Some Relations Between Conceptual and Performance Art, Frazer

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Some Relations between Conceptua l and Performance Art Author(s): Frazer Ward Source: Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4, Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century (Winter, 1997), pp. 36-40 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777718 . Accessed: 14/06/2013 08:01 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to  Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org

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Some Relations between Conceptual and Performance ArtAuthor(s): Frazer WardSource: Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4, Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice atthe End of This Century (Winter, 1997), pp. 36-40

Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777718 .

Accessed: 14/06/2013 08:01

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of 

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

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Some Relationsbetween

Conceptualn d Performancer t

Frazer Ward

I reallybelieve n having projectswhich infact can't be car-

ried out, or which are so simple that anyone could work

them out. I once madefour spots on the map of Holland,

withoutknowingwheretheywere. ThenIfound out how to

get there and went to theplace and took a snapshot.Quite36 stupid.Anybodycan do that. -Jan Dibbetsl

onceptual art's factions have frequently been at

odds, usually over definitions and often after the

fact. For the purposesof furtherargument,Concep-tual art mightbe considered as workthat emphasizedthe

underlying conditions of aesthetic experience: Languagewas seen as foremostamong hese conditions.Material orm

and sensoryperceptionwere madesecondary o analysesof

their discursive and institutionalframes. Performanceart,

on the other hand, seems relatively straightforwardto

define,"as a formof art thathappensat a particular ime ina particularplace where the artistengages in some sort of

activity, usually before an audience. The main difference

between performance art and other modes of visual art

practice, such as painting, photography,and sculpture, is

that it is a temporalevent or action."2

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was consid-

erable overlap between these categories.3 Subsequently,

however, t has become a commonplaceto think of perfor-mance artin oppositionto Conceptualart'scritical investi-

gationof the status, and presence, of objects, and to think

of it as treatingbodily presence in a relatively unproblem-

atic way. In what follows, I consider two worksof art, the

first of which, Ian Burn's MirrorPiece (1967), might be

described as typically Conceptual. The second, Vito

Acconci's Step Piece (1970), might better be seen as an

ambiguously Conceptual piece of performance art. The

juxtapositionhelps to reveal the ambiguityimportedinto

the category of the Conceptual with elements of perfor-

mance, which in turn makes it untenable to view perfor-mance art as the bodily counter to a linguistic paradigmwithin a particularmoment of avant-gardehistory.Rather,

some performance art may be seen to have challengedsome of the limitations of Conceptualart, particularly ts

notion of rationality,but from within a broadly Conceptualframework.In this account, Conceptualand performanceart are engagedin a continuingdialogue,sometimes a con-

versation,sometimes an argument.Where Conceptual art detailed relations between

aesthetic productionand its institutional conditions, per-formancesby artists including Acconci and Chris Burden

examinedthe effects of these relations on subjectivity.The

introductionof their ownbodies as termsin this set of rela-

tions has been seen to havehad a critical effect by pointingto the contingent, social construction of subjectivity. Or

else its effect has been seen in the visceral transgressionof

social and aesthetic norms. The former veers toward the

morerationalistic,Conceptualend of performanceart, the

latter toward its obsessional end. It is possible to argue,

instead, that their work shares a complex ambivalencetoward he uncertain determinationsof subjectivitywithin

the institutionalframeof art, as it takes its place, in turn,

in a widerpublic sphere.Bum's unambiguouslyConceptualMirrorPiece con-

sists of thirteentyped pages of notes and diagrams, ramed

and coveredwithglass, and an ordinary, ectangularmirror,

similarly framed(fig. 1). The notes include the following

statement,typicallyConceptual n its abandonmentof aes-

thetic authority:"I certifythatI consider this work s in no

way unique and mightbe reproducedat any time or place

by myselforanyotherperson(eitheractingon mybehalfor

acting independently)."4 Further, the notes explain the

work(and themselves) in termsof the interactionbetween

the spectator'srecognitionof the mirror'snormal function

andits "intentional"unction as art,referringo the displayof the mirrorwith the notes and diagramsas a "concept":"This concept becomes a framework or the mirroras art

and aims at gettingthe spectator'sseeing'to cohereagainsta particularbackgroundof inferredknowledge.The context

of roomorgalleryno longerservesto identifythe functionof

the mirror;he intention s built into the work."5

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FIG. I lan Burn,MirrorPiece, 1967,

acrylic,mirror,lass,woodframe,diagrams, nd notesinplastic leeve

and a 13-pageprintedext book.Art

Galleryf WesternAustralia,88/108.

