Through the latter half of 1964 and on into 1965 small groups of young people would converge at midnight every Saturday at the foot of a statue in Amsterdam. The statue was that of an anonymous small boy, the Lieverdje. It was a gift to the city from a tobacco company, and, as far as the Saturday night gatherings were concerned, it was less the statue itself than these donors who were important. For this was the spot chosen by Robert Jasper Grootveld to promote his campaign against the use of tobacco. Each midnight event would consist of a speech by Grootveld followed by the burning of something. On at least one occasion it was the statue itself which went up in flames.

Provocations in Amsterdam

The events at the Lieverdje were part of a one-man campaign. It started with Grootveld defacing cigarette advertisements with the word ‘Kanker’ or the letter ‘K’. As a consequence of legal action by advertising agencies for this vandalism he was repeatedly gaoled. From this first phase of his campaign he moved on to establish an ‘Anti-Smoking Temple’. Here he

Then in April 1964 Grootveld launched a citywide game called Marihuette. Although this name was based on ‘marijuana’ Grootveld claimed ‘marihu’ could consist of anything that smoked – straw as well as grass, so to speak – apart from tobacco. Teun Voeten says the idea of the game ‘was to demonstrate the establishment's complete ignorance on the subject of cannabis’ (1990). Its rules were distributed by means of a chain letter (a pre-Internet mechanism of viral communication), leaving receivers able to add to the rules as they wished. As part of the game Grootveld filled cigarette packets with marihu, of any burnable sort, and smuggled the packets into vending machines. The rules themselves, characteristically of this sort of game, were fairly inscrutable, largely having to do with getting numbers of points in relation to being arrested, rather than avoiding arrest, for marijuana usage.

There was yet another person observing the events in Paris in May 1968. In his own commentary on them Jean-Jacques Lebel used an interesting word: ‘The first stage of an uprising (the barricades, the mass demonstrations, the street fighting between the government forces and the radicals, as well as such events as the burning down of the Stock Exchange, which occurred on May 24th), the first stage of any revolution, is always theatrical’ (1969: 112).

He was not alone in his sense that political action was ‘theatrical’. Famously one of the founders of the Youth International Party, the Yippies, Jerry Rubin, talked about ‘revolution as theatre’ and the Bolivian revolutionary Che Guevara spoke, in a self-consciously ‘lyrical’ fashion, of how he learnt to see revolutionary situations in terms of ‘protagonists in the drama’ (in Baxandall 1969). Now it is clear that, across history, revolutions, uprisings and even limited protest actions have used apparently dramatic or theatrical devices and actions. Nottingham radicals in 1802 marched through the city with a figure of the Goddess of Reason; Westminster radicals in 1809 disrupted theatre performances by shaking rattles, holding placards and dancing jigs; members of the National Unemployed Workers Movement brought central London traffic to a standstill in 1939 by staging a mock funeral procession of coffins for the unemployed. These sorts of political demonstrations have been subject to much academic analysis, often in the context of research on new social movements, with the cumulative work of Charles Tilly establishing a framework for discussing political demonstrations as performances, with their own systems of reference and language (see Tilly 2008). For our purposes here, however, the interest is in the moment at which a concept and language of performance need to come into being in response to, and as shaped by, those demonstrations.

In the sixties and seventies there seemed to be a lot more of them. Not just the wave of student actions across the west but industrial disputes, strikes and demonstrations, civil rights and anti-war protests filled the cities and the news. Quite apart from quantity, however, what appears different in this period is the discourse about the events, the interest in describing not just what they do but how they function.

While Performance Studies may claim itself as a multi- or interdiscipline, a dominant strand of it tells a widely disseminated story of its own emergence within which the commitment to multidisciplinarity does not seem to extend very far. This version of the Performance Studies emergence story repeatedly insists on particular key features and keeps silent about other possible variants.

Canonisation

This can be seen in the earliest, and by now canonical, rendering of the story, as told by Marvin Carlson in Performance: A critical introduction, which appeared in 1996, the year after the First Performance Studies conference. That closeness is not coincidental. The newly institutionalised discipline makes itself felt through the book. Indeed it shapes the understanding of performance, as we shall see.

