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Performance Art has come to occupy a crucial place in histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Moving chronologically, this course will survey the development of performance as a medium across a range of primarily western historical, political, and social contexts, beginning with experiments in live art undertaken by the Italian Futurists and ending with contemporary practices. As we examine specific artists and movements, we will also explore the intersections between performance and other media; the ways performance artists have engaged questions of politics, race, gender, sexuality, and the relationship between performer and audience; theories of performance and performativity; and the place of performance within broader histories of art. What is performance art, we will ask, and what creative possibilities did it offer its practitioners at different historical moments? Throughout the semester, we will also lend careful consideration to the special problems that attend an investigation of ephemeral and time-based work. How is performance art best exhibited and best preserved? What challenges do time-based works present for the writer and for the historian? And, more basically, how should we approach the study of performance art? through the use of films? photographs? textual documentation? In other words, what exactly is it that we are studying when we turn our attention to performance?