In this PERFORMA-sponsored panel, It's History Now: Performance Art and the Museum, RoseLee Goldberg offers a brief history of performance and PERFORMA and introduces the event's panelists: art historian Alexander Alberro, curator Chrissie Iles, artist Martha Rosler and conservator Glenn Wharton, as well as respondents Eungie Joo, Curator at the New Museum, and artist Adam Pendleton. The focus of the panel is on the contemporary state of performance art and its relation to the museum as both an institution and an archival space. Central to the presentations and discussions are the essence, history and ephemerality of performance, as well as notions of what the museum is, the import of Feminism on performance art and the role and value of reperformance. Also addressed: questioning what an undocumented performance becomes when--as with VALIE EXPORT's Aktionshose:Genitalpanik, which neither took place in a porn cinema nor featured the artist wielding a machine gun--the memory and near-mythical recreations of a piece misrepresent what the original performance actually was; authenticity and the correlation between Feminism and performance art. And then the perennial and unavoidable question: is performance an inherently radical and oppositional medium, one necessarily opposed to acquisition and institutionalization? And how, exactly, do you acquire a performance? Expect no clear and definite answers, to be sure.

It's History Now: Performance Art and the Museum, part of PERFORMA's ongoing Not For Sale panels, took place on March 24, 2010 at the Einstein Auditorium of New York University. The event was organized by PERFORMA and the NYU Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions.