ABSTRACT:

Our project examines performance as a critical strategy in the production, reception and interpretation of art. This analysis is based on an expanded notion of the term performance. Beyond explicit referral to Performance Art and related artistic practices such as Happening or Body Art, its implications extend to other art forms. In art works from the sixties to the nineties – installations, objects, photographs, electronic and visual media works – performative aspects can be found: From a critique of the supposed autonomy of the art object as well as the producing or viewing subject and its implications in a fundamental reevaluation of the roles of process and event in art production; to ways of framing and freezing action in photographic images which require the act of reception to reveal their performative character.
Artistic strategies such as the staging of experience, spatialisation, temporalisation and embodiment shifted, rearticulated and sometimes suspended the separation between production and reception. The validity of terms like "artist", "artwork" and "viewer" can no longer be taken for granted, the way these terms are generated as well as their inherent functionality must be questioned.
In this context, the changing role of art criticism has to be reevaluated. Michael Fried reproached the sixties Minimal Art for beeing theatrical and with this observation provided a theoretic base for contemporary ways of questioning subjectivity, location and event.
Art history marginalized performative art for a long time before embarking on a course of re-territorialisation that was to eventually establish it in precisely the same categories it had succeded in transgressing.
A methodological critique is necessary that relates the methodology of art history to the philosophical and social-scientific notion of performativity as well as to the methodology of theatre research in performance documentation and analysis.

These questions will be approached by an examination of the works of the Irish artist James Coleman, who has expanded the field of visual arts with performative concepts since the seventies. His projected images – slide shows in combination with a voice-over – are performative constructions situated between photography, performance and theater. His works rethink the relationship between the static and the dynamic, the singularity of an event and its repetition in ways that proposedly alter the reception and the formulation of art theory as well as art history.


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