The Ecology of the Performance Art Process

This book offers a new, dynamic and ecological perspective to analyse the process of performance art, namely, what occurs during the unfolding of a piece, exploring the essence of its happening through the forces at play. The author’s aim is to provide a deeper understanding of performance art, which the existing scholarship acknowledges as an art form that actively engages with the world.

Much work has been done on the transformative effects of performance art on the artists and the audiences, and its impact on society over time. The author takes this perspective further by asking, how does this transformation happen? Little work exists on exploring the forces and dynamics occurring while a performance is developing: neither before nor after, but during it. This is the first and main gap that this book fills, given the importance of process and processuality as the characterising features of this art form. By filling this gap, this book offers a new way to understand performances and their impact in the world and over time, as well as providing practitioners with tools for performing and designing their works starting from the process rather than focusing on the outcomes. This book studies the matrix of the performance art process by conceiving it as an ecosystem, in which all the elements at play, animate and inanimate, are agentic and intertwine in relationships of mutual influence and exchange.

This book will be useful for scholars and practitioners of performance art and performance studies, practice-as-research (PaR), visual culture, art history and philosophy, especially phenomenology.

The author thanks Monash University (Arts) and the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) for the financial support in making this publication possible.