Kristine Stiles (born Kristine Elaine Dolan in Denver, Colorado, 1947) is the France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. [1] She is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global contemporary art and trauma. Her most recent book is Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma, University of Chicago Press, 2016. She is best known for her scholarship on artists’ writings, [2] performance art, [3] [4] [5] [6] feminism, [7] [8] destruction and violence in art, [9] [10] and trauma in art. [11] [12] Stiles joined the faculty of Duke in 1988, and she has taught at the University of Bucharest and Venice International University. She received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence in 1994, and the Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring in 2011, both at Duke University. [13] Among other fellowships and awards include a J. William Fulbright Fellowship in 1995, a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, and an Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts in Totnes, Devon, England in 2005.
Stiles is the second of five children born to Paul G. Dolan and Katherine Haller Rogers Dolan. Stiles's maternal genealogy includes a number of educators and public figures. Her grandfather, Frederick Rand Rogers [1894–1972], was a radical American educator, pioneer of physical fitness testing, and inventor of the Physical Fitness Index. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] Her great grandfather, Frederick John Rogers, was a professor of physics and Chair of the Physics Department at Stanford University and his wife, Stiles's great grandmother, was the colorful Josephine Rand Rogers, [19] a president of The League of Women Voters, and politically active in the Temperance Movement and in passing Child Welfare Laws. Another maternal great grandfather, Dr. George Spalatin Easterday, was mayor of Albuquerque, New Mexico; [20] and her great, great grandfather John Rankin Rogers, was third governor of the state of Washington and supporter of the “Barefoot School Boy Act.” [21] Stiles’ father's ancestry is all of Irish immigrants from Old Castle, County Cavan, but her grandfather William Joseph Dolan was born in Boston, trained in Italy as an Interior Designer and worked as a decorator of Catholic churches. Stiles retained her last name from her first marriage (1967–1974) to attorney Randolph Stiles.
Stiles earned her B.A. in Art History from San Jose State University in California (1970), and her M.A. (1974) and Ph.D. (1987) in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Peter Selz [22] and Herschel B. Chipp, [23] both known for their focus on artists’ writings, the social history of art, and international art, concentrations that shaped Stiles's scholarly direction. Stiles's doctoral dissertation, "The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS): The Radical Social Project of Event-Structured Live Art" (1987), [24] was the first thesis on the subject of destruction in art. DIAS took place in London in 1966, was organized by Gustav Metzger [25] (about whom Stiles has also published extensively [26] [27] ), and some fifty international artists, and poets, as well as a few psychiatrists participated in DIAS.
One of Stiles's principal theoretical contributions to the history of performance art was her 1987 dissertation argument that the presentation of the artist's performing body initiates a new communicative structure in the visual arts, appending the traditional re-presentational role of metaphor with the connective function of metonymy. Countering the widespread claim in the early post-1945 period that performance art breaks down the barriers between art and life, Stiles asserted that metonymy augments interpersonal communication through its linking function, and expands the conventional modes of visual communication by creating the potential for an exchange between presenting and viewing subjects. [28]
Stiles is among a handful of scholars who, in the late 1970s, laid the foundation for studying post-1945 performance art and related forms, writing about the pioneering artists of happenings, Fluxus, performance art, and new media. Her articles and essays, many of them book-length, have addressed the work of artists such as Jean-Jacques Lebel, [29] [30] Yoko Ono, [31] [32] Franz West, [33] Carolee Schneemann, [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] Raphael Montañez Ortiz, [39] Valie Export, [40] Jean Toche, [41] [42] Alison Knowles, [43] David Tudor and Henry Flynt, [44] Lynn Hershman Leeson, [45] Chris Burden, [46] Kim Jones, [47] Paul McCarthy, [48] Barbara T. Smith, [49] Marina Abramović, [50] William Pope.L, [51] Dan and Lia Perjovschi, [52] Peter D'Agostino, [53] [54] STELARC, [55] Jeffrey Shaw, [56] Maurice Benayoun, [57] and many others.
