Midway through a Sunday night performance in the Museum of Modern Arts atrium, Casey Spooner signaled his band Fischerspooner to a sudden halt. “I’m going to die!” he screamed to the young, fashion-conscious crowd, apparently displeased with their level of enthusiasm. “I’m a showbiz disaster. This is your last chance to show your love!” The crowd cheered, trying to oblige their fated star, and the noise appeared to be sufficient. Spooner who takes the role of a rampaging showman on stage — equal parts Boy George and Roman gladiator — motioned to his team, and the group’s raucous club music started again.

Later, Spooner explained his tantrum. “Sorry guys, they’re filming these shows,” he told the audience. “The film is what matters.” He noted that the performance would be included in a movie the group was making about a fictional pop star. Everything had to be perfect. As his meltdowns mounted, though, the crowd realized these show-stopping diatribes had been carefully choreographed — designed in part to provide time for performers to rest over the course of the three-hour show and change into new, Rococo costumes (designed by artist K8 Hardy).

The presence of Fischerspooner in MoMA’s hallowed halls encapsulates how far performance art has come from its roots in ephemeral art designed to shock audiences and resist canonization. MoMA invited the group to stage its gesamtkunstwerk as part of its “Performance” series and to mark the start of Performa 09, the performance art biennial that runs through Nov. 22 in New York. Today, performance art is big business. Spooner seemed keenly aware of the transformations. “This movie is going to be in a museum,” he giddily mentioned near the show’s end, before neatly summarizing the historical difficulty in bringing performances into museums: “If you don’t photograph it, it didn’t happen.”

Meanwhile, while MoMA was busy producing the manic dance party, its younger, more experimental affiliate across the East River, P.S.1, has found itself in the uncharacteristic role of staid historian, housing a short-term exhibition devoted to performance art. “100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009),” curated by Performa director RoseLee Goldberg and newly appointed P.S.1 director Klaus Biesenbach, solves the problem of representing performance by putting on display a mountain of documentary evidence. Photographs, photocopies, films, videos, audio recordings, and typed versions of manifestoes catalogue the history of performance art, cannily showing how its past can be constructed only through memories, relics, and artifacts.

Goldberg and Biesenbach begin with Filippo Marinettis 1909 “Futurist Manifesto,” and organize the proceeding 50 years of performance art in loose divisions, including “1915–1930, Dada and Surrealism, Germany and France,” “1930–50s and the United States,” and “A Brief History of Bauhaus and Oskar Schlemmers Theatre.” The story of these early years is inevitably text-heavy, given that film was inaccessible to many in the nascent avant-garde movements, but the curators keep things interesting with unusual inclusions.

A transcription of “Manifesto of Futurist Woman” (1912) is one such surprise, hanging on a wall devoted to Futurism, alongside better-known traces of the movement. One of the few female Futurists, Valentine de Saint-Pont — also the only member of the group to perform in New York (at the Metropolitan Opera in 1917) — penned the polemic in response to Marinetti’s foundational text. In her work, she entreats her gender, “Woman… go back to your sublime instinct, to violence, to cruelty,” urging women to procreate “while men are in charge of wars and battles.” Her presence serves as a welcome complication to standard narratives that have long favored male thinkers and performers.

Later in the exhibition, the presentation shifts to a strictly chronological format. As recording technology became more affordable and available, artists suddenly had the means to document their performances more thoroughly, a boon for viewers. In a room devoted to the years 1960-1979, for example, 24 televisions play classic works that range from Yayoi Kusamas Flower Orgy (1968) to Lynda Bengliss Female Sensibility (1971), in which two women kiss and caress each other before the gaze of the camera.

“100 Years” provides a rigorously efficient way to absorb the highlights of performance art. Its scope is unprecedented, meaning visitors will need to pick their viewing selections wisely (or make return visits), as it would take days to watch the complete collection of works assembled here. One can watch Gordon Matta-Clark enjoy a shower and a shave while sitting precariously on the hands of a clock tower in downtown Manhattan (outside the building where Alanna Heiss staged shows before opening P.S.1) in his 1976 Clock Shower, then glance over to see photographs of Carolee Schneemann pulling a paper manuscript from her vagina in 1975’s Interior Scroll.

Despite the attempts of many of its purveyors to resist any institutional co-optation, performance art has irrevocably entered the museum, here in fine fashion. Still, it is remarkable how fresh and frightening some of these works appear today. Watching Michael Smith crawl around New York streets dressed as a baby is still hilarious; seeing Chris Burden stand before a loaded rifle and prepare to take a bullet is still unsettling. Even ensconced in a museum and depicted in reproductions, these works contain challenges, both to viewers — Can you watch this? — and to artists — Can you measure up?