Live Museum

Lisa Beißwanger is an art historian specializing in 20th- and 21st-century art and architecture. Her research interests include performance art; discourses of the body, space, and movement; choreographies of architecture; museum and exhibition studies; and educational architecture. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Koblenz, Germany. Before her academic career, she worked as a curator of contemporary art.

“Drawing the curtain aside, The Live Museum offers a fresh look at the history of performance, from Merce Cunningham’s ground breaking dance performances at the Walker Art Center to Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing his muscles in the Whitney Museum. Beißwanger presents a panoply of perspectives around questions of exclusion and inclusion in the socio-cultural context of performance art, within the walls of the museum in new, enlightening, and challenging ways. This publication is nothing less than a deconstruction of the complex narratives and dense historical fields of research, that to this day inform our understanding of performance as a hybrid medium.”Barbara Clausen, professor and rector at Städelschule and director of Portikus Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany“Based on archival material, this groundbreaking study undertakes a thorough revision of the relation between performance art and the museum. Introducing an institutional perspective into the study of performance, the book is an archaeology of how live art from the very beginning was included in the market economy of the art world.”Gerald Siegmund, professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany“In The Live Museum: Performance and Art Institutions in 1970s America Beißwanger challenges the widespread assumption that performance art only recently entered the museum space. With archival depth and an attention to the economic infrastructure that supported early performance, she traces the complex, overlooked entanglements of performers and art spaces with brilliance and intellectual clarity, revealing a rich history of negotiation, collaboration, and co-dependence.”Mechtild Widrich, professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA

• Introduction1 Biting the Hand? Taming the Unruly? The Contested Relationship between Living Art and Museums2 Dance in the White Cube: The Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Walker Art Center, 19723 On the Compatibility of Body Art and Museums: Bodyworks at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 19754 On the Eventization of the Museum: Avant-Garde Performance Meets Bodybuilding at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 19765 Economies of Performance: The Foundation of Art Performances and Projects Inc. and the Distribution of Performance6 “Partially Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts”: Public Art Funding and the Institutionalization of PerformanceConclusion