ABOUT THIS BOOK

Shannon Jackson explores a range of disciplinary, institutional, and political puzzles that engage the social and aesthetic practice of performance in this collection of twenty essential essays spanning her career. Back Stages starts by considering the historical connection between performance practice and movements of social reform, while later writings analyze disciplinary debates on the place of performance in higher education and within the contemporary field of socially engaged art, tracking fraught and allied relationships to literary studies, art history, visual culture, theater, social theory, and critical theory.

At a time of increased aesthetic experimentation and political debate within the art world, these essays alight on artists, groups, and cultural organizations whose experiments have challenged conventions of curation and critique, including Theaster Gates, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Harrell Fletcher, and My Barbarian. Throughout, Jackson navigates the political ambivalences of performance, from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, tracking shifts in participatory art that seek to resist capitalism, even as such performance work paradoxically risks neoliberal appropriation by a post-Fordist experience economy.

Back Stages surfaces unexpected cross-disciplinary connections and provides new opportunities for mutual engagement within a wide network of educational, artistic, and civic sectors. A substantial introduction excavates the critical links between the essays and a variety of disciplines and movements.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

SHANNON JACKSON is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater; Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics; Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity; and Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity. Her writing has also appeared in dozens of museum catalogs, journals, and edited collections. Jackson has received numerous awards, including a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and she serves on the board of the Kramlich Art Foundation and the Oakland Museum of California, among others.

REVIEWS

“More than anyone, Shannon Jackson has helped us grapple with the gestures, trajectories, and vibrant interanimations among visual, mediatic, theatrical, and performance-based arts. Across decades of commitment, her work has invited us into sumptuous critical entanglements where arts' histories meet performance studies, where arts work is social work and social work performs. Now, Back Stages offers a vital collection of Jackson's influential essays curated to show the arc of her oeuvre and including some new work as well. The book will be an essential reader for all of us who meet at the crossroads of arts disciplines or gather where making meets thinking meets making again.” —Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment

“Over the last two decades, Shannon Jackson has played a leading role in bridging disciplines within the visual and the performing arts through a range of methodologies, helping develop critical language to best understand the social and political aims of performance-based work. This anthology is a must-read—a key reference for anyone involved in performance studies or socially engaged art.” —Pablo Helguera, author of Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook— -

“Shannon Jackson is the great participant-observer of performance. These essays, written over twenty years, are vibrant with insights, observations, and reflections. Reading them allows us to relive and rethink performance studies at its best. Highly recommended.” —Martin Puchner, author of The Language of Thieves: My Family’s Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate— -

“This anthology’s breadth of exploration exemplifies Jackson’s depth of knowledge and agility in moving confidently and with compelling insight across a range of performative practices—particularly socially-engaged forms—connecting disciplines and their histories while offering more expansive methods for their interpretation and analysis. Back Stages is an essential contribution to the field.” —Paula Marincola, executive director of The Pew Center for Arts Heritage — -

“Once again, a beautiful book by Shannon Jackson that connects worlds of performance to our social lives in social institutions and the extra-institutional everyday. Jackson shows us through detailed and persuasive readings and commentaries how performance challenged us to rethink the ties that bind us, the primacy of labor and social practices, the requirement for infrastructures that should support bodily life. We learn along the way how ‘performance’ became a scandal for both English departments and theater studies before performance studies showed that it was always inside those fields, operating in language and spatial locations in and beyond the proscenium. A social critic, a theorist of the public good, a shrewd art critic, Jackson also performs the truth of what she says, showing us that ‘demonstrating our claims’ demands a performance, a body enacting what it knows and feels and seeks to communicate through gesture, movement, word, and space. No one who reads this book will be able to dismiss ‘mere performance’ as if it were fluff, because Jackson shows us it is the moving substance of life itself.” —Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“More than anyone, Shannon Jackson has helped us grapple with the gestures, trajectories, and vibrant interanimations among visual, mediatic, theatrical, and performance-based arts. Across decades of commitment, her work has invited us into sumptuous critical entanglements where arts' histories meet performance studies, where arts work is social work and social work performs. Now, Back Stages offers a vital collection of Jackson's influential essays curated to show the arc of her oeuvre and including some new work as well. The book will be an essential reader for all of us who meet at the crossroads of arts disciplines or gather where making meets thinking meets making again.” —Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment

“Over the last two decades, Shannon Jackson has played a leading role in bridging disciplines within the visual and the performing arts through a range of methodologies, helping develop critical language to best understand the social and political aims of performance-based work. This anthology is a must-read—a key reference for anyone involved in performance studies or socially engaged art.” —Pablo Helguera, author of Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
SECTION 1: BACKGROUND STAGES
1. Performance at Hull-House: Museum, Microfiche, and Historiography
2. Performing Show and Tell: On the Disciplinary Problems of Mixed-Media Practice
3. Theatricality’s Proper Objects: Genealogies of Performance and Gender Theory
4. When “Everything Counts”: Experimental Performance and Performance Historiography
5. Resist Singularity
6. Rhetoric in Ruins: Performing Literature and Performance Studies
7. Living Takes Many Forms: Creative Time
SECTION 2: THE ARTS AT WORK
8. Life Politics/Life Aesthetics: Environmental Performance in red, black & GREEN: a blues
9. Elmgreen & Dragset’s Theatrical Turn
10. Performativity and Its Addressee: Walker Art Collection
11. Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity
12. Seven Ways to Look at Windows: Harrell Fletcher
13. Counter-Carnival in a Performance-Friendly World: En Mas’
14. Utopian Operating Systems: Theaster’s Way of Working
15. Trusting Publics: Paul Ramirez Jonas
SECTION 3: RE-STAGINGS
16. The Way We Perform Now
17. Drama and Other Time-Based Arts
18. Assemblies: Public Participation, Heteronomous Worlds
19. Epilogue: Essential Labor and Proximate Performance
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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