Performances 2006 to 2009 by Alastair MacKinven
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Published by Focal Point Gallery (2009) Published to accompany Alastair MacKinven’s exhibition at the Focal Point Gallery in 2009, this books attempts, through its natural, academic, and faux scientific veneer, to enact its own critique of historical oeuvre within the discourse surrounding the culture of contemporary performance. The book is not only a document of MacKinven’s practice, but an essential and integral part of the narrative behind his work and therefore a work in its own right. Through its distribution, it uses and comments on the history of the self-promotion and the ‘politics of publicity’ inherent within the history of Conceptual Art, which is still prevalent on every level within contemporary art practice. In essence if, within the history of performance art, individual works have traditionally been presented as a mechanical sequence of events - from the site and time of an original action, to its documentation, publication, critical evaluation and, as sometimes happens with seminal works, its subsequent re-enactment and re-appraisal - then this problematic chronology serves to canonise a performance within the field of historical discourse. £7.00
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