Senior Lecturer, Department of Film and Visual Culture, University of Aberdeen, UK
Amy Bryzgel is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film and Visual Culture, School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture, at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. She teaches courses on performance art and postmodern art, with a focus on artists from Eastern Europe, along with a course on Modern and Contemporary Russian Art. She has published widely on performance art in Eastern Europe, most notably her monograph, Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 (Manchester University Press, 2017), which is the first comprehensive academic study of the history and development of performance art in the region. She also published the first monograph on Latvian painter and performance artist Miervaldis Polis in 2015 with Neputns in Riga, Latvia. She has organised numerous performances and art events in Aberdeen and Scotland, and she is active on social media: follow her research on her website and on Twitter @PerformTheEast.
The essay focuses on four artist books by Mladen Stilinović (1947-2016). Several of the books are in an accordion-fold format, common for Stilinović’s photobooks and pamphlets that include drawings, word constructions, and collages.
Photography provided a guaranteed witness to the burgeoning genre of performance art in the 1960s, when restrictions in Socialist societies sometimes created a far different relationship between performance and documentation than in the West. Art historian Amy Bryzgel highlights several key works of Central and Eastern Europeanperformance art from the MoMA Collection. Artists have been…
