Performance / Media / Art / Culture

Jacki Apple

Description

Experience the interdisciplinary performance scene of the 1980s and beyond through the eyes of one of its most compelling witnesses. Jacki Apple’s Performance / Media / Art / Culture traces performance art, multimedia theatre, audio arts and dance in the United States from 1983 to the present. Showcasing 35 years of Apple’s critical essays and reviews, the collection explores the rise and diversification of intermedia performance; how new technologies (or rehashed old technologies) influence American culture and contemporary life; the interdependence of pop and performance culture; and the politics of art and the performance of politics.

 

Apple writes with a journalist’s attention to the immediacy of account and a historian’s attention to structural aesthetic and personal networks, resulting in a volume brimming with big ideas but grounded in concentrated reviews of individual performances. Many of the pieces featured in this collection originally appeared in small press journals and magazines that have now gone out of print. Preserved and republished here for current and future readers, they offer a rich portrait of performance at the end of the millennium.

Foreword by Marina LaPalma

PART I - THE TV GENERATION: MEDIA CULTURE AND PERFORMANCE

PART II - SPECTACLE, FILM, COLLABORATION

PART III - CROSSING CULTURES: SOUND, SPACE, GESTURE

PART IV - HISTORY RESTAGED

PART V - PROPHESIES PAST TENSE

PART VI - POLITICS OF CULTURE

PART VII - CONCERNING NATURE

Afterword: A Retrospective View

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• Performing Arts
• Rudy Pérez
• Theatre
• Terry Allen
• The Killing Fields
• Performance art
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Dance
• Art
• General
• Radio
• Yoshi Oida
• Performance

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789380866
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS
Cover and layout design: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover photo: Malcolm Dubliner
Production editor: Jelena Stanovnik
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78938-085-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-087-3
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78938-086-6
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK.
To find out about all our publications, please visit www.intellectbooks.com .
There, you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
This is a peer-reviewed publication
For Rachel R.
In Memoriam
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD by Marina LaPalma
THE TV GENERATION: MEDIA CULTURE AND PERFORMANCE

Performance in the Eighties: The TV Generation (1984)
Psycho-Opera (1987)
Commentary Intermedia: Performance and Video (1983)
Sex and Technology: The Politics of Intimacy (1990)
The Making of Cambodia: Spalding Gray and The Killing Fields (1985)
Terry Allen’s Radio Cinema (2000/2018)
The Life and Times of Lin Hixson: The LA Years (1991)
SPECTACLE, FILM, COLLABORATION

Time, Space, and Questions of Otherness (1989)
Time Lost/Time Found (2017)
Journeys to Heaven and Hell (2015)
Life, Art, and Death in Multimedia Experimental Theater (2011)
Light Energy, Dark Matter (2009/2015)
Wrestling with an Age That Won’t Give Back (1985)
CROSSING CULTURES: SOUND, SPACE, GESTURE

Radio Art: The Coming Sonic Boom (1990)
The Aural Stage (1991)
Yoshi Oida: Interrogations (1990)
Performance and the Art of Conversation (2015)
Listening to the Universe (1990)
Urban Bush Women (1987)
Tarika Sammy (1993)
Rudy Perez Performance Ensemble: Made In LA (1991)
Lula Washington: LA Contemporary Dance Theater (1989)
Fulfillment in The Empty Room (2012)
Peripheral Visions: Perspectives on Culture, Media, and Performance (2017)
Faustin Linyekula’s Journey from Darkness to Light (2017)
HISTORY RESTAGED

Plato’s Symposium (1986)
Tao, Mao, Now! (1991)
The Sound of History Dreaming the Future (1991)
Dancing on History’s Grave (2014)
Dancing on History’s Grave: Part Two (2014)
Mining the Past to Change the Future (2017)
1969 Speaks For Itself (2018)
Staging Politics: Allegory vs. Satire (2017)
My Lai Revisited: One Man’s Journey (2018)
1984 in 2016: Big Brother is Watching
PROPHESIES PAST TENSE

Voyage to Prague (1991)
Slouching Towards the Next Millennium: Some Meditations on Art and the Twenty-First Century (1989)
The Voices of America 1992 (1992)
Commentary Intermedia: A Bright Tomorrow? (1987/89)
Resurrecting the Disappeared: Recollections on Artists in Absentia (1997)
Commerce on the Edge: The Convergence of Art and Entertainment (1986)
Performance Art is Dead: Long Live Performance Art! (1994)
Notes on Performance and Sex(ism) (2015)
POLITICS OF CULTURE

Commentary Intermedia: Interdisciplinary Performance: Collaboration in the 1980s (1985)
Politics, Performance, and the Los Angeles Festival (1991)
Screamers (1991)
Radiodeath: The Expulsion of Art from the Airwaves (1995)
The Artist as Fundamentalist (1992)
A Question of Civic and Public Responsibility (1994)
Beauty and the (Art) Beast (1993)
CONCERNING NATURE

