Christian Janecke

Performance und Bild (Performance and Image)
Performance als Bild (Performance as Image)
VOLUME 160

An Anthology on Performance Art

The reorientation from the “what” to the “how” of practice has taken hold of cultural studies, and didn’t stop there. In the slipstream of this discussion linked to performance, staging, and performativity, performance art has also gained increased prominence and appreciation. Its distinctive mode of embodied enactment made it a paradigmatic example of this development—though only by ignoring those moments that didn’t fit with the story, namely the relationships it has with the image and the pictorial. The contributions to this volume are dedicated to precisely such moments: older living images, their more recent adaptations in performance art, and their implications for the performers and the performance itself.

Performers work with and in front of images. Performances can be a means to the end of producing photographs, or they can unexpectedly benefit from photographic documentation since they’re better preserved in images than they would be on their own. Against such alliances, there has been a debate since the Romantic era about the petrifying power of images, about the old fear that living representations become ossified within them.

With texts by Christian Janecke, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Anthony Howell, Jochen Gerz, Janet Grau and Tobias Bulang, Verena Kuni, Beatrice von Bismarck, Birgit Joss, Philip Ursprung, Günther Heeg, Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke, Birgit Wiens.

Edited and introduced by Christian Janecke (b. 1964 in Wuppertal). He is Professor for Art History at the HfG Offenbach, and teaches, researches, and publishes on modern and contemporary art, as well as on the relationships between art, theater, and topics in applied arts since the Renaissance.