Jeffrey Greenberg - Inventivity

I created and produced the art journal THE ACT as well as an art non-profit The Performance Project in New York City in the 80's and 90's. These were wily efforts to produce work I cared about as ethically as I could, with the help of fellow artists and friends, and limited help from a variety of prestigious institutions and foundations. In an effort to preserve the journal, in 2004 I had it photographed and put the images online. Whereas I've never documented online The Performance Project.

Unfortunately, THE ACT photographs were not great and the search engines have been unable to index the journal. So to preserve THE ACT and the work it captures, which is of some intellectual and historical significance, I am working to bring it better online, properly preserved and available.

The Performance Project was hosted weekly around NYC, starting from my living room. Eventually, folks like Martha Wilson of the Franklin Furnace, and Mark Russell of PS122 Space kindly gave me keys to their spaces to run our weekly gatherings. These weekly gatherings were for performance artists to do their work and get critical feedback from an audience of peers. I aimed to have more participatory and experimental work than conventional, character-based, theater style work. Whatever the work, I aimed to respond to it and guide conversation towards giving feedback without judgement; that is, in a descriptive style where the responder was urged more to describe what they saw and heard before what their feelings were about it. In this way, artists could better understand what they were communicating and make their own judgements about the outcome accordingly.

I was privileged to see hundreds and hundreds of pieces this way. None of it would have happened if it hadn't been for a core crew of artists who came repeatedly and engaged and did what was needed (Chwat, Allcroft, Goldberg, <list>). But the participatory, social, psychological work I craved occurred more rarely than I liked, and eventually I could no longer do it. I saw and met so many artists this way and people from a wide gamut of life's experiences and challenges. I also received friendship from a group of artists who regularly participated in the weekly performances and in the journal. Experiences that were gifts for which I'm very grateful. This was during the rise of AIDs and I lost one my most significant mentors, Jacques Chwat.

I aimed to focus the journal on artists and works oriented towards art-as-truth, art-as-participation, art-as-social-and-political-engagement, and what it means to be an "unartist". I was largely inspired by Allan Kaprow's work (a mentor), and John Cage's influences, as well as critical & feminist theories such as the important work of Suzanne Lacy, and of feminist artists and composers ( such as Pauline Oliveros ), as well as the culture-breaking-and-embracing poet, Jerome Rothenberg. A lot of people from UCSD where I'd gone to school...