Performance generating systems are systematic and task-based dramaturgies that generate performance for or with an audience. In dance, such systems differ in ways that matter from more closed choreographed scores and more open forms of structured improvisation. Dancers performing within these systems draw on predefined and limited sources while working on specific tasks within constraining rules. The generating components of the systems provide boundaries that enable the performance to self-organize into iteratively shifting patterns instead of becoming repetitive or chaotic. This book identifies the generating components and dynamics of these works and the kinds of dramaturgical agency they enable. It explains how the systems of these creations affect the perception, cognition and learning of dancers and why that is a central part of how they work. It also examines how the combined dramaturgical and psychological effects of the systems performatively address individual and social conditions of trauma that otherwise tend to remain unchangeable and negatively impact the human capacity to learn, relate and adapt. The book provides analytical frameworks and practical insights for those who wish to study or apply performance generating systems in dance within the fields of choreography and dance dramaturgy, dance education, community dance or dance psychology. Featured cases offer unique insight into systems created by Deborah Hay and Christopher House, William Forsythe, Ame Henderson, Karen Kaeja and Lee Su-Feh.

Essays, criticism, and performance scripts written between 1985 and 2003 by an artist whose artistic practice investigates and reveals the social structures of art and its institutions. Andrea Fraser's work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to "trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself." It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique-as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men's room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser's interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks-institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. Fraser's writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003-including the performance script for the docent's tour that gives the book its title-both documents and represents her work. The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser's artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical "artistic practice" as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, "Isn't This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao)," reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book's 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.

An illustrated study of performance and video artist Joan Jonas's 1974 video, an elliptical narrative that moves between the countryside of Nova Scotia and the artists's New York City studio. Joan Jonas approaches video as a drawing tool, a mirror, and a framing device. Since 1968, she has used video and performance to explore ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the archetypal authority of objects and gestures. With her influential 1976 work, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) Jonas nimbly structures an elliptical narrative that unmistakably establishes her voice and visual lexicon. I Want to Live in the Country features two locations-the untamed landscape of Nova Scotia and an artist's studio in New York City-as it examines themes of loss, displacement, time, and memory through still life compositions and Super-8 footage. Jonas creates a meditation of frames within frames, monitors within monitors, overlaid with poetic musings-a murmured story of the unconscious. Jonas's influences have included the writing of Samuel Beckett, the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Japanese Noh theater, and the work of John Cage. Stripped down to intimate, indelible gestures, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) explores a Beckettian dilemma: "I am both the observer and the object that I observe. Which of the two is the real 'I'?" In this richly illustrated Afterall book, Susan Morgan examines the emergence of Jonas's original work from this synthesis of influences and ideas.

Anyone who wants to start a youth storytelling group or troupe will find a wealth of practical information and inspiration in this guide. Written by two veteran storytellers and storytelling group leaders, this book takes you step by step through the entire process of planning, starting, managing, and growing your storytelling group-even up through taking the show on the road. Complete instructions for teaching storytelling skills and performing are accompanied by dozens of reproducible activities and practical tips-from how to recruit members and how to adapt stories for telling to what to wear when performing, and fundraising ideas. Storytelling is a powerful teaching and learning tool. It increases literacy and language skills, builds creativity and imagination, instills confidence, encourages cooperation and collaboration-and it's great fun for everyone! Share the gift of storytelling with young people and watch them grow. Grades 4-12.

Hailed for his humor and passion, the internationally acclaimed performance artist Tim Miller has delighted, shocked, and emboldened audiences all over the world. "Body Blows" gathers six of Miller's best-known performances that chart the sexual, spiritual, and political topography of his identity as a gay man: Some Golden States, Stretch Marks, My Queer Body, Naked Breath, Fruit Cocktail, and Glory Box. In "Body Blows," Tim Miller leaps from the stage to the page, as each performance script is illustrated with striking photographs and accompanied by Miller's notes and comment.
This book explores the tangible body blows--taken and given--of Miller's life and times as explored in his performances: the queer-basher's blow, the sweet blowing breath of a lover, the below-the-belt blow of HIV/AIDS, the psychic blows from a society that disrespects the humanity of lesbian and gay relationships. Miller's performances are full of the put-up-your-dukes and stand-your-ground of such day-to-day blows that make up being gay in America

