Education
Stiles earned her B.A. in Art History from San Jose State University in California (1970), and her M.A. (1974) and Ph.D. (1987) in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Peter Selz and Herschel B. Chipp, both known for their focus on artists’ writings, the social history of art, and international art, concentrations that shaped Stiles’s scholarly direction. Stiles’s doctoral dissertation, "The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS): The Radical Social Project of Event-Structured Live Art" (1987), was the first thesis on the subject of destruction in art. DIAS took place in London in 1966, was organized by Gustav Metzger (about whom Stiles has also published extensively ), and some fifty international artists, and poets, as well as a few psychiatrists participated in DIAS.
One of Stiles's principle theoretical contributions to the history of performance art was her 1987 dissertation argument that the presentation of the artist's performing body initiates a new communicative structure in the visual arts, appending the traditional re-presentational role of metaphor with the connective function of metonymy. Countering the widespread claim in the early post-1945 period that performance art breaks down the barriers between art and life, Stiles asserted that metonymy augments interpersonal communication through its linking function, and expands the conventional modes of visual communication by creating the potential for an exchange between presenting and viewing subjects.
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