Performing Show and Tell: Disciplines of Visual Culture and Performance Studies

Abstract

This article analyzes parallels and discontinuities between performance studies and visual culture studies, arguing that a comparison between the two newer fields provides a way of foregrounding the stakes faced in their shared consolidation. It considers the ways that the turn from art history to visual culture studies parallels a turn from theater studies to performance studies. However, it also shows places where the parallels break down, especially when we consider how the threat of theatricality has inflected a longer tradition of visual art criticism. Positioning performance as a ‘mixed media’ form in both its traditional and contemporary guises, it considers how the conventions of visual and theatrical criticism vary in their terms, histories and formal vocabularies. It argues that we could do a better job of attending to these legacies, both in the perceptual analyses that we employ and in the relevant object histories that we deploy as scholars within and between disciplines in the humanities.