Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action, it has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant-garde art.
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to American artist Sol LeWitt's definition of conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
Vito Acconci was an American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His performance and video art was characterized by "existential unease," exhibitionism, discomfort, transgression and provocation, as well as wit and audacity, and often involved crossing boundaries such as public–private, consensual–nonconsensual, and real world–art world. His work is considered to have influenced artists including Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Bruce Nauman, and Tracey Emin, among others.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Hannah Adelle Weiner was an American poet who is often grouped with the Language poets because of the prominent place she assumed in the poetics of that group.
Artists' books are works of art that take the form of a book. They are often published in small editions, though they are sometimes produced as one-of-a-kind objects.
Bernadette Mayer was an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School.
Willoughby Sharp was an American artist, independent curator, independent publisher, gallerist, teacher, author, and telecom activist. Avalanche published interviews they conducted with contemporary artists such as Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim and Yvonne Rainer. Sharp also was contributing editor to four other publications: Impulse (1979–1981); Video magazine (1980–1982); Art Com (1984–1985), and the East Village Eye (1984–1986). He published three monographs on contemporary artists, contributed to many exhibition catalogues, and wrote on art for Artforum, Art in America, Arts magazine, Laica Journal, Quadrum and Rhobo. He was editor of the Public Arts International/Free Speech documentary booklet in 1979. Sharp received numerous grants, awards, and fellowships; both as an individual or under the sponsorship of non-profit arts organizations.
Clark Coolidge is an American poet.
Tomaž Šalamun was a Slovenian poet who was a leading figure of postwar neo-avant-garde poetry in Central Europe and an internationally acclaimed absurdist. His books of Slovene poetry have been translated into twenty-one languages, with nine of his thirty-nine books of poetry published in English. His work has been called a poetic bridge between old European roots and America. Šalamun was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and was married to the painter Metka Krašovec.
Aram Saroyan is an American poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright, who is especially known for his minimalist poetry, famous examples of which include the one-word poem "lighght" and a one-letter poem comprising a four-legged version of the letter "m".
Lewis Warsh was an American poet, visual artist, professor, prose writer, editor, and publisher. He was a principal member of the second generation of the New York School poets,; however, he has said that “no two people write alike, even if they’re associated with a so-called ‘school’ .” Professor of English at Long Island University and founding director (2007–2013) of their MFA program in creative writing, Warsh lived in Manhattan with his wife, playwright-teacher Katt Lissard, whom he married in 2001.
Nick Piombino is an American poet, essayist, artist and psychotherapist. He has been associated with poets from both the New York School of the 1960s and the Language Poets of the 1970s, though his work is not easily classified.
Lee Jaffe is an American artist, photographer, filmmaker, musician, and producer.
Liza Béar is a New York-based filmmaker, writer, photographer, and media activist who makes both individual and collaborative works. Béar co-founded two early independent art publications Avalanche magazine and Bomb. Since 1968 she has lived and worked in New York City.
Conceptual writing is a style of writing which relies on processes and experiments. This can include texts which may be reduced to a set of procedures, a generative instruction or constraint, or a "concept" which precedes and is considered more important than the resulting text(s). As a category, it is closely related to conceptual art.
Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014) was an American visual artist who was closely associated with the feminist art movement and the conceptual art movement of the 1970s. She was a founding member of A.I.R. gallery, the first all-female artists cooperative gallery in the United States.
Michael Handler Ruby is an American poet and longtime editor at The Wall Street Journal. As a poet, he has primarily identified with surrealism, Language poetry and the New York School, including Bernadette Mayer, whose early books he co-edited.
Ed Bowes is a filmmaker, writer, and director who pioneered the use of video as cinema. The first person to make a feature-length film in video, he used poets, musicians, artists, video- and filmmakers as performers in films such as Romance (1975) and Better, Stronger (1978–79). As a result of the notice given to his camera work, Bowes began his long career as a cinematographer for filmmakers and video artists including Kathryn Bigelow, Lizzie Borden, Vito Acconci, and Robert Longo, among others. In the 1970s, he was instrumental in creating early exhibitions of video art at MoMA, The Kitchen, and other Downtown New York venues. He taught advanced filmmaking for more than three decades at the School of Visual Arts, where he influenced several generations of contemporary filmmakers. His work is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. It is also represented in The Kitchen Archive at The Getty Research Institute and the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive.
Avalanche was an American New York City-based arts magazine that existed for the six years between 1970 and 1976. 13 issues, all in black and white, were produced. Avalanche was co-founded and co-edited by Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar. Their aim was to cover Postminimalism from the artist's perspective, exploring conceptual art, minimal art, performance art, and land art.
