Kristine Stiles

[14][15][16][17][18] 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,[19] a president of The League of Women Voters, and politically active in the Temperance Movement and in passing Child Welfare Laws.

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.

Her articles and essays, many of them book-length, have addressed the work of artists such as Jean-Jacques Lebel,[29][30] Yoko Ono,[31][32] Franz West,[33] Carolee Schneemann,[34][35][36][37][38] Raphael Montañez Ortiz,[39] Valie Export,[40] Jean Toche,[41][42] Alison Knowles,[43] David Tudor and Henry Flynt,[44] Lynn Hershman Leeson,[45] Chris Burden,[46] Kim Jones,[47] Paul McCarthy,[48] Barbara T. Smith,[49] Marina Abramović,[50] William Pope.L,[51] Dan and Lia Perjovschi,[52] Peter D'Agostino,[53][54] STELARC,[55] Jeffrey Shaw,[56] Maurice Benayoun,[57] and many others.

[60] 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.

[61] Stiles provided evidence in 1990 that Schwarzkogler primarily staged his art in photographic tableaux, often using the Austrian artist Heinz Cibulka as his model.

[75] 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,[76] Bruce Gluck, and Fredrica Drotos, and at Twin Palms, founded by Lynn Hershman Leeson and Steve Dolan.