Performance art is an elusive and fugitive medium. While RoseLee Goldberg described it as a space for artists to test new ideas, Peggy Phelan argued that performance lives only in the present moment, and any attempt to document it turns it into something else. Organizing a historical exhibition on performance thus comes loaded with a number of issues and challenges which perhaps boil down to one central question: how to sufficiently convey historical substance without turning the show into a static museum display that loses the open-ended liveliness that characterizes the medium?

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), a thirty-year-old nonprofit organization with a long history of showing performance works, gives it a try with the exhibition Los Angeles Goes Live. Part of the Getty-funded Pacific Standard Time slate of exhibitions re-examining the history of Los Angeles art production between 1945 and 1980, LA Goes Live is a multi-pronged project that attempts to capture the past while maintaining “live” connections to the present. It includes an exhibition of original costumes and props used in historic performances as well as a collection of other performance art ephemera, a series of commissioned re-performances by younger as well as older artists and a catalogue (not yet released at time of writing).

The exhibition of costumes—titled Recollecting Performance and curated by Ellina Kevorkian—is unique and intriguing. Kevorkian has said that the show was inspired by her grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s varying recollections of dresses they had made for her mother.1 For Kevorkian, her family’s reminiscences evoked the sculptural quality of clothing and its ability to carry cultural meaning. The result is an innovative approach to recalling performance through objects. Moving through galleries filled with empty garments and sets is like visiting a haunted mansion, where the bodies have long departed but the spirits linger on, hinting at actions past without laboring to recreate them.

Cell phone-accessible audio snippets accompany the costumes. Including a few original performance soundtracks and numerous artists discussing the works on display, these audio bits serve to deepen the experience of each costume. Paul McCarthy’s simple pair of blue glasses becomes the jumping off point for the artist’s fascinating account of three homages to Yves Klein. Johanna Went considers the influence of Northwest Indian rituals on her highly improvisational performance practice, while the Kipper Kids are represented by a wild 1973 performance recording. Presented in each artist’s own unique voice, these are brief but powerful chunks of history, offering tantalizing voyages into the past.

Of the commissioned re-performance works viewable at time of writing, Heather Cassils’ companion works, Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture and Advertisement (Homage to Benglis), are the most compelling. The artist takes inspiration from two iconic feminist works—Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972) and Lynda Benglis’ Advertisement (1974)—to create a contemporary meditation on transgender identity. Instead of crash dieting to become thinner as Antin did in Carving, Cassils underwent rigorous physical training, including a hearty diet and a course of steroids, to build her body to its maximum masculine potential. Like Antin, she exhaustively documented her daily progress through photographs and video. Then, thinking of her own body as the metaphorical dildo in Benglis’ ad, the artist placed a striking photograph of herself at peak condition in gay male and transgender magazines.

Issues surrounding the re-enactment of classic performance works have lain in the collective art consciousness since Marina Abramović proposed an ethical if rather rigid method of re-enacting other artists’ works, a method that requires the obtaining of permission and a strict adherence to the artist’s original intentions.2 While noble, Abramović’s method can lead to mechanical and lifeless re-enactments. Cassils’ two projects, while faithful to the critical spirit of Antin’s and Benglis’ foundational works, exist firmly in the nexus of contemporary inquiries into the fluidity of gender and its performative nature. Cassils’ re-performances are fresh and very much her own but are also historically informed, and as such they represent in my opinion the most successful kind of re-performance.

So far, LA Goes Live offers a provocative taste of the dynamic nature of the LA performance scene, both past and present. The most promising elements of the project, however, are still ahead. The catalogue, with essays by leading performance scholars Amelia Jones and Peggy Phelan, will hopefully tie the project together in a meatier fashion. Re-performance commissions still in the works include pioneering artist Suzanne Lacy’s recreation of her seminal Three Weeks in May (1977) project and noted artist Liz Glynn’s Spirit Resurrection, which re-imagines Public Spirit (1980), the first performance art festival ever held in Los Angeles.

• 1. Ellina Kevorkian, “Performing Beyond Hollywood: The History of Performance Art in Los Angeles” [panel discussion. Art Platform—Los Angeles, October 3, 2011].
• 2. Marina Abramović, Seven Easy Pieces, 2005, Guggenheim Museum.