VIRTUAL New Schools of Thought

Abstract

How can concepts and techniques from performance art inform new pedagogies in architecture education? While artists have hosted live performances as artistic expressions since the Renaissance, performance art became an artistic medium in its own right in the 1970s. The first history of the genre was written by RoseLee Goldberg in 1979. She regards performance art as “a way of bringing to life the formal and conceptual ideas on which the making of art is based.” A work of performance art orchestrates relationships between bodies and media in space, time, and movement. Often performed outside of a traditional stage, many work reveals social assumptions in built environments, drawing attention to the design of cities and buildings. There is a wide spectrum of spectatorship, collaboration, and didacticism that can be considered as teachable moments. At a time when the power and coloniality embedded in the construction of knowledge are called into question, performance art frameworks open up a space to critique and invent. Using historic references and the author’s own experience, this paper argues that performance art involves many conceptual and design tools taught in architecture schools and can be productive to explore histories, embodiments, aesthetics, and technologies. It discusses how artists and architects, such as Gordan Matta-Clark, Anna Halprin, Petra Kuppers, and Andres Jaque, create performances in and beyond the classroom as ways to teach and learn collectively. Lastly, the paper presents performance-based pedagogical model by emerging architects today to speculate on ways to engage a new generation of students.