Performing Endurance
Art and Politics since 1960

Provides the first formal account and theory of endurance as a practice in performance art and protest.

Lara Shalson (Author)

9781108445160, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 November 2020

220 pages, 10 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.1 x 1.2 cm, 0.334 kg

'Through Performing Endurance, well-known works of art are returned to and seen in a rigorously new and resolutely political light … Shalson's book will sit alongside works by Peggy Phelan and Rebecca Schneider with Amelia Jones not too far away … Her writing equals publications by these thinkers in significance and rigor …' Nik Wakefield, The Drama Review

In Performing Endurance, Lara Shalson offers a new way of understanding acts of endurance in art and political contexts. Examining a range of performances from the 1960s to the present, including influential performance art works by Marina Abramovi?, Chris Burden, Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano, Yoko Ono, and others, as well as protest actions from the lunch counter sit-ins of the US civil rights movement to protest camps in the twenty-first century, this book provides a formal account of endurance and illuminates its ethical and political significance. Endurance, Shalson argues, raises vital questions about what it means to exist as a body that both acts and is acted upon, from ethical questions about how we respond to the bodies of others to political questions about how we live in relation to institutions that shape life in fundamental ways. In addition, Performing Endurance rethinks how performance itself endures over time.

List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Enduring objecthood
2. Enduring protests
3. Enduring life
4. Enduring documents
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Political ideologies [JPF], The self, ego, identity, personality [JMS], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Popular culture [JFCA], Theatre studies [AN], Performance art [AFKP], Theory of art [ABA]