1. See Sunshine and Noir: Art in L.A. 1960–1997, organized by Lars Nittve and Helle Crenzien (Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Art, exhibition catalog, 1997), 223. The catalog's unpaginated album includes two of Francis's Edge Paintings. Sunshine and Noir was exhibited at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, during the fall of 1998. [BACK]

2. I am echoing the title of C. Carr's stimulating book on performance art in the 1980s and early 1990s in New York City: On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993). [BACK]

3. Russell Ferguson, “Introduction: Invisible Center,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 9. [BACK]

4. Philip Auslander holds that late-capitalist commercialism and the mass media have succeeded in commodifying every possible critical art, eliminating any valid distinction between the center and the margin. Political and social critiques must be launched from “within dominant cultural discourses” and run “the necessary risk of being co-opted by them” (see his Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994], 8). [BACK]

5. André Maurois, Preface to Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, trans. Sherry Mangan (New York: New Directions), ix. Subsequent statements by Bruno and Pascal are from this source, ix-x. [BACK]

6. I am using the term “decentered” in a literal sense here, meaning voiding or blanking the central space. Decentered and decentering are also key terms associated with poststructuralist theories. For a brief review of these terms in current usage, see Colum bia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, ed. Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 71–73. [BACK]

7. Randall Jarrell, “Thinking of the Lost World,” cited in Sex, Death and God in L.A., ed. David Reid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), v. [BACK]

8. Nittve, “Sunshine and Noir,” in Sunshine and Noir, 7. [BACK]

9. Jack Kerouac, On the Road, cited in Sex, Death and God in L.A., v. [BACK]

10. Brecht's poem is quoted by editors Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise, in their preface to Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), ix. [BACK]

11. Gary A. Dymski and John M. Veitch, “Financing the Future in Los Angeles: From Depression to 21st Century,” in Rethinking Los Angeles, 35. [BACK]

12. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 13. [BACK]

13. Mikhail Bahktin uses “heteroglossia” to describe the fundamental condition under which meaning is produced. See Bahktin's The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). [BACK]

14. Charles Jencks, “Hetero-Architecture and the L.A. School,” in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 47. [BACK]

15. The urban history of Los Angeles that I trace here is based primarily on Soja and Scott, “Introduction to Los Angeles: City and Region,” in The City, 1–21. [BACK]

16. Ibid., 6; 11. For the historical patterns of Los Angeles's urban developments, see also Michael Dear, “In the City, Time Becomes Visible: Intentionality and Urbanism in Los Angeles, 1781–1991,” in The City, 76–105. [BACK]

17. I thank Amelia Jones for reminding me that Los Angeles actually voted against Proposition 187, which denies schooling and medical care to illegal immigrants, who come mainly from Latin America. Such a liberal gesture on the part of L.A.'s electorate, I argue, does not fundamentally change the city's at times inordinately harsh treatments toward illegal immigrants. See Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg, “Income and Racial Inequality in Los Angeles,” and Susan Anderson, “A City Called Heaven: Black Enchantment and Despair in Los Angeles,” both in The City, 311–35, 336–89. See also Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). [BACK]

18. There are many studies of the two urban uprisings in L.A. See, for example, Harlan Hahn, “Los Angeles and the Future: Uprising, Identity, and New Institutions,” in Rethinking Los Angeles, 77–95. [BACK]

19. Soja and Scott, “Introduction to Los Angeles,” 1. [BACK]

20. Ibid., 14. [BACK]

21. Jencks, “Hetero-Architecture,” 49. [BACK]

22. Jean Baudrillard, “Los Angeles by Night,” in West of the West: Imagining California, ed. Leonard Michaels, David Reid, and Raquel Scherr (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), 63. [BACK]

23. The phrase “inferno effect” comes from Baudrillard's “Los Angeles by Night”: “There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch's hell can match this inferno effect” (62). The “politics of location” is used by Todd Boyd in his fascinating article “A Small

24. The quoted phrase comes from Dana Polan's comment on the analogy between postmodern cultural experience and the operation of commercial television—a system described by Raymond Williams as “flow.” See Polan's “Brief Encounters: Mass Culture and the Evacuation of Sense,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 183. [BACK]

25. Raymond A. Rocco, “Latino Los Angeles: Reframing Boundaries/Borders,” in The City, 366. [BACK]

26. For a rich variety of analyses regarding “multiculturalism,” see Mapping Multicultur alism, ed. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). [BACK]

