No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience

by Frazer Ward

Overview

At a moment when performance art and performance generally are at the center of the international art world, Frazer Ward offers us insightful readings of major performance pieces by the likes of Acconci, Burden, Abramovic, and Hsieh, and confronts the twisting and troubled relationship that performance art has had with the spectator and the public sphere. Ward contends that the ethical challenges with which performance art confronts its viewers speak to the reimagining of the audience, in terms that suggest the collapse of notions like “public” and “community.” A thoughtful, even urgent discussion of the relationship between art and the audience that will appeal to a broad range of art historians, artists, and others interested in constructions of the public sphere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611683363
Publisher:	Dartmouth College Press
Publication date:	10/08/2012
Series:	Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	205
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

FRAZER WARD is an associate professor of art history at Smith College. His work appears widely in books, catalogs, and journals.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Reimagining the Audience • Performance after Minimalism: Fantasies of Public and Private • Acconci: “Public space is wishful thinking.” • Burden: “I’d set it up by telling a bunch of people, and that would make it happen.” • Abramovic: “You can stop. You don’t have to do this.” • Hsieh: “For me, the audience is secondary. However, without them my performances couldn’t exist.” • Notes • Bibliography • Index

What People are Saying About This

Judith Rodenbeck

“No Innocent Bystanders reorients our understanding of some of the most galvanizing and generative performance works of the 1970s. In prose that is both refreshingly direct and finely nuanced, Frazer Ward reads these works as explorations of the limit conditions of publicness and of community. The argument couldn't be more timely.”

Editorial Reviews

Ward has pulled off the impressive feat of navigating the complex theoretical positions of performance art and its histories, in a way that is both engaging and instructive, while widening established debates.” —Oxford Art Journal

From the Publisher