Forms Follows Action: Performance in/against the City in New York and Los Angeles (1970-1985)

Morelli, Didier

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-4g26-bf03

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Forms Follows Action: Performance in/against the City in New York and Los Angeles (1970-1985)

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This critical/theoretical history of performance art investigates the relationship between the body of the artist and the infrastructure of the city in Los Angeles and New York City between 1970 and 1985, with specific attention to how performance art resists, renegotiates, and responds to architectural functionalism. Using performance studies as a lens of analysis and intervention, it examines the connections between performance practices and ‘the regular flow of the city,’ and explores the potential of these performances to engender new spatial-subjectivities by imagining kinesthetic actions that defy political economies of power. The research examines three physical tactics that were adopted, adapted, or transformed by selected artists during a seminal 15-year period, theorizing these “techniques of the body” as sites and contextually specific kinesthetic interventions in the city. In paying particular attention to the contested state of urban public space in these cities during this time period the dissertation indexes how issues of race, gender, class, and ethno-nationality were at the very heart of the distribution and manifestation of power, wealth, and privilege in urban and cultural spaces.The dissertation traces the ways in which performance artists bypassed the white walls/cube of the gallery and studio for the bricks, concrete, and steel surfaces of the city in order to address, express, and/or challenge the insidiousness of state control, power, and abuse during a period of nationwide socio-political instabilities while contributing to the changing aesthetics and politics of an expanding and changing art world. In line with recent scholarship that seeks to understand the city and its architecture(s) as live performance and the kinesthetic actions that exist therein as part of placemaking processes, it considers how Los Angeles and New York City were at the center of new and contested forms of urban development, protest, and spatial theorization during the 1970s and early 1980s. In both cities the deindustrialization of large urban regions, changes in labor processes, the reorganization of housing markets, the rise of the service sector, and the increasing ghettoization of permanently unemployed lower class, reflect the rise of neo-liberalism that would reach its full force with 1980s ‘Reagonomics.’ Drawing from thinkers that sought to retheorize the spatiality of social life, as well as urban planners and architectural critics who looked to reshape the contemporary city and our views on it, the dissertation interweaves the rapidly evolving spatial and urban discourse of the period with that of performance art. In defining the performances that structure this project and their particular physical manifestations, I posit a framework that combines theory and practice for understanding performance events. Numerous narratives from the 1970s are difficult to access archivally, a situation compounded by a lack of feminist, queer, and anti-racist / anti-colonial initiatives in the art world and more broadly. As a transition moment between forms of documentation, post-paper but pre-digital, it is a largely undervalued period. Throughout this process, I have also employed my own practice as a movement-based artist to deploy performing as a form of knowing and knowledge production. Accumulating first-hand understanding of these works by conducting field research using my own body in order to better comprehend their kinesthetic particularities was a critical methodological tool. Combining spatial, art historical, and performance analysis methodologies, this project offers a historical genealogy, conceptual framework, and practical entry point into architecturally engaged performances and practices in New York and Los Angeles to contribute to scholarship in theatre and performance studies, art and architecture, and spatial theory.

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