Objectives

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• be familiar with the histories and development of live art and performance during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
• understand the historic contexts in which these practices emerged
• be able to analyse the formal strategies used by artists working with performance
• understand the key critical frameworks through which these practices have been understood
• understand how these practices have put pressure on the category ‘art’ and traditional methods of display

Preliminary Reading

• Stephen. C. Foster, ‘Event Structures and Art Situations’ in Event arts and art Events (Ann Arbor, 1998)
• Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’ in H. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New (1959)
• Brian O’Doherty, ‘The eye and the spectator’ in Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Berkeley Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1976
• Goldberg, Roselee, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (2001)
• Jones, Amelia, Body Art: Performing the Subject (1998)