Overview

In Artist, Audience, Accomplice, Sydney Stutterheim introduces a new figure into the history of performance art and related practices of the 1970s and 1980s: the accomplice. Occupying roles including eyewitness, romantic partner, studio assistant, and documenter, this figure is situated between the conventional subject positions of the artist and the audience. The unseen and largely unacknowledged contributions of such accomplices exceed those performed by a typical audience because they share in the responsibility for producing artworks that entail potential ethical or legal transgressions. Stutterheim analyzes the art of Chris Burden, Hannah Wilke, Martin Kippenberger, and Lorraine O’Grady, showing how each cannily developed strategies of shared culpability that evoked questions about the accomplice’s various rights and roles. In this way, Stutterheim argues that the artist’s authority is not sovereign, total, or exclusive but, rather, fluid and relational. By examining the development of an alternative model of participatory art that relies on a network of accomplices, Stutterheim radically revises current understandings of artistic agency, aesthetic property, and acknowledged authorship.

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9781478030690

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Reviews

“Sydney Stutterheim has identified the theoretical stakes of an artistic position that is almost always overlooked—the assistant in all its multiform roles. In so doing, she offers not only a nuanced revision of authorship, but also a fresh perspective on performance and participation in contemporary art.” -- David Joselit, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University

“Sydney Stutterheim has identified the theoretical stakes of an artistic position that is almost always overlooked—the assistant in all its multiform roles. In so doing, she offers not only a nuanced revision of authorship, but also a fresh perspective on performance and participation in contemporary art.” -- David Joselit, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University “Sydney Stutterheim challenges notions of artistic authorship that rest on sovereignty by examining mediating figures who usually go unacknowledged and proposes a subgenre of participatory art that explicitly critiques and revises current scholarship. Asking questions about labor, production, authorship, and ethics, Stutterheim uncovers networks of accomplices both willing and unwilling, providing complex new readings of works projects by major figures.” -- Judith F. Rodenbeck, author of * Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings *

Author Information

Sydney Stutterheim is an art historian based in Los Angeles and coeditor of Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden.

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