Carlson's book begins with the general, and laudable, aim of drawing a map, in simple terms, of the various different understandings of the word ‘performance’. Within these, the crucial difference, as Carlson sees it, is between an understanding of performance as ‘the display of skills’ as against a display, not of particular skills, but ‘of a recognised and clearly coded pattern of behavior’. To these he adds a third usage of the term where the emphasis is on how far an activity succeeds ‘in light of some standard of achievement that may not itself be precisely articulated’. This third usage is the one encountered when someone is said to perform well in class or when a product performs well in heavy mud, for example. In this usage a synonym in English might be the word ‘achieve’ or ‘work’ – and if you are not speaking English you could be using an entirely different word that might bear no perceivable connection to the word you use for the first two uses. This accretion of homonyms is quite common in English-language texts about performance, and McKenzie's general theory in Perform or Else (2001) seems to depend on them.

Having laid out these possible usages of the English-language word ‘perform’, Carlson rightly says that it would be futile to look for an ‘overarching semantic field to cover these seemingly disparate usages’ (Carlson 1996: 4–5). And it would be particularly futile, we might note, because the field would turn into separate little horticultural lots as soon as you moved beyond English. It only appears to be a project in the first place if you happen to be an English speaker.

By the late 1970s the French and the Germans had taken a new word into their languages. This word was necessary because it enabled them to specify an activity for which there was otherwise no available term. The new word that entered their languages was the English word ‘performance’.

The activity to which it was applied consisted of circumstances in which one or more people communicated in real time and shared space with another group of people. The method of communication did not explicitly refer to, and often made a point of rejecting, the conventions of what could be recognised as ‘theatre’. It was a communicative activity seen to take place much more widely and variously than the practice of theatre. Indeed, although never before systematically recognised as such, it was identified as a regular occurrence in general human behaviour, capable of being done by most human beings in whatever society.

This insight came out of a widespread interest in analysing and explaining behaviour that had hitherto been assumed to be simply everyday, normal, natural. It gathered pace, across various disciplines, from the mid-1950s onwards. The first part of the book thus tracks the differing theories and definitions of human interactional behaviour which, beginning in different places, when taken together bring into being a concept of something which is called ‘performance’.

By 1979 ‘performance’ seemed to have gained so much currency, to have spread so far, that it was, some thought, a catch-all term, used to describe almost anything. Over a period of about twenty-five years, then, a concept comes into being, is felt to have such potency that it moves across academic disciplines and arts practices and gets formalised into degree programmes. That coming into being in part resulted from the work of scholars studying the world around them, but a lot of the potency that is attached to the concept of performance was put in place outside the academy, in the work of political activists and artists. A new concept of performance was formed in a new practice of performance, a practice shaped by its interactions with, its battles against the limitations of, the specific presiding economic and social structures, the institutions and violent hierarchies of capitalism, in post-1945 western Europe and the United States, and going on still.

With its roots in literary study the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (CCCS) picked up the idea that ritualised human interaction could be seen to have a ‘syntax’, a set of rules, that could then be analysed as text. Another way of approaching these sorts of human interaction was to see them as offering roles to their participants. Once again this approach implies that the interactions are performed, and once again it grows out of sociological interests, but this time its development moves through the formal discipline of theatre studies.

The point of origin takes us back to that crucial period, the mid-1950s. Following a conference on Theatre and Society at Royaumont, in 1956 the sociologist Georges Gurvitch published their agreed findings as to a new direction of research. These identified the following topics: ‘the diversity of audiences, their different degrees of relative homogeneity and cohesion’; analysis of the ‘performance’ itself ‘as worked out within a specific social framework’; study of those doing the ‘performance’ as ‘a social group, both as companies and more widely as an occupation’; study of ‘the functional relationship between the content … and the actual social system, particularly structural forms and social classes’ (in Burns and Burns 1973: 76–77; my elision).

This approach is based on, and justified by, an assumed affinity between theatre and society. This affinity holds true whether one begins by studying theatre or society, and it can thus give new understanding not only of aesthetic production but also of society itself:

On the basis of that analogy Gurvitch finds himself, in the very same year as Goffman's Presentation of Self, thinking afresh about the concept of social role: ‘the acting out of social roles constitutes part and parcel of the social order.

