This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seen

through the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the larger

theoretical debates about whether and how performance remains.

Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance,

Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1)

brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object of

study, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoretical

frameworks and functional paradigms for thinking about—and enacting—the

conservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance is

undertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the art

market and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse on

how to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators,

curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longterm

care of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizes

their work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needs

of conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject is

sorely needed.

This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performance

that will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history,

theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.