Performing Policy: How Contem-Porary Politics and Cultural Programs Redefined U.S. Artists for the Twenty-First Century by Paul Bonin-Rodriguez (review)

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez is expert at accounting, both in economic and narrative terms. Over three decades as a dancer, solo performance artist, and now scholar of arts policy, he has honed his accounting skills through indexical storytelling (in shows such as The Bible Belt and Other Accessories), nuanced materialist analysis, and historicized critique. In Performing Policy, Bonin-Rodriguez brings together these perspectives to illuminate how U.S. arts and cultural policy in the 1990s redefined the role of contemporary artists. He does so as an artist, organizer, and advocate, bringing together performance studies critique with urban planning and economic analyses.

Drawing on multiple valences of what it means to “perform policy,” this monograph examines how contemporary arts policy has been shaped, while advocating for artists to negotiate their own place at the policy table. Bonin-Rodriguez adds innovative perspectives to ideas about artists as entrepreneurs, culture-shapers, and creative place-makers. Closely reading an archive of post-culture wars “gray literature”—policy position papers, blogs, and grant documents—alongside a repertoire of artist-producer practices, Bonin-Rodriguez moves between analyzing key policy documents from the 1990s and early 2000s and offering case studies that assess policy impacts on artists as culture-makers; that is, he historicizes arts policy-making while elucidating where and how that policy materializes in practice—with artists, students, and funders.

Fittingly for a performer, Bonin-Rodriguez opens with a monologue and an enticing inaugural line: “I used to say that I made my first full-length solo performance, Talk of the Town, for less than $100” (viii). In a witty prologue, he recounts the material details of his first solo performance, re-tabulating its costs and values. He builds a case through this storytelling for how artists can come to operate as what he later terms “artist-producers.” He argues that these inherently hybrid figures must learn to value the archiving of labor, relationships, opportunities, and obligations (or partnerships) in accounting for what they make.

Hybridization and relational accounting applies to artistic material, as well as to the fields in which it is produced. For Bonin-Rodriguez, this means introducing rural (Texas) representation into the field of queer solo performance work during the 1990s. Reflecting back on that work, he elucidates the importance of locating it within the 1990s culture wars, which positioned often queer or otherwise “marginal” artists as outsiders to communal “standards of decency.” He additionally reflects on how a performance studies vocabulary enables him to review his struggles and exhaustion, shifting a mode of thinking from scarcity (of material resources and energy) to abundance (for example, the experience of serving on grant panels). Thus, he compellingly argues for artists to recognize that they have a capacity for organizing that is often unrecognized by themselves or others. Performing Policy proceeds to account for how this organizing talent can be harnessed, in part, by understanding the forces that shape contemporary US arts policy.

An introductory chapter develops the book’s central claims and strategies, explaining how the terms of “performing policy” will be taken up as a set of performative acts. The chapter also develops the idea of the artist-producer as crafter not only of work, but also of public good. An explicit teleology outlines a movement from disciplinarily distinct arts spaces toward creative place-making, tracing a parallel shift from high/low art dichotomies, reliance upon nonprofit funding structures, and artists as state diplomats toward more open categorization and funding models. The chapter succinctly reviews an array of 1990s policy documents as shaping streams of thought that collectively assess the role of arts in communities. Bonin-Rodriguez argues that, read carefully and resistantly, these documents respond to the culture wars by offering a deeper knowledge of arts infrastructure and new methods of achieving ongoing sustainability.

Performing Policy advances its arguments by alternating between close critical...