Campos de acción entre el performance y el objeto 1,2 y 3 (pack) (Fields of action between performance and object 1,2 and 3 )

Volume 1 of Campos de acción opens with a foreword by Richard Koshalek on the exhibition Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA) in 1998, on which this publication is based. In his introductory essay Salto al vacío: el performance y el objeto (Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object), Paul Schimmel talks about the origins of performance in the post-war period in the United States, Europe and Japan and the importance of existentialism as a philosophical movement that invites awareness of the need for action.

Schimmel takes abstract expressionism as his starting point and focuses especially on Jackson Pollock, the legacy of John Cage, Shōzō Shimamoto, the group Gutai, the Italian-Argentinean artist Lucio Fontana, the new European realism and the happenings of Allan Kaprow. The curator continues with a historical review of movements such as arte povera, Viennese actionism and fluxus and closes with the sculptural performance of the sixties and the performance of the seventies. This first volume of the publication is a journey with comings and goings in time, without being totally chronological but establishing clear and fundamental relationships between the different practices and their contexts. The final section dedicated to chronology in this volume covers the years 1943 to 1958.