This may or may not be saved from a didacticism

alien to Duchamp,whose ready-madesprovidedthe model

for the work,by anyhumor n the faux-bureaucrateseof the

writing. But it serves to illustrate a problem that Mel

Bochneruses to explain whyhe does not like the term Con-

ceptualart. That is, it is not entirely clear what "concept"means here, and it runs the risk of being confused with

"intention."6The issue that Burn's work skates around is

that it is one thing for a work explicitly to reveal its"ideationalpremise,"but another or artistssimply to state

their intentions(whichapartfromanythingelse suggests a

weak readingof Duchamp).7Much Conceptualart of this

kindrestedon a somewhatnaive, overlyschematic separa-tion of the conceptualand the perceptual,to establish the

priorityof the linguistic overthe visual.8

Acconci'sperformance,StepPiece (fig. 2), is the first

work in UrsulaMeyer'santhologyof documentsby artists,

ConceptualArt 1972).The"project"s describedas follows:

An eighteen-inchstool is set up in my apartmentand used

as a step. Each morning,during the designated months,Istep up and down the stool at the rate of thirty steps a

minute;each morning, the activity lasts as long as I can

perform t withoutstopping.... Announcements re sent to

thepublic,who can see the activityperformed,n my apart-

ment,any timeduringtheperformance-months.9

There is a kind of obsessionally comic quality to this that

acts as a corrective to the rationalist terms of much Con-

ceptualart(though t mightbe said to conform o its "indis-

criminateempiricism").0lSimilarly,Rosalind Krauss has

arguedof Sol LeWitt(one of the godfathersof Conceptual

art),thatwhile his repetitivegeometricwork is often taken

to be a coolly analytical representationof the rationalityof

Mind(in a waythatsmuggles in a Cartesian,humanist sub-

ject), it in fact "provides one with an experience that is

obsessional in kind.""l

While the rationalismof Conceptualart might have

been intended by a number of its practitionersto demysti-

fy the conditions and the languageof aesthetic experience,

so that it became less elitist, both Krauss and GregoryBattcock, introducinghis Idea Art (1973), a collection of

critics' and artists' writings on Conceptual art, note the

hostility of audiences, particularly"nonart"audiences, to

Conceptual art.12 Perhaps this was because, as Harold

Rosenberg suggested, "to qualify as a member of the art

public, an individual must be tuned to the appropriatever-

bal reverberationsof objects in artgalleries, and his recep-tive mechanismmust be constantly adjustedto oscillate to

new vocabularies.")13This points to the weakness of Con-

ceptual art'snotionsof boththe public-the one concept it

did not approachempirically (or else it would have real-

ized that the public needed betterpersuasionto give up its

aesthetic pleasure, which was often already difficult

enough)-and, concomitantly,of rationality,which it failed

to consider in communicative erms.Hence JosephKosuth,

whose lack of concernwithpublic communications palpa-ble: "it is nearly impossible to discuss art in generalterms

without alkingin tautologies,"and "art ndeed exists forits

ownsake."14

Even in 1970 Acconci was at least implicitlyaddress-

ing these problems. Step Piece is typically Conceptual,inasmuch as it is, or documents, the execution of a verbal

