The first major monograph on the rich and varied art of Matt Mullican. Over the last four decades, Matt Mullican has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. His work takes form as drawing, collage, video, sculpture, performance, and installation, but Mullican is perhaps best known for his performances: these take place under hypnosis, allowing the artist to treat his own psyche as yet another medium. The drawings Mullican makes in this state--as an alter ego he refers to as "that person" --recall Surrealist experiments with automatic writing. In recent years, interest has surged in Mullican's work as younger artists and curators have rediscovered him. This first major monograph on the artist, a group of renowned art world figures considers the expanse of Mullican's art--from the "bulletin boards" that combine notes, sketches, and archival photographs to the graphic language used to illustrate his idiosyncratic cosmology. Curator Lynne Cooke and art historian Hal Foster address various aspects of Mullican's multidisciplinary practice, while a roundtable conversation between Mullican, Conceptual artist John Baldessari, and curator Ulrich Wilmes completes this comprehensive survey. The in-depth discussion investigates Mullican's early days as a student--when Baldessari was his professor--and the development of his signature works.

Using elements of autobiography to address such issues as religion, sex, race, family and the struggle of women to move beyond their traditional roles in society, these women integrate aspects of ritual, monologue, music, visual arts and theatre in their performances as they help to forge a new literary and theatrical tradition.

A brand new history of contemporary performance and its crucial role in contemporary art, written by one of the world's leading curators and writers on performance art.

A founding member of all-woman alternative rock band Zuzu's Petals recounts how, after her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, her best friends and she relocated to Minneapolis and launched successful careers before she fell in love and reevaluated her priorities. Reprint.

The first monograph of Chicago-based Theaster Gates, one of the most exciting and highly regarded contemporary artists at work today. Celebrated for bridging the gap between art and life, Gates’ work encourages political, social and spatial change, and reaches beyond a traditional art audience. His output includes sculpture, installation, performance, architecture and urban interventions, and has been exhibited and critically acclaimed in important exhibitions including Documenta Kassel and the Venice Biennale. This is the first time all his significant projects are collected and examined together.

The Juilliard-trained cellist Charlotte Moorman sat nude behind a cello of carvedice, performed while dangling from helium-filled balloons, and deployed an array of instruments onThe Mike Douglas Show that included her cello, a whistle, a cap gun, a gong, anda belch. She did a striptease while playing Bach in Nam June Paik's Sonata for AdultsOnly. In the 1960s, Moorman (1933--1991) became famous for her madcap (and oftenunclothed) performance antics; less famous but more significant is Moorman's transformativeinfluence on contemporary performance practice--and her dedication to the idea that avant-garde artshould reach the widest possible audience. In Topless Cellist, the first book toexplore Moorman's life and work, Joan Rothfuss rediscovers, and recovers, the legacy of anextraordinary American artist. Moorman's arrest in 1967 for performing toplessmade her a water-cooler conversation-starter, but before her tabloid fame she was a star of theavant-garde performance circuit, with a repertoire of pieces by, among others, Yoko Ono, JosephBeuys, John Cage, and Paik, her main artistic partner. Moorman invented a new mode of performancethat combined classical rigor, jazz improvisation, and avant-garde experiment -- informed byintuition, daring, and love of spectacle. Moorman's annual festival of the avant-garde offered thepublic a lively sampler of contemporary art in performance, music, dance, poetry, film, and othermedia. Rothfuss chronicles Moorman's life from her youth in Little Rock, Arkansas(where she was "Miss City Beautiful" of 1952) through her career in New York's avant-gardeto her death from breast cancer in 1991. (Typically, she approached her treatment as if it were aperformance.) Deeply researched and profusely illustrated, Topless Cellist offersa fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious story of an artist whose importance was morethan the sum of her performances.

Viewers of contemporary art are often invited to involve themselves actively in artworks, by entering installations, touching objects, performing instructions, or clicking on interactive websites. Why have artists sought to engage spectators in these new forms of participation? In what ways does active participation affect the viewer's experience and the status of the artwork? Spanning a range of practices, including kinetic art, happenings, environments, performance, installations, relational and new media art from the 1950s to the present, this critical anthology sheds light on the history and specificity of artworks that only come to life when you – the viewer - are invited to "do it yourself." Rather than a specialist topic in the history of twentieth- and twenty-first century art, the "do-it-yourself" artwork raises broader issues concerning the role of the viewer in art, the status of the artwork, and the socio-political relations between art and its contexts.

Presents a collection of stories, parables, musings, and thinkpieces on such topics as the nature of reading, writing, art, performance, life, and death.

Some 3600 print and media sources document avant-garde artists' performance from 1909 to 1975, with emphasis on 115 individual artists and groups.