ABSTRACT
Black performance art, from the outset, is a vexed form; it is inextricably linked to histories of subjugation, imperialism, and personal sovereignty. Valerie Cassel Oliver concurs, arguing that black performance in the Americas may have emerged as a by-product of chattel slavery, a “dysfunctional inheritance born from mastering both personal and communal survival”. A still more panoramic view of black performance art, and its attendant aesthetic lineages, pans out even further from the prototypical confines of the museum/gallery, moving from the mundanity of the urban landscape into the ecstatic energies of nightlife. For instance, performance art produced by black American artists was excluded from museums, often at the expense of the performing arts, which artist Clifford Owens argues is due to the perception the latter more easily reads as black cultural expression. “The dramaturgy of power that haunts racial politics and contemporary expressive cultural codes was first ‘formatted’ in those grim locations”.
