Performance or “comportamento”? Names and epistemologies of performance art

This chapter looks at the history of “performance art.” Appearing in the United States around 1970, “performance art” quickly became an internationally recognized label to capture a group of new works that were difficult to define. The term does not simply describe these practices but actively produces a new disciplinary space to contain them and construct their genealogies, geographies and common features. An example is the history of “performance art” in Italy. Local artists had already begun experimenting with artistic practices comparable to “performance art” in the 1960s. But these practices were described using different terms and placed in different disciplinary lineages, subsequently making them partially invisible in the global history of performance art. In his chapter, Gusman analyzes the primary term used in Italy to describe these art practices, that of “arte del comportamento” (behavioral art). He examines how the circulation of the concepts of “performance” and “performance art” in 1970s Italy set in motion a process of epistemological interweaving that changed not only the meanings of these terms but the very understanding of the art practices they named.