Kristine Stiles (born Kristine Elaine Dolan in Denver, Colorado, 1947) is the France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global contemporary art and trauma. Her most recent book is Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma, University of Chicago Press, 2016. She is best known for her scholarship on artists’ writings,Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; Revised, enlarged 2nd edition, ed. Kristine Stiles, University of California Press, 2012. performance art,Kristine Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions,” in Paul Schimmel, ed. Out of Actions: Between Performance and The Object 1949–1979. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998, 226–328.Kristine Stiles, “Between Water and Stone: Fluxus Performance, A Metaphysics of Acts,” in Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, eds. In The Spirit of Fluxus. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993, 62–99. Reprinted in Tracy Warr, ed. The Artists’ Body. London: Phaidon Press, 2000, 211–14.Kristine Stiles, “Performance,” in Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds. Critical Terms for Art History. 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003, 75–97.Kristine Stiles, “INSIDE/OUTSIDE: Balancing Between a Dusthole and Eternity,” in Zdenka Badovinac, ed. Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present. Ljubljana, Croatia: Museum of Modern Art, 1998, 19–30. feminism,Kristine Stiles, “Never Enough is Something Else: Feminist Performance Art, Probity, and the Avant-Garde,” in James M. Harding, ed. Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality. Madison: University of Madison/Wisconsin Press, 239–289.Kristine Stiles, “Home Alone: ‘Reversal of Positions of Presentation’ and the Visual Semantics of Domesticity,” in Nancy Princenthal and Helaine Posner, eds. The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973–1990. Purchase, New York: Neuberger Museum, 2011. destruction and violence in art,Kristine Stiles, “Survival Ethos and Destruction Art,” in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 14:2 (Spring 1992): 74–102; excerpted in Tracy Warr, ed. The Artists’ Body. London: Phaidon Press, 2000, 227–229.Kristine Stiles, “Thresholds of Control: Destruction Art and Terminal Culture,” in English and German for Out of Control. Linz, Austria: Ars Electronica & Landesverlag, 1992, 29–50; reprinted in Timothy Druckrey, ed. Ars Electronica: Facing the Future (A Survey of Two Decades). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. and trauma in art.Kristine Stiles, “Shaved Heads and Marked Bodies: Representations from Cultures of Trauma,” in Strategie II: Peuples Mediterraneens [Paris] 64-65 (July–December 1993): 95–117; reprinted with a new Afterword in Jean O'Barr, Nancy Hewitt, Nancy Rosebaugh, eds. Talking Gender: Public Images, Personal Journeys, and Political Critiques. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, 36–64.Kristine Stiles, “Thoughts on Destruction Art,” Impakt 1997. Utrecht: Impakt Festival, 1997, 2–5. Stiles joined the faculty of Duke in 1988, and she has taught at the University of Bucharest and Venice International University. She received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence in 1994, and the Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring in 2011, both at Duke University. Among other fellowships and awards include a J. William Fulbright Fellowship in 1995, a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, and an Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts in Totnes, Devon, England in 2005.
Biography Stiles is the second of five children born to Paul G. Dolan and Katherine Haller Rogers Dolan. Stiles's maternal genealogy includes a number of educators and public figures. Her grandfather, Frederick Rand Rogers [1894–1972], was a radical American educator, pioneer of physical fitness testing, and inventor of the Physical Fitness Index.Frederick Rand Rogers, Educational Objectives of Physical Activity. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1931.Frederick Rand Rogers, Treason in American Education: A Case History. New York: Pleiades Publications, 1949.Garfield Gary Pennington, unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Frederick Rand Rogers: Educational Provocateur,” University of Oregon, 1972.Garfield Gary Pennington, “Frederick Rand Rogers: Educational Provocateur (1894–1972),” Canadian Journal of History of Sport, Vol. 12, No. 1 (May 1981): 24–50. Her great grandfather, Frederick John Rogers, was a professor of physics and Chair of the Physics Department at Stanford University and his wife, Stiles's great grandmother, was the colorful Josephine Rand Rogers, a president of The League of Women Voters, and politically active in the Temperance Movement and in passing Child Welfare Laws. Another maternal great grandfather, Dr. George Spalatin Easterday, was mayor of Albuquerque, New Mexico; and her great, great grandfather John Rankin Rogers, was third governor of the state of Washington and supporter of the “Barefoot School Boy Act.” Stiles’ father's ancestry is all of Irish immigrants from Old Castle, County Cavan, but her grandfather William Joseph Dolan was born in Boston, trained in Italy as an Interior Designer and worked as a decorator of Catholic churches. Stiles retained her last name from her first marriage (1967–1974) to attorney Randolph Stiles.
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 SelzPaul J. Karlstrom, Peter Selz: Sketches of a Life in Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 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),Kristine Stiles, “Synopsis of the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) and Its Theoretical Significance,” The Act 1 (Spring 1987): 22–31. 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 extensivelyKristine Stiles, “The Story of DIAS and the ‘DIAS Affect’,” in Gustav Metzger. Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2005.Kristine Stiles, “Metzger’s Fierce, Poignant, and Prescient Manifestos” in Rett Kopi Documents the Future. Oslo, Norway: Rett Kopi, 2007.), and some fifty international artists, and poets, as well as a few psychiatrists participated in DIAS.
One of Stiles's principal 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.Kristine Stiles, “Synopsis of the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) and its Theoretical Significance,” The Act vol. 1 (Spring 1987): 22–31.
Career