Joining up the dots

Art & Design encounters performance art at an opportune cultural moment. In recent years the interest in performance and the performative (in its broadest sense) has touched many different disciplines and practices, resulting in a significant transformation in the metaphors we use to describe the world. Stuart Hall, in his introduction to Carnival, Hysteria and Writing, the recent collection of essays commemorating the work of the literary critic Allon White, draws attention to this change and to White’s use of Bakhtin’s notion of carnival in his analysis of literary culture. Bakhtin, whose highly performative notion of “dialogism” has been especially influential for recent work on self and culture is a central figure in the change Hall delineates. He cites the work of Allon White and others as evidence of a move away from dramatic simplifications and binary reversals in cultural criticism, into a complex, shifting, dialogic landscape, in which artists and critics struggle to find ways of thinking and speaking which articulate the dynamics of our current condition more clearly.

As a metaphor, the performative seems currently to grip our imagination, allowing us to articulate cultural processes in new terms. There is a renewed interest in the carnivalesque, in questions of the relationship of oral and written texts, in process and composition across the arts, in sound as art, in scores and documentation, and in the relationship of performance art to poetry and music. Performance art has benefited from this renewed interest. The thin trickle of English-language books which profile British and European performance art has now turned into a steady stream: steady enough, that is, for the questions which constellate around the continued mutations of performance to emerge.

Both Performance Art: Into the 90s and Audio Arts: Discourse and Practice in Contemporary Art discuss contemporary live work in an international context, though the emphasis in both is on Britain and Europe. Each also addresses the histories and critical contexts in which live, often ephemeral art, takes place and both raise questions about the direction of art today. Performance Art: Into the 90s is, in fact, an issue of Art & Design, a substantial magazine in book format; it addresses current work across the field of performance and its appearance in 1994 is an indication that performance art is once again enjoying a rising profile in the art world, a profile it has not had for some time.

Each of Art & Design’s bi-monthly magazine editions focuses on a current art world topic. Each is an eclectic mix of the serious, the new, the fashionable and the talked about. The magazine exemplifies the best and worst of art world publishing. The package is luxurious, thick glossy pages in large format with dozens of color pictures, but each issue can also seem carelessly selected and under-edited. Contributions are largely culled from other publications and are often reproduced with an astonishing lack of care. It’s a kind of hit and run approach held together by strong design and production values, and the performance issue sits square within this frame.

On the whole it works; and the reason it works is simple, the photographs. Simon Herbert’s twenty-page lead article is accompanied by thirty-two full color reproductions, seven full page. A six-page interview with Rachel Rosenthal is accompanied by twenty color illustrations. From Rosenthal’s two-page head rising from sand to the full page picture of a bare-breasted Marina Abramovic, arms wound with snakes, the photographs are sumptuous and sometimes remarkable. Art & Design has chosen to showcase performance art in a big, loud, glamorous way at a time when funding cutbacks and critical invisibility make artists feel creatively and politically marginalized. In contrast, this magazine looks good and is distributed widely, especially important since many of the artists in it are not well known outside Britain and northern Europe.

The visual quality and lay-out of the...