ABSTRACT
The author focuses on the constitutive role of books in the process of archiving performance-based art. The book as an art medium is something that remains—of the temporary configuration of an exhibition or an enactment of any kind, including performances and installations. What kind of material is published according to the possibilities of a book and its traditional structuring features? What information do the artists and curators offer to a wider public as a representation of their work? What narrative is laid out? And what do researchers on performance art historiography find out from these books? These questions are discussed with examples from the visual art field of two phases: a series of publications from the 1970s and two recently published catalogs and monographs on major female artists whose oeuvres also encompass performance art: VALIE EXPORT and Joan Jonas. Additionally, two workbooks from the field of theater and dance are analyzed as different ways of generating documents: the Wooster Group Work Book and the three-part series The Choreographer’s Score by Bojana Cvejic and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker.
