La performance al museo: qualche esempio a Roma, tra anni Novanta e Duemila

Starting from some early presence of performance art in the cultural programming of Italian museum institutions at the end of the season of affirmation of body-based artistic research, the essay focuses on the Roman scene. In particular, through the analysis of the exhibitions and collections of the two main museums of contemporary art, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and MAXXI, it will investigate the ways in which, between the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, this now canonized artistic practice infiltrated and was received in museum spaces and what kind of problems it poses, also in relation to strategies of documentation, preservation, fruition and valorization. While in the case of GNAM one can speak primarily of occasions for exhibition – of relevant historiographical significance given the venue’s authority – MAXXI’s different vocation allowed for some of the first acquisitions of performative interventions. In addition, within a little more than a decade of activity, MAXXI has also repurposed performances with their multifaceted documentary sedimentation in the exhibition display, consolidating the presence of such experiences in the range of artistic expressions of contemporary art. Through some recent examples involving this museum, we will reflect on the critical and theoretical stimuli that the procedures activated by the institution transmit to the performative work in its dialectics between permanence and variation, between score and alea, between authorial subjectivity and delegated figures.