ABSTRACT
From the 1950s to the 1980s in Euro-American culture the meaning of the “self” began to be understood and theorized in the social sciences as relational, while philosophers theorized postmodernism as the opening of self and meaning to process, and the destruction of master narratives. This chapter works within this matrix of ideas to explore how artists developed strategies in the visual arts of opening art to relational exchanges that take place over time and take account of the spaces in which they occur. Performance becomes a key method in this development and the chapter explores how and why performance was elaborated during this period to achieve an opening out of relationality, often toward explicit political goals relating to the rights and postcolonial movements.
