Back Stages: Essays across Art, Performance, and Public Life

Description

Shannon Jackson explores a range of disciplinary, institutional, and political puzzles that engage the social and aesthetic practice of performance in this collection of twenty essential essays spanning her career. Back Stages starts by considering the historical connection between performance practice and movements of social reform, while later writings analyze disciplinary debates on the place of performance in higher education and within the contemporary field of socially engaged art, tracking fraught and allied relationships to literary studies, art history, visual culture, theater, social theory, and critical theory.   At a time of increased aesthetic experimentation and political debate within the art world, these essays alight on artists, groups, and cultural organizations whose experiments have challenged conventions of curation and critique, including Theaster Gates, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Harrell Fletcher, and My Barbarian. Throughout, Jackson navigates the political ambivalences of performance, from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, tracking shifts in participatory art that seek to resist capitalism, even as such performance work paradoxically risks neoliberal appropriation by a post-Fordist experience economy.   Back Stages surfaces unexpected cross-disciplinary connections and provides new opportunities for mutual engagement within a wide network of educational, artistic, and civic sectors. A substantial introduction excavates the critical links between the essays and a variety of disciplines and movements. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1: Background Stages Chapter 1. Performance at Hull-House: Museum, Microfiche, and Historiography Chapter 2. Performing Show and Tell: On the Disciplinary Problems of Mixed-Media Practice Chapter 3. Theatricality’s Proper Objects: Genealogies of Performance and Gender Theory Chapter 4. When “Everything Counts”: Experimental Performance and Performance Historiography Chapter 5. Resist Singularity Chapter 6. Rhetoric in Ruins: Performing Literature and Performance Studies Chapter 7. Living Takes Many Forms: Creative Time Part 2: The Arts at Work Chapter 8. Life Politics/Life Aesthetics: Environmental Performance in red, black & GREEN: a blues Chapter 9. Elmgreen & Dragset’s Theatrical Turn Chapter 10. Performativity and Its Addressee: Walker Art Collection Chapter 11. Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity Chapter 12. Seven Ways to Look at Windows: Harrell Fletcher Chapter 13. Countercarnival in a Performance-Friendly World: En Mas’ Chapter 14. Utopian Operating Systems: Theaster Gates’s Way of Working Chapter 15. Trusting Publics: Paul Ramírez Jonas Part 3: Restagings Chapter 16. The Way We Perform Now Chapter 17. Drama and Other Time-Based Arts Chapter 18. Assemblies: Public Participation, Heteronomous Worlds Epilogue: Essential Labor and Proximate Performance Bibliography Index