Protagonist? Irruption? Squatter? Successively celebrated, rejected, ignored, and rediscovered, “performance” as a term and practice is a vexed and provocative domain within a number of fields. The publication of two new books—Shannon Jackson’s Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge, 2010) and Judith Rodenbeck’s Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (MIT, 2011)—provides the opportunity for a conversation about the possibilities and perils of performance as an aesthetic and social practice. The authors sit down with Pablo Helguera, André Lepecki, Frazer Ward, and Marianne Weems to think together about how performance may be engaged and reinterpreted from different vantage points, whether from the perspective of art history, experimental theater, expanded choreography, or socially-engaged art.
Literature programs at The Kitchen are made possible with generous support from the Axe-Houghton Foundation and with public funds from The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
Photo: Courtesy of Temporary Services, from 11 People 16 Spaces / How To Guerilla Art, 2006.
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