Looks at the development of American avant-garde art, including performance art, environmental art, conceptual art, video, and photo-realism.

"Presenting works from the early 20th century to today, The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance examines the notion of stillness as both a performative and visual gesture, featuring practitioners who have constructed static or near-static experiments that hover somewhere between action and representation as they are experienced in the gallery space. The exhibition investigates performance from the perspective of the object rather than the body, examining how performance has reinterpreted traditional artistic media. Stillness and permanence are qualities typically seen as inherent to painting and sculpture-consider the frozen gestures of a historical tableau or the unyielding solidity of a bronze figure. The Paradox of Stillness, however, expands the artwork's quality of stillness to accommodate uncertain temporalities and physical states, investigating works that merge objects with human bodies suspended in motion. Featuring artists whose works include performative elements but also embrace acts, objects, and gestures that refer more to the inert qualities of painting or sculpture than to true staged action, The Paradox of Stillness rethinks the history of performance through its aesthetic investigations into the interplay of the fixed image and the live body"--

"Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art has taken this opportunity to explore the language of exhibitions by examining the historical trajectory of performance art, producing new and existing live performances, and aligning that material with the possibilities of an interactive, installation-based, and documentary-style exhibition. Outside the Frame is a highly selective exhibition, designed to touch on many different forms of performance and to raise critical questions concerning the interrelationship between performance art and all other art forms."--Foreword

Objects as Actors charts a new approach to Greek tragedy based on an obvious, yet often overlooked, fact: Greek tragedy was meant to be performed. As plays, the works were incomplete without physical items—theatrical props. In this book, Melissa Mueller ingeniously demonstrates the importance of objects in the staging and reception of Athenian tragedy. As Mueller shows, props such as weapons, textiles, and even letters were often fully integrated into a play’s action. They could provoke surprising plot turns, elicit bold viewer reactions, and provide some of tragedy’s most thrilling moments. Whether the sword of Sophocles’s Ajax, the tapestry in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, or the tablet of Euripides’s Hippolytus, props demanded attention as a means of uniting—or disrupting—time, space, and genre. Insightful and original, Objects as Actors offers a fresh perspective on the central tragic texts—and encourages us to rethink ancient theater as a whole.

Artists as performers have radically altering our notion of what constitutes visual art. This text puts forward a method for teaching the subject as a discipline distinct from dance, drama, painting or sculpture.

Throughout its modern history, Russia has seen a succession of highly performative social acts that play out prominently in the public sphere. This innovative volume brings the fields of performance studies and Russian studies into dialog for the first time and shows that performance is a vital means for understanding Russia's culture from the reign of Peter the Great to the era of Putin. These twenty-seven essays encompass a diverse range of topics, from dance and classical music to live poetry and from viral video to public jubilees and political protest. As a whole they comprise an integrated, compelling intervention in Russian studies. Challenging the primacy of the written word in this field, the volume fosters a larger intellectual community informed by theories and practices of performance from anthropology, art history, dance studies, film studies, cultural and social history, literary studies, musicology, political science, theater studies, and sociology.

Performance art is a major contemporary art form and California is recognized internationally as a pivotal area for innovative performance art activity. This updated edition of Performance Anthology offers an extraordinary documentation of California performance art from 1970 through 1989. The anthology provides a chronicle of the literature of artists' publications, art journals, major books, and catalogues; introductions and original essays by artists and leading historians and critics of performance art in California; and photographs illustrating major works by California artists. Through the documentation of the literature, a framework is established of the artists, events, organizations and spaces that have been instrumental in launching and sustaining the performance art scene in California.

Java application performance is tied pretty heavily to the underlying Java Virtual Machine, and the new 1.4 version of Java has significant changes that mean previously used performance tips and strategies may no longer work. Significantly revised and expanded, this second edition not only covers Java 1.4, but adds new coverage of JDBC, NIO, Servlets, EJB and JavaServer Pages. Suitable for intermediate and advanced Java developers, this text also covers JDBC, RMI/CORBA, Servlets, JavaServer Pages and custom tag libraries, XML, internationalization, JavaMail, Enterprise JavaBeans and performance tuning. It should be a useful resource for teaching how to create a tuning strategy, how to use profiling tools to understand a program's behaviour, and how to avoid performance penalties from inefficient code, making them more efficient and effective. The result is code that's robust, maintainable and fast.

What is the object of comedy? What makes us laugh and why? Is comedy subversive, restorative or reparative? What is at stake politically, socially and metaphysically when it comes to comedic performances? This book investigates not only the object of comedy but also its objectives – both its deliberate goals and its unintended side effects. In researching the object of comedy, the contributions gathered here encounter comedy as a philosophical object: instead of approaching comedy as a genre, the book engages with it as a language, a medium, an artifice, a weapon, a puzzle or a trouble, a vocation and a repetition. Thus philosophy meets comedy at the intersection of various fields (e.g. psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural studies, and performance studies) –regions that comical practices and theories in fact already traverse.