ABSTRACT
How are we to understand the role and authority of the artist and how does this shift at the artist’s death? Performance-based artworks have altered the practice of conservators, registrars, archivists and curators working within the art museum, asking them to acknowledge and make more visible the networks of people and technologies that operate outside the museum and upon which the continued performance of these works relies. However, despite this shift in focus acting to potentially decenter the artist, the artist has remained persistently foregrounded and present for a range of practical, systemic and political reasons.
This chapter considers the production of performance from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire as a way of understanding how a performance comes together as a fluid assemblage of socio-material relations. It draws upon the historical concept of charisma to understand how the role of the artist continues to operate within the ideas of transmission that are central to the conservation of performance art. The research for this chapter was carried out within the context of the Andrew W. Mellon funded research initiative Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum and in particular through the consideration of Tony Conrad’s Ten Year’s Alive on the Infinite Plain, 1972.