Winner of Best Performance Design and Scenography Publication Award, Prague Quadrennial 2019 This beautifully illustrated book conveys the centrality of costume to live performance. Finding associations between contemporary practices and historical manifestations, costume is explored in six thematic chapters, examining the transformative ritual of costuming; choruses as reflective of society; the grotesque, transgressive costume; the female sublime as emancipation; costume as sculptural art in motion; and the here-and-now as history. Viewing the material costume as a crucial aspect in the preparation, presentation and reception of live performance, the book brings together costumed performances through history. These range from ancient Greece to modern experimental productions, from medieval theatre to modernist dance, from the 'fashion plays' to contemporary Shakespeare, marking developments in both culture and performance. Revealing the relationship between dress, the body and human existence, and acknowledging a global as well as an Anglo and Eurocentric perspective, this book shows costume's ability to cross both geographical and disciplinary borders. Through it, we come to question the extent to which the material costume actually co-authors the performance itself, speaking of embodied histories, states of being and never-before imagined futures, which come to life in the temporary space of the performance. With a contribution by Melissa Trimingham, University of Kent, UK

Every month, the art association HMKV presents the latest videos by international artists in its series "HMKV Video of the Month" which has been ongoing since March 2014. The idea for the series came from the desire to show the newest artistic productions in rapid succession, changing works at a faster pace than in the exhibitions of the HMKV. For the first time, this publication unites all 78 works that have been exhibited since 2014. The videos address a variety of different topics and stories, ranging from labour conditions, structural changes, speculative technologies, or posthuman machines to technology (and its history) as well as artificial intelligence. A wide array of works is devoted to the old 'new' right-wingers and the alt-right. The book not only shows stills of all videos, but each work is also accompanied by an introductory text to provide a comprehensive overview. Text in English and German.

In her performances, videos, and installations, Sharon Hayes (b. 1970) explores the nexus between politics, history, speech, and desire. Her works modify or appropriate the language and tools of political dissent, creating unexpected affinities between important historical events and the present. Highlighted in this volume is the video installation Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29 (2003)-a work in which Hayes memorized the famous taped speeches by Patty Hearst and her kidnappers, the leftist radical group the Symbionese Liberation Army, and then reads them to an audience who corrects her mistakes. It is in these slippages between memory and history that the meaning of Hayes's work resides. This book also includes a group of new site-specific works that addresses the Whitney's role in the historic development of process-based, performative art and its engagement with politics that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This book serves as document of Hayes's thinking process, featuring original contributions from Hayes and some two-dozen other writers, artists, and activists, which provide insight into the motivations and development of her projects. The catalogue includes images carefully selected by the artist-photographs, vinyl LP covers, fliers, images of Hayes's own work-and a short text response by each of the contributors. Contributors include: Dennis Adams, Lauren Berlant, Saramina Berman, Claire Bishop, Juli Carson, Kabir Carter, Christhian Diaz, Saeed Taji Farouky, Malik Gaines, Andrea Geyer, Leah Gilliam, Michela Griffo, Sharon Hayes, Holly Hughes, Chrissie Iles, Iman Issa, Hans Kuzmich, Cristobal Lehyt, Ralph Lemon, Brooke O'Harra, Jenni Olson, Dean Spade, Lynne Tillman, What, How & For Whom/WHW, Craig Willse. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition Schedule: Whitney Museum of American Art(06/21/12-09/09/12)

An aesthetic and social history of art and dance in mid-20th-century New York interpreted by contemporary artist Nick Mauss Over the past decade, Nick Mauss (b. 1980) has pursued a hybrid mode of working that melds the roles of curator, artist, and scholar. Following his highly acclaimed 2018 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition Transmissions, this volume elaborates on the artist's complex portrait of mid-century New York as seen through the prism of modernist ballet. By pairing installation views of the exhibition and photographs of its daily performances by Paula Court and Ken Okiishi with reproductions of artworks, ballet programs, and fashion magazines, Transmissions animates the vividly enmeshed social and artistic networks that shaped both modern art and modern ballet. Through his emphasis on the collaborations and intimacies between models, dancers, photographers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, publishers, critics, amateurs, and devotees, Mauss re-calibrates the standard narrative of American modernism to locate performance, spectatorship, and the eroticized body at its center. Transmissions features reproductions of documents and artworks-a number published here for the first time-by Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, Dorothea Tanning, Carl Van Vechten, Isamu Noguchi, Pavel Tchelitchew, Walker Evans, Ilse Bing, PaJaMa, Man Ray, Maya Deren, Marcel Duchamp, Elie Nadelman, Eugene Berman, Peter Hujar, and many more. Additional texts address the subjects of ballet and the body, Mauss's work as an artist and curator, and performance within museum spaces, while an extensive conversation with the sixteen dancers who participated in the Whitney exhibition brings rare insight into the labor of making performance-based work while negotiating diverging legacies of embodiment. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art and Dancing Foxes Press

All the girls love a bastard. Tom Jones follows the adventures of a young man of illegitimate birth through a tale of love, deception and mistaken identity; a feast of human nature, served up in the plain and simple manner of the West Country with all the high French and Italian seasoning of sex and vice. Will he gain his darling Sophia's hand? Will he escape the hangman's noose? Will he ever learn to keep it in his trousers...? Henry Fielding's comic picaresque novel 'A History Of Tom Jones, a foundling' caused a stir upon first publication in 1749. Often referred to as the first novel in the English language, this cunning new stage version tells the escapades and exploits of the infamous protagonist through an accessible and highly entertaining adaptation.