To clarify the assumption as to how theory usually operates I want to take a minor detour. All sorts of texts could be cited to demonstrate the proper function of theory, but I have chosen one on the basis of its date and its subject field. It comes from 1970, not especially significant in itself, but early in the engagement between theatre and social science. Its subject area is not that of performances and texts, aesthetic or otherwise, but anthropology. And about the doing of anthropology it raises some questions that predate the wholesale absorption of anthropology into performance.

When, in 1970, Jairus Banaji reviewed the state of British anthropology he suggested its problem was the persistence of functionalism. In its post-war manifestation this took the form of analysis of intersubjectivity, as opposed to structure, as the object of study. Both modes of study were faulty, he argued, because they not only look at but also primarily value the ideas about themselves that people consciously hold. Approaches based in phenomenology may be similarly faulty. As modes of study they are not looking for that which is ‘unconscious’, defined as that which shapes the formation of conscious ideas: ‘The anthropologist's task is to penetrate a people's conscious representations, as embodied in their ideological productions (myth, ritual, marriage rules) and uncover a more fundamental, “unconscious reality”.’ This unconscious reality, or set of determinations, may well differ from those ideas which, although conscious, may nevertheless be illusory. Into this overall argument Banaji places, among others, Victor Turner, whom he sees, despite Turner's account of himself, as ‘functionalist’. His model of liminality is abstracted from particular historical circumstances, and is thus a ‘dehistoricised structure’. Furthermore it is a ‘conscious’ model (Banaji 1970: 75, 78). It reports on people's sense of what they are doing but it doesn't explore the deeper, unconscious, situation. So liminal process can feel consciously like change and mobility while in fact, in a way of which the participants are unaware, it functions as a mechanism for ensuring structural stability.

It is not, of course, just with anthropological work that one can see the distinction between conscious and unconscious modes of knowing. Back in that year when performance apparently entered the academy, 1979, …

It was a new sort of activity. Well, actually, it was a very old sort of activity. Human beings appeared to have been doing it for centuries, but nobody had really called attention to it before. From the mid-1950s onwards, scholars in various academic disciplines began to get interested in how to describe and explain this activity. It was a little bit like theatre acting but didn't happen within the formal conventions and purposes of theatre. Instead it took place within what could be called everyday life, except that it could often be distinguished from other sorts of ordinary behaviour. While there were many different ideas as to how it was specifically distinguished, and to what sort of degree, from artistic theatre and ordinary behaviour, the various different scholars all ended up calling it the same thing, which was, of course, performance.

Although they were going on simultaneously I shall deal with these developments under two separate headings: first, the identification of a particular form of behaviour; second, the terminology of performance. In the first case, work by sociologists and sociologically influenced theatre specialists borrowed from each other to identify modes of interaction that were neither formal aesthetic drama nor casual everyday behaviour. In the second case, work by cultural anthropologists and folklorists developed terminology for, and understanding of the operation of, performed events in different societies. All of this together amounted not just to a new understanding of human interactions but also to a new way of doing understanding. The concept of performance was integral to both.

When the midnight crowd in Amsterdam were chanting ‘image image’ around Grootveld they were celebrating the revelation of, and attack on, the workings of the spectacle. And, when the Provos set about provoking the Dutch state to reveal the brutality behind the civilly organised commodity relationships, there was, again, an echo of the Situationists. The echoes were reverberating further afield. In Strasbourg a newly elected student union executive blew its entire budget in 1966 on printing a situationist pamphlet which had a significant set of words in its title: On the Poverty of Student Life: Considered in Its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for Its Remedy (discussed in Home 1991: 45; translations vary). The Strasbourg students were not alone. Student unrest was spreading across western Europe. And even as they watched it contemporary commentators became aware of a similar attitude to dominant order expressing itself, albeit in a somewhat different way, on the other side of the Atlantic. And just as was happening in European thinking there were new ideas about the thing that would end up being called performance.

It is 1967, in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco:

An everyday event such as this typified the culture of the young people who gathered in Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s, the hippies. Their culture very quickly attracted the attention of social commentators such as Fred Davis, …

From about the mid-1950s onwards there were people doing political, cultural and artistic things that seemed to be unlike things that had been done before. Much of what they were doing was consciously experimental, seeking to avoid or challenge already available categories. Politics and art were being made in a different way. But through this range of work there were some consistent ideas and connections. We shall trace these as we encounter the emergence of practices, and ideas about those practices, to which we might now give the name of performance.

