ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on activist Los Angeles performance art works from roughly 1970 to 1975. Given the erasure of this kind of LA performance by and large from mainstream histories of performance art as well as from histories of contemporary art (even those focusing on Los Angeles), and from histories of contemporary Los Angeles culture (which tend to focus on the film and music industries to the exclusion of art and performance), I will use this focus to take up the issue of whose bodies, whose performances, and thus whose memories and whose narratives get written into history and whose do not.1