Il
sito della Tate ha attivato una serie di materiale documentativo
sulle storia delle performance, molto pratico e funzionale. In queste
pagine sono percorsi gli ultimi decenni di questa importate pratica
artistica.
CS
Performance
at Tate: Into the Space of Art maps the previously little known
history of Tate’s engagement with performance over the last 50
years.
In
the 1960s performance was seen as fundamentally different from the
sort of art that could be collected or shown within art museums. It
was live, and its ephemerality challenged entrenched notions of art
based on artistic skill, medium specificity and market value. But
today performance has come to be seen as part of a set of strategies
available to contemporary artists, one that is not inherently
different from other art forms and not at all beyond the bounds of
what a museum can and should present to its publics. Performance—as
live actions and repeated, captured and collected iterations—has
become a major acquisition and display priority for Tate and other
art museums around the world.
To
map and investigate this shift in the place of performance in
relation to art museums Tate launched in 2014 a two-year major
research project in partnership with the University of Exeter with
the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project
set out to trace the evolving nature of performance practices since
the 1960s, as seen through Tate’s own history.
Now
published on Tate’s website, Performance at Tate: Into the Space of
Art is a multi-layered exploration of the place of performance art
and performativity in the museum. The lead essay by Jonah Westerman
argues against seeing performance as a medium or genre and urges that
it should be understood instead as an interrelated set of questions
about how art relates to its audiences and the wider social world.
The publication also provides many detailed case studies of
individual art works and events, together with an interactive
timeline. Bringing together previously little known audio, films and
videos, photographs, and museum documents drawn from Tate’s
Archive, the project reveals the richness and depth of the gallery’s
engagement with performance over five decades, offering new insights
into the museum’s role in framing and interpreting performance.
