Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960 9781108426459, 9781108551007, 2018012849

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PERFORMING ENDURANCE

In Performing Endurance, Lara Shalson offers a new way of understanding acts of endurance in art and political contexts. Examining a range of performances from the 1960s to the present, including influential performance art works by Marina Abramović, Chris Burden, Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano, Yoko Ono, and others, as well as protest actions from the lunch counter sit-ins of the US civil rights movement to protest camps in the twenty-first century, this book provides a formal account of endurance and illuminates its ethical and political significance. Endurance, Shalson argues, raises vital questions about what it means to exist as a body that both acts and is acted upon, from ethical questions about how we respond to the bodies of others to political questions about how we live in relation to institutions that shape life in fundamental ways. In addition, Performing Endurance rethinks how performance itself endures over time. lara shalson is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Theatre & Protest (2017).

PERFORMING ENDURANCE Art and Politics since 1960 LARA SHALSON

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108426459 DOI: 10.1017/9781108551007 © Lara Shalson 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Shalson, Lara, author. title: Performing endurance : art and politics since 1960 / Lara Shalson. description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: LCCN 2018012849 | ISBN 9781108426459 (hardback) subjects: LCSH: Performance art. | Endurance art. | Arts—Political aspects—History—20th century. | Arts—Political aspects—History—21st century. | BISAC: ART/Performance. classification: LCC NX456.5.P38 S53 2018 | DDC 700.1/03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012849 isbn 978-1-108-42645-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

PERFORMING ENDURANCE

In Performing Endurance, Lara Shalson offers a new way of understanding acts of endurance in art and political contexts. Examining a range of performances from the 1960s to the present, including influential performance art works by Marina Abramović, Chris Burden, Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano, Yoko Ono, and others, as well as protest actions from the lunch counter sit-ins of the US civil rights movement to protest camps in the twenty-first century, this book provides a formal account of endurance and illuminates its ethical and political significance. Endurance, Shalson argues, raises vital questions about what it means to exist as a body that both acts and is acted upon, from ethical questions about how we respond to the bodies of others to political questions about how we live in relation to institutions that shape life in fundamental ways. In addition, Performing Endurance rethinks how performance itself endures over time. lara shalson is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Theatre & Protest (2017).

PERFORMING ENDURANCE Art and Politics since 1960 LARA SHALSON

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108426459 DOI: 10.1017/9781108551007 © Lara Shalson 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Shalson, Lara, author. title: Performing endurance : art and politics since 1960 / Lara Shalson. description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: LCCN 2018012849 | ISBN 9781108426459 (hardback) subjects: LCSH: Performance art. | Endurance art. | Arts—Political aspects—History—20th century. | Arts—Political aspects—History—21st century. | BISAC: ART/Performance. classification: LCC NX456.5.P38 S53 2018 | DDC 700.1/03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012849 isbn 978-1-108-42645-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

PERFORMING ENDURANCE

In Performing Endurance, Lara Shalson offers a new way of understanding acts of endurance in art and political contexts. Examining a range of performances from the 1960s to the present, including influential performance art works by Marina Abramović, Chris Burden, Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano, Yoko Ono, and others, as well as protest actions from the lunch counter sit-ins of the US civil rights movement to protest camps in the twenty-first century, this book provides a formal account of endurance and illuminates its ethical and political significance. Endurance, Shalson argues, raises vital questions about what it means to exist as a body that both acts and is acted upon, from ethical questions about how we respond to the bodies of others to political questions about how we live in relation to institutions that shape life in fundamental ways. In addition, Performing Endurance rethinks how performance itself endures over time. lara shalson is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Theatre & Protest (2017).

PERFORMING ENDURANCE Art and Politics since 1960 LARA SHALSON

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108426459 DOI: 10.1017/9781108551007 © Lara Shalson 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Shalson, Lara, author. title: Performing endurance : art and politics since 1960 / Lara Shalson. description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: LCCN 2018012849 | ISBN 9781108426459 (hardback) subjects: LCSH: Performance art. | Endurance art. | Arts—Political aspects—History—20th century. | Arts—Political aspects—History—21st century. | BISAC: ART/Performance. classification: LCC NX456.5.P38 S53 2018 | DDC 700.1/03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012849 isbn 978-1-108-42645-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my parents

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

page ix xi

Introduction

1

1

Enduring Objecthood

40

2

Enduring Protests

78

3

Enduring Life

109

4

Enduring Documents

146

Epilogue

183

Bibliography

189

Index

199

vii

Figures

I.1 I.2 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2

Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971 Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970 Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (1964), 2003 Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0, 1974 Lunch counter sit-in at Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1960 Lunch counter sit-in at Woolworth’s store in Jackson, Mississippi, 1963 Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978–1979 Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1981–1982 Marina Abramović performing Gina Pane’s The Conditioning, First Action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973) in Seven Easy Pieces, 2005 Marina Abramović performing Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) in Seven Easy Pieces, 2005

ix

page 17 21 45 73 85 99 118 128 169 178

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

page ix xi

Introduction

1

1

Enduring Objecthood

40

2

Enduring Protests

78

3

Enduring Life

109

4

Enduring Documents

146

Epilogue

183

Bibliography

189

Index

199

vii

Figures

I.1 I.2 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2

Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971 Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970 Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (1964), 2003 Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0, 1974 Lunch counter sit-in at Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1960 Lunch counter sit-in at Woolworth’s store in Jackson, Mississippi, 1963 Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978–1979 Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1981–1982 Marina Abramović performing Gina Pane’s The Conditioning, First Action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973) in Seven Easy Pieces, 2005 Marina Abramović performing Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) in Seven Easy Pieces, 2005

ix

page 17 21 45 73 85 99 118 128 169 178

Acknowledgments

Anyone who has done it, or supported someone else through it, will know that writing a book can feel like an act of endurance. I am indebted to various people and institutions who have supported me in this endeavor. The idea for this book was formulated during my time as a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. I want to thank Shannon Jackson, whose challenging questions and insightful comments guided the early development of this work and whose encouragement helped me to carry it through to completion. I also want to thank Kaja Silverman and Linda Williams, whose invaluable feedback further shaped this research in its initial stages. All three provided me with models of intellectual generosity that I continue to aspire toward. In addition, I am grateful to several other teachers and mentors who influenced my thinking in lasting ways: Judith Butler, Ann Pellegrini, Peggy Phelan, Anne Wagner, and William B. Worthen. At Berkeley, I was fortunate to be surrounded by brilliant graduate students in performance studies, rhetoric, film, and art history. Thank you in particular to Patrick Anderson, Elise Archias, Renu Cappelli, Beth Hoffmann, Tung Hui Hu, Laura Levin, and Monica Stufft for being a source of inspiration then and now. A number of people have left their mark on this work in the intervening years. Though she is mentioned elsewhere in these acknowledgments, Lis Austin deserves thanks here first of all. She was my go-to reader when these words were at their most vulnerable, and her ability to understand what I meant even when I was having trouble articulating it helped me to see the path more clearly. I have also benefited enormously from feedback from Tracy C. Davis, Maria Delgado, and Rebecca Schneider, who each read the manuscript at different points in its development. Alan Read and Catherine Silverstone also read sections and offered me valuable suggestions, and Adrian Heathfield gave me advice on a draft of my proposal that helped me to frame the project more persuasively. In addition, my thanks go to the anonymous readers whose comments helped xi

xii

Acknowledgments

me to improve this book. One of these, I subsequently found out, was the inimitable Dominic Johnson, to whom I am grateful for the generous praise that appears on the cover. Students in my graduate seminar on Performance and Live Art, and audiences at the Goldsmith’s Visual Cultures Guest Lecture Series, London Theatre Seminar, Queen Mary University of London’s Quorum Seminar Series, the National University of Singapore’s Performance Research Seminar, Performance Studies international, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Performing Documents Conference at Bristol’s Arnolfini also contributed to my thinking about this work. I am thankful to the organizers of these events for their invitations and hospitality. A wider group of people have sustained my life and work since I moved to the United Kingdom. I am lucky to work with wonderful colleagues at King’s College London. Kélina Gotman, Alan Read, Theron Schmidt, and Harriet Curtis have made King’s a vibrant place to do performance research. Bob Mills, Mark Turner, and especially Jane Elliott have made the English department feel like home. As heads of department, Josephine McDonagh and Richard Kirkland provided me with generous research support and advice. Further afield, I have been privileged to be part of an extended community of theatre and performance studies scholars in the United Kingdom and abroad. In addition to those already named, my thanks go to Gavin Butt, Jill Dolan, Jen Harvie, Aoife Monks, Louise Owen, Paul Rae, and Heike Roms, who have enriched my working life in various ways. Thanks especially to my South London community: Joshua Abrams, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Shane Boyle, Morgan Wadsworth-Boyle, Bryce Lease, Martin Schnabl, Elyssa Livergant, Catherine Silverstone, and Julia Cort. Thank you to Kate Brett for believing in this project and to the team at Cambridge University Press for their guidance through the production process. Part of Chapter 4 was previously published as “Enduring Documents: Re-Documentation in Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces,” in Contemporary Theatre Review 23:3 (2013); it is reproduced in revised form here with permission. My admiration and gratitude goes to all of the artists, activists, and scholars whose work I have engaged with in these pages; without your provocations, this book would not have been written. Thank you to everyone who allowed me to use their images, and to Tehching Hsieh in particular, who generously provided the beautiful photograph for the cover. I want to end by expressing my gratitude to my family. Thank you to my parents, Vaughan and Solange Shalson, who always encouraged me

Acknowledgments

xiii

to pursue my goals, even when it meant moving 6,000 miles away. Their own curiosity about the world has inspired me, their love has bolstered me, and their sense of humor has kept me going. I am also immensely grateful to my brother, Axel Shalson, who has supported me in numerous ways. Our conversations about art and life continue to energize my thinking and to remind me of what really matters. Finally, my endless thanks to Lis Austin, who endured this journey with me.

Introduction

When the term started at Columbia University in September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz began carrying a standard-issue blue dorm mattress with her everywhere she went on campus. The action was conceived by the visual arts major as both a performance art piece for her senior thesis and a protest against her university’s handling of a rape charge that Sulkowicz had brought against a fellow student in 2013. When the university’s Office of Gender-Based Misconduct ruled that the accused was “not responsible” and turned down Sulkowicz’s request for an appeal, Sulkowicz designed and then embarked upon the performance, vowing to carry the mattress until she no longer attended school with her accused rapist. The piece was constructed around a simple set of rules. Principal among them: Sulkowicz always had to have the mattress with her on campus, and she could not ask for help carrying it, though she could accept help if it was offered (and it frequently was). At fifty pounds, the mattress was heavy enough that it was difficult but not impossible for Sulkowicz to carry it by herself, giving literal weight to the mattress’s symbolism as a burden that she had to bear. The performance would end when either Sulkowicz’s accused rapist left the university (voluntarily or through expulsion) or Sulkowicz graduated. On May 19, 2015, Sulkowicz, with the help of others, carried the mattress through Columbia’s graduation ceremony, thereby ending the performance. Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), as the piece is called, quickly garnered international attention. As an artwork, it was described by more than one critic as one of the most important works of 2014.1 As an act of protest, it quickly became a symbol for a movement: on October 29, 2014 hundreds of students across the United States carried mattresses 1

See, for example: Ben Davis, “Columbia Student’s Striking Mattress Performance,” Artnet News, September 4, 2014, http://news.artnet.com; and Jerry Saltz, “The 19 Best Art Shows of 2014,” Vulture, December 10, 2014, www.vulture.com.

1

2

Introduction

on their university campuses as part of “Carry That Weight Together,” a National Day of Action to raise awareness about rape on university campuses.2 Yet, while Sulkowicz earned the admiration of leading figures in art and politics, including performance artist Marina Abramović and US senator Kirsten Gillibrand, she and her performance were also heavily maligned in numerous articles and online forums, primarily by those who doubted her allegations of rape. One of the main objections and points of accusation was that she made a performance at all.3 Sulkowicz’s performance raises a number of questions that are pertinent to this book. How does Mattress Performance work, both as an artwork and as activism? What roles do bodily commitment and perseverance play in this piece? What is the significance of its long duration and indeterminate ending? How did spectators and participants in the performance help to shape this piece? Why did Mattress Performance generate such intense and polarized responses, and what might these responses tell us not only about the issues at stake within the piece but about the challenges of the performance itself? Such questions have everything to do with Mattress Performance’s form – the form that is the subject of this book. Sulkowicz describes her project as an “endurance performance art piece.”4 Her somewhat awkward designation would seem at once to point to a recognizable genre of performance and to indicate how uncertain such terms remain. In fact, if Wikipedia can be taken as a barometer of what has currency in public discourse, “endurance art” only established itself in the lexicon following Sulkowicz’s performance. A page on Mattress Performance was linked to a very rudimentary page on “Endurance Art” on February 12, 2015. The following day, that page was flagged for deletion with a notice that “There is no such thing as ‘Endurance art.’ No source supports the existence of ‘Endurance art.’ There are no reliable sources for ‘Endurance art.’” Over the course of the next twelve days, the Endurance Art page was updated by two contributors with additional citations, placing Sulkowicz’s piece within a lineage of performances by well-known artists including Marina Abramović and Ulay, Chris Burden, Tehching Hsieh, Bruce Nauman, Carolee Schneemann, and others. After some deliberation about the inclusion of long durational performance, 2

See Sarah Kaplan, “How a Mattress Became a Symbol for Student Activists against Sexual Assault,” Washington Post, 28 November 2014, www.washingtonpost.com. 3 See Eun Kyung Kim, “Columbia Student Carrying Mattress to Protest Alleged Rape Gets ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ Response,” Today News, September 5, 2014, www.today.com. 4 Kaplan, “How a Mattress Became a Symbol.”

Introduction

3

a definition was established: “Endurance art  is a kind of  performance art involving some form of hardship, such as pain, solitude or exhaustion. Performances that focus on the passage of long periods of time are also known as durational art or durational performances.”5 As this anecdote suggests, to write a book about the performance of endurance in art and political contexts (a project that began for me well before Sulkowicz started university) is to contend with a term that already exists in discourse, yet whose definition has remained vague. This book both is and is not about what has popularly been called “endurance art.” It is insofar as it aims to provide insight into the practice of endurance and in so doing contribute to an understanding of what something like endurance art might be. However, this book is not about “endurance art” insofar as, like the contributor who flagged the Wikipedia page for deletion, it does not take the existence of this category as a given. “Endurance art” has never been a movement, and the term has not acquired any consistency of usage. In fact, although “endurance art” has some currency, anyone searching for uses of the term within writing on performance art would find that it has been used fairly infrequently and often interchangeably with a variety of other terms such as “hardship,” “ordeal,” and “masochistic art.” For instance, in an early article to use the term, Thomas McEvilley refers to “the Ordeal or Endurance genre,”6 and in her survey Performance: Live Art Since 1960, RoseLee Goldberg equates “endurance art” with what Kathy O’Dell has termed “masochistic performance.”7 More recently, in a short entry on “endurance performance” published in 2016, Jennie Klein affirms that “‘Endurance Performance,’ [is] also known as ‘masochistic art’ (O’Dell 1998), or ‘hardship/ordeal art’ (Phelan 1993).”8 Such terminological inconsistencies suggest that understandings of endurance have been more implicit than specifically theorized. Yet, these terms have different connotations. O’Dell only uses “endurance” once in her book on 5

To see these changes to the Wikipedia entry, click to “view history” on the Endurance Art page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_art. 6 Thomas McEvilley, “Art in the Dark” (1983), in The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Postmodernism (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 2005), 249. 7 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 99. For O’Dell’s understanding of masochistic performance, see Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 8 Jennie Klein, “Endurance Performance,” in Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres, ed. Gabrielle Cody and Meiling Cheng (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 22. Klein is referencing O’Dell, Contract with the Skin and Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

4

Introduction

masochistic performance, and she does so to distinguish “performances that are regarded as endurance-oriented rather than masochistic.”9 Instead of being “about” endurance art – as though that category were stable – this book asks what endurance is, in art and in other areas of life where it is intentionally performed, most significantly for me, in political protest. What kind of an act is endurance? What happens when artists or activists set out to perform acts of endurance? And why do such acts matter? In seeking to answer these questions, I offer an understanding of endurance that is both more specific and broader than existing uses of the term. Most often, when the term “endurance” has been used within writing on performance, it has been associated with performance art practices that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly with body art works involving risk or pain.10 Accordingly, someone searching for the term “endurance” within texts on performance art might find a statement such as Robyn Brentano’s that “[i]n some of these experiments, artists placed themselves (and, at times, their audiences) at considerable risk, creating dangerous situations or performing disturbing acts of selfmutilation, physical endurance, and self-denial in order to confront fears and inhibitions and to plumb the physical, sexual, and psychological taboos of our society.”11 Or, one might come across Goldberg’s statement that “artists such as Chris Burden, Marina Abramović and Ulay, Gina Pane and VALIE EXPORT, engaged in acts of extraordinary endurance, insisting that their unnerving and frequently dangerous undertakings were learning experiences of a deeply cathartic nature. For them, pain 9

O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 76, O’Dell’s italics. The terms “performance art” and “body art” overlap considerably in their usage. Both terms emerged in the early 1970s (see O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 87–88, n. 34). Amelia Jones defines body art as works “that take place through an enactment of the artist’s body” (Amelia Jones, Body Art / Performing the Subject [Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998], 13, Jones’ italics). As she notes, this term is most often used to refer to work from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, which was labeled “body art” by its makers and commentators in the period, as opposed to “performance art,” which has been used much more widely across periods. For contemporaneous accounts of body art in this period, see Willoughby Sharp, “Body Works: A Pre-critical, Non-definitive Survey of Very Recent Works Using the Human Body or Parts Thereof,” Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970), 14–17, and Cindy Nemser, “Subject-Object: Body Art,” Art Magazine 46.1 (September–October 1971), 38–42. In this book, I use the broader term “performance art” but also refer to “body art” when discussing work that has been specifically described as such by its makers and critics. 11 Robyn Brentano, “Outside the Frame: Performance, Art, and Life,” in Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object, a Survey of the History of Performance Art in the USA since 1970, ed. Robyn Brentano and Olivia Georgia (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994), 46. 10

Introduction

5

and fear could be understood as the material of the work.”12 Such uses of “endurance,” not as a term for a particular form of performance but as part of a description of works that risk or produce pain for the artist, are among the most common uses of the word. For others, endurance has also been taken to imply long duration.13 “Endurance” and “duration” share the same root in the Latin durare (to last), after all. In her entry on “endurance performance,” Klein combines both connotations, writing that endurance performance “involves the artist using her or his body to the point of privation, discomfort, corporeal danger, or even pain for long periods of time, ranging from several hours/days to a year or longer.”14 That they last a long time is key for Klein, and she asserts that “it is duration – rather than corporeal suffering or competence  – that separates endurance performances from other manifestations of body art.”15 Karen Gonzalez Rice also brings together pain and long duration in the title of her recent book Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness (2016), the first book to use “endurance art” in its title. However, for Gonzalez Rice, the emphasis is evidently on suffering – she does not discuss duration per se in the book. “Endurance artists suffer,” she begins; “They practice self-discipline by testing their bodies’ physical and psychic capacities, performing longterm actions, or submitting to pain or hardship.”16 Overall, whether taking duration into account or not, endurance has largely been understood, as Adrian Heathfield writes, to take “the experience of pain as a primary focus” (or, in the case of long durational 12

Goldberg, Performance: Live Art Since the 1960s, 97. This, I believe, is what O’Dell has in mind when she suggests that Marina Abramović and Ulay’s long durational performances, including Nightsea Crossing (1981–1986) and The Great Wall Walk (1988), “are regarded as endurance-oriented rather than masochistic” (O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 76, O’Dell’s italics). 14 Klein, “Endurance Performance,” 22, my italics. 15 Ibid., 23. 16 Karen Gonzalez Rice, Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 1. Gonzalez Rice’s book was published as I was making final revisions to this book, and hence my engagement with this important contribution to a discourse on endurance art is brief. As her opening sentence suggests, Gonzalez Rice asserts the existence of endurance art, and specifically American endurance art, as a category. For her, endurance artists “attemp[t] to visualize, legitimize, and testify to the conditions of suffering” (2); specifically, she claims that “The disciplined hardship an artist undergoes in these intense, painful actions testifies to the dramatic and persistent affect of trauma” (3). In doing so, Gonzalez Rice argues, “strategies of endurance art in the United States participate in deep traditions of American prophetic religious discourse” (5). While Gonzalez Rice has much to offer in her discussion of the work of Ron Athey, John Duncan, and Linda Montano, the three artists she considers, it will be clear to readers that I do not share her view that endurance practices in art are always a response to trauma or that they are necessarily “a contemporary iteration of progressive American prophetic witnessing” (7). 13

6

Introduction

performances, to emphasize “a sustained living-through pain”).17 Much has been written about performances involving pain, whether arising through acute injury or prolonged hardship. Within these texts, a variety of claims have been made and debated about the motivations and effects of such performances. It has been argued that performances involving pain: break down the boundary between art and life, producing an experience of the “present” or the “real”; enable personal transformation and function as acts of self-determination on the part of artists; implicate spectators, transforming them into witnesses or active participants; serve as rituals, akin to religious practices, creating communal experiences that are cathartic or healing; confront taboos and critique social norms; and draw attention to violence and suffering in everyday life.18 This book diverges from these debates. 17

Adrian Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” in Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, by Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh (London and Cambridge, MA: Live Art Development Agency and MIT Press, 2009), 22. 18 See for example McEvilley, “Art in the Dark” (1983), in which McEvilley explores performances involving “self-mutilation and self sacrifice” in relation to “shamanic ordeal” (242); Claire MacDonald, Editorial, “On Risk,” Performance Research 1.2 (Summer 1996), vi–viii, in which MacDonald discusses Gina Pane as an artist who “used pain and injury to draw attention to social issues” but also worries about the “quasi-religious” interpretations that Pane’s work might seem to invite (vii); Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), where Carlson notes that performance in the 1970s that aimed to “push the body to extremes or even to subject it to considerable risk or pain” was often understood to “part[ake] of reality instead of the ‘more mushy’ illusory world of theatre” (103); O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, where O’Dell argues that the “dangerous or harmful acts” undertaken by masochistic performance artists served as “a key metaphor through which these artists could address the volatile social and political issues that affected the everyday lives of individuals in the early 1970s” (12). In The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008), Erika Fischer-Lichte explores the transformation of both performer and audience in performances involving pain. She argues that works such as Marina Abramović’s Lips of Thomas (1975), in which “Abramović was actually harming herself, abusing her body” (11–12) transform “spectators into actors” (13). Fischer-Lichte also situates performance art involving injury in relation to religious rituals (13). In her article “Performing the Wounded Body: Pain, Affect and the Radical Relationality of Meaning,” Parallax 15.4 (2009), 45–67, Amelia Jones explores the political potentiality of performances of wounding, arguing that “what matters in terms of what the wound means is determined by the extent to which the viewer experiences affect and in particular empathy in relation to the suffering body” (54, Jones’ italics). Furthermore, she considers the relationship between real and representational wounding, arguing that “a ‘live’ wound is not necessarily more affective (or for that matter politically effective) than a representational one.  . . . At the same time, the wound affects us if and only if we interpret and experience it as ‘real’” (50). Marla Carlson compares performances by what she terms “pain artists,” such as Marina Abramović and Ron Athey, to medieval representations of the physical suffering of mystics, martyrs, and saints (Marla Carlson, Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010]). She argues that “Because pain so powerfully solicits the spectator’s engagement, aestheticized physical suffering plays a vital role in creating communities of sentiment and consolidating social memory, which in turn shapes the cultural and political realities that cause spectators to respond in different ways at different times” (2). In his essay, “Intimacy and Risk in Live Art,” in Histories and Practices of Live Art, ed. Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan,

Introduction

7

As will become clear, while discomfort or pain may be involved in the performance of endurance, these are not the qualities that define it, and many performances of endurance do not involve extraordinary degrees of pain. Returning to Sulkowicz’s performance, while the mattress may have symbolized Sulkowicz’s suffering, the action itself was not necessarily painful, though it was strenuous, and the piece was explicitly designed to allow Sulkowicz’s burden to be lightened by others who could join in to help. We could consider other examples as well, such as Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s Bed-Ins for Peace (1969), in which they invited guests, including members of the press, to come and speak with them about peace while they sat in bed together for twelve hours a day for seven days,19 or Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Touch Sanitation (1979), in which, over the course of eleven months, Ukeles shook hands with the 8,500 workers then employed by New York City’s Department of Sanitation and thanked them individually for their work maintaining the city. 20 Performances such as these involve bodily commitment and persistence, but they do not emphasize suffering. Rather than equating endurance with “the experience of pain,” this book advances an understanding of endurance as a formal practice with identifiable structures at the heart of its complex and multiple manifestations. Unlike the terms “masochistic,” “hardship,” and “ordeal,” which attempt to name and describe experiences (experiences that will differ for every individual), endurance names an act. To endure is to do something, and it is the form that this doing takes that interests me. In taking this approach, I counter a long-standing habit of regarding performance art as essentially breaking with form (whether with the formal conventions of theatre or with the formalism of modernist art) and as therefore resistant 2012), 121–47, Dominic Johnson follows O’Dell in arguing that “works which involve injury . . . deploy carefully orchestrated representations to reveal the violent reality of everyday experience” (142); he further argues that body modification and other anomalous body practices allow artists to “claim ownership of the body” (144). As noted above, in her book Long Suffering, Gonzalez Rice also explores the relationship between “intense, painful actions” (3) and religion, arguing that “The forms and meanings of the artworks discussed in [her] book find their foundations in artists’ early experiences of religion” (5). She also argues that through their actions “these artists condemn the social conditions that generate trauma” (8). 19 Ono and Lennon performed two bed-ins in 1969. The first took place on the occasion of their honeymoon at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam. The second took place at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. 20 For an excellent discussion of Touch Sanitation as well as a number of Ukeles’ other “Maintenance Art” works, see Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Abingdon and New York: Routledge 2011), particularly, Chapter  3, “High Maintenance: The Sanitation Aesthetics of Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” 75–103.

8

Introduction

to formal definition.21 In contrast, I seek to provide a positive framework for understanding the formal resemblances that characterize endurance as a practice that has been central to performance art and that has been taken up strikingly beyond the realm of art. Here, the notion of performing endurance is key. It is the deliberate practice of endurance, undertaken with intention and will, that is at stake in these pages. In the remainder of this chapter, I introduce the form of endurance. I describe its structure and consider its physical composition. In the process, I open up a range of issues that arise from this form, which will be explored in the rest of the book. My premise is that formal analysis offers new insights into what endurance is and what it does, and in the following pages I argue for the ethical and political significance of endurance as a form that engages with fundamental concerns about embodiment and relationality. At the same time, a second proposition of this book is that a more specific understanding of endurance also offers new insights into wider debates about performance because, as will become clear, performances built on endurance structures have frequently served as key examples in performance discourse. The chapters that follow will therefore also recast a number of debates in performance studies, including central arguments about the relationships between audience and performer, between performance art and political protest, between art and life, and between live performance and its documentation.

The Form of Endurance In order to open up a formal understanding of endurance, I would like to turn to what is perhaps the most widely known work of performance art, Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971). For this piece, Burden had a collaborator shoot him in the arm in front of a small invited audience at the F-Space Gallery in Santa Ana, California.22 Shoot is not a foundational 21

See Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Jones, Body Art for examples of texts that position performance art as antiformalist. Sayre writes, “Performance, which was (and remains) styleless, diverse, and conspicuously unprogramatic, has consistently proved one of the most readily available means for realizing this strategy of opposition [to modernism’s formalist side]” (xii). Jones writes that “Body art is specifically antiformalist in impulse” (5). For a good discussion of the tendency to read performance art (and its British counterpart, Live Art) as always breaking with the formal conventions of theatre, see Beth Hoffmann, “Radicalism and the Theatre in Genealogies of Live Art,” Performance Research 14.1 (2009), 95–105. 22 Burden’s description of the piece, which typically accompanies exhibited photographs of Shoot, consists of the following: “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.”

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performance; it is not the first performance of endurance, nor is it the earliest performance discussed in this book. However, it is a useful place to begin for a variety of reasons. First, numerous critics have pointed to Shoot as the most representative work of 1970s performance art and body art: C. Carr describes the documentation of Shoot as the “most emblematic of seventies body art”23; O’Dell refers to Shoot as the “best known example of performance art”24; and Frazer Ward describes Shoot as “a signal example, among a body of more or less violent performances of the 1960s and ‘70s.”25 As such, Shoot has been closely aligned with that cluster of associations around risk and pain that I outlined in the previous section.26 This makes it a productive example with which to show how the perspective on endurance that I offer in this book differs from existing discourses. In addition, as we will see, Shoot has been taken as a central example within numerous debates about performance art more broadly and therefore serves as a productive meeting point for a range of concerns that extend beyond it. Shoot thus provides the opportunity to analyze and depart from some of the assumptions that have circulated around endurance-based performance and to begin to show what a theory of endurance has to offer to the wider discourse on performance. In its sparseness and apparent straightforwardness, Shoot offers a helpfully distilled example of the structure of endurance. This structure is easy enough to describe: it involves a plan and a following through of that plan. However, this deceptively simple premise opens up to a world of complexity, because the plan, like all plans, can never guarantee its outcome in advance. Burden asked his friend, Bruce Dunlap, to shoot him in the arm with the instruction that the bullet should just graze his skin. He also arranged with his wife, Barbara Burden, to film the action on a Super 8 camera; with his friend, Alfred Lutjeans, to take photographs; and with fellow artist Barbara T. Smith to make an audio recording. In addition, he invited a small group of people to watch the performance. Then, on November 19, 1971, before this assembled audience and with recording apparatuses in place, Burden followed through with his plan and was shot in the left arm by Dunlap, who was standing fifteen feet away from him. However, while the bullet was intended to just nick 23

C. Carr, On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1993), 17. 24 O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 1. 25 Frazer Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching ‘Shoot,’” October 95 (Winter 2001), 117, my italics. 26 Meiling Cheng describes Burden’s performances more generally as “pushing [h]is body to the limits of endurance, pain, and danger” (Meiling Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art [Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2002], 53).

10

Introduction

Burden’s arm, in the performance, it passed through his arm instead, causing a more substantial wound. This disparity arose because, although tightly circumscribed in its conception, the performance was open to innumerable factors that exceeded Burden’s advanced planning; from the possibility that the gunman’s finger could have slipped to the possibility that his audience might have intervened and not allowed the performance to go on, Shoot could have turned out in a number of different ways. This intentional commitment to a plan whose outcome cannot be determined in advance shapes all of the performances considered in this book. Indeed, it is this, I argue, that defines endurance, not that a performance is painful or long (though it might be either or both of these things). The implications of carrying out performances according to this structure will turn out to be vast. One might object that this description is too broad to be a useful characterization of a performance form. Many activities in life involve a plan and a following through of that plan. Yet, rather than taking this for granted, performances of endurance investigate this mundane feature of human action as a matter of great significance. As we will see, there are complex implications for the embodied subjects who carry out such plans, who strive to complete them as outlined, and who, in doing so, face the limits of their own capacity to control how things turn out. In its use of a plan or set of instructions, endurance in the context of art is formally related to conceptual art, and the plans that precipitate performances of endurance often function as conceptual schemes similar to the instructions that form the basis for many conceptual art works. It is not surprising, therefore, that performances of endurance have sometimes been associated with conceptual art. Burden himself seems to have aligned Shoot with conceptual art at times. When asked in 1973 if it mattered whether the bullet just nicked him or whether it went through his arm, Burden responded coolly, “No. It’s the idea of being shot at to be hit.”27 Yet, in its insistence upon the carrying out of the plan, endurance also diverges from conceptual art in significant ways. Unlike the classic definition of conceptual art offered by Sol LeWitt  – “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is 27

Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar, “Chris Burden: The Church of Human Energy, An Interview by Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar,” Avalanche 8 (Summer/Fall 1973), 54, my italics.

