Intro
Interview
Pulsing from the Bottom Up / Roselee Goldberg
Flash Art, 2014
Excerpt interview:
"Gianni Jetzer: You got involved with performance in the early ’70s when it was low on the totem pole of the art world. How did that come about?
RoseLee Goldberg: I wrote the first history of performance art [Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present] in 1979 when, as you say, few people regarded performance as a legitimate history. I was a dancer from an early age, in South Africa, and studied Fine Arts and Political Science. These elements played into how I understood art and culture as something to be viewed in tandem, and horizontally, across disciplines, ignoring divisions of art into objects or movement or music. I moved to London, studied art history at The Courtauld Institute, and wrote my dissertation on Oskar Schlemmer and performance at the Bauhaus.
GJ: How has the perception of performance art changed since the late ’70s?
RLG: Performance in the ’70s was the flip side of conceptual art — it was the “materialization of art ideas.” The aesthetic was bare, black and white, based on lists and instructions. It was about experience, about exploring perception. Both opposed art as commodity. It took place “downtown” — when there was still a downtown, mostly among other artists or musicians or filmmakers. Performance was considered difficult, an acquired taste. In the ’80s, when the art market came back with the Pictures Generation and New Painting, performance took on an ironic twist with cabaret-style monologists (Karen Finley, Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray) and generally was more accessible but still it stayed on the edges, in the downtown scene. In the last decade it started to appear regularly at biennials and art fairs, but always as a sideshow, something to see at the end of a long day of looking at art. Few people understood its direct connections to visual art or were knowledgeable about its long, continuous history. Or they called it by another name, such as “relational aesthetics.” In my book I made the point that performance is integral to art history. Artists have always made live performance: Leonardo da Vinci created live events for the Medicis, the Russian Constructivists were famous for public spectacles. Until I published my book, performance had been totally buried within art history — surprising because the entire 20th century from Dada and Futurism to Surrealism and Happenings has been a century of multi-disciplinary art."