RoseLee Goldberg

Filled with images from the artists many shows and performances, this unique book celebrates Anderson's many films, videos, sculptures, paintings, and concerts, as well as her collaborations with William Burroughs, Spalding Gray, Lou Reed, and others.
Laurie Anderson is one of the most acclaimed and innovative performance artists working today. This book delivers a comprehensive look at Anderson's mulifaceted career, from her performance pieces of the early 1970s to her 1999 electronic opera, Songs and Stories from Moby Dick. Filled with photographs of Anderson's performances, sculptures, books, installations, instruments, and inventions, stills from her films and videos, reproductions of her drawings and sketches, and including song lyrics and excerpts from many of her stories, the book vividly conjures up the artist's achievements.… (més)

There's so much amazing performance. This bk gives a great history of some of it. Other bks cd be very different. Sometimes I look at bks on subjects I'm fairly knowledgable about & think: "WHAT?! They don't even mention such-&-such?!!" This bk doesn't get that rejection. It covers Bauhaus light plays from 1922. It covers a performance of a Satie piece w/ Buckminster Fuller as one of the actors in conjunction w/ Merce Cunningham! It even gets into COUM Transmissions's 1976 Prositution show in London. Just the fotos alone are incredibly inspiring. I almost wish I'd found this bk in Arabic on the moon. Then I cd've died & gone to Earth - maybe reincarnated as an H2O molecule in a swimming pool at Al Roon's Health Club in New York in 1965 just in time to be a participant in Claes Oldenburg's "Washes". There's even a picture of Russian Futurist David Burlyuk w/ his face painted from around 1913. So much positive energy from so many people working w/o a net & we're still perpetually at war.… (més)

Amazon: First widely, and fittingly, recognized in the 1970s the heyday of conceptual art, which insisted on "an art of ideas over product, and on an art that could not be bought and sold" performance art has thrived in recent decades, according to RoseLee Goldberg's Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. First published more than 20 years ago, the book has been extensively updated. Goldberg (Laurie Anderson), a former curator of the Kitchen Center for Music, Video and Performance in New York City, analyzes artists as varied as the dadaists, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Cindy Sherman, Mariko Mori, Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney, Karen Finley, Forced Entertainment and Desperate Optimists.… (més)