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 ac-
tion that is necessarily ephemeral and immaterial. And yet, despite the impossibil-
ity 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 record-
ings, 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.