Jennie Klein – författare

This global anthology offers a constellation of practices, genealogies, contexts, movements, events, artists, theories, and debates around performance art and its meaning, current and future research, and emerging critical discourse.

At the core of this collection is the understanding that performance art and its organizations emerged globally, without a single point of origin. Each chapter engages artists and practices from different moments and regions, foregrounding how cultural and social conditions shape distinct motivations, methods, relations, and interpretive frameworks. The first section of the book is devoted to multiple genealogies, rather than one central history, of performance art’s formations throughout every inhabited continent on earth. The second section explores performance art as a situated practice of ethical engagement, political critique, and worldbuilding across diverse contexts. Chapters in the third section trace performance art’s afterlives in dynamic interfaces that reshape histories, challenge dominant narratives, and persistently reconfigure relationships among bodies, actions, and institutions. The final section of the book offers a constellation of performance art documents and microhistories from global contexts. Considerable space in this book is devoted to the institutional infrastructure for performance art, including organizations, spaces, publications, and festivals.

The book is of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, performance art, conceptual art, art history, performance studies, anthropology, curatorial studies, theatre, dance, music, critical theory, and photography.

This global anthology offers a constellation of practices, genealogies, contexts, movements, events, artists, theories, and debates around performance art and its meaning, current and future research, and emerging critical discourse.

At the core of this collection is the understanding that performance art and its organizations emerged globally, without a single point of origin. Each chapter engages artists and practices from different moments and regions, foregrounding how cultural and social conditions shape distinct motivations, methods, relations, and interpretive frameworks. The first section of the book is devoted to multiple genealogies, rather than one central history, of performance art’s formations throughout every inhabited continent on earth. The second section explores performance art as a situated practice of ethical engagement, political critique, and worldbuilding across diverse contexts. Chapters in the third section trace performance art’s afterlives in dynamic interfaces that reshape histories, challenge dominant narratives, and persistently reconfigure relationships among bodies, actions, and institutions. The final section of the book offers a constellation of performance art documents and microhistories from global contexts. Considerable space in this book is devoted to the institutional infrastructure for performance art, including organizations, spaces, publications, and festivals.

The book is of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, performance art, conceptual art, art history, performance studies, anthropology, curatorial studies, theatre, dance, music, critical theory, and photography.

This book focuses on the performance art of Marilyn Arsem, an internationally acclaimed performance artist known for her innovative and experimental work. Arsem’s work addresses women’s history and myth-making capacities, the potency of site and geography, the idea of the audience as witnesses and the intimacy of one-to-one works.

One of the most prolific performance artists working in the United States today, Arsem performs carefully choreographed durational actions that are developed site-responsively and range from deceptively simple interventions to elaborately orchestrated actions. This edited volume seeks to extend Arsem’s legacy beyond the audiences of her live performances and enter her work into the lexicon of the art world. Accompanied by 200 images, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of performance studies, feminist performance, feminist art history and performance history. It will also contribute to the history of alternative spaces and galleries, which is only now being written.

I have had the privilege of knowing Marilyn for over 30 years. Her work has given me so many epiphanies about live art, time-based art practice and durational performance practice. How and why do you choose a single action and enact it over an extended period of time? How do you respond to site and create a sacred meditational zone; a reflexive space about the human condition? And most importantly, how do you teach future generations about the importance of living while making art as a spiritual and philosophical practice? This book is yet another example of Arsem’s legacy. Fundamental, I’d say.

Watching Marilyn Arsem perform can be a slow, careful, vulnerable and heart-stoppingly profound experience. To see her is to know better the complex, intermingling particularities of body, space, time, being and action. Reading this comprehensive, lucidly written and deeply insightful book – the first significant publication on Arsem’s practice as a performance artist – will enable new perspectives on a major artist’s work. It also sheds vivid light upon enduring themes for the critical encounter with art: duration and doing, materiality and nothingness, truth and representation, commitment and experiment, togetherness and solitude, experience and endurance.