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  • Re Re Re:The Originality of Performance and Other (Post)Modernist Myths
  • Jennie Klein (bio)
BOOK REVIEWED: Perform, Repeat, Record, edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield. Bristol, UK and Chicago: Live Art Development Agency/Intellect, 2012.

We are now at a juncture in which scholars, curators, and institutions representing the fields of theatre and art, and where appropriate, dance and film, should take the opportunity to enlarge their separate histories.

Bonnie Marranca, "Being Here—PAJ at 100," (2012)

The call for an interdisciplinary history of performance by Marranca initially seems rather astonishing, until one surveys the field. After all, has not performance art/live art always engaged with transdisciplinary tactics that utilize theatre, visual art, dance, and media culture without necessarily being one thing or the other? Certainly PAJ has actively promoted the interrelationship of performance and visual art, bringing together the work of theorists, theatre critics, avant-garde artists, and playwrights in one journal, often in the same issue. And yet, live art/performance, in spite of claims to the contrary, insists on a genealogy that is rooted in the visual arts, and, in spite of the art world's embrace of postmodern theory and the cult of (un)originality, makes claims for the ontological uniqueness of the performance act. In the performance/live art mythos of the visual arts, the audience is key to the meaning of the work. In order for an action or event to actually "be" a performance, an audience has to be there, the performance has to be unique, and it has to take place just once.

Indeed, recent attempts to define what makes live art different from everything else have resorted to suggesting what live art is not rather than what it is. In keeping with the counter-cultural spirit in which live art/performance art first appeared in the late sixties and early seventies, the theorists/apologists for live art have embraced a definition of this work that emphasizes its resistance to reproduction and commodification along with its ability to challenge cultural and societal norms. Taking his cue from Lois Keidan, the founder, along with Catherine Ugwu, of the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), who had suggested in a strategy document written for Arts Council England in 1991 that "Live Art represents a challenge to received [End Page 108] ways of doing, thinking and seeing; a rejection of single art form practice; a way of opening frontiers to any political, social or cultural agenda," Adrian Heathfield, co-editor with Amelia Jones of Perform, Repeat, Record, has suggested that live artists "take the spectator into conditions of immediacy where attention is heightened, the sensory relation charged, and the workings of thought agitated."1

This definition of live art, promulgated quite successfully by the London-based LADA (and publisher of this book) and a number of academics, artists, and critics (including Heathfield), has served to cement the notion of live art as singularly unique and unable to be reproduced, a challenge to contemporary cultural norms of simulation and hyper-reality. However, the rapidly growing trend for avant-garde performance reenactment suggests that the situation is otherwise. Performances premised upon audience participation, delegated performances such as those conceptualized by Tino Sehgal, Vanessa Beecroft, and Francis Alÿs, performances commissioned for the openings of art fairs and biennials, and reenactments and reperformances of canonical work from the seventies and eighties by artists such as Allan Kaprow, Linda M. Montano, Carolee Schnee-mann, and Yoko Ono belie the claims made for performance's originality.

An entire industry of reenactments and reperformances has developed, particularly in the U.S., in conjunction with blockbuster museum exhibitions and gala performance events such as the biannual Performa organized by Roselee Goldberg. Live art/performance (the terms are used somewhat interchange-ably), in such situations, is in danger of becoming yet another commodity spectacle emptied of meaning or significance—an image, like many others, designed to lull the masses into complacency while giving them the fiction of viewing agency. Certainly, the canonization of the artist Marina Abramovic; for Seven Easy Pieces (performed at the Guggenheim as part of Performa 2005) and the MoMA retrospective The Artist is Present (2011), during which...

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