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When Jacki Apple asked me to collaborate with her on this book as her editor, I embraced the opportunity. In the 1980s and 1990s she and I attended many of the same performances and wrote for the same publications: Artweek, High Performance, the Los Angeles Weekly, Arts & Architecture, Images and Issues. Sadly, most of those publications are gone, as are the venues in which so many of those works were performed. The writing, however, endures. As writers, we both love language and have deep concerns over its distortion and degradation. As critics we affirm that criticism needs to be part of the dialogue around art; as artists we care deeply about the conditions in which art may be produced and experienced. As humans who have been privileged but are also awake, we feel that a passion for social justice is inherently linked to concern for the fate of the planet. We also have both worked in radio as a public art medium that has great potential for social transformation. We agree that great art often results from attempts to integrate the natural from which we emerge, the sometimes problematic technological civilization in which we participate, and the spiritual which remains unfinished.

Like all good observation and scholarship, these essays raise many broad questions regarding imitation, reproduction, and interpretation, the role of art and artists in society, and of audiences. They also examine the production and reception of art, and the relationship between art and technology with particular attention to the tensions between the social, concrete, practical and transcendent ideals and concepts in which the works and their creators are grounded. There is also, in this book, real enquiry into questions of beauty and its role in contemporary art, as well as discussions about the creative uses of space, architecture, and cities as sites for sonic arts.

Engaged art criticism is an integral part of a vibrant arts community; art is an arena for dialogue that has profound social functions. The dialogical is as necessary in culture as it is in science, in creative initiatives as much as in good governance. Thus our structure for this book is not chronological. Rather, we have grouped the writing into parts focused on fundamental themes and issues. Several parts lovingly interrogate the specific to uncover larger patterns that we might call historical. History is political because it is the description and explanation of what happened and what it means. In the wake of the collapse of previous boundaries between public and private, cultural space has been transformed. Information and attention have become the new contested resources and the word political has become an accusation of imbalance or one-sidedness, instead of the interactive way in which we organize the social world. The Politics of Culture focuses on both the politics of the art world and the larger culture, and how that affects what is produced.

Noam Chomsky has suggested that every now and then societies erupt in what he has called “outbreaks of democracy.” Certain artistic movements take political and cultural forms that can be seen as such outbreaks. Performance art emerged in the 1970s in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and American Indian Movements, and anti-war protests that politicized a generation of young people, and gave rise to the Feminist movement. Women asserted the right to have a recognized voice and representation in the public sphere, affirming an equivalence between the personal and the political, as did the Gay Rights movement.

Movements are the antidote to the status quo and thus to stasis. Women in performance art claimed the use of their own bodies to begin cracking open the patriarchal hold on what was valued in the arts. It began to be possible to see work by and about artists who were not of European ethnicity, who were female, gay, or otherwise did not fit into the normative regime. The incredible energy and creativity of that period revealed the yearning for connection that lay just beneath the surface in a civilization of atomized individuals and it generated possibilities of community.

The generation that became active in the 1980s responded in direct and visceral ways to Reagan-era culture, demonstrating the importance of live theater in an age of increasingly mediated experience and affirming the voices of previously excluded cultural and ethnic groups. It was only a beginning, but the arts have, in some senses, come a long way since. Innovators of new theater and performance art replaced “acting” as someone else with “performing” as oneself. In the same way that an ordinary bottle-rack placed in a gallery by Marcel Duchamp was thereby sculpture, an adventure to the Arctic, or the serving of a dinner could be performance. Drawing upon various relatively recently established disciplines like sociology and anthropology, art now suggested how any social act may be understood as performative. In time-based arts the relation of performers to audience can produce a visceral and emotional connection. It was a short step to the dissolution of boundaries between artist and spectator, art and life, self and other. The process of making art and the art itself became open to reconsideration. Alas, as we all know, when things are pushed to the “wide open” position, there will soon be a correction in the direction of “slammed shut tight.”

