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Noted New York University scholar, critic, and curator RoseLee Goldberg will talk about “100 Years of Performance Art” 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Williams Center for the Arts.
The free event is one of two keynote presentations in the eighth biennial Roethke Humanities Festival. Multi-disciplinary creative artist Laurie Anderson, Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Visiting Lecturer, will give a keynote presentation Friday, April 16.
Goldberg will describe the rich array of performance art that defined New York experimentation and breakthrough accomplishments from Anderson, John Cage, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, Eric Bogosian, and many others.
She pioneered the study of performance art with Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present to the Present. She has been director of the Royal College of Art Gallery in London and performance curator of the Kitchen in New York City. She is a regular contributor to Artforum and her books include Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (1998) and Laurie Anderson (2000). She originated and produced the multimedia performance Logic of the Birds (2001).
“When RoseLee Goldberg’s Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present was published in 1979, it shattered the conventional wisdom about modern art history as a succession of formal styles,” according to Art in America. “Goldberg demonstrated that visual artists of the past century had often produced live performances, in addition to making objects. Such events constituted what she termed a ‘hidden history’ vital to an understanding of Futurism, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism, because ‘these movements found their roots and attempted to resolve problematic issues in performance … it was in performance that they tested their ideas, only later expressing them in objects.’ Goldberg wasn’t the first to investigate this rich lode of material, but she was the first to create a cogently theorized narrative about it.”