Back Stages

Essays across Art, Performance, and Public Life

Performance Works

by Shannon Jackson

Imprint: Northwestern University Press

424 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in, 21 b-w images

Paperback
9780810144842
Published: June 2022

$34.95

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Hardcover
9780810144859
Published: June 2022

$99.95

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eBook
9780810144866
Published: June 2022

$34.95

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise
Artists Discussed

INTRODUCTION
SECTION 1: BACKGROUND STAGES
1. Performance at Hull-House: Museum, Microfiche, and Historiography
2. Performing Show and Tell: On the Disciplinary Problems of Mixed-Media Practice
3. Theatricality’s Proper Objects: Genealogies of Performance and Gender Theory
4. When “Everything Counts”: Experimental Performance and Performance Historiography
5. Resist Singularity
6. Rhetoric in Ruins: Performing Literature and Performance Studies
7. Living Takes Many Forms: Creative Time
SECTION 2: THE ARTS AT WORK
8. Life Politics/Life Aesthetics: Environmental Performance in red, black & GREEN: a blues
9. Elmgreen & Dragset’s Theatrical Turn
10. Performativity and Its Addressee: Walker Art Collection
11. Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity
12. Seven Ways to Look at Windows: Harrell Fletcher
13. Counter-Carnival in a Performance-Friendly World: En Mas’
14. Utopian Operating Systems: Theaster’s Way of Working
15. Trusting Publics: Paul Ramirez Jonas
SECTION 3: RE-STAGINGS
16. The Way We Perform Now
17. Drama and Other Time-Based Arts
18. Assemblies: Public Participation, Heteronomous Worlds
19. Epilogue: Essential Labor and Proximate Performance
Notes
Bibliography
Index

“Once again, a beautiful book by Shannon Jackson that connects worlds of performance to our social lives in social institutions and the extra-institutional everyday. Jackson shows us through detailed and persuasive readings and commentaries how performance challenged us to rethink the ties that bind us, the primacy of labor and social practices, the requirement for infrastructures that should support bodily life. We learn along the way how ‘performance’ became a scandal for both English departments and theater studies before performance studies showed that it was always inside those fields, operating in language and spatial locations in and beyond the proscenium. A social critic, a theorist of the public good, a shrewd art critic, Jackson also performs the truth of what she says, showing us that ‘demonstrating our claims’ demands a performance, a body enacting what it knows and feels and seeks to communicate through gesture, movement, word, and space. No one who reads this book will be able to dismiss ‘mere performance’ as if it were fluff, because Jackson shows us it is the moving substance of life itself.” —Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“More than anyone, Shannon Jackson has helped us grapple with the gestures, trajectories, and vibrant interanimations among visual, mediatic, theatrical, and performance-based arts. Across decades of commitment, her work has invited us into sumptuous critical entanglements where arts' histories meet performance studies, where arts work is social work and social work performs. Now, Back Stages offers a vital collection of Jackson's influential essays curated to show the arc of her oeuvre and including some new work as well. The book will be an essential reader for all of us who meet at the crossroads of arts disciplines or gather where making meets thinking meets making again.” —Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment

“Over the last two decades, Shannon Jackson has played a leading role in bridging disciplines within the visual and the performing arts through a range of methodologies, helping develop critical language to best understand the social and political aims of performance-based work. This anthology is a must-read—a key reference for anyone involved in performance studies or socially engaged art.” —Pablo Helguera, author of Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook

“Shannon Jackson is the great participant-observer of performance. These essays, written over twenty years, are vibrant with insights, observations, and reflections. Reading them allows us to relive and rethink performance studies at its best. Highly recommended.” —Martin Puchner, author of The Language of Thieves: My Family’s Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate

“This anthology’s breadth of exploration exemplifies Jackson’s depth of knowledge and agility in moving confidently and with compelling insight across a range of performative practices—particularly socially-engaged forms—connecting disciplines and their histories while offering more expansive methods for their interpretation and analysis. Back Stages is an essential contribution to the field.” —Paula Marincola, executive director of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

Artists Space 23, 305, 307, 310, 312, 321, 322

Asher, Michael 14, 115

Balanchine 306

Bamuthi Joseph, Marc 22, 163-80

Barzdžiukaitė, Rugilė 360. See also Vaiva Grainytė 360; Lapelytė, Lina 360

Sun & Sea (Marina) 353-54, 360-63, 367

Bausch, Pina 229

Beckett, Samuel 19, 195-97, 337

Endgame 196

Waiting for Godot 196, 337

Bel, Jérôme 9

Beuys, Joseph 174, 355

Black Monks of Mississippi 280, 286

Bochner, Mel 115, 191, 210-11

Measurement Room (1969) 115, 211

Brecht, Bertolt 88, 141, 336-37; Brechtianism 18, 86, 88-90, 96, 119, 154, 229, 329, 338, 364.

