Catherine Wood – författare

Stunningly beautiful, deeply puzzling, profoundly moving or intensely unsettling – performance art can evoke a wide variety of responses. In this important and richly illustrated book, Catherine Wood, one of the world’s leading curators and writers on the subject, provides the broadest and most up-to-date survey published in recent years.Wood proposes performance not as a genre of art separate from object-making but as an attitude that has infiltrated the entire terrain of contemporary art. From the musical-theatricals of Marvin-Gaye Chetwynd to the public encounters created by Tino Seghal and the social activism of Tania Bruguera, a hugely divergent set of practices has emerged in the past twenty to thirty years which embrace the worlds of sculpture and painting, spectacle and protest. Examining in turn individual, social and object-based approaches in the field, Wood first examines the influential performance art of the 1960s to 1980s: the body art of the Viennese actionists; the raw performances of Yoko Ono and Chris Burden; and the experiments of the Japanese Gutai group among others. She then explores how these sources have been revisited, reformed or rejected by contemporary artists in the twenty-first century.This impressive book encompasses international artists who fall outside the traditional European and North American focus, giving the reader the broadest and most up-to-date insight into the subject yet published.

Mike Kelley (1954–2012) is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time, with an irreverent and visionary practice that spanned and mixed performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, photography, sound, text and sculpture.Ghost and Spirit looks at his dense and colourful body of work, from early performances, to his iconic stuffed toy works, and on to his explorations of history, memory and trauma as they haunt our experiences of school or family. Asking prescient questions about how to exist among a world of media images, about the role of art and the artist, and about embodiment, Kelley adopted different personas and mediums, deliberately deflating his own status, and from his own position as a white, heterosexual man in postmodern, capitalist America, he challenged assumptions about identity, class and institutional authority.Bringing together a range of diverse perspectives which summon his ‘lingering influence’ (to paraphrase the artist), this book captures the complexity and persistent relevance of Kelley’s extraordinary practice.