Performance (PDF)

This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seen
through the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the larger
theoretical debates about whether and how performance remains.

Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance,
Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1)
brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object of
study, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoretical
frameworks and functional paradigms for thinking about-and enacting-the
conservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance is
undertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the art
market and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse on
how to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators,
curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longterm
care of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizes
their work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needs
of conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject is
sorely needed.

This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performance
that will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history,
theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.