We are experiencing a boom in performance. Many museums and institutions are incorporating this type of manifestation into their programmes or creating specialised departments. This is the case of Moma or Tate or, closer to home, the Miró Foundation, the Tàpies Foundation or Fabra i Coats, to name just a few. But why this resurgence of performance? Why are museums and institutions now incorporating it intensively into their programmes? What is the difference between the current ones and those of the 60s and 70s?
This reminds me that in 2000, when I was taking a course at the Appel Foundation in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to access the comprehensive video archive that the centre kept. Together with my classmates we spent hours and hours watching the works of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden or Ulay & Marina Abramovic, among others. In the same year, we attended a performance by Abramovic in Amsterdam in which, while maintaining the same bodily control and mastery as three decades earlier, she presented a notable difference: the temporal aspect. If in the 70s, her performances lasted for hours, in 2000 they did not exceed 45 minutes, and had a narrative structure of increasing intensity. This probably had to do both with the evolution of the artist’s own discourse, and with the fact that the proliferation of audiovisual material has been changing our way of perceiving things.
One of the most notable differences between the performance practices of the 60s and 70s and those of today is contextual. If in the former it was linked to a critique of the static object and a questioning of the institution and the market, today it responds to the fact that artistic work is usually carried out with different media, is interdisciplinary, collaborative, and the participation of the spectator is essential. To this we must add the relevant role of “experience” in a present in which everything is accessible at any time.
Another significant aspect is the relationship between these practices and their documentation. If in past decades videos and photographs were nothing more than a documentary record that only years later had value in the market, current artists relate to their documentation in very different ways: either by “objectifying” it (Matthew Barney), considering it a documentation material and not producing limited editions (Xavier Le Roy) or denying any form of registration (Tino Sehgal).
In reality, the practice of performance has never ceased to be present, among other reasons, because the “performative” is, in one way or another, an intrinsic aspect of contemporary art. From Christian Jankowski to Dora García or Joan Morey, through Martin Creed, Francis Alÿs or Roman Ondák, we always find either an artist who directs a staging, who carries out a process, who gives instructions to others, or who proposes an action that must be carried out by the spectator.
[Article published in Bonart, 2013]