Broodthaers, Marcel 115

Brown, Trisha 214, 219, 257

It’s a Draw-For Robert Rauschenberg 214

Lateral Pass 214

Man Walking Down the Side of a Building 214

Buren, Daniel 14, 115, 191

Byrne, Gerard 336-38

1984 and Beyond (2005–7) 338

A Man and a Woman Make Love (2012) 338

Cage, John 232

4’33” (1952) 232

Campbell, Charles 268, 272-73

Actor Boy: Fractal Engagements 272

Chan, Paul 152, 281

Chto Delat 152, 154, 255

Clark, Michael 9, 311-13, 320

Cornerstone Theater 155, 167, 170

Creative Time 22, 151, 223-24, 246

Cunningham, Merce 9, 214, 219, 309, 312, 313, 320

Danspace 306, 315

Dave the Potter 168, 286

De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa 9-10, 19-20

Work/Travail/Arbeid 10

DeFeo, Jay 207

The Rose 207

Denes, Agnes 355

Wheatfield—A Confrontation 355

Dewey, John 34, 254

Driscoll, Faye 3-4, 17

Thank You for Coming: Attendance 3-5, 17

Eiko and Koma 199, 211-14, 216, 219

Eliasson, Olafur 358

Ice Watch 358

Elmgreen & Dragset 22, 185-198, 256. See also Dragset, Ingar ; Elmgreen, Michael

Boy Scout 188, 196

Drama Queens 194-95, 197

Faustus, The Last Night 107, 120, 194

Powerless Structures, Fig. 255 188-90, 193

Reg(u)arding the Guards 191-92

Estévez, Nicolás Dumit 263, 267-68

C-Room 267

Fletcher, Harrell 23, 252-54, 256, 258-59

The Best Things in Museums Are the Windows 251, 253, 255, 258, 259

Fraser, Andrea 14, 115, 116, 127, 191, 255, 295, 311, 328

Garcés, Michael John 167, 170-74, 177, 178

Gates, Theaster 22-23, 154, 163, 167-69, 172, 279, 287-88

Dorchester Projects 279-82, 284, 289

Gonzalez-Torres, Felix 189, 215, 252, 295, 298

Grand Openings (art group) 9, 320

Griffith, Marlon 273-74

Haacke, Hans 14, 115, 191, 256, 354-55

Handspring Puppet Company 214

Hesse, Eva 211

Hsieh, Tehching 257, 326

One Year Performance 1981–82 (Outdoor Piece) 257

Jafa, Arthur 370

Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death 370

Jones, Bill T. 154

Jones, Van 165-66

Judd, Donald 113-16

Kaprow, Allan 73, 207

Klein, Yves 205-07

Kubota, Shigeko 207

Vagina Painting 207

Kushner, Tony 142

Lacy, Suzanne 9, 156, 252, 299

Landsman, Aaron 348, 350

City Council Meetings 342, 248

Levine, David 312, 333-336

2 Forms of Endurance 333

Actors at Work 333

Bauerntheater 333

Habit 333

Life is Living (festival) 165, 167, 169, 170, 173, 176, 178

Ligon, Glenn 212

To Disembark 212

Linyekula, Faustin 9, 320

Living as Form (organization) 22, 152-54, 158, 223-226, 241

Long, Richard 258

A Line Made By Walking 258

Manet, Edouard 80

Le déjeuner sur l’herbe 80

Michelson, Sarah 9, 266, 305, 315, 320

Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer 9, 320

Morris, Robert 210, 231, 355

Mirrored Cubes 210

Untitled (Corner Piece) 210

Murakami, Saburō 207

Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA) 319-20, 370

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 9, 215, 306, 308, 310, 315, 320-22

My Barbarian (group) 23, 223-25, 229-30, 232-233, 235-38, 241, 245-46

Patterson, Ebony 272

Performa Biennial 8, 196-97, 309, 320

Pew Center for Art and Heritage 26, 310, 321

Rainer, Yvonne 309, 313, 321, 323, 234, 257

Trio A 234

Ramírez Jonas, Paul 23, 293-301

Key to the City 298-99

Public Trust 299-301

Rauschenberg, Robert 214, 343

Rosler, Martha 14, 127

Schneemann, Carolee 207

Interior Scroll 207

Sehgal, Tino 19, 215-16, 218-19, 234, 252, 256

This objective of that object 215, 218

Serra, Richard 115, 119, 127

Shakespeare, William 71, 81, 137, 228

Shiraga, Kazuo 207

Smithson, Robert 115, 355

Steyerl, Hito 19

Split Britches 91

Steppenwolf 142

Tate Modern 9-10, 19, 27, 192, 266, 273, 310, 321, 370

Tatsumi, Hijikata 229

The Kitchen 4, 9, 310, 321, 330

Thek, Paul 212

Tillmans, Wolfgang 19

Tiravanija, Rirkrit 215

Tsang, Wu 9

Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 14, 107, 117-21, 152, 157, 256, 346

Social Mirror 346

Touch Sanitation 346

Under the Radar (festival) 9, 309, 320

Urban Bush Women (group) 153, 157

Venice Biennial 342, 362

Vera List Center 24, 279-80

Volksbuhne in Berlin 10, 19, 21

Walker Art Center 9, 24, 199, 306, 320

Warhol, Andy 72, 80, 194

Brillo Boxes 80, 194

Whitney Biennial 9, 23, 168, 280, 305, 309, 320, 33-31

Wolfe, George C. 171

The Colored Museum 171-73

Wooster Group 107, 120-22, 142

House/Lights 107, 118, 120-21

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco 165, 170

Yoshihara, Jirō 207

Zimmerman, Mary 142

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Back Stages

Essays across Art, Performance, and Public Life

Performance Works

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Back Stages

Essays across Art, Performance, and Public Life

Performance Works

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