Performance art and Los Angeles, two subjects spectacularly resistant to definitions, illuminate each other in this searching study by Meiling Cheng. A marginal artistic pursuit by choice as well as necessity, performance art has flourished in and about multicentric Los Angeles for nearly four decades, finding its own centers of activity, moving and changing as the margins have reconstituted themselves. The notion of multicentricity serves, somewhat paradoxically, as the unifying motif in Cheng's imaginative views of center and periphery, self and other, and mainstream and marginal cultures. She analyzes individual artists and performances in detail, bringing her own center gracefully and unmistakably into contact with all those others. Without suggesting that her approach is definitive, she offers a way of thinking and talking coherently about particularly elusive, ephemeral artwork.br br Cheng describes performance art as an intermedia visual art form that uses theatrical elements in