Envisioning high performance - periodical on performance art

The only magazine devoted exclusively to performance art, High Performance ran as a quarterly from 1978 to 1997. Based in Los Angeles, in the midst of a burgeoning performance art movement, the magazine provided a forum for both local and international artists, many of whom in the years beyond the 1970s and early 1980s became known as prominent and highly influential members of the vanguard. A significant document of a particular era in American cultural production, High Performance was central to the development, expansion, and legitimization of performance art as a medium distinct from theater, creating both an audience and a venue for the dissemination of live experimental and conceptual, body-based work.

Variously referred to as body art, bodyworks, live art, living art, and action art, performance art, as it came to be called, (1) was, for much of the 1970s, an art form with no consistent designation and, thus, no progressive discourse. Artists and critics alike reacted vigorously and negatively to the new art form, an unrecognized discipline flourishing on both the East and West Coasts. In 1974, Los Angeles--based painter Walter Gabrielson published one such diatribe in Art in America:

Today's Mainstream kick--Process-Conceptual-Performance, etc.--continues the slide in new and more fascinating vulgarities; we must now wade through the spectacle of thousands of little people doing their gawd-awful trendy "pieces." It is all so easy to do. At least in the (gasp) past you had to go out and make a painting or something... (2)

High Performance provided the necessary critical conditions needed to foster a fruitful discourse, rather than a set of reactionary responses. With no hope of coverage in mainstream art periodicals such as Artforum, Arts, and Art in America, Los Angeles--based performance artists were eager for information and discourses regarding other cities and outside scenes. Without a network of distributors and media organizations, video documentation was less easily duplicated and disseminated in the 1970s than it is today

Art historian RoseLee Goldberg's volumes, Performance: Live Art from 1909 to the Present (1979, revised and enlarged in 1988 and 1996) and Performance: Live Art since 1960 (1998), offer a groundbreaking history of twentieth-century performance. Full of color reproductions, the latter work is one of the most evocative sources for replicating the energy and feel of live performance and remains a popular reference book for art professionals. As the primary reference volumes on the subject of performance, Goldberg's volumes are invested with the authority of classic texts. The omission of High Performance from them is part of the larger erasure that contributes to the unstable legacy of 1970s and 1980s California feminist performance. (Two recent anthologies document a great deal of recent and historical performance: Amelia Jones's and Tracy Warr's The Artist's Body, 2000, and Peggy Phelan's and Helena Reckitt's Art and Feminism, 2001, both part of the Themes and Movements series produced by the German art publi sher Phaidon.)

With the commencement of High Performance, publisher, founder, and editor Linda Frye Burnham invented a standard format for the documentation and dissemination of live and ephemeral artworks, creating single- or double-paged spreads that paired a photograph with an artist-supplied text chronicling the live event. Operating on an open submission policy from its founding in 1978 until 1982, Burnham published any artist who could provide black-and-white photographic documentation, dates, and a description of the performance. The inclusion of an original text served to illuminate the ideas presented in the reproduced photographs. Single or serial, photographs create a compressed narrative within the space of a few frames. Without a written explanation, such documents are compromised by the potential misrecognition of the aesthetic motivations and impulses guiding the work. Through the publication of artists' texts, High Performance provided artists with the means of self-representation, insisting that they use t heir own voices, rather than those of critics, to describe and document both their works and their intentions. Introducing the magazine and its ambitions to Yoko Ono, Burnham wrote:

Perhaps I should tell you that our first concern with this magazine is to let the artist's voice be heard. We have featured interviews with and documentation by: Carolee Schneemann, Chris Burden, Les Levine, the Kipper Kids, Hermann Nitsch, and many others, including the famous and the newcomers. Among our concerns are a democratic approach to selection and editing, and a well-balanced mix of male and female artists. (3)

Many of the texts came in the form of original handwritten or typed scripts, which often included artists' notations, sketches, and greetings. Known as the Artist's Chronicle, this documentation comprised the bulk of the magazine and was published alongside interviews with individual artists, articles, news, and occasional fiction, poetry, and artists' projects. Historically important, the Artist's Chronicle contains some of the only existing description and imagery of many early, key performances, many of which were not videotaped. Documenting anywhere from fifteen to eighty artists each issue, High Performance provided a broad range of different kinds of performance, work that varied widely in content and form, from autobiographical monologues, to collective, activist practice, to time-based, endurance performance, providing a depth and breadth previously unseen and undocumented. As Burnham notes: