Live Art in LA

Performance in Southern California, 1970 - 1983

Peggy Phelan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136467059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Live Art in LA: Performance Art in Southern California, 1970-1983 documents and critically examines one of the most fecund periods in the history of live art. The book forms part of the Getty Institute's Pacific Standard Time initiative – a series of exhibitions, performance re-enactments and research projects focused on the greater Los Angeles area. This extraordinary volume, beautifully edited by one of the leading scholars in the field, makes vivid the compelling drama of performance history on the west coast.

Live Art in LA:

• moves lucidly between discussions of legendary figures such as Judy Chicago and Chris Burden, and the crucial work of less-celebrated solo artists and collectives;

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• examines the influence of key institutions, particularly Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and the California Institute of the Arts – and the Feminist Art Programme established at the latter;

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• features original and incisive essays by Peggy Phelan and Amelia Jones, and eloquent contributions by Michael Ned Holte, Suzanne Lacy and Jennifer Flores Sternad.

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Combining cutting-edge research with over 100 challenging and provocative photographs and video stills, Live Art in LA represents a major re-evaluation of a crucial moment in performance history. And, as performance studies becomes ever more relevant to the history of art, promises to become a vital and enduring resource for students, academics and artists alike.

ONE

VIOLENCE AND RUPTURE

Misfires of the ephemeral

Peggy Phelan

In the mythic version of the United States, California is cast in the role of golden child. Golden because of the sunset over the Pacific; golden because of the Gold Rush; golden because of the fortunes at play in Hollywood; golden because of the way the long clear light lends halos to hills. The golden aspect of the mythic claim is also perpetuated by the dulcet notes of The Beach Boys; California’s endless skyway, ribbons of highways, and redwood forests have all been serenaded by the sing-song world of folk and light rock. The myth renders California child in the global reach of Disney, ET, and Star Wars, while its decades-long fugue state regarding financial matters encourages politicians to ignore the gap between its income and its expenses. Like a child, the state tends to hope its astonishing beauty will persuade adults to soften their scolding reproach.

Like all myths, California as golden child both illuminates and obscures some central facts. Among the things hidden in the mythic version of California are violent truths. In 1942, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, virtually all Japanese-Americans who lived on the West Coast were interned. While these camps were located throughout the west, two of the largest were in California and the single largest, Tulle Lake, held more than twice the number of the others. Insufficiently heated, drastically overcrowded, and burdened by the psychological despair that accompanies pain with no known time limit, the internment camps were worse than many federal prisons. While it is true that in 1988, President Ronald Reagan offered an official apology to Japanese-Americans and token remuneration to 60,000 survivors of those interned in these camps, California continues to incarcerate its citizens with excessive violence. In May 2011, the golden state’s prison system was found to be in violation of the eighth amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment” by the Supreme Court. Severe overcrowding and no real plan to reduce the prison population for decades, despite a series of court orders, led a very conservative court to rule against the state. Similarly, given the ideologically imprisoning geography of the California–Mexican border, blood stains the golden hue of the mythic story.

Indeed, the glow of the golden has also obscured the racial politics of California. The Watts Riots of 1965, which took the lives of thirty-four people, are connected both implicitly and explicitly with the 1992 violent unrest in South Central Los Angeles. The lighting fluid for the latter event was the not-guilty verdict delivered by a Simi Valley jury in Rodney King’s police brutality case. Outraged by what was perceived as a racist verdict, fifty-three people died while stores and buildings went up in flames. To date, the two best artistic analyses of the complex racial mosaic that contributed to the King uprisings are Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles and John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood. When Smith premiered her performance, which was composed of verbatim excerpts of many of the people who were instrumental in the unrest, she invited all of the “characters” to see her work at the Mark Taper Forum in 1993. Many of the people interviewed sat next to those who held ideologically opposed views to them. Meeting their “enemies” in the aisles and some version of themselves on Smith’s stage was extraordinarily powerful because they were simultaneously experiencing themselves as characters and as audience members. Singleton’s 1991 film Boyz in the Hood, while it predates the 1992 riots, includes a brutal assessment of the racial violence in the LA police department and its effects on South Central LA. The fictive film took on a documentary dimension in retrospect. Taken together, the creative responses to this violence suggest the particularly entwined relationship between live art and destruction at work in the history of performance in Los Angeles. What is most striking about this entwining is how persistently it repeats itself; it is as if each generation must confront anew the same rupture and develop a creative response to it.

