T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko – författare

Fifty Key Performance Artists is a critical introduction to some of the most influential and innovative performance artists from the emergence of the genre post-World War II to the present, whose work has largely been underrecognized and underacknowledged within an English-language context.The collection compiles an international and innovative index of artists who, primarily through body art and live performance, have shaped the possibilities of the field. It includes artists whose now-canonical work defined performance art through feminist body art, interventionist public art, and durational performance, as well as new artists who are redefining the genre through emerging technologies and an explicit alignment with social activism. Artists indexed include Arahmaiani, Rebecca Belmore, Rocío Boliver, Lorenza Böttner, Disabled Avant-Garde, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi aka crazinisT artist, Emily Jacir, Lee Wen, Lorraine O’Grady, Graciela Ovejero Postigo, Tracey Rose, Seiji Shimoda, Leafā Wilson aka Olga Krause and Marcía X. Each entry considers the artist’s body of work in its historical, cultural, and political context, and a map at the end provides additional artists whose work is artistically and historically relational to those included.This is an essential survey of performance art for scholars and students in visual, theatre, and performance studies and for those interested in matters of the body in performance, reception theory, and live art.

Fifty Key Performance Artists is a critical introduction to some of the most influential and innovative performance artists from the emergence of the genre post-World War II to the present, whose work has largely been underrecognized and underacknowledged within an English-language context.The collection compiles an international and innovative index of artists who, primarily through body art and live performance, have shaped the possibilities of the field. It includes artists whose now-canonical work defined performance art through feminist body art, interventionist public art, and durational performance, as well as new artists who are redefining the genre through emerging technologies and an explicit alignment with social activism. Artists indexed include Arahmaiani, Rebecca Belmore, Rocío Boliver, Lorenza Böttner, Disabled Avant-Garde, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi aka crazinisT artist, Emily Jacir, Lee Wen, Lorraine O’Grady, Graciela Ovejero Postigo, Tracey Rose, Seiji Shimoda, Leafā Wilson aka Olga Krause and Marcía X. Each entry considers the artist’s body of work in its historical, cultural, and political context, and a map at the end provides additional artists whose work is artistically and historically relational to those included.This is an essential survey of performance art for scholars and students in visual, theatre, and performance studies and for those interested in matters of the body in performance, reception theory, and live art.

Beginning with Richard Drew’s controversial photograph of a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, Learning How to Fall investigates the changing relationship between world events and their subsequent documentation, asking: Does the mediatization of the event overwhelm the fact of the event itself? How does the mode by which information is disseminated alter the way in which we perceive such information? How does this impact upon our memory of an event?T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko posits contemporary art and performance as not only a stylized re-envisioning of daily life but, inversely, as a viable means by which one might experience and process real-world political and social events. This approach combines two concurrent and contradictory trends in aesthetics, narrative, and dramaturgy: the dramatization of real-world events so as to broaden the commercial appeal of those events in both mainstream and alternative media, and the establishment of a more holistic relationship between politically and aesthetically motivated modes of disseminating and processing information.By presenting engaging and diverse case studies from both the art world and popular culture – including Aliza Shvarts’s censored senior thesis at Yale University, Kerry Skarbakka’s provocative photographs of falling, Didier Morelli’s crawl through Toronto, and Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom – Learning How to Fall creates a new understanding of the relationship between the event and its documentation, where even the truth of an event might be called into question.