xv, 254 pages : 24 cm

"This finely illustrated book offers a simple yet comprehensive 'grammar' of a new discipline." "Performance Art first became popular in the fifties when artists began creating 'happenings'. Since then the artist as a performer has challenged many of the accepted rules of theatre and radically altered our notion of what constitutes visual art. This is the first publication to outline the essential characteristics of the field and to put forward a method for teaching the subject as a discipline distinct from dance, drama, painting or sculpture."--BOOK JACKET

Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-249) and index

1. Stillness -- 2. Being Clothing -- 3. Mimicry and Repetition -- 4. The Other and the other -- 5. Inconsistency, Catastrophe and Surprise -- 6. Cathexes and Chaos -- 7. Drives and the Primaries -- 8. Transitions as Desires -- 9. Transference, Substitution and Reversal -- 10. Language -- 11. Time and Space -- 12. Cathexes of Desire -- 13. Looking at Light -- 14. Presence or Puppeteering -- 15. Conclusion