This choreographed book is dedicated to the phenomenon of the bare body in contemporary performance. This work of artistic research draws on philosophical, biopolitical, and ethical discourses relevant to the appearance of bare bodies in choreography, setting a framework for a reflexive movement between affect and ethics, sensuous address and response. Acts of exposure and concealment are culturally situated and anchored, and are examined for their methodological and nanopolitical significance. The concepts of anarchic responsibility and choreo-ethics lead to a reevaluation of contact, relationship, and solidarity. Choreography is thus understood as a complex field of revelatory experiences based on ecologies of aesthetic perception and ethico-political agency.

Performing presence: Between the live and the simulated proposes that the advent of new media forms, and the increasing integration of contemporary performance and media, has generated new engagements, practices and understandings of presence. Addressing new media art and performance, multi-media theatre, video installation, mixed reality environments and locative arts, the book presents case studies of work by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Paul Sermon, Gary Hill, Tony Oursler, The Builders Association and Blast Theory, as well as analyses of a series of related experiments created for CAVE, an immersive virtual reality environment. Performing presence combines extensive analysis, and extracts from interviews with the artists, as well as the documentation of elements of work and working processes, in order to provide specific insight into these engagements with contemporary practices and concepts presence. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners of theatre and performance, contemporary art, media, new media and technology. -- .

The invisibilization of political violence, its material traces, and spatial manifestations, characterizes conflict and post-conflict situations. Yet, artists, writers, and human rights activists increasingly seek to challenge this invisibility, contesting the related historical amnesia through counter-semantics and dissonant narratives. Adopting "performance" as a concept that is defined by repetitive, aesthetic practices-such as speech and bodily habits through which both individual and collective identities are constructed and perceived-this collection addresses various forms of performing human rights in transitional situations in Spain, Latin America, and the Middle East. Bringing scholars together with artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, Performing Human Rights addresses these instances of omission and neglect, revealing how alternate institutional spaces and strategies of cultural production have intervened in the processes of historical justice and collective memory.

Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Victoria Howard was born around 1865, a little more than ten years after the founding of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in western Oregon. Howard's maternal grandmother, Wagayuhlen Quiaquaty, was a successful and valued Clackamas shaman at Grand Ronde, and her maternal grandfather, Quiaquaty, was an elite Molalla chief. In the summer of 1929 linguist Melville Jacobs, student of Franz Boas, requested to record Clackamas Chinook oral traditions with Howard, which she enthusiastically agreed to do. The result is an intricate and lively corpus of linguistic and ethnographic material, as well as rich performances of Clackamas literary heritage, as dictated by Howard and meticulously transcribed by Jacobs in his field notebooks. Ethnographical descriptions attest to the traditional lifestyle and environment in which Howard grew up, while fine details of cultural and historical events reveal the great consideration and devotion with which she recalled her past and that of her people. Catharine Mason has edited twenty-five of Howard's spoken-word performances into verse form entextualizations, along with the annotations provided by Jacobs in his publications of Howard's corpus in the late 1950s. Mason pairs performances with biographical, family, and historical content that reflects Howard's ancestry, personal and social life, education, and worldview. Mason's study reveals strong evidence of how the artist contemplated and internalized the complex meanings and everyday lessons of her literary heritage.

Die meisten Leute sind der Meinung, dass sie nur schlecht auswendig lernen konnen, aber Andrew Page hat die Entdeckung gemacht, dass man sich die Reihenfolge der Ereignisse im Markus-Evangelium sehr leicht merken kann. Dieses Buch will kein Kommentar sein, sondern zu einem Experiment einladen: Jesus neu kennen lernen, indem man sich die Jesus-Geschichte selbst erzahlt. Damit bietet das Markus-Experiment einen neuen und faszinierenden Zugang zur Bibel. Ein Resultat dieses Buches ist das Markus-Theater, bei dem 15 Christen einer Gemeinde oder einer Studentengruppe jede Begebenheit des Markusevangeliums als Rundtheater auffuhren. Das Markus-Theater findet in zahlreichen Landern statt.

