American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness, Book
Long Suffering productively links avant-garde performance practices with religious histories in the United States, setting contemporary performances of endurance art within a broader context of prophetic religious discourse in the United States. Its focus is on the work of Ron Athey, Linda Montano, and John Duncan, American artists whose performances involve extended periods of suffering. These unsettling performances can disturb, shock, or frighten audiences, leaving them unsure how to respond.
The book examines how these artists work at the limits of the personal and the interpersonal, inflicting suffering on themselves and others, transforming audiences into witnesses, straining social relations, and challenging definitions of art and of ethics. By performing the death of self at the heart of trauma, strategies of endurance signal artists’ attempts to visualize, legitimize, and testify to the persistent experience of being wounded. The artworks discussed find their foundations in artists’ early experiences of religion and connections with the work of reformers from Angelina Grimké to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who also used suffering as a strategy to highlight social injustice and call for ethical, social, and political renewal.
Performance, Religion, Trauma
Hardcover: 9780472073245
Ebook: 9780472122332
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8057432
Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness
Artists, Ron Athey, Linda Montano, and John Duncan engage deeply with religion. A multi-disciplinary book from Dr. Karen Gonzalez Rice about resistance in difficult times.
Art History
Performance Art
Performance Studies
Trauma Studies
Religious Studies
What people are saying
“Art historian Karen Gonzalez Rice’s Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness (2016) is an important addition to this growing bibliography…Gonzalez Rice’s work is especially key as she shifts interest in religion away from what the artists believed, pointing instead toward the practices of art, the bodily-based disciplines, sufferings, and desires.”
S. Brent Plate
Hamilton College
“The triumphant achievement of Long Suffering is its author’s deft application to art history of her detailed knowledge of approaches and insights drawn from religious studies.”
Dominic Johnson
Queen Mary University of London
“The author’s engagement with the actual performances through an intense immersion in archival material, primary sources, interviews with the artists, and a broad and sustained engagement with the context and historical circumstances of this work make this book particularly compelling, and her attempt to counter the academic mistrust of fundamentalism and embrace of secularism is laudable. Equally significant is her engagement with the relationship between ecstatic religions, ethical actions, moral imperatives, and the history of religious revivalism and reform in the U.S.”
Jennie Klein
Ohio University
“The author introduces us to previously understudied performance artists, zooming in on moments and performances that many other critics and audiences have chosen to avoid… she models what it means to lean in, to seek to understand the works on their own terms in as deep a way as possible. Such critical generosity (a term borrowed from performance scholar David Román) is invigorating and productive.”
John Fletcher
Louisiana State University
“In Long Suffering, Karen Gonzalez Rice details the complex, troubling intersections of religion, and trauma in the endurance art of Linda Montano, Ron Athey, and John Duncan in order to consider how these artists are part of an American tradition of prophetic witness. Their performances present ‘extreme, sometimes abject actions’ (p. 16) yet, Gonzalez Rice claims, should be seen as containing ‘devastating political critiques’ that can raise moral consciousness (p. 7).”
Claire Louise Wren Radford
University of Glasgow
“Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness by Karen Gonzalez Rice is an important book that deserves serious consideration. It documents and analyzes a component of theatre history and performance art that have rarely been subject to close consideration.”
Rhona Justice-Malloy
University of Mississippi
“This is a timely exploration of the relationship between the artist and culture. Gonzalez Rice offers an important contribution to performance and theatre studies, particularly around the impact of religion, trauma, and autobiographically influenced performance.”
Ashley Marinaccio
City University of New York
“In her 2005 volume of letters, Linda Montano suggests that we should look not just at the aesthetics and technology of performance art, but also at the psychological reasons artists create the work that they do. Karen Gonzalez Rice answers this call in Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness by bringing together religious studies, psychology, art history, and ethnography to analyze works by Montano, as well as Ron Athey and John Duncan.”
Joyce Lu
Pomona College
Table of Contents
One
The Arc of the Moral Universe Bends toward Justice
Two
Linda Montano, Performance Art Saint
Three
The Faith Hearings of Ron Athey
Four
John Duncan’s Confrontational Aesthetics
Epilogue
Endurance at the Corner of State and Bank
Karen Gonzalez Rice 