Caught in the Act: A Look at Contemporary Multimedia Performance - Hardcover

McAdams, Dona Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0893816809 ISBN 13: 9780893816803

Publisher: Aperture Foundation, 1996

Synopsis

Caught in the Act is an exhilarating look at multimedia performance with front-row-center photographs by Dona Ann McAdamns. Her unique vantage is in part due to the enormous respect she has earned from the performers, and it is her key to documenting this ground-breaking type of theater that continuallly challenges the definitions of all the arts. Caught in the Act seizes the energy of paint-squirting, media-mixing Blue Man Group drumming into oblivion, while it resounds with the passionate rants of Karen Finley, and quivers with Pat Oleszko's dazzling costumes of ever-moving appendages.

Covering performance art since is nasence at the East Village's Pyramid Club, the WOW Café, 8BC, and other clubs in the early eighties McAdams became the in-house photo archivist at the infamous performance space, P.S. 122, the home of cutting-edge theater that eschews convention as it draws energy and inspiration from all media. At P.S. 122 and other alternative performance spaces such as The Kitchen and Dance Theater Workshop, McAdams developed her long-term relationships with many performers.

C. Carr is a Village Voice writer and a long-recognized cultural critic of the New York underground arts movement; in her personal and insightful introduction to Caught in the Act, she writes, "The key to McAdams's work is the relationship she has with the artists. She empathizes. They trust." It is this collaborative approach that has allowed McAdams to faithfully represent the rage, courage, integrity, and creative force of such varied artists as Diamand Galás, Holly Hughes, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, DANCENOISE, Ethyl Eichelberger, and David Wojnarowicz--and this is only a small sampling of the performers featured here.

Caught in the Act celebrates the spirit that links all artists across their different disciplines and aesthetics. The wonderful coexistence of disparate sensibilities in this publication underscores the very nature of this hybrid art. At the same time, it features many artists who, while focusing primarily on a particular medium, have expanded the context for that medium and pioneered the boundlessness, the marvelous sense of possibility that so distinguishes this contemporary manifestation of performance.

This sleek book of black-and-white photographs printed in duotone includes contributions of words, drawings, and scores from some of the pictured performers, including many of those listed above, as well as Penny Arcade, John Bernd, Eric Bogosian, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Tim Miller, and many others.

A performance poet in the beat tradition who has been reading and performing since the early seventies, Eileen Myles also contributes a moving Afterword with her poem, "the Troubador." Taken altogether Caught in the Act is as much of the artists as it is about them. This Aperture publication is an entirely original and broad collection of work by some of the most gifted artists of our time.

About this title

About the Author

Dona Ann McAdams's photography is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has photographed for Artforum, The Village Voice, and The New York Times, among many other publications. She has been recognized for her talents as a photographer with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Council on the Arts, and the Polaroid Foundation. In 1993 she was awarded the Bessie Award for Sustained Achievement in Performance Documentation. In 1996 McAdams and writer Brad Kessler were given a Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor Award Honorable Mention by The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. McAdams lives in New York and lectures internationally on the documentary practice.

C. Carr began covering the performance front for the Village Voice in 1984. Many of the artists she felt compelled to cover in the eighties were targeted by the religious right in the nineties. Her pieces on Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Annie Sprinkle, David Wojnarowicz and many others have been collected in On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (Wesleyan Universty Press/University Press of New England). Her new book, Klan and Tribe, investigates the impact of a lynching on an Indiana town and will be published by Crown in 1997.

Eileen Myles has been reading and performing her work in New York City since 1974. Her latest book is Maxfield Parrish/early & new poems (Black Sparrow). Chelsea Girls (Black Sparrow) was her first full length collection of "fiction." She coedited (with Liz Kotz) The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading for Semiotext(e). Currently, she is writing a trilogy of novels, the first volume of which is called Cool For You.

Reviews

McAdams, as virtual house photographer for the performance space P.S. 122, became the primary visual documentarian of New York's 1980s performance art movement, a phenomenon made famous by right wing political attacks on Karen Finley for coating herself in chocolate. This foot-high album entertainingly indicates what all the fuss was about. The performers, overwhelmingly young, saw themselves as (what else?) a politically motivated avant-garde reacting against a repressive society. Many were feminist women and many were gay, which, along with their youth, led them to flaunt sexuality and their bodies. So nudity and near-nudity figure often, though hardly predominantly, in these pictures that, taken without flash or extra lighting, attest McAdams' technical expertise. The performances aimed to be visually striking, and these bizarre, suggestive, amusing, and puzzling images confirm that they were. The snippets of text from various performances, though attractively laid out on the volume's only color pages, seem, however, trite and dated. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Aperture Foundation
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0893816809
• ISBN 13: 9780893816803
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128