The ‘Extended Life’ of Performance : Curating 1960s Multimedia Art in the Contemporary Museum
- Submitting institution
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University of Dundee
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 50229161
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1163/9789004396852_006
- Book title
- The Explicit Material : Inquiries on the Intersection of Curatorial and Conservation Cultures
- Publisher
- Brill Academic Publishers
- ISBN
- 9789004396852
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- May
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Bodor’s peer-reviewed scholarly essay is the culmination of a research project investigating the curation of historical performance art in museums, through engaging with Ivor Davies’ 1960s Destruction Art in his major retrospective at National Museum Wales (2015). By comparing the nature of performance as ‘dematerialised’ art object with museums’ desire to collect artworks as physical objects, the study outlines the specific challenges performance art brings to museum practice and the impact exhibitions have on these works materiality. Through the analysis of the curatorial approach taken to Davies’s 1968 multimedia event Bodor introduces ‘remediation’ as a process of re-presenting a performance work as performative archival environment. Adapting the concept from the field of new media, Bodor proposes remediation as a curatorial approach that decouples the work from its unique historical materiality thereby recovering those essential performative elements that provide continuity between the experience of the historical artwork and its contemporary manifestation.
The output expands on Bodor’s ‘The Making of an Exhibition’ essay in Silent Explosion: Ivor Davies and Destruction in Art (London: Occasional Papers, 2015), which was the first comprehensive critical assessment of Davies’s practice in the 1960s avant-garde, and his pivotal role as early exponent of performance art in Wales and a key organiser of the international Destruction in Art Symposium alongside Gustav Metzger. It also builds on ‘Curation, conservation and the artist in Silent Explosion’, a peer-reviewed article in Studies in Conservation (Taylor and Francis, 2016), which explored the impact of knowledge-exchange between artist, curators and conservators on the curatorial approach in the artist’s 2015 retrospective.
Bodor’s essay offers original insights in exhibiting historical performance art in museums, proposing a new model of curatorial practice, leading emerging scholarship and interdisciplinary discourse relating to the shift in the understanding performance artworks as complex constructs of material relations.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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