Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (review)

Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties. Compiled by Linda Montano. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000; pp. 420. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Linda Montano spent ten years interviewing a wide and diverse assortment of performance artists and ten more years seeking a publisher. The result, Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties, is what Montano calls an "archival portrait" (xiv) of a social and artistic phenomenon that still captures the imagination. The artists are asked to address one of four themes—sex, food, money/fame, or ritual/death. Their interviews then fall into one of four corresponding chapters. But the main artist at work here is Montano herself. More than just a string of interviews, the book is a carefully planned and ordered quilt. Its pattern follows not just themes commonly shared by many of the performers of the eighties but also reveals Montano's own preoccupations. Encoded in her patchwork is a morality play's journey whose meanings are brokered by Montano and her subjects. The body of the book begins with sex and ends in death. In between is a journey toward fame sustained by food and finally illuminated by ritual.

Each individual interview reflects the life journey format of the whole work. Montano thinks that themes artists employ are born in childhood. Thus her first questions are about early memories associated with the theme addressed. The responses are usually intimate and often reveal the artist's childhood development of a capacity for innovative adaptation to difficult or confusing circumstances. Frequently the artist's childhood imagination contains the fundamental metaphor(s) of the mature artist's ultimate destiny. For example, the seminal Happenings creator Allan Kaprow describes his childhood Lone Ranger complex in which he fixated on the image of the eternally anonymous hero whose life is spent atoning for some obscure past misdeed. A sickly child, Kaprow was sent West to convalesce, taking on the guilt for his separation from his family. "As an artist I would also be the Lone Ranger. My fame, if I were famous, would never be collected on" (288). Ironically, Kaprow's resistance to fame became an important part of his mystique and helped make him famous.

Although "the avant garde doesn't demand acceptance" (xiii) it does seek attention. Montano has taken care to include marginalized and obscure artists as well as the upper pantheon of art stars and all had to subject themselves to her regimen of penetrating questions and categorization. Still, there is plenty of freedom for the artists' own definitions and characterizations of themselves and their work, and some real surprises ensue as the artists are revealed. For instance, Karen Finley grew up free of sexual trauma in an open, liberal atmosphere. Paul McCarthy, unphilosophical and action oriented, grew up Mormon.

The edges and border areas of Montano's quilt are densely ornamented by critical essays. In addition to the interviews, she supplies a preface, an overall introduction, four additional introductions (one for each of the main categorical headings), an afterword, a section of photos, and a chapter of biographies for each artist and critical essayist. While the apparatus is informative, the book does not need this much support and interpretation. Montano could rest easy in the profundity and power of the artifact she has assembled and not seek excessive critical corroboration. But the additional material does provide important clarifying information (e.g. background on Montano, whose first career was as an anorexic nun), and places eighties performance in its historical and cultural context. Contributing critic Lucy Lippard's essay is refreshingly brief and also underscores the importance of letting the artists speak for themselves. One possible strategy is to read the interviews first and the supplemental material later.

The voice of the artist is the heart of the work and emerges with resounding clarity, if not always with profundity. The interviewees reflect varying generations, art movements, degrees of insight, and predictability (or surprise). John Cage is aglow on the benefits of...