Career
Stiles is among a handful of scholars who, in the late 1970s, laid the foundation for studying post-1945 performance art and related forms, writing about the pioneering artists of happenings, Fluxus, performance art, and new media. Her articles and essays, many of them book-length, have addressed the work of artists such as Jean-Jacques Lebel, Yoko Ono, Franz West, Carolee Schneemann, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Valie Export, Jean Toche, Alison Knowles, David Tudor and Henry Flynt, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Chris Burden, Kim Jones, Paul McCarthy, Barbara T. Smith, Marina Abramović, William Pope.L, Dan and Lia Perjovschi, Peter D'Agostino, STELARC, Jeffrey Shaw, Maurice Benayoun, and many others.
While still a graduate student, Stiles taught a seminar on performance art at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979, which has been acknowledged as the second course on the subject taught in the U.S. Stiles also taught the first course in the U.S. on “Documentary Photography of the Nuclear Age” at Duke University in 1994, the same year that she curated two exhibitions on the subject, a symposium, and published an exhibition catalogue on the nuclear age photographs of James Lerager.
Stiles is also known for exposing as a myth that Austrian artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s castrated himself in a performance and died as a result of the wounds, a story circulated by Robert Hughes in Time magazine in 1972. Stiles provided evidence in 1990 that Schwarzkogler primarily staged his art in photographic tableaux, often using the Austrian artist Heinz Cibulka as his model. Hughes acknowledged his error in The New Yorker in 1996.
Stiles's work as an artist has included painting and mixed media pieces, conceptual and sociological art, and performance. She performed with Sherman Fleming and Yoko Ono, among others, and was the first multiple of Lynn Hershman Leeson's Robert Breitmore, appearing as Roberta in 1976. Active in the alternative art space movement during the punk era in San Francisco, Stiles performed, exhibited, and curated at JetWave (1980-82), founded by artists Randy Hussong, Sabina Ott, Bruce Gluck, and Fredrica Drotos, and at Twin Palms, founded by Lynn Hershman Leeson and Steve Dolan. She also served from 1976 to 1984 as the assistant to San Francisco artist Bruce Conner. From 1986 to 1989, she served on the Board of Directors at the Washington Project for the Arts when Jock Reynolds was its director. Stiles has worked as a curator, writer, lecturer, and/or consultant for the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Minneapolis; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, among many other institutions.
Stiles’s collected papers 1900-2012 are housed at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Special Collections, and include genealogical records, letters, artists' archives, over 500 documentary photographs of performances, etcetera: http://search.library.duke.edu/search?id=DUKE004196941
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