The Form of Endurance

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a perfunctory affair”28 – it would be difficult to describe the carrying out of acts of endurance as perfunctory, or as involving a minimum of effort or care. It is this insistence upon the carrying out of plans, I would suggest, that leads Frazer Ward, in an essay exploring “Some Relations Between Conceptual and Performance Art,” to turn to two performances of endurance (though this is not a term that he uses) in order to challenge a tendency to read conceptual and performance art as opposed. First, Ward discusses Vito Acconci’s Step Piece (1970), in which Acconci arranged to step up and down from an eighteen-inch stool at a rate of thirty steps a minute for as long as he could each morning over a series of selected months. Ward describes Step Piece as “typically Conceptual, inasmuch as it is, or documents, the execution of a verbal plan.”29 However, what distinguishes it from most conceptual art for him is that Acconci performed the action and invited an audience to watch him doing it, thus moving the work from the abstract space of conceptualism into the personal and specific space of Acconci’s home, where he performed for a particular audience (primarily members of the New York art world to whom Acconci sent progress reports on his actions) rather than for the generalized public presumed to be addressed by conceptual art. I would add that what distinguishes Step Piece from most conceptual art is specifically Acconci’s performance of endurance – in other words, his physical following through with the plan whose outcome (recorded in Acconci’s progress reports showing how many times he was able to step up and down from the stool, and how much he did and did not improve at this activity over time) was not determined in advance. The second piece that Ward turns to is, not surprisingly, Burden’s Shoot, which he also describes as having “in common with Conceptualism the fact that it is the (painfully) empirical working through of a predetermined plan.” 30 For Ward, Step Piece and Shoot are examples of works that “conduct[ed] a critique from within a broadly Conceptual framework, of the positivist, even enlightening claims made for rationality in the Conceptual art that denied its ‘burden of physicality.’”31 I would argue that it is precisely their status as 28

Sol Le Witt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5.10 (Summer 1967), 80. Frazer Ward, “Some Relations between Conceptual and Performance Art,” Art Journal 56.4 (Winter 1997), 37–8. 30 Ibid., 39. 31 Ibid., Ward’s italics. Ward is quoting Mel Bochner, “Excerpts from Speculation (1967–1970),” in ed. Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York: Dutton, 1972), 57. 29

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Introduction

performances of endurance concerned with the material realities of carrying out their plans that produces this critique. As an art practice, endurance thus brings together conceptual and performance art in works that are both conceptually provocative and materially specific. LeWitt described the execution of conceptual art as perfunctory because he wanted to avoid “making the physicality of the materials so important that it becomes the idea of the work.”32 Yet, with endurance, the physicality of the enduring body is inextricable from the idea of the work. Contrary to what Burden says, the fact that the bullet went through his arm rather than just grazing it is important to my interpretation of the work. One needs only to consider how our reading would change had the gunman missed altogether, or had his error turned out to be fatal, to see that the actual execution of the performance influences our sense of the work. Contrary to LeWitt’s definition of conceptual art, the physicality of the materials put into action – in this case, the path taken by the bullet through Burden’s arm – is central to Shoot’s conceptual impact and ongoing resonances. To reverse LeWitt’s formulation, we could say that the physicality of the work does become the idea. Endurance is built on a plan, then, but this plan does not fully dictate what the work becomes. The artist designs and then endures an unfolding of events that can never be fixed from the start. This indeterminacy arises from another essential element of endurance: namely, that it is always performed in relation to forces that are beyond the performer’s control. One can see this quite explicitly in Shoot. Although Burden is sometimes described as the artist who “shot himself,” it was someone else who wielded the gun, a situation that leads Ward to describe Shoot as “constitutively a collaborative event.”33 Burden’s performance depended upon other factors too, such as the proper functioning of the weapon and the conducive behavior of audience members (a rowdy audience could have distracted the gunman). Taking such elements into account makes it evident that, although it is often performed by an apparently “solo” artist, endurance is a relational form – though, as we will see, it is one that often challenges rather than participates in the “forms of conviviality” that Nicolas Bourriaud has described as the field of relational aesthetics.34 The very grammar of endurance suggests its unique form of relationality. As a verb, the act of enduring is both transitive and intransitive, 32

Le Witt, “Paragraphs,” 83. Ward, “Gray Zone,” 116. 34 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 16. 33

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meaning that it can operate with or without a direct object. In the transitive use, we say that a person endures persons, places, and things to the extent that she tolerates or puts up with them; in the intransitive use, we say that a person endures insofar as she survives or remains in existence. The two situations are not unrelated: in the transitive use, survival is still at stake; and even in the absence of an explicit direct object, there is always at least one implicit element being endured: time itself. Hence, endurance is always performed in relation to forces that exceed the individual. Moreover, endurance troubles our certainty that the person who endures is wholly the active agent of the verb. Again, this equivocal sense of agency is detectable in how the word is used. Although we generally think of the direct object as receiving the action of the verb (if I open the door or paint the house, it seems clear that I am doing something to the object; it is not that the door or the house does something to me), there is a sense with endurance that the direct object itself enacts a force against the enduring body (if I endure the heat or endure the long journey, it seems less that I am doing something to the heat or to the journey than that these things are doing something to me). Even in the absence of a direct object, time would seem to take its toll on the one who endures. As these usages suggest, endurance is both something done and something undergone. We perform the act of endurance, but we are also made to endure by circumstances that exceed our command. In this way, endurance offers a very different sense of relationality from Bourriaud’s account of relational aesthetics, where participants would appear always to be fully in command of their (relational) activity. (This sense of unqualified agency seems to lie behind Bourriaud’s assertion that in the experience of relational art, “I see and perceive, I comment, and I evolve in a unique space and time,” as though, ironically, the “I” does this all by itself.35) Endurance is thus a willful act, but a willful act that confronts in repeated and sustained encounters the limits of individual agency. In suggesting as much, it should be clear that in addition to moving away from a focus on pain, I also depart from popular associations of endurance with the triumph of a heroic individual. For some writers, such associations of endurance with feats of heroism by extraordinary individuals who suffer through and overcome great challenges have made the term “endurance” one to be wary of. For instance, in writing about Burden’s 35

Ibid. See also Shannon Jackson’s critique of Bourriaud’s “frictionless environment” in Social Works, 46.

14

Introduction

work, Patrick Anderson expresses reservations about the language of endurance, which he describes as “that avant-garde rhetoric of survival that casts the value of a given performance in terms of the artist’s will.”36 Noting that Burden’s performances have often been aligned with endurance, Anderson writes, “many popular and critical responses to Burden have either indemnified or indicted this tendency in his work seemingly to venerate the artist above all else. ‘Burden survived,’ such responses seem to cry, ‘against all odds.’”37 Importantly, Anderson links this view of endurance with an investment in “masculinity in its most stalwart and sturdy form,”38 and he notes that performances such as Shoot earned Burden a reputation as “the bad boy of avant-garde art produced in the 1970s,” reminding us that discourse celebrating performances of endurance as singular acts of boldness and daring is also often implicitly, if not explicitly, gendered.39 At the same time, endurance has also been practiced by many women, and it was used by explicitly feminist artists such as Eleanor Antin, Catherine Elwes, VALIE EXPORT, Gina Pane, and others who were making work in the same decade as Burden. Attempts to valorize this work have also frequently struggled against heroic notions of endurance, seeking to differentiate it from, as Deirdre Heddon puts it, “more ‘macho’ endurance work.”40 However, distinctions along gendered lines are often difficult to decide. For instance, attempting to distinguish similar body art works by women from those by men, Tracey Warr writes: “There is a fine line between work such as Pane’s which successfully evokes a universal empathy and work [such as Burden’s] which is narcissistic and about The Artist as hero.”41 What is noteworthy about Warr’s effort to mark a difference between formally similar work by women and men is how gendered terms are mobilized. Warr criticizes the “heroic” version performed by men as “narcissistic” while praising the version performed by women as producing a “universal empathy.” Yet, it is precisely the “personal” and allegedly not “universal” nature of women’s 36

Patrick Anderson, So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 82. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 25. 39 Ibid., 74, my italics. See also p. 60, where Anderson refers to “the spectacular imbrication of endurance and masculinity” (Anderson’s italics). 40 Deirdre Heddon, “The Politics of Live Art,” in Histories and Practices of Live Art, ed. Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 187. Here, Heddon is comparing and distinguishing Elwes’ Menstruation II (1979) to and from Stuart Brisley’s “more ‘macho’ endurance work, such as . . . And for today . . . nothing (1972).” 41 Tracey Warr, “Sleeper,” Performance Research 1.2 (1996), 3.

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performance art that has often earned women performance artists the label “narcissist.”42 Thus, the (gendered) terms of affirmation and censure remain the same, but they are allocated differently. Warr’s argument highlights the difficulty of accounting for the differences that gender makes without falling back on gendered oppositions, even if these are reversed (Warr herself asserts that the differences between men’s and women’s body art remain “elusive”). By paying attention to gender as well as to race and class and looking at performances by a diverse range of individuals in the following pages, I aim not only to steer away from a framework of heroism but to complicate the gendered assumptions that intersect with it as well. Rather than distinguishing “good” (nonheroic) versions of endurance from “bad” (heroic) versions, my argument is that endurance is itself a form that resists mastery – even in those instances where it might seem to perform it. Although Shoot has been described as intrepidly “deathdefying,”43 it challenges any sense of mastery. As a young man of draft age during the Vietnam War, Burden certainly could be seen as attempting to perform the heroic masculinity associated with the figure of the soldier who survives and overcomes in the face of gunfire. Twenty years after the event, Burden would describe Shoot as an attempt to gain control over a threatened injury. Noting that “being shot, at least in America, is as American as apple pie,” Burden described his performance as undertaking “to do it in this clinical way, to do something that most people would go out of their way to avoid, to turn around and face the monster and say, ‘Well, let’s find out what it’s about.’”44 Yet, rather than asserting Burden’s invincibility, Shoot exposed his vulnerability. In a photograph of Burden just before the trigger was pulled, one sees a young man standing squarely with his feet apart, his shoulders back, and his chest out; his 42

Numerous commentators have noted the tendency to describe performance art by women as narcissistic. See for example Rebecca Schneider’s discussion of Carolee Schneemann’s explicit body performance art, where she notes that “Schneemann was often dismissed as self-indulgent and narcissistic by the art establishment” (Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance [London and New York: Routledge, 1997], 31). Amelia Jones also notes that “body art, especially in its feminist varieties, has frequently been condemned (and occasionally exalted) for its narcissism” (Jones, Body Art, 46). And Jane Blocker writes that “It is rather commonplace to think of women’s performance art as having a more diaristic, personal quality and of men’s performance art as transcending the narcissism of personal reflection” (Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance [Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004], 32). 43 Roselee Goldberg, for instance, describes Burden’s performance work, including Shoot, as a series of “death-defying acts” (RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, revised and enlarged edition [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988], 159). 44 Burden quoted in Ward, “Gray Zone,” 119.

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Introduction

arms are held slightly away from his body. In this stance, he looks simultaneously broad and commanding and as though he is nervously holding the target for the bullet (his arm) away from the core of his body. He reads as sturdy and trembling at once. Contemplating Shoot in the context of the Vietnam War, we might see it not as reinforcing or uncritically celebrating the myth of an inviolable masculinity so much as a reminder that such notions have been mobilized in the context of war precisely in order to prepare young men for placing their bodies into positions of vulnerability. In the end, rather than mastering the threat of being shot by orchestrating a faceoff from which he would walk away with a grazed wound, Burden found himself coping with an injury for which he was not prepared. As he put it, “we didn’t even have any band-aids.”45 This lack of foresight could be attributed to hubris or naivety on Burden’s part, but regardless, it is also part of the piece. One needs only to look at a photograph of Burden after he was shot to see in his glazed over eyes and slackened jaw a look that confirms that Burden was not fully in charge of this experience (Figure I.1).

Enduring Bodies Ultimately, what Burden turned around to face in Shoot was not his own ability to act so much as his capacity as an embodied subject to be acted upon. Specifically, and not too hyperbolically, we could say that he turned to face the potential of his body to be killed. He charged his friend with possessing – and resisting – the inverse capacity: the capacity to kill. Of course, we all possess both capabilities. Though most commentators focus on Burden’s experience, assuming that he provides the point of identification for viewers (an assumption facilitated by a tendency to read Burden as “unmarked”; a similar performance by a woman and/or a person of color would be unlikely to be read unquestioningly in the same way), one could equally place oneself in the marksman’s shoes.46 What compelled him to agree to this performance? Was he hesitant to do so? Was he worried about injuring his friend? In conjuring the 45 46

Sharp and Béar, “Chris Burden,” 54. Consider, for example, Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension (2007), in which Bilal lived in a gallery space at Flatfile Galleries in Chicago for one month during which, twenty-four hours a day, online viewers could shoot at him using a remote controlled paintball gun and/or protect him by diverting the gun away. Informally referred to as “Shoot an Iraqi,” Bilal’s piece brought his identity as an Iraqborn artist to the fore. Rather than assuming that viewers would put themselves in his shoes, Bilal explicitly gave audience members the opportunity to identify (and participate) as sharpshooters – as well as potentially identifying with him.

Enduring Bodies

Figure I.1.

Chris Burden, Shoot, F Space, Santa Ana, CA, November 19, 1971 © 2017 Chris Burden / licensed by The Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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18

Introduction

capacities to kill and be killed, Shoot invokes a fundamental condition of embodiment which, for Emmanuel Levinas, provides the basis of ethical responsibility. It is possible to read the two men facing one another as a dramatization of Levinas’ description of the epiphany of the face: “the face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the ‘You shall not kill.’”47 While Shoot is particular in almost literalizing this scenario (in facing his friend, Burden both tempted murder and demanded against it), a broader investigation of what it means to exist in the form of a body that both acts and is acted upon lies at the heart of the performance of endurance. As I will argue, at stake in such explorations are ethical questions about how we relate to others and act responsibly toward them as well as political questions about what it means to live in relation to a range of biopolitical systems that act upon us in various ways. In acknowledging the capacity of bodies to be acted upon, endurance, I argue, actively explores an inherent passivity in embodiment itself. Consider, after all, that our embodied existence begins in a state of almost complete dependency, which defines us as relational beings. We are born through no will of our own, reliant upon the actions of others for our survival. In the psychoanalytic account, this primary passivity is the precondition for our subsequent development as subjects. As Judith Butler explains: “A formation in passivity, then, constitutes the prehistory of the subject, instantiating an ego as object, acted upon by others, prior to any possibility of its own acting.”48 I want to linger for a moment on this notion of the ego – which Sigmund Freud described as “first and foremost a bodily ego”49 – as an object. As the first instantiation of a self, prior to the formation of the subject, the ego emerges in relation to an experience of passivity and of one’s body being treated as an object. As Butler writes, “I am, prior to acquiring an ‘I,’ a being who has been touched, moved, fed, changed, put to sleep.”50 And, I have had all of these things done to me and for me (or else I would not have survived) long before I could speak or act on my own behalf. Crucially, Butler notes that this “prehistory of the subject” never stops happening.51 47

Emmanuel Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 167. 48 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 87. 49 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 20. 50 Butler, Giving an Account, 70. 51 Ibid., 78.

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Although we might imagine that we leave our infantile dependency and our inability to speak for ourselves behind, we persist in what I call our objecthood, both physically, insofar as our bodies remain capable of being acted upon and insofar as we continue to experience our bodies to some extent passively (we age, for instance, regardless of our will), and psychically, insofar as our subjectivity always remains partially opaque, both to ourselves and others (we are never able to account fully for ourselves52). In its willful engagement with passivity, the performance of endurance takes on this frequently disavowed feature of embodiment. To be clear, in using the word “objecthood” I am not suggesting that endurance performances treat the body as though it were some inert lump of material, completely divorced from subjectivity. Rather, I take this term to describe the physical and psychic consequences of existing as a body that is always in relation, that is both dependent upon and vulnerable to the actions of others, and that is resistant to being wholly identifiable. In other words, objecthood describes the condition of existing as a body whose capacity to be acted upon precedes any ability to act of one’s own volition, and whose dependence upon others exceeds any capacity to make oneself known. Objecthood, in this sense, is not the opposite of subjecthood at all; it is its precondition – one that we all share. It is worth noting that to stress objecthood as fundamental to relationality is to take a different step away from the notion of a self-sufficient subject than that usually taken within the discourse on performance art and body art, which has largely turned to the notion of intersubjectivity. In her influential writing on body art, Amelia Jones argues that body art works encourage an “opening of the art-making and -viewing process to intersubjective desires and identifications.”53 She argues that works that “perform the artist’s body in or as the work of art”54 produce dynamics “where the distances between artist and artwork, artist and spectator are definitively collapsed,” thus “challeng[ing] the reigning ideology of disinterested criticism.”55 Refusing a Cartesian notion of the subject with its mind/body dualism, body art reveals instead that subjects (in this case, both the artist and the viewer) are contingent rather than complete in themselves.56 The argument that I am making here also understands 52

Ibid., 20. Jones, Body Art, 26. 54 Ibid., 25. 55 Ibid., 8. 56 Ibid., 9–10. 53

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Introduction

subjects as contingent: as always in relation and as never wholly selfdetermining. However, whereas Jones argues that “body art projects explicitly stage the phenomenological model of intersubjectivity, in which the exchange of subjectivities (their intertwining) takes place through the engagement of bodies/subjects as well as, more specifically, the reversibility of expression and perception (as well as of subject and object),”57 performances of endurance often confront viewers with bodies that resist identification and do not seem to open themselves up to “exchange,” “intertwining,” or “reversibility”  – even while they make evident their relationality. Whereas Jones emphasizes that “Body art practices solicit rather than distance the spectator, drawing her or him into the work of art as an intersubjective exchange; these practices also elicit pleasures,”58 performances of endurance also frequently alienate viewers, producing experiences that can be particularly unpleasurable. Enduring this discomfort will turn out to be a vital part of experiencing these performances. The alienation that can be produced by performances of endurance is related to what Fred Moten calls “the resistance of the object.”59 Adrian Piper is, for Moten, a key example of a performance artist who performs such a resistance. Although Moten does not explicitly discuss Piper’s Catalysis Series (1970–1), one can read this series of performances as an exploration of the body’s objecthood and of the impact that this object/ body can have on others. For these performances, Piper intentionally violated social norms of bodily comportment in public spaces without providing any explanation that would frame or make sense of her performances for her inadvertent viewers. For instance, in Catalysis I, she rode the subway and browsed in a bookstore wearing clothing that had been soaked in a solution of vinegar, eggs, milk, and cod liver oil for a week. In Catalysis III, she covered her shirt with white paint, wore a sign reading “Wet Paint,” and went shopping for gloves in a Macy’s department store. And in Catalysis IV, she rode the bus, the subway, and the elevator in the Empire State Building with a large red towel stuffed into her mouth and hanging out of it.60 In performing such actions, she forced unsuspecting viewers to experience her body (a body also marked by gender and race) in unexpected ways. The photographs of these performances depict uncomfortable 57

Ibid., 106, Jones’ italics. Ibid., 31. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN and London: 2003), 1ff. 60 See Lucy Lippard, “Catalysis: An Interview with Adrian Piper,” TDR: The Drama Review 16.1 (March 1972), 76–8. 58 59

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scenes, not only because we must imagine the discomfort of Piper’s body covered in cold, wet, and stinking substances, or the feeling of her mouth stuffed to gagging point, but because we see in the looks of passersby, both at and away from Piper, their difficulty in encountering her body, a body that offers no account of itself, no explanation of why she has entered their shared space in this way. In images of Catalysis III, passersby leave a wide space between their bodies and Piper’s paint-covered body, staring at her as though to ensure the distance remains in place. Equally, we see in the turned backs and averted gazes of fellow bus passengers during Catalysis IV an active withdrawal, a kind of consolidation of the self in an attempt to avoid the impact of the object that Piper presented (Figure I.2).

Figure I.2. Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970. Performance documentation: five silver gelatin print photographs, 16” × 16” (40.6 × 40.6 cm). Detail: Photograph #4 of 5. Photo credit: Rosemary Mayer. Collection of the Generali Foundation, Vienna. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin and Generali Foundation.

22

Introduction

If, as Moten writes, there is a “resistance of the object,” it is both a resistance by the object and a resistance to the object. Returning to Shoot, it is clear that in presenting his body as an object vulnerable to the action of another, Burden did not reveal very much about himself as a subject. As Ward writes, “the wound (even the intended graze) may be seen to have opened out Burden’s body, without revealing any distinctive interiority.”61 Burden made explicit that “there would be no explanation as to why these things had happened, or what it meant.”62 Thus, while exposing his body’s capacity to be pierced or penetrated by another, Burden also performed the opacity of his objecthood. Resistance by an object is often met with resistance to that object, and it is no surprise that Burden’s performances have sometimes been described as “passive aggressive.”63 It is usually taken for granted that passive aggression is a bad thing. Yet this accusation also reveals the very power that the passive body has to act upon us. Whereas intersubjectivity emphasizes the “intertwining of self and other”64 (an intertwining that is complex, but which can sometimes appear to occur without resistance), a theory of relationality attentive to objecthood also recognizes the experience of separateness. It acknowledges both our interdependency (we are not self-sustaining; we require others to participate in our survival) and our separateness from others who possess the capacity to withdraw or turn their backs on us (we can be ignored, abandoned, and neglected). We are vulnerable, then, in our openness to the actions of others and in our distinctness from others who, in their own objecthood, remain partially opaque to us just as we remain opaque to them. This is not always a source of pleasure. Surely, the anguish of embodiment is that we are neither entirely connected nor entirely distinct.65 61

Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 96. 62 Burden quoted in ibid., 88. 63 See, for example, Peter Schjeldahl, “Chris Burden and the Limits of Art,” The New Yorker, May 14, 2007, www.newyorker.com, where Schjeldahl describes Burden’s performances as a “theatre of passive-aggressive cruelty.” 64 Jones, Body Art, 38. 65 Here, I would also distinguish the perspective that I am offering from Vivian Sobchack’s notion of “interobjectivity,” which she presents as “both complimentary and contrary” to the notion of intersubjectivity (311). Similarly to what I am proposing, Sobchack argues for a “recognition of ourselves as material objects” (295), and she notes the “vulnerability of our material objectivity” (287). Sobchack also acknowledges the potential for alienation in our encounters with (both human and nonhuman) objects; the possibility of being “overtaken by the passivity of immanence and the opacity of the material” (304, Sochack’s italics). However, while recognizing this, Sobchack’s aim is to find modes of perception that open toward a “non- alienated intertwining,” a sense of

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In exploring this condition, endurance practices reveal that our relationality and contingency are fraught with ambivalence. This ambivalence is apparent in the frequently polarized responses of audience members to this work. As Anderson notes, Burden’s performances in the 1970s elicited mixed responses from “audience members and critics who were either moved or repelled by the feats of endurance.”66 While Shoot has been celebrated within the history of performance art, Burden has also been called a “madman” and a “raving asshole.”67 Moreover, Shoot has continued to infuriate viewers so much that Burden once recalled “a man twenty years later  . . . calling [him] up with a crank call from Tennessee  . . . irate about it.”68 Such ambivalence has tended to be explained away in critical discourse on performance art, with defenders of performance works that arouse strong negative feelings in some viewers commonly dismissing hostile responses as symptoms of misunderstanding. Consider for example multimedia artist ORLAN’s The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN (1990-), a project involving a series of elective cosmetic surgeries designed to bring ORLAN’s face in line with a computer-generated image of her own face combined with features taken from art history. While this piece inspired strong levels of identification among members of the Modern Primitives from San Francisco who contacted ORLAN in the 1990s about recreating her bodily modifications on their own bodies,69 it has also inspired open hostility among other audience members, such as one woman who yelled at ORLAN during a conference at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1994, “You’re not crazy. You’re just rubbish. All this is about is shocking the bourgeoisie. It makes me want to give you a good slap.”70 Responding to such reactions, Kate Ince writes, “misinterpretations lead to hostilities, and ORLAN has been called a publicity freak and a surgery junkie, and had “chiasmatic reversibility, with the world and worldly things” (309). In contrast, I am suggesting that performances of endurance often explore the discomforts of objecthood – including the ways in which objecthood both connects us to others and separates us from them – as intrinsic to the experience of embodiment. See Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2004), particularly Chapter  12, “The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity,” 286–318. 66 Anderson, So Much Wasted, 59. 67 Linda Frye Burnham recalls such epithets being used by her viewing companions while watching Burden in a television interview in 1972 (Linda Frye Burnham, “‘High Performance,’ Performance Art, and Me,” TDR: The Drama Review 30.1 [Spring 1986], 20). 68 Burden quoted in Ward, No Innocent Bystanders, 89. 69 Andy Beckett, “Suffering for Her Art,” The Independent April 14, 1996, 18. 70 Jim McClellan, “Jim McClellan Meets Orlan, the Post-Human Eve,” The Observer April 17, 1994.

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Introduction

her mental equilibrium repeatedly called into question.”71 The suggestion would seem to be that only those who misunderstand ORLAN’s work would have such hostilities, and consequently the aggression that the piece provokes for many who encounter it remains unanalyzed. The negative affective response is considered separate from the artwork – a result of having missed the point. However, we might also note that the piece’s solicitation of a strong affective response, including aggression against it, is a pronounced part of what this performance does.72 Such ambivalence is, I argue, central to the experience of embodiment, which performances of endurance explore. In suggesting as much, I draw upon key insights from psychoanalysis. One can read Jacques Lacan’s well-known essay on the mirror stage as providing an account of the psychic ambivalence produced by the experience of objecthood.73 In this paper, Lacan proposes that it is when an infant first apprehends its body as an image that appears as a rigid totality that its primary sense of self (the bodily ego) is established. Lacan describes the moment as initially a jubilant one for the child, who (mis)recognizes itself as the gestalt in the mirror. Identifying with the coherent and bounded image of the body, the child is filled with a sense of wholeness and plenitude. But immediately, the child also recognizes the gap between its own uncoordinated and dependent body (the infant, who cannot yet stand up, is “held tightly by some prop, human or artificial”74) and the seemingly coordinated and independent image (which appears, object-like, as a “statue”75), and the child’s sense of completeness gives way to an apprehension of lack. The rigid image maintains its ideality, but this ideality no longer belongs to the child, who comes to experience the ideal ego as something external to itself toward which it will strive for the rest of its life. Thus, the externalized image of the body, which provides the individual’s primary identification, simultaneously functions as a site of alienation.76 71

Kate Ince, Orlan: Millenial Female (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 45. One important exception to the tendency to divert attention away from negative emotions is Jennifer Doyle’s Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2013), where Doyle argues specifically for the value of artworks that can produce hostile reactions in some viewers. 73 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 3–9. 74 Ibid., 4. 75 Ibid., 5. 76 “This gestalt . . . symbolizes the I’s mental permanence, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination” (Ibid., 4–5). 72

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Importantly, the commingling of identification and alienation that occurs in the mirror stage is not only about developing a sense of self; it is also about developing a relationship to the world, since the primary identification with one’s own image paves the way for all subsequent identifications. It does so because, in order to identify with external objects, the child must first recognize that the world of objects exists, and this is something that the infant realizes upon seeing itself as an object. Thus, the ambivalence of the mirror stage arises in part because the appearance of the statuesque body, which presents the promise of wholeness and individuation, simultaneously demarcates the individual as an object separated from other objects. Worse still, whatever compensation wholeness might have provided in the face of objecthood is denied by the sense that the body is “fragmented.”77 The experience entails a loss of unity with the self and “structures the subject as rivaling with himself.”78 As a result, the individual’s first relationship to the world of others is an aggressive one. The ego emerges as a defensive formation that Lacan describes as the “donned armor of an alienating identity” bent on holding together the body that threatens to fragment into bits and pieces, protecting the self from anything that threatens its wholeness.79 And what threatens the individual’s sense of wholeness but the world of objects of which he or she is a part, but whose apprehension has torn him or her asunder?80 In creating encounters with objecthood, performances of endurance also often invoke fantasies of wholeness and durability while simultaneously revealing the self ’s incompleteness and fragility, so it is not surprising that they can provoke ambivalent responses, from those that would exalt the artist to the status of hero (like the idealized image in the mirror) to those that would denigrate him or her as narcissistic, insane, or worse. One of the challenges, and the opportunities, presented by performances of endurance is to sustain such ambivalence. This argument might seem surprising. After all, we tend to think of ambivalence as a negative emotion to avoid. Yet coming to terms with objecthood and the ambivalence that it inspires has the potential to be an ethical act. Born 77

Ibid., 6. Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 23–4. 79 Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” 6. 80 My account of the mirror stage as an experience of grappling with the phenomenon of embodiment is indebted to the work of Kaja Silverman. For her illuminating account, see Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), in particular, the chapter “The Bodily Ego,” 9–37. 78

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Introduction

into a state of dependency, passive and acted upon by others, we enter the world into circumstances and relationships that we do not choose. Uncomfortable as this might be, this condition may be the foundation of our responsibility to others. Reading Levinas through a psychoanalytic lens, Butler argues that it is precisely our constitution in relations that we do not choose but upon which we are dependent that obligates us ethically: “It makes sense to assume that this primary susceptibility to the action and the face of the other, the full ambivalence of an unwanted address, is what constitutes our exposure to injury and our responsibility for the Other.”81 However, experience shows that this is not a responsibility we automatically take up. Overwhelmed by ambivalence, one may condemn others as objects, making them carry the burden of one’s own objecthood. As Butler writes, “condemnation becomes the way in which we establish the other as nonrecognizable or jettison some aspect of ourselves that we lodge in the other, whom we then condemn.”82 One manifestation of such attempts is the objectification of people on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and other marks of difference. Indeed, one way of understanding objectification is as a process through which a privileged individual or group projects their own objecthood onto others (casting them as less-than-human “objects”) in an attempt to secure the fantasy of being a self-sufficient subject for the self. Desiring a coherent sense of identity, the individual or group projects onto others the marks of absolute difference. This is an important reminder that psychic processes of identification and alienation play out in relation to a social world contoured by norms and power structures that give some people (such as those who are white, male, heterosexual, middle or upper class, nondisabled, and so on) more ready access to the category of subject while relegating others (those who are not these things) more regularly to the category of object.83 For some, the solution to this problem might seem to be to resist any notion of objecthood and to assert that human beings ought never to be considered objects. Yet, it is a disavowal of objecthood (and the discomforts that it involves) that leads to the attempt to erect a strict subject/object divide and the objectification of others in the first place. To take up an ethical relation 81

Butler, Giving an Account, 91, Butler’s italics. Ibid., 46. 83 This is why, as Kelly Oliver argues, we need “a psychoanalytic theory . . . that is thoroughly social” (Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression [Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004], xiii). I continue to think through the social dimensions of the mirror stage in subsequent chapters. See in particular my discussion of Frantz Fanon’s reworking of Lacan’s theory in Chapter 2. 82

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must be to accommodate rather than escape the ambivalence of objecthood. As Butler suggests, “a certain ambivalent gesture” marks “the action of ethics itself.”84 Performance art provides a productive framework within which to explore such concerns. Both continuous with life and a specialized realm within it, it has the ability to make conscious attractions and repulsions, receptiveness and resistance. It is a context in which our usual judgments are suspended (it is this that made Burden’s audience consent to Shoot, after all), so it holds the potential for the kind of suspension of judgment required for ethical deliberation. Performance art and body art have long engaged with the challenges of objecthood. From Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964-), to VALIE EXPORT’s TAPP und TASTKINO (Touch Cinema, 1968), to Barbara T. Smith’s Feed Me (1973), to Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974), to James Luna’s Artifact Piece (1986), to Bob Flanagan’s Visiting Hours (in collaboration with Sheree Rose, 1992), to Kira O’Reilly’s Untitled Action series (2003-), to Ron Athey’s Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle (2006), artists have placed their enduring bodies at the heart of open-ended performances that have explored the body’s capacity to be acted upon as well as the need of all bodies to be cared for and nourished. In doing so, such performances have inevitably confronted the problem of objectification – of women, of people of color, of people with disabilities, of queer people – sometimes risking accusations that the performers objectified themselves. In Chapter 1, I turn to Cut Piece and Rhythm 0, both of which made use of a similar endurance structure in which audience members were (and still are in the case of recent performances of Cut Piece) invited to interact with the artist’s body as an object for a sustained period of time, and both of which produced situations in the 1960s and 1970s in which the artists found themselves enduring aggressive responses from some audience members. Reading these performances through the lens of endurance, I argue that they responded differently to the problem of objectification of female and racialized bodies than reified feminist critiques have tended to allow. Rather than demonstrating how women are objectified in order to refuse objecthood, I contend, Ono and Abramović challenged their audiences to discover a new relationship to objecthood and an ethics not founded upon its defeat. Of course, questions about how we accommodate objecthood in our relations with others are also political questions that reach much further than the art context. Protestors have also used endurance practices to force a reckoning with their bodies. When disabled activists crawled 84

Butler, Giving an Account, 103.

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up the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington DC in 1990, in an action that would be credited with bringing about the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), or when asylum seekers in recent years in Australia, Turkey, and elsewhere have sewn their lips together in protest against their indefinite detention, they have employed endurance to resist violence against them and to refuse their abandonment by the state. Placing their bodies in the way of potential objectification, they have rejected a logic that wishes not to be confronted with objecthood and all that it implies – vulnerability, dependency, difference. In order to explore this further, I turn in Chapter 2 to an example of political protest that made use of an endurance structure in order to challenge racism and segregation in the United States in the 1960s. Specifically, I consider the Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins (and subsequent sit-ins in other cities), in which black civil rights activists occupied seats at “whites only” lunch counters and refused to move for days at a time in the face of violence and aggression from white segregationists. Drawing upon insights from the previous chapter and extending them into the social realm, this chapter shows how the staging of embodied encounters with objecthood over extended durations enabled a negotiation, and ultimately a revising, of existing social and legal systems and relational structures. At the same time, Chapter 2 continues to develop the theorization of endurance by considering how endurance’s engagement with passivity connects formally to practices of passive resistance.

