Performance Art
Why place Sandra Bernhard’s review (“Sandra Bernhard Gets Down to the Her of It,” Aug. 19) under the rubric of “Performance Art”?
Sandra is an excellent stand-up comedian and does skits and musical numbers. This does not make her a “performance artist.” As a friend says, Bernhard is an entertainer who deals in a form of satire that could be dubbed experimental or radical entertainment. Lenny Bruce and Lily Tomlin come to mind in this category.
Performance art has a tradition of visual- or sound-oriented conceptual content that is usually cross-disciplinary. The name performance has become umbrella to everything from stand-up, new music, experimental theater, solo work involving poetry, autobiography, political content, formal theatrical work and so on to the few true performance art pieces still being done.
I wish a new name could be found for all this work. But performance art is not accurate and should be reserved for performance art.
RACHEL ROSENTHAL
Director,
The Rachel Rosenthal Company
Los Angeles
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