Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta: Where Is Performance?

As major international art institutions incorporate performance into their programs and collections, a particular emphasis on the capacity of performance to produce relations and generate sociopolitical context has emerged. While this may suggest a turn away from performance ontologies so foundational to earlier formations of the field, this chapter asks how and where to locate the particular materialities and theoretical concerns of performance as it is produced by artists. In asking these questions, Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley consider three examples of retrospective exhibitions of performance artists—Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta—that use the display of objects as the primary mode. The retrospective is a particular form of solo exhibition that makes an account of an artist’s life and work and so puts forward claims about that artist’s position within a wider art historical discourse. In tracing the complex negotiations of context, decontextualization and recontextualization that the retrospective entails, the authors find that alternative ontologies of performance are produced.