While still a graduate student, Stiles taught a seminar on performance art at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979, which has been acknowledged as the second course on the subject taught in the U.S. [58] [59] Stiles also taught the first course in the U.S. on “Documentary Photography of the Nuclear Age” at Duke University in 1994, the same year that she curated two exhibitions on the subject, a symposium, and published an exhibition catalogue on the nuclear age photographs of James Lerager. [60]
Stiles is also known for exposing as a myth that Austrian artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler's castrated himself in a performance and died as a result of the wounds, a story circulated by Robert Hughes in Time magazine in 1972. [61] Stiles provided evidence in 1990 that Schwarzkogler primarily staged his art in photographic tableaux, often using the Austrian artist Heinz Cibulka as his model. [62] [63] [64] Hughes acknowledged his error in The New Yorker in 1996. [65]
Stiles's work as an artist has included painting and mixed media pieces, [66] [67] [68] conceptual and sociological art, [69] and performance. [70] She performed with Sherman Fleming [71] [72] [73] and Yoko Ono, [74] among others, and was the first multiple of Lynn Hershman Leeson's Roberta Breitmore, appearing as Roberta in 1976. [75] Active in the alternative art space movement during the punk era in San Francisco, Stiles performed, exhibited, and curated at JetWave (1980–82), founded by artists Randy Hussong, Sabina Ott, [76] Bruce Gluck, and Fredrica Drotos, and at Twin Palms, founded by Lynn Hershman Leeson and Steve Dolan. She also served from 1976 to 1984 as the assistant to San Francisco artist Bruce Conner. [77] [78] From 1986 to 1989, she served on the Board of Directors at the Washington Project for the Arts when Jock Reynolds [79] was its director. Stiles has worked as a curator, writer, lecturer, and/or consultant for the Museum of Modern Art, [80] New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; [81] Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, [82] New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, [83] New York; Walker Art Center, [84] Minneapolis; Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, [85] Minneapolis; El Museo del Barrio, [86] New York; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, [87] among many other institutions.
Stiles's collected papers 1900–ongoing are housed at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Special Collections, and include genealogical records, letters, artists' archives, over 500 documentary photographs of performances, etcetera: http://search.library.duke.edu/search?id=DUKE004196941
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines and for generating new art forms. These art forms include intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins; conceptual art, first developed by Henry Flynt, an artist contentiously associated with Fluxus; and video art, first pioneered by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell. Dutch gallerist and art critic Harry Ruhé describes Fluxus as "the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties".
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.
Gustav Metzger was a German artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. Together with John Sharkey, he initiated the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966.
Madeline Charlotte Moorman was an American cellist, performance artist, and advocate for avant-garde music. Referred to as the "Jeanne d'Arc of new music", she was the founder of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York and a frequent collaborator with Korean American artist Nam June Paik.
Alfred Earl "Al" Hansen was an American artist. He was a member of Fluxus, a movement that originated on an artists' collective around George Maciunas.
Carolee Schneemann was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneeman was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, saying: "I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." Her works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the London National Film Theatre, and many other venues.
John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, was a Northern Rhodesian-born British conceptual artist.
Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening it to a "new paintbrush." Kubota is known for constructing sculptural installations with a strong DIY aesthetic, which include sculptures with embedded monitors playing her original videos. She was a key member and influence on Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centered on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group since witnessing John Cage perform in Tokyo in 1962 and subsequently moving to New York in 1964. She was closely associated with George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, Joe Jones, Nam June Paik, and Ay-O, among other members of Fluxus. Kubota was deemed "Vice Chairman" of the Fluxus Organization by Maciunas.
Auto-destructive art (ADA) is a form of art invented by Gustav Metzger, an artist born in Bavaria who moved to Britain in 1939. Taking place after World War II, Metzger wanted to showcase the destruction created from the war through his artwork. This movement took place in England and was launched by Metzger in 1959. This term was invented in the early 1960s and put into circulation by his article "Machine, Auto-Creative and Auto-Destructive Art" in the summer 1962 issue of the journal Ark.
