Performance and Contemporary Art History: Mapping a Critical Subject, Medium, and Method in a Transdisciplinary Field

Art history has long maintained an ambivalent relationship with performance. As an ephemeral, body- and time-based practice —emerging in the late 1950s and including forms such as New Dance, Body and Action Art, Performance Art, participatory or activist performances-contemporary performance continues to elude its categorization. This provokes us to reflect on and expand art history's established methods and canons.

The conference approaches performance by looking beyond the disciplinary position of the visual arts, whose genealogies have primarily focused on objects and images. It brings together contributions situated in art history, theatre, and dance studies which explore understudied and new subjects or methodological foci. Over two days, the event will provide insights into contemporary forms of performance from the late 20th and 21st centuries that respond to art's increasing situatedness within the neoliberal logics of reproduction and visibility, as well as the oft-cited multiple crises of the twenty-first century.