Above The dust jacket of a new important book: Laura Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage and the Art of Blending In. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. The following is an excerpt from its promotional text—
Performing Ground is the first book to
explore camouflage as a performance practice, arguing that the act of blending
into ones environment is central to the ways we negotiate our identities in
and through space. Laura Levin tracks contemporary performances of camouflage
through a variety of forms—performative photography; environmental,
immersive, and site-specific performance; activist infiltration; and solo
artworks—and rejects the conventional dismissal of blending in as an
abdication of self. Instead, she contemplates the empowering political
possibilities of "performing ground," of human bodies intermingling with the
material world, while directly engaging with the reality that women and other
marginalized persons are often relegated to the background and associated with
the properties of space. Performing Ground engages these questions
through the works of some of today's most exciting performance artists…