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Regardless of whether their disciplinary specialism is in theatre or fine art, French scholars interested in performance have historically tended to see it, like their European and US counterparts, in terms of what the art critic RoseLee Goldberg has termed "the live gesture" (1988: 7). According to the logic of this position, the medium in which the gesture takes place is of little importance in itself (the gesture might be verbal, corporeal, musical or a combination of them all); rather what is crucial is that an action — that is to say, an unrepeatable event — is carried out by a performer in front of a live audience. In this chapter, by contrast, I want to explore a different modality of performance that has little in common with the discourse of "liveness' or co-presence evinced (initially) by Goldberg and so many French others (see Feral, 1982; Pontbriand, 1982; Labelle-Rejoux, 2004).¹ This does not mean, however, that I intend to reiterate well-rehearsed arguments made by US critics such as Henri Sayre (1989) and Philip Auslander (1999) about the paradoxical role of the document in performance art; and nor am I interested here in the French philosopher David Zerbib's fascinating claim that performance, in the articulations of conceptual art, sets up a temporal "disjunction between the doing and the event (2007–8: 15; original italics).

DOI: 10.1057/9780230305663_14

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