Description: Live performance is now one of the dominant art forms worldwide. In the United States and Europe, Japan, India, and Africa, an ever-increasing number of artists, including Lucinda Childs, Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, Marina Abramovic, and Matthew Barney, in a variety of styles, are engaged in evocative, contemplative, and critical performance works. This is the most complete and profusely illustrated survey of performance from the 1960s to the present.

RoseLee Goldberg, author of the 1979 Abrams book Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present, begins her discussion with the emergence of performance in the work of Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni and later in that of Hermann Nitsch and Joseph Beuys. In words and stunning photographs she shows how performance explores and reveals the unexpected and the forbidden more than any other art form.

With sections on politics; theater, music, and opera; the body; identity; feminism and multiculturalism; new dance; the spoken word; video; rock and roll; and much more, Goldberg demonstrates the depth and breadth of performance and its profound impact on every other form of contemporary art.

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