Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983 by Peggy Phelan (review)

The electrically charged cover photo of Peggy Phelan’s new edited collection offers a glimpse at a side of Los Angeles that one rarely sees in Hollywood movies. Harry Gamboa, Jr.’s Decoy Gang War Victim (1974) is, however, no less fictionalized. Part of a series entitled “No Movies,” it depicts the artist Gronk (Glugio Nicandro) lying motionless in the street, his body flanked by neon flares. An attempt by the radical Chicano art collective, Asco (of which Gamboa and Gronk are founding members), to critique such local media representations, the image restages the stereotypical association of Chicano youth with the story of “another gang death” routinely told on the nightly news. Gamboa’s photo does not merely represent the recent excavation of a mislaid artefact of LA art history but allegorizes, in its treatment of representational violence, the problematic at the heart of Phelan’s latest effort: the dearth of serious critical attention paid to the rich history of live art in Southern California. Phelan’s is also a scene that has, in a certain sense, been left for dead.

“Why then have critics and scholars been slow to consider this extraordinarily fecund location in the history of art?” Phelan asks in Live Art in LA(5), a book that forms part of the Getty Institute’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, which generated a series of exhibitions, performances, and research projects about the greater Los Angeles area. Noting the dominant role that the East Coast has played in the story of U.S. art history, Phelan laments that there has been comparatively little ink spilled over the West Coast’s participation in the development of live art in the 1970s and early 1980s, notwithstanding important appraisals by critics Linda Frye Burnham, Darlene Tong, Moira Roth, and Meiling Cheng. Phelan’s capacious editorial sensibility and decisive introductory essay set the terms for compelling elaborations by Michael Ned Holte, Suzanne Lacy and Jennifer Flores Sternad, and Amelia Jones. These contributions weave together art and performance criticism, local history, artist testimony and memoir, and first-person accounts of live artworks to create a vivid composite image of artistic production during the period that was “raw, innovative, and challenging to document and assess” (3), marked by the institutional violences that informed the artists’ creative processes.

Many of the artists working in this period set the agenda for performance art for the decades to follow. These include founders of postmodern dance like Simone Forti, Anna Halprin, and Yvonne Rainer (who established the San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop); pioneers of body art, including Barbara T. Smith, Linda Montano, Kim Jones, Chris Burden, and Paul McCarthy; crucial figures in the development of African American art, such as Bettye Saar, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Ulysses Jenskins, and David Hammons; and architects of the feminist art movement, such as Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Faith Wilding, Leslie Labowitz, Jerri Allyn, and Arlene Raven, among innumerable others. Speaking to Lynn Hershman Leeson, in 2005, Chicago observed that “there’s no way the feminist art movement could have started on the east coast. It could only have started on the west coast because there was a tradition on the west coast of inventing yourself, and one could only do that outside the shadow of the European art tradition” (5).

Radicalized by political concerns – social injustices, such as the role of the United States in Vietnam or the treatment of women, Blacks, Chicanos/as, and gays and lesbians in the United States and California, in particular – live art, in this period, was characterized by its explicit coalitional politics and embodied activism. The period was further characterized by the cross-pollination enabled by the networked social structure of the LA art community and the crucial role that art schools and institutional affiliations played in facilitating this communal culture (throughout the 1970s) and in institutionalizing its practices (by the early 1980s). The historical record of these artists’ works was sustained only...