The Destruction in Art Symposium was a gathering of a diverse group of international artists, poets, and scientists to London from 9–12 September, 1966. Included in this number were representatives of Fluxus and other counter-cultural artistic undergrounds who were there to speak out on the theme of destruction in art.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American multimedia artist and filmmaker. Her work with technology and in media-based practices is credited with helping to legitimize digital art forms. Her interests include feminism, race, surveillance, and artificial intelligence and identity theft through algorithms and data tracking.
Raphael Montañez Ortiz is an American artist, educator, and founder of El Museo del Barrio, in East Harlem, New York City.
Dan Perjovschi is an artist, writer and cartoonist born on 29 October 1961 in Sibiu, Romania.
Robin Page was a British painter. He was one of the early members of the Fluxus art movement.
Grapefruit is an artist's book written by Yoko Ono, originally published in 1964. It has become famous as an early example of conceptual art, containing a series of "event scores" that replace the physical work of art – the traditional stock-in-trade of artists – with instructions that an individual may, or may not, wish to enact.
Grapefruit is one of the monuments of conceptual art of the early 1960s. She has a lyrical, poetic dimension that sets her apart from the other conceptual artists. Her approach to art was only made acceptable when [people] like Kosuth and Weiner came in and did virtually the same thing as Yoko, but made them respectable and collectible.
Spice Chess is an artist's multiple by the Japanese artist Takako Saito, while she was resident in the United States. Originally manufactured winter 1964–65, and offered for sale March 1965, the work is one of a famous series of disrupted chess sets referred to as Fluxchess or Flux Chess, made for George Maciunas' Fluxshop at his Canal Street loft, SoHo, New York City and later through his Fluxus Mail-Order Warehouse.
"Takako Saito engaged with Duchamp's practice but also with masculinist cold war metaphors by taking up chess as a subject of [her] art. Saito's fluxchess works... question the primacy of vision to chess, along with notions of perception and in aesthetic experience more generally.... Her "Smell Chess," "Sound Chess" and "Weight Chess" reworked the game of chess so that players would be forced to hone non-visual perception, such as the olfactory sense, tactility, and aurality, in order to follow chess rules." Claudia Mesch
DuBois-Deyo House is a historic home located at Rosendale in Ulster County, New York. It was built about 1750 and is composed of two sections. The main block is a two-story, four-by-two-bay stone and frame building with a two-story frame rear wing. Also on the property is a garage dated to about 1890.
The feminist art movement refers to the efforts and accomplishments of feminists internationally to produce art that reflects women's lives and experiences, as well as to change the foundation for the production and perception of contemporary art. It also seeks to bring more visibility to women within art history and art practice. The movement challenges the traditional hierarchy of arts over crafts, which views hard sculpture and painting as superior to the narrowly perceived 'women's work' of arts and crafts such as weaving, sewing, quilting and ceramics. Women artists have overturned the traditional view by, for example, using unconventional materials in soft sculptures, new techniques such as stuffing, hanging and draping, and for new purposes such as telling stories of their own life experiences. The objectives of the feminist art movement are thus to deconstruct the traditional hierarchies, represent women more fairly and to give more meaning to art. It helps construct a role for those who wish to challenge the mainstream narrative of the art world. Corresponding with general developments within feminism, and often including such self-organizing tactics as the consciousness-raising group, the movement began in the 1960s and flourished throughout the 1970s as an outgrowth of the so-called second wave of feminism. It has been called "the most influential international movement of any during the postwar period."
Lil Picard, born Lilli Elisabeth Benedick, was a cabaret actress, artist, journalist and critic, born in Landau, Germany, who took part in several generations of counterculture and avant-garde art in Berlin and in New York City.
Sabine Breitwieser is an Austrian curator, art manager and publicist.