ART JOURNAL

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plan. At first glance, that is, whateverperceptual experi-ence the work provides is subject to a prior, conceptual

scheme, the linguistic formulationof which is part of the

work. In this sense it may participate in what Kosuth

regardsas the constitutive distinction of Conceptualart,

which is that it inquires into the foundations of the very

concept of art, as against the more familiar modernist

inquiriesinto specific media.15However,StepPiece neither

negates nor generalizes the public. Its demystifyingmoveagainstthe usual conditions of art is to collapse the public

space of exhibition onto the supposedly private space of

production,which in this case is not even the studio but

Acconci's home (suggesting that these are intertwined),and to extend exhibition back outside, as it were, by dis-

tributing monthly "progressreports" o the "artpublic."'6If it is not exactly clear who constituted the "artpublic,"what is clear is that Acconci selected a relatively specific

group of people as the public for this work. That is, the

work does not pretend to a generalized communicative

38 function,and mighteven be seen to parody he pretensionsof some other Conceptual art in this regard. (Certainly,

anybody might do that, but not everyonewas expected to

be interested.)At the same time, while the work s in its ownslight-

ly loony way rational, as a study of cause and effect, it

exceeds the abstract rationalityof much Conceptualism.Bochner observes that "there is no art that does not bear

some burden of physicality. To deny it is to descend to

irony."17By 1970 Acconci had outstripped many of his

Conceptual contemporaries in recognizing this. In Step

Piece, rationality itself is intimately connected with

Acconci's own physicality:the work is in parta record ofchanges in Acconci'sphysical status. Here is a post-Carte-sian bindingof abstractrationalityand experience,or con-

ceptualandperceptual,andpublic andprivate,in the form

of the site-specific developmentof a subject-"I can build

myself into the space as I build myself up."18The decep-

tively comic work s the process and recordof this binding.What is crucial to StepPiece, and what makes it so

ambiguouslyConceptual, s the complicationof a Concep-tual scheme with an element of performance withall the

confusion that enters into that term, given its setting in

Acconci's apartmentand its mediated presentation).In a

discussion in Octoberof the currentreceptionof the art ofthe 1960s, BenjaminBuchloh, who has written one of the

more authoritativeaccounts of Conceptualart, largely in

termsof the "linguistic paradigm,"19bservesof arthistoryabout the 1960s (including his own): "the opposition is

upheld between a victorious paradigmof Conceptualism,whichrepresses,excludes, denigratesall otherpractices-which at that moment are of performance,of the body."20Reflection on performance art in the vein of Step Piece

mightalreadyraise the questionof how victorious the Con-

ceptual paradigm actually was, but Buchloh points to a

more general problemfor art history:How to account for

and find relationsbetween the variousartisticpractices in

a period(especially a periodwithinrelativelyrecent mem-

ory,which may become historical against the grainof the

historian'sexperienceof it), when the implicationsof those

practices are takenup in subsequentart in ways that were

not predicted or predictable. Consider, for instance, a

recent turn to "thebody"in variousguises, which does notseem to assume the victoryof a Conceptualismprincipallyconcerned with linguistic conditions.

More specifically, there is the problem of how to

account for any relations between Conceptualand perfor-mance art. This difficultyis compoundedbecause perfor-mance art was not a "movement," in the way that

Minimalism or Conceptualism were, whatever attemptshave been made to situate it as one. Rather,performancehas surfaced and disappeared throughoutthe twentieth

century as a kind of undercurrent,periodically bubbling

up within-or in some relation to-various avant-gardemovements: the Soviet avant-gardes,Futurism,Dada, the

Bauhaus, neo-Dada, Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism, perhapseven AbstractExpressionism f we consider the arena-like

quality of Jackson Pollock's painting on canvases rolled

out on the studio floor.In works not only by Acconci, but

by ChrisBurden,JanDibbets, Dan Graham,DouglasHue-

bler, Bruce Nauman,Dennis Oppenheim,HannahWilke,

and even Daniel Buren (e.g., his Sandwichmen [1968]),and others, it certainlysurfacedin a close relationto Con-

ceptualart-as much as it mighthave surfacedin the work

of otherartists,againstConceptualism.

