art is (Speaking Portraits) [Paperback]

This new volume in the Performance Ideas series is drawn from the ongoing video workart is/poetry is/music is (Speaking Portraits), which features over 1000 artists—painters, poets, musicians, dancers, actors, video-/filmmakers—in eleven countries saying what art is.art isoffers an intimate view of seventy of those engaged in art as performance. Single-frame images, accompanied by individual artist statements, capture moments of high intensity from Marina Abramovic, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Jonah Bokaer, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Thurston Moore, Gary Hill, Vito Acconci, Archie Shepp, Joan Jonas, Anthony Braxton, Ann Hamilton, and many more. George Quasha writes in his Introduction: “Listening to so many artists, closely and over many years, has taught me further configurative dimensions of performative mind. Close listening/viewing—non-interfering attention—nurtures art, just as it does people, animals, maybe even plants.”

George Quasha, artist/poet/musician, is a Guggenheim Fellow whose twenty books includeAxial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance, An Art of Limina, andGlossodelia Attract (preverbs).

The third volume in the Performance Ideas series.

Selections fromart is (Speaking Portraits)(without photos)

Meredith Monk

I really believe that art has the power to heal.
And that doesn’t necessarily mean that it couldn’t be something
that
a lot of people think is very ugly
or all these controversial pieces that seem like they are
violent;
they seem like they are not obviously so life-affirming.

I basically think that most artists work out of love
and if something that is a very disturbing work wakes you
up in a way,
that’s definitely part of the process of life.
I mean pain is definitely part of the process of life.
And I think that ultimatelylc)