It has been 20 years since Anne Marsh’s historical survey of performance art, Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969-92 was published. In her introduction, Marsh described her goal as addressing a “gap in Australian art history” and noted a certain “cultural amnesia” which had enshrouded certain types of art practice that extended beyond the boundaries of the art museum during the late 1960s and 1970s.1 The year after Marsh’s book was published, artist and academic Sarah Miller built on this point, noting the cultural amnesia evident in the “absence of any but the most fleeting (and typically dismissive) mention of performance art in art critical discourses over the past ten years (as any survey of art journals in this country clearly indicates).” This, Miller suggested, was “particularly fascinating given the plethora of performance art/performance activity taking place in Australia not only throughout the eighties but the nineties, particularly in Sydney.”2 Two decades on, nothing much has changed. Body and Self is still the only publication dedicated to performance art in Australia, and it is out of print. I found my copy many years ago at a second-hand bookstore. It was checked out of Marrickville Council Library in 2004, and today copies are so rare they’re almost collector’s items, costing around $400 through online booksellers.3
This cultural amnesia is particularly odd given the explosion in performance art internationally in the last decade. Last year, Amelia Jones observed the “wholesale resurgence” in live art practices, which “has verged on art world obsession.”4 In Australia there have been new levels of visibility for performance art in major institutions across the country and with it, as curator Reuben Keehan remarks, “a greater purchase among a younger generation of practitioners.”5 And yet Marsh’s text still remains the only comprehensive study on performance art in Australia.
Marsh herself is perplexed that her work has produced so few descendants. In a recent email to me she noted, “it’s astounding to me that Body and Self is still current in the field (published in 1993!) Why didn’t someone else follow up?” As a performance artist interested in the history and lineage of the medium I practice, I find myself pondering this question quite regularly. Why, given the rich and vibrant legacy of performance art in Australia, is the history confined to one book, a collection of magazine articles, catalogue essays, artist monographs and the occasional mention of performance in books on Australian art, few of which reach enough depth to assist in connecting the past with the diverse and expanding array of contemporary practices? As Marsh commented in her email, it’s “amazing that we need to keep catching up on our own history.” After talking to Marsh, I began searching for the causes of this cultural amnesia in Australia.
The first potential cause relates to the ephemeral nature of the medium itself. Performance art, like many other conceptual practices of the 1960s and 1970s, developed within a particular socio-historic context that stressed, among other things, the ‘dematerialisation’ of the art object. The focus was on the ‘live’ moment and the unmediated relationship between performer and spectator. According to performance theorist Peggy Phelan:
Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance.6
Perhaps this is why performance art has not been well documented and why, as curator Sue Cramer noted, it is “often hidden from view and not adequately represented in public collections.”7 Miller took this one step further, suggesting there are certain hierarchies in the art world that “continue to revolve around the primacy of objects.”8 Perhaps the lack of history was a byproduct of artists who saw the medium as inherently and exclusively lodged in the present, combined with an institutional structure that favoured collectable objects. Certainly these two factors would, in combination, explain the absence of documentation.
If this is the case, it is unusually specific to Australia. It certainly wasn’t such a problem for historians in other parts of the world, where narratives of the medium have been developing since the 1970s. In America Lucy R. Lippard’s Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object came out in 1973, documenting the work of artists from America, Europe, Asia and even including brief entries on Australian artists Mike Parr, Peter Kennedy and Tim Johnson. In 1974, Lea Vergine’s The Body as Language was first published in Italy and documented the work of 60 performance artists from America and Europe, although no Australian artists were featured. In 1979, the first edition of RoseLee Goldberg’s classic text Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present came out in the US and featured American, British and European artists but, again, no Australians. A revised edition released in 2001 acknowledged the existence of “Australian artist Stelarc”, but only provided a single sentence of coverage. In her email to me, Marsh theorised that this dearth of serious critical interest in Australian performance is “primarily because generations of art historians have not chosen Australian art as an option.” This is not surprising, given measurements of academic excellence (such as those outlined by the Howard government’s Research Quality Framework and Excellence in Research Australia) tend to privilege English and American journals over Australian ones, thereby making it a disincentive to write about something as niche as Australian performance art history.
