Awards
2004 Art Journal Award
Jenni Sorkin, “Envisioning High Performance” (Summer 2003)
Jenni Sorkin
The Art Journal Award, established in 2001, is presented for a distinguished contribution (article, interview, conversation, portfolio, review, or any other text or visual project) published in Art Journal during the preceding calendar year. Jenni Sorkin is the winner for 2004. Her essay, “Envisioning High Performance,” appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of the journal.
In an era when increasing amounts of provocative and groundbreaking contemporary art is created within the temporally and corporally schizophrenic media of cyberspace, the notion of primary experience becomes blurred and indistinct. Since the 1970s, art, the action of the artist, and the fleeting moment of creation have been challenges for critics and scholars of performance art: How does one historicize the remnant documents of things past—which needed to be seen, were seen, and can no longer be seen—in a way that dynamically engages the viewer and adequately addresses the work? In a wonderfully written and lucidly mapped essay, Sorkin brings the now-defunct, artist-written magazine High Performance into a renewed visibility without authorial ego or coastal chauvinism. She revisits a chronicle that provided a counternarrative to the story of art as told in the 1980s and 1990s by the dominant, and often myopic, pages of other journals and magazines. Her excellent research and engaged, but objective, perspective allows her readers the rare chance to look back to a vital period (and periodical) in the history of performance art, while conceptualizing their own “new thinking” on the issues raised by this careful historian.
Committee: Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Harvard University, chair; Joanna Roche, California State University, Fullerton; Jacquelyn Days Serwer, Corcoran Gallery of Art; Deborah Willis, New York University.
