A Decade of Performance
ArtWeek , November 15, 1980, p.3

Performance Anthology: A Source Book for a Decade of California Performance Art, edited by Carl Loeffler, San Francisco, La Mamelle, 1980

La Mamelle's Performance Anthology: A Source Book for a Decade of California Performance Art is an unusual hybrid. It marries the traditional genre of "sources and documents"--those collections of letters, public records and contemporary commentary designed as subtext for art production of bygone eras--with the photography book, the annotated bibliography and the volume of essays. It augments a thin body of performance literature (Rose Lee Goldberg's general Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present and Art Metropole's European- and New York-oriented Performance by Artists) with a comprehensive survey delimited by specific geographic and temporal boundaries. This is nothing if not an ambitious undertaking and one which results in a text at times as dense as the Manhattan phone directory.

Performance Anthology's unusual form, however, seems appropriate for its unconventional subject matter. The book consists of two sections each punctuated with numerous black and white photographs. The first 366 pages are devoted to a "Chronology of Literature 1970-79" and the last 120 pages to essays by Judith Barry, Linda Frye Burnham, Carl E. Loeffler (Performance Anthology's editor) and Moira Roth. The chronology-cum-annotated-bibliography (assembled by Darlene Tong) provides a handy means of organizing information, some of it self-published or otherwise marginal. In a volume about less information-glutted times, we'd have been presented with all the documents. In 1980, we're lucky to get a directory.

Directory may be too neutral a term, though. The chronology paints a complex, far from unbiased portrait of seventies' performance-making in California. It also provides, incidentally, a bonanza of valuable information about performing spaces (Museum of Conceptual Art [MOCA], F Space, University Art Museum, Floating Museum, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art [LAICA], 80 Langton Street, Woman's Building, etc.) and publications (ArtWeek, Avalanche, High Performance).

The twenty-five words-or-less history of California performance in the seventies (bear in mind that in such radically abbreviated form a colorful tapestry gets rendered threadbare) reads something like this: first there were Bruce Nauman, Tom Marioni, Terry Fox and the Bay Area conceptualists operating mostly out of MOCA in San Francisco. Soon after UC Irvine students Chris Burden and Barbara Smith began to let it all hang out at F Space. Meanwhile, up in Fresno, Judy Chicago pioneered the Feminist Art Program, soon to move to Cal Arts, nearer to Los Angeles, and to spawn artists like Suzanne Lacy and Faith Wilding. Happenings founder Allan Kaprow also migrated to Cal Arts and then to UC San Diego, garnering senior spokesperson status. Shortly after mid-decade, a fusion of all these Southland elements transformed Los Angeles into a center of performance activity focused around two new spaces--LAICA and the Woman's Building. In San Francisco a strong support system, centered on a half-dozen high-energy alternative spaces was already in place. The last third of the decade--north and south--represents what some regard as the flowering and others the decay of energy and ideas seeded earlier.

In terms of an overview, performance buffs will not find, generally speaking, much that is new in the book's chronology of literature section. They will nevertheless be fascinated by the pictures and excerpts from reviews, interviews and artists' statements. Those new to the performance arena will discover an engrossing tale of high hopes, conceptual flights of fancy and sometimes phantasmagorical performances. What is truly astonishing about Performance Anthology's chronology is that it offers both compelling reading and a bibliography which will provide future scholars with an archival jumping-off point.

I say jumping off point because, although mammoth, this bibliography is incomplete. Little attention has been paid, for instance, to Bay Area daily and weekly newspapers. (More references to New York's Soho Weekly News are listed than to all Bay Area weeklies combined.) Even citations to articles in ArtWeek, the most frequently listed periodical, are missing. It also seems that the book, compiled in San Francisco, is inevitably skewed toward northern California activity. Without major, nonacademic institutions supporting performance in southern California until mid-decade, numerous performances slipped through the cracks. Obscure San Francisco events in out-of-the-way venues aren't complemented by their Southland counterparts. Alas, history as we know it is the history of the published, or at least the publicized.

Although I do not find these omissions or biases particularly troubling, I am troubled by (and I'm still speaking primarily of the chronology rather than the essays) the book's basic bias in favor of conceptualist--and against theatrical--performance. Theatrically inclined Guy de Cointet, for example, to my mind one of California's most innovative artists, receives a mere twenty lines about his work in addition to bibliographical references starting in 1973. Sculptor/performer Alan Finneran (Soon 3) is ignored after his work moves from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to his studio or more out-of-the-way, non-art locations.

By contrast, over thirty pages of non-bibliographical attention is lavished on Allan Kaprow, including lengthy photo-documentation from numerous rather repetitive, sociological inquiries. A consideration of Kaprow's influence on California performance in the form of introductory notes would have been helpful. And what about Bruce Nauman--elusive and influential, but why? (This is a pitfall of the book's "decade" modus operandi; surely the conceptualist seventies began about 1966.) In a chronology such as this one, apparent importance is directly correlated with the number and length of entries devoted to any particular artist.

