The Live Art Almanac

Book excerpt: The Live Art Almanac Volume 3 is a collection of ‘found’ writings about and around Live Art that were originally published, shared, sent, spread and read between January 2010 and December 2011. Selected from an open call for submissions and produced with a network of international partners, Volume 3 reflects the dynamic, international contexts in which Live Art and radical performance-based practices are taking place and the many ways they are being written about. Volume 3 features more traditional forms of writing such as newspaper reviews, journal articles, catalogue essays and lecture texts as well as new platforms for critical discourses like blogs, tweets and other emergent online media, to reflect the huge diversity of work and the seismic shifts that have happened in Live Art over the last few years, particularly the unprecedented institutional embrace of performance and the rise and rise of activist practices. The publication is grouped into seven loosely themed sections: Performance and the Institution; The Presence of Performance in Pop Culture and New Media; Performance, Activism and Public Protest; Taste, Trash and Outrageousness; On Stage/Off Stage: Performance and the Theatrical; Festivals, Scenes and Strategies: From the Local to the Global; and obituaries, lectures and miscellaneous writings. The Live Art Almanac Volume 3 is published by Live Art Development Agency and Oberon Books, and was developed in partnership with Live Art UK, Performance Space 122 (New York, USA), Performance Space (Sydney, Australia), La Pocha Nostra (San Francisco, USA), and Maska (Ljubljana, Slovenia), with additional support from Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), ArteEast (New York/Middle East) and Ashkal Alwan (Beirut).