In this connectionit is interestingto note differencesamongthe most important,more or less contemporaneous

anthologies about Conceptualart. Meyer's ConceptualArt

includes worksby Acconci, Buren,Dibbets, Graham,Hue-

bler, Nauman and Oppenheim,as well as Rosemarie Cas-

toro and BernarVenet,all of which involve some element

of performance,withoutremarkingupon or distinguishingit within Conceptualart as a whole. Similarly, Lucy Lip-

pard'sSix Years 1973) deliberately"muddies the waters,"

documenting"thewhole headyscene" that was the context

for Conceptualart.21 n Battcock's Idea Art, on the other

hand, the most extended references to performanceare by

RobertHughes, who pillories Herman Nitsch'sneo-rituals

and, in what is now a well-known error, Rudolf

Schwarzkogler's photographic "actions" (which Hughesmistookfor self-mutilations),and is sarcastic about Char-

lotte Moormanplaying the cello topless.22The differences

betweenthese collections suggest thateven in the moment

of Conceptualism (which was evidently not only its

moment),from the mid-1960s to early 1970s, the place of

performancewas uncertain.23

The October discussion follows Buchloh's remark

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FIG. 2 Vito Acconci, Step Piece,

February,April,July,November

1970, 8 A.M. each day, 102

ChristopherStreet, New York.

into a brief discussion of how art history is written, in

which RosalindKrauss asks:

Whatsense does it make, if you are a historian writingaboutthe emergenceof the linguisticparadigm Conceptualart was mobilizing,to write about all the counter-paradig-matic practices as well? Because then you have to write

about Gottund die Welt. Can we say that LyndaBenglis'swork was made specifically counter to Joseph Kosuth? I

thinknot.24

Acconci'sStepPiece suggests that there may be no neces-saryoppositionbetweenConceptualandperformance rt. It

is not a questionof paradigmaticand counter-paradigmatic

practices,but at least in certaininstances of practices that

were closely intertwined.For example, there are worksbyartists as different as Acconci, Chris Burden, and Bruce

Naumanthat mightusually be consideredmore closely in

relation to performanceart, which nevertheless draw on

important lements of "purely"Conceptualpractice.Even Burden'sShoot(1971), in which he arranged o

be shot in the armby a friend with a .22 gauge rifle, and

which at first glance seems emphatically counter to the

rationalanalyses of Conceptualism, has in commonwith

Conceptualismthe fact that it is the (painfully)empirical

workingthroughof a predeterminedplan. Not only that,but it now exists primarily as documentation (and what

Burden refers to as "relics"),so that its materialexistence,as with much performanceart, somewhat resembles the

characteristic orms of Conceptualart.

In the late 1960s Naumanmade works in the formof

sets of instructions-"Drill a hole about a mile into the

earth anddropa microphone o withina few feet of the bot-

tom"25-and furtherdemonstratedan interest in the con-

textualizingfunctionof languagein photographsand video

works, focusing on the body but set off by explanatoryor

punning titles. Art Makeup(1967-68) is a series of four

16mmfilms of Nauman,facing the camera directly, apply-

ing four different colors of what appears to be theatrical

makeup to his upper body, face, and arms. The title sug-

gests that this process of exposure,disguise, and represen-tation is how "artists"are "madeup."

WhatI suggest is that in writingourhistories of six-

ties art, we might see workslike Acconci's StepPiece and

Burden's Shoot as conducting a critique, from within abroadly Conceptual framework, of the positivist, even

enlighteningclaims made for rationality n the Conceptualart that denied its "burdenof physicality."The introduc-

tion of elements of performance nto that broadframework

addresses the weakness of Conceptualnotions of the pub-lic and of rationality,even if it does so in a negativelycrit-

ical manner(it is not as if Acconci or Burdenprovidedus

with models of a functioningpublic sphere).

Conceptualart undertookthe removal of traditional

elements of aesthetic expression from art. Empiricist sys-tems

(frequentlywith the

arbitraryqualityof the

"project"ofStep Piece) replacedmoretraditionallywroughtmodesof

expression and formalmastery.Conceptualism'spresenta-tion of its relatively flimsy bits and pieces, as art, re-per-

formed, parodically, the institutional valorization of art.

