Powtórzenie i krytyczny dyskurs o sztuce performance

In the heroic decades of the sixties and seventies of twentieth century, performance art was defined as a form of anti-repetition art. Later, in the eighties and nineties, there was a move away from this anti-repetition ideology towards an ever-growing interest in documentation, re-performances and re-enactments. A configuration of factors: historical, cultural, artistic, technological, institutional, economical, socio-political and educational played a decisive part in this process. Together with it came a change in the theory and historical narration of performance art: since the late nineties there has been developing what the author of the article terms „the critical discourse on performance art”. Its aim is to re-examine the conditions, the possibility of existence and the functioning of performance in cultural and social spaces. The key is to rethink the relationship between performance art and repetition, most importantly in the form of documentation and re-enactment. The article presents some major themes that appear in the texts of various proponents of this discourse. It analyses, at times also in a critical fashion, the new approaches to performance art offered, indicates their possible applications but also their internal tensions and limitations. It is an attempt to focus on the shape of the arising discourse on performance art and repetition as well as to find among its concepts, the ones that seem to carry the greatest potential for research and critical interpretation.