| ISBN : | 978-3-03764-576-5 |
|---|---|
| Publication : | Summer 2025 |
This two-volume anthology on performance, Happenings, Actions, and Events in the United States between 1955 and 1982, brings together a selection of seminal texts by artists, critics, and theoreticians, mostly published in journals and publications that are difficult to access today. They are translated here into French for the first time. All of them are major sources for the practice and definition of performance and artistic improvisation in the visual arts, as well as in the performing arts, dance, expanded cinema, and music.
The three decades spanning the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s represent the key period for the study and practice of American performance art, which renewed itself constantly before settling into a more institutional form in the 1980s. This anthology is conceived chronologically: the first volume traces the origins of performance and Happenings in the 1950s–1960s after the early experiments at Black Mountain College and Rutgers University; the second focuses on the late 1960s, from Fluxus and the shift from theater to the visual arts, to the proliferation of performances, debates, and the redefinitions of the Happening in the 1970s. For each period, the interweaving of “situated” texts allows the reader to follow the impact of new technologies and discourses on performance art, the importance of interdisciplinary thinking, and how a new art form was being created, theorized, and critiqued at the same time.
Bringing together 25 texts written between 1955 and 1966, this volume is edited and introduced by Lausanne University Professor François Bovier and Swiss philosopher Serge Margel. Both are specialists in performance art and experimental cinema. It is accompanied by a second volume spanning the years 1967 to 1982.
With texts and contributions by George Brecht, Earle Brown, John Cage, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Anna Halprin, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, Michael Kirby, Billy Klüver, Jonas Mekas, Charles Olson, Yoko Ono, Benjamin Paterson, Nam June Paik, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Tomas Schmit, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Watts, and Emmett Williams.
Published with ECAL-HES-SO, École cantonale d’art de Lausanne
