Introduction: On the present of past performance: Investigating the practices of reconstructing and representing performance art

In this chapter, Tancredi Gusman introduces the volume Reconstructing Performance Art and its lines of research. In the scholarly debate on performance art, there has long been an effort to clearly define the uncertain and shifting boundaries of this art form. The author addresses this issue but does not attempt to give a conclusive answer. Instead, Gusman argues that our view of what performance art is, is the historical product of practices that repeatedly negotiate its aesthetic and disciplinary space, determining paradigms of its production and reception. Building on this concept, the book investigates the historiographies of performance art, the role and function of performance documentation, and practices and models of archiving, collecting, and representing the works of performance art. Reconstructing performance art means examining the processes of transmission of this art form and how its works unfold over time. This is the challenge the volume outlines and for which it proposes new critical tools.