Carolee Schneemann played a vital role in the development of performance art beyond the early Happenings, formulating what she termed ‘Kinetic Theatre’, which concentrated on the dynamics of group collaboration and sensitisation. Schneemann conducted a sustained investigation of psychosocial interrelation, attempting to transform her Happenings into living, fluid image structures that could facilitate physical and mental communion between participants. Chapter 3 demonstrates how this was elaborated in dialectical relation to contemporaneous sociological, anthropological and psychological studies of communication. This was particularly evident in Schneemann’s 1967 Happening at the Roundhouse in London during the Dialectics of Liberation Congress. While focusing on this event, the chapter roots Schneemann’s vision in her earliest collective actions such as Labyrinth (1960), and concludes by proposing that, although Schneemann stopped making group work in 1970, her critical engagement with sociology and psychology would become an important element of US and UK art practice allied with women’s liberation.

Chapter 4 extends the focus on feminist analyses of communication in relation to Lea Lublin’s work in France and Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s. During May 1968, in the midst of the protests, strikes and sit-ins that brought Paris to a halt, Lublin exhibited herself with her baby during the Salon de Mai. This sparked multiple actions that sought to denaturalise received social processes, images and ideologies, particularly the sedimentation of communicative habits. Lublin’s interests parallel those of the Collectif d’art sociologique in France, and were contextualised within the transnational cybernetic and sociological frameworks for performance and conceptual art devised by the Buenos Aires-based Centro de Arte y Comunicación. However, Lublin’s denaturalisation exercises diverged from these organisations because of their strongly feminist commitments and engagement with the gendered politics of socialisation.

Taking a small portrait by Ravi Varma of a scholar reading in the glow of a lamp as a servant waits upon him in the background shadows, this chapter evaluates the emergence of the elitist figure of the artist against the backdrop of the subaltern craftsman. The differential inscription of light marks their place within the new order of visibility – the named artist whose face glows in the lamp and the anonymous craftsman marked by his labour. Keeping in mind recent art-historical scholarship that has tended to view the figure of the artist as the paradigmatic modern subject, this chapter tracks the developments in portraiture and the assertion of individualism, arguing that the representation of the elite artist allowed for a way to transition from the dominant anthropological model of portraiture popular in nineteenth-century India to the fiction of the assured subjectivity of later portraits.

The conclusion assesses the impact of performance art’s imbrication with communications theory on contemporary practice, focusing on how artists have used the tactic of the breaching experiment to question received patterns of socialisation. It considers artists including Pilvi Takala, Pope.L, Adrian Piper and Otobong Nkanga, who have mobilised their bodies to challenge patterns of social behaviour and their intense policing according to highly normative models, shaped by constructs of gender, race, sexuality and ability. The conclusion also investigates how artists have used reperformance to continue the experiments explored in Beyond the Happening, but also to highlight their blind spots and take their ideas in new directions.

This chapter examines the discourse on light and shadow in two paintings of scholars by Ravi Varma that use chiaroscuro to depict men reading within the interiors of a westernised home. Ravi Varma uses the symbolic qualities of light and shadow to produce private interior spaces, in this case an imagined inner world, where the Nayar matrilineal tharavad (household) is transformed into an intimate space for the cultivation of the (male) self. In step with the contemporary Malayalam novel, the paintings identify the domestic interior as a stage upon which a private life is imagined, where personal space and reflection are brought together to convey an interiority that one typically associates with the bourgeois modern subject. The chapter evaluates how the interior figured in domestic architecture and family life, its implications for gender and social relations and, finally, how a new idea of home emerged in tandem with a territorial imagination fuelled by the new possibilities of travel in late nineteenth-century Kerala. It argues that chiaroscuro emerges as an effective visual device to produce the fictions of the self-reflective autonomous self, with the light and darks suggesting hidden interiorities and buried subjectivities.

The introduction examines the empire of light formulated at the intersection of industrial and imperial visual technologies during the era of the industrialisation of light. It argues that this had a profound impact on public life and practices of seeing, instituting new regimes of visibility. It asks how this was a legacy of Enlightenment ideas of light and evaluates its reception and negotiation by Indian artists.

This chapter examines the emergence of the Indian landscape into the visibility of the Western world, drawing upon the iconography of unveiling as consonant with the trope of ‘disiy’. In the context of the civilising mission of empire, such acts of unveiling served as technologies of illumination, bringing light into benighted lands. The images examined foreground not only epistemological issues where visibility implies a transcendence of the darkness of Oriental mystique but are equally invested in aestheticising landscapes, so that exotic lands emerge as sites of visual pleasure. The ritual of unveiling dramatises the act of seeing, holding out the promise of an unmediated vision and the revelation of buried secrets and hidden pleasures.