Enduring/Living In its engagement with the conditions of embodiment, the performance of endurance also explores what it means to live. It explores, in other words, what it means as an embodied subject to persist over time. It is here that a concern with objecthood intersects with an interest in duration in the practice of endurance. It is here, too, that a brief performance such as Burden’s Shoot is linked with much longer acts of endurance, such as the five one-year-long and one thirteen-year-long performances of Tehching Hsieh (including a year- long collaboration with Linda Montano), which I discuss in Chapter  3. Built on plans and the following through of those plans over long durations, these performances, carried out between 1978 and 1999, explore the body-in-relation over the expanse of a lifetime. In bringing together performances of different lengths, the framework of endurance that I am proposing differs from an approach that

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would differentiate long durational performances from performance art practices more closely connected to body art. For instance, writing about Hsieh’s performances, Adrian Heathfield rejects the term “endurance art” (which he identifies with pain) and specifically distinguishes Hsieh’s work from body art.85 He argues that while sharing with body art “a questioning of subjectivity at embodied limits,” Hsieh’s work “takes a somewhat different course from that of Body Art, away from the explicit and suffering body-as-broken-object and toward sustained processes of lived subjection.”86 Heathfield suggests that the work’s emphasis on lived time distinguishes it from body art’s emphasis on the “body-as-object.”87 Yet, as Heathfield himself observes, persistence through time in Hsieh’s performances is specifically a bodily phenomenon.88 A key technique used in his first four performances makes this explicit: Hsieh shaved his head at the beginning of each performance and allowed it to grow unaltered for the duration. The growth of hair visible in photos taken during the performances serves as evidence of the passage of time and makes clear that these pieces entailed a body living and changing over this time. The growth of hair also reminds us that while the body acts, it is also experienced passively. Alongside Hsieh’s extraordinary effort through each performance, his hair grew regardless of his will. The slowness of hair growth  – unable to be witnessed on a day-to-day basis and yet constantly taking place  – tells us something about the pace and scale at which Hsieh’s performances explored the endurance of the body over time: the time of a life that cannot be witnessed in its entirety, only lived. In Hsieh’s “lifeworks,” as Heathfield evocatively calls them, questions of duration are inextricable from questions of embodiment. Rather than distinguishing between performances that foreground the body and performances that emphasize persistence over time, the understanding of endurance that I am proposing links them together by recognizing a continuity between the bearing of something or someone in a specific situation (endurance in the transitive sense) and a wider sense of surviving over time (endurance in the intransitive sense). This is not to deny that there are meaningful differences between performances that take place within a contained time and space before an audience and 85

Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 22. Ibid., 16. 87 Ibid. 88 Heathfield writes that one of the themes of Hsieh’s work is “how time is lived and felt in a body” (Ibid., 11). 86

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those that, in their extension over time, exceed the possibility for any audience member to witness them in their entirety. Clearly, the audience dynamics, for one thing, are different in such pieces. Yet, whereas Heathfield differentiates performances across the axis of time, contrasting long durational performance with “the temporality of eventhood ascribed to much performance work” and arguing that “extended duration lacks the distinction that separates the event from the mundane, the everyday,”89 I would suggest that the line between an “event” and “the everyday” is difficult to draw. Consider for example Marina Abramović’s House with the Ocean View (2002). For this performance, Abramović lived within the Sean Kelly gallery in New York City for twelve days. During this time, she remained atop three platforms, minimalistically designed as a bathroom, sitting room, and bedroom, and consumed nothing but water. (Ladder rungs made of upturned knives ensured that she would not come down, and nor would anyone climb up, for the duration.) During the gallery’s opening hours, members of the public could visit the gallery and witness Abramović in the space; a highpowered telescope allowed them to observe her closely if they chose. Here is a piece that took place over a delimited period of time within a clearly defined space. Here is a performance in which an artist offered up her body to be observed and interacted with (through the exchange of gazes) by audience members in a shared time and space. Yet, the performance also explored a “sustained process of lived subjection” (to fasting, to living and remaining within an ascetic space that lacked familiar comforts such as soft furnishings, to near constant exposure to an audience during all activities from showering to using the toilet), which exceeded any audience member’s ability to witness the whole thing. Though considerably shorter than Hsieh’s performances, it would still be impossible to distinguish between Abramović’s “everyday” and the art event during those twelve days.90 The question thus arises: at what point does a performance cease being an “event” and become something else? After twenty-four hours? After several days? A month? A year? To acknowledge the effects of duration (an element of every performance, after all) and the differences it can make is not necessarily to be able to make formal distinctions between long and short. 89 90

Ibid., 22. One might be tempted to distinguish between the periods of the performance when the gallery was open to the public and the periods of the performance when it was not, but it would be inaccurate to consider the former as the performance “event” and the latter as Abramović’s “everyday.” Both periods make up the piece, and both periods were part of Abramović’s life during this time.

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What ultimately unites performances of different durations for me is their formal engagement with the structure of endurance. Both Burden’s and Hsieh’s performances involve a plan and a committed following through of that plan; both explore the condition of existing as a body that is always in relation to a world one does not control; and both explore what it means to persist as a body that both acts and is acted upon. One thing that very long performances of endurance can do in exceeding the usual frameworks of art, both temporally and spatially (and here, we could consider examples such as Abramović and Ulay’s The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk [1988], which lasted ninety days, and Linda Montano’s “Art/Life” performances, including her 7 Years of Living Art + 7 Years of Living Art = 14 Years of Living Art [1984–98], in addition to Hsieh’s performances) is expand our view of the systems of relation that inform a person’s life. Thus, while my discussions in Chapters  1 and 2 largely focus on how those performances navigate interpersonal relations (themselves structured by norms and laws around gender and race among other things), my discussion of Hsieh’s performances in Chapter 3 takes a wider view of the body’s relationality, drawing attention to a range of biopolitical mechanisms, including economic and legal systems, which differentially shape how bodies endure over their lifetimes. As will become clear, our relations to such systems - which, as Michel Foucault wrote in an early account of biopolitics, have the “power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” – are as ambivalent as our relations to others.91 At the same time, the demand for ethical responsibility from these systems is as politically urgent. There is also another formal connection between endurance performances of different durations, which relates to how we can conceive of the longevity of the work. Regardless of their length, the performances considered in this book are linked in their ability to affect viewers who did not see them live. In their circulation following the performance, many of these pieces become formally similar, following patterns of performance art documentation that have dominated the form until very recently.92 For all except the handful of people present at Burden’s performance, encountering Shoot has most likely meant reading a short description and seeing a few black and white images. In recent years, 91

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, (1978, 1990), 138, Foucault’s italics. 92 I am referring to a pairing of a photograph (or photographs) with a brief description, a standard format that has been traced to Chris Burden’s own documentation practices. See my discussion in Chapter 4.

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it has also probably meant listening to and viewing a brief film clip on YouTube.93 This is possible because Burden was “shot” by a photographer and a filmmaker as well as by a sharpshooter with a gun. The acts of the camera people were not secondary to the performance; rather, as the double entendre of Burden’s title suggests, they were a central part of it. The resulting photographs and film footage have become the principal mode of viewing for future audience members  – future audience members whom Burden explicitly aimed to address.94 Similarly, for most people, to encounter Hsieh’s One Year Performances is largely to encounter brief statements outlining the conditions for his performances, a selection of photographs, and some film footage. Playing on this formal similarity, Jeannette Ingberman and Papo Colo, in their Endurance exhibition at New York’s Exit Art in 1995 – still, one of the most significant attempts to delineate endurance as a field of practice – were able to place performances that were very different in terms of their duration (including Shoot and Hsieh’s One Year Performances) side by side, presenting all of the works with equally sized photographs accompanied by brief textual descriptions. What this mode of exhibition suggests is that the life of endurance is not only the time of the live performance. Here, I steer away from performance discourse’s long-held fascination with ephemerality.95 For Peggy Phelan, it was “specifically, a genre of performance art called ‘hardship art’ or ‘ordeal art’” that most exemplified the “disappearance” of performance in her landmark text, Unmarked.96 As I will consider further in Chapter 1, Phelan’s reading of the dynamics produced by such work is enormously valuable. Yet endurance, as I understand it here, also contrasts with Phelan’s claim that “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.”97 My argument is that endurance exceeds the live event. Endurance works begin with decisions and plans made beforehand  – with invitation letters, 93

As far as I am aware, documentation of Shoot was first posted to YouTube on June 28, 2008 by Waldir Barreto, www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE5u3ThYyl4. 94 Ward notes that Burden was very much aware of “primary and secondary audiences” (Ward, No Innocent Bystanders, 89). 95 For an account of the history of this idea, see Rebecca Schneider’s “Small History of Ephemerality,” in Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 94–6. 96 Phelan, Unmarked, 152. 97 Ibid., 146, Phelan’s italics.

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notarized agreements, and instructions posted on walls  – and they continue afterward through the circulation of documents and accounts that generate powerful effects on viewers long after the performances are over. This is as true for performances that last a few minutes as it is for performances that last years. Hence, the time of endurance is multiple: it is the palpable experience of lived time, but it is also the time of plans and promises that reach forward to a future that will have been, and the time of recollection of a past that is not over yet. It is the time before the trigger was pulled, when Burden made a plan and invited his friends to watch him carry it out. It is the time of the gun being fired, the shot too quick to see but undoubtedly the sound must have reverberated through the bodies of everyone present. It is the time it took to bandage Burden’s arm and the time it took for his body to heal. It is the time, twenty years later, when an irate man phoned Burden to give him a piece of his mind. And it is every time that Shoot has been exhibited, written or read about.98 A salient implication here is that documentation  – including photographs, film and video, scripts and scores, and written and oral accounts – is part of endurance. Both preceding and following what we usually think of as the live performance, and often being interwoven throughout, it is a vital site for endurance’s lasting effects and affects. I explore the significance of this suggestion further in Chapter 4 through a consideration of Marina Abramović’s 2005 performance project, Seven Easy Pieces – a work in which Abramović “reperformed” in the mode of endurance the documentation of performance art pieces from the 1960s and 1970s. By including documentation within the form of endurance, I am not suggesting that documentation ultimately supplants the performance. Along these lines, Philip Auslander has argued that the act of documentation reveals that “performance is always at one level raw material for documentation.”99 As a result, he argues that the live event is of little concern. Taking Shoot (once again) as his example, he asserts that “the presence of [an] initial audience has no real importance to the performance as an entity whose continued life is through its 98

For another discussion of how Burden’s Shoot “lives on today” through discourse and various forms of reproduction, see Christopher Bedford, “The Viral Ontology of Performance,” in Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Bristol, UK, and Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2012), 77–87 (86). 99 Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28.3 (September 2006), 3.

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documentation.”100 Furthermore, he argues that Shoot’s impact “may not even depend on whether the event actually happened.”101 I take a different position. For Auslander, rather than providing a record of an event, the performance document “reflects an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility.”102 In this, he again connects performance art (exemplified by Shoot) with conceptual art, suggesting, it would seem, that in such work it is the idea above all that lasts. Yet, as I suggested earlier, the decisive difference between endurance and conceptual art is that with endurance it does matter that the performance actually happens. It matters precisely because the carrying out of the performance does not “disappear” but materializes in particular ways that continue to unfold into the future. Contrary to Auslander’s suggestion, the fact that a small, invited audience watched Shoot is critical to my reading of this work. Questions about why the audience didn’t intervene pulse through this piece: Was it because it was a work of art? Was it because Burden had convinced them it was safe? Was it because Burden was a man? Was it because his wife was there, and she let him do it? If the audience had interrupted the performance, Shoot would persist for us differently. It seems necessary to add that taking into account what actually transpires in a performance does not mean taking a naïve approach toward performance art’s “realness.” It is not simply to agree with the opposition in Burden’s statement, “Getting shot is for real . . . there’s no element of pretense or make-believe in it.”103 I have argued elsewhere against toosimplistic divisions between performance art and theatre on the basis that the first is “real” while the latter is not.104 Both performance art and theatre involve real actions, just as both involve elements of theatricality. Yet the realities involved in the making of theatre are often (though not always) repressed in order to conserve the coherence of the theatrical illusion, whereas performance art more often asks us to attend to those realities. This does not mean that the truth of the performance situation is always readily apparent, either during a performance or afterward in its documentation. The possibilities of not seeing or hearing correctly, of misremembering, and even of being deceived always remain. However, 100

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 9. Ibid. 103 Sharp and Béar, “Chris Burden,” 61. 104 See Lara Shalson, “On the Endurance of Theatre in Live Art,” Contemporary Theatre Review 22.1 (March 2012), 106–19. 101 102

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these are hazards of performance art precisely because it asks us to attend to its actualities. What performances of endurance ask us to pay attention to  – in whatever context they are performed  – are the consequences of the performers’ actions and the actions upon them. In the end, what makes Shoot different from a theatrical scene in which no actual bullets are fired (whether that scene is staged as part of a play or for the production of a photograph) is not that the first is “real” while the second is “fake.” It is that the consequences of the performers’ actions differ in each instance. Whereas we presume that the performer in the second instance walks away from the scene basically unharmed, we know that Burden required immediate medical attention, and presumably the pain of being shot lasted for some time after the initial audience had gone home. Furthermore, the psychological effects – on Burden, on the witnesses of his performance, and on those who encounter the work through its documentation  – have continued to reverberate long after the physical wound healed. What is often described as the “realness” of this action is an effect of its consequentiality. (For this reason, I also argue that endurance can be what links performance art and theatre in instances where the endurance of the performer onstage becomes apparent.105) Importantly, this notion of consequentiality is not a moral but a formal property of the work closely connected to the extension of endurance beyond the parameters of the live event. To acknowledge consequences is to recognize that a performance’s material impact continues after the ostensible end of the performance, making clear-cut boundaries between the artwork and life impossible. Certainly, consequences make it difficult to say when or where Shoot ends and Burden’s life begins. If the fact that Burden had to explain the gunfire to the police informs our understanding of the piece, then this is part of it. If the man who called Burden twenty years later informs our interpretation, then this bit of “audience interaction” is also part of it. Thus, endurance explores what it means to live a life with consequences, where our actions do not disappear into the past but have repercussions that extend into the future. This, then, is another way that the notion of endurance offered here differs from common understandings of hardship or ordeal. Rather than an “ordeal” to be passed through or triumphantly overcome, endurance is an investigation of what it means to last. 105

Ibid.

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Introduction

Encountering Endurance The chapters that follow expand upon and develop the ideas introduced here through extended readings of specific case studies, including the discourses that have surrounded them. This book does not attempt to provide an exhaustive history of endurance as a performance form. Its practice is too widespread for that, and intentional acts of endurance can be found in a range of contexts, from performance art and protest (my primary focuses here) to theatre, religion, and popular entertainment. Rather, I turn to selected examples that provide the opportunity to explore how endurance unfolds in particular situations, and which open up a range of considerations across them. As in this introduction, the chapters move from questions about the body’s objecthood and interpersonal relations to broader questions about our relationship to various institutions that shape our embodied experience throughout our lives. They move from considering discrete events to exploring long-term actions, and finally to a meditation on the ongoing life of endurance performances. By spending more time with fewer examples, my aim is to model the method of analysis that I argue performances of endurance require: one that stays with the work for a while, remaining with it even once the performance is ostensibly “over,” and one that attends to the material specificities of a performance and the relations that it puts into play. As with Shoot, the performances that I consider have each been taken as paradigmatic in some way: Ono’s and Abramović’s performances, discussed in Chapter  1, have held both period-defining status within the history of performance art and central prominence within discourses on feminist performance art more specifically.106 The lunch counter sit-ins, discussed in Chapter  2, are largely considered to be the first sit-ins to bear the name and thus stand out as inaugural instantiations of what is arguably the quintessential protest tactic of the 1960s.107 Tehching Hsieh, discussed in Chapter  3, has been called “the most genuine Endurance 106

In a talk at UC Berkeley, Frazer Ward named Ono’s and Abramović’s performances as bookends for a decade of performance art: “There’s a decade that begins with Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, in 1964, and ends with Marina Abramović’s reiteration-with-a-difference, Rhythm 0, in 1974” (“‘I don’t know. I left before it ended’: Performance Art 1965–75,” Visual Art in a Performative Mode Symposium, University of California, Berkeley, October 2003). 107 Actions resembling sit-ins had been performed before 1960, but the term itself was not widely used until the 1960s. “[S]it-in . . . appears to have been the first coinage with –in and to have obtained its widest use in the early 1960s, when there were sit-in demonstrations throughout the South, mostly at segregated lunch counters” (Kelsie B. Harder, “Coinages of the Type of ‘Sit-In,’” American Speech 43.1 [1968], 58).

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artist of all” by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith,108 for performances that Adrian Heathfield has described as “unparalleled in their use of physical difficulty over extreme durations.”109 And in Chapter 4, I take up what Amelia Jones has referred to as “the most celebrated and bestknown example”110 of a wave of reenactments in the twenty-first century, Marina Abramović’s 2005 performance project Seven Easy Pieces. I have chosen to focus on such prominent examples for a variety of reasons. One is the practical reason that, in their continued circulation, these performances provide substantial documentation as well as the opportunity to see how a number of people, including critics and scholars, have responded to them over time. Because I am interested in what endurance performances do (and continue to do), a key part of my methodology involves paying attention to audience response, both in terms of spectators’ or participants’ physical interactions in performances where audience engagement is a central part of the playing out of the work, and in terms of their affective responses. There are no audience surveys for these performances (although some artists have found other, nonscientific means for gauging audience reaction111). Rather, I look to the available documentation for clues about spectators’ reactions: where possible, I interpret the interactions of original audience members through close readings of videos and photographs; I analyze the responses reported in reviews and recounted in interviews; I also read the writings of critics and scholars as reflections of their own affective dispositions; and finally, I incorporate my own responses both to the documentation of historical actions and to those performances that I have attended. My aim is not to determine the truth about how everyone (or even most people) responds to these works. Nor is it to insist upon one meaning for the work based on these responses. It is, rather, to locate what is at stake in the performance of endurance  – aesthetically, ethically, and politically  – within the various and frequently conflicted responses it generates. In the process, I aim not only to shed new light on these influential performances (the perseverance of which, through discourse, documentation, and performance, goes to show that we have 108

Roberta Smith, “Art View; Still a Credo for Artists: Do as You Please,” New York Times, April 2, 1995, H42. 109 Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 11, my italics. 110 Amelia Jones, “‘The Artist is Present’: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR: The Drama Review 55.1 (Spring 2011), 23. 111 The documentation of Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces (2005), for instance, incorporates recordings of audience members discussing the work while it was being performed. See Marina Abramović, 7 Easy Pieces (Milan: Charta, 2007).

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not yet reached the end of what they have to offer), but to develop a theory of endurance that extends beyond them. My hope is that the ideas put forward here will provide a useful framework for others to explore the many performances of endurance, both historical and contemporary, that have played such a significant role in performance art and political protest since the 1960s. At the same time, my cases studies, in their very prominence within performance discourse, lend themselves to another aim of this book: to show how the theory of endurance offered here opens up different approaches to a number of debates within performance studies more broadly. Each chapter that follows seeks to recalibrate an existing argument in the field. My discussion of Ono’s and Abramović’s performances in Chapter  1 provides a different response to concerns about objectification that have pervaded discourses on body art since it emerged in the 1970s and that have specifically been at stake within feminist discourses on performance art by women. In the process, I navigate differently ongoing arguments about the relationships between audience and performer, viewer and viewed, subject and object, and active and passive modes of interaction. In turning to the lunch counter sit-ins in Chapter  2, I reconsider a relationship between performance art and political protest that has been both frequently assumed and frequently dismissed within performance scholarship. Moving beyond loose suggestions of influence or too-grand assertions of performance art’s efficacy as a mode of protest, this chapter takes another approach by investigating the formal connections between these practices. At the same time, it offers an alternative to the “drama” metaphor that has often been used by both performance and social movement scholars to explain the workings of political protest. Chapter 3’s focus on endurance as a practice of living in Hsieh’s performances puts pressure on the notion of “blurring the boundary between art and life,” which has been routinely celebrated within discourses on performance art. In contrast, it demonstrates that such affirmations often rely upon unexamined notions of “life” as a universal and homogenous medium, which fail to account for the social, political, and economic structures that influence how (and if ) different lives endure. Pursuing a more specific understanding of “life,” this chapter offers a different take on the relationship between art and life. Lastly, Chapter 4, through its discussion of Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces, engages with the question of how performance itself endures over time. Intervening in longstanding debates about the relationship between performance and its documentation, and more recent discourse on

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reenactment, it argues for the productiveness of endurance as an alternative to the prevailing terms of both “disappearance” and “remains.” I conclude the book with a brief Epilogue that returns to the context of protest and to questions of what it means to live in relation to social and political forces that variously nurture and neglect individual lives. Considering long-term acts of political protest in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I offer some final reflections on how endurance practices respond to the ethical and political challenges of the contemporary moment. ***

In an interview in the 1980s, reacting to a suggestion by her interviewer that performance art was “sensational,” “baffling,” and “indescribable,” performance artist Rachel Rosenthal distanced herself from what she described as “a very heroic period when a lot of the work had to do with personal endurance and physical danger.” It was this, she said, “that gave [performance art] its ‘bad’ rep.”112 Rosenthal’s response encapsulates so much about how endurance has been seen both by those who would dismiss performance art entirely for its association with physical danger and those who would seek to rescue performance art from the taint of a macho heroism. My hope is that this book will show that endurance – so central to the history of performance art, and extending so much further as well – has much more to offer than these terms have allowed.

112

Joe Brown, “Winter Stock, Actor’s Shock,” The Washington Post October 21, 1988, final edition, Weekend Section, N13.

chapter 1

Enduring Objecthood

In some of these works ... the artist has almost succeeded in transforming his own body into an object, albeit a human object, even for himself. – Willoughby Sharp1 The body, a spotlit organism in an alien world, is so thoroughly impinged upon by a merciless voyeurism which it assents to (or rather, sets up), that it becomes an object even to the consciousness of the one who possesses the body. – Max Kozloff2

In the 1970s, as performance art and body art were coming into their own as recognized practices, critics attempting to account for works incorporating artists’ bodies found themselves grappling with anxieties about the body’s status as an object. Most positive appraisals of body art at this time celebrated the form’s collapsing of distinctions between subject and object. For example, in an early article on the topic published in 1970, Willoughby Sharp proclaimed, “the artist’s body becomes both the subject and the object of the work. The artist is both the subject and the object of the action.”3 In her article, “Subject–Object: Body Art” (1971), Cindy Nemser described the “primary goal of body art” as “the desire to bring the subjective and objective self together.”4 Yet, from the beginning, the use of the body in performance art also gave rise to concerns that performance artists, rather than bringing subjecthood and objecthood together, were treating their bodies like objects in disconcerting ways. These concerns arose specifically in relation to performances, central to 1

Willoughby Sharp, “Body Works: A pre-critical, non-definitive survey of very recent works using the human body or parts thereof,” Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970), 16. 2 Max Kozloff, “Pygmalion Reversed,” Artforum 14.3 (Nov. 1975), 34. 3 Sharp, “Body Works,” 14. 4 Cindy Nemser, “Subject–Object: Body Art,” Art Magazine 46.1 (Sept.–Oct. 1971), 42.

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the burgeoning field of body art, in which artists appeared to endure some form of pain or injury. Thus, responding to works such as Barry Le Va’s Velocity Piece (1970), in which the artist ran back and forth between two walls, crashing his body into them at either end until he exhausted himself, and Dennis Oppenheim’s Rocked Circle – Fear (1971), in which Oppenheim stood still within a five-foot-diameter circle while a collaborator dropped rocks into the circle from a window above, Nemser argued that “the detached manner” with which many artists seemed to approach the “terrible torments” they inflicted upon themselves was ultimately at odds with “the desire to know oneself as both subject and object in relation to one’s surroundings.”5 Rather than collapsing the distinction between subject and object, Nemser worried that in treating their bodies as “materials or instruments” and in taking a “clinical attitude toward pain,” body artists might come closer to treating their bodies as pure objects.6 That one would be uneasy about approaching the body as an object is, I would suggest, widely taken as common sense. A key problem lies in the relations that such a view of the body would seem to encourage. Max Kozloff, responding in 1975 to Le Va and Oppenheim’s performances, as well as to performances by Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, and Chris Burden, described the body in performance as being “so thoroughly impinged upon by a merciless voyeurism which it assents to (or rather, sets up), that it becomes an object even to the consciousness of the one who possesses the body.”7 He worried that such a voyeuristic relation to the body could lead “to considering others as less than human. Crimes that violate bodies depend, in one degree or another, on our propensity to turn people into things,” he wrote.8 As Kozloff’s concerns reflect, to regard the body as any kind of object would seem to be always to risk a dehumanizing objectification. In this chapter, I want to reconsider the notion of the body-as-object as a distinct concern of 1960s and 1970s performance art and offer some different responses to the anxieties that this notion has tended to produce. What might be at stake in exploring the body as an object - that is, as a material entity capable of being acted upon? Why would performance artists set out to endure objecthood, even though it could mean risking objectification? In particular, what might be at stake for those already 5

Ibid. Ibid. 7 Kozloff, “Pygmalion Reversed,” 34. 8 Ibid. 6

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at heightened risk of objectification? For, if concerns about treating the body as an object arose in response to early body art works by men (the artists named above are notably male, though Kozloff did go on in his essay to mention the work of Eleanor Antin, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Lynda Benglis), the risks of voyeurism and objectification were especially pronounced for female performance artists, because the female body already existed conventionally as an (often sexualized) object in art – that is, in art made not by women themselves, but by men. Thus, for female artists to use their bodies in their art meant (and arguably still means) navigating a dynamic in which women’s bodies were already more likely to be exposed to voyeurism and objectification. This also made the project “to bring the subjective and objective self together” a distinct one for female artists in the 1960s and 1970s. If male artists aimed to do so by placing their (usually unseen) bodies within the frame of their art, thereby risking the kind of voyeurism and objectification that Kozloff described, female artists who made art with their bodies needed to work much more strenuously to assert their subjecthood in the face of an already prevalent objectification by demonstrating their status as art makers in charge of their own bodily display. As Wilke said in reference to her own work, including her What does this represent/What do you represent (Ad Reinhardt) (1978), a photographic piece in which Wilke posed naked with her legs spread, surrounded by toy guns, “I say Hannah Wilke is making this art. It’s mine . . . I’m me, doing my own portrait. I’m in control of my body.”9 The difficulty of making such a move, however, is evident in the fact that despite such statements, women who used their bodies in their art in the 1970s often found themselves being accused of simply playing up to their own objectification.10 What could it mean, then, for female artists to perform the (female) body as an object? One influential answer would emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s. Looking back at performance art by women from the 1960s and 1970s, feminist theorists at this time argued that the claims to 9 10

Wilke quoted in Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 300 n. 24, italics in Jones. Lucy Lippard described this conundrum in 1976 as follows: “Men can use beautiful, sexy women as neutral objects or surfaces, but when women use their own faces and bodies, they are immediately accused of narcissism. . . . Because women are considered sex objects, it is taken for granted that any woman who presents her nude body in public is doing so because she thinks she is beautiful. She is a narcissist, and Acconci, with his less romantic image and pimply back, is an artist” (Lucy Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art” [1976], in Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968–2014, second edition, ed. Hilary Robinson [Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015], 341).

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agency made by female body artists were less naïve than earlier feminists had assumed. They argued that female performance artists navigated the double bind facing them by using their bodies hyperbolically, not to lay claim to an essential subjectivity, but to draw attention, through their own presentation of their bodies, to imbalanced relations of looking where women functioned as “passive” objects to be seen. Jeanie Forte, for instance, wrote in her article “Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism”: “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, coincident with the women’s movement, women used performance as a deconstructive strategy to demonstrate the objectification of women and its results.”11 Faith Wilding’s 1972 performance, Waiting – a piece in which Wilding rocked back and forth while recounting a list of events for which girls and women conventionally wait throughout their lives, from “waiting for Mommy to brush my hair,” to “waiting for my first date,” to “waiting for my baby to come”  – was a primary example for Forte of how women’s performance art raised “awareness of the subtle ways in which women are denied an active role in the constructed paths of their own lives.”12 In her book The Explicit Body in Performance, Rebecca Schneider developed such claims further, arguing that early feminist performance art works, such as Carolee Schneemann’s 1963 Eye/Body, in which Schneemann incorporated her own nude and painted body within an installation that she had created, used the explicit body in performance to explicate, or render visible, the cultural assumptions that “aligned active with masculine and passive with feminine”13 and “kept women marginalized as subject seeing, central as object seen.”14 And, Amelia Jones, writing about Hannah Wilke, argued that “precisely because feminist body artists enact themselves in relation to the long-standing Western codes of female objectification  . . ., they unhinge the gendered oppositions structuring conventional models of art production and interpretation (female/object versus male/acting subject).” For her, Wilke’s acts of posing within her work served the function of “reiteratively exaggerating it beyond its veiled patriarchal function of female objectification.”15 Such arguments offer powerful and persuasive ways of reading many performance art works by women which stage the apparently passive 11

Jeanie Forte, “Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism,” Theatre Journal 40.2 (May 1988), 218, my italics. 12 Ibid. 13 Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 36. 14 Ibid., 38. 15 Jones, Body Art, 152, Jones’ italics.

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female body, and they continue to inform contemporary understandings of 1960s and 1970s body art by women. However, as I aim to show, such interpretations do not capture all of the ways in which female artists have performed the passive body, nor all of the implications that we might draw from such performances. In the following pages, I look at two influential art works from this period  – Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964–) and Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974) – to offer another feminist argument about how body art works by women, specifically works involving the enduring body, challenge objectification, not through the hyperbolic presentation of the mechanisms of voyeurism and objectification, but through an insistence upon coming to terms with objecthood itself. In the process, I hope to complicate abiding assumptions that regarding the body as an object is, quite simply, a bad thing, and to show why a different approach to objecthood might be especially urgent for those most at risk of objectification. Though different in substantive ways, as I will discuss, Ono’s and Abramović’s performances are useful to consider together for several reasons. Most pertinently, both performances were (and are in the case of ongoing reiterations of Cut Piece) carried out according to a structure of endurance in which the performer physically commits to a plan established beforehand whose outcomes are not determined in advance. Specifically, both engaged in a particular mode of endurance in which the artists presented their bodies as objects to be interacted with by audience members. Positioned at either end of an era of body art about which Lucy Lippard wrote “when [Bruce] Nauman was ‘Thighing,’ Vito Acconci was masturbating, Dennis Oppenheim was sunbathing and burning, and Barry Le Va was slamming into walls. It seemed like another very male pursuit  ... not likely to appeal to vulnerable women artists,”16 Ono’s and Abramović’s performances both highlight the importance of women’s explorations of endurance in this period and provide another view of how female performance artists negotiated the risks of making art with their bodies.

Beyond Voyeurism Both Cut Piece and Rhythm 0 center on an invitation to interact with a tenaciously passive female body. In Cut Piece, performed by Ono herself five times between 1964 and 1966 and once in 2003, and performed by numerous other people to the present day, the performer sits motionless 16

Lippard, “Pains and Pleasures,” 340–41.

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Figure 1.1 Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964. Performed at Théâtre Le Ranelagh, Paris, France, on September 15, 2003 Photo: Ken McKay, REX/Shutterstock.

while members of the audience are invited one by one to cut away a piece of the performer’s clothing (Figure  1.1).17 The performance concludes when either there is no clothing left or the performer ends it. In Rhythm 0, performed once by Abramović in 1974, audience members were presented with seventy-two items – instruments of both pleasure and pain, including a rose, honey, wine, a gun, a bullet, paint, and a whip – and invited to use these items to interact with Abramović’s body in any way they liked for six hours. Both pieces require(d) the active participation of audience members who interact(ed) physically with the artists, who remain(ed) insistently passive throughout. Both pieces also resulted in the artists enduring violent responses from some audience members in the 1960s and 1970s: on at least one occasion, Ono was threatened with the scissors (as she recalled of her first performance in Kyoto, one man “took the 17

Ono performed Cut Piece at Yamaichi Hall in Kyoto as part of the Contemporary American AvantGarde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure (1964); at Sogetsu Kaikan Hall in Tokyo as part of the Yoko Ono Farewell Concert: Strip-Tease Show (1964); at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York as part of New Works of Yoko Ono (1965); and twice at the Africa Centre in London as part of the Destruction in Art Symposium (1966). She subsequently performed Cut Piece at the Théâtre Le Ranelagh in Paris in 2003. See note 48 for a list of performances of Cut Piece by other performers.

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pair of scissors and made a motion to stab me. He raised his hand, with the scissors in it  . . .. But the hand was just raised there and was totally still. He was standing still . . . with the scissors, . . . threatening me”18); and Abramović’s life was threatened when some audience members loaded the gun, placed it in her hand, and pointed it at her head.19 Though not originally articulated by either artist as being about gender, both pieces would come to be read as works that address the objectification of women within voyeuristic viewing structures. Cut Piece, in particular, would be claimed as a protofeminist performance in the 1990s.20 (The feminist embrace of Rhythm 0 has been more hesitant, for reasons that will become clear.) The readings that emerged in this period, and which remain widely accepted today, understand Cut Piece very much as a piece that “demonstrate[s] the objectification of women and its results.” Kristine Stiles wrote in an exhibition catalogue in 1993 that Cut Piece “vividly demonstrates ... the potential for objectification of the ‘other.’”21 In a catalogue essay in 1994, Marcia Tanner described Cut Piece as “fiercely feminist” and asserted that it addresses “serious issues  – in this case voyeurism, sexual aggression, gender subordination, violation of a woman’s personal space, violence against women.”22 In 1996, Thomas Crow wrote that “it is difficult to think of an earlier work of art that so acutely pinpoints (at the very point when modern feminist activism was emerging) the political question of women’s physical vulnerability as mediated by regimes of vision.”23 And in 1997, Kathy O’Dell stated that Cut Piece “ironically replicat[es] stereotypically male practices of voyeurism, as well as stereotypically female states of passivity.”24 Similar readings have been offered repeatedly in exhibitions and descriptions of Cut Piece. Such interpretations arise from reading the physical interaction instantiated by the performance as the physicalization of a voyeuristic viewing relation. Laura Mulvey, reading classic Hollywood films, described this viewing relation 18

Barbara Haskell and John G. Hanhardt, eds., Yoko Ono: Arias and Objects (Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1991), 91. 19 A photograph of Rhythm 0, held by the Marina Abramović Archives, shows two men huddled over the gun, all four of their hands engaged in the task of loading it, suggesting that this sequence of actions was carried out by more than one person. 20 Kevin Concannon has traced the emergence of the feminist reading of Cut Piece back to Haskell and Hanhardt’s 1991 book, Yoko Ono: Objects and Arias. See Kevin Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece: From Text to Performance and Back Again,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30.3 (2008), 85. 21 Kristine Stiles, “Between Water and Stone: Fluxus Performance: A Metaphysics of Acts,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1993), 81. 22 Marcia Tanner, “Mother Laughed: The Bad Girls’ Avant-Garde,” in Bad Girls, ed. Tanner (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 62. 23 Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: America and European Art in the Era of Dissent (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 133. 24 Kathy O’Dell, “Fluxus Feminus,” TDR 41.1 (Spring 1997), 53.

