Performing Image

In Performing Image, Isobel Harbison examines how artists have combined performance and moving image in their work since the 1960s, and how this work anticipates a social turn toward performing images since the advent of smart phones and the spread of online prosumerism. Over this period, artists have used a variety of DIY modes of self-imaging and circulation-from home video to social media-suggesting how and why Western subjects might seek alternative platforms for self-expression and self-representation.

In the course of her argument, Harbison offers close analyses of works by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Mark Leckey, Wu Tsang, and Martine Syms, woven between a concise historicisation of the term and function of the 'prosumer'. Although all the artists she examines express their relation to images uniquely, they also offer a vantage point on today's productive-consumptive image circuits in which billions of us are caught. This unregulated, all-encompassing image performativity, Harbison writes, puts us to work, for free, in the service of global corporate expansion. Harbison offers a three-part interpretive framework for understanding this new proximity to images as it is negotiated by these artworks, a detailed outline of a set of connected practices-and a declaration of the value of art in an economy of attention and a crisis of representation.