ABSTRACT
In 1983, Thomas McEvilley’s essay “Art in the Dark” appeared in Artforum as the first theory of performance art to explore the medium’s origins, function, and significance in terms of religion. In this wide-ranging consideration of the state of performance art, he argued that performance artists act as shamans, communities’ designated transgressors of traditional boundaries. This chapter revisits this influential essay to acknowledge McEvilley’s innovative, important work, to locate his claims within the real conditions of intellectual, social, and religious histories in the 1960s and 1970s including psychoanalysis and the counterculture, and to call for the end of shamanism and other generalized religious references within performance art discourses.
