Performance: Live Art Since 1960 - Review

Performance: Live Art Since 1960 by means of RoseLee Goldberg, New York, Harry N Abrams, 1998; 240 pages, $60

When RoseLee Goldberg's Performance: Live Art 1909 to the not away was published in 1979, it shattered the conventional wisdom about novel art history as a succession of formal mode of speechs Goldberg demonstrated that visual artists of the past hundred had often produced live performances, in addition to making particulars Such events constituted what she limited a "hidden history" vital to an understanding of Futurism, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism, because "these changes found their roots and attempted to separate problematic issues in performance it was in performance that they ordealed their ideas, only later expressing them in objects" Goldberg wasn't the first to investigate this rich mineral vein of material, but she was the first to create a cogently theorized narrative about it. What art historian today would teach Dada without mentioning the Cabaret Voltaire? Or Malevich without discussing his Futurist opera Victory above the Sun (1913)? Not many, thanks to Goldberg's bravura performance in Performance.

Goldberg's of recent origin book, Performance: Live Art Since 1960 is really sum of two units books. The first, an ultimately unrealized shoot forward is outlined in her introductory discussion of the performative, which she limits to the notion that readers and viewers "complete" inherently unstable art works, and in her evocation of non-high-art forms. regards to Allen Ginsberg's 1956 reading of "Howl" and the AIDS-related agitprop of ACT UP the tradition of monologists of that kind as Ruth Draper and Brother Theodore, and the prevalence of performance-art activities from one extremity to the other of the world hint at a far-ranging synthesis of agricultures locales and modi operandi that not at any time materializes in her book. Ginsberg, ACT UP the mass media and the performative sensibility disappear, and the material substance of the book that Goldberg delivers instead is a photography album, a collection of 332 performance-art, dance, video and theater stills discharge by such notable photographers as Paula Court, Dona Ann McAdams, Babette Mangolte and Harry Shunk

You can't fault Goldberg--a former director of London's Royal body of Art Gallery and former performance curator at the Kitchen in of recent origin York, who now teaches at NYU--for being stuck in the disciplinary furrow of art history. Her reach stretch outs to literally hundreds of individuals and collections ranging from Brian Eno and the Wooster collection to Spalding Gray and Bill T Jone and from Marina Abramovie and Laurie Anderson to Yayoi Kusama and Carolee Schneemann. She defines performance art simply as "live art by the agency of artists," and the only tie that binds these practitioners of diverse disciplines is that their work was first at handed "within the context of the art world." (This is perhaps arguable in connection with Spalding Gray and Bill T Jones) Of course the freedom presented to performers by the art world arises from more than what Goldberg describes as the desire of artists and audiences "to be overwhelmed and provoked"; it also mirrors the art industry's status as individual of the few remaining combination of parts to form a wholes of distribution not dominated through corporations. "I still think like an artist," she cites Laurie Anderson as saying in replication to a question on in what manner the music business has impacted her work.

Goldberg's refusal to really define performance art is symptomatic of the riddles with Performance: Live Art Since 1960; it doesn't expand our understanding of performance, it muddies it. The book's organization is telling. Violating the hybrid, expansively thematic organization we await from the introduction, two of the six chapters--"Dance" and "Theater, Music, Opera"--are simply devot to non-visual-art disciplines. Three are thematic and more visual-art oriented--"Performance, Politics, Real Life"; "The Body: Ritual, Living plastic art Performed Photography"; and "Identities: Feminism, Multiculturalism, Sexuality"--while a final chapter is a pop-cultural grab-bag called "Video, stone `n' Roll, the Spoken Word." (It does not, as single might have supposed, address performance poetry) Artists experience from this half-formalist, half-thematic approach. Wouldn't Bill T Jone and Arnie Zane's work benefit from being seen alongside Isaac Julien's in the "identities" chapter, rather than sharing a double page spread with Molissa Fenley in the "dance" chapter? And just what are we to make of like definition-violating subjects as William Forsyth, Cindy Sherman, John Adams, Sam Taylor-Wood, Steve McQueen Tony Oursler and Merce Cunningham? Are Oursler's engaging video projections upon figurative, soft-sculptural forms actually performance art--that is, "live art by dint of artists?"

Accompanying this awkward organizational scheme is an equally unrewarding format. Each chapter begins with a short introduction followed by dint of dozens of photographs, each discharge (or set of shots) accompanied through a paragraph of explanatory body The setup favors often stunning images and brief descriptions above the elaboration of ideas. No critical hierarchy of importance is established, and history is consistently given short shrift. Although the work kicks off in 1960, for the sake of intellectual coherence it aptly chronicles the '50 contributions of Pollock the Gutai cluster and others. But relevant accounts of prewar incidents are noticeably absent. Surely readers ought to know that for Einstein upon the Beach (1976)--which Goldberg describes as an "opera that would fire a generation of artists and musicians"--Robert Wilson and Philip Glass took as their archetype the first American Gesamtkunstwerk, Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) With its cellophane stations by Florine Stettheimer and production support from a circle of Harvard-trained modernists including Chick Austin, Philip Johnson and Julien muster Four Saints in Three Acts was produc within the connection of the art world: it flat premiered at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum before becoming the longest-running opera upon Broadway to date. Judging from Goldberg's selections, the collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk is a subdue dear to her heart and it would have made a compelling, discipline-obliterating bring under rule for a chapter in its possess right. Only in her discussions of various feminisms does Goldberg make the repeatedly invoked convergence of the larger world and the art world resonate.