Performance, Live Culture and Things of the Heart

Abstract

Having worked in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, from 1985 to 2002, Peggy Phelan is now the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts at Stanford University. She is the author of Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (1997) and the forthcoming Death Rehearsals: The Performances of Andy Warhol and Ronald Reagan, as well as survey essays for the art catalogues Art and Feminism (2001) and Pipilotti Rist (2001). She is co- editor with the late Lynda Hart of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (1993) and with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (1998). Professor Phelan has also written plays and performances and has exhibited her visual art. She has made significant contributions across the Arts and Humanities, particularly at the points where live culture, feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and critical theory meet. In this interview Professor Phelan speaks about some of the awkward grey areas between Performance Studies and Visual Cultural Studies, as well as the themes and topics at the heart of her writing and her practice. These include feminism, performance, psychoanalysis and aesthetics; for Phelan, most of these themes touch on mourning, death and love.