Cal Books

C A L B0 0 Bssooooenoooe Performance Anthology Source Book for a Decade of California Performance Art Edited by Carl E. Loeffler with Darlene Tong Contemporary Art Press P.O. Box 3123, Rincon Annex San Francisco, CA 94119 Bob & Bob The First Five Years 1975-1980 By Linda Frye Burnham Astro Artz 240 So. Broadway Los Angeles, CA 90012 whos listening out there david antin Sun & Moon Press 4330 Hartwick Road College Park MD 20740 Arthur T. Johnson, a British visitor to California in 1910, "detected something elusively evil" there, reports Kevin Starr in 108 ROBERT COE his book, Americans and the CaliforniaDream: as if freedom, becoming license, were [sic] about to writhe back and gorge upon itself. Beneath the sense that all was possible, that anything went, lurked a baffled yearning for limits which in its frustration threatened to turn any minute into a repressive counter-force that denied the myth of liberation through which Californians mythically defined themselves." Johnson interpreted California's emptiness as license, and perhaps he's not off the mark. Freedom writhing back to devour its own tail: not a bad description of much of the work documented in Performance Anthology , a history of California events, actions and performance practice in the '70s. We presume that the relationship Johnson John Duncan, Scare. L.A. 1976.Performing spontaneously for 2 successive nights, Duncan rang the doorbell of his friends and upon (their) answering, shot them with a blank pistol. This work was in response to Duncan being held up himself. From Performance Anthology sensed between license and evil-Ortega y Gasset considered this the fundamental conflict facing western culture as the result of modernism-is enfeebled by the sheer energy and revelation, harmless violence and self-reflection, banality and high spirits of California performance's decade-long hijinks. We might better ponder how California produced Chris Burden as well as Charles Manson, the Ant Farm and "The Love Boat," Bob & Bob and Werner Erhard. Beats me why I think about it; as edited by Loeffler and Tong, PA doesn't touch on theoretical issues, even more obvious ones suggested by its regional bias. PA is largely just a chronological account of a remarkable body of activity by such groups and artists as the Ant Farm, Bob & Bob, Chris Burden, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Allan Kaprow, the Kipper Kids, Paul McCarthy , Linda Montano, Bruce Nauman, Bonnie Sherk, T.R. Uthco, and many others. Regionalism may seem like a queer mantle to hang on the sloped shoulders of performance art anyhow, but as PA makes clear, performance (in California as elsewhere) is a homemade form, drawing on popular performing styles, political documentary, games, techniques for selfexposure , and expanding developments in 20th century visual arts. The four critical essays-by Loeffler, Linda Frye Burnham, Judith Barry, and Moira Roth-are thematic and descriptive, failing to qualify trends or place events in the perspective of an evolving/devolving form. The feminist viewpoint of Barry's and Roth's essays are the most clearly drawn, principally reflecting on performance's role in communitybuilding -which is the purpose this "sourcebook" most clearly serves. For outsiders, PerformanceAnthology is little more than an incredibly thorough collation of what Tom Marioni, curator of the ierry tox. uorner Pusn. Moose PaInay, s.F. 1970. From Performance Anthology. Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco , calls "an age (in art) of theatricality and decoration." Johnson's "repressive counterforce" is called "art " or "society,'' or at best "male oppression." That's pretty general thinking. In the day of the locust, where is the history of performance art's necessity? Even the vitality of pure gratuitousness deserves better accounting. Bob & Bob (The FirstFive Years) is a paean to just how great those "art" guys really are. What they do is made for Linda Frye Burnham 's pseudo-journalistic treatment-especially Bob & Bob's business merger/artistic counter-attack on the city of Beverly Hills. The transcendent irony of the unbroken pose: throwing the hip image of progressive/commercial L.A. back in L.A.'s face might legitimately strike some people as an irrelevance, but the joke is so thorough, so unrepentant, so insincere-you just got to laugh, you know what I mean? The colored...