Histories of Performance Documentation ─ Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices

How might we document, curate, collect, and exhibit performance?

Histories of Performance Documentation traces the many ways in which museums have approached performance works from the 1960s onwards. Considering the unique challenges of documenting live events including hybrid and interactive arts, games, virtual and mixed reality performance, this collection investigates the burgeoning role of the performative in museum displays, and examines a number of interdisciplinary documentation practices which have influenced the field of performance documentation.

Gabriella Giannachi and Jonah Westerman bring together interviews and essays by leading curators, conservators, artists and scholars from institutions including MoMA, Tate, SFMoMA and the Whitney. Developing from recent approaches which argue that discussions of performance should not focus purely on the live event, and that documentation should not be read solely as a process of retrospection, these chapters build a radical new framework for thinking about the relationship between performance and its documentation – and how documentation might shape ideas of what constitutes performance in the first place.

Gabriella Giannachi is Professor in Performance and New Media at the University of Exeter, UK.

Jonah Westerman is Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York. From 2014-2016 he was AHRC Postdoctoral Research Associate at Tate, and in 2016-17 he was Chester Dale Senior Fellow in Art History at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.