RoseLee Goldberg Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (1979)
I first picked this up at the age of sixteen or thereabouts during the initial thrill of having discovered art. I was nuts for Dada and Futurism, and this covered aspects of both whilst seemingly describing a line of continuity leading up to what was the then present day and my beloved Throbbing Gristle in their Coum incarnation. Strangely, I never actually realised I no longer had a copy of this until Amazon suggested I might want to buy it because I'd also purchased a chocolate frying pan, The Best of the Barron Knights on eight track cartridge, and The Purple Revolution: The Year That Changed Everything by Nigel Farage*. I have no memory of getting rid of my original copy, or of ever having declared it surplus to requirements, so maybe I simply lost it or lent it to someone and never got it back.
Reacquainting myself with the thing, the first surprise is that I realise I've never actually read it all the way through. I certainly dipped in here and there, but there are entire chapters I'm only now reading for the first time. This is probably because I didn't read so much as I do now, and my reading was a little too focussed for its own good. I wasn't particularly interested in broadening horizons so much as filling out the details with which I was already more or less familiar. That said, this re-reading - if we can really call it that - hasn't really changed the initial impression I'd formed through reading the Dada and Futurist chapters followed by just looking at the pictures for the remaining hundred or so pages. I've never been able to work up much enthusiasm for the Bauhaus or its theatrical experiments, or indeed much of the history of modernism from about 1940 onwards; and now having made the effort to actually read about it all in some depth, it still seems mostly as though it's all been a waste of time. Here, for example, is Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus choreographer as a character called the Turk in his Triadic Ballet of 1922.
I first picked this up at the age of sixteen or thereabouts during the initial thrill of having discovered art. I was nuts for Dada and Futurism, and this covered aspects of both whilst seemingly describing a line of continuity leading up to what was the then present day and my beloved Throbbing Gristle in their Coum incarnation. Strangely, I never actually realised I no longer had a copy of this until Amazon suggested I might want to buy it because I'd also purchased a chocolate frying pan, The Best of the Barron Knights on eight track cartridge, and The Purple Revolution: The Year That Changed Everything by Nigel Farage*. I have no memory of getting rid of my original copy, or of ever having declared it surplus to requirements, so maybe I simply lost it or lent it to someone and never got it back.
Reacquainting myself with the thing, the first surprise is that I realise I've never actually read it all the way through. I certainly dipped in here and there, but there are entire chapters I'm only now reading for the first time. This is probably because I didn't read so much as I do now, and my reading was a little too focussed for its own good. I wasn't particularly interested in broadening horizons so much as filling out the details with which I was already more or less familiar. That said, this re-reading - if we can really call it that - hasn't really changed the initial impression I'd formed through reading the Dada and Futurist chapters followed by just looking at the pictures for the remaining hundred or so pages. I've never been able to work up much enthusiasm for the Bauhaus or its theatrical experiments, or indeed much of the history of modernism from about 1940 onwards; and now having made the effort to actually read about it all in some depth, it still seems mostly as though it's all been a waste of time. Here, for example, is Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus choreographer as a character called the Turk in his Triadic Ballet of 1922.
Just fucking no.
Art lost something about half way through the twentieth century, and I'm still trying to work out what it was.
To briefly digress, reading Performance felt very much like following up the first half of the story described in Fight Your Own War, edited by Jennifer Wallis. Fight Your Own War represents an attempt to define power electronics and noise music in an historical context, and the often confrontational performances it describes seem very clearly descended from the outrages of the Futurists, Dadaists and others; and then we have the intervening years of Yoko Ono belching into a top hat for the edification of an audience of mildly distracted art connoisseurs; and I know this image is wrong, but that's nevertheless how it looks to me.
The performance which appealed to me was an expression of some broader tendency with which it shared a common purpose, and a common purpose beyond simply adding the experience of new art to the canon. The problem is that the same can probably be said of quite a lot of the stuff I regard as more or less pointless, and no quality I appreciate in the art of which I approve seems to be exclusive to the same; so I guess it's just personal taste, or even prejudice. Oh well.
Goldberg's book is firstly a roughly chronological roster of who did what and when, with some of the why. It doesn't go into great depth, but then performance was only barely established as an art form of a standing potentially equal to painting and sculpture back in 1979, so the author can probably be forgiven the occasional lapse into shorthand; and it's hardly her fault that the Bauhaus and all which came in its wake was one colossal yawn.
*: Not really.
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