Part of the Editor's Choice series.
Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Courtesy of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
There is something happening: what once was referred to as performance art—a marginal form of theater that had originated with the sound poems and cabaret skits of Dadaism and Futurism—has developed into a cornucopia of themes and mixed media forms. Now, no longer restricted to bohemia, theaters or galleries committed to experimentation, performance has had a significant effect on contemporary sculpture, dance, theater, and even Las Vegas lounge acts.
This mainstreaming of performance art began in the 1960s when an increasing number of artists and dancers influenced by Happenings sought to address the interface between art and life by engaging time and presence in newer, less fixed ways. With chapter headings such as “performance, politics, real life,” “dance, or the body,” “ritual, living sculpture,” “performed photography,” RoseLee Goldberg reflects in Performance: Live Art Since 1960, that performance art is no longer esoteric, threatening, or academic (this is not to say that it has in all aspects been tamed.)
Goldberg’s original study of performance art has been a standard reference book in the field for the last 20 years. Mirroring performance art’s changing status, this book is a coffee-table size archive of gritty black-and-white images as well as glitzy color ones. Each picture, its accompanying texts, as well as an invaluable compilation of biographies and chronology are meant to record not only the history of performance and performers since the ’60s, but also its development and mutation. As Laurie Carlos states in the introduction, “Each picture carries the residue of time and each has a way of making the past present and fleetingly real.”
—Saul Ostrow
Performance: Live Art Since 1960 was published this fall by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
“I hope it’s not a masochistic impulse within me, but I will always stay until the end to see how a creative thought completes itself.”
A 1971 photograph by Jan van Raay shows artist Cliff Joseph leading a group of artist-activists—members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC)—in the dead of winter protesting the Whitney Museum’s controversial exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America (months before its opening on April 7, 1971).
Still with limited access to travel abroad, the Internet, and other communications technologies, young Cuban artists continue to innovate using their surroundings and available materials.01
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with James Hyde, Mary Heilmann, Alan Warner, Scott Spencer, Catherine Gund-Saalfield, Cassandra Wilson, Revenge Effect, Elevator Repair Service, Zoe Wanamaker, and A Day in Brasilia.
Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply indivisible as a Black lesbian and feminist.
Audre Lorde
