ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the limits and stabilities of the archive in performance. It presents different practices and contexts, artists' use of self-archive as process and source in the making of work. The book focuses on auditory elements that operate at the margin of the archive's conventional things, objects, statements and compositions: ambient sound; sensed vibration; silence; individual and communal 'rhythm'. It also explores the aesthetics and ethics of the theatricalised first person re-telling of early conceptual art and performance art, alongside troubling recollections and allusions to aspirations to martyrdom and acts of terror. The book considers how the affordances and agency of objects and things have been integral to performance and conceptual art, including Abramovic's own practice. It explores the Wooster Group's self-archiving of their performance history through and in relation to their production of new work.
