Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics by Shannon Jackson
A "performative turn" has shaped art practice over the last several decades. This has led to a chiasmus of sorts: post-dramatic theater borrows codes from painting and scupture, and post-studio art has moved itself towards means commonly associated with theater. Though experimental art performances are accesible via multiple media registers, critical discussions of innovation have differed based upon which media the performance is seen to be disrupting. This has had profound effect on the rhetoric surrounding experimental work within both the academic and the broader sociopolitial spheres.
This month's Berkeley Books selection, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics by Professor of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and Rhetoric Shannon Jackson, probes the forms, goals, and cultural critical possibilities of contemporary performance and visual art. Blending insightful work in cultural theory with focused analyses of specific works, Jackson offers the reader an innovative method by which to understand and articulate the social as it becomes a key player in art's "performative turn." This exploration of an (aptly named) "aesthetic conviviality" allows Jackson to interrogate the limits of art's engagement with its audience and, beyond this, its engagement with sociality. Jackson's interdisciplinary approach mediates previous lmitations, and her astute understanding of the fields represented allows her to realistically assess experimental art's contemporary situation.
Ann Cheng, former Berkeley faculty and Professor of English at Princeton, writes: "With her characteristic clarity and keenness of mind, Shannon Jackson gives shape to this vibrant but notoriously amorphous field we call performance studies. More importantly, she compels us to grapple with performance's internal social work."
Jackson's previous book, Professing Performance (2004), won the Best Book Prize in both Theatre Studies (ATHE) and Performance Studies (NCA). Before that, her book, Lines of Activity (2000), won an Honorable Mention in the John Hope Franklin Prize in American Studies (ASA). In addition, she is the director of Berkeley's Arts Research Center and has received numerous honors, awards, and grants.
Visit the Biblio-file to view books that shaped Professor Jackson's thinking while working on Social Works.