You can never step in the same river twice, unless you're a performance artist working today.
Artists who specialize in the most ephemeral, fleeting and hard-to-preserve visual art form are increasingly trying various ways to resurrect their earlier pieces and bring them to new audiences. And the 11-day Performance and Public Art Festival that starts Thursday in Los Angeles will be a big test of how effective their work can be when brought back to life in a different era. Funded primarily by the Getty as part of Pacific Standard Time — the museum-wide celebration of Southern California art history that started in October and runs into spring — the festival will revisit several memorable works done in the L.A. area in the late 1960s and '70s. This was a time when performance art captured the imagination of many artists, including those who went on to make their name in other mediums like painting or sculpture.
Some artists are nearly exactly replicating early performances, as with James Turrell using road flares and metal reflectors to virtually set a Pomona College auditorium on fire, a repeat of a 1971 performance.