When the Curtain Never Comes Down: Performance Art and the Alter Ego

Most self-taught artists, including those who have shaped art environments and yard shows can be perceived as performance artists. Their work is infused with daily rituals, public actions, gestures, and enactments, defining a lifelong artistic practice for which the curtain never comes down. This volume documents and contextualizes the work of twenty-seven artists from around the world and active from the late nineteenth century to the present. Beyond paintings and sculpture, featured artworks include ceremonial clothes, kinetic apparatuses, ephemeral installations, writings, fragments of ever-changing constructions, and other statements that have been captured by photographers and filmmakers. The inventive devices and countless strategies these artists configure are expressions of an alter ego, which they assume for its power to transform the world and, above all, to transform their own connections to reality.

Historically, collectors and museums have prioritized artworks that are readily collectible and more conventional in their materials and techniques, like paintings, drawings and sculpture--an attitude that elucidates a direct relationship between conservation and recognition. When the Curtain Never Comes Down: Performance Art and the Alter Ego delves into an underside of self-taught art and art brut, opening a door to the study of the field's neglected facets. Under a new light, it considers these creations as interdisciplinary and within a continuous body of work rather than one-dimensional or strictly object-oriented.

Fully illustrated publication that accompanies the exhibition When the Curtain Never Comes Down and explores the daily rituals, public actions, and performance art by twenty-seven self-taught artists from around the world.

By Valérie Rousseau, PhD, with a foreword by Anne-Imelda Radice, PhD, and contributions from Mario del Curto, Beate Echols, Savine Faupin, Gustavo Giacosa, Stefan Hartmaier, Thomas J. Lax, Gianluigi Mangiapane, Martin Mangold, Judith McWillie, Viviane Morin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ricardo Resende, Thomas Röske, Lisa Spindler, and Michel Thévoz. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2015. 137 pages, hardcover, 8 1/4 x 10 1/2 in.