However,despite the rationalist,democratizinggroundson

which it soughtto demystifyaesthetic experience and mas-

tery("Anybodycan do that"), t maintainedthe abstraction

of content crucial to the high modernist art that had until

then been institutionally valorized (and remains so). If

modernistpaintingwasjust aboutpainting,Conceptualart

wasjust about art. In this way, it maintainedthe somewhat

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elitist disembodiment of its own subject, and its ratio

ism remainedabstract,andonly abstractlycommunical

Step Piece and Shoot, and other works that im

performanceinto a Conceptual frame, model a diffe

version of the subject of aesthetic experience. As agathe putatively democraticsubject of linguistic rationm

that Conceptualism proffers, they provide a model of

subjectfor whomthe languageof rationalityhas intima

physical effects, effects that may go beyond Accorhomespun, quirky anticipation of the gym craze to

potentially dire consequences of the pathologicalem]cism of Shoot(made,it mightbe worthrecalling, duringVietnamWar).Rationalismalone, in this context, guatees nothingto aesthetic experience.

In conjunctionwith this, if these works expressdesire for an emphatickind of embodimentthat could

groundthe subject of Conceptualreason, their media

and perhaps undecidable status as performancesat c

confounds that desire. If Conceptualart is only abstra

40 communicative, these works are altogether ambiva

about the possibility of communicative action, in athat points up some of Conceptualism's pretensil

Despite the artist'spresence in a particularplace at a

ticulartime, they are siteless in a way quite different f

Conceptual art's ethereal idealism ("Anybody car

that"),or from Seth Siegelaub'scatalogue-as-exhibitioFor in each case, the act of embodiment,the performa]is simultaneous with its own representation, as puannouncement or photographic record. The event ta

place in a private space (Acconci'sapartment, he spacwhich Burden invited a small group of people), but

becomes the site ofpublicity

in theprocess

ofrepresetion. For us to be able to write art histories of it, sul

quently,that moment of embodimentin which the prirealm is shot through with publicity also becomes

moment of the reproduction of Acconci or Burden

"Acconci" or "Burden")as "artist."It mightbe sugge,that in orderto speak, the artist is not only trappedbu

go in art,however uncomfortablea place that is, and h

ever much this or that account of Conceptualism m

want to explain it away.

Notes

1. "Dibbets,"in ConceptualArt, ed. Ursula Meyer (New York:Dutton, 1

121.

2. Anne Marsh, Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia (MelboOxfordUniversity Press, 1993), 7. But this definitiondoes not go withoutco

cation or contest, either. The status of documentation, especially photogr;

documentation, is an issue in discussions of performance art, and it ten

resolve into twoopposed positions. Either you had to be there, so that the sin

neous presence of performerand audience was definitive, or you did not, an

event was as much a pretext for its documentationas anything else. For a s

version of the former,see C. Carr'sevocations of her experiences of perform,from the late 1970s into the 1990s in On Edge: Performance at the End C

TwentiethCentury Hanover,N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993). Forth

ter, Vito Acconci has reflected on the "world"of performanceart: "it turned

be after all only visual, the action mightas well have been a picture (that's h

it was going to be historically preserved anyway).""Performanceafter the I

nal- New Observations,no. 95 (May-June 1993): 31. As I will argue, it is clear that in

tive. some performance art, the simultaneous reproduction of the work and its subse-quent distributionwere integral to it, so that the relation between the event and its

port documentation must at least be allowed to remain in tension. It seems preferableat

rent the very least to let the uncertain status of the photographs do some work. For

t instance, what can be gatheredfromthe photographs hatmightnothave been evi-

dent on the spot?

ality 3. See, for example, Lizzie Borden, "Three Modes of Conceptual Art,"Artfo-

the rum 10, no. 10 (June 1972): 68-71. Borden's second mode "locates the body in

space for demonstration or performance,"69. Further examples are discussed

ltely below.

lCi'S4. Ian Burn, Minimal-Conceptual Work, 1965-1970, exh. cat. (Perth: Art

Galleryof WesternAustralia, 1992), 74.the 5. Ibid.

