"A thoughtful and engaging contribution to the field that will have a sustained and lasting impact on the way feminist performance is defined and understood, as well as on how feminist histories and historiographies continue to challenge and transform the larger field of performance."
---Charlotte Canning, The University of Texas at Austin

"Harding forcefully challenges and destabilizes the male-centered Eurocentric genealogy of the avant-garde, which he claims is an uncontested, linear, positivistic history, unproblematized by theory. Then he argues that this gendered biased version of the European avant-garde is carried over into American historiography . . . A forceful case for a revisionist history."
---Daniel Gerould, The City University of New York Graduate Center

Cutting Performances challenges four decades' worth of scholarship on the American avant-garde by offering a provocative reconceptualization of the history of avant-garde performance along feminist lines. Focusing on five women artists (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, and Valerie Solanas) whose performance aesthetics made prominent use of collage techniques, James M. Harding sheds light on the cultural history of the avant-garde and the role that experimental women artists played in that history. He investigates the prominent position that collage technique occupied within the artists' performance aesthetic, and the decisively feminist inflection that their work gives to collage as a mode of avant-garde expression. The radical juxtapositions in their works produce the powerful effects of making the familiar strange and establishing contexts from which new understandings may emerge.

Harding examines the performative dimensions of collage in experimental, feminist redefinitions of the literary, graphic, and theatrical arts, filling a void in a scholarly discourse that, while ostensibly about the vanguard, has lagged well behind other significant theoretical and historiographical currents. Cutting Performances not only challenges assumptions that have governed scholarship on the American avant-garde but also establishes a context to rethink the history of American avant-garde performance along feminist lines. It will appeal to audiences interested in theater history and performance studies as well as those interested in the cultural history of the avant-garde and the role that feminist experimental artists have played in it.

James M. Harding is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. His other books include Not the Other Avant-Garde: Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (with John Rouse); Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies (with Cindy Rosenthal); and Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality.

Illustration: Carolee Schneemann in Eye Body-36 Transformative Actions (1963) Action for camera (Photograph by Erró). Reproduced by permission of Carolee Schneemann.

《切割表演》挑战了四十年来关于美国前卫艺术的学术研究，按照女权主义的思路对前卫表演的历史进行了挑衅性的重新概念化。詹姆斯-M-哈丁聚焦于五位女艺术家（艾尔莎-冯-弗莱塔格-洛林霍芬、格特鲁德-斯坦因、小野洋子、卡罗莱-施奈曼和瓦莱丽-索拉纳斯），她们的表演美学突出使用了拼贴技术，他揭示了先锋派的文化历史以及实验性女艺术家在这一历史中扮演的角色。他研究了拼贴技术在艺术家们的表演美学中所占据的突出位置，以及他们的作品对拼贴作为先锋派表达方式的决定性的女性化的转折。他们作品中的激进并置产生了强大的效果，使熟悉的事物变得陌生，并建立了可能出现新理解的背景。

哈丁研究了拼贴画在实验性的、女权主义的文学、图形和戏剧艺术的重新定义中的表演性维度，填补了学术话语的空白，虽然表面上是关于先锋派的，但已经远远落后于其他重要的理论和历史学潮流。切割表演》不仅挑战了支配美国前卫艺术学术研究的假设，而且还建立了一个背景，按照女权主义路线重新思考美国前卫表演的历史。它将吸引对戏剧史和表演研究感兴趣的观众，以及对前卫文化史和女权主义实验艺术家在其中发挥的作用感兴趣的人。

詹姆斯-M-哈丁是玛丽-华盛顿大学的英语教授。他的其他书籍包括《不是另一个前卫：前卫表演的跨国基础》（与John Rouse合著）；《重塑六十年代》。激进剧院及其遗产（与辛迪-罗森塔尔合著）；以及《戏剧前卫的轮廓：表演与文本性》。

插图。Carolee Schneemann在 "眼睛"-36 "转型行动"（1963年）中的相机动作（摄影：Erró）。经Carolee Schneemann许可转载。