On Objects

Abstract

The history of performance art has been closely linked to the critique and de-materialisation of the ‘static object’. Yet much early performance art also arose in diverse, hybrid forms that sought to capture the ephemeral charge that actions lent to things, texts and images. In the radical performance art of the 1960s and 1970s, objects, things and materials were qualified but also often invested in, even charged with carrying performance forward through its remains. The life of this performance by predominantly conceptual artists invariably embraced actions documented rather than encountered directly, or engaged with a “liveness” and presence operating in relation to objects and remains or felt at the periphery of encounters with things, while emphasizing relation with objects and change over time. Such dynamics are reflected also in recent concepts of the entanglement of things and humans in the creation of culture and experience: ideas defined in archaeological theory that further erode distinctions between objects and events and which provide a further lens for considering ways in which objects are bound to performance and vice versa. This article applies this archaeological theory and the sensibilities that surround it to historical live and performance art, ‘artefactual performance’ foregrounding the agency and mediation of objects, and recent ‘conceptual/performance’ and theatre to identify emergent modes of object-based performance and its implications for relationships between things and events.