The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Postmodernism
Lisa Paul Streitfeld
This penetrating volume must not simply be approached as a contradiction of terms reflecting the paradox inherent in its subject matter. A larger truth is introduced by the title: the separate but parallel streams of conceptual and performance art in the formation of postmodernism not only reflect but reinforce the body/mind split in the culture.
Consider this: When dealer Sean Kelly accepted a 2005 AICA Award for his Joseph Kosuth exhibition, he recounted how he flew to Europe to toast his artist just prior to the opening only to discover that the work hadn’t yet been made. Kelly reminded the audience of critics that he had been at the podium in 2004 to receive an award for Marina Abramovic’s House with an Ocean View. In this scenario, McEvilley’s categories converge: the cynical dead end of conceptualism as mercantilism supports authentic performance delivering the body into a new era.
McEvilley introduces this brilliant compilation of essays with anecdotes of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, a progenitor of anti-art performance whose intention was to thrust society out of its self-satisfied slumber. In this manner, the author–who heads the department of Art Criticism at the School of Visual Arts–equates the patriarchal environment of the Greeks with the latter half of the 20th century.
He opens with an ingenious structuring of origins that interprets Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein through a philosophical underpinning which seeks to move beyond the limitations of ego and claim a non-existent path between the opposites for Western art. The book then splits into the dichotomy of its dual structure. Dating back to the early 1980s, these illuminating writings reveal McEvilly’s critical role in the development of idiosyncratic conceptual pioneers such as John Baldessari and William Anastasi as they bring the collective unconscious up to public view.
These artists anticipated the looming shadow of celebrity combined with growing pressures of globalization, a condition examined by juxtaposing Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys as opposite thrusts of anti-art sharing a mutual goal. While a groundbreaking essay on Marina Abramovic and Ulay, as well as Abramovic alone in her award-winning performance, reveal the power of transformation in collaboration, their followers all too frequently expect fame as the reward for their assaults on the system. Where has this led but to an alarming complicity exhibited by Mark Kostabi’s cynical conceptual art performance piece on his Manhattan cable television show where he invites critics to title his non-art objects (which proclaim their sole importance in not being painted by the artist). Those who once had a crucial role as adversary are now participants in the celebrity-obsessed shadow that has swallowed up authenticity in art. Kostabi has taken out a full-page ad in Art Forum as proof of this public triumph of the inauthentic. Is this public undermining of the critical apparatus the logical conclusion of Anti-Art?
McEvilley falters at the very moment he is required to sum up the importance of anti-art. Yet, he succeeds in establishing the foundation by which we can probe the evil/live equation by which conceptual (mind) and performance (body) art might join hands in the 21st century. The timing with which his publisher has released this historical testimonial–just as Performa05 announced the revival of performance for a new century–makes this fascinating volume a critical marker for the transition.
