A carregar...
Publicação
From intangibility to materiality and back again: preserving Portuguese performance artworks from the 1970s
| Nome: | Descrição: | Tamanho: | Formato: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.88 MB | Adobe PDF |
Autores
Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
Performance art has seen growing incorporation in museum collections in the last decade, and yet
Conservation is still struggling to find methods to conserve these artworks, which resist acts of containement.
In the context of the present research, three problems hampering progress in the conservation
of performance art were identified: (1) Conservation’s scope is often seen in opposition to the
nature of performance artworks, (2) there is a lack of an epistemological analysis of Conservation’s
documentation methodologies, and (3) there are difficulties in managing the artwork’s networks in
institutional contexts. The third problem is beyond the scope of this thesis, as this project was undertaken
outside an institutional setting. This thesis therefore sheds light on the first two issues by
drawing on agential realism (Karen Barad 2007), an epistemological lens which considers that every
act of knowing implies material and discursive entanglements within every agent involved.
To answer the first problem, a relational ontology of Conservation, which considers that
Conservation practice, instead of being associated only with tangible objects, constitutes and is coconstituted
by material-discursive practices, is proposed. Following this reasoning the act of conservation
is then presented as a set of decisions, which vary in scale and produce materialisations of
artistic manifestations. This thesis argues that cultural heritage works, including performance art, are
thus always intangible until being materialised by heritage practices, which are characterised by specific
ways of seeing, or measurements. In this sense it will be demonstrated that performance art,
instead of existing only in the present, exists in various material ways, which are recursively disseminated
over time through practices of memorialisation.
To understand the second problem, two performance artworks created in the 1970s by Portuguese
artists have been documented for the first time in this thesis. The case study analyses demonstrate
how current methodologies are focused on perfomance-based art’s materials instead of its materiality
and how that process increases the number of exclusions in the documentation process.
Exclusions are then explained as acts of affirmation of the dominant cultural and political discourse
and, in that sense, contribute to the invisibility of counter-narratives which not only co-constitute but
are an intentional part of the fabric of performance artworks. Aside from implying a constant delimitation
in the materialisation of these works, exclusions also immortalise social injustices in the form
of, for example, community misrecognition. Participation, understood in the broad sense as an act
of yielding authority, is proposed as a way to materialise performance artworks while reducing the
exclusions that occur in every documentation process. This thesis argues that a dislocation of authority
to peripheral stakeholders is not a loss of authorial power, but a way to multiply the instances of
the work in multiple body-archives. An outcome of this dissertation, is a proposal and detailed outline
for an innovative methodology for documenting performance art works.
Descrição
Palavras-chave
performance art conservation agential realism participation