‘The Trouble With Performance Art’ combines two elliptical trajectories of enquiry: (i) exploring the history of UK performance in relation to social, political and cultural history since 1970; (ii), considering whether documentation and archival practices can reproduce key aspects of the original experience of time-based works. Specifically, the essay addresses how and whether original intentions to explode given constructions of time, historical relegation and cultural economies of art and its values can continue to be effective beyond the artwork’s time and site of exposition. Central to Ross’s research is the documentation of Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis’s Battle of Ogreave and works by Anne Bean and Mona Haltom through which she revea...