Joshua Sofaer: Performance | Objects | Participation

Joshua Sofaer works across boundaries, borders, and disciplines to create artworks that engage with all levels of society. In cultural institutions or on the street, for art galleries or personal homes, staged as operas or cast as golden sculptures, Sofaer’s work weaves with and through social fabric to consider the ideas that hold us together.
 
Copublished with the Live Art Development Agency, this lavishly illustrated volume is the first in-depth study of the artist’s work, featuring discussions with producers and participants, documentary images and a new photographic essay, interviews with the artist himself, and thirteen commissioned essays by scholars, curators, and artists from the perspectives of performance studies, archaeology, and opera criticism. With a mixture of intellect, humor, and striking design, Joshua Sofaer: Performance | Objects | Participation analyzes the artist’s oeuvre in the contexts of liveness, visual art, and participatory practices. It explores the binding aesthetics of his approach as a model for contemporary practice, and it considers the impact of his work on audiences, institutions, and pedagogy, as well as on fine art and performance ecologies as a whole.

Roberta Mock is professor of performance studies at the University of Plymouth. She is the editor of the anthologies Walking, Writing & Performance: Autobiographical Texts by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith and Performing Processes: Creating Live Performance, also published by Intellect. Mary Paterson is a writer and curator who works between performance, literature, and visual art.