Editorial

EDITORIAL erforming Arts Journal enters its eighteenth year of publication with this forty-sixth issue which we have titled "Bodies of Work." In choosing that title we wanted to acknowledge the achievement ofartists who over a period ofyears, sometimes stretching to decades, have collectively created a body of work that defines the last half century of American performance and whose significance is becoming increasingly clear in the new research and scholarship, retrospectives, exhibitions, and histories that are emerging or planned for the future. At the same time, our special section, "Ages of the Avant-Garde," allows the opportunity to suggest a relationship between the body of work and the body of knowledge, one the art, the other the artist. We contacted the numerous contributors to this section, because they reached the age of fifty or more since we began publishing in 1976, to reflect on the impact of aging on their work and thoughts. What are the implications for the performing body? What is the relationship between past and present concerns? What are the important issues at this stage in a life and a career? The personal responses to our questions, addressing the body, historical styles, sexuality, creativity, art politics, career, audiences, and recent work, among many topics, taken together are unflinchingly honest and direct, provocative at times. In addition to focusing on a specific time frame for the artists in that section, we have also included several pieces on different kinds of new work in performance, video, photography, film, theatre, painting . Elsewhere there are reconsiderations of well-known artists and their works. This issue inaugurates a design change which we feel will open up the space in the journal and allow greater flexibility in the formating of articles, and in the use of photographs. It also reflects our desire to expand more into the art world, with extended commentary on installations, painting, architecture, and photography around issues of performance and spectatorship . In this sense, we are returning to the earlier concerns ofLIVE, the avantgarde magazine we published from 1979 to 1982, when there was more activity and support of experimental work in the "downtown" arts scene. We want to try to integrate thinking about performance from both the visual arts and theatre perspectives because their separation in most arts commentary has been detrimental to creating a complete history of performance in the twentieth century. Besides, there exists a knowledgeable international audience for cross-overs in the arts, and the work of many artists in the different art forms and media is known on several continents. In future issues of PAJwe plan to publish features on cities and art, teaching and the performing arts, and the visual arts and performance in Soho. Daryl Chin, who has been a contributing editor to PAJ since 1979, and Larry Qualls, who with Chin edited Art & Cinema, will become associate editors beginning next fall. We will be working together in an attempt to envision a different kind of theatre periodical , with less compartmentalizing of readership and art practice. PAJwill continue to publish artists' and critics' writings, new plays, interviews and dialogues, essays on books, reports from abroad, and historical research. As previously , our books will supplement and expand on the issues, artists, and modern and contemporary works discussed in the pages ofthe journal. For 1994-95 we have planned a collection of plays by Mac Wellman, another of contemporary German drama; two Gertrude Stein volumes; a history of dada and surrealist performance, and one on puppets and modernism. We have started a series of performance monographs, the first three of which will be on Meredith Monk, Carolee Schneemann, and Rachel Rosenthal. Our sixth volume of contemporary drama in the Wordplaysseries is in preparation now. After more than one hundred books and forty-six issues of PA, our publishing program of supporting new work and rethinking the modernist heritage has defined our vision over the years, though now more than ever, the increasingly ideological agendas ofmuch commentary on the arts and culture compel us to honor art over theory, the singular voice over the group chant. ON THE COVER John Cage, Solo for Piano, Concert for Piano and Orchestra. Photo: Courtesy Northwestern University Music Library...