IF YOU CAN’T ACT . . .

Contrary to what appears to be the comfortably unconscious assumption of both George J. Leonard and Henry M. Sayre, whose “The Object of Performance” Leonard discusses at some length in his essay (Book Review, July 16), there is virtually nothing about it significantly distinctive of the principal or fundamental visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.) rather than of the plain old familiar established theater. To claim the incorporation of “poetry, music, mime, narrative, and dance,” or of projected “film and still photography,” in “performance art” as a major and impressive innovation by its brilliantly original practitioners, or as any innovation at all, which Leonard does in his review, is so ignorant of the history and current practice of the theater, or, more likely, so wildly careless, as to be silly.

People who call themselves “performance artists” simply make up their minds that although they haven’t, in most cases, substantial training or experience in any branch of the theater as such, they just don’t need pedantry like that to do “performance arts,” because having been trained in painting, etc., makes them artists in some wonderfully, magically generic, or perhaps soteriologically redemptive, way. If you truly want to do any aspect of theater, it helps very much to get some of the relevant theatrical training, even if you already have some other kind of training. If you truly want to do visual art, in the old-fashioned, narrow sense, learn, at a minimum to draw.

R. BARNAI

BEVERLY HILLS