Performance Art

“Let’s murder the moonlight!”—Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1909)

This course traces the history of “performance art,” a medium named in the 1960s but with roots in the avant-garde movements of the early 20^th century. Distinct from theatre and emerging more often from the visual and musical arts, performance is a slippery object. Our explorations will be recursive. We will examine its history chronologically from Futurism and Dada to the happenings of the 1960s and up to present-day projects. Framing critical concepts—from ideas of the gesamtkunstwerk and synesthesia to the trennung der elemente of Berthold Brecht and from the “theater of cruelty” of Antonin Artaud to current formulations of performance, performativity, and the participatory—will guide a second pass, expanded to draw on examples from Wagner to Disney, from Stanislavski to Butler, and through the history of performance. We will also be considering formal issues, including questions concerning audience, the space/time of the event, the score, documentation, and the afterlives of performance.