ABSTRACT
As a durational act, performance art is always in the process of being forgotten, and its history is therefore of necessity a continual attempt at reclamation. We were commissioned by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) to conduct fifty interviews for Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970-83 as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, a region-wide initiative of the Getty Foundation. We highlight here some artists’ memories of 1967-1983, the most fecund period in the history of live art.1 From this archive of interviews we have extracted “field reports” of various aspects of southern California performance art and its relations to its audiences interweaving our observations with pertinent extracts of the words of those who were there, made it happen, and have provided us with a memory bank for future study and analysis.
