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Performing Image

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By Isobel Harbison

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An examination of how artists have combined performance and moving image for decades, anticipating our changing relation to images in the internet era.

In Performing Image Isobel Harbison examines how artists have combined performance and moving image in their work since the 1960s, and how this work anticipates our changing relations to images since the advent of smart phones and the spread of online prosumerism. Over this period, artists have used a variety of DIY modes of self-imaging and circulation—from home video to social media—suggesting how and why Western subjects might seek alternative platforms for self-expression and self-representation. In the course of her argument, Harbison offers close analyses of works by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Mark Leckey, Wu Tsang, and Martine Syms.

Harbison argues that while we produce images, images also produce us—those that we take and share, those that we see and assimilate through mass media and social media, those that we encounter in museums and galleries. Although all the artists she examines express their relation to images uniquely, they also offer a vantage point on today's productive-consumptive image circuits in which billions of us are caught. This unregulated, all-encompassing image performativity, Harbison writes, puts us to work, for free, in the service of global corporate expansion. Harbison offers a three-part interpretive framework for understanding this new proximity to images as it is negotiated by these artworks, a detailed outline of a set of connected practices—and a declaration of the value of art in an economy of attention and a crisis of representation.

“Harbison's timely and incisive book probes our spectral projections of the digital image as an extension of the self: as identity, and labor. She deftly charts our seduction by, and service to, the power of the image, and analyzes the approaches of a number of key contemporary artists who have anticipated and reimagined the 'Janus face' of media consumption tied to our role as producers. Harbison asks essential questions about how artists intervene in these addictive circuits which are altering our social bonds, and how they imagine new ways in which we might shape our futures in such a territory. Her book provides a very current, and original take on this territory, and her deep engagement with contemporary art practice is brought to bear upon our ordinary, daily practices.” 

Catherine Wood, Senior Curator, International Art (Performance) at Tate Modern

Isobel Harbison is an art historian and critic, is Lecturer in Fine Art (Critical Studies) in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College, London.

Additional Information
More Information
SKU 9780262039215
Author(s) Isobel Harbison
Publisher(s) MIT Press
Format Hardback
Original publication date 9 April 2019
Number of pages 256 pages incl 23 b&w photos + 46 Illustrations
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