ABSTRACT
When Karen Kelly and I were putting together the conference on which this book is based, I thought of “Performance and Image” as our panel devoted to artistic process. I also thought that we used both words, performance and image, because we assumed they were not the same thing, that there was in fact a tension between them: performance is what the artist does, image what the audience receives. Bringing together a performer (Kathleen Hanna) and an image-maker (video-and filmmaker Katherine Dieckmann) would provide perspectives on both ends of the performance →image communication equation. The critic (James Hannaham) and the scholar (Lawrence Grossberg) would provide insight on what happens inside and around the arrow. That we chose this title instead of, say, “Creation and Voice” may have been an at-the-time unanalyzed indication of our own media-saturated cynicism-or perhaps it was just a result of our respective positions in curatorial and critical institutions, where Karen and I are privy to but still outside the act of creation.
