Performance: Live Art Since 1960, by RoseLee Goldberg, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1998, $60

When RoseLee Goldberg's Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present was published in 1979, it shattered the conventional wisdom about modern art history as a succession of painting styles. Goldberg demonstrated that visual artists of the past century had often produced live performances, in addition to making objects. These events constituted what she termed a "hidden history" vital to an understanding of Futurism, Constructivism, Dadaism and Surrealism, because "these movements found their roots and attempted to resolve problematic issues in performance...it was in performance that they tested their ideas, only later expressing them in objects." Goldberg wasn't the first to investigate this rich lode of material, but she was the first to create a cogently theorized narrative about it. What art historian today would teach Dada without mentioning the Cabaret Voltaire? Or Malevich without discussing his Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun (1913)? Not many, thanks to Goldberg's bravura performance in Performance.

Goldberg's new book, Performance: Live Art Since 1960, is really two books. The first, an ultimately unrealized project, is outlined in her introductory discussion of the performative, which she limits to the notion that readers and viewers "complete" inherently unstable artworks, and in her introductory evocation of non-high-art forms. References to Allen Ginsberg's 1956 reading of Howl and the AIDS-related agit-prop of ACT UP, the tradition of monologists such as Ruth Draper and Brother Theodore, and the prevalence of performance-art activities throughout the world hints at a far-ranging synthesis of cultures, locales and modus operandi that never materializes in her book. Ginsberg, ACT UP, the mass media, and the performative sensibility disappear and the body of the book that Goldberg delivers instead is a photography album, a collection of 332 performance art, dance, video and theater stills shot by such notable photographers as Paula Court, Dona Ann McAdams, Babette Mangolte, and Harry Shunk.

You can't fault Goldberg for being stuck in the disciplinary rut of art history, though. Her reach extends to literally hundreds of individuals and groups ranging from Brian Eno and the Wooster Group, to Spalding Gray and Bill T. Jones; and from Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson, to Yayoi Kusama and Carolee Schneemann. She defines performance art simply as "live art by artists," and the only tie that binds these practitioners of diverse disciplines is that their work was first presented "within the context of the art world." (This is arguable in connection with Spalding Gray and Bill T. Jones.) Of course the freedom offered to performers by the art world arises from more than Goldberg's assertion that artists and audiences want "to be overwhelmed and provoked;" it also reflects the art industry's status as one of the few remaining, non-corporate-dominated, systems of distribution. "I still think like an artist," she quotes Laurie Anderson to this effect in response to a question on how the music business has impacted her work.

Goldberg's refusal to really define performance art is symptomatic of the problems with Performance: Live Art Since 1960; it doesn't expand our understanding of performance, it muddies it. The book's organization is telling. Instead of the hybrid, expansively thematic organization we're set to expect from the introduction, two of the six chapters--"dance" and "theater, music, opera"--are simply devoted to non-visual-art disciplines. Three are thematic and more visual-art oriented--"performance, politics, real life," "the body: ritual, living sculpture, performed photography," and "identities: feminism, multiculturalism, sexuality"--while a final chapter is a pop-cultural grab-bag called "video, rock 'n' roll, the spoken word." (It does not, as one might expect, address performance poetry.) Artists suffer from this half-formalist, half-thematic approach. Wouldn't Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane's work benefit from being seen alongside Isaac Julien's in the "identities" chapter, rather than sharing a double page spread with Molissa Fenley in the "dance" chapter? And just what are we to make of such unexpected subjects as William Forsyth, Cindy Sherman, John Adams, Sam Taylor Wood, Steve McQueen, Tony Oursler, and Merce Cunningham? Are Tony Oursler's engaging video projections on figurative, soft-sculptural forms actually performance art--that is, "live art by artists?"

Accompanying this awkward organizational scheme is an equally unrewarding format: each chapter begins with a short introduction followed by dozens of photographs, each photo (or set of photos) accompanied by a paragraph of explanatory text. The format favors often stunning images and brief descriptions over the elaboration of ideas. No critical hierarchy of importance is established in this leveling approach and history is consistently given short shrift. Although the book kicks off in 1960, it aptly chronicles the fifties' contributions of Pollock, the Gutai group et al in the interests of intellectual coherence. But relevant accounts of pre-war events are noticeably absent. Surely readers ought to know that for Einstein on the Beach (1976)--which Goldberg describes as an "opera that would fire a generation of artists and musicians"--Robert Wilson and Philip Glass took as their model the first American gesamtkunstwerk, Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934). With its cellophane sets by Florine Stettheimer and production support from a circle of Harvard-trained modernists including Chick Austin, Philip Johnson, and Julien Levy, Four Saints in Three Acts was produced within the context of the art world: it even premiered at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum before becoming the longest running opera on Broadway to date. Based on Goldberg's selections, the collaborative gesamtkunstwerk is a subject dear to her heart and it would have made a compelling, discipline-obliterating subject for a chapter in its own right. Only in her discussions of various feminisms does Goldberg makes the frequently invoked convergence of the larger world and the art world resonate.

Performance: Live Art Since 1960 will likely be compared to Out of Actions: Between Perfromance and the Object 1949-1979, the recent exhibition organized by Paul Schimmel for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Although they commence at essentially the same post-war juncture in the fifties, Performance and Out of Actions are, in fact, very different projects. As David Joselit has noted in this magazine, Out of Actions is not about performance per se so much as the self-objectification of the artist within the object-oriented discourse of late modern painting. Hewing close to its medium- and time frames, Out of Actions is far less adventurous but more fully realized than Performance. It is also more geographically inclusive, showcasing artists from the former Eastern bloc and Latin America, as well as Northwestern Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan. Goldberg offers a diverse array of British artists (the book was first published by Thames and Hudson), but surprisingly excludes well-known artists from Latin America, especially Brazil (Cildo Meireles, Helio Oiticica and Lygia Pape), as well as the San Francisco Bay Area (Ant Farm, George Coates, Lowell Darling, Terry Fox, Lynn Hershman, Tom Marioni, Bonnie Sherk, and Survival Research Lab, among many others.)