Dominic Johnson

Live Art is a contested category, not least because of the historical, disciplinary and institutional ambiguities that the term often tends to conceal. Live Art can be usefully defined as a peculiarly British variation on particular legacies of cultural experimentation – a historically and culturally contingent translation of categories including body art, performance art, time-based art, and endurance art. The recent social and cultural history of the UK has involved specific factors that have crucially influenced the development of Live Art since the late 1970s. These have included issues in national cultural politics relating to sexuality, gender, disability, technology, and cultural policy. In the past decade there has been a proliferation of festivals of Live Art in the UK and growing support for Live Art in major venues. Nevertheless, while specific artists have been afforded critical essays and monographs, there is a relative absence of scholarly work on Live Art as a historically and culturally specific mode of artistic production. Through essays by leading scholars and critical interviews with influential artists in the sector, Critical Live Art addresses the historical and cultural specificity of contemporary experimental performance, and explores the diversity of practices that are carried out, programmed, read or taught as Live Art. This book is based on a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review.

Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK

Critical Live Art

Charlie Fox

Nick Mauss

Tobi Haslett

Jennifer Krasinski

Elizabeth Wiet

In seinem nur zwölf Jahre umfassenden Schaffen brach der iranische Theatermacher Reza Abdoh mit sämtlichen Parametern des Theaters und brachte seine Schauspieler und das Publikum oft an ihre Grenzen. Seine halluzinatorischen Traumlandschaften waren eindringlich, seine Inszenierungen adressierten sprachgewaltig die bitteren politischen Realitäten seiner Zeit – vom staatlich sanktionierten Rassismus über die Weigerung der Reagan-Regierung, sich der AIDS-Krise anzunehmen, bis hin zu den Kriegen der USA. Kurz vor seinem Tod verfügte er, dass seine Stücke nicht neu aufgeführt werden dürfen. Der Katalog enthält neben zahlreichen Abbildungen neue Essays über die Einflüsse und Rezeption seines Werkes, bereits publizierte und bisher unveröffentlichte Interviews mit Reza Abdoh, Gespräche mit Weggefährten sowie Skripte seiner Stücke und Presseberichte.

Reza Abdoh

Alistair Gordon

A new comprehensive career planner and training guide for individual contributors and technical specialists. 740 pages of tools, checklists, models and ideas to resolve every business challenge you face in a complex technical role.

How to Use Expertship to Achieve Peak Performance, Seniority and Influence in a Technical Role

Master Expert

Deirdre Heddon

It's All Allowed: The Performance Works of Adrian Howells is the first book devoted to the work of the artist Adrian Howells. Adrian Howells (1962-2014) was one of the world's leading figures in the field of one-to-one performance practice. In one-to-one performance, an event is staged for one audience member at a time. Howells' award-winning work, developed over more than a decade, demonstrated not only his enduring commitment to this genre of performance, but also his determination to find new challenges and innovations in performance art, 'intimate theatre', and socially engaged art. Co-edited by Deirdre Heddon and Dominic Johnson, and designed by David Caines, the book pays testimony to Howells' remarkable achievements in performance, including his earlier theatrical works (solo works, and works with major theatre companies and collaborators, including Citizen's Theatre, Nigel Charnock, Stewart Laing, and Leigh Bowery). Contributors accounts for the methodological, thematic, and historiographical challenges posed by his performances. Citing his permissive mantra as its title, It's All Allowed includes new writing from leading scholars and artists, including Rosana Cade, Jon Cairns, Katie Gough, Helen Iball, Nic Green, Stephen Greer, Marcia Farquhar, Tim Crouch, Fintan Walsh, Rachel Zerihan, and others. It also includes writings by Howells, and two extensive interviews with the artist by Dominic Johnson and Jennifer Doyle. 'Working' documents, scores, and visual materials reproduced from Howells' archive reveal new insights into his process. It's All Allowed is part of a legacy project led by Deirdre Heddon and Dominic Johnson and funded by Creative Scotland, Live Art Development Agency, the University of Glasgow, Battersea Arts Centre, the Arches, National Theatre of Scotland, Society for Theatre Research, and Queen Mary University of London.

