Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties - Hardcover

Performance artist Linda Montano, curious about the influence childhood experience has on adult work, invited other performance artists to consider how early events associated with sex, food, money/fame, or death/ritual resurfaced in their later work. The result is an original and compelling "talking performance" that documents the production of art in an important and often misunderstood community. Among the more than 100 artists Montano interviewed from 1979 to 1989 were John Cage, Suzanne Lacy, Faith Ringgold, Dick Higgins, Annie Sprinkle, Allan Kaprow, Meredith Monk, Eric Bogosian, Adrian Piper, Karen Finley, and Kim Jones. Her discussions with them focused on the relationship between art and life, history and memory, the individual and society and the potential for individual and social change. The interviews highlight complex issues in performance art, including the role of identity in performance audience relationships and art as an exploration of everyday conventions rather than a demonstration of virtuosity.

"Linda Montano is the ultimate practitioner of art in life, life in art. These conversations with other artists about four primal aspects of the everydaysex, food, money, deathuncover the heart, the nerve, and the scar tissue behind some of the late 20th century's edgiest work."C.Carr, The Village Voice