Being Here—PAJ at 100

As I write this preface to the 100th issue of PAJ, Occupy Wall Street has already been influential enough for the movement to spread across the U.S., violently at times, as more and more citizens are drawn into its message of social justice. Similar interventions have broken out in cities on several continents, protesting the corruption of democracy by powerful financial interests. Someone dressed as Jesus, holding a sign that declared, “I Threw The Money Lenders Out for a Reason,” was seen demonstrating in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, in a throwback to what used to be called guerrilla theatre, adding a moral dimension to the outrage. In the cradle of civilization, our biblical garden of Eden, the U.S. is mired in the longest wars and occupations of its history. By now several months have passed since the “Arab Spring” has brought massive upheaval to the Middle East, its revolution streamed by the new social networks that horizontalize the globe. On the continent the Euro crisis threatens the long-held dream of a European Union.

What should I, an editor of an arts journal, do in this world with the means at my disposal? How should I act in the world, and upon it?

It is within this steady disenchantment of contemporary life worldwide that several months ago I began to conceive an editorial approach for PAJ 100 that would reflect uniquely personal perspectives on the ecology of a community: where we are now, how we have gotten here, and how we may go forward. Under the title “Performance New York,” this special volume was organized around four central themes to which several generations of artists, critics, curators, and producers were asked to respond. Everyone was assigned an individual topic: Belief, Being Contemporary, Performance and Science, Writing and Performance. What moves me in reading the statements of contributors is their origination from a contemplated reserve of individual conviction. Taken together, they outline a measure of the responders’ worldliness in the face of a global crisis in biopolitics through the choice to remain faithful to all that embodies their most profound values: the work of art.

Turning from the statements to the conversational form, three dialogues open up perspectives on the conditions of making art now, acknowledging the economic struggle that characterizes being an artist in New York City. Their subtexts circulate around the influence of legacy and tradition, essential subjects for art forms adjusting to the writing of performance history in the present tense. In between the commentaries, portfolios of several artists highlight the intersections of performance and visual art that characterize the American arts. In effect, PAJ 100 is a polyphony of one hundred voices, offering a half-century of artistic thought and life experience by those who have created the histories of contemporary performance and others exploring the world they are now entering.

What is fascinating to hear in PAJ 100 are the voices of some of the same artists first featured in the journal decades ago as young artists, and now still prominent, as they speak from years of working lives. No irony, no posing, no self-promotion. Just the eloquence of honesty. Already enshrined in the history books, they are the ones who have helped to create the post-war experiments in performance, film, video, theatre, and dance that can now be seen as an avant-garde tradition. We are dealing with their legacies more than three decades later, in an illuminating perspective on the history of performance knowledge. In recent years, exhibits and festivals have focused on the performance, dance, and art worlds of the sixties and seventies, especially in New York and in London, highlighting the interest in this period as the context of the work-in-progress that is performance history. The younger artists in this issue confront the traditions of the forms in which they work, generating insightful responses to contemporary imperatives. In turn, the artists looking back over decades of achievement open up worldviews inflected by the many phases of time and process.

In the long view, the thirty-five-year history of PAJ is also...