Perimeter's curated Reading Capsules aim to explore some of the store's key points of interest and enquiry. Each capsule, focusing on various themes, mediums and contexts in art and design publishing, features titles available for individual purchase or as a specially priced bundle.
Our third capsule looks at key artists and dialogues that engage with Performance Art. The capsule includes the major monographs of three notable performance artists, as well as four contemporary texts that further experiment with and expand the practice.
Each of these titles are available for individual purchase through the web store, or as a specially priced bundle ($299 with free domestic shipping).
Mel O'Callaghan: Centre of the Centre
Mel O'Callaghan: Centre of the Centre is the first significant publication dedicated to the practice of this leading contemporary artist. O'Callaghan is a Paris based, Australian born artist whose practice often explores human psychology and behaviours in relation to perseverance and endurance. The book was produced to her major solo exhibition incorporating performance, moving image and sculpture to investigate the elemental template of life on Earth, as a celebration of collective strength through resilience. (Artspace – Sydney)
Agatha Gothe-Snape – The Outcome Is Certain
Agatha Gothe-Snape’s work is characterised by colour, text, minimal aesthetics and an economy of materials. Propelled by doing, moving and making, the Australian artist has straddled various modes of performance and visual arts over the last decade. Doing a lot with a little, her practice distils the intangible into visual form and highlights the encounter between art and audience, and art and life. The Outcome Is Certain is the first major monograph tracing Gothe-Snape’s at once rigorous, ambitious, intuitive and poetic work. (Perimeter Editions – Melbourne)
First published in 1974, Yvonne Rainer’s Work 1961-73 documents the artist’s landmark early works at the intersection of dance, performance, and art. Assembled ostensibly as a survey, the publication provides multifaceted insight into some of Rainer’s most celebrated choreographic works. The publication is also a book of writing, with the artist’s frank, witty, and sometimes humorous prose intimately leading the reader thorough each work. (Primary Information – New York)
Another Version: Thinking Through Performing
ANOTHER VERSION: Thinking Through Performing approaches performance as a method of producing different versions of the self, referred to as ‘versioning’. It explores technologies and processes that produce such versions, and asks the question of how to understand the self within this multiplicity. ANOTHER VERSION: Thinking Through Performing proposes strategies of versioning as a means of attaching gesture, speech or lived experience to research questions or problems. (Onomatopee – Eindhoven)
Imaginative Bodies: Dialogues in Performance Practices
Imaginative Bodies is a series of conversations with choreographers, composers, visual artists, hip hop artists, dramaturges, and more. Its overall theme is defined by the body, both in relation to the place it takes in the artist’s practice, and to wider debates in the arts, philosophy, science, medicine, and anthropology. Each dialogue centres on a specific theme, ranging from poetics to politics, mythology to ecology, and intercultural studies to conflict management. (Valiz – Amsterdam)
Choreography as Conditioning: Practicing Futures Through Voicing
The books included in the series Choreography as Conditioning are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organising subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making.
Practicing Futures through Voicing, the second book in this series, connects with the first book’s concern with how practices destabilise and (re)constitute the concept of conditioning. (Art Paper Editions – Ghent)
Choreography as Conditioning: The Orphans of Tar – A Speculative Opera
The Orphans of Tar – A Speculative Opera answers the question posed in the second book by transforming life into voices and presenting possible mindsets through co-authoring a factual fiction. (Art Paper Editions – Ghent)