Performative work has historically been commissioned rather than collected; supported at its genesis by patrons or donors contributing funds towards its production. Selling, collecting and owning performance as an artifact is a more contemporary complication of this role between the work and those who support it financially. At the institutional level, performance has traditionally been collected as the sum of its records. Photo, film and later video documentation of a performative event were a way to make them tangible; to objectify them and allow these records to serve as placeholders for the performance in museum collections. The performance exists as archive in these instances, and is often exhibited as these collected records rather than performed anew. In more recent years, artists have tended away from selling the ephemera or documentation surrounding a performance, and have begun to sell the intangible idea or essence of the work, allowing performance to exist in its inherent immateriality within museum collections. In these instances, the work must be re-performed in subsequent exhibitions, reanimated from its original conceptual guidelines. Realizing the specific artistic vision of an artist – and organizing the logistical elements like rehearsal and production – are outside of the museum’s traditional remit, and so the artist often returns to the work and re-engages with the collecting institution when a piece is to be reperformed.
In 2014 Tate completed a research initiative titled Collecting the Performative, which defined, from its outset in 2012, an important parameter for an art object’s commodification: “the ability to exist independently from the artist is considered a fundamental prerequisite for an artwork to be both collected and sold…” This definition, when extrapolated to performance art, dictates that in order for its physical ownership to change hands, the performative event must be objectified and divorced from performer specificity if it is to endure beyond its record. This is an interesting complication of a form which, particularly during its emergence within the art world in the 1960s and 70s, was deeply personal and almost intrinsically tied to the artist as performer. The delegation of performance, of the artist functioning as choreographer, director or curator of the performance rather than its performer, is a model adopted more widely by artists today.
In recent years – most notably since the emergence of the Performa biennial – the commission has re-emerged as a viable form of funding and producing performative or otherwise ephemeral work. Many contemporary ‘patrons’ have the backing of a foundation or plan their purchases as museum gifts rather than private acquisitions. Many sponsor or produce performance in much the same way donors to theatrical productions might support a work. Of this re-emergent relationship, gallerist Elizabeth Dee notes: “We’re seeing expansion of the support of the medium on a production level… When an artist wants to realize a project in the live performance realm where there isn’t a lot of material collateral, we’ve had collectors become producers. They’re excited to be a part of the cultural production on that level.”
These new terrains of performance and its collection and staging have raised complicated questions surrounding the life of performative work within collections. Questions such as what happens to the work when the artist dies and can no longer directly reengage the work? emerge in this setting.
