Introduction to «The Musealization of Performance art: Acquiring, Conserving, Exhibiting, and Reenacting»

Performance art, as a practice of immediacy and instant gesture, is not in principle destined to become an object of collection and exhibition. Indeed, unlike durable, material art forms such as painting and sculpture, performance art carries with it the idea of the obsolescence of the art object, and is structured around a bodily action that is necessarily ephemeral and immaterial. And yet, despite the impossibility of storing it in storage or exhibiting it on a picture rail or pedestal, performance art has gradually made its way into museums, and since the early 2000s has become the object of an ever-growing number of curatorial practices. How is a creation that sets itself up against all forms of durability and materiality likely to become part of a museum's collections? In which form is it acquired, conserved and passed on to the public? In other words, what processes and strategies are used to transform it into a museum object? In concrete terms, the musealization of the performance is achieved by preserving all the documents associated with it. Video or film recordings, photographs, sketches, notes, correspondence, certificates and other objects are all material traces of what existed before, which the museum sometimes treats as archives, sometimes as genuine collection and exhibition objects.