There is no such thing as Performance Art In her seminal overview, RoseLee Goldberg writes that performance art “draws freely on any number of disciplines and media for material – literature, poetry, theatre, music, dance, architecture and painting, as well as video, film, slides and narrative – deploying them in any combination”. Considering this statement together with the radical heterogeneity of her examples, one may wonder what holds all this together and whether ‘performance art’ is actually an art form at all, whether it is a method, a type of movement, or a determinate negation of one’s artistic origin.
If negation is the appropriate category, it makes a difference whether something is not theatre, not dance, not music, not sculpture, or not painting. But even these negations suggest too much of a unity, if not of content but of process. The modes of distancing oneself from one’s discipline vary as greatly as that which they negate, and the various movements do not converge – Yvonne Rainer and Marina Abramović have next to nothing in common. In order to understand this field, it is necessary to trace where a performative practice comes from and where it takes place, and the categories of material and site become crucial. In addition to explicating these ideas theoretically, I will employ them to look at a number of contemporary examples (Tino Sehgal, Jennifer Walshe, Forced Entertainment, and Public Movement)
Christian Grüny is professor of Contemporary Aesthetics at the State University of Music and the Performing Arts in Stuttgart. He received his PhD 2003 at the Ruhr University Bochum and his Habilitation 2011 at the University Witten/Herdecke, where he was assistant professor from 2008-2014. He has been visiting professor at the music academy in Hamburg, interim professor at the art academy Düsseldorf and at the Technical University Darmstadt, and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. He has published in aesthetics, the philosophy of music, phenomenology, symbol theory and the philosophy of culture. www.grueny.info
Organized by Institute of Musicology / IMV in collaboration with The Seminar of Aesthetics