On Edge: Performance at the End of the Century

Performance art is a genre with a long career and a short history. It got its name in the late 1960s, when it was invoked to distinguish the work of a number of conceptual artists who were attempting to replace the familiar static art objects of the galleries with literal physical actions or behavior that could stand in their place. As its name got shortened to the more comfortable “performance,” its career got lengthened and its meaning was broadened to embrace the early 1960s conceptual gags and microevents of Fluxus, the late 1950s spectacles of the Happenings artists, and the musical performances of any number of disciples of John Cage, whose own multimedia spectacle at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s counted as a pioneering example and whose book Silence gave impetus to almost everyone interested in actions on the art/life boundary.

On the same principle that allowed most of those artists fluid crossing of genre boundaries, the term was easily expanded to include the work of the “anti-dancers” of the Judson Dance Theater or the psychological dance of Anne Halprin, Grotowski workshops, guerilla and street performances of all kinds, that ranged from the Bread and Puppet Theater to the political antics of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, and later to the symbolic, psychological, and social transactions of the feminist encounter groups of the 1970s and the autobiographical explorations inspired by them. Since many of these performers laid claim to earlier precedents in dada cabaret, Futurist and constructivist theater, and Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, invoking similar models in folk and vernacular entertainments like circuses and vaudeville and culturally embedded sacred or secular rituals and ceremonies, it didn’t take much ingenuity to sweep into the genre political demonstrations, the spectacles at Versailles, Leonardo’s harmless ignition of brandy vapors in an enclosed room, the standing record of St. Simeon Stylites, the levitations of St. Joseph of Coppolino, the mock sea battles of the Romans, and the minimalist philosophical performances of Diogenes of Sinope and Cratylus, the disciple of Herakleitos.

Against this kind of background almost any book will appear slight or at least very partial, though perhaps none quite so appalling as RoseLee Goldberg’s cut-and-paste pseudohistory, Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present. There have been a few exceptions, mainly scholarly books dealing with narrowly selected aspects of the subject. Standing somewhat apart from these is Frantisek Deak’s Symbolist Theater (1993), a deeply and broadly researched work that extends its considerations to Mallarmé’s Tuesday “performances” and the projected performance of his never completed grand Livre, as well as to the life performances of the d’Aurevillyean and Baudelairean dandy, and to the “art of personality” (kaloprosopia) of Sar Peladan. There is also Henry Sayre’s The Object of Performance (1989) an extensive critical discussion of the performative mode as it informed nearly all of the arts in the United States in the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

Because Carr, who works for The Village Voice, is more of a journalist than a critic and has a war correspondent’s taste for battle, the book, mainly a collection of brief reviews, reads like a collection of dispatches from the front—the grungy little fly-by-night East Village clubs and galleries that were the only cheap rent places left for a New York bohemia by the relentless Reagan-era real estate inflation. “I came to New York to live on the art frontier,” she says in her introduction.

When I began writing for the Village Voice in 1984 . . . I was ambivalent about a journalism career. But I had no doubts about who and what I wanted to cover: artists who worked in that precarious area just a little off terra firma. No one knew what to call that territory. Some said it wasn’t even art. Others called it “performance art” because that category is still relatively uncodified. There were...