What does it mean to collect performance art?
You can’t hang it on your walls – but serious collectors of contemporary art would be remiss to ignore this growing discipline. By Chloë Ashby
‘There’s a certain confidence among private collectors of performance art,’ says London-based curator and researcher Rose Lejeune. They’re confident in their understanding of artists who don’t feel bound to realising their ideas in any one medium. There’s a sense of following the different threads of an individual’s practice, and of archiving the spectrum of contemporary art. And then, of course, there’s the bonus that performance doesn’t take up much space. ‘A joke I make, and it’s really only half a joke, is that you start thinking about these more immaterial forms when your walls are full.’
Lejeune has spent the past two decades working with artists who explore ideas of process, duration, and viewer engagement. Several projects she’s been involved with have taken place in hospitals, schools, and other non-traditional gallery spaces. After stints at the Serpentine and Art on the Underground, she became interested in how living practices were being documented and situated within art history. ‘As public funding was getting harder to access, and the art market was getting bigger, I also wanted to confront my assumptions about the market and who and what it supported,’ she says. ‘For me, thinking about how performance, which historically comes from a non-commercial space, was going to fit into this new paradigm was really interesting.’
It’s a puzzle that museums have been trying to solve for some time. In 2012, Tate initiated Collecting the Performative, a two-year research project examining the challenges of collecting and conserving live work. In their fourth and final meeting, participating academics and museum professionals drew up The Live List, a set of prompts for institutions to consider when acquiring performance art. They range from the practical (‘Is any special lighting required?’) to the legal (‘Who owns the rights?’).
Art fairs such as Frieze, which established Frieze LIVE at its London edition in 2014, have attempted to help private collectors get in on the action. ‘But I think fairs tend to frame performance as a part of the public programme – as entertainment or marketing – rather than a commercial endeavour,’ says Lejeune. Part of the problem, she adds, is that it’s hard for galleries to take a risk on presenting live work at a fair when the costs of attending are so high. The world’s first fair devoted exclusively to the sale of live art, A Performance Affair, launched in Brussels in 2018 – but ended after its second outing the following year. The trouble, perhaps, was that rather than rethinking the fair structure, the organisers tried to fit live art into the old format, with booths standing empty, and viewers standing around waiting, between performances.
There is an audience for live art, just no clear framework for selling it. Enter Performance Exchange, a live art programme founded by Lejeune in London in 2020, which works with commercial galleries to give collectors a better idea of what it means to buy and own performance. Once a year, each gallery is invited to present work from an artist on its roster, along with a digital document that lays bare ‘a direct link from the live work shown to its acquisition’. ‘I developed this idea that alongside each performance, instead of just having an interpretative text, you would have more of an acquisitions document,’ Lejeune says. ‘Not a legal contract, but something that explains how a work would enter your collection.’ Also, how a work could be reactivated once acquired, and whether any residual objects used in the live work would be included in the purchase.
What, exactly, is being bought – the related documentation of performance art (scripts, films, props) or the rights to perform the piece – varies. With artists who were making work in the 1960s and ’70s, what’s being collected is mostly archival material. ‘Photographs and drawings are certainly an easier access point for collectors,’ says Alys Williams, founding director of Vitrine, one of the first galleries to join Performance Exchange. ‘But most of the artists we work with choose not to allow documentation or preparatory drawings to become the artwork. These would be part of the acquisition pack accompanying the live work, used as a guide for its presentation or as a score and a physical record.’ Take the Swiss artist Nicole Bachmann, who photographs all her live work, but instead of presenting the images as art, prefers to create objects alongside a performance – from neon works to benches – that can be acquired by collectors who follow her live pieces but aren’t prepared to buy them.
Performance has flourished in recent years, but it also has a rich history – and that history largely accounts for the lack of a secondary market. ‘Historically, lots of practitioners were interested in performance precisely because it was anti-establishment,’ says Lejeune. ‘They believed that something ephemeral and participatory could evade the market.’ In other words, its intangibility appealed to early practitioners in the underground and countercultural scenes as a means of preventing their work from becoming a commodity. ‘That founding myth has pervaded even as the economic foundations of the art world have changed, and even as performance has become more mainstream.’
The absence of a secondary market makes performance more suited to long-term collecting. ‘It’s not like with NFTs, or these young painters coming to auction, where you can just buy a work and flip it,’ says Lejeune. In fact, she believes that purchasing live art becomes especially interesting when viewed as an act of sponsorship – somewhere between collecting and patronage. Many collectors prefer to keep their commercial transactions and philanthropy separate, but performance has the potential to be a suitable bridge.
As a commercial gallery, representing artists who work with performance is a big commitment, says Williams. You have to be prepared ‘to give them equal space in your programme, [compared to] painters or sculptors, while knowing the return might take more time’. For collectors, acquiring live art is both a challenge and a chance to make sense of an artist’s oeuvre in its entirety. Since the mid 20th century, performance has become a crucial part of many contemporary artists’ work – both in and of itself, and within a broader practice. Think of someone like Ai Weiwei, says Lejeune: there’s no way you can truly understand his trajectory without having some grasp of his early performance pieces. ‘If you’re interested in building up a rich collection of a multidisciplinary artist, being mindful of how performance fits into it becomes almost necessary.’
It’s unsurprising, then, that many of the collectors Lejeune works with have art-historical and academic backgrounds, and that they’re often considering what it means to create a collection that will speak to a particular urgency or moment. Williams says there isn’t such a thing as a typical private collector of performance art (yet). ‘A number of the individuals who consider collecting live art are already collecting practices that traverse varied materials and have a linguistic and time-based aspect,’ she adds. ‘As the acquisition and staging instructions that surround most performances are relevant for institutional spaces, it needs to be a private collector who’s interested in museum loans and isn’t tied to owning a work that can exist in any environment – although a performance created for a domestic space would be interesting in this conversation.’
And so, if you do have a long-term view, now might be the time to take a leap. ‘There are lots of performance works that aren’t in collections, public or private, and there’s an opportunity to create a collection that’s unique,’ says Lejeune. ‘There aren’t many people collecting performance art right now, and because of that you could end up with something potentially important.’ Something with a legacy – and you won’t have to rehang your walls.
Chloë Ashby is an arts journalist and the author of the novel Wet Paint.