ABSTRACT
Building on the lineage of performativity, Chapter 3 starts its genealogical tracing with the post-war North American social sciences concepts of the shaping of the self through social performance and interpersonal relations, concepts that arose in the late 1950s. Defining both selfhood and social meaning as relational, this model flourished for example in the studies of sociologist Erving Goffman—from his influential 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life to his 1970s work on “gender display”—and in the work of social psychologists around the same time. Through strategic interpretive ruptures presenting relational art practices from the 1960s onward, the chapter connects this increasing foregrounding of the relational circuits through which selfhood and meaning are continually shifting to artistic explorations, often strategically driven by concerns central to the rights movements at the time, wherein artists from Brazil to the US to Europe produced works of art specifically aimed at engaging spectators as active participants, opening the work to others and so foregrounding identity and relational selfhood as key to the experience of art. The chapter also begins to point towards how these increasingly dominant ideas of art as relational and performative favored work by artists who identified as queer or gender nonbinary, tracing the ways in which artists and theorists saw this as an increasingly natural connection.
