Evan Murdoch

Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Baram, Uzi

Area of Concentration

Anthropology and Art History

Abstract

This thesis will explore the potential of contemporary performance art to confront colonial legacies in museums. The imposition of marginalized artists’ physical bodies, which have been historically objectified by the institution, into the space disrupts the notion of the museum as a neutral classifying house and draws attention to its colonial inheritance. This live, active body of the performer contrasts with the static identities and objects otherwise on display. It is from this contrast that performance art draws its power within museological spaces, contesting the naturalization of a passive Otherness through the assertion of agency and identity. The disruptive character of this form of artistic practice will be analyzed through an examination of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez Peña’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians (1992-4), a performance work that suggests the power of the oppositional gaze, located in the performers’ bodies, as a means of resistance to institutional authority and legacies of subjugation. Here, performance art represents a means of protestation of the colonial museum through its assertion of an artist’s own identity and agency within the space. The liminoid qualities of performance are able to disrupt the liminal experience of museums, imbued with the power to transport viewers in the space of the performance, and briefly rendering transparent the politics of museum display in order to challenge its “official” histories. The ephemerality of performance nevertheless also limits its potential as a form of radical disruption, so this thesis will also address the need to understand performance art as only one piece of the active struggle to reimagine museums.

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