The legacy of the documentary approach: crucial historical texts

When I mentioned to the feminist artist Lynn Hershman Leeson that I was working on the Getty’s “PST initiative,” she joked that a better name might be the “PTSD initiative.” I am interested in thinking seriously about the sometimes funny associations we make between “PST”—Pacific Standard Time—and “PTSD”—post-traumatic stress disorder. Part of the purpose here is to address the relative dearth of serious critical attention to the history of art made in California, particularly Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is worth asking if that neglect is a symptom of something traumatic in the location and/or in the work produced “out west.” Here, I will be looking at the ways in which violence and creativity are braided through artwork composed in California during the 1970s and early 1980s. In addition to addressing art and theoretical issues pertaining to work that takes violence as its subject, I am also interested in the ways in which institutional violence of various kinds informs the perception of art. The racist and sexist blind spots that have prevailed among curators, commentators, and collectors for far too long have done immense violence to the history of art.

Determined to avoid these long-entrenched attitudes about art, the performance that emerged in southern California in the 1970s was raw, innovative, and challenging to document and assess. In 1980, Performance Anthology: Sourcebook of California Performance Art was published in its first edition; it has been re-issued several times since.¹ It is indispensable for serious scholars of California art in the 1970s. Organized chronologically, the first 350 pages of the volume are devoted to summaries of exhibition and performance reviews, interviews with artists, and artist statements. Compiled by Darlene Tong, the text exhaustively documents performance in San Francisco and Los Angeles throughout the decade. Four survey essays follow, perhaps the most interesting of which is Linda Frye Burnham’s.² She bluntly states that the two most important performance artists in California are Chris Burden and Allan Kaprow and also claims “three other artists may be said to be outstanding … as artists and role-models”: Suzanne Lacy, Eleanor Antin, and Barbara Smith.³ While her essay discusses more artists than these, her commentary is chiefly focused on these five artists. She describes Chris Burden’s early work (1970–1975) and notes that it was often seen as “sensationalistic and risky”; the mainstream media, she explains, called Burden the “Evel Knieval of the Art World.”⁴ Her remarks about Lacy, Antin, and Smith avoid the “is it feminist?” narrowness of some discussions of their work and usefully focus on a wide array of work (by men and women) concerned with sexual politics. Moira Roth, whose essay concludes the volume, argues that feminist art in Los Angeles “presents a synthesis of concerns about women never achieved before in the fine arts, and it was performance not painting or sculpture that was the necessary medium for this synthesis in Southern California—the last outpost.”⁵

And it seemed for a surprisingly long time that Roth’s “last outpost” was also the last word about this rich period of performance. It took more than two decades for another scholar to focus on Los Angeles’ contributions to performance history in a deep way. Meiling Cheng’s In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Art (2002) is among the few serious critical reflections on the city’s contributions to the development of live art.⁶ Adept at undermining the often false dichotomies between theater and performance, Cheng’s argument is also particularly attentive to overlapping racial, gender, sexual, and ethnic identities as well. Moreover, she offers illuminating readings of key players in the foundational moments of Los Angeles’ performance scene, including Lacy, Tim Miller, and Johanna Went. Excellent and thoughtful as it is, Cheng’s book is not a history or even a chronicle of the development of performance and live art in Los Angeles, San Francisco or other influential locations in the broad terrain of Pacific Standard Time, however.

Some of the critical neglect afforded to experimental art can be attributed to the outsized role of Hollywood in all discussions of southern California. The explicitly commercial aspirations and enormous worldwide market for popular films has left little room for critical assessment of avant-garde live art, which is often marginal in most communities and especially so when dwarfed by “the industry.” Additionally, the complicated legacy of the emergence of feminist art in the United States, an emergence rooted in southern California, may also play a part in the disinterest in the larger history of performance art on the West Coast. Routine misogyny and racism still conspire to locate socially progressive art at a slight remove from “serious” high art. And yet, many of the artists working in southern California during this period set the agenda for contemporary live art for the ensuing forty years. Anna Halprin, who along with Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer, founded the San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, directly influenced the development of postmodern dance. Brown and Rainer helped established Judson Dance Theatre in New York, and that company in turn transformed the development of international dance and choreography. Oliveros, Phranc, and Jackie Apple (who came to Los Angeles after working in New York) did pioneering work in sonic performance. Diamanda Galás, something of an outlier in these quick histories, also did enormously influential work in sound art in both southern and northern California during this period; much of it explored the intersection between violence and creativity. Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Kim Jones, Montano, Barbara Smith, and Paul McCarthy pioneered body art; Guillermo Gomez-Pena and James Luna did moving and politically savvy early work that made alliances between political critiques of racism and performance art impossible to ignore (see Fig. 8); while African American artists such as Bettye Saar, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Ulysses Jenkins, and David Hammons worked collaboratively across a range of media, including sculpture, sound, painting, installation, and performance art, to examine the peculiar and persistent intersection ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 VIOLENCE AND RUPTURE: Misfires of the ephemeral
• 2 HAPPENING AGAIN: Reinventing Allan Kaprow
• 3 VOICES, VARIATIONS, AND DEVIATIONS: From the LACE archive of southern California performance art
• 4 LOST BODIES: Early 1970s Los Angeles performance art in art history
• INDEX