Performance Art Chapter 7 (p.190-225)

The 1970’s emergence of performance art in the western world was brought into the mainstream realm of the art world. The 1980’s and 1990’s performance art challenged performance and the movement of the body during a massive sociopolitical uprising of the 1980’s. The eighties outwardly and without avail confronted issues with cultural identity.

RoseLee Goldberg expresses that artists were increasingly using performance to examine their cultural roots (p.210). This I found interesting as it provided a platform for ‘otherness’ whether it be race, gender, culture, east, west, so on. Goldberg does not necessarily suggest that this platform is new, but I do like that she highlights politics such as the end of the Cold War as well as the AIDS epidemic as examples of what the world was confronting at large. The influx of artists from former communist countries to the West that made it evident that performance art had functioned almost exclusively in the East as a form of political opposition in the years of repression (p.214). This eludes that performance and the ideology of the movement of the body in it’s purest form is so powerful that government must place restrictions on it. This statement also feels timeless as the world is experiencing this type of censorship today. 

Goldberg expresses “that minorities were increasingly pressing the issue of ethnic identity and multiculturalism” (p.210) during the 1980’s and 1990’s. I feel that this section seemed to have separated race and culture from the political and economic issues of Wall Street crashing, Nelson Mandela’s release from from prison, and protests for democracy in China. Goldberg’s separation of minorities from geopolitics feels skewed and frustrates me that these are issues are not related in her statement. Perhaps, I am misunderstanding her statement? Global politics, culture, race, and gender issues are all components to the arts and the creative process.