Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present

Goldberg, Roselee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. New York: Abrams, 1988. Revised and enlarged edition of RG's Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present. New York: Abrams, 1979.

History stressing first three decades of the 20th c. Performance Art covers Italian Futurism's experimentation with machine noise as music, mechanical choreography and puppets, moving sets and mechanical costumes. RG finds Russian Futurism more political. The Constructivists announced the death of painting and supported art created in real space. Dada performance made less use of mechanized sets and costumes. Berlin Dadaists, however, demanded progressive unemployment through automation so workers could find the truth of and learn to experience life. In Holland, Schwitters argued for the equality of all materials, including equality among human beings, wire netting, and "thought pumps" (71). Bauhaus performances and ballets also combined art and technology, the human and the mechanical. Costumes aimed at the transformation of the human figure into a mechanical object, and choreography emphasized the dancers as objects. In the last third of the book, RG shows that many of these ideas came to the fore again in the 1940's and 50's at Black Mountain College, in the music of John Cage, and in Merce Cunningham's dances. More recently they have been extended by conceptualist, punk, live art, and other postmodernist performance art. See in this Category the entry for S. Bann.