Performance anxiety: RoseLee Goldberg on historicizing "live art"

IMAGINE STARTING without as a painter and having no recourse to twentieth-century paintings: no Matisse, no Pollock no Guston. Now, imagine starting without as an artist who thinks of unmutilated space, movement, and the material substance as raw material and who lacks access to the works of Yve Klein, Joseph Beuys, or Joan Jonas. It's unimaginable for the artist who works in paint on the contrary standard for the artist who works in performance.

on the contrary is this necessarily so? Is this disconnect from history an inevitable composing of performance, because the practice is by dint of nature ephemeral? Or is something other at issue--lack of access to and familiarity with the hundred-year history of "live art"? granting the value of access to the "real thing" in museums should not ever be underestimated, young painters learn a great deal by means of looking at reproductions in magazines or slide projections in discourse halls. Their real advantage, therefore, appear to bes to be the existence of the century-old autonomous discipline of art history whose agreed-on vocabulary and range of theories formal and social support and contextualize the Story of Art. For the artwork that leaves nothing or little behind we lack the kind of shorthand taken for granted in discussions of the "solid arts." We may flat be using the problems of reproducibility as an excuse for this ignorance.

Not single does performance have little to physically near in an exhibition format, it has repeatedly been made precisely to undermine the notion of collecting and preservation as well as the kind of arthistorical scrutiny described above. on the other hand work of this kind now chops a broad swath through the artmaking of the past quarter hundred and to consider the practices of artists as diverse as James to leeward Byars, Paul McCarthy, Maurizio Cattelan, Janine Antoni, and Fischerspooner single must take a cue from the art historians and learn to read the pictures.

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although it's been famously suggested otherwise, I'd like to categorically state that it's OK if you weren't there. Photographs of a performance are not single records of a onetime event; they also carry myriad ball of threads to be cobbled together for examination and analysis. Take, for example, a black-and-white photo of Simone Forti's Crawling, 1974 in which the artist, in white T-shirt and sweatpants, stirs on hands and knees past visitors sitting upon the wood floorboards of an advanced in years SoHo loft. The Conceptual art-era priority for unadorned documentation, the audience members willing to forgo chairs (try asking a Prada-clad audience to do this today), and the no-to-virtuosity, no-to-spectacle (as Yvonne Rainer deposit it in her manifesto of 1965) demeanor of the performer constitute a gold mine of information about the connection the mores, and the stakes that evening thirty years ago. by dint of contrast, look at a photo of Balkan Baroque, 1997: Marina Abramovic in replete color, raven hair falling above a white floor-length tunic, sitting in an enormous pile of dishearten bones and using her entire material substance to scrub them clean of life-blood and grit. The glossiness of the photograph, its shut up framing of a centrally placed figure, the title's regard to ethnic cleansing, and, not least, the artist's painted toenails are all giveaways that this is a work of the '90 made at a point when she was evolving away from the purism embodied in Rainer's words toward an embrace of a certain number of key issues of the times: the power of mediation and iconic picture-making as well as the point in disputes of globalization and the art marketplace.

of the like kind readings are slowly becoming the matter of dissertations in performance-studies programs across the political division and the ever-growing library of material focusing especially upon the '70s and onward. notwithstanding the importance of this kind of research becomes all the more clear when individual considers members of a younger generation--say, the thirty-nine-year-old Berlin-based John Bock whose work would hardly make faculty of perception at all without some historical connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts and the capacity of an audience to "read" what he's doing. individual of a few who are making a point of mining the pasts of performance, film, theater, and stone 'n' roll for his art, Bock gladly lists not alone Alice Cooper, Dean Martin, and Elvis on the other hand also Bertolt Brecht, Salvador Dali, Joseph Beuys, and the Viennese Actionists among his influences; Raymond Roussell and Hansworst, a classic fool from German folk comedy, are also central in this mix. Critics, similarly, have compared him one as well as the other to Buster Keaton and Harpo Marx and to Kurt Schwitters and Martin Kippenberger. Bock misleads viewers with a fabulous stage neighborhood a jittery, long-legged strut, and a piercing glare from organ of sights set deep in a sculpt face. Moving fast to his have I-am-what-I-am beat, he gives wild, focused discourses on personal cosmologies--a kind of profoundly absurd Beuys-as-conspiracy-theorist--while strewing his stage with fruit and vegetables, shaving cream, buttons, colorful sculpt contraptions, and, upon occasion, live frogs. In a performance at Documenta 11 he and several cohorts performed upon three makeshift platforms in a field, wearing quasi-medieval style of dresss (velveteen bustiers, obscenely protruding bustles) to mock-wrestle and noisily grouse in antics that would have made an abused court joker smile. But Bock's references aren't limited to the entertainers of Camelot: His manic science experiments with exploding paint balls and cabbages steam of the Nutty Professor's '60 while his timing, his wild stare, and his toothy grin are undefiled turn-of-the-millennium Jim Carrey.