Lecture-Performances and Para-Institutional Pedagogies

“Staging Professionalization: Lecture-Performances and Para-Institutional Pedagogies.”

For Performance Research Journal 21.6, “On Radical Education”

Radical pedagogical formats proliferated in artistic output of the 1960s, spurred both by the shift toward compulsory academicization for artists, and by the rise of artist-activism. Correspondingly, the lecture-performance emerged as a vital aesthetic form. Throughout the decade, artists mobilized the format to imagine how knowledge might be produced and disseminated outside the academy: within alternative institutional frameworks, beyond authorized communicative forms, and through embodied modes of performativity.

Bringing its hitherto nebulous history into focus, this essay traces the deployment of the lecture-performance by artists during and after the Vietnam War. Recent shifts in the academy and the post-Fordist conversion of the educator into a manager of “knowledge assets” demand that we revisit these early pedagogical experiments with ever-greater urgency. Looking backward toward lecture-performances of the 1960s, this essay charts possibilities for radical modes of knowledge production, performative pedagogy, and zones of resistance in the present.