Abstract

This single-day curated conference, following on from the first performance-as-paradigm conference in April 2013, explores the politics of acts of creativity and their consumption. Framing and staging have historically been powerful ways to negotiate collectivity, both metaphorically and in practice. This conference looks at ways in which performance is less about objects than the power of frames.

Questions addressed will include:

How do groups – both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic – imagine and perform themselves politically? Can something be performance without assuming a collective reception, and vice versa? In cultures that privilege the individual, how can systems be made visible? How do artworks deal with their situation of complicity with the political relations they seek to critique? How does creative behaviour interact with its various economic frames? How does performance subvert prevalent notions of ‘the work’? How do live and recorded performances respectively frame interaction between participants of all kinds?

In this interdisciplinary conversation, we take the paradigm of performance as a mode of enhancing cultural critique.