Out of the Margins: Performance in London’s Institutions 1990s – 2010s at London’s Whitechapel Gallery – reviewed

Although performance art emerged during the 1960s and 70s as a dissident, anti-institutional rejection of the social and political injustices of the time, the last 20 years, in the UK at least, have been crucial to the institutionalisation of performance and live art in galleries and art institutions. From Lois Keidan’s role as director of live arts at the ICA during the 1990s to Tate Modern opening its dedicated performances spaces The Tanks in 2012, Out of the Margins surveys the shifts in the institutional engagement with live art, highlighting key moments in London’s visual-art institutions that pushed the radical practices of live art from underground and marginalised to an acknowledged (and commodifiable) artform.

Out of the Margins is a small exhibition, displaying curatorial records from the Whitechapel archive as well as short interviews and documentation of performances such as Franko B’s I’m Not Your Babe at the ICA in 1996 – in which, posed like Christ on the cross, covered in thick white paint and slowly collapsing to the floor, the artist bleeds from his arms until he is surrounded by a viscous pool of his own blood – and Vaginal Davis’s Memory Island, which formed part of ‘Trashing Performance’ at Tate Modern in 2011. For an iteration of Hermann Nitsch’s performance The Orgies Mystery Theatre at the Whitechapel in 2002, a typewritten note details a list: ‘sheep (slaughtered), blood, eggs, brains, fresh lungs, red grapes, milk, raw milk, raw fish’. It is in discovering archival moments such as these that we get a sense of performance’s practical implications for the art institution – how do you stage this work in a gallery space? How do we conserve ephemeral performances for the future?

Η συνέχεια εδώ.