What follows is the text of a talk broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on Thursday 4 November 1999 as part of an evening exploring the life and work of Glenn Gould. It was produced by Tim Dee. Amid the clinker of this century of technology, a century in which we have all of us learned to live beside ourselves, through photographs, homepages, video, telephone and recorded sound, we may also glimpse the fact that this has also been emphatically the century of performance.
Performance is the hot antidote to the chill delirium of the information age.
Our fascination with the lives of artists shows clearly enough that we expect our artists not only to come up with works of art, but more importantly to perform the exemplary act of being an artist. In this sense, maybe all art since the early nineteenth century has been a kind of performance art. In the work of Jackson Pollock, the originator of what came to be called action painting, the performance of the act of painting was the whole point of the exercise, and the resulting canvases valuable principally for the traces they preserved of the pouring out of art into enactment. Nowadays, no artist or performer, no matter how they may fear or disdain public appearance, can wholly escape this demand, not least because of the powerful counter-myth of the reclusive genius that is bundled up with it. Glenn Gould inhabited both these extremes of public performance and highly-publicised solitude.