Welcome to The Live Art Almanac Volume 4, an ongoing publishing project led by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) that collects and disseminates ‘found’ writings about Live Art. Like the previous three volumes (published in 2008, 2011 and 2013), Volume 4 draws from a varied pool of sources representative of the most absorbing, thought provoking and considered writings about Live Art and the wider cultural contexts it sits within. This fourth edition gathers writings by artists, scholars, curators, critics and others that were published, shared, sent, spread and read between January 2012 and December 2014. Volume 4 takes forward a cultural dialogue started in Volumes 1, 2 and 3 with the aim of being a useful resource and an enjoyable read for everyone from artists to academics, programmers to producers, writers to students and all those with a curiosity about contemporary Live Art practice.
As with the previous three volumes, the content for Volume 4 was selected from materials collected following an open call for recommendations issued in early 2015:
We are seeking recommendations for material to include in the Live Art Almanac Volume 4. The Live Art Almanac draws together all kinds of ‘found’ writing about and around Live Art from a wide range of sources – from more traditional forms such as magazine articles, newspaper reviews, transcribed interviews, or public lectures, to digital forms such as blog entries, Facebook pages and Twitter conversations, to less conventional forms of ‘publishing’ such as emails, diary entries and letters. It aims to be both a useful resource and a great read for artists, writers, students and others interested in the field of interdisciplinary, performance-based art throughout the world. If you’ve read something that engaged, provoked, excited or amused you, or made you rethink Live Art and radical performance then we want to hear about it.
The recommendations that came in from this open call were complemented by submissions received from a range of artists, thinkers and producers from across the world that we had directly invited to nominate writings, and by a bank of ‘found’ writings that LADA had accumulated.
With Volume 3 we had extended the reach of the Almanac by working with a host of international partners from five continents on the submission and selection of materials. This was a rewarding but labour intensive and time consuming process which ultimately delayed the publication date of Volume 3 and starting our work on Volume 4. In response to this, Volume 4 has taken a slightly different shape, featuring for the first time writings from a three, rather than two, year period, and, to speed up the editorial process, LADA has taken sole responsibility for making the final selections of content.
As with previous editions there was a great response to our call for submissions with an influx of great writing in a wide array of forms. By the submission deadline of 31 June 2015, we had over 150 reviews, obituaries, tributes, interviews, blog posts, speeches, press releases, Facebook posts, letters, open letters, fan mail, news articles, magazine features and more to work with. A noticeable shift in this edition is the inclusion of more mainstream press outlets, undoubtedly due to the rise in public prominence of performance art practices, resulting in the content being more varied than ever with major news brands sitting alongside niche blogs and private correspondence.
As with previous editions, Volume 4 discouraged the submission of writings from academic publications, as it aims to complement the publishing work of scholarly institutions and journals by reflecting a range of contributions to critical discourses around Live Art. To this end we also stipulated a maximum word limit of 3,000 words.
With over 80 pieces, Volume 4 is the biggest volume yet. This volume features writers from across the globe and articles about significant international issues from the USA to Taiwan, Poland to Afghanistan, Australia to Russia. Contributions from the UK still make up the bulk of the content reflecting the large number of submissions from the UK, the still primarily UK-based readership, and LADA’s inevitable partiality.
Whilst we’ve remained as hands-off as possible in relation to the actual texts (no major updates or revisions have been made and most texts are reprinted here as found, bar correcting a few errors that slipped through when they were first published) we have, as with Volume 3, grouped articles within seven loosely themed sections: Locating Performance; Performance Under Attack; Speaking Up/Speaking Out; Show Me the Money; High Art in Low Places; Reviews; and Dearly Departed. Although too broad to be considered chapters, these sections do address recurring themes and, to an extent, reflect key moments in Live Art between the beginning of 2012 and end of 2014. However, the Almanac in no way aspires to be comprehensive or authoritative, and these sections should not be taken as anything beyond an attempt to make things slightly more digestible or coherent for the reader. Indeed there were hundreds of potential running orders and we therefore encourage you to dip into the Almanac in any way you want and to make links and connections that even the original writers could never have imagined.
In Volume 3 we drew attention to the huge institutional shift towards the embrace of performance practices, perhaps symbolized best by the headline grabbing Marina Abramović. Three years on, this ‘boom’ in Performance Art within visual art contexts shows no signs of slowing. Performance Art is everywhere, with everyone from Jay Z to Shia LaBeouf having a go, and gallerists falling over themselves to ‘rediscover’ the performance oeuvres of countless overlooked twentieth-century performance artists.
However, despite this embrace of performance practices, during this period we’ve seen performance artists come under attack like never before. From the detentions of Ai Weiwei and Tania Bruguera, to the court proceedings against Reverend Billy, from the incarceration of Pussy Riot and, as I write this, the unlawful arrest of Jelili Aitku and the attempted sectioning of Petr Pavlensky, performance artists are proving yet again that their work is relevant, powerful and deemed enough of a threat to the status quo to necessitate these (largely unsuccessful) attempts to silence them. In the section Performance Under Attack we shine a light on the plight of performance artists working at the edge of the ‘law’. In a further subsection we look more closely at what lessons can be learnt from one of the most headline generating performance events of recent years, Brett Bailey’s controversial Exhibit B, which was shut down by the Barbican in London after a huge outpouring of public protest. The case generated much debate, and for Volume 4 we have collated some of the most insightful writings to come out of the furor from varying perspectives, in an attempt, we hope, to continue this vital conversation.
In Reviews we focus on a handful of writings selected for their surprising, playful and thought-provoking approaches to Live Art, from the refreshing fanaticism of Megan Vaughan to the fittingly frustrating review of GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN’s Big Hits by Andrew Haydon. In Show Me The Money we reflect on a string of recent discussions around pay, funding and ethics in the arts, from the perspective of the individual artist through to the institution. It’s also timely to reflect on the notable performance figures we’ve lost over the period in question; in Dearly Departed key figures from Jennifer Doyle to Guy Brett reflect on the loss of some of our most brilliant performance peers. Further sections on Locating Performance, Speaking Up/Speaking Out and High Art in Low Places raise many of the issues central to the subversion and questioning of ideas of context, audience, value and worth, taste and politics that Live Art practices offer.
With the now vast amount of writing about Live Art, and fast, cheap and independent publishing options (such as print on-demand and online platforms), we’ve come a long way since the publication of The Live Art Almanac Volume 1 back in 2008. The mainstream press and traditional media no longer has a stranglehold over what can and can’t be published, or even what publishing could be. Despite receiving a vast amount of recommendations for Volume 4 we know that this selection barely scratched the surface of the huge amount of performance writings produced within the timeframe. It’s become impossible to stay on top of all the Live Art writing being produced, and there are many brilliant texts that we’ve been unable to represent or completely failed to unearth. All of these things will inform our future approaches to the concept of the Almanac, but for now, we hope you enjoy reading The Live Art Almanac Volume 4.
The Almanac is only possible because of the interest and engagement of those who recommend writings for consideration. We want to thank you all and regret that we didn’t have the space to include everything. Of course we are especially grateful to the writers and publishers who generously gave us permission to reprint their work.
February 2016