How to Be When We See: Social Codes, Spatial Domestication, and the Performance of Viewing

To curate performance is to indirectly curate the performance of its viewing. The combined presence of certain social codes, enforced by both the construction of any space and its temporary inhabitants, dictates where to move and look, before and after what, and for how much time. By choosing how to navigate in/through/around/out of a work, as well as the frameworks that contain it, the viewer-cum-agent simultaneously performs the viewing.

With an eye toward promoting the performance of viewership into the discourse of curatorial practice—especially of performance—the authors consider how curating, making, and viewing contemporary performance necessitate a performative negotiation with spectatorship, agency, and choice-making in order to consider the histories, implications, and futures of how to be when we see.