Published in Women & Performance (Routledge)
As many critics and scholars have noted, museums are ushering performance back into their galleries at a furious pace. Some speak of the trend with an oddly literal metaphor – performance as new life to reanimate culturally and economically dead spaces. Roberta Smith writes of the Whitney Biennial: “The 2012 incarnation is a new and exhilarating species ... an emerging curatorial life form, at least for New York” (Smith 2012, The New York Times). Although rarely acknowledged, on a more fundamental level, the new“species” entering the museums is not a “curatorial life form” but the performer, the artist who is an interpreter rather than a creator of a live work. Full text