Drawing the curtain aside, The Live Museum offers a fresh look at the history of performance, from Merce Cunninghams ground breaking dance performances at the Walker Art Center to Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing his muscles in the Whitney Museum. Beißwanger presents a panoply of perspectives around questions of exclusion and inclusion in the socio-cultural context of performance art, within the walls of the museum in new, enlightening, and challenging ways. This publication is nothing less than a deconstruction of the complex narratives and dense historical fields of research, that to this day inform our understanding of performance as a hybrid medium.
Barbara Clausen, professor and rector at Städelschule and director of Portikus Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany
Based on archival material, this groundbreaking study undertakes a thorough revision of the relation between performance art and the museum. Introducing an institutional perspective into the study of performance, the book is an archaeology of how live art from the very beginning was included in the market economy of the art world.
Gerald Siegmund, professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany
In The Live Museum: Performance and Art Institutions in 1970s America Beißwanger challenges the widespread assumption that performance art only recently entered the museum space. With archival depth and an attention to the economic infrastructure that supported early performance, she traces the complex, overlooked entanglements of performers and art spaces with brilliance and intellectual clarity, revealing a rich history of negotiation, collaboration, and co-dependence.
Mechtild Widrich, professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA
