Early Works - Performance Art, 1978-83
Dublin Core
Title
Description
This collection of early performance art projects by Lynn Book, were expansive in their conceptual and material play and drew from the art historical moment of the late 70s, as well as from Book’s intrinsic physicality developed in her modern dance practice and study (including the boundary breaking postmodern experiments of ‘Judson Church’ dancers). The term “Performance Art” had only been coined in the early 70s to describe artists engaged with the process of engaging with material forms; performing material manipulations with their bodies. Book was in tune with these shifts in the landscape of art making having honed in on this new territory as a space for her, as a young woman, to freely explore her creative ideas that were already crossing disciplinary borders. From site-specific performance works, such as the “Advance and Stack” series to staged multimedia performances to performance installation works like those in the Up Front exhibition (1980-81). Book was also developing a nascent understanding of how women were mostly excluded from the larger art historical canon and created works that critiqued that paradigm, as in “Recent Paintings by Lynn Book”, a performance installation project at the short lived, but influential Randy Toy Gallery in Memphis.
Because of the border crossing works, many of the works represented here, will also be found in the Early Works - Sculpture Collection as Book as creator and/or co-creator of the material constructions of the installations that would be performed in, and continue beyond the performance, its residue playing a central role in the experience of an installation site throughout an exhibition, such as “Build Up Break Down”, Up Front (1980-81).