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in 1975 as involving a “split between active/male and passive/female.”25 In this formulation, the female performer, despite her activity on screen, is rendered passive before the male viewer, who, despite sitting still in the dark, is figured as the active party. In reading Cut Piece in terms of voyeurism, the activation of the viewer that the performance brings about by inviting the audience to leave their seats to participate in the making of the work is interpreted as acting out, and thereby magnifying, the already active viewership implied by voyeurism. As Hannah Higgins put it, Ono’s performances of Cut Piece produced “a disconcerting actualization of voyeuristic language (‘I undressed her with my eyes’).”26 Photos of Cut Piece in catalogues and surveys have often supported such interpretations by showing male participants cutting Ono’s clothing, even though women participated in Ono’s performances as well.27 Yet such interpretations raise a number of questions about the implications of inviting audience members to participate in such an “actualization.” If O’Dell’s assertion that Cut Piece produced an “ironic” replication of voyeuristic dynamics suggests that the acting out of a voyeuristic viewing relation made it available for critique, Higgins’ sense that this actualization was “disconcerting” suggests that in inviting the act of cutting, Ono’s performances may also have allowed the very violation being critiqued to take place. How, then, are we to understand the invitation to the audience that is central to this piece? Significantly, Ono herself describes the invitation of Cut Piece as a gift. She drew inspiration from an allegory about the Buddha, which she learned as a child. In this story, the Buddha embarks upon an endeavor to give to the world whatever is asked of him.28 In Ono’s description, Cut Piece was built on the premise that “[i]nstead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give, the artist gives what the audience chooses to take. That is to say, you cut and take whatever part you want.”29 In order for this gift to be genuine, it was crucial that Ono offered her best self, so she “went onto the stage wearing the best suit [she] had. To think 25

Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 19. Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2002), 118. The photos used in major surveys of performance art, including Lisa Gabrielle Mark, ed., WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art; and Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007); RoseLee Goldberg Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998); Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan, eds., Art and Feminism (New York: Phaidon, 2001); and Tracey Warr, ed. and Amelia Jones (survey), The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon, 2000), all depict a male participant cutting Ono’s dress. Notably, the exhibition catalogue for Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2015, made the unique choice to show two images of women and one of a child cutting Ono’s dress, and none of a man (see Klaus Biesenbach and Critophe Cherix, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960– 1971 [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015]). 28 Haskell and Hanhardt, Arias and Objects, 91. 29 Ono quoted in Jieun Rhee, “Performing the Other: Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” Art History 28.1 (Feb. 2005), 106. 26 27

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that it would be OK to use the cheapest clothes because it was going to be cut anyway would be wrong.”30 When she performed Cut Piece again in 2003, Ono presented it as her “hope for world peace.”31 Such statements suggest a very different understanding of Cut Piece’s invitation to the audience than interpretations focused on voyeurism suggest. In the twenty-first century, several scholars have expanded the reading of Cut Piece established in the 1990s by paying attention both to Ono’s specific position as a Japanese-born woman living and working within the context of the New York avant-garde and to her performance of Cut Piece within specific national and artistic contexts: Julia Bryan-Wilson has read Cut Piece in the context of United States–Japanese relations after the United States bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II and argued that the cutting of Ono’s clothing cites the visual effects of atomic war.32 Jieun Rhee has considered the different ways in which Ono functioned as an “exotic ‘other’” in Japan (where she was exotic because of her association with the American avant-garde) and the West (where Ono was exotic because of her Asianness).33 And, James Harding has read Cut Piece in relation to the American avant-garde practice of collage, arguing that Ono’s performance demonstrated how collage techniques “easily accommodated a fetished [sic], voyeuristic humiliation of her own person.”34 Yet, the conundrums presented by the form of the performance remain under addressed. Though these analyses have added valuable layers to the prevailing interpretation, noting that objectification is an expression of racism and xenophobia as well as sexism, and greatly enriching understandings of Cut Piece’s symbolism by drawing out the cultural and historical implications of the act of shredding Ono’s clothing,35 they have continued to interpret the activity of the audience as the physical manifestation of an objectification that the piece condemns. Bryan-Wilson alone has argued that “Cut Piece does not simply accuse the audience for taking up the scissors.”36 Reading the piece as recreating images of survivors of atomic war in Japan – images that were used in 30

Ibid. Michael Bracewell, “Review: Yoko Ono, Théâtre du Ranelagh, Paris, France,” Frieze 79, November 11, 2003, https://frieze.com. 32 Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” Oxford Art Journal 26.1 (2003), 99–123. 33 Rhee, “Performing the Other,” 114. 34 James Harding, Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists and the American Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 97. 35 In addition to Bryan-Wilson’s illuminating reading of the aesthetics of cut clothing in relation to the effects of the atomic bomb, Rhee offers a suggestive interpretation of the symbolism of cutting clothing as the antithesis of the making of a traditional kimono, which is assembled from pieces of fabric that have been cut as little as possible (Rhee, “Performing the Other,” 109). 36 Bryan-Wilson, “Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” 103. 31

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part by the US army “to illustrate the suffering of the enemy, to document and scientifically measure the bomb’s consequences”37 – Bryan-Wilson argues that Ono’s 1960s performances of Cut Piece involved the audience in an act of memorialization. I am moved by the idea that Ono’s performance might embody such images of human vulnerability. However, the audience’s role in this action remains ambiguous. Bryan-Wilson’s interpretation depends upon reading the audience’s actions as purely symbolic: “Ono’s work metaphorises rather than embodies violence,” she writes.38 Yet, given that the symbolic act of Cut Piece was actualized (Ono was stripped, and at times with real aggression), the question of what it could mean to involve participants in replicating the visual effects of such an annihilating act of objectification remains. Rhythm 0 also presents questions about how to interpret the audience’s behavior, with notable differences. Like Cut Piece, it was built on an invitation to the audience to interact with the performer’s body; and like Cut Piece, the audience’s actions ultimately shaped the performance. However, whereas Ono’s piece specifies to a large extent the action that spectators should undertake, Abramović’s did not. As a result, Abramović opened herself up to a far greater range of responses, including more destructive and more nurturing acts. In practice, Abramović’s performance of Rhythm 0 resulted in her enduring multiple acts of violence. Although the piece did not prescribe that her clothes be cut from her body, they were. She was also pierced with the thorns of the rose and had her throat cut and her blood drunk, in addition to having the loaded gun placed in her hand and held to her head.39 The photographic documentation of Rhythm 0 also indicates that audience interactions with Abramović were gendered and sexualized: the primary participants appear to have been men (crowd shots show more men than women in the audience, and of sixty-nine photographs from Abramović’s archive, only one captures a woman taking a leading role in engaging with Abramović); and the photographs show one man in particular pulling open Abramović’s shirt and revealing her breasts, pulling her face down to his and kissing her cheek, and standing with his hands on either side of her head while Abramović lies on a table wrapped in chains with a butcher knife positioned between her legs.40 Such actions on the part of 37

Ibid., 109. Ibid., 120. 39 For representative descriptions of Rhythm 0, see Thomas McEvilley, “Marina Abramović/Ulay. Ulay/Marina Abramović,” Artforum International 22.1 (Sept. 1983), 52; and Lynn MacRitchie, “Marina Abramović: Exchanging Energies,” Performance Research 1.2 (1996), 27–8. 40 Documentation of Rhythm 0 can be seen in Marina Abramović, Artist Body: Performances 1969–1998 (Milan: Charta, 1998), 80–93. 38

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audience members are essential to how Rhythm 0 has been understood, and like Cut Piece it has been read as a (violent) physical rendering of a gendered objectification. Thus, describing the audience’s interactions with Abramović as recreating a series of objectifying tropes, Chrissie Iles wrote in the 1990s, “she became a passive object, operating like a mirror onto which the public projected themselves. The three main roles they constructed for her were Madonna, mother and whore.”41 Reflecting on Abramović’s refusal to answer to these interpellations, Frazer Ward has suggested that, “One conclusion that might be reached is that Rhythm 0 is a hyperbolic demonstration of the construction of female subjectivity from without, or of female subjectivity as purely exterior, an imposition.”42 Though Ward refers to the construction of female “subjectivity,” the imposition of such stereotypes – virgin, mother, whore – must certainly be read as objectifying. Ward thus reads Rhythm 0 in familiar terms: as a hyperbolic rendering of the objectification of women. Interpretations of both pieces, then, have emerged from reading the actions of the participants as “disconcerting actualizations” of objectifying logics: through a ritualized act of cutting whose symbolic violence was carried out at times with real aggression in Cut Piece, and through participants’ violent attempts to make Abramović conform to overdetermined tropes of femininity in Rhythm 0. However, such interpretations tend to fix the meanings of these works: Ono is seen as casting her spectators in a voyeuristic role they were condemned to fulfill from the start,43 and even Abramović’s more open-ended experiment seems to have been predestined to produce the gendered and sexualized aggression it did. Yet, as performances of endurance structured around a plan and a following through of that plan, neither Cut Piece nor Rhythm 0 determined how they would unfold in advance. Even Ono’s tightly framed 41

Chrissie Iles, “Cleaning the Mirror,” in Marina Abramović: Objects Performance Video Sound, ed. Iles (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 21. 42 Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 127. 43 For instance, asserting that “Ono, in the very early sixties, had already recognized that the most powerful, enduring, and pernicious fabrications were carried into the theater rather than produced by it” (110), Harding argues that Ono’s performances of Cut Piece “cast [spectators] in the role of the artist enacting the fundamental performative gestures of collage aesthetics  . . . in an environment where their ethically problematic decision to prey upon Ono implicitly doubled as a profound indictment of the latent racist and sexist assumptions that were still extant in the avant-gard[e]” (Harding, Cutting Performances, 113). In this reading, Ono’s participants were “cast in a role” and asked to carry out actions whose meanings were already determined by Ono in advance.

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instructions left open the possibility that the performance could play out in various ways. There was no requirement that the act of cutting her clothes be performed in actively aggressive ways. One could imagine a version in which the cuts remained so infrequent or small that the piece took hours to unfold as opposed to its usual sixty minutes.44 (In some contexts, audience members were hesitant to participate. As Ono recalls of her first performance of the piece in Japan: “It was very, very difficult for people to come up. So there would be very long silences and then you would hear the scissors cutting.”45 We cannot imagine an entirely benevolent audience in this instance, however, because this was also the performance in which a man “made a motion to stab [her].”46) Complicating fixed meanings further, Ono’s instructions for the piece are clear that the performer did not have to be her, and did not have to be a woman.47 Performed six times by Ono between 1964 and 2003, and performed and reinterpreted by numerous others, including several men, Cut Piece actively resists any singular, symbolic reading.48 Abramović’s piece, though performed only once, could have played out in an even wider range of ways. As Ward notes, “it is possible, after all, to imagine another version in which Abramović is tickled or massaged or fed cake for six hours.”49 44

Ono’s former husband, Tony Cox reported that Cut Piece usually lasted an hour. See Anthony Cox, “Instructive Auto-Destruction,” Art and Artists 1.5 (Aug. 1966), 18. 45 Haskell and Hanhardt, Arias and Objects, 91. 46 Ibid. 47 In the first set of instructions for Cut Piece, the performer is referred to with masculine gender pronouns; in the second, the audience is invited to cut each other’s clothing (both sets of instructions are reproduced in Haskell and Hanhardt, Arias and Objects, 92). The third iteration of the piece insists that “the performer  . . . does not have to be a woman” (Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970], n.p.). 48 It would be impossible to provide a comprehensive list of performances of Cut Piece by people other than Ono. It has been done by professional artists, students, and others in various contexts. A necessarily partial list includes performances by: Charlotte Moorman, at New York University in 1967, and numerous other times until Moorman’s death in 1991 (Moorman claimed to have performed Cut Piece hundreds of times over a twenty-five-year period. Images, videos, and relics from Moorman’s performances of Cut Piece were included in the exhibition A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s at Northwestern University’s Block Museum in 2016); Jon Hendricks, at the Paris Hotel, where he was teaching as part of a “Semester in New York” in 1968 (see Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” 91); Lynn Hershman-Leeson, in her video Cut Piece: A Video Homage to Yoko Ono (1993); Herma Auguste Wittstock, at Kunst-Werke, Berlin in 2001; Ming-Yuen S. Ma, whose ReCut Project (2006) at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) included eight new interpretations of the piece by a diverse group of participants; Ken Little, at the University of Texas, San Antonio, in 2007; Peaches (aka Merrill Nisker), at London’s Meltdown Festival curated by Yoko Ono in 2013; and Weronika Trojańska, at Museum der Moderne Salzburg in 2017. Some who have performed Cut Piece have presented their performances as “reenactments” or “homages.” Yet the capacity for the piece to be performed repeatedly by anyone is built into its form. 49 Ward, No Innocent Bystanders, 123.

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What would it mean to read Cut Piece and Rhythm 0 as genuinely open in their invitation? Could we read the performances of passivity at their hearts not as hyperbolic renderings of a passive female body, demonstrating (ironically, or tragically, depending on one’s perspective) “the objectification of women and its results,” but as explorations of what it means for all of us to exist as bodies that are acted upon? In other words, what if, rather than performing “as objects” in order to expose objectification, Ono and Abramović’s insistent performances of objecthood did something else, namely, provided occasions to remain in an uncomfortable encounter with objecthood, with all of the vulnerability and opacity that attends everyone’s embodied existence. Might we then read the relations opened up by these performances, and the real threats that Ono and Abramović endured in them, differently? Importantly, to approach the pieces this way is not to leave a feminist approach behind, nor is it to lose sight of the femaleness of Ono’s and Abramović’s bodies or the gendered nature of the aggression acted out upon them. In that vein, Kevin Concannon has questioned feminist interpretations, writing, “Cut Piece wasn’t always a feminist statement, however. Cut Piece is an incredibly rich and poetic work that raises questions about the nature of the artist-audience relationship”50 – as though raising questions about the artist-audience relationship were incompatible with a “feminist statement.” Looking at an example of the piece performed by Jon Hendricks in 1968 with his students as audience members, Concannon argues that that instantiation of the performance was “more about challenging the authority of the performer rather than his vulnerability” and asserts that, “thus performed, the more recent feminist framings seem irrelevant.”51 I am also suggesting that Cut Piece raises questions about the artist–audience relationship (and interpersonal relations more broadly). However, unlike Concannon, I contend that this is a feminist project. One can see why in the very fact that, for Concannon, the capacity to read Cut Piece as a challenging of authority arises in a context in which it was performed by a man. Could it be that, as a woman, Ono’s “authorizing signature [was] suspect” from the beginning, as Schneider writes about female performance artists more broadly?52 Nevertheless, Ono described Cut Piece as an attempt to “produce work without ego in it” and to give not what she wanted to give 50

Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” 88. Ibid., 91. 52 Schneider, Explicit Body, 41. 51

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but what the audience chose to take.53 As I will discuss later, Abramović also framed Rhythm 0 as an attempt to create work beyond her own intentionality. What could it mean to read Ono and Abramović as challenging their own authority? What could it mean to read Hendricks as acknowledging his vulnerability? In opening up all of these possibilities, Ono and Abramović’s performances, I aim to show, explored objecthood in ways that sought not just to expose objectification through its reiteration but to counter the objectification of feminine, racialized, and otherwise “othered” bodies by insisting upon objecthood as a shared condition of relationality.

Incorporating Viewers To illuminate the shift in understanding that I am proposing, I want to read both performances’ involvement of their spectators not through the structure of voyeurism but in relation to a different framework. Specifically, I want to read Cut Piece and Rhythm 0 within the context of a wider shift in focus from the artwork itself (presumed to be selfcontained and self-sufficient) to the artwork’s viewing conditions, which accompanied the transition from modernism to postmodernism. At the “crux” of this transition, to quote Hal Foster, was minimalism.54 Minimalist artworks drew attention to their viewing situation. Often large, simple geometric structures, such as Robert Morris’s Untitled (L- beams, 1965) or Tony Smith’s Die (1962), minimalist objects acknowledged both the space of the gallery, by standing on its floors and leaning against its walls, and the viewers who, because of the objects’ scale, were forced to maneuver around them. Being thus “activated,” viewers of minimalist art were forced to an awareness of their own embodied experience of being in the gallery with the object. In his polemic against minimalism, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), Michael Fried articulated a connection between minimalist art (which he termed “literalist” because “the materials do not represent, signify, or allude to anything; they are what they are and nothing more”55) and performance that would prove to be of lasting, if perturbing, interest 53

Ono quoted in Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” 89. Foster uses the phrase “the crux of minimalism” to describe minimalism’s pivotal position at the transition from modernism to postmodernism. As he writes: “minimalism is an apogee of modernism, but it is no less a break with it” (Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996], 42). 55 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 143. 54

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for scholars of performance art. Denouncing literalist art’s awareness of its spectators, he described such an awareness as “theatrical,” because, as he wrote disparagingly, “theatre has an audience  – it exists for one  – in a way the other arts do not.”56 What disturbed Fried was the sense that, in its acknowledgment of the spectator, minimalist art produced an experience of an “object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”57 Rather than functioning independently as an autonomous work of art, “literalist work,” Fried lamented, “depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him.”58 Of course, what Fried denounced was being celebrated elsewhere, not only by minimalist artists but by a range of people interested in the “literal” in art. For instance, in his 1966 manifesto on the Happenings, Allan Kaprow affirmed that there could be no “audience” for a Happening: “By willingly participating in a work,” he asserted, “people become a real and necessary part of the work. It cannot exist without them.”59 In the subsequent years, Kaprow’s positive view of what we might call too simplistically “audience participation” came to reflect the dominant position on the matter. As Philip Auslander noted in 1992, “it is clear who won Fried’s war; suffice it to say that Fried was not rooting for the victors.”60 Although Fried’s essay would come to be acknowledged frequently in discussions of performance art for recognizing, in his use of the term “theatrical,” an incipient turn to performance within minimalism, this acknowledgment would also be regularly accompanied by a dismissal of Fried’s negative evaluation of this trend.61 However, Fried’s very unease with objecthood and how it works to incorporate viewers into the artwork warrants further attention. 56

Ibid., 140, Fried’s italics. Ibid., 125, Fried’s italics. Ibid., 140, Fried’s italics. 59 Allan Kaprow, “The Happenings are Dead: Long Live the Happenings!” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (expanded ed.), by Kaprow, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 64. 60 Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1997), 52. 61 Henry Sayre, for instance, described Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” in 1989 as “perhaps the earliest essay to examine the aesthetic assumptions of performance art” (6), but he also dismissed Fried’s assessment of the qualities he identified, asserting that “Fried’s very articulation of the problem . . . reveals the depth of his misunderstanding” (7). Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989). See also Amelia Jones, “Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning,” in Performing the Body/Performing the Text, ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 39–55, for an essay that strongly denounces Fried’s value judgments while simultaneously affirming the “highlighting of the spectatorial relation that Fried so rightly perceived to be the downfall of his particular kind of modernism” (46). 57 58

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To read Fried symptomatically, as an articulate, astute observer who did not like what he experienced in his encounters with literalist art, has much to offer to our understanding of works such as Ono’s and Abramović’s that involve their spectators – indeed, that depend on their audience’s involvement  – in a difficult encounter with objecthood. Fried’s discussion is relevant to a consideration of these performances in part because he asserted that “the entities or beings encountered in everyday experience in terms that most closely approach the literalist ideals of the nonrelational, the unitary and the wholistic are other persons.”62 Taking this comparison seriously will help to develop further the understanding of objecthood explored in the introduction and will shed new light on the challenges that these performances present to a notion of subjectivity bent on denying objecthood and affirming its own coherence. Surprisingly, it was their hollowness that gave literalist objects the qualities Fried associated with other people: “the apparent hollowness of most literalist work – the quality of having an inside – is almost blatantly anthropomorphic. It is, as numerous commentators have remarked approvingly, as though the work in question has an inner, even secret, life.”63 While others were drawn to the literalist object’s suggestion of interiority, Fried found the invocation of a hidden inner life intolerably aggressive: the literalist object was “hollow with a vengeance.”64 A similar invocation of and refusal to reveal their interiority infused Ono’s and Abramović’s performances of objecthood, and, as we will see, a similar frustration appears to have been experienced by some audience members. While both artists allowed their bodies to be exposed, both remained silent and impassive in their facial expressions. Describing the responses of participants in Cut Piece, Ono once said, “People went on cutting the parts they do not like of me. Finally there was only the stone remained of me that was in me but they were still not satisfied and wanted to know what it’s like in the stone.”65 Likening her interiority to a stone, Ono’s metaphor suggests both the something and the resistant nothing that Fried described as hollowness. Abramović also refused to reveal her subjectivity. As she described Rhythm 0, “I was just the object, well dressed, looking the public straight. In the beginning nothing happened. Later on the 62

Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 128–9, Fried’s italics. Ibid., 129, Fried’s italics. 64 Ibid., my italics. 65 Yoko Ono quoted in Tracey Warr, ed., and Amelia Jones (survey), The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon, 2000), 74. 63

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public started being more and more aggressive.”66 Confronted with her unrevealing stare, her audience may have violently attempted, as Iles suggests, to identify her as a virgin, mother, and whore. Yet, Abramović persisted in performing, as Ward notes, an “evacuation of interiority” and a “refusal even to acknowledge what she was called.”67 Fried’s description of his unease with literalist objects is revealing about why the encounter with objecthood might produce such aggression, especially for a subject (white and male in this instance) not used to acknowledging his own objecthood. He expressed an acute awareness that literalist objects (which were like “other persons”) simultaneously inhabited a variety of unstable oppositions: they were hollow, yet they possessed a substantive interiority; they were demanding of spectators without whom they were incomplete, yet they were also indifferent and unyielding. Perhaps most disturbing to Fried was the way in which literalist objects confounded any distinction between proximity and distance. He asserted that “literalist works of art must somehow confront the beholder – they must, one might almost say, be placed not just in his space but in his way.”68 Yet, at the same time, he argued that the literalist object also “distances the beholder – not just physically but psychically.”69 Describing the literalist object as “waiting” for the beholder to complete it, he insisted that “once he [the viewer] is in the room, the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone – which is to say, it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him (such isolation is not solitude any more than such confrontation is communion).”70 Such an experience was profound for Fried, who argued that it was “precisely this distancing that makes the beholder a subject and the piece in question  . . . an object.”71 This surprising assertion might remind us of Jacques Lacan’s account of the mirror stage, which I discussed in the Introduction. Fried’s discomfort with literalist art’s emphasis on the “values of wholeness, singleness, and indivisibility,”72 and the indeterminate position into which these gestalts seemed to him to force the spectator, who becomes aware of his or her own mobility (and perhaps, who feels rather uncoordinated by this sudden awareness of embodiment) 66

Marina Abramović, “Body Art,” in Marina Abramović, by Marina Abramović and the Fondazione Antonio Ratti (Milan: Charta, 2002), 30. 67 Ward, No Innocent Bystanders, 127–8. 68 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 127, Fried’s italics. 69 Ibid., 126, Fried’s italics. 70 Ibid., 140. 71 Ibid., 126, Fried’s italics and ellipses. 72 Ibid., 119.

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resounds of the conflict between perceiving something external to the self as unitary and whole while experiencing the self as uncoordinated and incomplete that inaugurates the first sense of self – and aggression against the world of objects  – in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage. And like Lacan’s infant, Fried responded with aggression. Furthermore, as Amelia Jones and Jennifer Doyle point out, his aggressive response was charged with gendered implications, his unconventional use of “theatrical” to describe such things as Robert Morris’s plywood polyhedrons being legible as an “an unease with theatricality’s femininity.”73 Yet, if Fried attempted to secure his own authority through his denunciation of minimalist art, what we see in his “almost hysterical attack,” as Jones describes it, is how the encounter with objecthood destabilizes the subject.74 Why was Fried so disturbed by being made a subject? Precisely because he experienced this as an effect of the object. Indeed, in Fried’s account, it is the object that subjects in a manner that unsettles the viewer’s sense of autonomy and control. By declaring themselves to be objects in particular situations that explicitly included their beholders, Ono and Abramović, I submit, literalized the dynamics that Fried identified in minimalist sculpture by replacing the anthropomorphic object that appeared like another person with an actual person. At the same time, they raised the stakes on minimalism’s “enduring objects,”75 exposing the generality of its “specific objects”76 and posing questions about how gender factors into the social nature of the object alluded to within minimalist discourse but abstracted nevertheless. As I suggested in the Introduction, to read their performances this way is to take a different approach from one that reads body art in terms of intersubjectivity. Rather than producing a situation where “in the experience of dialogue (or, in our case, the production and reception of works of art), the two subjects involved (art maker, 73

Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 115, my italics. Doyle supports this statement with a quote from Jones, “Art History/Art Criticism,” 45. 74 Jones, “Art History/Art Criticism,” 42. 75 I take the phrase from Susan L. Stoops. Describing the work of feminist minimalist artists, Stoops writes, “As they reject the authority of modernism, so do these artists articulate an alternative to the ‘unified structures’ and ‘enduring objects’ of minimalism” (11). Rather than an alternative, I argue that the artists in this chapter rearticulate the very notion of enduring objects. See Stoops, “Introduction,” in More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the ‘70s, ed. Susan L. Stoops (Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1996). 76 This is Donald Judd’s term. See Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 181–9.

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art interpreter) ‘are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity’”77; rather than producing a situation where “the relation to the self, the relation to the world, the relation to the other: all are constituted through a reversibility of seeing and being seen, perceiving and being perceived,”78 Ono’s and Abramović’s performances of objecthood created situations in which viewers were drawn in and distanced by the performers’ object-bodies in ways that refused dialogue and remained resolutely asymmetrical in their relationality.

Persistent Objects Before turning to Cut Piece and Rhythm 0, there is one more element in the encounter with objecthood to consider: duration. Fried recognized that the encounter with objecthood takes place over time, and he decried literalism in part because he argued that unlike modernist painting which “has no duration,”79 the literalist object “persists in time.”80 This persistence was unbearable for Fried, I would suggest, because the rich ambivalence of the encounter never resolves: the object continues to be substantive and hollow, needy and indifferent; and the viewer continues to find herself implicated and distanced. Fried experienced this lack of resolution as a kind of endlessness, and so he described literalist art as “essentially a presentment of endless, or indefinite, duration.”81 Elongating the words themselves as though to more fully convey their discomfort, Fried could not communicate the passing of time, and all of its uncertainty, without stress. Though Fried found it intolerable, the very discomfort of duration is central to the performance of objecthood. That is, a key part of what this work does is ask its audience to remain for an extended period with the unresolvable matter of objecthood. This is difficult even for those who value the qualities that Fried abhorred (as well as for those who do not share his privileged subject position). For instance, twenty years after Fried’s essay was published, Peggy Phelan witnessed a performance by Angelika Festa that would take a central place in her oft-cited chapter “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction.” In that text, Phelan argues that “performance is the attempt to value that 77

Jones, Body Art, 41. Jones is quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Ibid., Jones’ italics. 79 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,”145, Fried’s italics. 80 Ibid., 144, Fried’s italics. 81 Ibid., Fried’s italics. 78

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which is  . . . nonmetaphorical.”82 Yet, her devotion to the value of the nonmetaphorical does not preclude an ambivalent relationship toward the literal. Festa’s multimedia work, Untitled Dance (with fish and others) (1987), brims with symbolism that is beyond the context of the present discussion, but the centerpiece of her twenty-four-hour-long performance was very much a performance of objecthood: Festa’s own body, suspended between two poles, wrapped in white sheets, with her eyes covered by silver tape. Responding to this unseeing, enduring body, Phelan describes alternating emotions between feeling “cannibalistic, awful, guilty, ‘sick,’” and being keenly aware of how “obscenely arrogant” Festa’s performance was “in the endurance she demand[ed] of both her spectator and herself.”83 As she negotiates these emotions and the questions they raise  – who was committing violence against whom in this scenario? Was Festa’s arrogance more or less problematic than Phelan’s “cannibalism”? – Phelan comes to the following conclusion: The performance resides somewhere else  – somewhere in the reckoning itself and not at all in the sums and differences of our difficult relationship to it. But this thought does not allow me to completely or easily inhabit a land of equality or democracy, although I believe that is part of what is intended. I feel instead the terribly oppressive physical, psychic, and visual cost of this exchange. If Festa’s work can be seen as a hypothesis about the possibility of human communication, it is an uncompromising one.84

Confronted with Festa’s enduring body, Phelan believed that this “extravagantly literal”85 performance was intended to produce a shared experience: “a land of equality and democracy.” Yet she found herself instead oppressed and overwhelmed by the impossibility of communication presented by the work. Phelan concludes her discussion of Untitled Dance by questioning if such literalness is ultimately desirable: “Enormously and stunningly ambitious, Festa’s performances leave both the spectator and the performer so exhausted that one cannot help but wonder if the pleasure of presence and plenitude is worth having if this is the only way to achieve it.”86 Yet the gesture toward pleasure comes as a surprise given that Phelan does not describe much that would ordinarily be called “pleasure” 82

Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 152. Ibid. 84 Ibid., 162. 85 Ibid., Phelan’s italics. 86 Ibid. 83

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in this experience: she felt cannibalistic, awful, guilty, “sick,” and put off by what she perceived as Festa’s arrogance. Part of why the experience failed to be pleasurable, I contend, is because the performance of objecthood does not – cannot – offer plenitude in its presence. It was a constitutive absence that marked the enduring presence of the object for Fried (as opposed to the “presentness” that he attributed to modernist painting, in which “at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest,” in which it were “as though . . . a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it”87). For Phelan, Festa’s literalism, her attempt to produce “a direct and unmediated Presentation-of-Presence,” does something similar.88 Rather than presenting her body as “wholly manifest,” as instantaneously apprehensible “in all of its depth and fullness,” Festa’s performance confronted viewers with a shrouded body, blatant in its opacity. Thus, for Phelan, an overwhelming sense of absence accompanied Festa’s unceasing presence. This absence was felt most profoundly in the sustained lack of a reciprocated gaze. As Phelan writes, “The spectator’s inability to meet the eye defines the other’s body as lost; the pain of this loss is underlined by the corollary recognition that the represented body is so manifestly there.”89 Rather than the “reversibility of seeing and being seen, perceiving and being perceived” that Jones associates with body art,90 Phelan found in this performance her very desire for such a reciprocal relationship thwarted. Phelan describes Festa as “a sacrificial object completely vulnerable to the spectator’s gaze.”91 Yet it is Phelan who found herself undone by this encounter. Here, we see how the performance of objecthood might resist the framework of voyeurism without either reversing the gaze or escaping the position of object of the look. In Festa’s performance, the object did not refuse to be subjected to the voyeurism of the seeing subject; rather, it robbed the desire for visual mastery of its supposed pleasures by revealing vision itself to be incapable of achieving mastery, incapable of confirming the seeing subject as whole unto herself. After all, what is clear from Phelan’s description is that it is not only the literalist object/ body that reveals itself as simultaneously present and absent, holistic and hollow, unitary and lacking. The beholder, too, experiences herself 87

Fried, “Art and Objecthood,”145–6, Fried’s italics. Phelan, Unmarked, 162. 89 Ibid., 156, Phelan’s italics. 90 Jones, Body Art, 41, Jones’ italics. 91 Phelan, Unmarked, 161. 88

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in these ways, as both separate from yet dependent on the object, as self-contained yet incomplete. And, like the object that simultaneously draws the viewer in and distances her, the viewer too seeks to incorporate and expel the object: Phelan felt both “cannibalistic” and “sick.” Like the being-made-a-subject to which Fried was so averse, the experience is one of both an external imposition and a negation insofar as the impact of the object cancels the sense that subjectivity emerges from the self or is possessed by the self. In this way, that which presents itself obdurately as an object, unavailable for “communion,” paradoxically reminds the viewer of her interdependency, not by arriving at an experience of intersubjective exchange, but by insistently remaining with the discomforts of objecthood. For me, this is an experience worth having (and it seems clear that Phelan found it worth having as well). It is worth having because such an encounter, in its duration, provides the opportunity to remain with one’s ambivalence and, perhaps, to arrive at a different response to objecthood from the objectifying aggression that seeks to assert clear boundaries between subject and object, seer and seen, self and other. Instead of activating the viewer’s voyeurism, the literalist object invites another form of activity: One walks around the literalist object, not to discover what it looks like on the other side – its gestalt is immediately recognizable. One walks around it because it compels us to circle it, to spend time with it, to be with it, and in so doing, to be with our own needy selves: incomplete, uncoordinated, and in relation. It is this relationship to objecthood that Ono’s and Abramović’s performances explored. By staging their specifically female bodies as objects, the artists addressed the problem of objectification not by seeking to escape objecthood but by enduring and asking their audiences to endure the encounter with objecthood instead. Fried found minimalist art intolerable because it sought “to discover and project objecthood as such” rather than striving, like modernist painting, to “defeat or suspend its own objecthood.”92 In their own endeavors to discover and project objecthood as such, Ono and Abramović interrogated the impulse to defeat objecthood in the first place. With these aims in mind, I turn now to read Cut Piece and Rhythm 0. Spending time with the documents that have informed most readings of these works, and paying attention to the ways that audience members interacted with Ono and Abramović, I seek not to provide new symbolic interpretations but to read the literal 92

Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 120.

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unfolding of the works as performances of enduring objecthood fraught with ambivalence and uncertainty.

