Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties
TItle: Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties
Author: Linda Montano
Published: 2000
ISBN: 0520210212
From the introduction:
Shall We Talk? Linda M. Montano performs autobiographical voices
by: Angelika Festa
I like these 2 paragraphs because it gives me ideas for how to think of our own work and its transcription:
p2: “Montano’s talking performances combine the personal stories of each artist with her own performative vision. These performances are restaged in PAT as a “portable exhibition” in the form of an “artist’s book” that is a significant document of an era in American cultural production as well as an addition to Montano’s own work.
Montano’s performance raises complex issues concerning performance as art and as language. These issues include: (bulleted list is mine)
• an emphasis on the vernacular and everyday
• an insistence on the integral relationship b/t art and life
• the indexing of events and concepts
• the use of personae as a way of problematizing issues of identity within performer-audience relationships
• the practice of art as an exploration and critique of the conventions of daily life, rather than as virtuosity and mastery.”
p2: “Performing the autobiographical “voice” is among the more challenging explorations that have shaped the history of American conceptual and performance art since the 1960s. ”
p3: “Artists’ talking performance use language (speech, writing, and reading) as a medium for expression, construction of identity, and social change.”
As a limited pedigree for “talking performance”, the author refers to turn of the 20th century cabaret, Dada, and Surrealists, as well as Gutai, Situationist International, Nouveaux Realistes, Art & Language and Fluxus. She also includes a list of “landmark talking performances” from the US.
p5: “Talking is not neutral; it reveals complex social conditions and power relations.”
READ: Roselee Goldberg essay, “Performance: A Hidden History” reprinted here
p7: “As performance art continued to shift and change throughout the 1980s, it combined elements from the visual, verbal, and performing arts, popular culture, and daily life and used these to introduce the artist’s body and voice as formal art mediums, as ideological constructions, and as political agents.”
p30: “To underscore the integral relationship b/t art and life, Montano calls her work “living art” or “art/life”…Art/life opens up the categories of art by dissolving conceptual, social, and economic boundaries that tend to limit conventional art forms and artistic expressions.
(Note that by the 1960s, these terms had become popular among artists, but the problem of recognizing and evaluating art that appeared to be identical to life remained unresolved for many audiences and critics.)
Here we are in Chicago. It’s raining again. It has been such a wet summer.