Letters from Linda M. Montano is an anthology of writings by one of the seminal performance artists of the last century. It provides an autobiographical and historical record of Montano's artistic practice over the last thirty years, collecting together stories, fairytales, letters, interviews, manifestos and other previously unpublished writings. At the same time, the book acts as a 'how-to' manual for aspiring performance artists, offering practical guidance for students and a range of exercises that Montano has used in her teachings and workshops. Finally, Letters from Linda M. Montano represents a performance in itself, in which the artist considers the process of writing, creating and bringing the work to fruition as another form of 'endurance performance' similar to that of her durational works 14 Years of Living Art and Blood Family Art. COVER PHOTO COURTESY OF GISELA GAMPER.

"An exceptional anthology of writings by one of the seminal performance artists of the past century. It provides a candid autobiographical and historical record of Montano's life and artistic practice over the past thirty years, collecting together stories, fairy tales, letters, interviews, manifestos and other writings, many previously unpublished." - Back cover.

Beyond Belief: Theoaesthetics or Just Old-Time Religion? explores the possible reemergence of a theological dimension to contemporary art. Long estranged from symbol and sacrament, contemporary artists--and those who think and write about them--seem to have turned once again to a vision rooted in the sacred. In an era marked culturally by world-weary cynicism and self-conscious irony, a new "humanism" may be emerging, one which aims to move beyond fragmentation and opposition to integration and unification. The aim of this book is not to propose a resurgence of religious iconography, but rather to give voice to long-suppressed--often maligned, and certainly professionally risky--positions informed by and reverberating with themes of the sacred. The essays included here, by a range of scholars working on these issues today, originated as a lively and spirited session of the 2008 College Art Association annual conference.

An unflinching, illuminating look at three U.S. artists and their performances of suffering

Guillermo Gómez-Peña has spent many years developing his unique style of performance-activism; his theatricalizations of postcolonial theory. In Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what's left for artists to do in a post-9/11 repressive culture of what he calls 'the mainstream bizarre'. Over forty-five photos document his artistic experiments and the text not only explores and confronts his political and philosophical parameters; it offers groundbreaking insights into his, and his company's, methods of production, development and teaching. The result is an extraordinary and inspiring glimpse into the life and work of one of the most daring, innovative and challenging performance artists of our age.

Conceptual Performance explores how the radical visual art that challenged material aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s tested and extended the limits, character and concept of performance. Conceptual Performance sets out the history, theoretical basis, and character of this genre of work through a wide range of case studies. The volume considers how and why principal modes and agendas in Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s necessitated new engagements with performance, as well as expanded notions of theatricality. In doing so, this book reviews and challenges prevailing histories of Conceptual art through critical frameworks of performativity and performance. It also considers how Conceptual art adopted and redefined terms and tropes of theatre and performance: including score, document, embodiment, documentation, relic, remains, and the narrative recuperation of ephemeral work. While showing how performance has been integral to Conceptual art’s critiques of prevailing assumptions about art’s form, purpose, and meaning, this volume also considers the reach and influence of Conceptual performance into recent thinking and practice. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre, performance, contemporary art, and art history.

Bringing together philosophies of the maternal with digital technology may appear to be an arbitrary pairing. However, reading them intertextually through select creative practices reveals how both encompass an aesthetics of interruption that becomes a novel means of understanding subjectivity. EL Putnam investigates how the digital performances of certain artists, creators, and technologists rupture existing representations of the maternal, taking advantage of the formal properties of digital media. What results are interruptions of visual and aural constructions through an immanent merging of the performing body with digital technologies. Putnam bases her analysis on close examinations of the way certain makers use the formal properties of digital imagery, such as the gap, the glitch, and the lag, as means of rendering images of the maternal uncanny in order to challenge mediation, constituting an aesthetics of interruption. The result is a radical critical strategy for engaging with digital technology and subsequent understandings of the subject that defy current modes of assimilation.

Wark brings together a wide range of artists, including Lisa Steele, Martha Rosler, Lynda Benglis, Gillian Collyer, Margaret Dragu, and Sylvie Tourangeau, and provides detailed readings and viewings of individual pieces, many of which have not been studied in detail before. She reassesses assumptions about the generational and thematic characteristics of feminist art, placing feminist performance within the wider context of minimalism, conceptualism, land art, and happenings

Latina/o/x places exist as both tangible physical phenomena and gatherings created and maintained by creative cultural practices. In this collection, an interdisciplinary group of contributors critically examines the many ways that varied Latina/o/x communities cohere through cultural expression. Authors consider how our embodied experiences of place, together with our histories and knowledge, inform our imagination and reimagination of our surroundings in acts of placemaking. This placemaking often considers environmental sustainability as it helps to sustain communities in the face of xenophobia and racism through cultural expression ranging from festivals to zines to sanctuary movements. It emerges not only in specific locations but as movement within and between sites; not only as part of a built environment, but also as an aesthetic practice; and not only because of efforts by cultural, political, and institutional leaders, but through mass media and countless human interactions. A rare and crucial perspective on Latina/o/x people in the Midwest, Building Sustainable Worlds reveals how expressive culture contributes to, and sustains, a sense of place in an uncertain era.

Following the critical scepticism surrounding the notion of the ‘self’ as a singular entity during the 1960s, many artists and writers sought to test the apparent problem posed by autobiography as both a traditional genre and as a way of working. Considering the consequent emergence of autotheory, Lifework traces this shift in artistic and literary production during the late twentieth century and beyond, examining a set of diverse practices that mine the line between what it is to make art and what it is to live life. The book’s chapters connect a variety of artistic strategies that cut across medium, geography and time, uncovering how the historical marginalisation of first-person experience has taken on larger social, cultural and political implications in the contemporary moment and how the work of living might still relate to the work of art.