More of a Medley than a Survey

Abstract

Live Culture was a four-day exhibition and conference held at Tate Modern which brought together an international selection of distinguished artists, theorists and curators to examine the relationship between performance art and cultural change. I was commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency and Tate Modern to curate a video programme of performance art to be included in the exhibition and conference, entitled 'Specific', and to write a catalogue essay addressing performance in locations other than the gallery or theatre. My interest as a researcher here was in the variety of aesthetic, material and performative strategies adopted by each of the artists to explore ideas of site and place. In my role as a curator of the 'Specific' video programme, I selected artists who could be said to represent different historical moments in the evolution of site-specific performance art in Britain, between 1980 and the present. They included: Anna Best, Station House Opera, Fiona Templeton and Kirsten Lavers, as well as a piece of my own, entitled Present. In my essay, I described the specific nature of each of the works, and the different ways in which they articulated their relationships to the site. The research significance of my curation was that, by presenting the performance works as a series, it allowed comparisons and interactions to occur between the different forms of site-specific British performance art since 1980. My essay appeared in the accompanying Live Culture catalogue, and extracts from the Specific video programme were included on the Live Culture DVD. The catalogue and DVD were presented as a boxed set by the Live Art Development Agency and distributed to academic libraries within the UK. Copies are also held at the Live Art Development Agency Archive.