ABSTRACT
Given the critical acclaim that the Wooster Group was receiving by 1979, and Spalding Gray's instant rapport with the audience, his monologues gained immediate attention and popularity. In so doing they galvanized a public awareness of a phenomenon that had been underway for some time, self-created solo performance pieces that were known as performance art. Gray's onstage persona, and those of several other autobiographical performance artists, are equivalent to Jorge Luis Borges' map, they are simulacra placed on top of the original. But no matter how exact the fit it is still a cover, not the original, and the audience experiences a strange sense of dislocation, causing part of the focus to fall not simply on the engaging stories or upon the storyteller but upon the gap between the two. Performance art, if not the avant-garde in general, has become more a style than an approach to the creation of art.
