Back Stages: Essays across Art, Performance, and Public Life

420 Pages·2022·12.197 MB·English

by  Shannon Jackson

Back Stages
SERIES EDITORS This series publishes books in theater and performance studies,
Patrick Anderson and focused in particular on the material conditions in which
Nicholas Ridout performance acts are staged, and to which performance itself
might contribute. We define “performance” in the broadest sense,
including traditional theatrical productions and performance art,
but also cultural ritual, political demonstration, social practice,
and other forms of interpersonal, social, and political interaction
that may fruitfully be understood in terms of performance.
Back Stages
Essays across Art, Performance, and Public Life
Shannon Jackson
northwestern university press
evanston, illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2022 by Northwestern University. Published 2022 by
Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Jackson, Shannon, 1967– author.
Title: Back stages : essays across art, performance, and public life / Shannon
Jackson.
Other titles: Performance works.
Description: Evanston, Illinoia : Northwestern University Press, 2022. |
Series: Performance works | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021062396 | ISBN 9780810144842 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780810144859 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810144866 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Performing arts— Social aspects— United States. |
Performing arts— United States. | Arts and society. | BISAC:
PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism
Classification: LCC PN1590.S6 J33 2022 | DDC 791.0973— dc23/
eng/20220105
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062396
For my students

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
Part 1: Background Stages
Chapter 1
Performance at Hull- House: Museum, Microfiche,
and Historiography 31
Chapter 2
Performing Show and Tell: On the Disciplinary Problems
of Mixed- Media Practice 67
Chapter 3
Theatricality’s Proper Objects: Genealogies of Performance
and Gender Theory 83
Chapter 4
When “Everything Counts”: Experimental Performance
and Performance Historiography 107
Chapter 5
Resist Singularity 127
Chapter 6
Rhetoric in Ruins: Performing Literature and Performance Studies 133
Chapter 7
Living Takes Many Forms: Creative Time 151
Part 2: The Arts at Work
Chapter 8
Life Politics/Life Aesthetics: Environmental Performance
in red, black & GREEN: a blues 163
Chapter 9
Elmgreen & Dragset’s Theatrical Turn 185
Chapter 10
Performativity and Its Addressee: Walker Art Collection 199
Chapter 11
Just- in- Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity 223
Chapter 12
Seven Ways to Look at Windows: Harrell Fletcher 251
Chapter 13
Countercarnival in a Performance- Friendly World: En Mas’ 261
Chapter 14
Utopian Operating Systems: Theaster Gates’s Way of Working 279
Chapter 15
Trusting Publics: Paul Ramírez Jonas 293
Part 3: Restagings
Chapter 16
The Way We Perform Now 305
Chapter 17
Drama and Other Time- Based Arts 319
Chapter 18
Assemblies: Public Participation, Heteronomous Worlds 341
Epilogue: Essential Labor and Proximate Performance 369
Bibliography 379
Index 399
Acknowledgments
This reader tracks more than twenty-fi ve years of thinking and writing.
As such, it is indebted to a wide network of universities, journals, presses,
museums, theaters, biennials, and public art organizations who involved
me in their work throughout my career. The collection is also indebted to
the people at each of these spaces—w hether scholars, curators, editors,
artists, or students. Indeed, I want to thank the many teams of people
whose invitations prompted me to think and write in the first place. Of
course, I also want to thank all of the publication outlets and photogra-
phers who allowed me to reprint this work.
I am honored and grateful to be included in a series coedited by Nich-
olas Ridout and by my former student, Patrick Anderson, one that is
published by the press associated with my graduate alma mater, North-
western University. I have perpetual gratitude for my research assistants
who tracked down material for this publication, beginning with Megan
Hoeteger and Sophia Sobko, and concluding with the incredibly respon-
sive and expert support of K. C. Forcier. Thanks are also due to Paris Cotz
and Soomin Suh– my administrative staff at UC Berkeley who allowed me
to focus on this project alongside our campus duties. The assembly of this
collection coincided with an intense period of administrative service at
the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an unfathomable global
pandemic. It also coincided with a time of significant personal challenge
in my life. Hence, more thanks go to my most devoted friends—J oan,
Kang, Rob, Joyce, Ann, Shawn, Gina, Gail, Benjamin, Antonia, Michael
T., Berit, Karen, Sarah, Jessica, Bruno, Daphne M., and Nader– for being
by my side while I rekindled both brain and heart. I am grateful as always
to my family— my children, Daphne and Jack, and my mother, Jacqueline
Jackson— for their good humor and their tolerance of my working life.
As my dedication acknowledges, the last expression of gratitude goes
to my first interlocutors, my students. I have always tuned my writing to
their ears, hoping that my thinking could be, in some way, adequate to
their own committed thinking and their voracious desire to learn. If there
is anything worth reading in what follows, it is indebted to them.
ix