Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience
ISBN: 9781611683363
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Dartmouth College Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Art and Architecture; Theater and Performance Studies;

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.