Accordingly, I began wondering if this lack of interest in our own histories might have something to do with an Australian provincialism, in which we still see ourselves as “a nation in which most activities are derivative and most new ideas are taken from abroad,” a point Donald Horne articulated in The Lucky Country back in 1964.9 Mark Davis repeated this point in 1997, arguing that “even now, cultural contact with places other than Europe or the USA carries little weight among the cultural establishment.”10 Coverage of cultural activity produced within Australia is still seen as secondary to that produced, and imported, from overseas.
This perhaps helps to explain why Australian artists have been left out of the picture and why our histories are not being written. The relatively undocumented history of video art (the medium that often captures performance art) in Australia also supports this perspective. In 1986 curator Bernice Murphy pointed to the “repeated gaps in transmission” in the history of Australian video art.11 In 2004 writer and curator Daniel Palmer summarised the same topic by remarking, that Australia’s “history of video art remains to be written” as it has been “relatively poorly documented and subsequently little known.”
Palmer used the same terminology as Marsh, finding that, with the exception of sporadic local histories buried in a few magazine articles and catalogues, video and performance art had been the subject of “cultural amnesia”.12 This helps to explain why most of my artistic references from the canon of performance art are imported from elsewhere, from Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965) to Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll (1975) and Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974). Whilst these works took place in a markedly different context, it is relatively easy to encounter them (most are visible online), and read their history and critical discussion of their context and impact. By contrast, it is extremely difficult to find comparable discussion regarding artists who directly influenced the development of performance art in Australia, for example Bonita Ely, Joan Grounds or Lyndal Jones. Ely was one of my lecturers at COFA in the early 2000s. I didn’t encounter her influential performances Dogwoman Communicates with the Younger Generation (1982) and Dogwoman Makes History (1985) until after I’d graduated, when I saw her do an artist talk in Korea.
Notably, Bonita Ely, Joan Grounds and Lyndal Jones share another feature in common to many performance artists beyond the relative obscurity of their work. Anne Marsh notes that performance art was an attractive medium for female artists because “it was not entrenched within the art world hierarchy and as a new medium could be used by women to analyse their position in society.”13 Charles Green, also writing from an Australian perspective, found that women were “dominant in this arena” which did not bring with it the “patriarchal history of sculpture or other more traditional art forms.”14 Another Australian, Nick Waterlow, furthers the suggestion that performance art was a form in which women were particularly prevalent, arguing, “although male artists such as Stelarc, Parr, Danko and Kennedy are central to the narrative of performance, so are equally complex artists such as Bonita Ely, Joan Grounds, Lyndal Jones and Jude Walton.”15
In the USA, Moira Roth notes that performance and the women’s movement went hand in hand:
By 1970 women artists had discovered that performance art – a hybrid form which combined visual arts, theater, dance, music, poetry and ritual – could be a particularly suitable form in which to explore their reassessments of themselves and other women. Thus, increasingly over the decade more and more women artists channeled their creative energies into this new medium and in the process transformed its content and form.16
The high presence of female artists practicing performance art during the 1970s and 1980s may, in itself, suggest another driving force behind the cultural amnesia. The absence of women in art history has been a key subject since the rise of the modern women’s movement in the late 1960s. In 1971, Linda Nochlin posed the question, in her landmark essay of the same name, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” She investigated the social and economic factors that had prevented women from achieving the same status as their male counterparts. Nochlin advocated the need for a “feminist critique of the discipline of art history” and the entire education system. Her critique drew attention to the alarming degree to which women’s artistic output failed to enter the canon and major institutions.17
Certainly, there were early suggestions that this absence had the potential to impact on performance art in Australia. In a 1984 collection of essays, compiled and independently published by Anne Marsh and Jane Kent, Kent observed that “performance art has been consistently left out of art history, which has concentrated on the art objects of the major art movements.” She continued that, “as performance art has been concealed or omitted from history, women’s contribution to performance has been hidden more so.”18 Whatever the rationale, the marked absence of critical attention around women’s art can easily be argued to have impacted upon the wider histories of mediums in which they were perceived to be ‘dominant in the arena.’