Calls from the Deep (1990)
Reviving the Horror (1986)
Miwa Matreyek’s Self-Made World (2014)
Laurie Anderson’s Dirtday! (2012)
Cynthia Hopkins: This Clement World (2013)
Meredith Monk: On Behalf of Nature (2013)
Entangled Waters (2018)
AFTERWORD: A Retrospective View
APPENDIX I: Publications
APPENDIX II: Performances
NOTES
BIOGRAPHIES
INDEX
Acknowledgements
From the very beginning of this project I was thinking about who would be the perfect editor to collaborate with. Thus a very special thank you to Intellect editor Jelena Stanovnik for giving me the opportunity to choose that person myself. It was my even greater good fortune that Marina La Palma said “Yes!” without a moment’s hesitation. I would like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to her for her extraordinary knowledge and intellect, her keen insights and historical overview, her passion for the subject matter, her skillful guidance, her generosity, and her wit. The care and thoughtfulness she has given to the process of editing this book has been invaluable. Not only has she been a dedicated collaborator and brilliant editor throughout, but a joy and an inspiration to work with.
I dedicate this book in memoriam to my dear friend Rachel Rosenthal whose life and work and values — her commitment to excellence, and her willingness to take on the truly big issues — have been my inspiration from the very beginning of our friendship when I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1981. She was a brilliant artist, writer, performer, and teacher who did not shy away from controversy, and spoke from her heart and mind. She was powerful and she was also funny. She was my soul mother. Her courage, integrity, intelligence, passion, wit, and honesty are all in the image that graces the cover of this book. It speaks for me and for my writing over the four decades represented in this collection. Thank you Rachel for being you, and for being there for me. I miss you every day and honor your memory with gratitude.
Thank you to Linda Burnham for founding High Performance magazine as a forum for performance art and cultural politics and carrying on its editorial mission with courage and integrity. Much appreciation to my editor Steve Durland for providing me with the opportunity to write critical issue-based features, many of which are the heart and soul of this book. Thank you for your maverick spirit and wry sense of humor, for your encouragement and support, for urging me to take on controversial subject matter and write in my own voice, and in so doing making me a stronger writer. I am grateful for my years as a contributing editor/writer (1983–95) and Media Arts Editor (1993–95) and the privilege of having been a part of a groundbreaking publication that facilitated a dynamic discourse for its community of artists and writers.
Much appreciation and many thanks to the late Joan Hugo, the southern California editor for Artweek , and a dear friend. I had barely been in LA for a month when Joan recruited (more like arm-twisted!) me into writing the first of many pieces as a regular contributing writer for her between 1982 and 1990. I am grateful for her persistence and her ongoing support. She was a discerning and knowledgeable critic with an impressive command of language. A master of repartee with a pithy wit and playful sense of humor, she also functioned as the grammar police, keeping us on our toes. I learned how to say a lot in a short space from her. I think she would be proud of this book.
Thank you to Chris Davies, the publisher of Fabrik magazine and website for having given me the uncensored free space to write in my own way about what I want to write about in this past decade. Much appreciation for his support of my column Peripheral Visions: Perspectives on Performance, Media and Culture and providing the online venue, and for granting permission to reprint twenty pieces written between 2011 and 2018.
Thank you to Kelly Hargraves, Marketing & Media Manager for REDCAT, CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts for her ongoing support and assistance in providing me with tickets, photos, and sometimes texts from the works I have written about. And likewise to Holly Wallace, former Communications Manager at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.
Thank you to Jeff McMahon, Lin Hixson, Jill Kroesen, Anna Homler, Leslie Labowitz, Ping Chong, Xiao Ming Xiao, Bruce Odland, and Sam Auinger for digging back into their old files to find photos and color slides of their early work for the photos in this book. Thank you to Kate Noonan for providing images of Rachel Rosenthal. Thank you to Robin Bisio and Ethan Turpin for the video stills from Entangled Waters .
My deepest appreciation to all the artists, performers, writers, and composers who have envisioned and created these works, as well as all the ones covered in the many articles I have written over four decades that we were unable to include in this book.
Finally many, many thanks to Tim Mitchell, Jelena Stanovnik, and James Campbell at Intellect for supporting this book and bringing it to fruition. Thank you for your guidance, your collaborative spirit and openness to ideas, and your wonderfully good manners that helped make it such a pleasure to work with you. Thank you to everyone at Intellect for their patience and consideration in accommodating my design preferences.
With much appreciation to all my readers over the years, and those yet to come.
— Jacki Apple
Foreword by Marina LaPalma
When Jacki Apple asked me to collaborate with her on this book as her editor, I embraced the opportunity. In the 1980s and 1990s she and I attended many of the same performances and wrote for the same publications: Artweek , High Performance , the Los Angeles Weekly , Arts & Architecture , Images and Issues . Sadly, most of those publications are gone, as are the venues in which so many of those works were performed. The writing, however, endures. As writers, we both love language and have deep concerns over its distortion and degradation. As critics we affirm that criticism needs to be part of the dialogue around art; as artists we care deeply about the conditio