Conceptual Performance: Enacting Conceptual Art

Conceptual Performance explores how the radical visual art that challenged material aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s tested and extended the limits, character and concept of performance.

Conceptual Performance sets out the history, theoretical basis, and character of this genre of work through a wide range of case studies. The volume considers how and why principal modes and agendas in Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s necessitated new engagements with performance, as well as expanded notions of theatricality. In doing so, this book reviews and challenges prevailing histories of Conceptual art through critical frameworks of performativity and performance. It also considers how Conceptual art adopted and redefined terms and tropes of theatre and performance: including score, document, embodiment, documentation, relic, remains, and the narrative recuperation of ephemeral work. While showing how performance has been integral to Conceptual art’s critiques of prevailing assumptions about art’s form, purpose, and meaning, this volume also considers the reach and influence of Conceptual performance into recent thinking and practice.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre, performance, contemporary art, and art history.

Nick Kaye is Professor of Performance Studies, University of Exeter, United Kingdom. His books include Site-Specific Art (2000), Multi-Media (2007), Performing Presence (with Gabriella Giannachi, 2011), Dennis Oppenheim: Body to Performance (with Amy van Winkle Oppenheim, 2016), and he is co-editor of Artists in the Archive (2018).