Chris Reeves

This course surveys performance as art throughout the Modern and Postmodern periods?including contemporary and non-Western incarnations?and covers roughly the last one hundred fifty years. Areas of historical and theoretical focus include the philosophy of performance, ethnography, feminism, and the interface of performance with film, video, dance, sculpture, theater, technology, and popular culture. Movements like Futurism, Dada, and Fluxus are explored alongside themes like endurance, performance in everyday life, the culture wars and censorship, performance and AIDS, and postcolonial uses of performance.

Key figures such as Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovic are analyzed through comparison of documentaries about their work. Any number of seminal performance pieces are screened, including ones by Yoko Ono, Linda Montano, Diamanda Galas, Guillermo Gomez-Pe?a & Coco Fusco, and Anna Deavere Smith. Further historical context comes from essays and movies about AIDS activism and Punk & New Wave. Readings include primary sources, artist interviews, C. Carr's reviews, and noted works in Performance Studies from Richard Schechner, Peggy Phelan, Amelia Jones, and others.

Students will attend two performances and write reviews, an annotated bibliography assignment provides opportunity to explore historical and non-western performance topics, and there will be much discussion.

In this course we will examine the ecstasy, transgressions, and transformations that occurred largely around queer networks of artistic activity in the United States ca. 1970-99. Focusing on larger cities, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis, we will look at an intermedial roster of often undersung or understudied painters, photographers, dancers, performers, conceptualists, fashion designers, and DJs who honed an aesthetic of excess that critiqued and opened up possibilities both within social conventions and the art world. While this class is not a history of disco, It is nonetheless rooted in the politics of the dancefloor, where friendship, movement, inclusion, and joy can become political expressions of freedom.
Topics explored include glamour and celebrity as a mode of critique and celebration (Les Petit Bon Bons, the Miss General Idea Pageants, File Megazine), conceptual and performance gestures that trafficked in vernacular forms (Diana Ross translated through Julius Eastman, Arthur Russell), the voices of other voices in Lipysnka and Pinkietessa, alternative actions and spaces via performances and exhibitions in the storefront windows of Fiorucci and Mayfield Bleu, public performances by The Cockettes and The Whizz Kidz, space making with David Mancuso, Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, and Adrian Piper's Funk Lessons, and the politics of partying and friendship around the dance-floor. We will read excerpts and texts by and from Micah Salkind, Peter Shapiro, Deforrest Brown Jr., Giorgio Agamben, madison moore, Albert Goldman, Tim Lawrence, A.A. Bronson, Jose Esteban Munoz.
Students will present on one reading or screening, do a midterm creative research project, and a final presentation with a 10 page paper.

This section surveys select moments throughout art history in which artists aimed to agitate for social, political, or artistic change. In this collaborative and interdisciplinary course will explore such topics as the political satire of Meiji era Japan; William Morris' socialist utopia of the 19th century in conversation with Lizzie Borden's in the 20th Century; significant South American artistic dissent from the Grupo de Artists de Vanguardia and Tropicalia movements of the 1960s; Post WWII Japanese experimental groups such as Hi Red Center and Gutai; Benjamin Patterson, Robert Filliou, and George Brecht inside and outside of Fluxus; The Guerrilla Television movement of the 1970s-80s relative to YouTube culture of today; and many other minor gestures that continue to have major power today. The work, ideas, movements, and artists discussed in this course are potent reminders of art's potential and desire to not just manage the system we are all in, but to actively work to transform it.

This seminar looks at a crucial exclamation that guided so much artistic practice in New York City following the 1960s: 'no.' While appearing straightforward as a general working manifesto, the various shapes this philosophy of refusal took during the period of 1970-1989 led to a more open and vernacular hybrid of artistic practices but also what Hal Foster called 'a stagnant condition of indiscrimination' in the arts. The NYC performance artists discussed in this course were not part of a 'movement' but rather, as writer Julie Ault puts it, shared concerns and overlapping agendas...social configurations as well as communication and degrees of collaboration between individuals - one thing leading to another, migration of ideas and models, generative social processes.' In the hope of sorting out our own position on the effectiveness of this social processes, we will look at a wealth of material in this course: the queering of 1960s New Music via Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell; the vanguard vernacularism of modern dance by Jill Kroesen and Yoshiko Chuma; The 'No Wave' Scene and its adjacent filmmakers; interventions into the city via David Hammons and William Pope L; East Village performances at artist run clubs like the Pyramid Club and Club 57; Glenn O'Brien's cable access show, TV Party and his theories of 'Mass Localization.' Through films, group projects and presentations, key readings, and discussions we will explore the successes and follies of this crucial post 1960s time period in the United States.