Environmental Performance: Framing Time

Do ants and grasshoppers perform? Do clouds, plants and melting ice? Do skyscrapers, traffic jams and computer vira? And what happens to our understanding of liveness if that is the case?

This chapter takes ongoing theoretical disputes about the nature of live performance in performance studies as its starting point to investigate liveness within a specific kind of contemporary performance: ‘environmental performances’. Environmental performances are arts practices that take environmental processes as their focus by framing activities of non-human performers such as clouds, wind and weeds - key examples being Francisco López’ La Selva (1998), James Turrell’s Skyspaces (1974-), James Benning’s Ten Skies (2004), Pierre Huyghes Untilled (2012) and Pierre Sauvageots Harmonic Fields (2010).