In exploring Marsh’s question as to why her work had provoked so few descendants, it seems to me that Australian performance art has been lost somewhere between the ephemeral nature of the medium, a provincial reluctance to value our culture and the seeming invisibility of women’s creative output. But equally I ponder why the medium, and women’s participation in it, seemed to be undergoing a revival. As Bree Richards, curator at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, commented in 2012, “live and performative artforms are enjoying a resurgence internationally and, in an Australian context, particularly amongst early career and experimental women practitioners.” As I personally take part in this resurgence, as a researcher, writer and artist, I ponder most of all what the critical fortunes of my peers will be and whether we, like Bonita Ely, Joan Grounds and Lyndal Jones will find our history consigned to sporadic catalogue essays and magazine articles. The concern isn’t just how the cultural amnesia has obscured our history, but how it obscures our present and future work. We need to not only catch up on our history but to develop a narrative that connects the present with our past.
1. Anne Marsh, Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969-92, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993, p.1.
2. Sarah Miller, ‘A Question of Silence – Approaching the Condition of Performance’ in 25 Years of Performance Art in Australia, Marrickville: Ivan Dougherty Gallery, 1994 (Catalogue), p.7.
3. Anne Marsh has recently released a digital version of Body and Self, which can be accessed on The Australian Video Art Archive website.
4. Amelia Jones, ‘The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History’ in Perform, Repeat, Record, Live Art in History, ed. by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, Chicago: Intellect, 2012, p.13.
5. Reuben Keehan, ‘Double Agents: Complication in Recent Performance,’ Art & Australia, vol.47, no.1, 2009, p.450.
6. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked the Politics of Performance, London: Routledge, 1993, p.145.
7. Sue Cramer, Inhibodress: 1970-1972, Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1989 (catalogue), p.4.
8. Sarah Miller, ‘A Question of Silence – Approaching the Condition of Performance’ in 25 Years of Performance Art in Australia, Marrickville: Ivan Dougherty Gallery, 1994 (catalogue), p. 7.
9. Donald Horne, The Lucky Country (1964), Camberwell: Penguin Modern Classics by Penguin Group, 2005, p.101.
10. Mark Davis, Gangland, Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997, p.186.
11. Bernice Murphy, ‘Towards a History of Australian Video’, The Australian Video Art Festival 1986, Sydney: Australian Video Festival, 1986 (catalogue), p.19.
12. Daniel Palmer, ‘Medium Without a Memory: Australian video art’, Broadsheet, 33, 2004, p.21.
13. Anne Marsh, Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969-92, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1993, p.168.
14. Nick Waterlow, 25 Years of Performance Art in Australia, Marrickville, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, 1994 (catalogue), p.4.
15. Charles Green, ‘Words and Images: The Fate of Australian Performance’, 25 Years of Performance Art in Australia, Marrickville, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, 1994 (catalogue), p. 15.
16. Moira Roth, The Amazing Decade, Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980, Los Angeles, Astro Artz, 1983, p.8.
17. Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists’, in Art and Sexual Politics: Why have There Been No Great Women Artists? ed. by Elizabeth C. Baker and Thomas B. Hess, New York, Macmillan Publishing, 1973, p.2.
18. Jane Kent, ‘Performance Art and W.A.M: A Report’, Live Art: Australia and America, ed. by Jane Kent and Anne Marsh, Adelaide, Anne Marsh and Jane Kent, 1984, p.8.
19. Bree Richards, Contemporary Australia: Women, Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, 2012 (catalogue), p.173.
‘Catching Up On Our Own History: Performance Art and Cultural Amnesia’ was originally written by Diana Smith in Das Platform magazine, Issue 26, 25 April 2013. http://dasplatforms.com/magazines/issue-26/catching-up-on-our-own-history-performance-art-and-cultural-amnesia/