Selecting Performance Art: Curating vs. Programming

Abstract

Performance art is often understood to exist in an in-between place, traversing a murky territory that overlaps the “visual” and “performing” arts. Alongside recent theorizations of its history and origins as a twentieth-century phenomenon stemming from a western visual-art tradition (see, for example, RoseLee Goldberg), performance art is also often understood as a trans-, multi- or interdisciplinary practice involving time, space, bodies and a relationship to an audience. In this second understanding, performance art is linked to broader notions of “performance,” and potentially, by extension, to formal elements from various traditions, including the performing arts, political activism, sports, ritual practices, social occasions and personal behaviour. Such an understanding may be of particular value in approaching the considerable performance activity currently evident in Aboriginal, Third World and other non-western cultures. Thus, performance art might be thought of, not as a discipline, but rather as a contested series of practices that are subject to change over time and across cultural boundaries — in other words, as a temporary classification for creative projects whose formal concerns extend beyond the current limits of recognized disciplines.