Cut Piece, 1964– She sat impassively on the stage, enduring this ritual of symbolic yet actual assaults. –Marcia Tanner writing about Cut Piece93

David and Albert Maysles’ film recording of Ono’s New York performance at the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965 provides the opportunity to study the actual unfolding of one instantiation of Ono’s piece.94 Since its first major public showing in 1998, this film has served as the most complete document for anyone writing about Cut Piece.95 A close reading of the film will help to complicate pervasive interpretations of the work as the literalization of a voyeuristic metaphor (“I undressed her with my eyes”). The film begins with the performance already in progress. The camera frames Ono in the center of a medium shot, and participants enter and exit the frame as they approach and slice away fragments of Ono’s dress: a woman removes a long strip from Ono’s left sleeve; another woman trims a section from Ono’s collar; and a third woman snips one of the gold buttons from the front of Ono’s dress. The camera periodically zooms in to get a close-up of Ono’s face, or zooms out to provide a better view of the audience member/participant’s action, but for the most part it remains trained on Ono. Static from the microphone, heels on wooden floorboards, and the occasional chuckle or subdued cheer from members of the audience can be heard; “Well cut, well cut!” a man remarks after the second woman makes her alteration to Ono’s garment. The atmosphere is relaxed, jovial; the participants neither hesitate to approach nor rush the stage. The film reel is changed after less than two minutes, and we return at a later point in the performance. In this take, three minutes into the film, the first interaction that could be described as threatening takes place. A man in a dark suit jacket approaches, takes the scissors, and walks a brisk circle around Ono before stooping down to her left sleeve to make his 93

Tanner, “Mother Laughed,” 62. Cut Piece, 16 mm, directed by Albert and David Maysles, 1965. The transcriptions of the film that follow are my own. 95 Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” 91. 94

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cut. The move is predatory and contrived. There is a rushed showiness to this prowl around Ono. The man is clearly aware of being watched and is playing up for the audience, who respond with approving laughter and applause when he has finished his cut. Then, immediately following him, a young man in a white collared shirt approaches. Whereas the cuts until now have focused on fairly innocuous parts of Ono’s clothing – primarily the hemline and the sleeves – this man takes hold of Ono’s dress over her left breast, pulls it away from her body and snips a hole approximately where her nipple would be. Certainly, I would describe this as a violent act. The act is gendered, sexualized, and aggressive. Rather than participating in the slow encroachment around the edges of Ono’s clothes that the other participants have embarked upon, this man punctures Ono’s dress right at the heart. Ono’s eyes dart to the left to see what he is doing before returning to look forward once again. For the first time, the camera follows the participant as he walks to the edge of the stage and jumps down. The audience is silent, and when the camera returns to Ono, the performance has continued unabated: a young man has just finished his tailor job and is so eager to get off the stage he nearly trips as he makes a runner’s start from Ono’s side. Later, the man in the white collared shirt returns to the stage. Again, he is clearly conscious that he is a performer. He is also aware that he is acting not only in relation to Ono, but also to the other members of the audience. He turns to the crowd, addressing them directly, and says with faux grandiosity, “This is very delicate; it might take some time.” A voice off-stage speaks to him and he responds, “Oh, but not too long, all right.” He begins cutting directly down the center of Ono’s slip, which is at this stage exposed, between her breasts down to her lower ribs, then snips through the shoulder strap on the same side. At this, Ono’s right hand lifts, seemingly involuntarily, and hovers over toward her exposed left side for a moment before she regains her composure and places her hand back down on her leg. Involuntary gestures such as this remind us that the body performing objecthood before us is an enduring body. Willed and unwilled action seem to be reversed here: stillness and nonreactivity are what must be deliberately enacted, whereas action is what exceeds the performer’s control. If this man attempts to objectify Ono, Ono nonetheless remains steadfast in her performance of objecthood. As the man struggles to pull the slip from between her arm and side body so that he can cut it, Ono looks down briefly at what he is doing, then raises her eyes up and away, subtly rolling them before resetting her face into a purse-lipped look of resigned

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tolerance. “Love the expression on her face,” a man near the camera comments. “He’s getting carried away,” a woman responds. Ono remains actively passive, enduring the awkward fumbling of the participant as he attempts to cut the slip from underneath her arm. Once he has completed the left side, the participant moves on to the right and eventually slides around behind Ono’s back as he continues to snip away the top half of her slip. As he shifts to her back, Ono’s expression becomes slightly more nervous, but she holds her tongue, biting her lower lip. The woman near the camera mumbles, “There’s not going to be anything left” as the man in the white collared shirt continues to work. As he carries on cutting at the back of Ono’s dress, a man from the audience calls out, “Come on, make a piece for Playboy with it.” But while this man goads him on, a woman from the audience soon cries out, “Okay, stop!” A man shouts, “Let somebody else do something.” Finally, a woman’s voice rings out from the audience: “Stop being such a creep!” The man in the white shirt stops and puts his hands in the air. Turning to the audience, he speaks in a defensive tone saying, “Okay. Alright. But  . . .” and here his words are muffled until he concludes, “. . . a long time ago.” One can only guess at what he says in between, but I can’t help but perceive in the defensive tone and his concluding words the protestation that he has only been trying to move the performance along – Ono’s dress should have been cut away already a long time ago, I think I hear him say. As he leaves the stage, members of the audience hiss. A man calls out “Cornball.” The entire interaction, from his mounting of the stage to his departure, has taken less than two minutes. This interaction is difficult to watch. It seems to last much longer than its two minutes, and the man’s cutting feels undeniably like a violation. Yet, my interpretation of the words I cannot hear also arises from my sense that however disagreeable his behavior, this man does what the performance asks him to do. Ono asserts that the “piece ends at the performer’s option,” (indicating that Ono maintained authority even as she relinquished control), and documentation of the piece makes clear that at least in some of the performances, Ono’s clothing was removed entirely.96 96

Alaster Niven describes Ono’s performance in London as part of the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium as follows: When the last piece of tunic had been removed and Yoko sat motionless in a ‘G’ string the audience relaxed thinking the show was over. Not so, the compère requested a volunteer to cut off this last fragile garment. For a few moments nobody responded until, to cheers from the onlookers, a less inhibited Nigerian member of the Africa Centre, deftly severed the string . . . (Quoted in Rhee, “Performing the Other,” 112)

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If the piece was designed to lead to the performer being fully disrobed, and if Ono could have stopped the performance at any time, why is the man in the white collared shirt a “creep”? Is it perhaps not because he cuts away Ono’s clothes and exposes her body, but because he rushes ahead and cuts too much? After all, the audience members don’t ask for the piece to end – it continues after he departs from the stage – they ask for him to stop dominating the action and allow others to participate. Kristine Stiles has written that Cut Piece both “visualizes and enacts the responsibility that viewers must take in aesthetic experience.”97 In a later essay, she suggests what this responsibility entails: “Ono demonstrates the accountability that the viewer has to the condition, reception, and preservation of objects of art by addressing the ways in which viewing without responsibility cuts into and destroys the object of its perception.”98 I agree with Stiles that responsibility is decidedly at stake in this piece. Yet, rather than being demonstrated by the work, responsibility is surely called into question in its live enactment. If the ultimate lesson of Cut Piece is that we must take care not to cut into and destroy the objects of our perception, it teaches this lesson by asking its participants to engage in the very act of destruction the work would seem to condemn. What is the responsibility of the audience in the enactment of this work, we might ask. Is it not their responsibility to follow the instructions given to them, to participate by cutting Ono’s clothing? Or, is part of the audience’s responsibility to act against the terms of the piece by refusing to engage in the potentially aggressive act asked of them? And what is our responsibility, those of us who are not participants but who encounter the event through its documentation? If Cut Piece’s meaning emerges from the audience’s participation, how ought we to interpret this participation? If the predominant reading of Cut Piece as a work that reveals the objectification of women is supported by the fact that at least one man acts like a “creep,” and at least one man overtly sexualizes Ono by likening her “strip tease” to something out of Playboy, how should we assess these men’s actions? Have they fulfilled the aims of the piece by exposing their objectification of Ono, or have they abused their role as participants This description gives us a rather different sense of the conclusion of the performance than the Maysles film, which cuts off at an image of Ono covering her breasts and holding up the straps of her bra and slip. Lest we imagine that Ono simply let things go further at her later performance, note that descriptions of her Tokyo performance also describe that “soon the scissors cut even her underwear” (Rhee, “Performing the Other,” 104). 97 Stiles, “Between Water and Stone,” 81. 98 Kristine Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions,” in Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979, ed. Paul Schimmel (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 278.

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by inappropriately responding to Ono’s invitation? The former position would seem to conform to most interpretations of Cut Piece. If this is the case, Ono’s participants are condemned to produce a meaning already fixed within the structure of the performance. However, if we read the performance this way, how do we understand Ono’s role as orchestrator of this scenario? I am reminded of a young woman at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles who, viewing the Maysles’ film of Cut Piece during the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), became increasingly agitated until she eventually protested, “But, she’s making them do this to her!” And then, that unbearable phrase: “she’s asking for it!” We are clearly in a complicated bind as we try to interpret the “symbolic yet actual assaults” that Ono has orchestrated. To be clear, I am not suggesting that we should not be critical of how some participants take up the invitation of Cut Piece (or any piece for that matter). Rather, I am suggesting that the invitation of the piece, in both courting violence and commanding against it, is more ambivalent than many interpretations acknowledge. This ambivalence is part of the piece. If, as I suggested in the Introduction, taking up an ethical relation means accommodating rather than escaping the ambivalence of objecthood and relationality, enduring Cut Piece’s ambivalence might be its central challenge. What if the man in the white collared shirt’s excessive cutting was an attempt to move the performance along? What if it reveals an unease with the “stone” that Ono presented, a discomfort with the fact that this “strip tease” wasn’t revealing anything? What if, as Ono suggests, he went on cutting because he could not be satisfied with the stone? Perhaps then we might read his actions not only as an act of objectification but as a sign of his impatience with the slow, communal process that Cut Piece asks its participants to engage in: a process in which they must remain with the enduring body before them while waiting for others to take their turns. Here, we must remember that objecthood and duration are linked. Fried found objecthood distressing in part because it produced a sense of “endlessness, of inexhaustibility, of being able to go on and on.”99 The discomfort generated by the enduring object is thus related to a desire for consummation. One of the anxieties produced by Ono’s performance is that no matter how much the audience cut, Ono’s performance of objecthood persisted. No matter how much of her clothing was removed, her inner subjectivity was not revealed. Cut Piece, in all of its iterations, presents a challenge to endure the uncomfortable encounter with objecthood  – a condition, after all, from which none of us are 99

Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 143.

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exempt, even though certain bodies (e.g., gendered and racialized bodies) are made to bear its burden more than others. Finally, my sense that Cut Piece is about an insistent encounter with objecthood is confirmed by reading the actions of one audience member in the Maysles brothers’ film who has escaped notice in the many writings on Cut Piece. So trained was I to the action of cutting, that it took multiple viewings before I noticed a woman who comes onto the stage and, instead of cutting Ono’s clothes, places a scroll of paper on the floor next to her. Ono does not react, and the scroll remains there, beside her for the remainder of the performance. Of the twenty-one participants captured in the Maysles footage, this woman is the only one who does not cut Ono’s dress. One might be tempted to read the refusal to cut as a refusal to objectify her, and to read this attempt to communicate with Ono, through the gift of the scroll, as an effort to address her as a subject instead. Acts made against the aesthetic terms of performance art works in order to protect the artist have long been celebrated within histories of performance art. Yet this woman’s small, subversive act has remained entirely unnoticed. Why have commentators failed to see her? Is it because the pervasive interpretation of the work needs the man who cuts too much from the bodice of Ono’s slip, needs the man who likens Ono’s performance to something out of Playboy, but does not know what to do with the woman who leaves a message for Ono? One reason the woman with the scroll goes unnoticed is because Ono does not react to her offering; the unread scroll remains at Ono’s side, a mute reminder of her refusal to enter into this mode of communication. Insistent in her performance of objecthood, Ono’s performance is clearly not about overcoming the problem of objectification by entering into dialogue (and the fantasy of mutual recognition that dialogue often implies). Instead, Ono allows the object of the scroll, with its unrevealed interior, to rest beside her own object body, as if to reflect the patience with the object that her own performance demands of its audience. Through her presentation of her own enduring body, Ono challenged her audience to discover an appropriate mode of engaging with objecthood. It is a challenge they took up through their individual acts, but it is also something they had to negotiate in relation to each other and under the watchful gaze of other audience members, making clear that interpersonal relations are always embedded within broader group structures and dynamics. The man with the white collared shirt’s behavior is problematic not because he took up the invitation to cut, but because in his impatience he acted aggressively. Rather than locating the meaning of the performance

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in his mode of participation, however, we might also pay attention to the participation of others. It is not insignificant that the audience intervened when they felt that he had overstepped his bounds. Cut Piece, then, does not just manifest “women’s physical vulnerability as mediated by regimes of vision,” but sets the stage for a collective reckoning about responsibility toward a body that in its very objecthood refuses the fantasy of reciprocal recognition. Disorienting the audience, the object/body poses the question anew: how ought I to behave in relation to you?

Rhythm 0, 1974 Abramović kept her pledge, silently enduring both the best and worst the audience had to offer when confronted with the artist as blank canvas. –The Marina Abramović Institute on Rhythm 0100

Rhythm 0 made use of a similar structure to Cut Piece but was different in a number of significant ways. As we will see, its particular context and framing affected how the audience negotiated Abramović’s performance of objecthood and contributed to the heightened levels of violence that the piece generated. “I am the object,” Abramović announced, “there are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.”101 In response, the audience showed its willingness to take up the most threatening objects and use them. As a result, unlike Cut Piece, which has been performed numerous times since the 1960s, Rhythm 0 was performed by Abramović only once. In its extremity and unrepeatability, Rhythm 0 warns of the limits of performing objecthood. Yet it demands consideration, for, as we will see, it is at the point where the performance seemed to prove unsustainable that Abramović insisted most powerfully on persisting in her performance of objecthood. While serving as a reminder of the very real dangers that arise from an aggressive relation toward objects, a consideration of Rhythm 0 alongside Cut Piece will ultimately suggest how important carefully crafted encounters with objecthood continue to be. Rhythm 0 marked the conclusion to a series of works by Abramović exploring the body’s capacity to perform beyond intentionality.102 The 100

www.mai-hudson.org (2014). This description was also used by Salt Galata (Ankara, Turkey) for its exhibition of Rhythm 0 from January 17 to February 9, 2014. See http://saltonline.org/en/738/ rhythm-0-marina-Abramović. 101 Abramović, Artist Body, 80. 102 Abramović states that Rhythm 0 “conclude[d her] research on the body when conscious and unconscious” (Abramović, Artist Body, 80).

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Rhythm series included performances in which Abramović: repeatedly stabbed between her fingers with a series of knives, both consciously and unconsciously replicating the rhythms and the chance errors of her strikes (Rhythm 10, 1973); lay in the middle of a large burning star constructed on the ground until she accidentally lost consciousness due to the lack of oxygen and had to be rescued by a member of the audience (Rhythm 5, 1974); took a series of psychotropic drugs to see how they would react with her body (Rhythm 2, 1974); and peered into an industrial air blower until the sheer force of air caused her to pass out (Rhythm 4, 1974). All of these were performances of endurance involving the intentional submission to situations that Abramović did not fully control, and all of them were interested in objecthood. As Abramović’s longtime partner Ulay explained a number years later in an interview with Linda Montano: So the whole notion of being an object became a very obvious thing in our work, in all of our performances – to make yourself an object. . . . If you make a mistake and fall, at that very moment you are an object.  . . . The moment you fall unwittingly, without a choice, without choosing, in that moment you are left to be an object . . .. You see, it’s the noninvolvement of self, of consciousness, of decision, of realization.103

Using the metaphor of falling to describe the body’s capacity to be acted upon by forces beyond one’s control (the step that is missed, gravity itself ) and intentionally seeking to explore such states, Ulay suggested that his work with Abramović emerged from a longstanding interest in exploring objecthood. What was unique about Rhythm 0 in comparison to the other performances in the Rhythm series is that while Abramović used a variety of external aids to help her achieve states beyond her conscious control in the earlier pieces (the knife game, flames, drugs, an air blower), she relied, paradoxically, upon her own willpower to abandon her volition in Rhythm 0. Moreover, she did so within the framework of a performance that was overtly participatory. Rhythm 0 thus raised the interpersonal stakes of her explorations of objecthood, exploring not only the body’s capacity to be cut, its vulnerability to a variety of chemicals inhaled or ingested, or its ability to be blown over by a blast of air, but more explicitly its vulnerability to, and dependency upon, the actions of others. To extend Ulay’s metaphor, we could say it engaged with the idea that 103

Linda Montano, “Interview with Marina Abramović and Ulay,” in Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties, by Linda Montano (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2000), 330.

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sometimes one falls because one is pushed; and sometimes one is caught because someone rushes in to help. As with Ono’s Cut Piece, the question of responsibility in the face of such conditions was a central conundrum of Rhythm 0. In her instructions for the performance, Abramović acknowledged her authorial role in creating the piece, stating: “I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility.”104 However, responsibility itself was called into question by the performance as different senses of the word were forced into sharp contrast: by “taking full responsibility,” Abramović seemed to relieve her audience of one sense of the word  – that of culpability. Yet, in authorizing them to act independently, to make decisions without seeking approval first, she also gave them an enormous amount of responsibility in determining the course of the performance. Years later Abramović would directly reverse her earlier formulation, stating in an interview, “There was one performance when the public took all the responsibility. This was the piece Rhythm 0, where the control was not in my hands any more.”105 By placing into tension various connotations of “being responsible”  – from “taking the blame,” to “being in charge,” to “acting with care”  – Abramović’s piece activated the very question of what it means to be responsible, particularly toward someone who, in her giving up of control, neither said “no” nor explicitly consented to the interactions the audience had with her. What the audience was expected to do in this performance was surely less defined than in Cut Piece. Whereas Ono gave her audience limited means and specific instructions about how to interact with her body, Abramović gave her spectators numerous suggestive implements and no guidelines about how to use them. While a number of the items provided – paint, brush, cake, coat, shoes, grapes, wine – suggested a range of harmless or even pleasurable possibilities, from feeding Abramović, to dressing her up, to painting her body, quite a few of the items – gun, bullet, whip, pocket knife, kitchen knife, chains, saw, hammer, nails, ax, metal pipe, scalpel, metal spear – overtly tempted violent uses. Whereas Cut Piece specified a single action that delimited the potential violence of the scissors while still resonating with a rich ambivalence (a destructive act framed as a gift), Rhythm 0 provided the tools without setting any limits for a much more extreme and polarized range of acts. 104 105

Abramović, Artist Body, 80. Alexandra Balfour and Pitchaya Sudbanthad, “Interview with Marina Abramović,” Museo: Contemporary Art Magazine 2 (1999), www.columbia.edu/cu/museo/2/marina.

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As we know, the audience’s response swung toward the side of violence. The photographs that document Rhythm 0 present a catalogue of disturbing scenes. We see Abramović with signs attached to her clothes, with words written on her face, with various props applied to and removed from her body. We see men removing her clothes, pouring liquid on her head, carrying her, and kissing her (an action that reads as violent in the absence of Abramović’s overt consent106). We see her lying on a table wrapped in chains with a knife stabbed into the table between her legs. We see her with a gun placed in her hand and held to her throat. We see her made to pose holding Polaroid pictures of herself. In only one photograph do we see anything that might be regarded as an act of care: a woman with a concerned face wipes Abramović’s eyes with a tissue, perhaps to keep some substance from getting in them, or perhaps to wipe her tears away.107 Unlike the Maysles’ film of Ono, which, though only nine minutes long, gives some sense of the pace of the performance, the temporality of Rhythm 0, its rhythms and duration, is hard to feel in these photographs. The images are fragmentary and incomplete. It is difficult to tell how much time has passed between them or how quickly certain actions unfolded. To make sense of such scenes, the viewer of the documentation of Rhythm 0 must imagine what it might have been like to be in that space for that length of time. One must imagine standing in the white space of the gallery with Abramović and a crowd of other viewers – a setting that distinguishes Abramović’s performance from Ono’s, which is generally staged in a proscenium arrangement. In Cut Piece, that audience members have to leave their seats to engage with the performer 106

Here we could usefully contrast Rhythm 0 with Barbara T. Smith’s Feed Me (1973), performed at the San Francisco Museum of Conceptual Art as part of an event called All Night Sculptures. Smith performed the piece in the women’s bathroom, which she had decorated with a mattress, rug, pillows, and a space heater. Participants were invited to enter the room one at a time, where they would find Smith waiting naked, with food, wine, marijuana, and massage oil, and a recording of her voice repeating the instruction “feed me.” Notoriously, several men took up the invitation to “feed” Smith by initiating sexual intercourse. What is crucial is that Smith actively consented (or not) to any actions proposed by audience members. As she recounted in an interview with Amelia Jones: “This piece was about my controlling the room, and the audience had to ask me if I wanted a cup of tea or water or a massage, or to make love, or whatever it was, and I could say yes or no” (quoted in Suzanne Lacy and Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Voices, Variations, and Deviations: From the LACE Archive of Southern California Performance Art,” in Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983, ed. Peggy Phelan [Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012], 88). In contrast to Smith’s controlled, case-by-case negotiations, Abramović’s intentional giving up of control left open the question of her consent throughout the performance. 107 These descriptions are based on photographs maintained by the Marina Abramović Archives. See also documentation published in Abramović’s Artist Body, 80–93.

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breaks the convention of the fourth wall that usually separates performers from spectators. Audience members also approach the performer one at a time under the watchful scrutiny of the rest of the audience. In contrast, Rhythm 0’s situation in a gallery meant that Abramović’s audience/participants stood and circulated around her as a group. This would have allowed a group think mentality to emerge and completely disallowed any fantasy of passive spectatorship. Ono’s audience members could have chosen to not approach the stage, and in this way imagined that they were not participating, but in Rhythm 0, as some members carried Abramović’s body to lay her down on the long table, or moved her into various positions, those watching would have had to move in order to create space and to gather around to see what was happening. Thus, even the most relatively inactive spectatorship was marked as an overt choice, and the audience as a whole was implicated in whatever took place regardless of their individual actions. Fried was horrified by the idea of standing in an “indeterminate, open-ended  – and unexacting  – relation as subject to the impassive object on the wall or floor.”108 For him, such an activation of the spectator was an imposition  – he called it “the special complicity that that work extorts from the beholder.”109 To be made responsible to a situation he did not choose or design, but which would be shaped by his actions, was intolerable (even though, as I discussed in the Introduction, this situation might also be recognized, following Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler, as the foundation of ethics). Abramović’s participants were also made complicit in an indeterminate, open-ended, unexacting relation. And like Fried, a number of them responded with aggression. The extended duration of Rhythm 0 (six hours as opposed to Cut Piece’s usual sixty minutes) and the late night hours (from 8 p.m. until 2 a.m.) also clearly correlated with the level of aggression the performance inspired. As Lynn MacRitchie described it, “things began playfully, with audience members decorating her face and putting flowers in her hands. But as time went on the choice of objects became more and more threatening.”110 Given the tenseness and intolerability of Ono’s interaction with the man in the white collared shirt – an interaction that lasted less than two minutes  – one can only imagine what six hours of such interactions must have felt like: the stress of watching and not knowing 108

Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 128, Fried’s italics. Ibid., 127. 110 MacRitchie, “Marina Abramović: Exchanging Energies,” 28. 109

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what someone else might do; the sense of responsibility and necessary vigilance; the uncertainty about whether this event was safe (for anyone); the dilemma of deciding whether or not to intervene; and the rising frustration and fatigue as the night wore on into morning. Although most of the images of Rhythm 0 focus on Abramović and the few participants directly engaging with her, some offer glimpses of the expressions on the faces of those standing by. Some show signs of nervous laughter: in one photo, which appears to be about midway through the performance, a man is fixing something to the front of Abramović’s shirt; in the background, a man and woman clutch their coats and grin. His hunched up shoulders and her scrunched up eyes give the impression that they are giggling, like they can’t believe what they are witnessing. Other images show signs of apprehension: as a man approaches Abramović, who is now lying on the table covered in a coat, onlookers watch him closely (Figure  1.2). One man furrows his brow in disdain; a woman with her arms crossed regards him with her mouth agape, her jaw offset in suspended disagreement. Certainly, feelings of anticipation, doubt, titillation, disgust, excitement, worry, guilt, nervousness, vigilance, and anger must have run high over the course of those six hours.

Figure 1.2.

Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0, performance, six hours, Studio Morra, Naples, 1974

© Marina Abramović, Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives, DACS 2017.

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Yet, for viewers of the documentation (for this viewer at least), what is most captivating is the intensity of Abramović’s own stony gaze. Rather than the actions of the audience members, which may or may not have attempted to objectify Abramović into images of virgin, mother, and whore, what is astonishing is the unrelenting impassivity of Abramović’s expression as she is manhandled and maneuvered into a series of precarious positions. The impression of Abramović’s nonreactivity is of course influenced by the form of the documentation. Whereas the Maysles’ film of Ono’s Carnegie Recital Hall performance reveals Ono’s shifting facial expressions and minute gestures in response to her participants, the still images of Rhythm 0 present a more complete impression of Abramović’s passivity. Nevertheless, Abramović’s apparent lack of response to her participants’ actions is staggering – something that demands notice lest one take the notion of the “passive” female body as a given. What kind of will and concentration in the face of terrifying circumstances enabled this performance of objecthood? And through what powers of self-control did Abramović endure the piece’s length? Six hours is a long time. In the end, what is remarkable about Rhythm 0 is not how the audience responded to Abramović – they behaved in ways that are sadly all too common. What is extraordinary is Abramović’s persistent act of not reacting to them. What are the implications of this steadfast commitment to the performance of objecthood? Considering how the performance concluded suggests some answers. There are two conflicting accounts of how Rhythm 0 ended. Some commentators have indicated that the performance was terminated by the intervention of the audience in the struggle over the gun.111 However, Abramović herself, while affirming that the gun incident happened, insists that it did not bring about an end to her performance. Rather, she asserts that she finished the performance at exactly the previously appointed time: “After six hours, at 2 in the morning, I stopped, because this was exactly my decision: six hours. I started walking to the public and everybody run [sic] away and never actually confronted with me.”112 The photographic documentation also suggests that the gun incident happened before the performance was over: an image of Abramović with the gun pointed at her neck shows her still fully dressed, as opposed to later images in which her top has been removed. 111

McEvilley’s account is probably the most influential of this version. See McEvilley, “Marina Abramović/Ulay. Ulay/Marina Abramović,” 52, and McEvilley, “The Serpent in the Stone,” in Marina Abramović: Objects Performance Video Sound, ed. Chrissie Iles (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 46. 112 Abramović, “Body Art,” 30.

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The distinction between these two endings is significant. In the first version, the audience’s rescue of Abramović puts an end to her performance of objecthood. The performance is figured as unsustainable, and the whole event becomes a cautionary tale about the dangers of objectification. In Abramović’s version of events, however, the audience’s rescue of her did not bring an end to her performance of objecthood, but allowed it to continue. In other words, the audience’s responsibility turns out to be not to rescue her from her objecthood, but to sustain her in it. Abramović’s description of the audience running away in fear once the piece was over and she began to approach them suggests how disconcerting this lesson could be. The anxiety she alludes to is reminiscent of one version of the uncanny described by Sigmund Freud: a situation in which there are “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.”113 It is as though after six hours of testing this “object” for signs of subjectivity, the audience was terrified of Abramović’s emergence from her passive state. The notion of an inanimate object with a secret life also recalls Fried’s description of literalist objects as both hollow and intolerably anthropomorphic. The terror of such objects lay for Fried in their incompleteness, in the way in which the literalist object waits for the beholder and then “refuses, obstinately, to let him alone – which is to say, it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him. (Such isolation is not solitude any more than such confrontation is communion.)”114 The notion of such an alienating proximity, of a relentless confrontation with an other whose interiority remains inaccessible, would seem to describe very well the encounter with Abramović in Rhythm 0. It also suggests one reason why Rhythm 0 generated much greater aggression and violence than Cut Piece. Whereas Ono’s performances of Cut Piece asked audience members to willingly traverse the gap separating audience from performer, Rhythm 0 did not admit of any such distance. Whereas two-thirds of Ono’s audience chose not to come up on stage, Abramović’s audience could not escape her relentless proximity.115 As the literalist object incorporates (from the Latin corporare, “to form into a body”) the viewer through a double movement, both drawing the viewer into the 113

Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.  17, ed. and tr. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth, 1955), 226. Freud is quoting Ernst Jentsch. 114 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 140. 115 According to Cox, only about a third of the audience participated in any instantiation of the piece. See Cox, “Instructive Auto-Destruction,” 18.

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artwork and simultaneously making her acutely aware of her status as an embodied subject who must physically negotiate and maneuver around the object that stands in her way, Abramović’s viewers were confronted with their own indissoluble complicity and alienation. It has often been suggested that performance art breaks down subject/ object binaries through the artist’s establishment of a reciprocal gaze with the audience. The artist is not just a viewed object, but a seeing subject as well. However, in both Ono’s and Abramović’s performances, there was an overt refusal to return the gaze. There are, however, moments in the documentation when the eyes pique an awareness of the “inner, secret lives” of these objects even as they refuse to provide access to this internal world. In Ono’s performance it is the moment when she rolls her eyes as the man in the white collared shirt struggles to cut her slip away. Ono does not look at the audience in this instant but gestures, her eyes hinting at her inner thoughts while she refrains from speaking them. In Abramović’s performance, something different happens: not the movement of her eyes, but the movement of liquid over them as her eyes well up with tears. The photographs of Rhythm 0 show Abramović with the same blank expression on her face throughout. However, in some images, her eyes appear huge and aqueous, highlighting not Abramović’s gaze but the very unseeingness of her eyes. The glistening film hints at Abramović’s fear, exhaustion, and grief, but she does not express such feelings overtly. Her tears reveal her body’s permeability, while Abramović’s unwavering performance suggests a different sort of imperviousness. How might we learn to reside with such vulnerability and opacity? How might we learn to live with the incommensurable alienation that simultaneously opens us up to one another and marks us as inexorably separate? How, finally, might we stop trying to defeat objecthood – our own and others – and start learning to endure objecthood instead? Fried concluded his polemic against objecthood by noting that “we are all literalists most or all of our lives.”116 This, for Fried, was why art ought to produce something else. But, as Fred Moten has written, “just because we are literalists most of our lives does not mean that we actually ever really pay attention to or experience objects in their intensity.”117 To experience such intensity was the challenge put forward in Cut Piece and Rhythm 0. 116 117

Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 147. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 239.

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In creating encounters with objecthood, both pieces generated collective endeavors on the part of their audiences to negotiate individual and group responsibility toward others, and both challenged their audiences to discover an ethics not dependent on a reciprocal relation, nor contingent upon the recognition of subjectivity over and against objecthood. Abramović, in her steadfast, perhaps naïve, commitment to the project showed how difficult it is to endure objecthood  – and how deadly the consequences of not doing so can be. Cut Piece, with its more contained, deliberate approach, provided a more measured way of exploring this necessary and inescapable undertaking. That this piece has been recreated so many times over the past fifty years should come as no surprise. The lesson of objecthood, first discovered in the mirror, is never learned only once; it must be repeated, again and again.

chapter 2

Enduring Protests

Why, I asked myself, would artists push their bodies to such extreme physical and psychological limits? Intuitively, I knew that women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, and the Vietnam War were all part of the reason. – Kathy O’Dell1

In the preface to her book Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (1998), Kathy O’Dell pointed to an intuitive link between artists pushing their bodies to their physical and psychological limits and the protest movements of the period. She was not alone in making such a connection; a link to protest has frequently been proposed in writing on performance art. In some accounts, performance art and body art are said to have been directly influenced by the protests of the 1960s and 1970s, especially protests against the Vietnam War: Vito Acconci, for instance, said about his own performance work that he never would “have thought of this kind of stuff without the context of that time, without the context of demonstrations against American involvement in the Vietnam War”;2 Jane Blocker has written that the emergence of body art, with its “hopes for the sublation of art into life,” was propelled by the “despair produced by the war in Vietnam” and a concomitant “desire for dissidence”;3 and Amelia Jones has written that “extreme body art had taken off from the political protests of the 1960s.”4 Others have described performance art itself as a “vehicle for social

1

Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), xii. 2 Vito Acconci quoted in O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 40. 3 Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 59. 4 Amelia Jones, “Performing the Wounded Body: Pain, Affect and the Radical Relationality of Meaning,” Parallax 15.4 (2009), 46.

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change,”5 with some even suggesting that performance art provides models for political activism. For example, Kristine Stiles, writing in 1990, described performance art as “a concrete social practice that . . . provides a paradigm for social action.”6 Certainly, performance art works such as Yayoi Kusama’s Anti-War Naked Happening (1968) and Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s Bed-Ins for Peace (1969), which made use of protest forms (the street demonstration and the sit-in, respectively) within explicitly political artworks, confirm that early performance art was both influenced by protest practices and aimed to function at times as a form of political activism itself. A more recent performance such as Mike Parr’s Close the Concentration Camps (2002), in which Parr repeated asylum seekers’ protest actions by sewing his lips, eyes, and ears shut in a piece objecting to the incarceration of asylum seekers in Australia, shows that performance art continues to be influenced by and still seeks at times to operate as a form of protest.7 At the same time, a number of scholars of performance art and body art have cautioned against what they see as overly simplistic connections between performance art and political activism. In 1998, Jones critiqued Stiles’ “rendering of performance as triumphantly activist”8 and distanced herself from “those who wish to privilege performance or body art for its merging of art and life” and who see performance art “as an unmediated reflection of the self whose presence guarantees the redemptive quality of art as activism.”9 Though her later work would acknowledge a connection between “extreme body art” and the protests of the 1960s, she would still caution that “different contexts provoke radically different effects due to the expectations attached to each venue.”10 Similarly, O’Dell, while claiming that the artists she wrote about attempted to “address 5

For instance, in her catalogue essay for her curated exhibition, Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object, a Survey of the History of Performance Art in the USA since 1970, Robyn Brentano writes, “Performance has been a powerful catalyst in the history of twentieth-century art not only because it has subverted the formal conventions and rational premises of modernist art, but also because it has heightened our awareness of the social role of art and, at times, has served as a vehicle for social change” (Robyn Brentano, “Outside the Frame: Performance, Art, and Life,” in Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object, a Survey of the History of Performance Art in the USA since 1970, ed. Robyn Brentano and Olivia Georgia [Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994], 31). 6 Kristine Stiles, “Performance and Its Objects,” Arts Magazine 65 (November 1990), 47. 7 See Edward Scheer, “Australia’s Post-Olympic Apocalypse?” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30.1 (January 2008), 42–56, for a discussion of this piece. 8 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 247, note 37. 9 Ibid., 35. 10 Jones, “Performing the Wounded Body,” 46.

