The Performative Museum and the Site-Constructive Work of Mkultra

Abstract

This paper works through recent developments in museum practice and the work of performance company Mkultra in order to articulate a practice of scenography that proceeds through an engagement with material culture. In relation to the space brought into being by the museum and by performance a series of expectations might be in play – the museum as a site of permanence, a series of artefacts, a historical record; the performance as a site of impermanence, an ephemeral event, a limited duration. Certain contemporary museum practices and the increasingly common intermingling of performance/installation could be seen to subject these notions of permanence and impermanence to radical scrutiny through the particular scenographies they instantiate. Scenographies emerging from practices of collection and display, of the accumulation and articulation of “stuff”. Stuff, that is objects, enters performance most often as props or set yet in life objects and persons conspire to create ‘spaces’. A genuine resurrection in performance or the museum would return the artefact to this agency, to an active role in the making of space. A scenography focused on practices rather than appearances. As anthropologist Roland Miller has pointed out, material studies matters because objects matter to people, not as signs of something but as partners in practices which construct the self. Underlying this article is a shift in emphasis from a scenography imagined as shaping appearances to construct a symbolic space to a scenographic practice embedded in the process of making performance material, an engagement with objects as agents – what they do, what they do to us and what they let us do.