Taking up space

One of the many innovations with which performance art can be credited is its revolutionary approach to space-making and inhabitation. Its reanimation of objects, events and bodies takes up space as a material presence, which incidentally engenders a conceptual problem. Philosophical aesthetics has had a lot to say about our relationship with the built form, but this work has not been brought to bear on performance art and the ways this artform complicates such relationships. This paper addresses this void by exploring two dimensions of what architect Daniel Libeskind has called ‘the space of encounter’—the physical and the ethical.