This new volume in the Performance Ideas series is drawn from the ongoing video work art is/poetry is/music is (Speaking Portraits), which features over 1000 artists—painters, poets, musicians, dancers, actors, video-/filmmakers—in eleven countries saying what art is. art is offers an intimate view of seventy of those engaged in art as performance. Single-frame images, accompanied by individual artist statements, capture moments of high intensity from Marina Abramovic, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Jonah Bokaer, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Thurston Moore, Gary Hill, Vito Acconci, Archie Shepp, Joan Jonas, Anthony Braxton, Ann Hamilton, and many more. George Quasha writes in his Introduction: “Listening to so many artists, closely and over many years, has taught me further configurative dimensions of performative mind. Close listening/viewing—non-interfering attention—nurtures art, just as it does people, animals, maybe even plants.”