Artist, Audience, Accomplice

“Sydney Stutterheim has identified the theoretical stakes of an artistic position that is almost always overlooked—the assistant in all its multiform roles. In so doing, she offers not only a nuanced revision of authorship but also a fresh perspective on performance and participation in contemporary art.” - David Joselit, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University

“Sydney Stutterheim challenges notions of artistic authorship that rest on sovereignty by examining mediating figures who usually go unacknowledged, and she proposes a subgenre of participatory art that explicitly critiques and revises current scholarship. Asking questions about labor, production, authorship, and ethics, Stutterheim uncovers networks of accomplices both willing and unwilling, providing complex new readings of works by major figures.” - Judith F. Rodenbeck, author of Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings

"In this well-researched volume, Stutterheim investigates the roles and responsibilities of both aware and unaware accomplices in the burgeoning fields of performance, participation, and appropriation art in the 1970–80s United States and Western Europe. These auxiliary but crucial participants were intrinsic to the execution of artworks, yet have heretofore been overlooked as the primary focus of examination in art history or criticism. . . . This work is an important addition to the study of audience and participation in contemporary art history. Highly recommended." - A. Verplaetse, Choice