Text in English & German. Like literary texts, films often tell stories on multiple levels. Ridley Scott made an ironic reference to this when he called his legendary science-fiction film Blade Runner a "700-layer cake". These buried structures are created in two ways: by elements that resonate throughout the film itself and by references to other films, texts, myths, paintings, historical events etc. that are adapted in a specific way by the director, the scriptwriter and the production team. The heroine in Hitchcock's film The Birds, for instance, is a modern Aphrodite / Venus. Just as Venus, born from the sea foam, was carried to land on a seashell, Melanie is carried across Bodega Bay in a boat that is not much bigger than Venus' vessel in Botticelli's painting. Melanie's name is another reference to Aphrodite, who was also known as Melaina, "the black one". In the fist scene of the film, in which she enters the pet shop where she later gets to know Mitch and buys the love birds, Melanie is also dressed in black. The Venus-like Melanie is felt to be a threat by others within their world, and especially by more conventional women. One of them screams at her hysterically: "I think you're evil! Evil!". This creates a particular connection between love and horror in the film. The classical Aphrodite also had a dark side -- her union with Ares produced not only Harmonia, but also Deimos and Phobos: "dread" and "fear". Detecting hidden references is only the first step in creating an analysis; the next step is to elucidate the function of the reference within the film. For instance, what does it mean that Hitchcock's heroine is attacked by birds, whereas Venus was depicted accompanied by a dove? And why does Melanie, our "Venus", wear furs? Kirsch's investigations of this and other questions open up new perspectives on a number of films, with extensive illustrations allowing the reader to follow these in detail. The book invites us to take a second look at The Birds, Blake Edwards' The Party, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Gladiator and Stefan Ruzowitzky's Anatomy. Konrad Kirsch is a PhD in literature and an enthusiastic viewer of films. He has published texts on Georg Buchner, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, Franz Kafka and William Shakespeare. Most recently, his article on Heinrich von Kleist was published in the Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologie.

Theatre in Dublin,1745-1820: A Calendar of Performances is the first comprehensive, daily compendium of more than 18,000 performances that took place in Dublin's many professional theatres, music halls, pleasure gardens, and circus amphitheatres between Thomas Sheridan's becoming the manager at Smock Alley Theatre in 1745 and the dissolution of the Crow Street Theatre in 1820. The daily performance calendar for each of the seventy-five seasons recorded here records and organizes all surviving documentary evidence pertinent to each evening's entertainments, derived from all known sources, but especially from playbills and newspaper advertisements. Each theatre's daily entry includes all preludes, mainpieces, interludes, and afterpieces with casts and assigned roles, followed by singing and singers, dancing and dancers, and specialty entertainments. Financial data, program changes, rehearsal notices, authorship and premiere information are included in each component's entry, as is the text of contemporary correspondence and editorial contextualization and commentary, followed by other additional commentary, such as the many hundreds of printed puffs, notices, and performance reviews. In the cases of the programs of music halls, pleasure gardens, and circuses, the playbills have generally been transcribed verbatim. The calendar for each season is preceded by an analytical headnote that presents several categories of information including, among other things, an alphabetical listing of all members of each company, whether actors, musicians, specialty artists, or house servants, who are known to have been employed at each venue. Limited biographical commentary is included, particularly about performers of Irish origin, who had significant stage careers but who did not perform in London. Each headnote presents the seasons's offerings of entertainments of each theatrical type (prelude, mainpiece, interlude, afterpiece) analyzed according to genre, including a list of the number of plays in each genre and according to period in which they were first performed. The headnote also notes the number of different plays by Shakespeare staged during each season and gives particular attention to entertainments of "special Irish interest." The various kinds of benefit performance and command performances are also noted. Finally, this Calendar of Performances contains an appendix that furnishes a season-by-season listing of the plays that were new to the London patent theatres, and, later, of the important "minors." This information is provided in order for us to understand the interrelatedness of the London and Dublin repertories.

Western fans today may not recognize the name Ernest Haycox (1899-1950), but they know his work. John Ford turned one of his stories into the iconic film Stagecoach, and the whole Western literary genre still follows conventions that Haycox deftly mastered and reshaped. In this new book about Haycox's literary career, Richard W. Etulain tells the engrossing story of his rise through the ranks of popular magazine and serial fiction to become one of the Western's most successful creators. After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1923 with a degree in journalism, Haycox began his quest to break into New York's pulp magazine scene, submitting dozens of stories before he began to make a living from his writing. By the end of the 1920s he had become a top writer for Western Story, Short Stories, and Adventure, among other popular weeklies and monthlies. Ernest Haycox and the Western traces Haycox's path from rank beginner, to crack pulp writer, to regular contributor to Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. Etulain shows how Haycox experimented with techniques to deepen and broaden his Westerns, creating more introspective protagonists (Hamlet heroes), introducing new types of heroines (the brunette vixen, the blonde Puritan), and weaving greater historical realism into his plots. After reaching the height of success with his best-selling Custer novel, Bugles in the Afternoon (1944), Haycox moved away from the financially rewarding but artistically constricting Western formula - only to achieve his final coup with The Earthbreakers, a historical novel about the end of the Oregon Trail, published posthumously in 1952. Reconstructing the career of a popular literary giant, Ernest Haycox and the Western restores Haycox to his rightful place in the history of Western literature.

