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Unpacking the history of performance art and celebrating the work of contemporary practitioners, a must-read for both art lovers and students alike.
Stunningly beautiful, deeply puzzling, powerfully moving, or intensely unsettling—performance art can evoke a wide variety of responses. In this important survey, Catherine Wood, one of the world’s leading curators and writers in this field, provides the broadest and most up-to-date insight into the subject yet published. Wood proposes performance not as a genre separate from object-making but as a medium that has profoundly influenced the shape of contemporary art.
From the spectacular forms of intimacy performed by Marina Abramović to the painting processions initiated by Ei Arakawa and the social activism of Tania Bruguera, hugely divergent practices have emerged in the past 30 years that embrace the worlds of sculpture and painting, spectacle, and protest. Shifting the focus from “I” to “We” and then “It,” Performance in Contemporary Art is divided into sections that examine the perspective of the individual, the social, and the object. Wood looks at histories of performance through the lens of contemporary practitioners: the Japanese avant-garde group Gutai in the 1950s, Brazilian neo-concretism in the 1960s, and the feminist performance at Womanhouse in the United States in the 1970s are key examples of historical precedents that have been revisited, reformed, or rejected by contemporary artists in the 21st century.
Includes color photographs
Publisher : Tate (September 13, 2022)
Language : English
Paperback : 240 pages
ISBN-10 : 1849768234
ISBN-13 : 978-1849768238
Item Weight : 11.9 ounces
Dimensions : 8.35 x 1.05 x 10.05 inches
5
Reviewer: Sean Robin
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Whatever happened to the Happenings?
Review: Performance Art seems to have found a solid home within museums, which is not without a certain irony. A number of 1950s and 60s experimental phenomena – from Free Jazz to Fluxus, French Situationism and Happenings all began to thrive in smaller venues like coffee houses, galleries, bars, and eventually moved to non art spaces entirely – such as department stores, parking lots and crowded street corners and freeways. And yet not all of their progenitors were hostile to the art establishment even back in the day.The advantage of museums deciding to champion performance is of course they have a wealth of resources – including plenty of potential performance space. (To my taste, they are still a bit stale, compared to the streets, or even a convention theatre – not to mention the public is rather exclusive, and is expected to be entertained in rather conventional ways.)This book provides a nice round-up of recent and historic material and performers, going back to the 1950s. I am particularly impressed with the international round-up presented under “We” – accounts of social “performance” – although this section really stretches the use of the title “performance” since these works are closer to being “Happenings.” In a Happening, one of the precursors to “performance art” the artist is not necessarily the central character. More often, there is an ensemble of people – friends of the artist, or strangers completely, but seldom if ever are they trained performers. In the later version of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, there is no audience that is distinct from the performers – everyone is participating – and so the question must be raised, “is this really even performance?” Live Art, Total Art, Time-Space Art, Situations, Events or Cultural Actions might all be better names, and might have been a better title for this book, or at least, the middle section. Alas, we are stuck with an academic-art establishment category, even if it hardly fits this more eclectic mix of recent and sometimes subversive activity.We should take under advisement what scholar Judith Rodenbeck tells us was Allan Kaprowâs attitude towards âPerformance Artâ – for him it was a corruption and diminishing of his and his generationsâ Happenings and Live Events. Clearly others have brought creativity and originality to âLive Artâ – even if until lately their has been an absence of more radical society-wide questioning.
