Cutting Performances

by Harding, James M.

• ISBN13: 9780472117185
• ISBN10: 0472117181
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-02-25
• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr

Summary

Cutting Performancesboldly challenges four decades of scholarship to revise the history of American avantgarde performance. Focusing on the modernist period, the book explores the work of five celebrated women artists whose performance aesthetics make prominent use of collage techniques---Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, and Valerie Solanas---to reveal how their work gave a decisively feminist inflection to collage as a mode of avant-garde expression. Drawing upon broadly conceptualized notions of collage aesthetics and performance art, this impressively interdisciplinary work will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural history of the avantgarde and the role that feminist experimental artists have played in it."A complex work of cultural history that forcefully challenges and destabilizes the male-centered Eurocentric genealogy of the avant-garde." ---Daniel Gerould, City University of New York"A thoughtful and engaging contribution that will have a sustained and lasting impact on the way feminist performance is defined and understood." ---Charlotte Canning, University of TexasJames M. Harding is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. His other books includeNot the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance(with John Rouse),Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies(with Cindy Rosenthal), andContours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality.