Doing Performance Art History

Led by the renowned Slavist Sylvia Sasse from the University of Zurich, Doing Performance Art History offers an invaluable insight into the creative resistance of artists in Central and Eastern Europe working under the constraints of censorship and limited recognition.

Art historiography is itself performative. It works with concepts, narratives, rhetoric, and staging, it presupposes a history that constitutes it conceptually and analytically. It is this performance of historiography that interests us in our publication. We do not look at it in art history in general, but rather in the genre that is – because of its ephemeral quality – most clearly at the mercy of art historiography, performance art. We have therefore asked very different actors to reflect on their artistic, curatorial, theoretical work as performative processes of art historiography. In doing so we concentrate on four key areas, some of which are universal, others concern the specific situation in Eastern Europe between 1950 and 1990: 1. Documenting, 2. Archiving, 3. Exhibiting, 4. Re-performance. These areas are meant to bring together questions that are central to the historiography of performance art.

Edited by Sandra Frimmel, Tomáš Glanc, Sabine Hänsgen, Katalin Krasznahorkai, Nastasia Louveau, Dorota Sajewska and Sylvia Sasse

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