ABSTRACT
Curators Marcia Tucker and James Monte were aware of what was happening in alternative spaces and lofts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and realized that they could offer comparable conditions for performance by clearing the museum's galleries of their objects and walls. At that same time, the Whitney was also staging live arts in the direct vicinity of plastic arts. In 1969, the Whitney presented the intermedia exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, a watershed show that introduced the public to work that was fundamentally about process. In thinking about earlier museum exhibitions, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object was an incredibly important, broadly inclusive survey that drew a global map of so many important practices. With Rituals of Rented Island, the artists included came not only from visual art backgrounds but also via dance, theater, music, and poetry. There was often no durable artifact from their performances.
