ABSTRACT
The authors in this chapter investigates performance and performance-based artworks as material and conceptual entities through the lens of conservation. It aims to promote the critical-reflective approach of conservation that has long been overlooked in the larger theoretical debates concerning whether and how performance remains. The conservation of performance is embedded in, and indebted to, broader discourses in the conservation of contemporary art and in the theory of conservation. As a practical and discursive field, contemporary art conservation has produced a number of ambitious and enlightening reference works that are relevant to the conservation of performance, including on the topics of installation art, media art and the so called "time-based media", digital art and kinetic works. The work of Cauleen Smith, like that of Scott, is animated by the belief that performing the past might help to change the future. On the contrary, while some answers are provided, many more questions are asked.
