artistic creation, on one hand, and their reciprocal performative power on the other. The second panel, Documenting or Re-Presenting?, focusses on performance documentation, investigating its phenomenological constitution, the specificity of certain mediums of documentary transmission, as well as interrogating modes of reception of performance histories through documentation. The final panel, Spaces and Times of Performance Art, examines the practices of archivation and exhibition of performance art, analysing how they take part in the processes of its re-presentation and reception. In addition, at the roundtable, scholars from various fields of research will discuss and compare their methodological approaches to performance-based art forms and their history.
In each section, a recurrent yet shifting “centre” will resurface—the document—considered not as a mere medium or record of a performance, but as a juncture at which practices and strategies of historicisation, conservation, and representation are entangled. The symposium intends to contribute to the reading of this entanglement and to stimulate novel approaches to analyses of its stratification. Performance documentation thus functions not only as instrument and source for historical re-construction, but also a device for the critical scrutiny of these same practices of re-construction.
The symposium is part of the research project Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977. The research is conducted by Tancredi Gusman as principal investigator at the Institute of Theatre Studies of the Freie Universität in Berlin, and supervised by Erika Fischer-Lichte. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 747881.
Programme
Friday, 30 November 2018, L115 Seminarzentrum, Freie Universität Berlin
13:30 Registration and Reception
14:00 Welcome– Erika Fischer-Lichte
14:15 Tancredi Gusman (Berlin) Toulouse-Lautrec at the Beach. Documentation and its Role in Performance Art History
Section 1 – Defining the Boundaries: Performance Art Ideas and Historiography
Chair: Torsten Jost
15:00 Heike Roms (Exeter) Performance Documentation as Artistic Self-Historicisation in the 1960s and 1970s: Modalities of Performative Historiography
15:45 Break
16:15 Lorenzo Mango (Napoli) Historical Roots of “Performative Theatre”: The Italian Post-Avantgarde
17:00 Sylvia Sasse (Zürich) Practical Aesthetics: Performance Art (as) Theory in Eastern Europe
17:45 Break
Roundtable–Methodologies of Performance Art Research
Chair: Tancredi Gusman
18:00 Doris Kolesch (Berlin), Jan Lazardzig (Berlin), Michael Lüthy (Weimar)
Saturday, 1 December 2018, L115 Seminarzentrum, Freie Universität Berlin
09:30 Registration and Reception
Section 2 – Documenting or Re-Presenting? Media of Performance Art
Chair: Andrej Mirčev
10:00 Philip Auslander (Atlanta) Performance Documentation and Its Discontents; or, Does It Matter Whether or Not It Really Happened?
10:45 Barbara Büscher (Leipzig) Easy Access? Book as Archive of Performance Art and as Source Material of Its History
11:30 Break
11:45 Sabine Gebhardt Fink (Lucerne) Re-mediate and Remember Performance Art and Activism in Collaborative Constellations: Some Thoughts about the Methodology of Performance Chronicle Basel
12:30 Lunch break
Section 3 – Spaces and Times of Performance Art: Exhibition and Conservation History/ies
Chair: Tancredi Gusman
13:30 Annette Jael Lehmann (Berlin) Exhibiting Performance Art of the 1970s: Outlining Central Questions in a Case Study
14:15 Barbara Clausen (Montreal) On the Interplay of the Archival and the Curatorial
15:00 Gabriella Giannachi (Exeter) How a Record Becomes Art: The Role of Documentation in the Preservation, Exhibition, and Experience of Performance Art
15:45 Break
16:15 Adrian Heathfield (London) Recurring Imponderables
17:00 Closing remarks and farewell
The event will be held in English. Detailed information on the speakers and their presentations is available in the supplemental Book of Abstracts.
Registration
Admission is free. Registration is preferable. Email: symposium.performance2018@gmail.com
Venue
Freie Universität Berlin
Silberlaube (Ground Floor)
Seminarzentrum L115
Otto-von-Simson-Str. 26
14195 Berlin-Dahlem
Contact
symposium.performance2018@gmail.com
Organized by
Tancredi Gusman, P.I. of the research project Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977 (Freie Universität Berlin, Marie Skłodowska-Curie IF, Horizon 2020, Project ID 747881)