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the volatile social and political issues” of their time, nevertheless asserted that “to infer a direct relation between these performances and specific motivations in the sociopolitical arena is too pat. Moreover, it is still too suggestive of a simplistic collapse of art into life.”11 Such arguments have served as important reminders of the need to remain attentive to the differences between the contexts of art and protest. Deliberations about performance art’s relationship to political activism continue to infuse the literature on performance art. As Deirdre Heddon writes, using the British term “live art,” the “political potentiality of live art is its most iterated discourse.”12 Yet, protest itself (which is to say, protest that does not lay claim to being art) has rarely been analyzed in detail in relation to performance art and body art of the 1960s and 1970s (though protest has frequently been taken up within performance studies more broadly).13 In this chapter, I want to open up a different conversation about the connections between performance art and political activism by turning to a particular protest action that I read as a performance of endurance. In doing so, I aim to offer another way of thinking about the connections between performance art and protest by attending to specific formal similarities in their practices. The action that I consider here has endured over time as a pivotal example of what is perhaps the most emblematic protest practice of the 1960s: the sit-in. Considered by many commentators to mark the start of the decade, the Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In began on February 1, 1960 when four black college students  – Ezell Blair 11

O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 12. Deirdre Heddon, “The Politics of Live Art,” in Histories and Practices of Live Art, ed. Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 175. 13 One article that does consider protest actions in relation to performance art is Mary Richards’ “Sewing and Sealing: Speaking Silence,” in Art in the Age of Terrorism, ed. Graham Coulter-Smith and Maurise Owen (London: Paul Holberton publishing, 2005), 34–48. There, Richards notes similarities and differences between actions including Iranian refugee Abas Amini’s sewing of his lips, eyes, and ears shut in 2003 in protest of attempts by the UK’s Home Office to revoke his refugee status, and similar actions by Ron Athey, Franko B, and Ulay and Marina Abramović. For Richards, the different contexts of art and protest, as well as the freedom of the artists she considers versus the oppressed status of those who undertake such actions in protest, mark significant contrasts between them. Similarly, in her article “Performing the Wounded Body,” Jones also begins by reflecting on the action of sewing the mouth shut as something that has been performed in both art and political contexts. While Jones asserts that “these different contexts provoke radically different effects,” she does not remain with the protest examples to consider what these effects might be (46). Concluding this section with the statement that the protest context “obviously addresses an entirely different, and potentially much broader, audience from the art world audience of those works performed in visual arts and performance venues” (47), her article focuses on art and performance examples thereafter. 12

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Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond – sat down at the “whites only” lunch counter in the Woolworth’s “five and dime” store in Greensboro, North Carolina and ordered a cup of coffee. After being refused service and told to leave, they remained seated until the store closed. They returned the next day and for many days following with increasing numbers of sit-in protestors who endured not only the refusal of service but the violence of racist white opposition demonstrators who heckled them and assaulted them with methods as diverse and vicious as “dropping lighted cigars on their clothing, throwing hot food and hot liquids on them, spraying them with insecticides and ammonia, and the like.”14 They were variously ignored, insulted, beaten, and arrested. Yet, throughout it all, they remained calm, refusing both verbal and physical retaliation in a mode of passive resistance inspired by Mohandas Gandhi. In the following pages, I explore this act of passive resistance as a performance that, I argue, has much in common formally with the performance art works discussed in the previous chapter. In pursuing this line of inquiry, my aim is not to prove the historical influence of protest on performance art, nor to use a protest example as leverage to make claims for the political efficacy of endurance-based artworks, but to explore what the theory of endurance developed in this book has to offer to an understanding of performances that take place beyond an art context. What might tools of analysis derived through specific practices of performance art lend to an understanding of political action? As the ordering of these chapters makes clear, my understanding of endurance in art informs my reading of this protest action. As such, I aim to show that the Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-in – an action that was explicitly engaged with problems of objectification and with questions of how bodies occupy space and the ambivalences that circulate around them  – produced similar (which is not to say identical) kinds of encounters to those produced by Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) and Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974). Confronting their beholders by placing the protestors’ bodies “not just in [white segregationist] space but in [white segregationists’] way,” to invoke once again Michael Fried’s characterization of literalist art,15 the lunch counter sit-ins, I argue, made palpable a fraught relationality and challenged those who encountered them, either in the flesh or at a remove 14

Martin Oppenheimer, The Sit-In Movement of 1960 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1989), 178. 15 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 127, Fried’s italics.

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through documentation, to reconsider the objectifying logics of segregation and arrive at a different relationship with objecthood as something shared. While the aims of the lunch counter sit-ins were specific to their context, the lessons they teach remain pertinent today, not only insofar as the problems of racist (and other forms of ) objectification and violence persist, but insofar as sit-ins and other bodily occupations of space remain vital protest tactics, as I consider further in the Epilogue. Finally, in analyzing a protest example as a performance of endurance, I also aim to offer a different view of protest from others writing about related performance art works of this period, who have tended to distinguish such works from the protest culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Frazer Ward, for instance, has argued that performances such as Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) and Abramović’s Rhythm 0 “were deeply suspicious of the protest culture in the context of which they took place, a suspicion that might be translated into a more general suspicion of the formation of any like-minded group whatever.”16 O’Dell also distances what she describes as “masochistic” performance art of the 1970s from protest, arguing that performances by Abramović and Ulay, Acconci, Burden, and Gina Pane “emphasized the artists’ distanciation from their audiences and attended to concepts of alienation. Thus, they could never have served as models for public protests.”17 Both authors assume that political protests rely upon group identification and argue that the artists they consider produced performances that were too aversive to achieve this necessary sense of solidarity. However, such characterizations of protest are too narrow. If some facets of the (largely white) counterculture maintained a naïve faith in “the democratizing potential of participatory culture,” as Ward puts it,18 participation  – and its exclusions  – is precisely what was in question for civil rights protestors. Just as Ono’s and Abramović’s pieces showed participation to be shaped by wider cultural forces that can make it unequal, potentially injurious, and difficult to navigate, the civil rights protests presented a more critical view of participation than is often associated with subsequent anti-war movements and the counterculture in general. As I will show, the protestors in the lunch counter sit-ins confronted spectators with the push and pull of identification and alienation, and, like the performance art works considered in the previous chapter, generated ambivalent responses as they forced audiences to decide how 16

Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 21, my italics. 17 O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 12. 18 Ward, No Innocent Bystanders, 11.

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they would participate in the action and how they would negotiate their relationships to the protestors. To read the protests this way will be to continue to think about the ethics of enduring objecthood over and against objectifying logics that strive to disavow objecthood on the part of dominant subjects – logics that were very much connected to systems of segregation in the South in 1960.

The Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins The story of the lunch counter sit-ins has been told many times. Here is one account.19 It starts with the observation that the protest began with a plan. Blair, McCain, McNeil, and Richmond resolved to sit down at the “whites only” lunch counter in the Woolworths department store downtown. More elaborately, they decided that they would dress in their “Sunday best” and make a few small purchases in the Woolworth’s toiletries department first. Then they would sit down at the “whites only” lunch counter and order a cup of coffee. After that, the performance would no longer be under their control; it would depend on the responses of others. While they planned ahead for some contingencies, they also knew that a major part of their action would be waiting to see what happened. As they expected, the white waitress told them “We don’t serve negroes here.” To this they had a ready response: Blair replied succinctly, “I beg to disagree with you. You just finished serving me at a counter only two feet away from here.”20 The waitress informed her manager, Clarence Harris, of the situation, and he instructed her to ignore the men and let them sit. He did not want to arrest customers and was hoping that, if left alone long enough, the college freshmen would become bored and leave of 19

The narrative in this section draws upon the overlapping components of several accounts. For some of the most complete chronicles see Miles Wolff, Lunch at the 5 & 10, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1990); William H. Chafe’s Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and the film documentary February One, DVD, prods. Steven Channing, Rebecca Cerese, and Daniel Blake Smith (San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel, 2004).The version I tell here attempts to capture the key elements of the story as it is usually told rather than to assert or assess the historical truth of the events. As with many of the performance art works discussed in this book, around which a degree of mythology circulates, it is the moments that are repeated again and again in narratives about the sit-ins that hold the key to its affective force and its continuance in the American cultural imagination. 20 Wolff, Lunch at the 5 & 10, 12. See also Thomas R. Brooks, Walls Come Tumbling Down: A History of the Civil Rights Movement 1940–1970 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 146; and Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 115.

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their own accord. But they did not leave. They sat and waited, terrified of what might happen to them. Two police officers came into the store, but because Harris did not want to issue a trespass warrant, the police had no reason to arrest the men. Instead, the officers paced behind them, beating their billy clubs against the palms of their hands.21 As McCain describes it, “We didn’t know what they could do to us, we didn’t know how long we could sit. Now it came to me all of a sudden: maybe they can’t do anything to us. Maybe we can keep it up.”22 Determined, the students remained seated without being served until the store closed. They returned the next morning, this time with twenty-seven other students, including four women from Bennett College, the historically black women’s college. They brought their course books, and aside from occasionally requesting to be served, they sat silently and studied. White customers continued to sit and be served at the lunch counter, although reports indicate that some white customers refused to sit alongside the black students. This time, the media came as well. That evening, the Greensboro Record ran the first story about the sit-ins on the front page of its local section along with a photograph that would represent the movement for years to come. Although the four men pictured are often taken to be the “Greensboro Four,” it is McNeil and McCain along with Billy Smith and Clarence Henderson who are captured in this image (Figure  2.1). The following morning, the Greensboro Daily News published a story about the sit-in front and center on its local page. On the third day, black students occupied sixty-three of the sixty-six seats at the lunch counter. The remaining three seats were filled by “idle waitresses, who were having a rather slow morning.”23 Additional students stood in the aisles, waiting to fill any seats that were vacated. The third day also brought the presence of white detractors. White youth and young men  – described variously as “the long-haired teenaged group”24 and “the duck-tailed and leather-jacket group”25 – surrounded the protestors, muttering epithets and verbally abusing them. No major incidents were reported. By the fourth day, the number of sit-inners had grown to as many as 300. At the same time, the white opposition group had grown, and they began blocking the aisles and filling the seats at the lunch counter in order 21

February One. See also Brooks, Walls Come Tumbling, 146. Wolff, Lunch at the 5 & 10, 16. 23 Ibid., 39. 24 Police report quoted in ibid., 45. 25 Ibid., 42. 22

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Figure 2.1 Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, William Smith, and Clarence Henderson sitting in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, February 2, 1960 Photo: Jack Moebes, Greensboro News & Record.

to prevent the protestors from doing so. The police report from that morning states, “the tension at that time was already running high .... During the mid-morning a white boy spilled a glass of coke on the head of a colored student. We are unable to say whether it was accidental or intentionally [sic].”26 With many of the seats taken by white segregationists, some protestors decided to go down the street to the Kress department store to begin a sit-in there. A number of white youth followed, and the situation at Kress soon mirrored the scene at Woolworth’s. On this day, white women supporters also began to participate in the sit-ins. Three white women from Woman’s College, the Greensboro division of the University of North Carolina, approached the lunch counter. Three of the white male opponents to the sit-ins gave up their seats to them, assuming that the women were on the “same side” as themselves. However, when the wait staff came to take their orders, the women replied, “There are people who were here ahead of us,”27 and refused to place their orders until the black activists sitting at the counter had been served. From this day forward, white civil rights activists participated in the sit-ins following this model. 26 27

Ibid. My transcription from the documentary February One.

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By Friday, the scene was even more intense. The first arrests were made on this day, all of white male opponents of the movement: one man was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon after he lit a protestor’s coat on fire; another was arrested for drunkenness; and a third was arrested for disorderly conduct.28 (As the sit-ins continued, large numbers of peaceful protestors would also be arrested when similar attacks were carried out against them.) Meanwhile, the protestors continued to sit and study in silence while being refused service. The crowds continued to grow and tensions continued to rise. The following day, an apparent bomb threat at Woolworth’s caused the store to be shut down early. What started in Greensboro that first day in February quickly grew into a nationwide movement. Within nine days, the sit-ins had spread to other cities in North Carolina, including Winston-Salem, Durham, Charlotte, and Raleigh. Within two weeks, the sit-ins had spread to nearby states in the South. Within two months, sit-ins had occurred in nearly eighty communities throughout the South, as well as in locations in the North where state laws for equal accommodations were being violated.29 Supportive picket lines also began outside of Woolworth’s stores and other convenience stores in the North. As they had in Greensboro, protestors employing the principles of passive resistance endured the violence and aggression of white detractors opposed to integration. Over the course of a year, thousands of protestors were arrested, and many were physically assaulted by white racists. On July 25, 1960, nearly five months after the sit-ins had begun, the first black customers were served food sitting down at the now integrated lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro. Within a year, the Congress on Racial Equality reported that 138 communities throughout the South had integrated at least some of their facilities.30

Performing Protest What was it about the Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins that made them so powerful? Typical discussions make use of a “drama” metaphor, suggesting that the sit-ins worked by “dramatizing” injustice and racism: “the sit-ins . . . were the stuff of high political drama, a morality play come 28

Wolff, Lunch at the 5 & 10, 45. Oppenheimer, The Sit-In Movement, 43. 30 Ibid., 180. 29

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to life”;31 “The students’ quiet protest dramatized social injustice”;32 “these young men took it upon themselves to dramatize the evils of racism, and thereby hasten the day when democracy could become a reality for themselves and all black Americans.”33 Theatre scholar Rebecca Kowal has taken up the drama metaphor, arguing that “the protesters dramatized both the exclusion and the possibility of inclusion that was at the core of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”34 Exploring the drama analogy further, she charts how in this protest “location, demonstrators, attire, speech, action, and by-standers become analogous to theatrical conventions like venue and mise-en-scene, actors, costumes, script, choreography, and audience.”35 Kowal’s reading demonstrates notable parallels between protest and theatrical practices. Such correspondences are well established in performance studies, and they allow us to recognize protest actions as intentionally directed in order to produce certain effects, rather than “as purely spontaneous and lacking in form or technique,” as Susan Leigh Foster disputes in an article on the choreography of protest in which she also considers the lunch counter sit-ins.36 Without doubt, the sit-ins were carefully crafted, and decisions were made about what the protestors would wear, what they would and would not say, and how they would behave with the aim of representing the protestors in particular ways – namely, as polite and respectable – for both primary and secondary audiences (those who would observe the events through the media). As Kowal notes, in this way the protestors did not just highlight racist exclusion but aimed to show what inclusion could look like as well. Yet, as with any metaphorical understanding of performance, the drama analogy leaves open a number of questions about how the sit-ins worked in more literal terms. For one thing, readings focused on dramatization tend to assume that highlighting and making visible injustice inspires sympathy and action against it. Yet the historical record makes clear that “dramatic” displays of racism and injustice do not always inspire action against these things but frequently have served to confirm and 31

James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 35. 32 Mark Edelman Boren, Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject (New York, NY: Routledge, 2001), 139. 33 Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, vii. 34 Rebekah J. Kowal, “Staging the Greensboro Sit-Ins,” TDR: The Drama Review 48.4 (Winter 2004), 148. 35 Ibid., 135. 36 Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” Theatre Journal 55.3 (October 2003), 397.

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preserve unjust racist systems. For nearly one hundred years before the Greensboro sit-in, the Ku Klux Klan in its various incarnations performed  – with attention to costuming, set design, scripts, and so on – spectacularly grotesque acts of racist violence precisely in order to preserve white supremacy after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States in 1865. As Harvey Young notes, “as public performances, lynchings far surpassed all other forms of entertainment in terms of their ability to attract an audience.”37 These performances did not aim to inspire their audiences to act against the evils of racism: instead, racist white audiences found their racism celebrated and affirmed, while black audiences were terrorized and often immobilized with fear. As Blair recalls, the widely publicized murder of fourteenyear-old Emmett Till by two white men in Mississippi five years before the Greensboro sit-ins had primarily instilled in him the dangers of even seeming to transgress Jim Crow laws and racist customs.38 The question, then, is how the sit-ins’ “dramatization” of racism differed from other dramatic displays of racism (from the most mundane to the most spectacularized) that were an ongoing part of everyday life for the inhabitants of Greensboro and elsewhere in the United States. Perhaps the most obvious difference lies in who was credited with authorship of the scene. In the scenes of racist violence enacted by the Ku Klux Klan, the perpetrators of violence “authored” and controlled the spectacle. The victims of this violence were objectified and denied agency insofar as the very forms of violence were designed to show the victims’ inability to alter the course of events. As Young writes, “lynchings objectified the bodies and rendered them permanently still.”39 In contrast, in the case of the sit-ins, it was the recipients of violence, who actively persisted in sitting still at the counter when they were attacked, who were seen as having “authorship” of the scene. This sense of authorship is key to Kowal’s reading of the protests as staged events. Thus, she argues that by doing such things as dressing well and bringing their books to read, the protestors “cas[t] themselves as respectable and economically viable members of the bourgeoisie”40 (a performance that Kowal problematically describes as “playing up [their] ability to conform to white identified conventions of speech and behavior, in this way demonstrating 37

Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 169. 38 February One. 39 Young, Embodying Black Experience, 176. 40 Kowal, “Staging the Greensboro Sit-Ins,” 137–8.

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[their] readiness to enter the white world”41) rather than, for instance, being cast as threats to white women, as black men so often were in the scenarios constructed by the likes of the Klan.42 Through these actions, Kowal argues, the protestors altered the scene and made a “moral demand” on white witnesses to the events,43 who, it would seem, were more likely to object to violence if they identified with its victims. However, there are limits to how much the attribution of authorship can explain within the framework of the drama metaphor. For, remarkably, in the sit-ins the recipients of violence had “authorship” of the scene even though they did not fully control it. In this way, they enacted dynamics much more akin to endurance practices found in performance art, in which performers use their authority to construct situations in which they also give up control, than those usually associated with drama. Rather than acting out a scripted scenario, the sit- inners performed a simple action according to a basic set of rules: they dressed in their best clothes, they sat at the lunch counter, they asked for service, they remained polite and passive in response to any aggression acted out against them, and they remained steadfast in waiting to be served. As with Cut Piece and Rhythm 0, their performance involved the participation of those who encountered them, from Woolworths’ staff, to other customers in the store, to the segregationists who came to harass and abuse them. Thus, responsibility for how the scene played out was not held solely by the protestors who planned and orchestrated the event. If the Greensboro sit-in “dramatized” the evils of racism, this “drama” was not scripted by the protestors in advance. It was the response of the white establishment and the white opposition demonstrators that exhibited racism and injustice. Crucially, however, this display of racism is not the only thing that the sit-ins enabled. As with all performances of endurance, the outcome of this action was not determined from the start. Again, this is a different 41

Ibid., 141. Although Kowal is careful not to naturalize the association of such behaviors with whiteness (she refers to them as “white identified”), her reading is nevertheless problematic. Contemporary accounts of the protests repeatedly describe the students as being dressed as though they were going to church (itself a prominent site in the black community, which served a central role in the civil rights movement), not as though they were “white.” Furthermore, as college students, their act of reading books would seem more connected to their own identities and experiences than to performing, as Kowal writes, “‘as if ’ they were white” (149). 42 Numerous people have recognized and discredited this frequently used narrative, which was immortalized in D. W. Griffith’s silent film The Birth of a Nation (1915). The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was founded by Jessie Daniel Ames in 1930 to contest the widely accepted view that lynchers were acting in defense of white womanhood. 43 Kowal, “Staging the Greensboro Sit-Ins,” 149.

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understanding than the drama analogy tends to produce. For instance, Kowal reads Blair’s exchange with the waitress, when he informed her that Woolworth’s did serve black customers, as serving a theatrical function. She writes, “Blair ‘plays’ the scene as though he believes he can convince the waitress to serve him,” even though he “knew what the waitress would say even before he engaged her in dialogue.”44 This assertion leads Kowal to argue that: he acted not to try to change her mind about serving him but to bait her to represent the store policy so he could then show that it was based on flawed logic and morality. And, as in theatre, the waitress “had” to reply the way she did. The exchange communicated to audiences near and far exactly what its sit-in authors intended.45

In this reading, Blair’s prescripted dialogue (and indeed, subsequent protestors were encouraged to offer similar responses when they were refused service46) served to render a predetermined scene whose intended interpretation would be “communicated exactly” to an external audience. It did not, in this reading, present a challenge in the present moment because the outcome of the exchange was ostensibly already known. Foster also describes the protestors as “knowing full well they would never be served.”47 Certainly, the protestors expected that the wait staff behind the counter would refuse them service, and their response cleverly exposed the hypocrisy of Woolworth’s business policies – its preparedness to take money from black customers in exchange for goods but not to serve them at the lunch counter. Yet, within the wider action of the sit-in, this exchange also exceeds the logic of making a predetermined point. If the protestors fully expected not to be served at first, they nevertheless sat for hours, days, weeks, and months, with the determination that eventually they would be. On this level, the request to be served was not just “the kind of discursive play associated with theatre,”48 nor was it taken as already “known” that they would “never be served.” In fact, many believed they would be, and most report that when the sit-ins started they simply did not know what would happen. In sitting, and persisting in this sitting, in the face of an insistently indeterminate future, the protestors did not play out a scene that “had” to happen the way it did; they engaged in a consequential action whose outcome was uncertain. 44

Ibid., 141. Ibid. 46 Ibid., 139. 47 Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 397. 48 Kowal, “Staging the Greensboro Sit-Ins,” 141. 45

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As a result, the sit-in did not just highlight racism and injustice, or put these things on dramatic display; it actively created the opportunity to intervene in such displays. As an open-ended performance, the sit-in invited the possibility of unexpected interventions, and it is apparent that such surprising interactions did take place and influence the course of events in Greensboro: for instance, when the first three white women joined the sit-in. Because the white male segregationists assumed that the women shared their goals, the men gave up their seats to the women in line with conventional manners at the time. By taking advantage of these conventions, the white women were able to disrupt the white male segregationists’ assumptions and reveal that solidarity does not automatically adhere along racial lines. Thus, the open-endedness of the performance of endurance, and its receptiveness to the participation of those who might otherwise remain in the “audience,” allowed for the possibility that the “drama” could play out differently. Here, then, lies another critical distinction between the scene of racism that played out in the sit-ins and other visible scenes of racism that were a part of everyday life in the South. Whereas other scenes of racist violence were enacted again and again to ensure the continuation of a prescribed status quo, the sit-ins were repeated day after day with the very goal of changing the conventional script. At its most basic level, the act performed by the Greensboro Four  – the act that defines a sit-in – was one of occupying a particular space and refusing to move for an extended period of time. It is this performance that must be analyzed in order to understand how the sit-ins worked, to understand both the aggression that was carried out against the protestors and how the sit-ins created the possibility for change. As I argued in the previous chapter in relation to Ono and Abramović, the enduring body often inspires aggression against it in part because it is experienced as “in the way.” In the case of the lunch counter sit-ins, the protestors not only put their bodies in the way of the flow of business as usual; they put their bodies in the way of racist phobias and aggressions. Embracing the methods of passive resistance, the protestors refused to fight back or respond “like for like” to the violence launched against them. Instead, as accounts of the sit-ins often note, the protestors “endured the resulting insults, beatings, and arrests with stoic dignity.”49 Like Ono’s and Abramović’s performances, these were willful performances of passivity that were difficult to maintain. As Foster points out, the protestors had 49

William L. O’Neill, The New Left: A History (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2001), 7–8.

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to learn and practice how to “defy the physical impulse to respond in kind to assault and to redirect it into maintaining composure.”50 To this end, they participated in training workshops where they “would practice not striking back if someone struck us.”51 In this way, the protestors not only demanded recognition as authorial subjects but also engaged in a performance of objecthood that acknowledged the material condition of existing as a body that can be both acted upon and abandoned, that is both separate and always in relation. Though this performance of passivity “seemed to some to reinforce the stereotype of the passive Negro waiting expectantly for consideration,”52 I aim to show that through this extended refusal to reciprocate, the protestors not only demanded “consideration” but radically intervened in the psychic structures that motivate segregation, modeling an ethical form of relationality and inviting others to join in the effort by sitting still alongside them.

The Psychodynamics of Segregation In order to pursue this argument, it is necessary first to recognize segregation as a social phenomenon intricately connected to psychic processes of racism. Segregation is not the separation of previously existing, independent racial groups but a system that actively works, through such spatial practices as the lunch counter system, to demarcate discrete racial categories. Various laws, customs, and scientific discourses are mobilized to generate and maintain the fantasy of racial purity and distinction that props up white supremacy. For example, the “one-drop rule,” which determined that individuals with any African ancestry would be classified as “black,” served to enforce a binary opposition between blackness and whiteness that the rule itself showed to be an imposition. While ostensibly aiming to prevent miscegenation, the one-drop rule did not prevent racial mixing even while it sought to preserve the ostensible “purity” of white racial identity. During the era of slavery in the United States, white men could rape with impunity black women whom they kept as slaves. Children born from these acts of violence would be classified as “black” and would follow in the condition of slavery of their mothers. That the one-drop rule served actually to encourage certain configurations of racial mixing demonstrates that the fantasy of racial distinction it sought to 50

Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 400. Protestor Diane Nash quoted in ibid. 52 Ibid., 402. 51

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protect was in fact something it constructed. As Gwen Bergner writes, “If the miscegenation taboo operates so as to facilitate certain combinations of race mixing, then it contradicts the fantasy of racial purity. Ultimately, the symbolic regime of racial difference is structured on an internal contradiction that unravels its own logic.”53 Insofar as segregation is a system that operates to assert the coherence and racial “purity” of the white subject through a complex of laws and cultural practices that belie the very instability of the racial differences they purport to maintain, segregation can be understood as the social manifestation of a psychic endeavor on the part of that dominant subject to overcome the self-difference that lies at the heart of subject formation. As I discussed in the introduction, Lacan’s account of the mirror stage suggests that the subject’s first sense of self is established in the form of a bodily ego that is fundamentally split. Upon encountering a mirror image of itself, the infant experiences a simultaneous identification with and alienation from the image of its body, a momentary sense of wholeness that gives way to a recognition of self-difference – to the recognition that difference resides within the self. As Ann Pellegrini explains, race functions within a colonialist context (such as the United States of 1960; a characterization that follows Fredric Jameson’s reading of the civil rights movement as “a movement of decolonization”54) to relocate that difference elsewhere. Importantly, the difference managed and produced by the system of race does not function neutrally in a lateral proliferation of differences where all “selves” are defined equally in relation to all “others.” Rather, a clear hierarchy is established wherein “the colonizer generates the fiction of his self-identity by displacing difference elsewhere, onto the colonized, who become the placeholder of absolute difference.”55 As a response to the incoherence of the bodily ego, racism commandeers the primary mechanism of the mirror stage, identification, for itself. It endeavors to preserve for the white (male) subject exclusive access to the idealized imago, while forcing onto racially marked subjects an identification with a de-idealizing image. Thus, while the colonizer confirms his self-identity by projecting difference onto the colonized, “The colonized do not have the same luxury of disidentification; even their inner 53

Gwen Bergner, Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2005), xxviii. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in The Sixties Without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres et  al. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1984), 180. 55 Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York: Routledge, 1997), 70. 54

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kingdoms may be overrun by images of the colonizer in the double sense of images of the colonizer as measure of what it is to be human and images the colonizer has of them or of ‘their people.’”56 Holding the colonized to a de-idealizing (and de-humanizing) identification, racism works to displace the anxiety of objecthood induced by the mirror stage away from the colonizer and onto the colonized through a process of objectification. It is not difficult to see the segregated lunch counter as one manifestation of such a process. While Jim Crow laws and customs called for “equal but separate” accommodations for people designated black and white, in fact, facilities allocated for black people were always inferior to those designed for white people. In the case of food service at Woolworth’s, there was a counter where black customers could be served food, but it was at the back of the store in a less desirable location, and it was a standing-only counter, which was obviously far less comfortable. In designating the seats at the main lunch counter as “whites only,” the stools became both figuratively and literally pedestals designed to prop up and support white bodies exclusively, while black customers were denied access to these props and were forced to identify themselves  – often quite literally by standing under a sign marked “colored” – with less ideal surroundings. At the same time, the “colored” lunch counter’s location at the back of the store and the fact that it was a standing only counter suggests another facet of how segregation worked to consolidate the identity of dominant white subjects, not only by objectifying black bodies through the enforcement of de-idealizing identifications but by dispersing black bodies through public spaces. At the Woolworth’s in Greensboro in 1960, black shoppers could circulate through the same space as white shoppers as long as they kept moving. What they could not do was sit down. Making the one counter that did serve food to black patrons a standing-only counter thus not only made clear its inferior status but worked to ensure that its patrons would not remain in place for long. This imposition of constant movement on black bodies, while preserving the right to sit for white bodies, might remind us that the idealized imago in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage appears as a “statue,” whereas the embodied self is experienced as insufficient and animated by “turbulent movements.”57 By not allowing black patrons to sit on the 56 57

Ibid., 70, Pellegrini’s italics. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 4–5.

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stools/pedestals at the lunch counter and insisting that they keep moving, the idealized position of the “statue” was reserved for the white individuals allowed to sit at the counter while forcing the less desired role of the body-that-is-not-in-control-of-its-movements onto those who were made to move through the shop without being “served.” This logic is also evident in the fact that black people worked in food service capacities at Woolworth’s. In food service, stationary bodies are tended to by moving bodies. Those who are served are accorded the privilege of occupying space and of remaining in place while someone else brings items to them and later takes them away. Furthermore, the one who serves must navigate around the bodies of those being served in an unobtrusive manner. The best service “disappears.” What I am approaching here is the suggestion that if racism functions through objectification, this objectification operates not only as a “fixing” of racialized identities but simultaneously as a dissipating force. One can see this dual process at work in Frantz Fanon’s well-known “sociodiagnostic” psychoanalysis of colonialism, Black Skin, White Masks, first published in 1952. Opening his chapter “The Fact of Blackness” with an account of racist hailing  –“‘Dirty nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’”58 – Fanon begins by describing this interpellation as an objectifying force: “I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.”59 Yet, as Fanon continues, it becomes clear that the kind of object he is made to be is one that, though hypervisible, also disintegrates. Reworking the fundamental components of Lacan’s mirror stage, Fanon tells a story in which the glance of the other functions like the mirror first to fix him in place and then to bring about the experience of bursting apart. When the pieces are reconstituted, Fanon finds that “the fragments have been put together again by another self.”60 Unlike the presumptively white (male) subject of Lacan’s account, the black subject does not develop his or her “corporeal schema” or bodily ego through an interaction between his or her sensate body and the image in the mirror. Rather, Fanon argues that his own corporeal schema is subtended by a “historico-racial” schema: “The elements that I used had been provided 58

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 109. In turning to this anecdote, I am following in the footsteps of numerous scholars before me who have looked to what Nicole R. Fleetwood calls “the Fanonian moment.” See Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 21–28, for her discussion of some of the ways that Fanon’s story has been taken up within studies of race and subjectivity. 59 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 109. 60 Ibid.

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for me not by ‘residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,’ but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.”61 Fanon’s description of a bodily ego composed of a thousand images imposed upon him suggests that the process of objectification is connected to the projection outwards by the colonizer of the fragmented body experienced before the mirror in an effort to preserve a sense of wholeness for the self. To be objectified is thus also to be torn apart. Although Fanon is frequently quoted for his statement, “the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man,”62 Diana Fuss argues that there is a second theory of black-white relations in Fanon’s text that “implicitly disputes his initial formulation of racial alterity.”63 Of even greater importance for anticolonialist politics, Fuss argues, is “Fanon[‘s] consider[ation of ] the possibility that colonialism may inflict its greatest psychical violence precisely by attempting to exclude blacks from the very self/other dynamic that makes subjectivity possible.”64 For Fuss, this happens insofar as the black body becomes a “stationary ‘object.’”65 Reading the opening lines of “The Fact of Blackness,” she writes: Objecthood, substituting for true alterity, blocks the migration through the Other necessary for subjectivity to take place. Through the violence of racial interpellation  – “‘Dirty nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’”  – Fanon finds himself becoming neither an “I” nor a “not-I” but simply “an object in the midst of other objects.”66

Fuss uses the word “objecthood” here as Fanon himself seems to at the beginning of his chapter, where he describes himself as being “sealed into [a] crushing objecthood,” to describe a body objectified.67 Yet, rather than being turned into a stationary object, Fanon’s text suggests that the black body may be excluded most perniciously through its dispersal, through the very refusal to allow it to remain in place. After all, Fanon finds himself “an object in the midst of other objects” at the moment that he also “burst[s] apart.”68 The problem, as Fanon states it, is that if he is 61

Ibid., 111, my italics. Ibid., 161. 63 Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,” Diacritics 24.2/3 (1994), 21. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 109. 68 Ibid. 62

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an object, he is one that “has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.”69 If objecthood itself were the problem, it would seem that the solution to such a state of affairs would be to assert one’s subjectivity as forcefully as possible over and against objecthood. However, the solution suggested by Fanon’s text – and, I argue, by the sit-ins – is not to reject objecthood as such, but to rediscover and reassert its inextricable connection to subjectivity as well as its central role in self/other relations. For, if racism attempts to consolidate the identity of the white subject by objectifying nonwhite “others” and asserting that difference resides externally to the white subject rather than internally, this is an impossible endeavor because the duality of subject/object is integral to personhood. As Kaja Silverman writes, “although the normative white male bodily ego is defined through its aspirations to coherence, the principle of the self-same body is, even there, never more than momentarily and delusorily victorious.”70 Furthermore, the attempt to separate objecthood from subjecthood is problematic because it is an individual’s ability to take up both positions that enables her or him to have relationships with others. One of the functions of the mirror relation, after all, is to lay the groundwork for subsequent self/other relations. Homi Bhabha takes up Fanon’s question, posed at the beginning of Black Skin, White Masks: “What does the black man want?”71 In his search for an answer, Bhabha lands upon the following words in Fanon’s text: “I occupied space. I moved toward the other  . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea  . . .”72 In this passage Bhabha finds what he is looking for. He writes, “From that overwhelming emptiness of nausea, Fanon makes his answer: the black man wants the objectifying confrontation with otherness.”73 Although Bhabha uses the word “objectifying,” what he describes is closer to my sense of objecthood. Occupying space, confronting the colonist with the object-body of the colonized, and insisting upon the encounter with objecthood  – insisting, that is, upon an encounter with the embodied vulnerability and opacity that both parties share (the white other in Fanon’s description must also no longer be 69

Ibid., 110. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 31. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004). Notably, neither Bhabha nor Fanon ask what black women might want. 72 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112, ellipses in original. 73 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 73. 70 71

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evanescent, transparent, disappearing) – might be the very means through which to enter the self/other relation.

