Introduction

The exhibition is a dynamic context in which established traditions of display and performance interact. A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, staged at Tate Modern in 2012, while including some examples of contemporary practice in the later stages of its installation, engages for the most part with a precisely historicised performance art terrain. On entering this event, visitors encounter in the first gallery two related cohorts of objects which establish the premise for the exhibition, as devised by Tate’s Senior Curator of International Art, Catherine Wood. Exhibitions, like ontologies, are linked descriptions of things. Drawing on tropes typically allied with the event of theatre, these exhibitions initially appear, like the Great Exhibitions of the past, as ‘spectacular gestures which briefly held the attention of the world before disappearing into an abrupt oblivion’. Delivering the 1996 Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture, Serota promoted a mode of exhibition between experience and object related to that which this project traces.