Ästhetik des Performativen

Since the 1960s, contemporary artworks can no longer be captured within the terms of conventional aesthetics. Instead of creating 'works', artists increasingly produce events that, in their execution, invalidate the old aesthetic relations of subject and object, of material and sign status. To understand this development, Erika Fischer-Lichte, in her foundational study, develops an aesthetics of the performative that places the concept of performance at its center. This encompasses the characteristics of the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators, the performative emergence of materiality, as well as the emergence of meaning, culminating in a definition of performance as an event. The dissolution of the separation between art and life, which recent forms of expression strive for, is here aesthetically articulated.