What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism-tactics of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Fisher tracks the ways in which artists on the margins-from hacker collectives like Ubermorgen to feminist writers and performers like Chris Kraus-have willfully abandoned the radical scripts of opposition and refusal long identified with anticapitalism and feminism. Space for resistance is found instead in the mutually, if unevenly, exploitative relations between dominant hosts giving only as much as required to appear generous and parasitical actors taking only as much as they can get away with. The irreverent and often troubling works that result raise necessary and difficult questions about the conditions for resistance and critique under neoliberalism today.

"Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan tells the peculiar story of an art caught in a sea of overtly ideological ebbs and flows. Nancy Guy demonstrates the potential significance of the political environment for an art form's development, ranging from determining the smallest performative details (such as how a melody can or cannot be composed to whether a tradition ultimately thrives or withers away. When Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949, they brought Peking opera performers with them to strengthen their authority through a symbolically important art. Valuing mainland Chinese culture above Taiwanese culture, the Nationalists generously supported Peking opera to the virtual exclusion of local performing traditions, despite their wider popularity. Later, as Taiwan turned toward democracy, the island's own "indigenous" products became more highly valued and Peking opera found itself on a tenuous footing. Finally, in 1995, all of its opera troupes and schools (formerly supported by the ministry of Defense) were dismantled. Nancy Guy investigates the mechanisms through which Peking Opera was perpetuated, controlled, and ultimately disempowered, and explores the artistic and political consequences of the state's involvement as its primary patron. Her study provides a unique perspective on the interplay between ideology and power within Taiwan's dynamic society.

In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects-shame, disgust, and unbelonging-to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility.

In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects-shame, disgust, and unbelonging-to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility.

The first performances by Joseph Beuys were a radical turning point for twentieth-century art. Beuys saw art as a transformative action that is both personal and communal, and his expanded artistic practice engaged spirituality, personal mythology, political structures, and symbolic materials. For Manresa, one of his legendary performance actions, which took place on December 15, 1966 in Dusseldorf, he collaborated with the Danish artists Henning Christiansen and Bjorn Norgaard. This book presents never-before-seen materials from the performance, including texts, images, scripts, and preparatory drawings, alongside contributions from scholars and critics that offer further insight. Friedhelm Mennekes, an art critic and Jesuit priest, analyses Saint Ignatius of Loyola's imprint on Beuys's work while elucidating its spiritual complexity, looking beyond the popular vision of the artist as shaman. Pilar Parcerisas examines Beuys's spiritual geography, explaining the importance the town of Manresa within it and also laying out the physical and mystical coordinates of Eurasia, a site that was always present in Beuys's work. Klaus-D. Pohl addresses the paradoxical union between Beuys's mysticism and the neo-Dadaists of Fluxus. Beuys's collaborator Bjorn Norgaard recalls his time working with the German artist and reflects on the paths he opened up. Finally, art historian Harald Szeemann considers the possibility of liberating politics through spirituality.

In So Much Wasted, Patrick Anderson analyzes self-starvation as a significant mode of staging political arguments across the institutional domains of the clinic, the gallery, and the prison. Homing in on those who starve themselves for various reasons and the cultural and political contexts in which they do so, he examines the diagnostic history of anorexia nervosa, fasts staged by artists including Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic, and a hunger strike initiated by Turkish prisoners. Anderson explores what it means for the clinic, the gallery, and the prison when one performs a refusal to consume as a strategy of negation or resistance, and the ways that self-starvation, as a project of refusal aimed, however unconsciously, toward death, produces violence, suffering, disappearance, and loss differently from other practices. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Giorgio Agamben, Peggy Phelan, and others, he considers how the subject of self-starvation is refigured in relation to larger institutional and ideological drives, including those of the state. The ontological significance of performance as disappearance constitutes what Anderson calls the "politics of morbidity," the embodied, interventional embrace of mortality and disappearance not as destructive, but rather as radically productive stagings of subject formations in which subjectivity and objecthood, presence and absence, and life and death are intertwined.