Objecting Bodies I do not wish to experience the impact of the object. Contact with the object means conflict. I am Narcissus, and what I want to see in the eyes of others is a reflection that pleases me. – Frantz Fanon74

Of course, confronting the objectified “other” as an other is precisely what white segregationists in the South did not want to do. By sitting on the stools at the lunch counter, the protestors did much more than assert their right to be full customers. They inserted themselves within placeholders that enabled the people who occupied them to become “guests” at the lunch counter and, like the linguistic shifters “I” and “you,” to take up positions as both subjects and objects in a relational exchange. By occupying this aggressively defended site of ideality, they asserted the exchangeability of their bodies and the bodies of the white customers who usually occupied these spaces. Through this simple act, they revealed the tenuousness of any division between black and white and generated a crisis of identification for the white segregationists who sought to preserve this idealized position for themselves. In a long footnote concerning Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, Fanon asks, “what would happen if the mirror image the young white saw were black.”75 He asks the question as an appendage to his discussion of Negrophobia, where he seems to suggest an answer: “at the extreme, I should say that the Negro, because of his body, impedes the closing of the postural schema of the white man – at the point, naturally, at which the black man makes his entry into the phenomenal world of the white man.”76 In other words, if blackness is one of the things that the white male subject excludes in his attempt to achieve self-sameness 74

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 212. This is Kelly Oliver’s gloss in her chapter “Alienation and Its Double; or, The Secretion of Race,” in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 185. Fanon writes, “It would indeed be interesting, on the basis of Lacan’s theory of the mirror period, to investigate the extent to which the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at the usual age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of the Negro” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 161, Fanon’s italics). 76 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 160. 75

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with his mirror image, the experience of encountering a black man as a mirror image would tear the white subject’s (delusory) sense of wholeness asunder. By occupying the stools at the lunch counter that were designated “whites only,” the sit-in protestors produced such an experience for the white segregationists who opposed them. That the white men who came to harass and attack the protestors found their sense of coherence threatened by the sit-ins seems apparent in documentation of the events. One of the most striking photographs of the sit-ins was taken by Fred Blackwell at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 (Figure  2.2). It shows three protestors surrounded by a mob of white men. The protestors  – Anne Moody, a young black woman; Joan Trumpaur, a young white woman; and John Salter, a light-skinned, mixed race professor at Tougaloo College where the other two were students  – sit facing forward, away from the crowd that surrounds them from behind. The protestors appear still: Moody and Salter strike the same pose with their hands folded together on the

Figure 2.2.

John Salter, Joan Trumpauer, and Anne Moody sitting in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi, May 28, 1963 Photo: Fred Blackwell, © Fred Blackwell.

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counter in front of them and their heads bent slightly forward; Trumpaur sits with her head leaning on her right fist propped up on her elbow. Salt and sugar fills the protestors’ hair and covers the counter. The protestors’ clothes are soiled with ketchup and blood. Cigarette butts lie on the counter after having been stamped out on the protestor’s bodies. The form of the violence against the sit-inners suggests anxiety on the part of their attackers about the insufficiency of boundaries between themselves and the protestors. The food and drink poured over the protestors’ bodies marks them as abject – as that which Julia Kristeva tells us “disturbs identity, system, order.”77 In contrast to the stillness of the protestors enduring these assaults, the agitation of the crowd of white men behind them is evident. They are caught in suspended animation: One man’s arm extends over Trumpaur’s head, an empty sugar canister in his hand, which he has just dumped down the back of her neck; another man’s hand is caught hovering around the cigarette in his mouth; a young man gestures excitedly to someone else in the crowd; a head appears in the background, rising above the others as though this man has jumped up to see what is going on. The image is crosscut by the many directions of the gaze: the crowd of white men look every which way and no two pairs of eyes meet. For the most part, they do not look at the protestors but rather to each other, as if for confirmation. That the group sitting-in in this image was racially mixed  – as the sit-ins increasingly were as they progressed  – is significant. This almost certainly amplified the racist mob’s anxiety over the instability of boundaries between white and black. The historical record makes clear that tensions were especially heightened when the first white supporters joined the Greensboro lunch counter protest. A police detective reported on February 4, 1960 that the situation became “immediately explosive upon their (the white girls’) joining the colored group” and noted that “their presence among the colored students acted to inflame the feelings of all spectators and also the white students who were there in opposition to the colored demonstration.”78 That it was white women’s support of the movement that heightened the panic and rage of segregationists also reminds us that if consolidating the identity of the privileged white (male) subject is at stake in racism, the “protection” of white femininity has frequently been articulated as a basis for and justification of racism.79 77

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 78 Wolff, Lunch at the 5 & 10, 44, parentheses in original. 79 See note 42.

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In the case of the Jackson protest, Moody recalls that when Trumpaur joined the sit-in (after an outbreak of violence against the first three protestors to sit at the counter resulted in one of them being badly beaten and subsequently arrested by the police), Trumpaur became the next immediate target. Moody describes an older man telling a young man to take the protestors off the stools. When the younger man asked who he should “get” first, the older man pointed at Trumpaur and responded “that white nigger.”80 Demonstrating quite clearly that racial difference is socially constructed, this phrase also reveals an effort to reassert distinctions at precisely the point where they were breaking down. In the face of such aggression, the protestors remained remarkably calm  – and remained so for exceptionally long periods of time. The group in the photograph endured continuous abuse for three hours until the manager finally closed the store, and other sit-ins lasted much longer with more and less violence. Moreover, the sit-ins were repeated day after day for months in some locations. To say that the protestors remained passive is not to say that they never reacted at all. As one would expect, the protestors exchanged looks with one another, spoke with one another to check in about how they were doing, and reacted to such things as being dragged off their stools by, for instance, raising their arms to protect their heads. Moody recalls that after being dragged out of the store at one point, she and Trumpaur made their way right back to the counter and sat down again. Yet, what Blackwell’s photograph captures so vividly is the relative stillness of the protestors against the agitated movements of the crowd behind them. In this contrast, one can see how the protestors occupying the “pedestals” at the counter discomposed the white segregationists who opposed them, shattering any illusion of coherent identity. At the same time, in their stillness and passivity  – in their refusal to aggress back against those who aggressed against them –the protestors also occupied these sites of ideality differently, modeling a form of agency not bent upon denying objecthood or incompleteness. Whereas racist violence attempts to consolidate the identity of its perpetrator as being wholly “the one who acts” by turning the other (the one who is acted upon) into an object of violence, the sit-inners actively inhabited the position of “object”  – of the entity that is acted upon  – while occupying the site of ideality, thereby refusing the binary logic that seeks to separate active and passive, subject and object. Taking on the very bodily 80

Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi: An Autobiography (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 238.

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vulnerability that acts of racist violence seek to exploit,81 the sit-in protestors thus exerted an agency separated from, rather than wed to, violence at the same time that they refused the separation between subject and object. Remaining still while food was spilled on them, cigarettes were extinguished on their skin, and racist epithets were literally written on their bodies,82 the protestors refused the dehumanizing objectification launched against them paradoxically by insisting upon the objecthood of their own enduring bodies. In doing so, they did not just demand recognition as subjects; they also made clear that there is no subjectivity without objecthood, and there is no subject that is not in relation. Remaining in place and refusing to be scattered by the violence launched against them, the protestors also created the possibility for new responses. They did this in part by intentionally leaving seats available beside them.83 This invited the possibility that others would join them, and, at the very least, it encouraged secondary audiences who watched the events through the media to consider whether they would be willing to take up a seat beside the protestors. Unlike the white opponents to the movement who sought to fill all of the seats at the counter in order to prevent anyone they identified as black from sitting down, the protestors did not endeavor to commandeer these sites for themselves. Rather, they acknowledged that there were a finite number of seats at the counter and demonstrated the need to take turns. To this end, the response given by white protestors to the waiters who attempted to serve them - “There were others here before me” – was not just a tactical maneuver to obstruct the flow of business as usual; it was an ethical stance and an acknowledgment that making room for others means learning to wait. Importantly, for white supporters to sit on one of the available stools was not only to recognize the protestors’ rights as subjects; it was also to take up a position of objecthood alongside them: to become a body that was acted upon, a body that was also experienced as “in the way.” 81

Elizabeth Alexander notes that for many young black people in the 1950s, “Emmett Till’s story . . . was the basis for a rite of passage that indoctrinated these young people into understanding the vulnerability of their own black bodies, coming of age, and the way in which their fate was interchangeable with Till’s” (Elizabeth Alexander, “Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?”: Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” Public Culture 7 [1994], 88). 82 Moody describes one of the protestors having the word “nigger” spray painted on his back. Moody, Coming of Age, 238. 83 Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 401. Foster references Merrill Proudfoot, Diary of a Sit-In, 2nd ed. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 39.

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Enduring alongside one another without insisting upon self-sameness or identity, the racially diverse group of protestors called into question the denial of corporeal multiplicity that underpins the aggressively defended ego. Such acts of solidarity exceeded the individualist rights discourse usually associated with the civil rights movement, where it is the right of individual subjects to pursue their own interests without undue restriction that is at stake. The protestors did more than assert black Americans’ right to sit at the lunch counter and order something to eat; they performed a staunch refusal to accommodate the racist phobias underpinning segregation, which deemed that black and white Americans could not sit side by side. Together, the protestors endured both the racist refusals (to serve them, to sit beside them) and the racist attacks, not only to demand the right of black individuals to sit and be served, but to insist that the racist response – and its strenuous defense of the white individualist subject – must change.

Enduring Disidentifications I have been arguing that the sit-ins intervened in the psychic structures propping up segregation, but it is necessary to acknowledge some limitations. Although the sit-ins presented a challenge to the defensive logic that seeks to separate subject from object, this does not mean that they overturned such dynamics entirely. There is, in the ways that white spectators responded to the sit-ins, evidence that a contest over ideality remained central to how many white southerners negotiated the effects of the protests. Here, another important factor in the sit-ins must be taken into consideration: class. The sit-in movement has sometimes been described dismissively as “‘middle class,’ not truly revolutionary in intent or consequence,” because the desegregation of eating establishments and other public accommodations could only benefit those with enough money to patronize them.84 While I have attempted to show that the performative effects of the sit-ins were far more radical than such a statement suggests, it is necessary to acknowledge how class factored into responses to the sit-ins. In contrast to the “undeniably middle-class or upwardly mobile” black college students,85 the white antagonists to the protests were almost always described in contemporaneous accounts as poor and working class. 84 85

Brooks, Walls Come Tumbling, 148. Ibid., 149.

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Specifically, they were described as such by white supporters of the movement. As one chronicler writes: I have used the phrase “white liberals” to describe white southerners who perceived existing race relations as unjust and who were willing to participate in programs to fight segregation. “Rednecks” and “poor whites,” in turn, refer not to specific social or economic groups, but to the labels widely used by upper-class whites to describe those at the other end of the political spectrum who seemed to them intolerant, bigoted, and otherwise unwilling to endorse an urbane approach to matters of race.86

The strange assertion that a phrase like “poor whites” would not refer to a “specific social or economic group” suggests that class markers were regularly projected onto various parties to account for differences in political outlooks. Regardless of their actual class status, active opponents to the movement were regularly marked as poor by white supporters of the movement, who, this account suggests, were usually upper class. Such characterizations suggest that identification remained key to many white spectators’ responses to the sit-ins. However, instead of being based on race, the disidentification of white supporters of the movement with white segregationists, and their implicit identification with the protestors, was framed in terms of class. The question of with whom one would rather identify and associate – the protestors or their attackers – was posed again and again in public dialogue among white people reconsidering segregation. For instance, in a letter to the editor, a Greensboro merchant asked readers if they would prefer “sitting alongside of a well-behaved, nicely mannered, cleanly dressed quiet Negro student or sitting alongside of a filthy dirty, ... disheveled duck tailed, loud mouthed white rowdy who was served promptly even though his white skin looked as if it hadn’t been washed since Christmas.”87 Even the segregationist Richmond News Leader found itself disidentifying with the active opponents to the sit-ins and published an editorial stating: Many a Virginian must have felt a tinge of wry regret at the state of things as they are, in reading of Saturday’s “sit-downs” by Negro students in Richmond stores. Here were the colored students in coats, white shirts, ties, and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk outside, was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slackjawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to 86 87

Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 6. Wolff, Lunch at the 5 & 10, 79, ellipses in original.

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kill, and some of them, God save the mark, were waving the proud and honored flag of the southern states.88

While the Richmond News Leader identified with the Confederate flag – a symbol of the southern states’ fight during the US Civil War to preserve slavery, among other things – its editors nevertheless found themselves more sympathetic to the well-dressed, educated protestors than the disheveled, “slackjawed” crowd that opposed them. One might read the Richmond News Leader’s expression of regret as a sign that the sit-ins worked to expose the irrationality of racism, encouraging white spectators to come to more reasoned conclusions about racial difference. Drawing attention to the behaviors of the individuals involved rather than their skin color, the black students’ peaceful protest, performed as an act of civil disobedience, revealed the contradictoriness of maintaining civil laws and conventions that served those who did not behave in a civil manner while excluding those who embodied civility. Certainly, it did reveal these contradictions. However, it is also clear in the examples above that any questioning of the logic of segregation emerged in relation to less rational processes of identification and disidentification as well. There remains in the comparisons being made a continued effort to manage the boundaries between an idealized selfimage and an abjected other. Moreover, this distinction continues to be articulated in terms of the bodily ego. Though that which is deemed a threat shifts  – from “black” skin to “red” necks and “filthy dirty” white skin – the assertion of an absolute difference between a “pure” white self and a newly identified “other” remains intact. Such responses show how powerful the “donned armor of an alienating identity” can be.89 Yet the deliberation itself suggests that important negotiations did happen at the psychic level in response to the sit-ins. If racial domination operates in part through the mechanism of identification, this is a two-way process. Accounts following Fanon have often focused on how colonialism dominates the other by holding the colonized to the image the colonizer has of them. However, in order to maintain the system, the identifications of the colonizers too must be heavily managed  – in part to protect them from guilt, which Fanon argued leads to making the “racial drama” unconscious for the

88

Steven Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954–68 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996), 71. 89 Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” 6.

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colonizer,90 but also surely to ensure that the colonizers’ psychic investments in racial distinction remain in place. The sit-ins interrupted this process, reproducing that alienating encounter with the mirror that precipitates the formation of a subject-in-relation at the same moment that the individual’s sense of wholeness is taken apart. The attempt of white liberals to distance themselves from “rednecks” reflects a dawning recognition of  – and a defense against  – something that the sitins made clear: there are no “innocent” forms of “racial practice.”91 Segregation could no longer pretend to be a neutral system of separation because it was shown to be motivated by the same murderous impulses exhibited by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, what remains not fully conscious is the “class drama” (which may persist as one of the most repressed forms of inequality in the United States) that also played out here. There is a hint of it in the iconic photo of McNeil, McCain, Smith, and Henderson sitting at the counter. Four names grace the caption, identifying these men as both the subjects sitting and the objects of our gaze. But there is another person in the picture, too, not meant to be our focus. On the opposite side of the counter stands another black man dressed in the white smock, apron, and cap of a food-service employee. Neither the subject nor the object of this photograph, he is instead part of the backdrop of the Woolworth’s department store. So “unremarkable” is his presence that in some versions of this photograph, he has even been cropped out. In the ease with which he has been overlooked, perhaps we catch a glimpse of what remains excluded.

On the Possibility for Radical Engagements To analyze the lunch counter sit-ins as I have done is to offer a different perspective from those that have seen the events in terms of “drama.” Instead, I have sought to understand this protest in relation to performance art and specifically to understand the action formally as an act of endurance in which plans are made and carried through in the face of indeterminate outcomes. Identifying endurance at the heart of the US civil rights movement makes clear its ethical and political stakes as 90

Fanon writes, “Since the racial drama is played out in the open, the black man has no time to ‘make it unconscious.’ The white man, on the other hand, succeeds in doing so to a certain extent, because a new element appears: guilt” (Black Skin, White Masks, 150). 91 This is Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’ phrase. See her book Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

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a practice that explores fundamental conditions of embodied existence. At the same time, insofar as my understanding of endurance has been informed by art, I have also aimed to show the critical potential of endurance art practices and theory to enrich our understanding of protest actions that also contend with what it means to be an embodied subject, with the inextricability of subjecthood and objecthood, and with a relationality that marks the limits of individual control. This is not to deny the differences between performance art and protest contexts, nor to make simplistic equations between the two. Both performance art and protest are too various in any case to allow for sweeping generalizations. It is instead to suggest that those of us working from the perspectives of theatre, performance studies, and art history have the opportunity to contribute to more nuanced understandings of protest practices by bringing more specific understandings of various performance forms to our analyses. Doing so also means not taking for granted familiar assumptions about how protest differs from performance art, such as that the articulated aims or demands of a protest movement give its actions definitive or objective meanings while art remains open to multiple interpretations, or that the outcomes of protest are determinable and measurable, whereas the outcomes of art remain indeterminate and unquantifiable. As I have attempted to show, the lunch counter sit-in protestors did more than make visible predetermined meanings and went beyond their explicit demands through a formal action that involved their spectators in an open-ended encounter.92 In cautioning against too simplistic understandings of performance art “as a vehicle for social change,”93 Jones wrote that: body art is not “inherently” critical, as many have claimed, nor (as we will see others have argued) inherently reactionary, but rather  – in its opening up of the interpretive relation and its active solicitation of spectatorial desire – provides the possibility for radical engagements that can transform the way we think about meaning and subjectivity.94 92

By the same token, engaging in more concrete analyses of protest actions also has the potential to enrich our understandings of performance art. Surely, the lunch counter protestors’ actions have something in common with art works that have used endurance to interrogate the hypervisibility and exclusion of black bodies in public spaces. I am thinking, for example, of William Pope.L’s Crawl performances, which Darby English has described as a “counterpractice of civil disobedience,” intervening “in sites where the right to inhabit common space is not only constantly at stake but entirely an issue of power and identity” (Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness [Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2007], 261, 264). 93 Jones, Body Art, 13. 94 Ibid., 14, Jones’ emphases.

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Rather than differentiating performance art and political action along these lines, we have much to gain from exploring how political protest actions, too, open up interpretive relations and solicit a wide range of affective responses from viewers. Certainly, by sitting down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on that day in 1960, the Greensboro Four created the possibility for radical engagements that were very much about “transform[ing] the way we think about meaning and subjectivity.”

chapter 3

Enduring Life

Within the literature on performance of the mid- twentieth century, “breaking down the barrier between art and life” became a ubiquitous mantra. – Jane Blocker1 [T]he convergence of art and life [is] a recurrent motif and agenda in live art’s history. – Deirdre Heddon2

One of the most reiterated claims about performance art is that it attempts to blur the boundary between art and life. Indeed, given performance art’s diversity, which makes any single definition impossible, exploring the relationship between art and life has sometimes been understood as performance art’s sole shared project. As Robyn Brentano writes: It is somewhat misleading to describe performance as a single genre because many local factors  – audience, space, and the community of artists – as well as broader social and political conditions, and differences in the sensibilities of individual artists, have contributed to the formation of many kinds of performance work.  . . . At the same time, to begin to delineate the features of performance, it is useful to keep in mind that they are rooted in the inquiry into the relationship between art and life.3

One need only glance at a handful of works that figure prominently within the historiography of performance art to see that the relationship 1

Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 56. 2 Deirdre Heddon, “The Politics of Live Art,” in Histories and Practices of Live Art, ed. Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 180. 3 Robyn Brentano, “Outside the Frame: Performance, Art, and Life,” in Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object, ed. Robyn Brentano and Olivia Georgia (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994), 33.

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between art and life is evoked again and again in the commentary surrounding a wide range of art practices that were turning toward performance in the mid-twentieth century: one sees that Harold Rosenberg responded to the action painting of artists such as Jackson Pollock with the statement, “the new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life”4; that composer John Cage opened the celebrated “untitled event” of 1952 at Black Mountain College (which he created in collaboration with choreographer Merce Cunningham) with the declaration that, “Art should not be different [from] life but an action within life. Like all of life, with its accidents and chances and variety and disorder and only momentary beauties”5; that Allan Kaprow wrote of the Happenings that “the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible”6; and that the Living Theatre, too, was “beautifully floundering behind its proscenium toward some open life it was dimly beginning to sense.”7 As these diverse examples suggest, claims about “breaking down the barrier between art and life” have been both widespread and heterogeneous. Accomplishing “the convergence of art and life” has meant multiple things, and attempts to achieve it have often coincided with efforts to dismantle other binaries as well, such as divisions between process and product and between artist and audience. So far in this book, some of the ways in which endurance practices “blur the boundary between art and life” have already emerged (though it has not been my project to assert such a blurring). We have seen how the bodily consequences of a performance can make the line between art and life difficult to draw. We have seen how the participation of audience members makes it impossible to distinguish an artwork from the lived experience of its encounter. In the last chapter, I performed my own critical blurring of the boundary between art and life by looking at a protest practice more usually associated with “life” (and with life-and-death consequences) than with “art” in order to argue for the value of understanding endurance as a practice that is undertaken in both contexts. In this chapter, I return to the world of art but do so in order to look at a body of work that uses endurance insistently to challenge art’s boundaries. In the process, I argue, it raises 4

Ibid., 35. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, revised edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 126. 6 Allan Kaprow, “Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings,” in The Twentieth- Century Performance Reader 2nd edition, ed. Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (London and New York: Rouledge, 2002), 260, italics removed. 7 Arthur Sainer, The New Radical Theatre Notebook (New York: Applause, 1997), 12. 5

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questions about the very project of “blurring the boundary between art and life.” What does endurance have to show us about this boundary, the overcoming of which has so often been associated with avant-garde art? The artist whose work I consider here has been understood as “breaking down the barrier between art and life,” not through the direct staging of his enduring body in an event that involved audience members as witnesses or participants, but through a series of long-durational performances that exceeded any audience members’ ability to witness them in their entirety. Between 1978 and 1986, Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwanese artist who immigrated to New York without authorization in 1974, carried out a series of unprecedented One Year Performances.8 Over the course of these performances, Hsieh remained locked inside an 11′66″ × 9′ × 8′ cell constructed in his studio, without speaking, reading, writing, listening to the radio, or watching television for one year; punched a time clock in his studio every hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day, for 365 days; lived outdoors without ever entering a building, subway, car, or other structure throughout the New York City fall, winter, spring, and summer; and was tied together at the waist with the artist Linda Montano by an eight-foot rope, the two artists never touching yet never being separated for the entire year. For his final One Year Performance, Hsieh took a vow of abstinence from all art-related activities, stating that he would “not do ART, not talk ART, not see ART, not read ART” for the duration; he would “just go in life.”9 He then followed this performance with an even more prolonged act of removal from the art world: a thirteen-year piece stretching from December 31, 1986 to December 31, 1999 in which he vowed to make art but not show it publicly. When, at the end of the performance, he revealed what he had done during those thirteen years, he announced simply, “I kept myself alive.”10 In their use of unrelenting bodily commitment over prolonged durations, Hsieh’s performances blur the supposed boundary between art and life across the axis of time. Whereas shorter pieces might be considered interruptions or breaks from everyday life, the six performances produced by Hsieh between 1978 and 1999 cannot be circumscribed in this way. Over the course of the eighteen out of twenty-one years occupied 8

Each of these is titled One Year Performance followed by the years across which it was performed. For example, Hsieh’s first year-long performance is titled One Year Performance 1978–1979. The works are also known by informal, more descriptive titles, which I will use as this chapter progresses. 9 Sam Hsieh, “Statement,” July 1, 1985. (Hsieh used the name “Sam” until 1982, when he reverted back to his given name, Tehching.) 10 This sentence appears on the poster produced by Hsieh upon his completion of this performance.

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by these performances, Hsieh grew older (he was twenty-eight when he began the first piece and forty-nine when he concluded the last), and he experienced whatever loves and losses life had to offer him. It is no surprise that writers about Hsieh’s work have repeatedly made statements such as: “Of all performance artists, Tehching Hsieh seems to come closest to merging his life and his art”11; “Hsieh made his life and performance works uniquely apposite to each other, in their way functionally synonymous”12; “No other artist I know of has succeeded in combining life and art so fully as Hsieh.”13 In the first monograph on Hsieh’s work, published in 2009, Adrian Heathfield describes Hsieh’s performances as “unparalleled  . . . in their absolute conception and enactment of art and life as simultaneous processes.”14 Unparalleled they are. Yet, as I aim to show, Hsieh’s performances also enact a far more complicated relationship between art and life than gestures toward their merging  – gestures that since the historical avantgarde of the early twentieth century have celebrated art that breaks away from the realm of autonomous art to become “indistinguishable from life at the level of both production and reception”15 – often imply. While participating in a project of blurring the boundary between art and life, Hsieh’s oeuvre, I argue, also critiques assumptions that have often underpinned this project. For, if performance art emerged in “an era in which art hopes more and more ardently for unity with its presumed opposite, life,” as Jane Blocker writes, we might ask why life has been the “presumed opposite” of art at all.16 What is “life” in the context of such a claim? This, I contend, is one of the most pressing questions that Hsieh’s art poses. Both enacting and drawing attention to the paradoxes of attempting to blur the boundary between art and life  – a presumed boundary that, as Hal Foster has written, tends to posit life “not only as remote but also as immediate, as if it were simply there to rush in like so much air once the hermetic seal of convention is broken”17 – Hsieh’s work, I aim to show, raises questions not only about the frameworks of 11

Jonathan Siskin, “Still Doing Time: Tehching Hsieh,” High Performance 5.3 (1982), 76. Jill Johnston, “Tehching Hsieh: Art’s Willing Captive,” Art in America (September 2001), 140. Andreas Gedin, “Tehching Hsieh: Passing Time,” Nu: The Nordic Art Review 4.1–2 (2002), 68. 14 Adrian Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” in Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, by Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh (London and Cambridge, MA: Live Art Development Agency and MIT Press, 2009), 11. 15 Blocker, What the Body Cost, 54. 16 Ibid., 53. 17 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 15, Foster’s italics. 12 13

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art (that which is usually under scrutiny when the boundary between art and life is invoked) but of life itself. It does so, I will argue, through its exploration of living as an act of enduring. As I noted in the Introduction, Heathfield, in his authoritative account, rejects the term “endurance” for what he calls Hsieh’s “lifeworks.”18 Yet, Hsieh’s performances clearly employ an endurance structure as I define it here. All of Hsieh’s performances began with a plan. Presented as formal “Statements,” written and signed by Hsieh, these plans take the form of straightforward sets of rules that Hsieh followed for the duration. The embodied carrying out of the plan is also essential to the work. Thus, although Hsieh’s performances largely took place outside of public view (aside from a selection of public open days scattered throughout), several aspects of the performances were carefully designed to verify that Hsieh did in fact carry them through. One of these is the use of signed affidavits from witnesses confirming that Hsieh adhered to the conditions of each piece. Another is the use of hair growth, which I mentioned in Introduction. Hsieh shaved his head at the start of each of his first four performances and allowed it to grow freely for the duration. Captured in daily photographs, the growth of hair serves as bodily evidence that Hsieh endured the full length of his performances. Finally, in being carried out, Hsieh’s performances also had physical and psychological consequences; most obviously, they consumed years of his life. Hsieh’s oeuvre thus continues an exploration of the conditions of embodiment central to the performance of endurance, expanding our focus beyond the direct encounter with an enduring body to the body’s endurance over a lifetime.

Framing Lifetimes My argument in the following pages is that Hsieh’s performances reconfigure an understanding of life in relation to art through their presentation of life as endurance through time. What, after all, is “life” in Hsieh’s performances? One might begin by suggesting that it is Hsieh’s life. Accordingly, some have aligned Hsieh’s blurring of the boundary between art and life with an autobiographical form of art making.19 Yet, Hsieh is distinctly uninterested in the personal, and his work offers very 18 19

Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 22. Jill Johnston writes, “In a genre virtually defined by its bias for autobiographical source material, Hsieh made his life and performance works uniquely apposite to each other, in their way functionally synonymous” (Johnston, “Art’s Willing Captive,” 140).

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little in terms of autobiography. Although his first, third, and fourth One Year Performances (informally referred to as “Cage Piece,” “Outdoor Piece,” and “Rope Piece”) all include a number of semicandid “Life Pictures,” showing Hsieh, and Montano in “Rope Piece,” going about daily life, the documentation provides only very limited hints at Hsieh’s experience.20 His fifth One Year Performance and his final thirteen- year performance (referred to respectively as “No Art Piece” and “Thirteen Year Plan”) include no documentation of what Hsieh did during each of them, until finally, all we know is that Hsieh “kept [him]self alive.” There are no written records for any of the pieces; Hsieh reports that he “didn’t write anything down” during them.21 Explicitly excluding his experience, Hsieh’s performances can be seen, as Frazer Ward has argued, as comprising a “near-systematic negation of subjectivity.”22 Rather than being defined by biography, life would seem to be understood by Hsieh purely as existence over time. As he once expressed it in an interview: When we speak of historical figures we say they were born this year, died that year. Or, we say, they are still alive. That’s all we talk about really. It’s just like the dinosaurs, all we can talk about is when they lived and died. So for me, I use similar language. I can only say that I have kept myself alive. More details are unnecessary, survival is all.23

Stripped of his personal experience, life is posited by Hsieh in universalizing terms as a persistence across time undertaken by all living beings, from the dinosaurs, to “historical figures,” to Hsieh, to all of us. And yet, as we will see, Hsieh’s performances also suggest that individual lifetimes are formed and experienced differently. Hsieh’s particular position as an undocumented immigrant infuses the work in ways that are difficult to ignore. He himself has linked the form of his works to this experience: “the loneliness in several of my works reflects my situation as an illegal immigrant in the USA. . . . I didn’t have a work permit and 20

“Life Pictures” is the title given to these photographs in the DVDRom documentation of the works. See Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance Art Documents 1978–1999, DVDRom, created and distributed by Tehching Hsieh, 2000. 21 Hsieh quoted in Adrian Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life: An Exchange with Tehching Hsieh,” in Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, by Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh (London and Cambridge, MA: Live Art Development Agency and MIT Press, 2009), 330. 22 Frazer Ward, “Alien Duration: Tehching Hsieh, 1978–99,” Art Journal 65.3 (Fall 2006), 8. 23 Hsieh quoted in Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey, “In Conversation: Tehching Hsieh,” The Brooklyn Rail, August 1, 2003, http://brooklynrail.org.

