The Routledge Companion to Performance Art
Will be published approx. on 13. July 2026
734 pages
978-1-040-46014-6 (ISBN)
Description
This global anthology offers a constellation of practices, genealogies, contexts, movements, events, artists, theories, and debates around performance art and its meaning, current and future research, and emerging critical discourse.
At the core of this collection is the understanding that performance art and its organizations emerged globally, without a single point of origin. Each chapter engages artists and practices from different moments and regions, foregrounding how cultural and social conditions shape distinct motivations, methods, relations, and interpretive frameworks. The first section of the book is devoted to multiple genealogies, rather than one central history, of performance art's formations throughout every inhabited continent on earth. The second section explores performance art as a situated practice of ethical engagement, political critique, and worldbuilding across diverse contexts. Chapters in the third section trace performance art's afterlives in dynamic interfaces that reshape histories, challenge dominant narratives, and persistently reconfigure relationships among bodies, actions, and institutions. The final section of the book offers a constellation of performance art documents and microhistories from global contexts. Considerable space in this book is devoted to the institutional infrastructure for performance art, including organizations, spaces, publications, and festivals.
The book is of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, performance art, conceptual art, art history, performance studies, anthropology, curatorial studies, theatre, dance, music, critical theory, and photography.
At the core of this collection is the understanding that performance art and its organizations emerged globally, without a single point of origin. Each chapter engages artists and practices from different moments and regions, foregrounding how cultural and social conditions shape distinct motivations, methods, relations, and interpretive frameworks. The first section of the book is devoted to multiple genealogies, rather than one central history, of performance art's formations throughout every inhabited continent on earth. The second section explores performance art as a situated practice of ethical engagement, political critique, and worldbuilding across diverse contexts. Chapters in the third section trace performance art's afterlives in dynamic interfaces that reshape histories, challenge dominant narratives, and persistently reconfigure relationships among bodies, actions, and institutions. The final section of the book offers a constellation of performance art documents and microhistories from global contexts. Considerable space in this book is devoted to the institutional infrastructure for performance art, including organizations, spaces, publications, and festivals.
The book is of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, performance art, conceptual art, art history, performance studies, anthropology, curatorial studies, theatre, dance, music, critical theory, and photography.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
50 Halftones, color; 52 Halftones, black and white; 50 Illustrations, color; 52 Illustrations, black and white
File size
24,76 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-040-46014-6 (9781040460146)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Graciela Ovejero Postigo | Jennie Klein | Lucian O'Connor
The Routledge Companion to Performance Art
Book
approx. 07/2026
1st Edition
Routledge Art History and Visual Studies Companions
€302.50
Not yet published
Persons
Lucian J. O'Connor (Lead Editor), Associate Professor, Humanism and Bioethics, Western University of Health Sciences, Pomona, California.
Graciela Ovejero Postigo, Founder-director, Peras de Olmo - ARS CONTINUA, Constelaciones Decoloniales en Arte-Accion, and Cine+Perfo International Festival, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Natalie Loveless, Professor, Contemporary Art and Theory, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.
Jennie Klein, Professor, Art History, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
Graciela Ovejero Postigo, Founder-director, Peras de Olmo - ARS CONTINUA, Constelaciones Decoloniales en Arte-Accion, and Cine+Perfo International Festival, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Natalie Loveless, Professor, Contemporary Art and Theory, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.
Jennie Klein, Professor, Art History, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
Content
Performance Art in Context, Performance Art in Motion SECTION I: Global Emergences 1. Situating Live Art Globally 2. The "Lives" of Performance Art in 1960s Japan: Koi (Acts) and Information Operations 3. Benjamin Patterson Inside and Outside of Fluxus 4. Chilean Conceptualism and Performance Art Under Dictatorship 5. A Short Genealogy of Performance Art in Australia 6. Aotearoa New Zealand Performance Art 7. Africa on the Move 8. Performance Art in East-Central Europe 9. Tattoos, Performance Art, and Protest 10. Political Performance and the Life of the Artist 11. Towards a New History of Post-Soviet Russian Performance Art: Liudmila Gorlova and theAesthetics of Care in the 1990s 12. Bodies-in-Extension in the Nordic Countries: Towards an Affective Understanding of Relation in Contemporary Performance Art 13. The Body Politic: Performance Art as Resistance and Transformation in Ireland SECTION II: Unsettled Performance 14. Embodiments, Resistances, and Collectivities Part 1: Embodiment 15. Embodiment Claims for