Performance and Contradiction

A transformative history of the explosion of performance in both art and theory in 1970s America

In the 1970s, something called “performance” was everywhere, cast as an innovative form of artistic practice and a burgeoning field of scholarly analysis. Yet it was impossible to define and subject to vociferous debate. Why was the decade a watershed era for performance and why were its discourses so roiled with conflict? In this richly illustrated new history, Catherine Quan Damman argues that the answer lies in the powerful ways artists used performance to theorize the emerging social contradictions of their time.

Though it has often been claimed that performance eludes commodification, Performance and Contradiction offers a major rethinking of the ways performance is enmeshed in historically specific capitalist logics. As the growing service sector’s sharp rise in waged affective labor collided with longstanding expectations of gendered naturalness and racialized authenticity, artists mobilized performance as a singular means to explore the socially compelled management of pretense.

Drawing on original archival research, Performance and Contradiction highlights the work of important but understudied figures, including Rosemary Mayer, Sheryl Sutton, Julia Heyward, Anthony Ramos, and the collective The Waitresses, placing them in dialogue with Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Allan Kaprow, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Wilson, and others. Treating performance as a pliable, capacious register, the book locates its subject in a range of formats. Indeed, as the book reveals, performance’s refusal of easy definition or tidy categorization is precisely what makes it a generative form for the critique of authenticity, authorship, and political economy.