Research Project
Performative Monuments

Research Project
Dr. Mechtild Widrich
 

This project comes out of my PhD research at MIT (PhD 2009). It argues the conceptual significance of performance, and of a performative model of art, to the revival of the monument in the wake of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the fall of the Eastern bloc. Through detailed studies of artists working along each of these ideological fault lines, it argues that it is not the subjective, anti-authoritarian rhetoric of performance that makes it public art, but its power to build interpersonal bonds both personal and political. The survival of performance in photographic documents that cross time and space to meet new audiences makes it the paradigmatic monument. Readers interested in contemporary art, politics, photography and performance theory will find in this book new facts and arguments for their interconnection.

The research will be published under the title "Performative Monuments. The Rematerialisation of Public Art" by Manchester University Press (Series: Rethinking Art's Histories). The book is scheduled for early 2014.