| ISBN : | 978-3-03764-577-2 |
|---|---|
| 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 definitions 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 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 35 texts written between 1967 and 1982, 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 first volume spanning the years 1955 to 1966.
With texts and contributions by Vito Acconci, Marina Abramović, Robert Ashley, Chris Burden, Jan Butterfield, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Merce Cunningham, Richard Foreman, Simone Forti, Dan Graham, Jon Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Lejaren Hiller, Ken Jacobs, Joan Jonas, Richard Kostelanetz, La Monte Young, Les Levine, Carl Loeffler, Jackson Mac Low, Meredith Monk, Gordon Mumma, Claes Oldenburg, Ralph Ortiz, Adrian Piper, Frederic Rzewski, Elaine Summers, Jean Toche, Wolf Vostell, Christian Wolff, Robert Whitman, Robert Wilson, and Marian Zazeela.
Published with ECAL-HES-SO, École cantonale d’art de Lausanne.
