This book coincides with an increase in the programming of live art elements in many galleries and museums. Traditional art history has, however, been wary of live art’s interdisciplinarity and its tendency to encourage increased formal and conceptual risk taking. Time-based performances have challenged the conventions of documentation and the viewer’s access to the art experience. This book questions the canon of art history by exploring participation, liveness, interactivity, digital and process-based performative practices and performance for the camera, as presented in gallery spaces.
The essays present both academic research as well as case studies of curatorial projects that have pushed the boundaries of the art historical practice. The authors come from a wide range of backgrounds, ranging from curators and art producers to academics and practising artists. They ask what it means to present, curate and create interdisciplinary performative work for gallery spaces and offer cutting-edge research that explores the intricate relationship between art history, live and performing arts, and museum and gallery space.
Contents: Mary Oliver: Lies, Lies, It’s All Lies I Tell You! – Pip Laurenson/Vivian van Saaze: Collecting Performance-Based Art: New Challenges and Shifting Perspectives – Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X]: Exhibiting Performance, Staging Experience – Beryl Graham: Histories of Interaction and Participation: Critical Systems from New Media Art – Eva Fotiadi: From Event to Archive and to Event Again – Kaija Kaitavuori: Participation in the Gallery: (Re)negotiating Contracts – Amy Mechowski: Playing Ball: Friday Late, Performativity and the Victoria and Albert Museum – Lee Campbell: Heckler, Performance, Participation and Politeness: Using Performance Art as a Tool to Explore the Liminal Space between Art and Theatre and its Capacity for Confrontation – Leah Lovett: Crowd Control: Encountering Art’s Audiences – Outi Remes/Cally Trench: At Play: Curatorial Notes about Playfulness – Sophia Yadong Hao: Attending the Gallery – Helen Sloan: Like Shadows: A Celebration of Shyness – Claudia Marion Stemberger: South African Live Art and the Representation of its Residue: On Gabrielle Goliath’s Stumbling Block.
Outi Remes is the Gallery Director of the New Ashgate Gallery, Surrey. She is the author of many publications, including Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art (with Pam Skelton, 2010), and the curator of numerous projects, such as the Rules and Regs live art residencies and the At Play exhibition series (with Cally Trench, 2009-12). Laura MacCulloch is Curator at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is responsible for a collection best known for its nineteenth-century paintings. She began working with contemporary art during her time as Curator of British Art at the National Museums Liverpool, where she curated exhibitions by the winners of the Liverpool Art Prize and acquired works by artists such as Haroon Mirza, Lubaina Himid and Yoko Ono. Marika Leino is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at Oxford Brookes University. She has written on early modern sculpture and the history of collecting. Her book, Fashion, Devotion and Contemplation: The Status and Functions of Italian Renaissance Plaquettes, was published with Peter Lang in 2013.
