Harvard professor and art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has published texts on dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, collaborative artists Allora & Calzadilla, and parafictional works of art. She is currently writing a book that expands upon her 2009 essay on parafiction, audience stratification, and trust. We discussed her latest research by way of the value of investigation, epistemological behaviors, and fake news in an age of uncertainty.

"Academia isnʼt contemporary artʼs funeral parlor. It is its current address"

On the aesthetics and politics of recuperation. Dances are listened to, pianists play upside-down and backwards, and audiences re-tune their senses in Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's inventive works of "delegated performance" (Bishop). I articulate the reparative dimensions of their practice, and its provocative resonances: between physical and mental recovery from war's violence; the desire to restore the meaning of politically-appropriated works of art; and the transformative potential of art itself.

"Between 1998 and 2008, artists gave us advertising campaigns for imaginary products, a not-really-censored exhibition, hacked museum audio tours, several never-made movies, a sham supermarket, nonexistent video installations, dubious abortions, a staged marriage proposal, an impersonated Pope, ersatz archives, ques- tionable military units, a faked vacation, an invented critic, a fictional historian, a made-up monkey, an arguably authentic rabbit, a projected penguin, and legions of fake artists, both historical and contemporary (twenty-seven in the recent pseudo- collaborative EU portrait by Czech artist David Cerny alone).14 More generally, we’ve seen the term “intervention” supersede “resistance” in discussions of political art, valorizing modes like the parafictional that act disruptively outside the artistic con- text,15 while in the wider culture, fiction-in-the-real has become the characteristic mode of political humor for our time, with Sasha Baron Cohen, The Daily Show, and Brass Eye perfecting a technique in which parodists pass as their real counterparts, interacting with unsuspecting subjects whose gullibility, pompousness, stupidity, racism, extremism, or simple greed for the spotlight is then mercilessly exposed."

"A brilliantly vivid description of Rainer, Judson, and art making in the 1960s, Being Watched sets a new scholarly standard for dance and performance studies. Combining impeccable archival work, a nuanced understanding of the drama of vision, and a lyrical sensitivity to movement, Being Watched is an absolute pleasure to read. In these pages, Rainer emerges as a muscular thinker, a complicated personality, and one of the most influential choreographers of our time. Great artists need great commentators and here we are fortunate to see a truly compelling duet."

Peggy Phelan, The Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts, and Professor of Drama and English, Stanford University