Eventually, even when not explicitly suppressed by censorship or direct force, movements die down through entropy or are sucked back into the mainstream by corporate consumer culture that dominates not only the physical sphere but the thought-world in which we operate, communicate, and create. In all the arts, what was uniquely original and disruptive for one generation gets distilled for the marketplace into just another menu option for the next. Beatniks and hippies were absorbed into an array of lifestyle choices available in the mass-consumption sphere. Once-rebellious rock-and-roll, rap and hip-hop are now major industries dealing in stars, brands, and products. Graffiti art became a hot luxury commodity at auction. When everything — our desires, personality, talents, appearance, choices, even our hopes and fears — become commoditized, we yearn for sincerity and authenticity. Essays such as “Commerce on the Edge: The Convergence of Art and Entertainment,” and “Performance Art is Dead: Long Live Performance Art!,” prophetically written in 1986 and 1996, take on this phenomenon in American culture.

During the 1980s new terminology arose to talk about multidisciplinary genres that encompassed all forms of time-based works including sound. Performance art was replaced by Performance. The first three parts investigate a range of new technologies, contexts, and intermedia hybrids employed by several decades of artists exploring different terrains, cultural influences, and political positions. Artists seized on existing, as well as the latest technologies. Some videomakers optimistically embraced the possibility of redefining television by proposing radically different narratives. Others interacted with live performance. While radio was recognized as a rich field for artistic intervention and innovation; the broadcast spectrum was also understood as another slice of the commons being overtly grabbed through government licensing, and insidiously swamped by the ideology of the market. Control of the airwaves, explored in The Politics of Culture was understood as part of the struggle for public space during the culture wars of the early 1990s.

In academia one form of displacement was the mapping of one discipline or practice onto another. Reading became the metaphor for any activity of looking at or trying to comprehend human-made objects or systems; a city, a poem, a subway system, a constitution, a national park, a dance, all could be “read” as texts through a variety of systems. Although today’s widespread and often willful confusion between self-serving fictions and consensual reality is sometimes blamed on postmodernism, it is a very different animal from the creative ambiguities then employed in pursuit of artistic truth. Cognitive challenges for today’s audiences include a mental space saturated with triviality, banality, hedonism, and narcissism. Today the critical question is in cyberspace: who will dominate the limited bandwidth of our minds, who will occupy and own our most precious resource, attention?

The last part in this book, Concerning Nature, deals with works addressing humanity’s role as planetary destroyer, concerned only with short-term gain in terms of endless growth and the almighty Market. There are powerful predecessors such as Rachel Rosenthal (to whom this book is dedicated) whose work is pivotal to the whole enterprise. There continues to be work — by some well-known artists, as well as others — that directly confronts the beauty and horror of the cataclysmic destruction wrought on a global scale by our consumer civilization.

I live in New Mexico, the site of major hunting and trade routes for the native people of Mesoamerica. It was once all indigenous land, then it became El Camino Real, the Spanish crown’s conquest route from Mexico City and later the Santa Fe Trail on the westward trek for European settlers. To me it seems urgent that we cultivate an awareness of the full history of what is beneath our feet. Artists are indispensable to that undertaking. If the political is not personal, it becomes a dirty word indeed.

Performance, Media, Art, Culture: Selected Writings 1983–2018 is not only a catalogue of the fundamental, crucial issues raised by the works and their informed examination and an archive of often ephemeral events and works. Crucially, it is a rich compendium of thirty-six years of responses by a sharp-eyed and eloquent witness to the evolving genius of an age. The word has been piffled down to mean “the person who can make your electronic devices work”; but in ancient Mediterranean culture, genius — a word related to create, produce, or bring into being — indicated the guiding spirit of a person, family, or place. In modern times, it has been used to indicate the uniqueness of exceptional individuals (Mozart, Picasso, Einstein). But when certain new and powerful ideas and practices emerge — often in more than one place — it is a kind of collective genius of the moment in the sense of that original usage, something inherent and profound. As such, we believe this book will be of substantive use to future scholars, artists, historians, and others interested in cultural developments as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first.

In this book, I am merely the finger pointing at the moon. The moon is all up in these essays.