Abstract
Part art-historical document, part socio-cultural anthropology, Tendrils of Lost Time and the Self: An Aesthetic Anthropology of New York City's "Post"-Avant-Garde takes a critical look at the socio-economic conditions of a generation of artists following in the wake of the American Avant-Garde theatrical and performance artists of the 1970s and 80s. Encapsulating almost a decade of living and working in New York's contemporary performance sector, Tendrils begins from the idea that the public life of artists extends beyond the ritualized aesthetic frame engaging broader social, spatial, economic, and temporal networks across the urban landscape. As a foray into the landscape of post-industrial anthropology, it explores the pioneering-aesthetic edge of New York City's shifting cultural life and history during the decade from 1999 to 2009. In her investigation, the author also asks a broader question: what subtle violences operate in the modern "peaceful" state, and how do they maintain the state-subject contract while also avoiding conflict's narrative height or any need for active historical reference and reconciliation? She asks these questions from perspective of a native, which is not necessarily a new thing for Anthropology post-sub-altern turn, but it allows for that native to forego illusions of disinterested distance, and betray her own emotional/visceral position in the field, a field increasingly lost in a kind of extended un-reconcilable present. Akin to the suspension of an ethnographic present. Akin to a waiting room.