Among the dissenting voices in 1979, the German artist Klaus Rinke refused to allow his work to be called ‘performance’. The better word, he said, was ‘Aktion’ or ‘Demonstration’. Not only was ‘performance’ a North American term, from the ‘Happening era’, but it also had inappropriate overtones of theatricality (in Bronson and Gale 1979: 195). Similarly his contemporary Franz Walther noted that ‘Ever since the word “performance” was first applied to my work I've had difficulties with it, because for me it has too many theatrical associations. All sorts of words have been used, but I haven't found the one that's right.’ He would prefer to use the word ‘Handlung’ or ‘Aktion art’, but this presents problems when translated into English, in that the word ‘action’ has, he thinks, ‘something programmatic about it’ because it seems to amount to ‘a definition of content’. Therefore, he suggests, ‘A better way to put it in English would be just “doing” – it's simply an activity’ (in Bronson and Gale 1979: 195).

When Rinke and Walther objected to their work being called ‘performance’ it was because it was being put into the wrong category, assimilated to something it was not. Their battle over terminology was about maintaining ownership over the products of their own labour. What they were doing was something more than refusing to let their art become commodity. In circumstances where their work was named by others in a way the artists could not or would not recognise it was in a sense being taken out of their hands. They were becoming alienated from their own work. To insist on the work being named as one wants to name it oneself is to refuse alienation.

Rinke and Walther were not alone. A number of performed practices, whatever they were called, however consciously artistic or not, seem to share an impulse to resist alienation. This is what Stuart Hall thought he saw when he was looking at the hippie counterculture. In an attempt to explain their activities he put them in the larger historical context of ‘post-industrial societies’ where ‘the technical-productive system has been enormously expanded and revolutionised – raised to such mature forms as to have transformed social consciousness itself.’ That transformation of social consciousness produced conditions experienced as alienation. By way of response to it, says Hall, ‘new modes of consciousness’ are being produced, …

While Conquergood's mapping of the issues may have derived from his own particular combination of oral interpretation and ethnography, the basic characteristics which he attributes to performance are shared pretty widely among those who come to the subject from oral interpretation.

There is a crucial difference, however. Conquergood's engagement with anthropology more or less put him in the same territory as Richard Schechner, with his enthusiasm for social sciences. Both men lionised Victor Turner. So although Conquergood's department was based in the discipline of oral interpretation he deviated from the disciplinary norm. And that norm insisted on some rather different emphases. An early statement of these comes from Conquergood's senior colleague at Northwestern, Wallace Bacon. Bacon was the great driving force behind oral interpretation's change to Performance Studies, indeed the magisterial authority of Wikipedia itself pronounces him the founder of Performance Studies. Somewhat more soberly, Strine, Long and Hopkins suggest that Bacon was one of three authors who provided ‘the conceptual framework for text-centered studies that draw on performance-related insights to supplement the textual analysis of literary scholarship’. Alongside Bacon, Don Geiger made a ‘theoretical integration of American New Criticism and principles of dramatism’ and Thomas Sloan argued for ‘the interrelationships among oral performance, rhetoric, and literary criticism’, both in the mid-1960s (Strine, Long and Hopkins 1990: 182). For all three performance is deeply connected with, bound into the analysis and effects of, text. In Bacon's words oral interpretation teaches ‘the art of performing texts – not simply the art of performing’. If some versions of Performance Studies were to pride themselves on their disciplinary inclusivity or lack of definition, Bacon does the reverse and insists on specificity: ‘we are not, in essence, anthropologists, nor folklorists, nor sociologists, nor political scientists’. For him ‘Our center is the interaction between readers and texts.’ This interaction provided the transformative power of the educational project, in that it ‘enriches, extends, clarifies, and (yes) alters the interior and even the exterior lives of students through the power of texts’. It also provides its ethical centre: the performance of texts develops ‘that sense of the other so crucial to any concept of education as a humanizing, liberalizing experience’ (1984: 84).

Instituting the inclusive classroom

Here in miniature are the aims and values that were to be so often reiterated in the work of all those who came to Performance Studies via oral interpretation.

