Artist, Audience, Accomplice: Ethics and Authorship in Art of the 1970s and 1980s

In Artist, Audience, Accomplice, Sydney Stutterheim introduces a new figure into the history of performance art and related practices of the 1970s and 1980s: the accomplice. Occupying roles including eyewitness, romantic partner, studio assistant, and documenter, this figure is situated between the conventional subject positions of the artist and the audience. The unseen and largely unacknowledged contributions of such accomplices exceed those performed by a typical audience because they share in the responsibility for producing artworks that entail potential ethical or legal transgressions. Stutterheim analyzes the art of Chris Burden, Hannah Wilke, Martin Kippenberger, and Lorraine O’Grady, showing how each cannily developed strategies of shared culpability that evoked questions about the accomplice’s various rights and roles. In this way, Stutterheim argues that the artist’s authority is not sovereign, total, or exclusive but, rather, fluid and relational. By examining the development of an alternative model of participatory art that relies on a network of accomplices, Stutterheim radically revises current understandings of artistic agency, aesthetic property, and acknowledged authorship.

Sydney Stutterheim is an art historian based in Los Angeles and coeditor of Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden.