Toward Liveness: The Polytemporality of Performance Objects

In this dissertation, I examine the temporal and material connections between component parts of hybrid artworks, specifically between live events / acts of performance and the long-lasting sculptural elements that those events / performances produce. I propose a re-orientation of the temporal gaze of performance art history, from one oriented to the past to one focused on the continually unfolding present. Such a re-orientation requires a nonlinear approach to art making that complicates set boundaries of past and present, liveness and record, and presence and absence, and disrupts in potentially corrective ways our historically normative systems of looking, categorizing, and archiving art. Through a transfeminist analysis that prioritizes multiplicity rather than categorization, I consider elements of liveness in relation to subjectivity and agency, paying attention to their effect on the works’ ongoing reception and classification in archiving systems. I examine three elements of liveness as maintained through indexicality: action, endurance, and presence. Each of these elements has been historically associated with live art but not with static objects; each has been considered only in the past tense after the initial performance has ended. Using definitions of indexicality, nonlinearity, and agency as starting points, I examine how performance-based artworks connect the performance and subjectivity of the artist across time. This project loosely takes the form of three case studies of hybrid art practices by contemporary artists: Kate Gilmore, Mary Coble, and Cassils