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rather than from the dominant white Anglo-Saxon cultural strain. In the book's Introduction and in their essay, Victor and Edith Turner suggest that the lack of symbolic life in the U.S. may be traced back through the effects of industrialization to early American settlers' rejection of the post-feudal Europe of royalty, nobility and clergy, and of the visually oriented symbolic system associated with it. The Protestant ethic, reinforced by the Enlightenment, produced a rational, naturalistic and individualistic attitude toward worship. This resulted in a separation of church and state, recognition of the individual as the ethical unit of society, and increased valuation of conscience and one's personal experience of and relation to the sacred. These impulses led to public celebrations which emphasized the Word, song, music and movement as opposed to emblems. The opposition between ritual processes emphasizing sacred objects and those focusing on the inner worth of persons emerges as one vital theme of the text. Celebration raises important issues on many aspects of ritual process and readers of varying interests will find selections of value in it. It should be of particular use to those examining the nature and ritual sources of performative activity, or evolving strategies to respond effectively to their own cultural contexts. John Fiscella The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980 Edited by Moira Roth Astro Artz, 165 pp., $12.50 (paper) Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory Dept. of Performance Studies NYUITSOA, 104 pp., $5.00 (paper) Reading Moira Roth's essay on women and performance art in the seventies , I experienced the pleasure of recognition. Like everyone else who came of age in that decade, I was affected by the women's movement. My entry into active participation in the movement was via new left politics, and my first work as a performance artist involved a "re-examination and redefinition [of] the models on which [1] had based [my] self-image." Then here Roth is, talking about us, pulling together the strands of sixties political protest, concerns of the women's movement, and developments in performance art, demonstrating how art is adapted to express the ideas of its time. In this fresh, lively, un-pedantic overview of women's performance art, Roth identifies three significant areas where women have made important contributions to the form: the autobiographical/narrative tendency (which includes experiments with creating persona and attempts to "study, expose, mock, and challenge stereotyped roles of woman"), the mystical/ritualistic 136 tendency, and the political tendency. She discusses the work of artists as diverse as Martha Wilson and Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer and Joan Jonas, Suzanne Lacy and Pauline Oliveros, Carolee Schneemann and Laurie Anderson. She doesn't try to fit their work into a definition of feminism, but, by looking at what they do and what their interests are, sketches a portrait of the varieties of feminisms-from earth mother goddesses to a group organized as a band to use the "high energy borrowed from music and the recklessness borrowed from girls" (Disband). Having begun the essay by establishing the historical context of the work discussed, she ends it with a look at problems in the eighties for the women's movement and performance art. "How can we sustain our energies, and in what direction should we move and act? ... Feminist performance art offers a highly imaginative form, to men as well as women, for using art and learning how to live in such a difficult and frightening world." Throughout the essay she emphasizes the process orientation of performance art, its useful synthesis of a variety of art forms and the open boundaries of the form. Perhaps it is the art form most accomodating to the conjunction of life and art. In addition to Roth's essay, The Amazing Decade includes a detailed chronology of performance art set in the context of significant historical events and developments in the women's movement since 1956; an extensive (although incomplete) bibliography on the artists featured in the book, and individual profiles on thirty-seven artists who were featured in an exhibit of women performance artists organized for the Women's Caucus for Art...

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