Calonje, Teresa. 2024. APPROPRIATING GESTURE: LIVE ART FOR SALE THINKING APPROPRIATION THROUGH THE WORK OF LA RIBOT, TINO SEHGAL AND L. NÓBREGA. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

As Live art is available for sale and acquired by public and private collections, this thesis questions what property adds or does to the opening event of art’s occurrence and what relationalities it generates or perpetuates. For something exteriorised to be available for commercial exchange, I argue it first needs to be made a legal and private thing, appropriated and constituted as an object of one’s own by an artist. I attempt to unpack what is at stake then, if anything, in the capture of gestures, of a relation in the world in and through the body, by the artist as property-holder; and what modes of relating can take place outside this regime of APPROPRIATION.

I approach these questions from a historical, existential and legal perspective as I look at three particular artists and approach their work in an ekphratic manner. La Ribot’s Distinguished pieces, in production since the early 1990s, are the focus of the first part of the thesis. Here, I intuitively approach the question of the becoming body and the becoming property of the bodily gestures, as the condition for the construction of saleable choreographies. The middle section is occupied by Tino Sehgal’s success story and the accommodation of the “constructed situations” within the visual art logic. I consider here the legal and performative technologies at work in the making of the artist and his work. From an exigency to think of a relation otherwise, the last part of this research listens to the muteilations and screams in l. Nóbrega’s actions and explores the possibilities of un-doing or unwanting the work of art, as object and property. This refusal will demand a radical repositioning of the artist and the self, and so I finish by presenting strategies of withdrawal and rethinking a m-other relation to gesture.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00037484
Keywords:	Live art, gesture, Performance art, art market, collecting, appropriation, expropriation, La Ribot, Tino Sehgal, Luísa Nóbrega
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Art
Date:	31 July 2024
Item ID:	37484
Date Deposited:	21 Aug 2024 11:07
Last Modified:	21 Aug 2024 11:07
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37484

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