Performance in Contemporary Art

Now available in paperback, in this important and richly illustrated book, Catherine Wood provides the broadest and most up-to-date survey on performance art published in recent years.Stunningly beautiful, deeply puzzling, profoundly moving or intensely unsettling – performance art can evoke a wide variety of responses. Wood proposes performance not as a genre of art separate from object-making but as an attitude that has infiltrated the entire terrain of contemporary art. From the musical-theatricals of Marvin-Gaye Chetwynd to the public encounters created by Tino Seghal and the social activism of Tania Bruguera, a hugely divergent set of practices has emerged in the past twenty to thirty years which embrace the worlds of sculpture and painting, spectacle and protest.Exploring individual, social and object-based approaches in the field, Wood first examines the influential performance art of the 1960s to 1980s: the body art of the Viennese actionists; the raw performances of Yoko Ono a