27. My formulation of these concepts is inspired by Lisa Lowe's analysis of Asian American identities. She highlights “heterogeneity,” which suggests “the existence of differences and differential relationships within a bounded category”; “hybridity,” which “marks the history of survival within relationships of unequal power and domination”; and “multiplicity,” which designates “the way in which subjects located within social relations are determined by several different axes of power, are multiply determined by the contradictions of capitalism, patriarchy, and race relations.” See Immi grant Acts, 67. [BACK]

28. Dear, “In the City, Time Becomes Visible,” 98. [BACK]

29. Soja and Scott, “Introduction to Los Angeles,” 12. [BACK]

30. As Lowe points out, explicating Gramsci's theory: “The reality of any specific hegemony is that, although it may be for the moment dominant, it is never absolute or conclusive” (Immigrant Acts, 69). [BACK]

31. Dear, “In the City, Time Becomes Visible,” 99. [BACK]

32. The original translated version of the poem by Guillaume Apollinaire is:

The poem is cited by Anne Seymour, “Transformation and Prophecy,” in Joseph Beuys • Yves Klein • Mark Rothko (London: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, exhibition catalog, 1987), 9. [BACK]

33. This “poor theater” tendency of L.A. performances is evident in California Performance, vol. 2: Los Angeles Area, ed. Thomas Leabhart (Pomona, Calif.: Pomona College/ Mime Journal, 1991–92). On a different note, Linda Frye Burnham has commented on performance art's marginal status: “The form will probably never become highly commercial because of its unpredictable nature”; hence, “the continuing problem” that plagues performance artists is “economics” (“Performance Art in Southern

34. Kristine Stiles, “Performance Art,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 680. For an etymology of the category performance art, see Bruce Barber, “Indexing: Conditionalism and Its Heretical Equivalents,” in Performance by Artists, ed. A. A. Bronson and Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1979), 183–204. According to Rose Lee Goldberg, currently in Britain “there is a preference for the term ‘live art’ because it is more directly descriptive and this is used as frequently as ‘time-based art’; in Australia, ‘performance’ quite specifically refers to work that has originated in the traditions of theater, while ‘performance art’ refers to performance artists with bona fide art-school diplomas” (Performance: Live Art Since 1960 [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998], 12). [BACK]

35. This specific use of “performance” to refer to what was once called “performance art” is different from the more general use of performance in theater studies. David Román offers a succinct definition for the theater studies usage: “A performance stands in and of itself as an event; it is part of the process of production. A performance is not an entity that exists atemporally for the spectator; rather, the spectator intersects in a trajectory of continuous production” (Arts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998], xvii). In a different chapter, Román suggests why current practitioners of performance art prefer to drop “the ‘art’ and its subsequent privileging of aesthetics from ‘performance art’ to foreground questions of identity and community. This is particularly true for performers who emerge from oppressed groups who see their work as overtly political in nature” (120). See my Chapter 5 for a more extensive discussion. [BACK]

36. Dick Higgins, “Statement on Intermedia,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, organized by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, exhibition catalog, 1993), 172–73. [BACK]

37. These multiple disciplines include, following Goldberg's list in Performance, “literature, poetry, theater, music, dance, architecture, and painting, as well as video, film, photography, slides, and text, and any combination of these” (12). [BACK]

38. As Stiles historicizes, “After World War II, performance by artists emerged almost simultaneously in Japan, Europe, and the United States…. [These artists] resumed the performance work undertaken by every modernist avant-garde from the futurists and to the dadaists… But whereas the performative aspects of the modernist avantgardes had been a marginal aspect of their work, the artists who turned to performance after 1945 made the actions, psychological and social conditions, and cognitive features of the body the primary medium of art, and they developed performance as an independent medium in the visual arts” (“Performance Art,” 679–80). Goldberg also mentions that performance art is “a missing piece in the big picture of art history studies” (Performance, 9). [BACK]

39. For a study on the numerous technical and conceptual tropes of performance art, see Anthony Howell, The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice (Amsterdam: OPA/Harwood Academic, 1999). [BACK]

40. Goldberg, Performance, 11. [BACK]

41. For performance art's associations with existentialism and phenomenology, see Performance in Postmodern Culture, ed. Michel Benamouand (Milwaukee: Center for Twentieth Century Studies, 1977); and The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984). [BACK]

42. Quoted in Martin Esslin, Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 17. [BACK]

43. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997 [1965]), 6–7. [BACK]

44. Richard S. Weinstein, “The First American City,” in The City, 30, 29. [BACK]

45. See Nittve, “Sunshine and Noir,” 10. [BACK]

46. Soja and Scott, “Introduction to Los Angeles,” 7. See also Mike Davis, “Sunshine or Noir,” in City of Quartz, 15–97. [BACK]

