In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Exhibiting Performance Art’s History
  • Harry Weil (bio)
100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009), a group show at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York, November 1, 2009–May 3, 2010 and Off the Wall: Part 1—Thirty Performative Actions, a group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, July 1–September 19, 2010.

The past decade has born witness to the proliferation of performance art in the broadest venues yet seen, with notable retrospectives of Marina Abramović, Gina Pane, Allan Kaprow, and Tino Sehgal held in Europe and North America. Performance has garnered a space within the museum’s hallowed halls, as these institutions have hurriedly begun collecting performance’s artifacts and documentation. As such, museums play an integral role in chronicling performance art’s little-detailed history. 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009) at MoMA PS1 and Off the Wall: Part 1—Thirty Performative Actions at the Whitney Museum of American Art are two of the first major museum exhibitions dedicated to constructing a history of performance art. Both exhibitions stray from placing performance in a socio-political context in favor of presenting a streamlined, palatable approach to interpreting and assessing the lineage of performance art.

100 Years, curated by MoMA PS1 curator Klaus Biesenbach and art historian RoseLee Goldberg, structured a strictly linear history of performance art. A five-inch thick straight blue line ran the length of the exhibition, intermittently pierced by dates written in large block letters. The blue path mimics the simple red and black lines of Alfred Barr’s chart on the development of modern art. Barr, former director of MoMA, created a simple scientific chart for the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1935) that streamlines the genealogy of modern art with no explanatory text, reducing it to a chronological succession of avant-garde movements. Similarly, the 100 Years exhibit considers the lineage of performance art without a pedagogic structure. The blue line never winds or diverts off track. As a result, the only relationship between the art works in a given room was temporal proximity. Themes that have continually surfaced in performance art’s history, including feminism, political strife, and body [End Page 65] politics, are sidelined in favor of a tidilytold history.

The first room greeted viewers with a call to arms to “sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness,” a quote from Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, which, coincidentally, enjoyed its hundredth anniversary in 2009. The exhibition coincided with the third installment of Goldberg’s Performa biennial, which celebrated the founding of Futurism. In this entry room, the origins of performance art are imagined as spawning from the socio-political discontent of a small avant-garde group within the established order, and reads as a condensed version of Goldberg’s landmark tome Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (first published in 1974). The book, like the exhibition, is an uncomplicated reading of performance art history that flows neatly from one early twentieth century art movement to the next, from Cubism to the Bauhaus to Dada to Constructivism and so on.

However, despite MoMA’s vast holdings, the inclusion of artists’ activities outside the production of performances was absent from the exhibition. The curators failed to relate how these early avant-garde groups were integral to the development of modern art in challenging how audiences engaged with painting and sculpture while simultaneously experimenting in performance practices. Work by Futurist Giacomo Balla would have put Marinetti’s manifesto into better context of the group’s interest in capturing dynamic movement of the industrial age. Similarly, the work of Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque would have put into context the repetitive forms of Fernand Léger’s film Mechanical Ballet.

Despite this lack of historical and conceptual context, the curatorial choices for 100 Years were finely edited to include luminaries in dance, theatre, and music integral to the conversation on performance art, including John Cage, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Meredith Monk. Televisions looping various performances were mounted on a platform running through the exhibition, providing the opportunity for viewers to capture the scope of performance as it came to rely on...

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