Performance in Contemporary Art

$40.00 Member Price: $36.00

Now available in paperback, in this important and richly illustrated book, Catherine Wood provides the broadest and most up-to-date survey on performance art published in recent years.

Stunningly beautiful, deeply puzzling, profoundly moving or intensely unsettling – performance art can evoke a wide variety of responses. Wood proposes performance not as a genre of art separate from object-making but as an attitude that has infiltrated the entire terrain of contemporary art. From the musical-theatricals of Marvin-Gaye Chetwynd to the public encounters created by Tino Seghal and the social activism of Tania Bruguera, a hugely divergent set of practices has emerged in the past twenty to thirty years which embrace the worlds of sculpture and painting, spectacle and protest.

Exploring individual, social and object-based approaches in the field, Wood first examines the influential performance art of the 1960s to 1980s: the body art of the Viennese actionists; the raw performances of Yoko Ono and Chris Burden; and the experiments of the Japanese Gutai group among others. She then explores how these sources have been revisited, reformed or rejected by contemporary artists in the twenty-first century. This impressive book encompasses international artists who fall outside the traditional European and North American focus, giving the reader the broadest and most up-to-date insight into the subject yet published.

Catherine Wood is curator of Contemporary Art / Performance at Tate Modern. She co-curated the exhibitions The World as a Stage at Tate Modern in 2007, Pop Life in 2010 and curated A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance in 2012, as well as co-directing the opening programme for the Tate Tanks in 2012, titled Art in Action. She has programmed numerous performance works at Tate since 2003 including works by Mark Leckey, Joan Jonas, Guy de Cointet, Jiri Kovanda and Sturtevant and initiated the online project, ‘Performance Room’ in 2011. She is author of Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle (2007, Afterall/MIT press), and a regular contributor to Afterall, Artforum and Mousse magazines, and writer of numerous catalogue essays, recently on Joachim Koester, Piotr Uklanski, and Sung Hwan Kim.