Goldberg Variations: Performing Distinctions

In the early eighties, I and a group of friends—musicians, dancers, performance artists, theatre artists—got together to try to define “performance art” in contradistinction to the other arts, in particular theatre. This discussion went on for hours, got more and more frustrating, and came to no conclusion. We all sort of “knew” what made performance art what it was and not something else; but when it came to defining it in terms of its elements, it was clear that the wide purview of various traditions that constitute theatre, especially in its twentieth-century avant-garde forms, made it impossible to definitively distinguish performance art from theatre as a “live art.” Most attempts can only do so by reducing all theatre to fourth-wall naturalism, which, for all its cultural impact, is a small moment in the long history and varied cultural locations of theatre. (The only exception I could think of would be the literal and experiential character of endurance and body art, but even they become theatricalized in their mode of presentation. Think of the Grand Guignol of Ron Athey.) In the long run, however, genre distinctions are always more of a concern for critics, theorists, and historians than they are for artists.

Nonetheless, our instincts told us that performance art did seem like something new and different, and its difference largely consisted of disrupting the very categories we were trying to distinguish over against it, instead of distinguishing itself as a new category complete in itself. “Performance” as a larger concept to be argued about only emerged once “performance art” became recognized as a provocative and genre-destabilizing force. Its role, as Josette Féral once put it, was to make each specific art form aware of, and draw attention to, the modes of its own production (which to my mind also overlaps significantly with conceptual art). But as Féral had also remarked in a later essay, performance lost this interrogative power when it began to be seen as a genre in itself.

What we see in RoseLee Goldberg’s big new coffee-table book Performance: Live Art Since 1960 seems to reflect this trajectory described by Féral. Insofar as she constructs the book thematically, Goldberg includes a variety of disciplines—including dance, theatre, video, and visual art—whose limits are probed by this self-conscious thing called “performance.” While Goldberg wants to claim that performance art is really operating in resistance to commodity culture, especially as it was articulated in the seventies, it’s clear as we follow the chronology of the documentation that such an ideal was assuredly abandoned by the eighties, and performance as a highly polished commodity is clearly prominent in the nineties (and this book is an example). This shift in attitude can be read in the almost historical shift from black-and-white photos to color. There is a sense of mere utility in black-and-white, which points to the idea that documentation is really only a supplement to a performance having to do with context, space, action, ideas, of which the photograph is primarily a reminder. Moving into color photography, especially as gorgeously displayed in a book like this one, it’s clear that the photograph becomes less a record of a conceptually interesting event than a visual work to be appreciated for itself. For example, the cover photograph, from Lou Reed and Robert Wilson’s Time Rocker, is an onstage performance view no audience member could possibly have; however good or bad the performance itself may have been, for the person who never saw it, the photograph takes on a different life to stimulate other unrelated fantasies.

“Live Art” is indeed a category that is accepted at face value, and I wonder what Philip Auslander’s response to this would be, given his critique of the concept in his new book Liveness, and given Goldberg’s self-admitted irony of creating a book of photographs to capture the spirit of a time-based art. But does it...