The avant-garde has been criticized for being too commercial to be avant-garde, not commercial enough to further the cause of the avant-garde, and too self-indulgent to make a statement. Rather than focusing on the controversies that inevitably are heaped on the challenging, Berghaus (theater, U. of Bristol) describes the antecedents and reasons for the very concepts behind the avant-garde, its genesis within modernity, the earliest performance practices up to 1919, and transition from late modernism to postmodernism, and the beginning of the avant-garde in the USA and Japan. He then tackles the performances themselves, ranging from body art, ritualism and neo-shamanism to video and multimedia and the rise of the avant-garde in cyberspace. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)