47. William R. Hackman, “L.A. Chronology,” in Sunshine and Noir, 13. [BACK]

48. Moira Roth, “Toward a History of California Performance: Part Two,” Arts (June 1978): 114–23. Roth's article provides a major source for my historical narrative of performance art in the 1970s. Other important sources concerning this period of history include Burnham, “Performance Art in Southern California”; Moira Roth, “Autobiography, Theater, Mysticism and Politics: Women's Performance Art in Southern California,” in Performance Anthology, 463–68; and Jacki Apple, “Performance: The State of the Art,” CalArts Today 9, no. 2 (Nov. 1983): unpaged. I thank Apple for giving me several of her published and unpublished essays on performance art as references. [BACK]

49. I quote from Allan Kaprow's own description cited in Richard Schechner's Performance Theories (New York: Routledge, 1988), 36. [BACK]

50. Roth, “Toward a History,” 115. [BACK]

51. Numerous art critics and historians have indicated the significance of art schools in nourishing the local performance art and visual art scene. As Jacki Apple notes, “Unlike New York, with its geographically concentrated art community in downtown Manhattan, southern California's sprawling network of universities and art schools was the breeding ground for the performance art activities of the 1970s,” in “The Life and Times of Lin Hixson: The L.A. Years,” The Drama Review 35, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 30. See also Michael Duncan, “L.A. Rising,” Art in America 82, no. 12 (Dec. 1994): 72; and Lynn Zelevansky, “A Place in the Sun: The Los Angeles Art World and the New Global Context,” in Reading California: Art, Image, Identity, 1900–2000 (Los Angeles/Berkeley: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/University of California Press, 2000), 293–311. (Special thanks to Amelia Jones for bringing Zelevanksy's essay to my attention.) [BACK]

52. Author's interview with Barbara T. Smith (a noted performance artist and a graduate from the UC Irvine art program), Nov. 12, 1998, in Los Angeles. Smith stressed that performance art at Irvine was a student-generated activity and not part of the academic curriculum. I thank Smith for generously sharing her archive of materials on performance art. [BACK]

53. Faith Wilding, “The Feminist Art Program at Fresno and CalArts, 1970–75,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams), 32–47. [BACK]

54. Arlene Raven, “Womanhouse,” in Power of Feminist Art, 48–65. See also the Web project Women house at www.cmp.ucr.edu/womenhouse, which reassesses the issues of Womanhouse through the contemporary lens of Internet culture and multiculturalism. I thank Amelia Jones for reminding me of this valuable reference. [BACK]

55. See Linda Frye Burnham, “Editorials: Running Commentary [on the demise of the Woman's Building],” High Performance (Fall 1991): 8–9. [BACK]

56. Davis, “Sunshine or Noir? ” in Sunshine and Noir, 71. [BACK]

57. Linda Frye Burnham, “Pipeline: Pumping Life into Theater,” in High Performance 39 (1987): 58–61. [BACK]

58. Author's interview with Anna Homler, Dec. 18, 1997, Los Angeles. [BACK]

59. Jacki Apple suggests that Lin Hixson's performance art can be best understood as “the cultural autobiography of a white American of the TV generation,” in “The Life and Times of Lin Hixson,” TDR 35 no. 4 (Winter 1991): 28. Hixson returned to her home-town Chicago in 1987 and later cofounded the performance group Goat Island. [BACK]

60. Reza Abdoh, in California Performance, vol. 2, 11–27. See also a special issue on Abdoh's performances in TDR 39, no. 4 (Fall 1995), and the PAJ monograph Reza Abdoh, ed. Daniel Mufson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Abdoh died of AIDS in 1995 at age thirty-two. [BACK]

61. Apple, “Lin Hixson,” 33. [BACK]

62. Author's interview with John O'Brien, Dec. 15, 1997, Los Angeles. [BACK]

63. Davis, “The Mercenaries,” in City of Quartz, 71–78. [BACK]

64. John Malpede, in California Performance, vol. 2, 95–120; also author's interview with Malpede, May 22, 1998, Venice, Calif. [BACK]

65. Author's interview with Shishir Kurup, Nov. 9, 1998, University of Southern California. Kurup was involved with LATC since 1988, and served as the head of its Asian American Theatre Project from 1989 to 1991, when LATC folded under financial and political pressures. [BACK]

66. The NEA Four were L.A.'s Tim Miller and John Fleck and New York's Karen Finley and Holly Hughes. See an excellent analysis of the controversy over censorship at the National Endowment for the Arts by Peggy Phelan, “Money Talks, Again,” in TDR 35 (Fall 1991): 131–42. [BACK]

