In Italia le pratiche artistiche performative entrano precocemente nei contesti istituzionali, dalla Biennale di Venezia – dal 1966 come spontanee infiltrazioni, ma nelle edizioni degli anni Settanta già all’interno di proposte curatoriali – alla Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Torino (1967) e al Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna (1970), e con maggiore frequenza nella seconda metà della decade, in particolare in realtà civiche esordienti oppure di nuovo corso, come nella neonata Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (dal 1975 in avanti), nella diffusa proposta culturale di Palazzo dei Diamanti di Ferrara (dal 1977) o ancora alla Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna di Ancona (1979), per citare solo alcuni tra i casi più noti,^[1] che spaziano dagli interventi all’interno di esposizioni temporanee a rassegne dedicate.

Quasi a conclusione di questa stagione, in cui soprattutto le istituzioni civiche si sono mostrate ricettive e permeabili, perfino l’allora unico museo statale dedicato esclusivamente all’arte del XIX e XX secolo, la Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna di Roma, ospita una singolare rassegna di performance, proposte più che da artisti visivi da gruppi del nuovo teatro: Paesaggio metropolitano. Nuova performance, Nuova spettacolarità, curata da Giuseppe Bartolucci, in collaborazione con l’Assessorato alla Cultura del Comune di Roma. Tra gennaio e febbraio 1981, soprintendente Giorgio De Marchis, nella sala conferenza del museo si alternano gli interventi performativi, previsti alle 19.30 nei giorni feriali, e comunicazioni e dibattiti la domenica mattina, in continuità con un’attività didattica definita da tempo,^[2] Le reazioni critiche sottolineano l’importanza di intercettare un pubblico diverso da quello dei teatri sperimentali, soprattutto per l’effetto di «beatificazione»^[3] garantito dalla cornice museale.

Allan Kaprow, in his 1966 book Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings, argued that "the most forward looking" art is transient, ephemeral and resists objectification and commodification. "There is no fundamental reason," he wrote, "why it should be a fixed, enduring object to be placed in a locked case… If one cannot pass this work on to his children in the form of a piece of ‘property,’ the attitudes and values it embodies surely can be transmitted."^[1] Kaprow’s stance toward the art object came to be seen as emblematic in the realm of performance art as evidenced by the continued insistence that ephemerality is a defining characteristic of performance.^[2] RoseLee Goldberg summarizes the essential points by saying of performance that "although [it was] visible, it was intangible, it left no traces and it could not be bought and sold."^[3] Over time, and until the recent past, this perspective, which sets performance against the art object and all of the things that go along with objectification—including commodification and musealization—has become the dominant way of understanding the historical emplacement of performance art and the impulses behind it.^[4]

But what if, rather than defining performance as a form that is ineluctably opposed to the object, we instead considered performance art as an artistic genre that necessarily includes and engages with objects and objecthood? What if we viewed performance, not from the perspective of the impossibility of its institutionalization and, specifically, musealization, but accepted it as just another form entering the institution of memory and becoming an "object" of collection, conservation and display? What if performance, by manifesting duration and materiality, cannot be divorced from the object or conceptualized apart from it? What if it is through duration, repetition and repeatability that performance takes on the aura of an object that can be encountered repeatedly at different times and in different places?

Depuis la deuxième décennie du XXI^e siècle, les musées font l’acquisition de performances et d’œuvres performatives (performance-based artworks) sous des formes vivantes. Les premières sont issues de l’art performance des années 1970-1980 ; les deuxièmes, très fréquentes depuis la décennie 1990, procèdent de l’intégration de la performance aux autres médiums artistiques, telles la photographie, la vidéo, la sculpture, l’installation, que l’on qualifie alors de « performatives ».^[1] En collectionnant ces œuvres, les musées s’engagent à les réactiver, c’est-à-dire à remettre en action leurs composantes performatives. Ce processus introduit de nouveaux modes de muséalisation des œuvres. La fortune critique des performance studies dans les années 2000 a encore élargi le champ du performatif en y intégrant des œuvres d’une pluralité d’horizons culturels et disciplinaires. Leur muséalisation pose des défis d’ordre épistémologique puisqu’elles dérogent des catégories, des découpages disciplinaires, des histoires des arts et des conceptions de l’artiste qui sous-tendent les collections muséales occidentales.

Je propose ici d’étudier l’acquisition d’une installation performative et programmatique, La bibliothèque architecturale samie de l’artiste sami norvégien Joar Nango. L’œuvre a été acquise en 2022 par le Musée des beaux-arts du Canada (MBAC), le plus important musée d’art du pays, situé dans la capitale nationale, Ottawa. Complexe et ambitieuse, cette acquisition s’inscrit dans le plan stratégique adopté un an plus tôt par l’institution. Celui-ci vise la décolonisation et l’autochtonisation du MBAC, tant dans les orientations de sa programmation et de sa collection, qu’à travers ses méthodes de travail et sa gouvernance.

Performance, as the practice of liveness and instant gesture, is not in principle destined to become an object of collection and exhibition. Indeed, unlike durable, material art forms such as painting and sculpture, performance art carries with it the idea of the obsolescence of the art object, and is structured around a bodily action that is necessarily ephemeral and immaterial. And yet, despite the impossibility of storing it in storage or exhibiting it on a picture rail or pedestal,^[1] performance art has gradually made its way into museums, and since the early 2000s has become the object of an ever-growing number of curatorial practices. Museums such as the Tate Modern in London, MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and MAXXI in Rome have significantly opened up their collections to performance art, acquiring both recent creations and works by established historical figures. The question of transforming performance into a museum collection object has thus become central, both in the academic field and among contemporary art conservation professionals. This phenomenon of "musealization," which therefore implies the idea of transformation, has been (and still is) the subject of numerous debates, even controversies.

In the 1990s, for instance, Peggy Phelan adopted a notably radical theoretical position, arguing that performance is inherently— ontologically speaking—unrepeatable, non-reproducible, and therefore destined to disappear. According to this perspective, the transmission of a performance would only be possible through the memory of those who witnessed it, thereby excluding documentation from the field of performance. "Performance’s only life is in the present," she writes. "Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representation: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance."^[2] This was a point of view defended in the years 2000 by other researchers, such as Rebecca Schneider^[3] and Diana Taylor,^[4] who postulate that the documents and objects that the museum acquires will never be able to capture and restore the very essence of the work.