A feeling of the new disciplinary shaping is suggested by the programme for the first few years of the Milwaukee Center for Twentieth Century Studies. Founded in that seminal year 1968 its activities gathered steam in the early seventies. Although there were seminars on subjects across the humanities, photography features frequently at the start. Then in 1973 there was a symposium on the ‘Self-Reflective Artwork in Contemporary Literature and Art’, followed later by a week of events on French women artists and thinkers. For 1975–1976 the theme was Film, with a symposium in November 1975. This, though, was the mid-seventies and discussions of art and ideas were never far away from economics: in September 1975 there was a conference on Public Taxing and the Humanities in Multi-Campus University Systems. Then in 1976–1977 the theme was Performance, with talks by Umberto Eco, Ionesco, Herbert Blau and Victor Turner, and a symposium in November 1976. The next year the theme was Technology and the Humanities.

The programming showed awareness of, and desire to respond to, emergent subjects and trends. That response was made by drawing on ways of thinking that seemed appropriate to the various innovations and that were, themselves, undergoing change. New theoretical models were building on and revising traditional psychoanalysis and Marxism, pushing structuralism into poststructuralism, rethinking historiography, circulating intensely around notions of ideology, discourse and the subject – all the various elements that came to be named, with a capital letter, Theory.

Like similar research centres elsewhere the Milwaukee Center was seeking to think about new materials in a new way. Its declared intention was to ‘sift theories of contemporary culture’, and this it formally commenced with its first publication, based on the November 1976 event, ‘The International Symposium on Postmodern Performance’. The insertion of the word ‘Postmodern’ both aligns this sort of ‘Performance’ with an area of contemporary concern and marks it off from anything else which might be known as performance. What makes it so special in postmodernity, and a worthy subject for the Milwaukee Center's first publication, is that, according to the Center's director, Michel Benamou, performance is ‘the unifying mode of the arts in our time’ (1977a: n.p.).

Performance, as a concept, can take on this role because of its range of application, which Benamou differentiates into three ‘aspects’: ‘the dramatization of life by the media, the playfulness of art, …

The concept of performance developed by sociologists, ethnographers and theatre scholars amounted, in general terms, to a form, or, rather, set of forms, of communicative behaviour. Neither presented nor received as theatrical, it is designed to have effects on its respondents. Although an apparently habitual part of everyday living, such behaviour is nevertheless constructed. This conceptual modelling identified new objects of study, often by framing them as performance, but its work was largely continuous with, and bound by, the evolving interests of specific academic disciplines and the dialogues between them. In the world around it meanwhile there were performed practices that polemically sought to question boundaries and continuities. They often refused to be categorised and labelled, and they posed challenges to institutions. Among the challenged institutions were the universities. The political and cultural conflicts of the late sixties and early seventies turned the universities into all too literal battlegrounds. Students and lecturers joined and organised campaigns around peace, democracy and social equality and, as part of this, they asked questions not only about the world outside but also within the classroom. Traditional disciplines fractured under the pressure of new ideas, one of the most spectacular examples being English in the United Kingdom. From the fracturing, new disciplines emerged, such as cultural studies and film studies and, somewhat later, Performance Studies and as those disciplines emerged they brought with them, well, new discipline.

While the folklorists were trying to identify the ways in which ‘performance’ could be related to and distinguished from everyday behaviours, other cultural anthropologists were interested in the social functions of events that were clearly framed as performances. This area of inquiry took anthropology very close to analysis not merely of non-theatrical performances but also of aesthetic theatre itself. For our purposes here, this development is interesting because it works towards a concept of performance as an overarching category which includes a variety of different kinds of event.

The research in this area is usually assumed to start with the work of Milton Singer in Madras in the mid-1950s. It had come out of the same School of Sociology at Chicago as produced the work of Goffman and Becker. At Chicago Singer worked alongside Robert Redfield and other colleagues to explore the role of cities within social and cultural modernisation. This role was particularly interesting in the case of a city which was so thoroughly governed by traditional beliefs and practices as was Madras. Singer came to believe that he could understand the operation of these beliefs, and their role in resisting or negotiating change, by watching religious ceremonies, which he categorised as ‘cultural performances’. He developed this approach on the advice of an Indian colleague, the great Sanskrit specialist, Venkataraman Raghavan. So we should note, in passing, that, insofar as ‘cultural performance’ is one of its foundational concepts, the extended notion of performance that we now accept has one of its points of origin in the Indian academy.

