Roselee goldberg biography of rory leave

These ideas just keep bursting out. As writer, curator, teacher, and producer, RoseLee Goldberg has been a foremost champion of performance art since before the form had a name.

Goldberg, who is 72 and retains

She was the first to write it into the historical record with her groundbreaking book, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Her follow-up book, Performance: Live Art Since , told the story in pictures. Performa, the biennial she founded in New York in , recently celebrated its tenth anniversary with the November premiere of a collaborative work by Francesco Vezzoli and David Hallberg, followed by 77 events around the city.

Born in Durban, South Africa, when the country was under apartheid rule, Goldberg grew up as a dancer in a middle-class family that enjoyed the privileges accorded to whites, but from an early age, she was acutely aware of the multiplicity of cultures and the boundaries between them. In , when she was curator of video and performance at the Kitchen, she married the furniture designer Dakota Jackson, with whom she has two children and one grandchild.

Time and the voracious art market have made a mockery of that utopian idea; today, museums have departments of performance art and colleges list it as a course of study, albeit one independent of the art-historical canon. There lies the rub for Goldberg, who can give one example after another of visual artists whose signature works came out of live actions performed in front of an audience in theaters and cabarets, on city streets, or for a camera.

It was a challenging proposition to begin with. The whole idea was to make things different for all of us, or certainly for me, so that I could see things that I wanted to write about, to commission things, and be astonished. From day one, it was like, this has to be. We had Happenings or actions. In , we came up with live art for the first edition of my book.

It stuck in the U. I called it Performance: Live Art to the Present. After that, I started using performance art.