Los Angeles Goes Live

“Performance’s potency comes from its temporariness, its ‘one time only’ life.” Peggy Phelan

Los Angeles Goes Live is an exhibition, performance series and publication project that explores the histories and legacies of performance art in Southern California in the 1970s and early 80s. It will include a broad range of materials that represent the varied material record of performance: from photographic and video documentation to scores, scripts, costumes, posters and artist books. The Los Angeles Goes Live performance series will feature re-inventions of historical performances and new performative actions staged throughout the city.

Los Angeles Goes Live is part of Pacific Standard Time. This unprecedented collaboration, initiated by the Getty, brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene. LACE’s exhibition, performances and publication are supported by a generous grant from the Getty Foundation.

LACE invites its audiences to interrogate a central issue at the core of performance art practice and scholarship:

How can one revisit performance art after the fact? Through documentation? Through restaging the work by the original artist? Through a contemporary reinvention by another? EXHIBITION

The exhibition will feature performance art documentation and ephemera that has gone unseen for generations and will feature a range of artists and approaches to performance. Artist and guest curator Ellina Kevorkian has organized Recollecting Performance. This collection of clothing and objects suggests that the clothing or objects used in a performance are not remnants but a sculptural void holding an inherent performance to be fulfilled. Building upon the dominant history created by the actions of Eleanor Antin, Chris Burden, Suzanne Lacy, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Barbara T. Smith, the exhibition features artists and collectives that were also pushing the boundaries of convention and shaping the broader creative community with their work such as Jerri Allyn, Asco, Bob & Bob, Dorit Cypis, Dreva, Gronk, Ulysses Jenkins, Kim Jones, the Kipper Kids, Richard Newton and Johanna Went, to name just a few.

PERFORMANCE SERIES

LACE is commissioning re-stagings and re-inventions of historic performances in Los Angeles from the 1970’s. The series will serve as a platform to spark dialog and creative actions that span the generations of Los Angeles’ performance art history. Commissioned artists include: Ulysses Jenkins, Cheri Gaulke, Jerri Allyn, Liz Glynn, Heather Cassils, Dorian Wood, Denise Uyehara, James Luna and the OJO collective. LACE is also working with Suzanne Lacy to produce Three Weeks in January. Lacy will re-stage her seminal interventionist art project entitled Three Weeks in May, a political art performance that took place in Los Angeles in May 1977 and sponsored by Studio Watts Workshop, The Woman’s Building and The City of Los Angeles.

PUBLICATION

LACE’s Los Angeles Goes Live publication, published by Routledge, features scholarly essays by Peggy Phelan, Amelia Jones, and Michael Ned Holte and a piece by Suzanne Lacy and Jennifer Flores Sternad that connects the personal reflections of 50 artists working in performance art and public practices in Southern California during the 70’s and early 80’s.

COMMISSIONED ARTISTS

Jerri Allyn Debating Through the Arts: A Performance Art Event is based on a Model United Nations paradigm. During this interactive daylong event, artists and interested others will choose an issue about performance art today and a team, debate their point of view for an audience. Through a structure of debate, caucus and collaboration, artists are provided with an outlet to create and express their collective point of view on issues of import in performance today.

Heather Cassils Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture consists of a durational performance, a mobile device application and Insertion/ Exertion a designed print advertisement. The work is structured as a dialogue with a seminal performance work, Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture and Lynda Benglis’ 1974 Advertisement. Rather than crash diet, over three months Cassils will build her body by injecting herself with testosterone, adhering to a strict bodybuilding regime through nutrition and exercise. She will document her body as it changes, taking 4 photos a day, from 4 vantage points and will create digital flipbook application for mobile devices, inspired by Antin’s photographic grid. Using a touch-based interface, the viewer will be able to turn view her body like a sculpture turning on a pedestal.

Cheri Gaulke Peep Totter Fly is a new interactive video installation and performance that revisits the artist's 1970-80s critique of high heels. The installation will include an evocative video of high heels juxtaposed within natural environments. Viewers will have an opportunity to try on red high-heeled shoes for every size. The gallery installation will "kick-off" with an opening performance on the street of Hollywood.

Liz Glynn Spirit Resurrected is a platform and performance structure that brings invites artists to recreate Public Spirit / Live Art LA, a performance festival of live art that took place October 1–31, 1980. The basis of the Project is a web-based platform that will 1) serve as an archive for historical documents from and about Public Spirit to give people access to this history and 2) serve as an organizing tool and catalyst for the recreations of the original performances by serving as a space for people to meet up and make practical connections.

Suzanne Lacy For the project Three Weeks in January, Lacy will re-stage her seminal interventionist art project entitled Three Weeks in May, a political art performance that took place in Los Angeles in May 1977 and sponsored by Studio Watts Workshop, The Woman’s Building and The City of Los Angeles.

OJO Cave-Out (In Three Parts, All At Once) will begin as a media intervention in X-TRA magazine designed to encourage public participation in Play It Into the World, a collaborative performance and soundtrack for Los Angeles. Participants will call a toll-free number provided by 323 Projects and leave as their message a performance of the work found in the magazine. The recordings will be compiled and released as a 45rpm single. Finally, OJO will perform the score at LACE along with the audience.

Denise Uyehara and James Luna Transitions: Survival Skills in a Suburban Landscape. James Luna and Denise Uyehara will revisit Transitions, one of Luna's performances from the 70's in which he unpacked a burlap bag full of “Indian” objects and created new rituals with them. The two artists, both born and raised in Orange County, will conduct a series of rituals that recount surviving life behind the “Orange Curtain,” incorporating a call-and-response, video, music, and hundreds of bones.

Dorian Wood Athco, Or The Renaissance of Faggot Tree sets out to both explicate and re-interpret the historical trajectories and connections made by, and involving, the East L.A.-based Asco collective, cross-dressing performance artist Cyclona, artist Ron Athey, musician Rozz Williams and the underground club performance scene of the early 80's. This installation/performance consists of 200 people, each representing crucial figures in the history of Los Angeles performance art from the late 70’s to early 80’s. This project will take place outdoors in a Los Angeles park in October 2011.

Los Angeles Goes Live
Performance Art

Künstler: Eleanor Antin, Chris Burden, Suzanne Lacy, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Barbara T. Smith, Jerri Allyn, Asco , Bob & Bob, Dorit Cypis, Dreva , Gronk , Ulysses Jenkins, Kim Jones, The Kipper Kids , Richard Newton, Johanna Went ...