67. The HBO Workspace started producing monthly performance programs around 1996. [BACK]

68. The three exhibitions included MOCA's Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 (Feb. 8-May 10, 1998), LACMA's Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968 (March 8-June 8, 1998), the Armand Hammer's Sunshine and Noir: Art in L.A. 1960–1997 (Oct. 7, 1998-Jan. 3, 1999). See Chapter 2 for an extensive discussion. [BACK]

69. Supported by a grant from Southern California Studies Center (SC2) at the University of Southern California, I conducted extensive interviews with local performance artists and completed a monograph entitled “Otherness Naturalized: Multicultural Performance Art in Los Angeles.” The monograph is published online at the SC2 web site (www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/SC2). My comments in this paragraph reflect the information collected in these interviews. [BACK]

70. See Howard N. Fox, “Waiting in the Wings: Desire and Destiny in the Art of Eleanor Antin,” in Eleanor Antin (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, exhibition catalog, 1999), 26. [BACK]

71. Antonin Artaud, “Preface: The Theater and Culture,” in The Theater and Its Dou ble, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 8. [BACK]

72. Both Kristine Stiles and Amelia Jones have indicated the significance of intersubjective engagement in performance art. See Stiles, “Between Water and Stone: Fluxus Performance: A Metaphysics of Acts,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, 62–99; Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). [BACK]

73. See The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena, vol. 1, ed. Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland (New York: Critical Press, 1998). Almost all the works discussed in this collection of essays originally published in High Performance belong to the genre of redressive performance. [BACK]

74. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Isthe Message, with photographs by Jerome Agel (San Francisco: Hardwired, 1996 [1967]). [BACK]

75. Amelia Jones suggests that most critical accounts of performance art overstress the redemptive function of performance. She holds that some performances are radical precisely because of their ambivalence toward the social. See Body Art, 247. [BACK]

76. Josette Féral, “What Is Left of Performance Art? Autopsy of a Function, Birth of a Genre,” Discourse 14, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 144, 148–49. [BACK]

77. Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Out There, 282. [BACK]

78. See Roth, “Toward a History,” and Burnham, “Performance Art in Southern California.” [BACK]

79. For a description of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, see Rose Lee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 128–30. For a comprehensive documentation of Happenings, see Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, En vironments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966). [BACK]

80. Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 17. [BACK]

81. For more on the criteria of art critics Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, see Charles Harrison, “Modernism,” in Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 142–55. [BACK]

82. In “Education of an Un-Artist, Part II,” Kaprow mentions that nonart is “lifelike,” and “an art of resemblance” (Essays on the Blurring, 110). [BACK]

83. Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring, 21. [BACK]

84. Stiles, “Between Water and Stone,” 96. [BACK]

85. Kaprow, “Experimental Art” (1966), in Essays on the Blurring, 70. [BACK]

86. Kaprow, “Education of the Un-Artist, Part I,” in Essays on the Blurring, 98. [BACK]

87. Kaprow, “Education of an Un-Artist, Part II,” 124–25. [BACK]

88. I thank Marguerite Waller for reminding me of this. After CalArts, Kaprow moved

89. See Moira Roth, ed., The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America: 1970–1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983). See also Amelia Jones, “Sexual Politics: Feminist Strategies, Feminist Conflicts, Feminist Histories,” in Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, ed. Amelia Jones (Los Angeles/ Berkeley: UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center/University of California Press, exhibition catalog, 1996), 20–45. [BACK]

90. Jones, introduction to Body Art, 9. [BACK]

91. My descriptions of the installations and performances in Womanhouse are based on Raven, “Womanhouse.” [BACK]

92. According to Cheri Gaulke, the three founding members of the Woman's Building were Judy Chicago, Sheila de Bretteville, and Arlene Raven. See “Acting Like Women: Performance Art of the Woman's Building,” in Citizen Artist, 15. [BACK]

93. Ibid., 15. The Feminist Studio Workshop began operation in 1974, the same year the Woman's Building held its first documentary exhibition. In addition, the Woman's Building housed many other feminist organizations, including Womanspace (a women's gallery), the Performance Project (which coordinated women's performing groups), and Women's Improvisation (a theater workshop). [BACK]

94. Roth, in Amazing Decade, 138. [BACK]

95. Roth, “Autobiography,” 466. [BACK]

96. Peggy Phelan has an extensive argument against this “visibility” strategy in her Un marked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993). See Chapter 6 for a discussion. [BACK]

97. Ruth Askey, “Rachel Rosenthal Exorcises Death,” in Rachel Rosenthal, ed. Moira Roth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 102–4. I thank Rosenthal for making her script for The Death Show available to me. [BACK]