Singer, be it said, placed great value on his Indian colleagues even though his was the only name that went into the western publishing machine, with his first book, Traditional India (1959), consisting of essays by various authors, including Raghavan, and published by the American Folklore Society. The concept of cultural performance was more fully developed in a later book, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, in 1972. Here Singer explained how Indian friends thought of their civilisation as ‘encapsulated’ in the performances of religious ceremonies: ‘The performances became for me the elementary constituents of the culture and the ultimate units of observation.’ Each of these units has ‘a definitely limited time span, a beginning and an end, an organized program of activity, a set of performers, an audience, and a place and occasion of performance’ (1972: 71).

A few years before Schechner told his colleagues to abandon old-fashioned theatre studies a new concept had appeared on the scene. This concept was to be adopted by Performance Studies and would become a major reference point for the efficacy of performance, even though it had arrived via theatre and indeed text. The impetus behind its formulation was derived from that source of so much political and theoretical innovation in the period, feminism and its distinct point of arrival was an essay in Theatre Journal, edited by Sue-Ellen Case and Timothy Murray. The essay, which appeared in 1988, was called ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, written by Judith Butler.

Back in 1988 that first word of Butler's title had less resonance in drama and theatre scholarship than it might have done in anthropology or linguistic philosophy, but that very soon changed. In 1990 the essay was reprinted in Case's anthology Performing Feminisms, and from here it was picked up by many theatre academics. Jill Dolan, for example, used it in her contribution to Reinelt and Roach's book in 1992. By the early years of the new century, ‘performativity’ had become the seemingly regular, if not obligatory, partner to ‘performance’. But, although this now seems a perfectly natural pairing, like some of the most enduring relationships it began with arguments. Somewhat more alarmingly – at least as far as my metaphor is concerned – in the evolution of this relationship one of the partners appeared to lose their identity.

‘Performativity’ had made its significant arrival into academic discourse in the mid-1950s in a series of lectures on linguistic philosophy by J.L. Austin. In the years that followed, it was the subject of hilariously acrimonious philosophical dispute between Jacques Derrida and John Searle, but this had next to nothing to do with performance as hitherto understood. An exception was Tambiah's suggestion in 1979 that Austin's performativity might be employed as a way of thinking about ritual practice. In ‘A Performative Approach to Ritual’ Tambiah suggested three ways in which ritual could be thought of as performative: ‘in the Austinian sense of performative wherein saying is also doing something as a conventional act; in the quite different sense of a staged performance that uses multiple media by which the participants experience the event intensively; and in the third sense of indexical values …

The more surprising it is, then, that feminism does not appear in the index of one of the most influential accounts of the history of body or performance art, RoseLee Goldberg's Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. Just as the histories of happenings positioned them conceptually, so too it was for what became known by many as ‘Performance’, now with a capital P, or Live Art, also a capital affair.

Claiming a heritage

Next to nothing has done this positioning more influentially than Goldberg's Performance, which has been reprinted several times since its first publication in 1979, with additional material and a slightly reworked preface. When it appeared it was a pioneering attempt to marshal a great body of diverse material into one place, thereby offering a way of making sense of it, and it begins by announcing a watershed moment: ‘Performance has only recently become accepted as a medium of artistic expression in its own right.’ That acceptance has meant that what had been a ‘hidden history’ can now be comprehensively reviewed. In discovering the hidden history it becomes clear that ‘artists have always turned to live performance as one means among many of expressing their ideas.’ A characteristic of this expressive medium is that ‘Live gestures have constantly been used as a weapon against the conventions of established art.’ This claim ties in with the first chapter's topic, the Futurists and their calls to ‘go out into the street, launch assaults from theatres’. But Goldberg is clear that this ‘hidden history’ begins well before Futurism and includes ‘tribal ritual or medieval Passion plays, Leonardo da Vinci's experiments before invited audiences or his river pageants, Bernini's staged spectacles’. In the twentieth century, ‘Performance manifestos, from the Futurists to the present, have been the expression of dissidents … Performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. For this reason its base has always been anarchic. Moreover, by its very nature, performance defies precise or easy definition beyond the single declaration that it is live art by artists’ (1979: 6, 12; my elision).

While she quite properly admits the slipperiness of the term of which she is trying to write the modern history, this slipperiness is somewhat lubricated by the foreword.