Shanks Full Dissertation

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Performing the Museum: Displaying Gender and Archiving Labor, from Performance Art to Theater A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies by Gwyneth Jane Shanks 2016 © Copyright by Gwyneth Jane Shanks 2016 ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Performing the Museum: Displaying Gender and Archiving Labor, from Performance Art to Theater by Gwyneth Jane Shanks Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Sean Aaron Metzger, Chair In recent decades, art museums’ definition of art has expanded to include not only inanimate objects but also live performers. This shift represents a transformation in museum culture and an increase in curated live performance. Performing the Museum: Displaying Gender and Archiving Labor, from Performance Art to Theater contributes to emerging debates in performance studies that seek to understand how performance is impacted by museums. This project, however, does not look solely at performance in museum spaces. Rather, it is one of the first to align contemporary museum performance with theatrical works that dramatize the creation and subsequent museum exhibition of visual art. The project examines work by Marina Abramović, Asco, Guillermo Goméz-Peña, Maria Hassabi, and the musical Sunday in the Park ii with George. Moving between the museum gallery and the proscenium stage, I examine how performers’ labor and certain gendered stereotypes are revealed in the act of being on display. My analysis focuses on material documents that support or augment a performance, such as photographs, performer contracts, and costumes, as a means to analyze how performers’ labor and considerations of gender are rendered legible through what I term “performance remainder.” Performance remainder is an analytic strategy that draws together the material objects that support or augment a performance, a performance event, and, finally, a broader landscape of visual cultures. The analytic extends the temporal and material life of a performance, challenging discourses of disappearance or ephemerality that predominate in performance studies. The project reveals how certain types of cultural workers are under or de-valued in relationship to ideas of display, exhibition, and curation. I ultimately argue that the way performance intersects with the strategies and histories of museal display, whether visible in museums or theater spaces, reproduces certain gendered narratives about how women have historically been rendered visible in relationship to museums, exhibition, and the display of visual art. Performance remainder strategically aligns live performance and material objects to foreground the ways in which gender, agency, and labor intersect in the interface between live performance and the art world. iii The dissertation of Gwyneth Jane Shanks is approved. Sue-Ellen Case Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns Eleanor Kaufman Miwon Kwon Sean Aaron Metzger, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv In memory of my grandparents Ana Pat and Gramps, and to my family, Hannah, Lori, Alan, and Andrew. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………vii Biographical Sketch……………………………………………………………………………xii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..1 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….22 Chapter One: The Afterimage of Performance: Chicano Performance and Museum Display….25 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..80 Chapter Two: Hold the Pose: Haunting, Stillness, and the Curation of Contemporary Dance….86 Appendix…………………………………………………………………………….....128 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………129 Chapter Three: The Text Remains: Performances of Contract and the Conditions of Contact..132 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………187 Chapter Four: Staging Art Legacies and Histories: Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George…………………………………………………………………………………………192 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...241 vi Preface This project is theoretical in scope and focuses on how live performance is transformed in relationship to the act of being on display, whether in a museum gallery or on stage. I wish to begin, however, not with my key terms or chapter breakdown, but rather with events that happened in November of 2015, and that, in ways quite distinct from my case studies, foreground the tense interface among performance, bodies, and museum spaces. It was Friday the thirteenth. I had flown out of Los Angeles International Airport the evening before, and some fifteen hours later, my mother and I were finally in Paris and through customs at Charles de Gaulle Airport. It was still early in the afternoon and, as we waited for the RER B train to arrive, I shifted my heavy backpack on my shoulders, straining to stretch a back and neck sore from hours spent sitting upright in an overcrowded plane. It was my first visit to the city; I was there for a conference focused on performance in museums that was to begin the following week. On our long train ride into the center of Paris and to the apartment my mother and I would be staying at for the next week, we traveled south the city’s surrounding suburbs. First created in the nineteenth century in the wake of the Haussmannization —Paris’s poor pushed out of the city center as boulevards were expanded and crowded tenements razed to signal the city’s modern aspirations—the suburbs are still largely populated by lower income communities and increasing communities of color and first and second generation immigrants to France. A news story I had heard only a few days before leaving for Paris about France’s increasingly tense and troubled relationship with its more recent immigrant population re-played in my head as our train traveled past the shells of burned out cars and large, multiunit public housing complexes. vii Later that evening, settled in our apartment, I awoke from a long nap to the sounds of sirens. It was after ten PM. I shuffled out to the living room and found my mother sitting tense and still on the couch. In a strangled, yet oddly calm voice, she said, “Something terrible has happened.” The something terrible were the attacks carried out by young men radicalized by ISIS. For the next five hours, we sat on the couch, drinking tea, then coffee, then overly sweet wine, watching the events happening in the city unfold before us on the small screen of my computer. We did not sleep well that night. For the next week, the city was caught in a suspended state of mourning and apprehension. Streets and cafés were largely empty. State operated museums, cultural institutions, and historic sites closed for three days, the effects of the official state of mourning declared by President François Hollande. Piles of wilting red carnations filled the sidewalk in front of the Bataclan theater, the site of so much carnage; they spilled out into the barricaded street and mingled with the electric cords and chairs and lighting instruments of the hundreds of news crews that lined the street. We visited the following week, and the small crowd gathered to pay their respects was largely quiet; only a few days earlier, though, mass panic had erupted in front of the theater, the crowd of mourners convinced they had heard a gunshot. For several days it was unclear whether the conference would go forward; it was co-hosted by the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay and all the panels and roundtables were to be held between the two museums. In the end, the conference was held, if short some half a dozen participants who decided not to fly to the city. The first day of the conference was held in the Louvre’s theater, located off the museum’s sprawling lobby. There was hardly any line to get in, an almost unheard of event, fellow conference-goers assured me. Our bags were searched upon entering the museum, and, viii while somewhat perfunctory, it was a safety precaution that was to be implemented at every museum, cathedral, or historic site across the city. Members of the French military armed with automatic weapons patrolled the museum’s grounds and were posted at gallery entrances throughout the museum. Walking past armed military personnel into the conference auditorium to then spend many hours in the dark watching videos of performers’ bodies animate gallery spaces, I was struck by what exactly my project meant by “museum performance.” As I reflect now, having completed my dissertation, on the events of that week, and most particularly on the embodied presence of those young men in uniform, it seems clear that they rendered legible one iteration of the cultural and socio-political stakes of investigating the interface between museums and performance. While the re-performances of performance artist Marina Abarmović’s pieces in the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the satirical send-up of museum networking in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George represent versions of how we might imagine the intersection of museums and performance, here I wish to acknowledge the presence of the French military as part of the expanding landscape of museum performance. If their armed presence has drifted far afield from aesthetic performance practices, their bodies and the larger socio-political landscape they rendered legible are, nevertheless, implicated within performance studies and its insistence upon understanding non-performance events as the performance. While the spectacle of young men—so very young—with automatic weapons is not new (for many in New York City it was an all too common sight in the wake of 9/11) their presence, interpolated through the lens of state mourning, fear, and acts of terror, gestured at a long history of geopolitical and aesthetic tensions that have scripted the interplay between technologies of display and strategies of performance. My aim here in this short preface ix is not to engage the contentious and violent extremism of ISIS or the West's various geopolitical responses towards the threat of the group’s aggressive actions, but rather to reflect upon what museums mean and how performance and embodiment function within such institutions.

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