98. I am referring to the Berliner Ensemble's production of this play. See Helene Weigel—Actress, ed. Wolfgang Pintzka (Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1961). [BACK]

99. Fox, “Waiting in the Wings,” 60. [BACK]

100. I am indebted to Amelia Jones and Marguerite Waller for insisting that I include Eleanor Antin in my discussion of feminist performances in L.A. For an insightful analysis of Antin's Jewish identity, see Lisa E. Bloom, “Rewriting the Script: Eleanor Antin's Feminist Art,” in Eleanor Antin, 159–90. [BACK]

101. Roth, Amazing Decade, 86–87. [BACK]

102. Gaulke, “Acting Like Women,” 14. [BACK]

103. The quest to advertise L.A. as a multicultural paradise continues to this date, witnessed by the colorful banners that suddenly graced the city's surface streets at the

104. Scott Kelman, “Scott Kelman,” in California Performances, vol. 2, 84. [BACK]

105. Burnham, “Performance Art in Southern California,” 390. [BACK]

106. Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996), 104. [BACK]

107. Stiles, “Between Water and Stone,” 97. [BACK]

108. See Kaprow's “Nontheatrical Performance,” in Essays on the Blurring, 163–80. [BACK]

109. The Burden interview is cited by Carlson in Performance, 103. The original interview, conducted by Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear, appeared in Avalanche 8 (1973): 61. [BACK]

110. Timothy Martin, “Rocking the Lifeboat,” in Sunshine and Noir, 171. [BACK]

111. See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). [BACK]

112. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 120; the chart appears on 252–53. [BACK]

113. As Auslander argues in Presence and Resistance: “we cannot afford simply to dismiss artists' movements from the margins to the center or from the avant-garde to the mainstream as ‘selling out’ any more than we can afford to ignore the significance of cultural expression that originates within the mainstream” (4). [BACK]

114. Philip Auslander, “Going with the Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture,” TDR 33, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 123. For a sampling of recent scholarship on entertainment and mass culture, see Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment. [BACK]

115. Herbert Blau, “Letting Be Be Finale of Seem: The Future of an Illusion,” in Perfor mance in Postmodern Culture, 59. [BACK]

116. See Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ, 1987), 25. [BACK]

117. See Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, passim. [BACK]

118. See Bodyworks (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibition catalog, 1975). [BACK]

119. Paul Schimmel first discussed Burden's work in relation to minimalism: “Rather than being narcissistic explorations into human psychology, [Burden's] performances created a single minimalist image, a frozen moment that captured the essence of a very pure action” (“Just the Facts,” in Chris Burden: Twenty-Year Survey [Newport: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1988], 15). [BACK]

120. Kathy O'Dell, Contract with the Skin (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3. [BACK]

121. Schimmel, “Just the Facts,” 15–18, and Howard Singerman, “Chris Burden's Pragmatism,” in Chris Burden, 19–29. [BACK]

122. Quoted by Martin, “Rocking the Lifeboat,” 172. [BACK]

123. Linda Frye Burnham, “High Performance, Performance Art, and Me,” TDR 30, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 35. [BACK]

124. Rosenthal, “Rachel Rosenthal,” in California Performances, vol. 2, 186. [BACK]

125. Burnham, “High Performance,” 18. [BACK]

126. Ibid., 18. [BACK]

127. Jacki Apple, “Performance Art Is Dead/Long Live Performance Art,” High Perfor mance (Summer 1994): 54–59. Apple served as a contributing editor and eventually the editor of High Performance during the magazine'stwo decades' tenure in the U.S. art world, and in these positions contributed greatly to the dissemination of performance art. [BACK]

128. Ibid., 55. [BACK]

129. Ibid., 57, 59. [BACK]

130. I am inspired by Homi Bhabha's concept of mimicry in “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in Modern Drama: Plays/Criticism/Theory, ed. W. B. Worthen (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 1091–97. A prime case from contemporary U.S. culture that lends credence to my example is that of the African American singer Michael Jackson, who, despite claiming that a disease has altered his skin pigments to appear “white,” has not escaped public censure or ridicule for his act/dilemma. [BACK]

131. I am citing Foucault's remark: “What the intellectual can do is to provide instruments of analysis, and at present this is the historian's essential role. What's effectively needed is a ramified, penetrative perception of the present, one that makes it possible to locate lines of weakness, strong points, positions where the instances of power have secured and implanted themselves by a system of organization dating back over 150 years” (“Body/Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper [New York: Pantheon Books, 1980], 62). [BACK]

132. See Michel Foucault, “Discursive Formations,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 38. [BACK]