The Performances of Adrian Howells

It's All Allowed

Across a series of twelve in-depth interviews with a diverse range of major artists, Dominic Johnson presents a new oral history of performance art. From uses of body modification and physical extremity, to the creation of all-encompassing personae, to performance pieces lasting months or years, these artists have provoked and explored the vital limits between art and life. Their discussions with Johnson give us a glimpse of their artistic motivations, preoccupations, processes, and contexts. Despite the diversity of art forms and experiences featured, common threads weave between the interviews: love, friendship, commitment, death and survival. Each interview is preceded by an overview of the artist's work, and the volume itself is introduced by a thoughtful critical essay on performance art and oral history. The conversational tone of the interviews renders complex ideas and theoretical propositions accessible, making this an ideal book for students of Theatre and Performance, as well as for artists, scholars and general readers.

An Oral History of Performance Art

The Art of Living

- First monograph on one of the world's leading feminist photographers, Kat Toronto - Kat Toronto's photographs offer a unique interpretation of female erotic art - Brings together 250 Polaroid images, captured over the past six years Kat Toronto was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and currently resides in London. In 2010, she was diagnosed with a rare form of cervical cancer, which three years later led to a full hysterectomy - a traumatic procedure that alienated the artist from her body. Toronto developed her alter ego, 'Miss Meatface', as a way to process that trauma and to give her an outlet to explore her sexuality beyond what is typically expected of those who have a womb. "I found myself stopping to think about what the heck gender really was", she recalls, "and why society historically placed so much emphasis on sculpting gender stereotypes." In the beginning, she experimented with special effects makeup and took self-portraits with a Polaroid camera. "That's where the Meatface thing came from", she says. Then gradually, as she explored her relationship with the fetish community and reflected on her personal history, 'Miss Meatface' began to evolve: "it's interesting, how with the twists and turns that my life takes, she just kind of goes with it and reveals something new to me every time." Wearing masks and dressing in fetish-wear is a joyous process for Toronto, as it liberates her from the restraints set on her physical body by a society obsessed with defining and policing gender. In her Miss Meatface self-portraiture, Toronto stages fetishized domestic scenes that play with dominance and submission - games of power that mirror heterosexual power hierarchies - while her sexually ambiguous figures subvert conventional standards of beauty, gender, and power. In the world of 'Miss Meatface', she says, the role of homemaker is not the stereotypical ideal of feminine domestic submission, it is one of ultimate control over her domain. This book, Kat Toronto's first large-scale publication, brings together some 250 scenes from 'Miss Meatface's' life over the past six years, drawn from locations in the US and UK, and captured on Polaroid.

Kat Toronto - Miss Meatface

Ron Athey is an iconic figure in contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey calls into question the limits of artistic practice. These limits enable Athey to explore key themes including gender, sexuality, radical sex, queer activism, post-punk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual and religion. This landmark publication includes Athey’s own writings, commissioned essays by maverick artists and leading academics and full-colour images of Athey’s art and performances since the early 1980s. The diverse range of artistic and critical contributors to the book reflects Athey’s creative and cultural impact, among them musician Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons who contributed a foreword.

The Art and Performances of Ron Athey

Pleading in the Blood

The willingness to believe in some kind of payback or karma remains nearly universal. Retribution awaits those who commit bad deeds; rewards await those who do good. Johnson explores how this belief has developed over time, and how it has shaped the course of human evolution.

How the Fear of God Makes Us Human

God Is Watching You

Ron Athey is an iconic figure in contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis, and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey calls into question the limits of artistic practice. These limits enable Athey to explore key themes including gender, sexuality, radical sex, queer activism, post-punk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual, and religion. This landmark publication includes Athey's own writings, commissioned essays by maverick artists and leading academics, and full-color images of Athey's art and performances since the early 1980s. The diverse range of artistic and critical contributors to the book reflects Athey's creative and cultural impact, among them musician Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons who contributed a foreword.

Dominic Johnson

About

Books

Join the club