Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Carrasco, Malena

Area of Concentration

Art History

Abstract

The resurgence of performance art in mainstream museum exhibitions of the last decade has revealed how newly emergent the curatorial practice of its collection and exhibition is. Performance art’s growing ubiquity within the museum setting is a testament to the institutional reassessment of the artistic discipline’s canonical value. The exhibition of performance art thus presents a unique case for the re-writing of the art historical canon that occurs through the instrument of curation. Namely, performance art’s consequent display through multiple media has revealed the discipline’s misrepresentation as an entirely “live art” form. Moreover, the exhibition of performance art demonstrates the growing intersection of artistic practice and curatorial method. Using the trajectory of Marina Abramović’s oeuvre from the 1980s forward as a case-study for the progression of performance art’s institutionalization, I argue performance art has fronted the subversion of the modernist function of the museum exhibition site through challenging previously fixed pedagogical formats of display and historiography.

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