Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History ed. by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, and: Live Art in La: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983 ed. by Peggy Phelan (review)

Does writing a history of an art form defined by its elusiveness and resistance to theorization entail breaking away from the conventional scholarly format, the monograph? While Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983 deceptively resembles a conventional collection of essays, it makes a convincing case for an editorial model structurally engaging with its material—an ambition shared with and expressed more visibly by Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Both rely upon a materialist approach to their subject matter, aiming to correct self-referential perspectives on the aesthetic experience of live art by providing ample historical and geographical contexts. Perform, Repeat, Record’s presentation is based on the assumption that developing a historiographical approach to live art (the term conflates performance and body art throughout) means opening up a “kaleidoscopic” perspective (Jones 41) in an effort to formally espouse the slippery subject-matter, to perform it as it were, rather than smother it under more assertive discourse. The open-ended architecture aims to provide multiple points of entry rather than a recapitulative or anthological perspective, “some orientation points, in an as-yet-uninstituted archive of global late twentieth and early twenty-first century performance and live art” (Heathfield 237).

Perform, Repeat, Record features two separate introductions by coeditors representing the fields and approaches that have traditionally documented live art: art history (Amelia Jones) and theatre and performance studies (Adrian Heathfield). They have surrounded themselves with a “multitude of voices” (11), a combination of “artists, theorists and historians” reflecting the inherent interdisciplinarity of the art form. The book is divided into three parts, somehow reflecting the dialectic between theory and practice, with considerable overlap: “Theories and Histories,” “Documents,” and “Dialogues.” Both Jones and Heathfield insist on a materialist approach, arguing that “performance cannot be . . . understood without some recourse to its complex enmeshment within historical, material and discursive formations” (Heathfield 28).

The first section is organized along loosely chronological lines, including four essays already published elsewhere, and combines theoretical reflections with case studies. The essays extend “philosophically oriented debates into performance theory proper” (Jones 41), deploying intertwining variations on the notions of presence, reception, memory, and documentation, with many taking issue with the traditional vision of performance as disappearance. Although its formal boldness is commendable and generally successful, the centrifugal structure leaves an ambivalent impression, the iterative nature of the variations walking a fine line between nuance and repetitiveness. Several essays directly echo and answer each other, mostly because better-known, previously published works serve as points of reference to be confronted, extended, or entrenched: Christopher Bedford frontally challenges Peggy Phelan’s claim that “[p]erformance’s only life is in the present” in Unmarked (1993); Jane Blocker relies upon Rebecca Schneider’s refusal to embrace the “logic of the archive” (139) and its patriarchal implications; Philip Auslander’s claim that performance documentation is an inherently performative gesture can be retraced to Boris Groys’s interrogation of the shift “away from the art work and toward art documentation” (209), arguing that the installation provides a topographical anchor for documentation to retrieve “an aura of the original, the living, the historical” (217).

Most of the original essays are devoted to case studies and offer problematized (re)examinations of a diverse set of artists and collectives, challenging the understanding of canonical works: Hannah Higgins decenters the figure of George Maciunas in the Fluxus movement; Mechtild Widrich looks at Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT’s 1969 photoperformance Genital Panic through the lens of Marina Abramovic’s 2005 reenactment; André Lepecki presents an overlooked aspect of Allan Kaprow’s creative process during the preparation of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. Several authors incorporate lesser- known, geographically marginal figures to offer a glimpse into an alternative...