Maidment, IM; (2016) Provisional Realities: Live Art 1951-2015. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis reframes the history of live art as a mode of simultaneous production, exhibition and reception that emerged as an aesthetic form of new significance post-1945. In an attempt to complicate the existing terrain of interpretation, I present the history of live art as a mode of representation, and method of making, rooted not just in space but, importantly, in time. Over five chapters I trace a trans-historical dialogue between the neo-avant-garde and contemporary live art since the turn of the millennium. The thesis is structured around four temporal framings: the vernissage; the night; the stage, and the museum; four sites of live production in which the live event emerged as a new aesthetic paradigm. In Chapter One I deploy the vernissage as a discursive framework and focus on two case-studies: Yves Klein’s Le Vide (1958), and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s Cavern of Anti-Matter (1959). Chapter Two positions Group Zero’s night work as a key example of the post-war development towards live art, whilst Chapter Three underscores the transnational nature of that development in a study of the Tokyo-based collective Jikken Kōbō first work The Joy of Life (1951). The final two chapters examine the situational aesthetic and its strategic manipulation of the museum since the turn of the millennium through the work of Tino Sehgal, Tania Bruguera, and Roman Ondák. Central to the history I am tracing is the relationship between live art and the contemporary art museum. In an effort to expand the existing history beyond a narrative of consensuality or dissent, I propose a history of live art and the museum as active, rather than reactive and recast the relationship as dialogic in character rather than necessarily effective as institutional critique. I address the museum as a dispositif, a performative apparatus in its own right.

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