Tagungsankündigung:

The Art of Performance - The Performance of Art
The Concept of Performance as a Model for the Aesthetics of the Performative

Art is on the move. Theaters and concert halls are opening their doors to installations and performance art. Galleries are making room for performers and dancers. Walking through the city is like walking onto the stage. We have begun to question the functions of public and private spaces, and to make them the sites of aesthetic experience. The transformation of these spaces corresponds to a reexamination of the temporal dispositions of art. Beginnings and ends, duration and execution no longer fit within the framework of conventional patterns. Art works are becoming aesthetic practices marked by the processual quality of their own constitution. Beholders, viewers and listeners form part of this movement, since new modes of production correlate with altered strategies of reception. Perception is no longer understood as the passive reception of and occupation with static objects, but rather as a sensual and physical process demanding active participation. The status of viewers and listeners is at stake when their experience of the aesthetic process is addressed. Art appears as an enabling space for open processes, which can effect diverse forms of aesthetic experience. The increasingly performative quality of art, which fundamentally challenges the concentration on art's character as a work and its aesthetic, is becoming the paradigm for a multiplicity of aesthetic practices. This movement presents particular challenges for analysis.

Reflections on the analysis of productions, which have been developed in the field of theater studies, offer a model for dealing with performative aesthetic processes. Theater is the performative art form par excellence. The materiality of a theatrical production is characterized by the transitoriness that makes it impossible to transform it into, or pass it down through, artifacts. Theatrical productions exist only in the moment of their execution in front of and with a concrete audience. The simultaneous presence of actors and audience constitutes the particular perceptual situation of the theater. This quality of a medium and the materiality of the production develop a dynamic of their own, which is the aesthetic marker of the theater.

An expanded concept of performance (Aufführung) could prove to be an interdisciplinary methodological framework which would allow us consistently to incorporate reflections on the relationship between art work and beholder, staging and audience. From the point of view of the performativity of a production, staging and perception always refer to each other. Expanding our understanding in this way would enable us to extend the concept of performance to those cultural practices that are not normally associated with the theater or even the arts, in order to do justice to their performativity. The issue up for discussion here is to what extent the concept of performance is applicable to the analysis of processes of staging (in its metaphorical sense) and perception. Following these premises, a number of questions arise, including

* How does art take up the character of performance? How can we define the status of the aesthetic in the face of an increasing dissolution of the boundaries of art? How can we describe and analyze this character of performance?

* What processes of perception occur in performances? How can they be described and analyzed? How do performances guide processes of perception?

* How can we study the various phases of the transformation into language and writing between the performance and the analytical text? What is the status of video documentation, texts, or musical scores?

In order to pursue these questions, the project "The Aesthetics of the Performative" within the interdisciplinary research center Cultures of the Performative at Berlin's Free University would like to invite you to an interdisciplinary conference. At the conference we will be inquiring into the heuristic productivity of the concept of performance for an understanding of cultural processes in the following diverse fields:

Participants:
Thomas Alkemeyer (Oldenburg), Gabriele Brandstetter (Basel), Christa Brüstle (Berlin), Michael Eigtved (Kopenhagen), Hinderk Emrich (Hannover), Erika Fischer-Lichte (Berlin), Susan Foster (UC Los Angeles, USA), Jochen Gerz (Paris), Barbara Gronau (Berlin), Dorothea von Hantelmann (Berlin), Hermann Kappelhoff (Leipzig), Swantje Kühn (Berlin), Gertrud Lehnert (Potsdam), Jon V. McKenzie (Dartmouth College, USA), Gesine Moritz (Köln), Herfried Münkler (Berlin), Robert Pfaller (Linz), Clemens Risi (Berlin), Jens Roselt (Berlin), Sabine Schouten (Berlin), Eva Schürmann (Darmstadt), Sandra Umathum (Berlin), Christel Weiler (Berlin) u.a.











| oben | Homepage | SUCHEN | Stand: 01/03