Amy Bryzgel's history of performance art in eastern Europe, the second book-length study the author has devoted to the topic, is a must-consult for anyone interested in the subject. The amount of performances, actions, happenings, and body art that Bryzgel catalogues and interprets is staggering, and most are interpreted competently. And while the larger nations of the former eastern Europe with their by now more or less established canons receive much attention, performance practices in the “peripheral margins”—Albania, Macedonia, Belarus, and the Baltics—are also discussed, sometimes at length. Here, Bryzgel's book additionally performs the crucial task of canonizing performances that have, in some instances, received little or no critical mention in art historical accounts so far.

The author lays the foundations for her argument through a (short) foray into the historical avant-garde that forms part of an introductory first chapter, organized more or less chronologically. Subsequent chapters abandon strict chronological order and are organized around more synthetic themes such as “The Body,” “Gender,” “Politics and Identity,” and “Institutional Critique.” If these headings eschew a historical perspective, Bryzgel avoids the impression that they should be treated as unhistorical givens, or that their east European inflections can be subsumed without loss under the history of their western counterparts. This said, the author's seamless integration of post-1989 performance with its post-Wende counterpart—the book includes performances up to around 2012—while it mitigates the obsession with binary division that characterizes cold war art history, also poses a series of problems (some of them are acknowledged in the preface), inasmuch as on occasion it makes for juxtapositions of works and practices that can seem far apart both conceptually and historically. The author's deliberate decision to not treat 1989 as an absolute rupture, which has much to be said for it, also complicates the use (and usefulness) of the term eastern Europe, which, it must be acknowledged, after the fall of the Berlin Wall shifted from being shorthand for the west's “small Other” during the cold war to serving as a convenient label for a global art market hungry for regional differentiation. The issue is important because it raises the fundamental question if, after 1989, we need a history of east European performance art at all, as opposed to say, a history of Polish, French, Albanian performance, or, maybe, a history of performance art in Europe. The impetus behind Bryzgel's study is the one that currently motivates so many revisionist art histories in the former eastern Europe: the frequent exclusion of the region from the history of western postwar performance art. Of course, it is not a matter here of an absolute difference between east and west, but of what elsewhere I have called “conditional similarity”—the varying degrees to which art in the region, despite its phenomenological similarity, also differs from a western model that is itself neither universal nor undifferentiated.

Acknowledging this fact, Bryzgel is at her best when she puts these asymmetries to practical use, avoiding their reduction to the common cliché regarding “freedom” versus “oppression” that all too often becomes the interpretative model of choice for art historians at pains to explain how east European postwar art differs from its western counterpart. Indeed the author mentions some fascinating instances where east European performance artists attacked such mythmaking already at the time of the cold war, precisely by historicizing the west (I'm thinking for instance of her discussion of Tamas Szentjóby's 1970s amazing work Sit Out-Be Forbidden which, as Bryzgel notes, makes an explicit reference to Bobby's Seale's gagging in a US courtroom). In other instances, she works across the east/west binary and its attendant stereotypes by noting the formal affinities between performance practices in different countries within eastern Europe: her astute analysis of the critique of representation in the work of Hungarian Dóra Maurer, Romanian Ion Grigorescu, and Polish Natalia LL, for example, is one of the book's highlights. On balance, one might perhaps have wished for a more robust theoretical model of performance (and its distinction from body art, action art, and others) to orient the reader through the book. On the other hand, the incredible diversity and vitality of the works Bryzgel discusses certainly offer ample compensation.