For over fifteen years Peggy Phelan’s astute characterization of performance art has remained persuasive. This is due in equal parts to the elegance of her formulation and to the radical social possibilities her understanding of the medium implies and permits. “Performance’s only life,” Phelan contends, “is in the present. Performance cannot,” she continues, “be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being . . . becomes itself through disappearance” (Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, 146; emphasis in original). Phelan’s contention is predicated on an insistence that performance is inherently “nonreproductive” and thus irreconcilable with the “machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital” (148). For Phelan, because the space of performance is free from the strictures of the social world, it offers performers and audience members the chance to experiment freely with new social models; here lies the fundamental value of performance art. The Getty Research Institute’s exhibition Evidence of Movement: Documenting Performance...