Brochure produced for the exhibition High Performance (LACE, 2003)
About High Performance:
Utilizing material from the High Performance archive, housed in Santa Monica, CA, as well as from the artists themselves, the exhibition examines the first five years of the magazine’s history through correspondence, layouts, photographs, videos, artists’ books, and other objects. With its radical, non-commercial status, performance art was, for much of the 1970s, an unrecognized discipline flourishing in both New York and Los Angeles, and Western Europe. Assembling performance documentation from a wide range of established and emerging artists, High Performance offered coverage to artists whose practices often challenged the boundaries, conventions, and silences of the established art world. Through live, body-based works, artists engaged experiences of autobiography, catharsis, and social injustice, challenging the ideological separations between art and life.
Artists included:
Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kim Jones, Suzanne Lacy, The Lesbian Art Project, Paul McCarthy, Linda M. Montano, Gina Pane, Rachel Rosenthal, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara T. Smith, the Waitresses, and others.
Essay by Jenni Sorkin, 27 black and white photos.
-LACE Website, 2015
