Stuart Brisley is a pioneering multi-media and performance artist who developed performance art as a form of social action in the 1960s and 1970s. This book assesses his seminal influence on British art through a focus on his lifelong engagement with the histories and imaginaries of revolution. Linking revolutionary history with material from a critical dialogue established with Brisley over the last decade, the book recognises Brisley's corpus as a fascinating stage for addressing important questions about the relationship of art, politics and history. How do we make sense of politically committed art in a contemporary context where revolution has supposedly died or is deemed impossible? What can the afterlives of performance art tell us about the historical past, including the promises and contradictions of revolutionary time?
Elizabeth B. Schwall aligns culture and politics by focusing on an art form that became a darling of the Cuban revolution: dance. In this history of staged performance in ballet, modern dance, and folkloric dance, Schwall analyzes how and why dance artists interacted with republican and, later, revolutionary politics. Drawing on written and visual archives, including intriguing exchanges between dancers and bureaucrats, Schwall argues that Cuban dancers used their bodies and ephemeral, nonverbal choreography to support and critique political regimes and cultural biases. As esteemed artists, Cuban dancers exercised considerable power and influence. They often used their art to posit more radical notions of social justice than political leaders were able or willing to implement. After 1959, while generally promoting revolutionary projects like mass education and internationalist solidarity, they also took risks by challenging racial prejudice, gender norms, and censorship, all of which could affect dancers personally. On a broader level, Schwall shows that dance, too often overlooked in histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, provides fresh perspectives on what it means for people, and nations, to move through the world.
The historical roots, key practitioners, and artistic, theoretical, and technological trends in the incorporation of new media into the performing arts. The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of new media art. Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms of theatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallels between contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentieth century. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on the work of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixon considers changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considers virtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artists including Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatrical spectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematic performances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and online drama communities, and considers the "extratemporal" illusion created by some technological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominant theoretical approaches to digital performance—including what he calls postmodernism's denial of the new—and offers a series of boldly original arguments in their place.
First published in 1979, the latest edition of this pioneering study in "the World of Art" series surveys a full century of performance, from the Futurist manifesto of 1909 to the second decade of the new millennium. Art historian and gallery curator Rose Lee Goldberg explains how a medium once used only in sporadic outbreaks of artistic dissent has become, over the course of a century, a vital and integral part of the contemporary mainstream and a global phenomenon.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a German composer, conductor, music theorist, and essayist, primarily known for his operas (later called music dramas). Wagner s musical style is often considered the epitome of classical music s Romantic period, due to its unprecedented exploration of emotional expression. He transformed musical thought through his idea of Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork), the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, epitomized by his monumental four-opera cycle The Ring of the Niebelung (1876). Wagner even went so far as to build his own opera-house to try to stage these works as he had imagined them. His literary friendship with Franz Liszt led to a long-lived correspondence later compiled in the two volumes of Corrrespondence of Wagner and Liszt (1889); a book that was attributed to both musicians. Among his other famous works are Tristan and Isolde, which broke important new musical ground, My Life (in two volumes) (1880), and The Flying Dutchman.
This book explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. Since the 1960s, visual art practices - from body art to minimalism - have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery; by embracing theatricality and performance and exploding the boundaries set by traditional art criticism. The contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised as much more dynamic and contingent. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical fine artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Gunter Brus, this book offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.
This book presents research on mediated scandals and substantiates the understanding of such forms of scandals and their impact on societies. Additionally, it connects the study of scandals with the broader fields of political communication research, organizational communication, journalism studies, and digital communication research. The authors focus on the 21st century as an age of perpetual scandalization and on digital technologies as a catalyst in this respect. Against this backdrop, the book examines different aspects of the transformation of mediated scandals through digital communication practices. Topics covered include, but are not limited to, the scandalizing potential of new media and the requirement of modified strategies of reputation management and crisis communication in politics, the entertainment industry, and the economic system among others; a different perspective on professional journalism and scandals created through new media; technological infrastructure and digital tools allowing journalists to establish new means to investigate hard scandals, i.e., substantial financial or political wrongdoings by the economic and political elite. The book, therefore, is a must-read for researchers and scholars from different disciplines, as well as practitioners and policy-makers interested in a better understanding of the study of scandals, their impact on societies, and their catalyzation through new media.