Performance Art 16. When We(I) Walk In... A Reflection on Relations and the Affective Weight of Navigating Performance Spaces 17. Breaking Trail: You Don't Really Know How Performance Art/Bodies are Vulnerable until Someone Tells You; and I Don't Know How to be Sad cuz I Might be Sad for 500 Years and I Can't Waste Time - an Indigenous Performance Artist Confessional (with Annotations and Reflections) 18. Toward an Acknowledgement of Embodied Lexicons of Performativity 19. Like the Wildflowers and Groundsquirrels: Relational Reflection Across Time, Geographies, and Embodied Gesture Part 2: Resistance 20. In Between Queer and Performance 21. Transgression and Stereotype in Contemporary Performance Art 22. Hope on a Blank Paper: The White Paper Revolution and the Performance of Politics 23. The Political Promises of Performance Art and NFTs: Tactics of Feminist Collectivities of Resistance Part 3: Collectivity 24. The Queer Art of Collectivity 25. Para-Institutional Sites of Resilience 26. Performance, Poetry, and Politics SECTION III: Curation, Documentation, and the Archives 27. Interfacing Performance Art 28. The Other History of Performance Art's History 29. Dematerialization and Politicization of the Exhibition in Yugoslavia 30. Contexts, Ideas, and Futures of Performance Art in Finland 31. What is a Performance Document a Document for? Reflections on Ten Years of Emergency Index 32. Vulnerability in Process, Radical Empathy, and the Aftermath 33. Transformations and Openings for Native American Performance 34. A Basket and a Dancer, Activating Archives and Practicing Repatriation Otherwise 35. Empty Stages, Crowded Studios, Networked Bodies: ADAM's East Asian Perspectives on Contemporary Performance 36. Inviting and Promising 37. Active Archives. On Performance Curatorial Research and Historiographic Method 38. On Liveness, Blackness, Documentation, and Becoming SECTION IV: Performance Documents from the Field 39. Notes from the Performance Art Sector Part 1: Special Collection from South America 40. RENAMING UTOPIA: Peras de Olmo - ARS CONTINUA / House-Lab: Exhibition Space:
Residency: Archive 41. Action Art in Bolivia 42. Laboratorio Abierto de Performance (LAP): Self-managed Experimentations and Encounters for
Performance Artists 43. PerfoArtNet as a Center of Creative Thought for Social Transformation 44. Testimony: Body-action and Shared Experiences from elgalpon.espacio 45. PERPENDICULAR 46. Acciones al Margen / Actions on the Margin: A Decade of Performance 47. Performance in Ecuador: Actions to Revisit 48. Walls that Contain Me and Streets that I Walk: Public Space Performance in Paraguay 49. Affective Cartographies of Perfo in Uruguay, 2000-20021 50. Mapping Marginal Artistic Performance Practices in Venezuela 51. Performance Art in Cordoba, Argentina: Artists - Organizations 52. Notes about the CuerpAs Festival (2016-2020): Discussions, Inflections, and Resistances 53. Performance and Artistic Experimentation in Montevideo in the Sixties: Teresa Vila's Thematic
Environments and Teresa Trujillo's Liquidation of an Audience... Part 2: Transnational Proliferations 54. Self Performance Art Meetings (S.P.A.M.): a Clandestine Communal Self-study in Performance
Art through Praxis and Reflection, in Singapore's Public Spaces 55. Drifting, Floating, Standing: Sea as Primal Matter in Site/Performance Art 56. At the Threshold Between Rememberings and Forgettings 57. Post Internet Performance from Aotearoa New Zealand 58. Mobius and Performance Art in Boston 59. About Performance Art Bergen (PAB) 60. Out of Site Chicago: Creating Space for Local and Global Communities 61. Out of Site Chicago: Rites of Passag 62. Out of Site Chicago: Immediacy and Confrontation in Performance Art 63. Art Action in Quebec 64. Expressing the "Unspeakable": Performance and the Greek "Crisis" 65. Under the Cobblestones, the Oceans: Performing the Colonies from the Capital City
Residency: Archive 41. Action Art in Bolivia 42. Laboratorio Abierto de Performance (LAP): Self-managed Experimentations and Encounters for
Performance Artists 43. PerfoArtNet as a Center of Creative Thought for Social Transformation 44. Testimony: Body-action and Shared Experiences from elgalpon.espacio 45. PERPENDICULAR 46. Acciones al Margen / Actions on the Margin: A Decade of Performance 47. Performance in Ecuador: Actions to Revisit 48. Walls that Contain Me and Streets that I Walk: Public Space Performance in Paraguay 49. Affective Cartographies of Perfo in Uruguay, 2000-20021 50. Mapping Marginal Artistic Performance Practices in Venezuela 51. Performance Art in Cordoba, Argentina: Artists - Organizations 52. Notes about the CuerpAs Festival (2016-2020): Discussions, Inflections, and Resistances 53. Performance and Artistic Experimentation in Montevideo in the Sixties: Teresa Vila's Thematic
Environments and Teresa Trujillo's Liquidation of an Audience... Part 2: Transnational Proliferations 54. Self Performance Art Meetings (S.P.A.M.): a Clandestine Communal Self-study in Performance
Art through Praxis and Reflection, in Singapore's Public Spaces 55. Drifting, Floating, Standing: Sea as Primal Matter in Site/Performance Art 56. At the Threshold Between Rememberings and Forgettings 57. Post Internet Performance from Aotearoa New Zealand 58. Mobius and Performance Art in Boston 59. About Performance Art Bergen (PAB) 60. Out of Site Chicago: Creating Space for Local and Global Communities 61. Out of Site Chicago: Rites of Passag 62. Out of Site Chicago: Immediacy and Confrontation in Performance Art 63. Art Action in Quebec 64. Expressing the "Unspeakable": Performance and the Greek "Crisis" 65. Under the Cobblestones, the Oceans: Performing the Colonies from the Capital City