ri- 6. Mel Bochner, "Excerpts from Speculation (1967-1970)," in Meyer, Concep-tual Art,50. See also Rosalind Krauss,"Sense and Sensibility: Reflectionson Post

the '60s Sculpture,"Artforum12, no. 3 (November1973): 43-53.

ran- 7. Meyer, introduction to ConceptualArt, viii. In fact, there is tension within

Conceptual art, between artists who emphasize intention and those who say, like

Jan Dibbets, "anybody can do that," the effect of which is to suggest that the

the democratizingeffect of Conceptualism is to allow anybodyto have the same inten-

notions as Conceptual artists, an opportunity or which anybody would no doubt be

deeply grateful.Ition 8. See, for example, Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, "The Role of Language":

"Whatever attitude we have to seeing may depend very much on the kind of dis-

tinctions we typicallyuse in language, and in fact on the wayin general that we set

ICtly out to describe our visual experiences. It may mean that, to establish any new

lent modes or nuances of 'seeing,' the mode (orsuch conditions as will allow for it) must

first be established in anappropriate anguage."

InArtinTheory,

1900-1990: An

way Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford:

nHS. Blackwell, 1993), 881. I do not mean to be dismissive of Bur's MirrorPiece, butto point to the confusion over "concept." Bur retained from Minimalism an inter-

par- est in the phenomenological, which mightbe addressed in this case via the ques-

From tion of what is reflected n the mirror n its different contexts.

i do 9. Quoted in Meyer, ConceptualArt, 3.10. VictorBurgin, "SituationalAesthetics," in Meyer, ConceptualArt,87.

)n.2 11. Rosalind Krauss, "LeWitt in Progress," in The Originalityof the Avant-

Gardeand OtherModernistMyths(Cambridge,Mass.: MITPress, 1986), 252.

12. GregoryBattcock, ed., introduction to Idea Art:A CriticalAnthology(Newblic York:Dutton, 1973).

ikes 13. Harold Rosenberg, "Art and Words," n Battcock, Idea Art, 153-54.14. JosephKosuth,"ArtafterPhilosophy, andII," n Battcock, deaArt,83, 91.

>e o 15.Ibid.,93.

this 16. Kate Linker, VitoAcconci (New York:Rizzoli, 1994), 24.17. Bochner, "ExcerptsfromSpeculation," 57.

18. Acconci, "StepPiece,"Avalanche, no. 6 (special issue: Vito Acconci) (Fallbse- 1972):1.

19. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "ConceptualArt, 1962-1969," October,no. 55e

(Winter1990): 105-43.

the 20. "The Reception of the Sixties," roundtable discussion, October,no. 69

(or (Summer 1994): 18.21. Lucy Lippard, "Escape Attempts," foreword to the reissue of Six Years

sted (1973; Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1997), vii.

t et 22. Robert Hughes, "The Decline and Fall of the Avant-Garde," n Battcock,Idea Art. Hughes fell thoroughly or the most superficial opposition between Con-

lOW- ceptual and performance art: "If Conceptual Art represents pedagogy and stale

ight metaphysics at the end of their tether, Body Art is the last rictus of Expression-

ism," 194.

23. By 1992, its historical status seemed to have been decided, at least in

some quarters, if that compendium of avant-gardism, Charles Harrison and Paul

Wood'sArt in Theory, s anything to go by. While there are texts by Joseph Beuys

972), and Allan Kaprow, here is no mention of performance, et alone performanceart.

(Perhaps it was assumed that performanceart was atheoretical.) This omission hasurne: subsequently been addressed in Theoriesand Documentsof ContemporaryArt,ed.

mpli- Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1996).

aphic 24. "TheReception of the Sixties," 19.

ids to 25. "Nauman," n Meyer, ConceptualArt, 187.

nulta- 26. Seth Siegelaub, "On Exhibitions and the World at Large,"in Battcock,

id the Idea Art.

FRAZER WARD is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at

Cornell University.His dissertation is on performanceart

and the public sphere.

WINTER 1997

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