Show Cause: Unconscious Partisanship in the History of Performance Art. - Review - book review

Jack Anderson. Art Without Boundaries. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. 360 pp., 36 ills. $34.95 paper.

Jill Johnston. Marmalade Me. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. 334 pp., 13 ills. $19.9g paper.

RoseLee Goldberg. Performance: Live Art Since 1960. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998. 240 pp., 123 color ills., 209 b/w. $60.

Sally Banes. Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in Nov York 1976-85. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. 312 pp. $47.50, $16.96 paper.

Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds. The Ends of Performance. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 384 pp., 14 ills. $18.95 paper.

On Friday, March 12, 1999, The New School in New York held a symposium entitled "The Resurrection of Live Art: what kind of life will it be?" Lorraine O'Grady moderated, and panehsts included Coco Fusco, RoseLee Goldberg, Kathy O'Dell, and Martha Wilson. The press release described the symposium's focus as: "Actions [ldots] performance [ldots] performance art [ldots] live art [ldots] we still don't know what to call it. But we do know it is one of the twentieth century's most influential art forms and that 1998 was its critical year." Publications offering historical perspectives on "live art" proliferated during this year. Among them were books by Goldberg, O'Dell, and the Winter 1998 "Performance Art" issue of this very journal, edited by Wilson, director of Franklin Furnace. What this proliferation highlights is the problem inherent in any historical enterprise involving contemporary art, exacerbated in this case because of current crises in historicism and criticism. The books considered here demonstrate the difficulties and challenges of dealing fairly with an evanescent art form.

Let's begin with Marmalade Me, the field's reputed classic. Both Deborah Jowitt (in her new introduction) and Sally Banes (in her afterword) immediately assume that Marmalade Me is central to any discussion of the art of the 1960s. And for those of us who have a dog-eared copy of the old Dutton paperback, Marmalade Me has long been an important source of opinion regarding that period. Certainly, Johnston's book consolidated the reputation of certain artists, most notably Yvonne Rainer. After the period covered by Marmalade Me, Rainer gave up her career as a choreographer and has devoted herself to filmmaking. Yet her importance to the development of "live art" has been indisputable because of the printed record (of which Marmalade Me was a prime exponent). And there weren't that many such records. So for those interested in postmodern dance and intermedia, Johnston's book has been a veritable bible. Because of this, Johnston subsequently was regarded in avant-garde circles as an oracle, and therein lies the rub.

In the original edition much was made of Johnston's creation of herself as the heroine of her own life. In the intervening years, Johnston has attempted to resurrect her career as an art critic, a career cultivating in Secret Lives in Art (1994) and Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (1996), two volumes which might most charitably be described as misguided. The expanded Marmalade Me is certainly welcome, because more information on such events as the original Judson Dance Theater concert ("Democracy," 38-40) is definitely needed at this time, when the history of Performance Art is being historically defined. And the essays included in the expanded Marmalade Me reveal dear and succinct writing, analytic discussion, and intelligent reasoning. In these essays, Johnston emerges as one of the finest dance critics this country has produced, on a par with Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce (though radically different from them) And "radical" is a good description for Johnston, as her prose comes gradually unhinged in t he course of her essay--a disintegration mirroring the political radicalism that swept through this country in the late 1960s.

If the expansion of Marmalade Me is so welcome (and it is), what's the problem? We can sum it up 55 "20/20 hindsight." When Johnston first collected the essays for the original edition, she made sure her choices emphasized herself, and she included those reviews that accentuated her friendship with the artists she felt, at the time, were of great importance (Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Meredith Monk). Here's an example: in 1971, Trisha Brown's career had not reached anywhere near its peak, and in the original Marmalade Me, Johnston's only references to Brown appeared in her reviews of group activities, such as the essays "Photoplay" and "The Unhappy Spectator." Now the new, improved edition includes several more reviews in which Brown figures, malcing it seem as if Johnston were prescient in her insight into Brown's artistry. Of course Johnston's comments in the 1960s on Brown are smart and insightful, but Brown has survived as the only choreographer from the original Judson Dance Theater group to maintain a sustained and continuing career in dance. Johnston, who has always posed as the critic as cowgirl, ready to take on all comers at high noon, has a right to attempt to salvage her reputation. But because she so frequently has thrust her subjectivity at us, we have the right to wonder what she's trying to slip over on us this time, as we imbibe her marvelous record of the tumultuous arts of the 1960s.