Performance / Media / Art / Culture

Selected Essays 19832018

By (author) Jacki Apple Edited by Marina LaPalma

Publication date:

01 October 2019

Publisher

Intellect Books

Dimensions:

244x170mm
7x10"

ISBN-13: 9781789380859

Experience the interdisciplinary performance scene of the 1980s and beyond through the eyes of one of its most compelling witnesses. Jacki Apple’s Performance / Media / Art / Culture traces performance art, multimedia theatre, audio arts and dance in the United States from 1983 to the present. Showcasing 35 years of Apple’s critical essays and reviews, the collection explores the rise and diversification of intermedia performance; how new technologies (or rehashed old technologies) influence American culture and contemporary life; the interdependence of pop and performance culture; and the politics of art and the performance of politics.
 
Apple writes with a journalist’s attention to the immediacy of account and a historian’s attention to structural aesthetic and personal networks, resulting in a volume brimming with big ideas but grounded in concentrated reviews of individual performances. Many of the pieces featured in this collection originally appeared in small press journals and magazines that have now gone out of print. Preserved and republished here for current and future readers, they offer a rich portrait of performance at the end of the millennium.

'This book is a stunning piece of scholarship, authorship, curation, and artistry. A potent historical record of performance art, it would serve well as a primer for any scholar, artist, or upper-level/graduate course interested in learning this history from a primary source. At the same time, the essays combine to become an inspiring call-to-action for experimental art-making. I frequently found myself wanting to know Apple and LaPalma’s current thoughts on the questions they raise, but the book’s true gift is the space they allow for the essays to question each other. Through their tremendous restraint in not adding additional comment, they invite readers to explore their own curiosity about performance, performance art, or whatever term comes next.'