The essays in Performance Anthology are mixed. Carl E. Loeffler's From the Body into Space is largely a compilation of the editor's favorite practitioners of the Bay Area performance-as-sculpture-in-four-dimensions (a.k.a. body art) school. Lacking theoretical analysis, it simply provides a concise synopsis of the work of a few artists. Filmmaker/visual artist Judith Barry's Women, Representation and Performance Art is appropriately speculative, but often virtually incomprehensible. Barry's key point: "Feminists are asking, 'how can women stand outside this [Western, metaphorical] tradition and risk not existing, while simultaneously remaining within it, which is in fact where we are, as part of our lived experience'." This is certainly the seminal question of the seventies and perhaps of the eighties, too. But if the answer is embodied in her structuralist analysis of specific performances, it may have to be published in Cahiers du Cinema to find an appreciative readership.

Southern California fares better at the pens of its commentators. Linda Frye Burnham's Performance Art in Southern California: An Overview is engagingly written, delivering just what its title promises. Moira Roth's Autobiography, Theatre, Mysticism and Politics: Women's Performance Art in Southern California in a model of contemporary history writing, despite the considerable overlap with Burnham's essay. Roth lucidly describes and analyzes numerous performances while sorting out the thematic/conceptual concerns on which embodied in such works.

What ultimately distinguishes performance from other visual art media is, literally and figuratively, vivacity. Surprisingly, this book manages to capture some of that excitement. Surprisingly, despite its flaws, Performance Anthology manages to capture some of that excitement.

Space Time Sound: A Decade in the Bay Area
Live, 1982, p. 24

Until recently, the response of museums to performance art has been marked by fear and loathing, paranoia and ambivalence. Given its anti-commodity, boundary-blurring character, this shouldn't come as any surprise. No longer subversive now, performance has recently been institutionalized with the swiftness and ubiquity of a tidal wave.

The late seventies brought performance art the academic seal of approval with instruction in its history and practice offered by numerous art schools and university art departments. Codification comes in the form of texts by RoseLee Goldberg, articles by Moira Roth and recently published anthologies by alternative spaces like Toronto's Art Metropole or San Francisco's La Mamelle, Inc. Commercial viability is insured by artists' use of booking agents and the sale of documentary artworks. Possibly the ultimate irony is provided by the newly revivified Life Magazine's proclamation that "live art" has indeed come of age.

Now we have the museum-organized group performance retrospective. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Space/Time/Sound 1970s--A Decade in the Bay Area is a show of gargantuan proportions and galling chutzpah. While the credentials of the "codifiers" mentioned above attest to a long-standing interest in performance, the museum's record in this area is checkered. (Most of the artists featured in the show have received little support from the museum and currently the rotunda, the museum's only real performing space, is being overhauled as a sculpture court.) As far as I know, this exhibition is the first undertaking of this scale by a major museum. I doubt that it will be the last.

Space/Time/Sound showcases the work of twenty-one Bay Area artists, mostly conceptualists, active locally during the seventies. Richard Alpert, Ant Farm, Paul Cotton, Peter D'Agostino, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Suzanne Helmuth and Jock Reynolds, Mel Henderson, Lynn Hershman (founder of the Floating Museum), Paul Kos, Stephen Laub, Tom Marioni (Museum of Conceptual Art), Jim Melchert, Linda Montano, Bill Morrison, Jim Pomeroy, Darryl Sapien, Alan Scarritt (Site Gallery), Bonnie Sherk (The Farm), T.R. Uthco and John Woodall are represented.

Virtually all of the exhibited artists have, at various times, created performances, videotapes and installations, although approximately one-quarter are not performance artists in the sense of making art involving personal interaction with a live audience. Certain key art makers are omitted--Bruce Nauman, Dianne Blell, Margaret Fischer, Joe Ries, Joel Glassman, Susan Wick, Anna Banana, and Bill Gaglione--but it's not a bad sampling. What's missing is art itself. A few recreated installations and performances and non-performance related videotapes don't fare badly in this documentary context, but many performers are represented only by documentation--and the quality of that documentation is, well, execrable. Some performances of note are encapsulated in a few small PR-style photographs totally inappropriate for exhibition in an enormous gallery (unless placed within a vitrine.) Others, such as Stephen Laub's allusive slide projection performances in which he merged with autobiographical photographic imagery, have been essentially, perhaps inevitably, falsified through video recreation.

The key to the museum's exhibition strategy is the show's historical nature. One traditional function of a museum is to conserve art. In the case of Space/Time/Sound this encompasses the conservation of information about ephemeral art works and events. For this exhibition, these materials have been liberated from the library resulting in a show that look as if it's really designed as a book. (Unfortunately, the catalog will not be available until long after the show has closed.) Given the kind of interpretive material available at the exhibition, it also promises a standard biographical approach incorporating these artists into a linear vision of the history of sculpture.

The lack of contextual material on view helps to guarantee the show's unpopularity, not to mention its unfathomability to a general audience. (Remember that this is the museum which premiered Judy Chicago's Dinner Party to SRO crowds and scrutinizes attendance figures very carefully.) In one gallery, for instance, Bonnie Sherk recreates her installation, Living in the Forest. An outdoor installation moved into a neo-classical gallery space, sans performance, it consists of live and dead trees, plants, birds, and animals living in a microcosm of an environment where the physical realities of life are daily enacted. What is the museum visitor to make of this installation-cum-natural history display without its performance heart? If the show proves unpopular, the museum can now cite lack of interest by paying customers as justification for its continued non-support of such unconventional work.