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NOTES ON TEACHING PERFORMANCE ART Jacki Apple andra Bernhard and Reno are not performance artists, no matter what they say. Neither is Eric Bogosian despite his Soho art world roots. Nor Ann Magnusen. Beth Lapides doesn't claim to be one. Holly Hughes may be one of the infamous NEA four, but I've never seen her do anything remotely resembling performance art. They are performers. Actors who write and perform their own material. Smart comics. Serious entertainers. And they are very good at what they do. But it still isn't performance art even if/when their material is very off center. There is an important distinction, one which has gotten lost in current parlance. I myself shortened the term to just "performance" in my writings in the 80s in order to encompass the changing nature of the activities, and avoid confusion with 70s conceptual and body art pieces. But nowadays we've gone so far afield that no one seems to remember that performance art is first and foremost a visual art hybrid even when it employs narrative. Co-opted by entertainment and media culture on one side, and the commodity driven art world on the other, it has virtually disappeared into the theatre. Not the visual and kinetic experimental theatre that emerged in the 60s and 70s whose methodology and art ideology make it performance art's sibling, but the conventional theatre of one-act plays and one-person shows. Text-based theatre. Stand-up talk theatre. Musical revue theatre. The irony of course is that a visual art form that initially positioned itself as anti-theatrical and was so often lambasted as "bad theatre" should end up more often than not as being just thatbad theatre made by performing, not visual artists, who know little if anything of the history, formal vocabulary, or syntax of the art form whose name they misguidedly present themselves under. The result is a lot of ranting and raving, confessing and complaining sans visual accoutrements. Granted performance art has had its share of self-indulgence and bad writing. But at the very least it surprised, provoked, or even baffled you. In the meantime real performance art has become an endangered species, carried on primarily by its first and second generation practitioners. Rather than declare it dead in the 90s, I prefer to think it has gone into hibernation. (See "Performance Art is Dead. Long Live Performance Art!" High Performance,Summer 1994.) U 121 The fact that performance art has gotten dislodged from its visual art roots, separated from its own history, and yes at this point one can say traditions, can be attributed to the mainstream art establishment as well as the pervasive and insidious power of mass media culture. If the latter digests all marginal, deviant, or oppositional forms of cultural expression and regurgitates them in its own wrappings as product, the former simply ignores them. Since performance art has produced few profits within the commodity driven art marketplace, its history has been given short shrift, and its (mis)representation has been left to the tabloid sensibilities of the popular press. Nowhere is this more evident than within the confines of academia. It is reflected in both the teaching of art history, and in studio classes which are generally designated by specific media-painting, photography, video, etc., rather than an interdisciplinary, cross media curriculum. Performance art falls between the cracks. Thus the unabashed ignorance and historical amnesia of young artists should not surprise us. Few undergraduate university art departments offer performance art workshops, let alone any on-going course of study. Once in a while it pops up in a dance department as a visiting artist's class. We won't even mention theatre departments. It hardly ever makes it into the syllabus of modern or postmodern art history or art theory classes. Even in art schools it occupies a marginal place, if any at all. The isolation of performance art from the rest of visual arts practices is in fact a fallacy as most of its most accomplished, most radical, and most proficient practitioners have been/are artists also working in other media as well-painting, sculpture, photography, video...

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