Contesting Collections: how to secure a legacy for Live Art?

By Jenine McGaughran

In October 2008 CollectingLiveArt organised a number of events to take place at the heart of Zoo Art Fair. Discretely subversive soldiers whistled whilst mingling amongst an art savvy audience, while fair attendants clogged up doorways to galleries, only to disperse and re-group in different locations and configurations throughout the fair. The most provocative of all spectacles performed by Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry, was a live auction, auctioning itself off to the highest bidder. The events sought to plant a provocation at the heart of the fair, prompting gallerists, collectors and visitors to think through the potential ways it is possible to collect the uncollectable, intangible live events or happenings with a shelf life lasting long as the action itself.


Established in January 2008, CollectingLiveArt’s mission is to campaign for the collection of ephemeral works, thus ensuring Live Art’s legacy through its presence in private and public collections. While their strategy is to challenge collectors and audiences, their aim is to develop sustainable relationships between collectors and performance artists, creating methods of collecting relevant to the practices of individual practitioners. While CollectingLiveArt’s campaign signals the necessity for the collecting of performance, its very definition contradicts the notion of establishing a collection in formulating a legacy; for it is only within the collective memory and through the process of documentation that Live Art can be remembered and recorded.

The lineage of ‘Live Art’ or performance (the particular genre of the live of concern here) has been catalogued since its inception in the 1960s. Originating in movements such as Surrealism and Dada but also off the back of the dominant practice of Conceptual Art, performance offered a space for artists to transcend the commodification of their work, a space where ideas would be exchanged in return for the spectators’ time. Existing as a platform for the bringing to life of conceptual ideas, performances were enacted directly to audiences with the view to shock them into reassessing their own conceptions of art and there relation to wider cultural and political spheres.

In recent years, performance has taken a more prominent role within the contemporary art circuit, while simultaneously the art world has morphed into the wider sphere of the leisure industry. Audiences have come to expect scheduled events programmed around exhibitions and art fairs, thus performance art is in high demand. More and more spectators expect a closer encounter with the creator of these spectacles and galleries keep coming up with goods, supporting their artists while gaining invaluable PR for the creativity and breadth of their gallery’s programme in the process. However, despite audiences growing demand for such spectacles, there remains an ambiguity as to the authenticity of their engagement. Do the spectators seek out performance in the spirit of its original creation or is it just that it happens to be part of a social scene?

The notion of collecting performance art is by no means new; increasingly museums are allocating funds specifically for the acquisition of ephemeral works. The collection of performance documentation, in the form of photographs and written remnants, has existed for as long as it has been the by-product of a performance. Props used in performance enter collections and in so doing often undergo transformation from theatrical prop to sculptural item. Take Spartacus Chetwynd’s papier-mâché octopus, which formerly featured in The Sex Life of Nero and Hokusai Octopus - 'tentacle porn' as part of the Bloomberg’s New Contemporaries in 2004, the same piece was later included in Stay Forever and Ever and Ever for its physicality as an ‘object’ that retains it cultural significance through nostalgic collective memory.

However these examples of collecting Live Art depend entirely on the leftovers of performance and render the live act obsolete by preserving it through its trace. An alternative model for acquiring the live event is played out through the work of Tino Sehgal. Informed by a background in choreography and economics his practice critiques the production of material objects. His performances (‘situations’) refuse any means of cataloguing; no objects are produced, no written instructions or contracts created, documentation through video and photography are forbidden, the event exists and relies entirely on oral instruction and interpretation by its performer. The dematerialised object created in Conceptual Arts legacy emphasises process over commodity, Sehgal’s work proposes an alternative and sustainable means of production dependant upon the ephemeral moment.

Getting collectors to buy into this is an entirely difference matter. Of course major institutions acquire these moments in time and reproduce them in the conditions and spirit of their creation. However, how is it possible for such works, by perhaps lesser known artists, to become more widely purchased amongst private collectors? What is to be exchanged between artist and collector? Once the deal is done are there to be restrictions are placed upon the artist or rights bestowed upon the collector? Indeed there are no definitive rules for the collection of ephemeral works; there are no best practice guidelines in place, instead the situation relies upon the mutual agreement of both parties on the terms and conditions of the sale, but also on the willingness of collectors to support artists through commissioning new works that have little or no material trace surviving beyond the event