Fenomenología y Performance. Expresión, Institución y Movimiento a Partir de Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

This book examines performance art from a philosophical and historical perspective, drawing on the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s categories of expression, institution, and movement. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the philosophy of performance, highlighting its access to the perceptual world in ways comparable to painting. Performance reveals the relationship between body and world, exposing its historical dimension and its ongoing search for meaning. Considered as an unfinished action, performance reflects an epochal style and manifests as an art form that expresses behaviors, ideas, and beliefs rooted in tradition, often difficult to conceptualize. Performance inhabits an ambiguity between the everyday and the artistic, unveiling daily practices hidden from habitual perception. By focusing on the body and gesture, it opens reflection on the meaning of the sensible world. The book argues that performance is essential for understanding the aesthetics of movement through the expressive body, which operates as both historical and gestural action. In dialogue with other traditional interpretations, such as those of Phelan and Schechner, the book explores the notion of institution to question performance’s traditional dichotomies: ephemeral/enduring and new/habitual. Finally, the book identifies different ways in which performance remains in the body: first, in the body as support, analogous to photography and video; second, in the lived body, through the traces performance leaves within it; and third, in a deeper register anchored in gesture, beyond subjects’ full and voluntary control. It undertakes a demanding task: understanding the body within the context of history and art.