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didn’t know very many people in New York, I was mostly killing time.”24 Remarking on his first performance, he says, “‘I was a prisoner in my studio, and felt very isolated.’ The ‘Cage Piece’ . . . ‘was a way of making a form for how I felt.’”25 Moreover, the structures explored in his first four performances open themselves up to being read in relation to Hsieh’s specific situation as an unauthorized immigrant. As Ray Langenbach writes: If we read Hsieh’s life and work as a narrative of the transgressive immigrant, it takes on a kind of coherency. By imprisoning himself in a cell for one year, he positioned himself as the incarcerated, illegal Asian immigrant. While punching a time clock every hour, twenty-four hours per day for a year, he embodied the abject (foreign) proletarian, enmeshed in the American (and global) capitalist system. By living on the streets for a year, Hsieh reproduced the life of the homeless vagabond at risk. Tied together with Linda Montano, he assumed a symbolic “marriage” of (professional) convenience with an American woman, a tactic commonly resorted to by immigrants to obtain a green card.26

That Hsieh’s performances make available such interpretations begins to suggest just how specific any individual’s passing of time is. Importantly, it is the form of the works, rather than personal accounts from Hsieh, that opens them up to this reading. It is here that the inescapable symbolism of Hsieh’s first four performances demands attention  – despite the fact that Hsieh himself has sometimes denied their symbolism. While stressing that the passage of time is the essence of his performances, that “time becomes the main thing . . .. It doesn’t matter what I do, I pass time,”27 Hsieh has also asserted that the structures he gave to them should not be read as metaphors for actual situations in the social world. When asked if “Cage Piece” had anything to do with the prison system, for instance, Hsieh said, “The prison-like cage was only a way of indicating what I was working with, it had nothing to do with prisons. I mean, I had actually chosen to lock myself in. The cage is a technicality. In practice it could just as well have been a patch of floor.”28 Yet this claim is contradicted by the material specificity of the performance with its carefully constructed set (the cell), costuming (Hsieh wore the same uniform everyday with his name and an “ID number” printed on it), props (even Hsieh’s mattress was stamped with his name and 24

Hsieh quoted in Gedin, “Passing Time,” 67. Hsieh quoted in Johnston, “Art’s Willing Captive,” 143. Ray R. Langenbach, “Statutory Obligations: The Performances of Tehching Hsieh,” Art and Asia Pacific 33 (2002), 50. 27 Hsieh quoted in Bajo and Carey, “In Conversation.” 28 Hsieh quoted in Gedin, “Passing Time,” 67–8. 25 26

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number, resembling prison issue furnishings), and other visual elements (such as Hsieh’s scraping of lines in the wall to mark the passing days, an image that is inescapably tied to the idea of prison). “Cage Piece” did not take place on a patch of floor from which he refused to move; it was framed within the terms of a recognizable structure that exists in the social world. Through their form, the first four performances undeniably evoke social and political structures that any interpretation must contend with. Hsieh’s oeuvre thus presents a series of contradictions. He claims that living is purely the passage of time without regard for personal specificities, yet his performances emerge from and appear to reflect his particular situation as an undocumented immigrant. In addition, he emphasizes the abstract passage of time, divorced from any social context, yet his first four performances employ material structures that cannot avoid being read in relation to real-world situations. However, it is possible to reconcile these aspects of Hsieh’s work. As I will explore, while Hsieh’s performances posit that life at its most basic level involves persistence over time – that “whatever you do, living is nothing but consuming time until you die”29 – they also draw our attention to a range of legal, economic, and social conditions that variously act upon the time of individual lives. Here we can see how Hsieh’s very refusal to narrate his experience (an approach that once again confronts his viewers with the opacity of a specific body that conceals its interiority, this time not through the presentation of objecthood but through persistence over long durations, during which Hsieh’s experience remains unexpressed) forces us to look beyond personal narrative to the relational structures that form different experiences of time. Although Hsieh insists that his first four performances are about time, and not about the carceral system, industrial capitalism, homelessness, or marriage, what becomes clear in reading his work is that time cannot be thought outside of such social and political structures, which extract time as punishment, exchange time for payment, define certain uses of time as waste, and manage the time of human relationships. What emerges from Hsieh’s performances, I submit, is a sense that endurance through time is both intrinsic to embodied existence and always experienced in relation, not only to other individuals but to the time of the state, to the time of capital, to the time of various institutions. Lifetimes are shaped differently by these relations. To persist 29

Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 335.

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through time (in other words, to live), is therefore, as we have seen before, to endure as a body in relation to a world that one does not control. As I aim to show, in their exploration of life as endurance through time, Hsieh’s performances ultimately critique blithe notions of blurring the boundary between art and life by revealing that “life” is anything but a homogenous medium “out there,” simply waiting to rush in, like so much undifferentiated air. Subjecting his life to rigorous sets of rules, Hsieh’s performances demonstrate that life is always already lived in relation to institutions that differently structure the times of individual lives. These institutions have the ability both to nurture and neglect life. As Judith Butler writes, “we are, as bodies, vulnerable to others and to institutions, and this vulnerability constitutes one aspect of the social modality through which bodies persist.”30 Bodily endurance through time is thus caught within biopolitical processes that have the power both to support (as Butler writes, “the very future of my life depends upon that condition of support”) and to make precarious individual lives as these mechanisms operate to “establish a set of measures for the differential valuation of life itself.”31 As I argue in the close readings that follow, Hsieh’s performances stage this ambivalent relationality, where life endures in relation to structures that sustain life and also have the power to diminish (both the quality and the length of ) life. The first four do so most overtly, exploring how the times of individual lives are shaped in relation to such institutions as law, labor, property, and marriage. It is in light of this argument that Hsieh’s final two performances, though leaving behind the symbolism of the first four, will emerge as a continuation of the same project. As we will see, the last two turn attention to what life is in relation to the institution of art. Overtly ambivalent about this relationship, they reveal art too as an institution with the power both to support and relinquish life.

Doing Time – “Cage Piece” Hsieh’s One Year Performances began with a radical reduction of his life to nothing other than the endurance of time. From September 30, 1978 to September 29, 1979, Hsieh lived inside a small cell with wooden bars, which he had built inside his studio. The cell was sparsely 30

Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 210. 31 Ibid., 198.

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Figure 3.1 Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978–1979 © Tehching Hsieh, Courtesy of the artist.

furnished with a simple cot, a sink, and a waste bucket. Throughout the year, Hsieh wore white trousers and a white shirt with his name and the numbers 93078–92979 stamped on it (representing the dates of Hsieh’s “incarceration”). During this time, he did not converse with anyone, read, write, or engage with any media. Each day, an assistant, Cheng Wei Kuong (described in the statement announcing the piece as Hsieh’s “friend”) brought him food and clean clothing and removed his waste. He also shot daily photographs of Hsieh, which resemble mug shots in their framing and in Hsieh’s neutral forward gaze, as well as sixteen “Life Pictures,” which show scenes of daily life: Hsieh sitting and lying on his cot, staring into space (Figure  3.1); Hsieh eating with chopsticks while sitting on the floor; Hsieh sitting on his waste bucket with his pants around his ankles (the photograph is discreetly framed so that Hsieh’s pelvis is hidden by a bar of his cage). Nineteen times during the year, the public was invited to observe Hsieh in his cell; no speaking was allowed during these viewings, and Hsieh “remained silent and unresponsive throughout.”32 For the rest of the year, Hsieh lived in isolation without any interaction with the external world. 32

Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 24.

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In eliminating most activities besides those required to maintain a bare existence (eating, sleeping, eliminating waste), “Cage Piece” made sheer persistence through time its primary action. Hsieh has described the piece as an attempt to “make the process of thinking about art in my studio an artwork.”33 Refusing to separate the process of art making from its product – or, the time of art making from an artwork imagined as complete – “Cage Piece” could be seen as an attempt to inhabit what the philosopher Henri Bergson described at the turn of the twentieth century as “pure duration . . . the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.”34 Bergson defined duration as internal to the body and distinct from external, spatialized measures of time. As he wrote in his doctoral thesis, Time and Free Will, describing the experience of watching a clock: Outside of me, in space, there is never more than a single position of the hand and the pendulum, for nothing is left of the past positions. Within myself a process of organization or interpenetration of conscious states is going on, which constitutes true duration. It is because I endure in this way that I picture to myself what I call the past oscillations of the pendulum at the same time as I perceive the present oscillation.35

Duration was connected to the consciousness of a living body for Bergson. It was the body’s ability to “gather” impressions rather than merely count them in succession that constituted duration.36 Yet, just as the ego had to “let itself live” in his account, duration was something the individual had to endeavor to experience. This could be accomplished through the effort of “intuition,” a concept that Bergson explicitly linked with aesthetic perception,37 which he suggested could take the form of “an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would take life in general for its object.”38 Heathfield connects Hsieh’s performances, and durational aesthetics more broadly, to Bergson’s theory of duration. He points out that “subjective and experiential understandings of time” such as Bergson’s have 33

Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 319. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover, [1913] 2001), 100, Bergson’s italics. 35 Ibid., 108, Bergson’s italics. 36 Ibid., 86. 37 “That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved by the existence in man of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception” (Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover, [1911] 1998), 176–7). 38 Ibid., 177, Bergson’s italics. 34

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usually been thought of as being opposed to the “objective and universal, regulated and homogenized ordering of temporality” under capitalism.39 As such, durational aesthetics, Heathfield argues, have the ability to call into question “commonsense understandings of time and hence its wider cultural rationalization” and to make us aware “that our perceptions and understandings of time are a cultural construct, and as such open to revision.”40 More hopefully, Heathfield suggests that durational practices such as Hsieh’s might offer liberation from oppressive orderings of time: “durational aesthetics,” he writes, “give access to other temporalities: to times that will not submit to Western Culture’s linear, progressive meta-narratives, its orders of commodification; to the times of excluded or marginalized identities and lives; to times as they are felt in diverse bodies. Time, then, as plenitude: heterogeneous, informal, and multifaceted.”41 Certainly, Hsieh’s focus on the unrelenting and uninterrupted passage of time in “Cage Piece” calls into question our usual perceptions and understandings of time. Yet “Cage Piece” establishes a much more ambivalent sense of duration as an embodied experience than the notion of time as “plenitude” might suggest. “Cage Piece” exposes that, while duration is embodied and subjective, it is always experienced in relation to the world. In the quote from Bergson above, the body’s duration is connected to its sustained perception of the moving pendulum. In another of Bergson’s well-known examples, it is linked to waiting for the sugar to dissolve in a glass of water.42 Insofar as duration is relational, it is also a site of vulnerability to myriad forces that can act upon it. Describing his impatience in waiting for the sugar to dissolve, Bergson described a certain discomfort in the experience of duration: he asked, “What is it that obliges me to wait, and to wait for a certain length of psychical duration which is forced upon me, over which I have no power?”43 Elsewhere, his language also suggests that the experience of duration could be imposed in painful ways: Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed, he wrote in italics, describing the process of aging (perhaps the clearest reminder that embodied duration, while actively lived, is also outside of one’s control).44 A similar sense of duration as both lived and 39

Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 21. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23. 42 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 9–10. 43 Ibid., 340, my italics. 44 Ibid., 16, Bergson’s italics. 40 41

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imposed is present in Hsieh’s understanding, suggestive with regard to “Cage Piece,” of “life as a life sentence.”45 Hsieh claims that “Cage Piece” “had nothing to do with prisons.”46 Yet, the material properties of the performance and the restrictions on the performer both resemble the terms of a severe prison sentence. “Cage Piece” may not have been about the prison system, but the concept of prison  – and specifically of solitary confinement  – qualifies the duration of this piece. Why might a body of work exploring life as endurance through time begin by invoking such conditions? We must consider the logic of “doing time.” Solitary confinement, the most extreme form of “doing time,” began in the United States in the early 1800s at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. It was considered by the Quakers, who initiated it, to be a preferable alternative to other forms of punishment such as public floggings and hanging. They believed that prisoners confined to an empty cell with nothing but a bible would use the time to repent and seek forgiveness from God. Solitary confinement began therefore not only as a punishment but as a form of rehabilitation that would enable those who were put through it to live their lives differently. However, by the late 1800s, the practice was falling into disrepute, and in 1890 the US Supreme Court condemned solitary confinement, noting that: A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.47

Recognized as a detriment to the continued lives of the prisoners subjected to it (and to the wider community that these individuals were meant to rejoin), solitary confinement was discredited as a method of reform and was subsequently practiced by fewer institutions. However, it returned with a vengeance in the latter part of the twentieth century with the introduction of the super-maximum security, or “supermax,” prison. In such facilities, inmates are generally allowed to leave their cells for just one hour a day to shower and/or exercise in isolation. As opposed to the 45

Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 324. Hsieh quoted in Gedin, “Passing Time,” 67–8. 47 Quoted in Laura Sullivan, “Timeline: Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prison,” NPR, July 26, 2006, www.npr.org. See also Brooke Shelby Biggs, “Solitary Confinement: A Brief History,” Mother Jones, March 2, 2009, www.motherjones.com. 46

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earlier aim of reform, solitary confinement since the twentieth century has largely been considered “a purely punitive tool used to break the spirits of inmates considered disruptive, violent, or disobedient.”48 Yet a vestige of the idea that solitary confinement might “support” continued life remains in the frequent use of solitary confinement to “protect” those at risk in ordinary prisons, such as children and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people who are placed in “involuntary protective custody,” ostensibly for their safety. Even in the case of death row prisoners, solitary confinement appears to reside on the side of (biopolitical) “life,” with life being actively maintained, albeit at the barest level (consider practices such as force-feeding or suicide watch), to ensure that prisoners’ lives proceed (until they are executed) according to the law. To “do time,” then, is to live a life in which the state has taken charge of one’s bodily time in the name of punishment or reform. In its most severe form, it is to live a life reduced to nothing but the passage of time. Barred from activities that would occupy time, prisoners in solitary confinement can neither pass the time in distraction nor make use of the time in productive ways. Often subjected to artificially lit conditions twenty-four hours a day, they are removed from the rhythms of day and night. Days flow into one another with few indicators to differentiate them. Confined and cut off from human interaction, prisoners are also removed from social time: the world changes; their neighborhoods will be different when they return. Meanwhile, they age; their bodies change. Obliged to experience the passing of time while being excluded from the changing world outside, the prisoner is subjected to life as pure duration where the only relation is to the prison. The delivery of food or the oncedaily process of being handcuffed and taken to shower become the only impressions left to gather. In conjuring such conditions, “Cage Piece” exposes the relationality of embodied time and its vulnerability to structures of power that can both maintain and curtail life. To the extent that Hsieh’s persistence over time depended on his own willpower to make it through, it also depended absolutely on Kuong, who performed the ambivalent role of both prison warden and friend. Had Kuong stopped showing up to bring Hsieh food and remove his waste, Hsieh would have been forced to end the piece. At the same time, “Cage Piece” offers another view of the relationship between the body’s duration and the social time of clocks and calendars, one that overturns the usual opposition between them. Although it 48

Biggs, “Solitary Confinement.”

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violated his rule against writing, Hsieh found that he needed to mark the passing days with strokes on the wall. He asserts that the marks helped him to survive: “I had to calculate time; although I may have broken the rule of no writing, it helped me to know how many days I had passed, how many days I had to go.”49 Here, the spatialized time of clocks and calendars offered bodily relief; delineating time as finite and quantifiable, the marks insisted this time would end. The individual strokes on the wall, in the simplicity of their form and the extended labor of their etching, also serve as indexical traces of impoverished days, of an entire year of days with nothing to distinguish them. If Hsieh inscribed the passing time into the wall in an attempt to project time outward toward the social world from which he was excluded, time was also inscribed into his body: Hsieh emerged from this piece “very weak and sensitive.”50 With “Cage Piece,” Hsieh inaugurated his investigation of time with a perspective on duration as embodied, relational, and subject to power.

Spending Time – “Time Clock Piece” While his first performance explored endurance through time in relation to the state’s power to imprison life, Hsieh’s second One Year Performance engaged with that arena around which E. P. Thompson developed in 1967 the notion of “time discipline”  – the domain of labor within industrial capitalism.51 Soon after concluding his first piece, Hsieh embarked upon “Time Clock Piece” on April 11, 1980. If his first performance seemed to reflect upon his lack of legal status through its invocation of prison, this piece seemed to call attention to the fact that this individual who lacked a work permit could indeed “work” diligently – though, as Heathfield points out, Hsieh performed “a job that is strenuous but ultimately empty and wasteful.”52 For this performance, Hsieh punched a standard work clock in his studio “every hour on the hour for one year.”53 Throughout the performance, he wore the same clothes, resembling a generic workman’s uniform: grey trousers and a shirt with a badge sewn onto the left breast bearing his name and the numbers 41180–41181 (again, the dates of the performance). Each time he “clocked in,” Hsieh shot a single frame of 16 mm 49

Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 327. Johnston, “Art’s Willing Captive,” 141. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (December 1967), 56–97. 52 Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 33. 53 Hsieh, “Statement,” April 1980. 50 51

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film, producing a motion picture that compresses the entire year of hourly punches into approximately six minutes of footage. As with his first performance, the props and costume of this performance say much about its exploration of time. Its central apparatus, the time clock, emerged as a way to calculate the labor of workers in the industrial age, when the “time period” came to replace the “task” as the primary unit of production.54 Whereas before the Industrial Revolution it was common for the workday to be irregular, determined by the time of year and by the rhythms of tasks to be accomplished, the factory system introduced a rigidified structure of time abstracted from the cycles of daylight and seasons. As workers came to be paid for time on the job, rather than for tasks accomplished, time itself became a commodity, a limited resource to be earned and spent. For employers paying for workers’ time (workers whose wages are determined by the clock are often paid to the minute), making full and efficient use of this time became imperative. As Thompson writes, “the employer must use the time of his [employee’s] labour, and see it is not wasted. . . . Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.”55 Concomitantly, workers under industrial capitalism came under increasingly elaborate forms of time discipline, of which the time clock was one of the more advanced measures. By contrast, the time structure of the ruling class continued according to more flexible rhythms. The time discipline that emerged in the industrial age, then, was associated with an increasing rift between the working and ruling classes based upon the differential control of individual times (a division that continues today in the distinction between jobs that are paid hourly  – generally those that are considered “manual” or in the service of others – and jobs that are salaried – mainly those considered “intellectual”). Thompson notes that with industrial capitalism came “a clear demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life’”56 – a distinction that was more or less absent in pre-industrial societies where work was task-based and “social intercourse and labour [we]re intermingled.”57 As a temporal division determined by the clock, the separation of “work” from “life” was based on a concept of time as a quantifiable, homogenous, linear form – exactly the notion of time that Bergson wrote against. However, such a division is illusory because, in the division of “work” from “life,” it was work that 54

See John Hassard, “Commodification, Construction and Compression: A Review of Time Metaphors in Organizational Analysis,” International Journal of Management Reviews 3.2 (2001), 133. 55 Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline,” 61, Thompson’s italics. 56 Ibid., 93. 57 Ibid., 60.

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became the organizing principle of workers’ life/times. All other activities were forced to fit around the work schedule, whether or not the hours left in the day were adequate for the other tasks needing to be accomplished. The apparent separation of life from work was thus simultaneously a subordination of certain lives to the timeframes of work. Hsieh’s performance of “Time Clock Piece” exaggerated the effects of this subjection to a homogenized, quantifiable time divided into units that are relentlessly equal, revealing what Heathfield describes as “the altered biological conditions of shift labor.”58 During this year, he could not sleep for more than fifty-five minutes at a stretch; he could not travel further away from his home than would enable him to return within an hour; he could not enjoy a movie without interruption; he could not maintain another job. In fact, the conditions of this piece made it difficult for him to do much of anything other than repeatedly record his arrival – or departure (the two are the same here) – from work. Subjected to a constant registering of time, Hsieh’s existence was once again reduced to a life in which “time becomes the main thing.” As Hsieh reports, “In the ‘Time Clock Piece,’ in one hour I could not do much, my mind and my body have to be totally concentrated on time. Even if I were talking to someone I would be thinking, ‘I have to go and punch the time clock’; I could not miss that.”59 In performing this total preoccupation of mind and body with the time clock, “Time Clock Piece” evokes conditions described by Karl Marx in which the entire life/time of the worker under capitalism is converted into work time. Personifying capital as a life-sucking werewolf, Marx described capital as a force that, without any societal measures to stop it, would seek to sustain the lives of its workers at the barest level in order to maximize the use of their labor-time: What is a working day? What is the length of time during which capital may consume the labour power whose daily value it buys? . . . It has been seen that to these questions capital replies; the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labour power absolutely refuses its services again. Hence it is selfevident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital.60 58

Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 32. Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 334. 60 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of the Political Economy, Volume I (1887), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996), 270, my italics. 59

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Describing capital as “usurping” time, “stealing” time, and “haggling” over time, Marx saw capital as allowing only as much time for lifesustaining activities (such as eating and sleeping) as was absolutely necessary to allow the worker to continue working. One effect of this was that the “time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body” was disastrously reduced to the point of “shortening the extent of the labourer’s life.”61 Though ostensibly free, workers, Marx showed, are trapped by capital in a cycle in which they must work to sustain their lives (“The worker perishes if capital does not keep him busy”62), yet in doing so, they contribute to the system that also shortens their lives: “the labor-power of the wage-laborer can exchange itself for capital only by increasing capital, by strengthening that very power whose slave it is.”63 Through Hsieh’s cyclical and never-ending “labor,” “Time Clock Piece” enacted this entrapment and the bare level of existence to which it leads. In the emptiness of his labor  – Hsieh produced nothing except the records of his time spent – “Time Clock Piece” also suggests that through labor, the worker yields nothing for himself or herself except the conditions for further work. As Marx wrote in response to the question of whether a worker in a cotton factory produces only cotton: “No. He produces capital. He produces values which serve anew to command his work and to create by means of it new values.”64 The six-minute film that Hsieh produced as part of this performance is a remarkable rendering of embodied time’s capture by the mechanics of labor. In it, Hsieh appears, standing next to the time clock, growing one year older as the clock registers the accelerated passage of time. Because each frame was shot on the hour, the minute hand of the clock remains fixed in place, pointing skyward in a perpetual “now,” as the hour hand circles wildly around. Hsieh, like the minute hand, stands erect, permanently at attention. But he also appears to rattle nervously as the hour hand spins, his body jerking about while remaining caught in the same position within the frame. He appears slightly pitched forward as though attempting to exit the picture, but he is pinned in place as though being pushed back by some force pummeling his body. As he stands there, fixed by the stop-motion technique of the film, his body still shows signs of 61

Ibid., 271. Karl Marx, Wage-Labor and Capital (1849), trans. Harriet E. Lothrop (New York: New York Labor News Company, 1902), 40. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 62

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aging. The lines in his forehead deepen; he seems to grow wearier. Most strikingly, his hair grows from being shaved to being shoulder length by the end of the film. It is this bodily marker that perhaps most of all proves that Hsieh’s film is not fabricated, that it indexes lived time. It is here, in the artificially accelerated bodily evidence of time’s passing, that we see most clearly how time is extracted from the worker’s body. Subjected to a regimented parceling of time, the body is emptied of duration. Hours, whole days, segments of a year of a life, pass in the blink of an eye.

Passing Time – “Outdoor Piece” Hsieh’s third One Year Performance left behind the spatial and temporal confinements of the first two. For this performance, carried out from September 26, 1981 to September 26, 1982, he remained outside on the streets of New York City, never entering “a building, subway, train, car, airplane, ship, cave, tent.”65 Over the course of the year, he did not go into any facility to use a toilet or to wash; he did not set foot in any stores or restaurants to purchase food; and he never went inside any shelter to sleep. Hsieh did all of these things outdoors throughout the New York City fall, winter, spring, and summer. Whereas the posters for Hsieh’s previous performances had included calendars depicting the 365 days of the year, Hsieh’s poster for “Outdoor Piece” simply lists the seasons, signaling an experience of time quite distinct from the quantified days of captivity or the tightly monitored hours of wage labor that shaped his previous performances and paced more closely with the earth’s rotation around the sun (Figure  3.2). The seasons as a register of time also emphasize that for a person without shelter, the weather and the length of day are critical to one’s very survival. While his two previous performances had restricted his movements to the space of his studio – “Cage Piece” by literally locking him in, and “Time Clock Piece” by requiring him to remain within half an hour’s traveling time  – “Outdoor Piece” performed a different relationship between time and movement. With no place to settle or take shelter from the constant activity of the city, Hsieh subjected himself to a year of wandering out in the open, where places to rest were hard to come by and any period of repose could always be interrupted. In addition to a series of “Life Pictures” and fifty minutes of film shot by Hsieh and several 65

Hsieh, “Statement,” September 26, 1981.

Figure 3.2 Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1981–1982 © Tehching Hsieh, Courtesy of the artist.

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friends, Hsieh’s primary documentation of “Outdoor Piece” is a series of daily maps depicting with red lines his travels through the city. These maps reduce life once again to its bare necessities: they record the times and places where Hsieh ate, slept, and defecated; they note the high and low temperatures for the day and if it rained or snowed; they indicate where and when Hsieh made fires to keep himself warm; and they record how much he spent on food (reminding us that money remains a bare necessity in the city, even as Hsieh lived outside its properties). The pace of his movements can be discerned from this record of bodily needs: the times between sleeping and waking, between waking and eating, between eating and shitting, all connected to the distances travelled in between. No longer the undifferentiated days of the inmate, nor the regimented hours of the worker, the time of “Outdoor Piece” was that of the vagabond, the drifter. Heathfield recounts attempting to follow one of Hsieh’s maps to better understand the tempo of this piece. Confronted with a singular cadence intimately connected to Hsieh’s bodily needs, Heathfield reports attempting “to honor these intervals if not their bodily functions.”66 He also describes needing to slow down and, in doing so, discovering a different relationship with the space of the street. With nowhere in particular to go, the street ceases to be the nonplace of passage that it is for many in the city and begins to be a place to be inhabited. Reducing his pace through Chinatown, Heathfield remarks: Then there are the others whose business it is to wait in these spaces: the Chinese guys playing checkers, the car lot attendants, the restaurant wranglers and bouncers, the street traders, the police, the street cleaners, the hardened guys who are loitering for some enigmatic reason (possibly criminal), the drug pushers, the sex workers, the kids looking for trouble, the homeless.67

Noticing those who do not only pass through the streets on their way somewhere else but linger in the streets, Heathfield “sees that they see and move in a different way, their senses being deeply attuned to the street as a habitat, to the shape and rhythms of encounters that can arise here.”68 For some, “Outdoor Piece” might seem to perform Hsieh’s escape from the harsh temporal structures and their supporting systems of surveillance that he had explored in his previous performances. No longer 66

Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 38. Ibid., 39. 68 Ibid. 67

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the “inmate” subjected to an impoverished duration, and set free from the punishing requirements of the time clock, Hsieh’s wandering could be seen as also liberating him from the mundane patterns structuring most people’s lives. As Jonathan Siskin writes: He spends his days observing how others spend theirs; always outside, he watches his fellow humans go about their daily business, coming and going and doing what they must do within the rut routines each has established. . . . By staying outdoors for a year he is able to live within a reality different from most, allowing him a unique perspective on how the vast majority of people use their time and consume their lives.69

Released from the cycles of work, leisure, and home that determine how most people in the United States spend their time, Hsieh may have enjoyed a certain kind of freedom. Frazer Ward also suggests that Hsieh might have achieved a kind of escape with this piece. Understanding Hsieh’s status as an “illegal alien” (the US government’s term for unauthorized and deportable immigrants70) through Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the “relation of exception” (that “extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion”71), he argues that “Hsieh’s achievement is in part to have turned the relation of exception to his own advantage.”72 Noting that the situation of the homeless invoked in “Outdoor Piece” is connected with the position of the “illegal alien” insofar as both are representatives of what Agamben terms “bare life,” Ward argues that “in ‘Outdoor Piece,’ Hsieh took his nonstatus and ran with it, under cover of art, asserting his will by performing his own invisibility.”73 Extending his “nonstatus” as an undocumented immigrant (excluded from the rights and protections granted by the state and subject to deportation if discovered) by abstaining from all forms of shelter, including those for the homeless, Hsieh, Ward seems to suggest, took advantage of the ambiguity of the relation of exception  – where, as Agamben writes, “to be ‘banned’ originally means both to be ‘at the mercy of ’ and ‘at one’s own will, freely,’ to be ‘excluded’ and also ‘open to all, free’”74 – to achieve his own sovereignty.75 69

Siskin, “Still Doing Time,” 76. See “Immigration Terms and Definitions Involving Aliens” at www.irs.gov. 71 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1998), 18. 72 Ward, “Alien Duration,” 8–9. 73 Ibid., 14. 74 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 29, my italics. 75 This is how I understand Ward’s statement that Hsieh’s work “in the end gives rise to a counterintuitive and critical inversion of sovereignty” (Ward, “Alien Duration,” 8). 70

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Yet it is important not to romanticize the figure of the outlaw, because the ambiguity that surrounds the homo sacer (the original representative of “bare life” who is both excluded and included, sacred and profane, abandoned and captured) is part of the production of what Agamben describes as that “bare life that expresses our subjection to political power.”76 It is clear in Agamben’s critique of Georges Bataille, who “attempted to propose the very same bare life as a sovereign figure,” that Agamben sees no such possibility.77 In the final pages of Homo Sacer, he writes: Let us now observe the life of homo sacer, or of the bandit . . ., which are in many ways similar.  . . . He has been excluded from the religious community and from all political life. . . . he can save himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land. And yet he is in a continuous relationship with the power that banished him precisely insofar as he is at every instant exposed to an unconditioned threat of death. He is pure zoe [biological life], but his zoe is as such caught in the sovereign ban and must reckon with it at every moment, finding the best way to elude or deceive it. In this sense, no life, as exiles and bandits know well, is more “political” than his.78

Rather than imagining him as escaping those biopolitical mechanisms that shape lifetimes, Hsieh’s engagement with conditions of homelessness in “Outdoor Piece” – conditions that were very much in the public consciousness in 1981–2 (during this year, the number of people sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City rose 40 percent79) – requires us to consider the systems of exclusion that ultimately subject homeless people to political power. These include proscriptions against performing such life-sustaining activities as sleeping, washing, and relieving oneself in public places – activities that poignantly mark Hsieh’s passage of time in “Outdoor Piece.” Indeed, every time that Hsieh urinated or defecated throughout the duration of “Outdoor Piece,” he risked fines or jail time.80 The need to find somewhere to relieve himself safely out of sight would thus have been part of the timing of these bodily functions (as it is, with more or less difficulty, for all of us). Only one Life Picture depicts this process: in it, we see Hsieh squatting with his bare backside 76

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 182. Ibid., 112. 78 Ibid., 183–4. 79 Robin Herman, “New York Trying to Add Shelters for Its Homeless: City Soliciting Proposals From Private Groups,” New York Times, July 26, 1982, B3. 80 Relieving oneself on the street was punishable by a fine of up to $250 or ten days in jail under New York’s sanitation code (Josh Barbanel, “Societies and their Homeless,” New York Times, November 29, 1987, E1+ [8]). 77

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extending precariously off the edge of a pier. Other Life Pictures return repeatedly to scenes of Hsieh washing (with water from a fire hydrant; in a stream; fully naked at the water’s edge, an act that would have been in violation of New York’s ban against “Exposure of a Person”81) and sleeping (on benches; in parks; in abandoned lots). (That a number of these “sleeping” photographs have been taken during daylight hours also reminds us that such things as curfews on parks serve the function of preventing homeless people from sleeping there at night.) That needs like sleeping and urinating are daily and unavoidable shows the threat that sanctions against performing these acts in public pose to the very existence of homeless people. In an article on “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom,” written in 1991 following a decade in which the homelessness rate in the United States tripled,82 and during which laws around activities such as loitering and sleeping were increasingly enacted and debated across the country, Jeremy Waldron outlined the implications of such legislation for the homeless: If sleeping is prohibited in public places, then sleeping is comprehensively prohibited to the homeless. If urinating is prohibited in public places (and if there are no public lavatories) then the homeless are simply unfree to urinate. These are not altogether comfortable conclusions, and they are certainly not comfortable for those who have to live with them.83

In Waldron’s analysis, private property rules governing where basic bodily functions could legally be carried out constituted “one of the most callous and tyrannical exercises of power in modern times.”84 Rather than escaping from the relations to law and capital that he had imitated hyperbolically in his first two pieces, Hsieh brought himself closer to real legal (and financial) consequences in “Outdoor Piece.” This is not to say that Hsieh’s “homelessness” was any more actual than his status as a “prisoner” or “worker.” Hsieh had a home. Moreover, his relative financial security, part of which derived from subletting his studio, enabled him to perform the piece.85 Rather, it is to say that in performing this piece, Hsieh placed himself daily and incessantly in relation to 81

New York Penal Law Section 245.01, enacted in 1967. Martha R. Burt, “Causes of the Growth of Homelessness during the 1980s,” Housing Policy Debate 2.3 (1991), 916. 83 Jeremy Waldron, “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom,” UCLA Law Review 39.295 (1991), 315. 84 Ibid., 301. 85 Hsieh has referred several times to the financial support he received from his family and to the fact that he supported himself by renting out parts of his studio. See Bajo and Carey, “In Conversation”; Ward, “Alien Duration,” 11; and Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 332. 82

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laws that were real. It is therefore not too surprising that a major event of “Outdoor Piece” involved Hsieh’s arrest. As a person on the streets, Hsieh was vulnerable to the kinds of violence often carried out against the homeless. Once, he was assaulted by a man with an iron club who did not want Hsieh sleeping in his doorway.86 On another occasion, when Hsieh used nunchaku to defend himself, he was arrested.87 This is the only time that Hsieh entered a building during the year, and one can see in the filmed documentation of the event the pain that it caused him to be dragged inside the police station (Hsieh asked the friend who was with him at the time to record what was happening88). In a performance that required him to break rules constantly in order to survive, the law finally intervened to break the rules of Hsieh’s piece. However, what emerges from this incident is something that Hsieh’s later performances would explore more explicitly: art’s own power to frame the time of a life. Astonishingly, Hsieh’s status as an artist was accepted by the judge, who had read an article about Hsieh in the Wall Street Journal, as a legitimate reason for him to be allowed to remain outside the courthouse during his hearing.89 The film documentation shows Hsieh’s lawyer explaining the situation to Hsieh outside the building: “Ok, first of all the judge excused you for today, you don’t have to come into court” he relays. “And for the next time,” he continues, “you don’t have to come indoors either.  . . . He accepted that you’re a serious artist and that this is your [pause] piece that you’re doing, and he understands that you can’t come into court, consistent with the integrity of your art.”90 Here, Hsieh’s status as an artist appears to have superseded his position as a vagrant sleeping in a business’s doorway, and perhaps more surprisingly, his position as an unauthorized immigrant (in fact, the judge does not seem to have registered at all Hsieh’s illegal residency in the United States). Allowing him to remain outdoors during the trial, the court upheld the rules of Hsieh’s performance, and in the end, in exchange for a “guilty” plea on a charge of disorderly conduct, sentenced him to “time served.”91 86

Siskin, “Still Doing Time,” 76. Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 44. 88 Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 328. 89 Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 44. 90 My transcription from the film documentation included in Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance Art Documents 1978–1999, DVDRom. The film is credited as being documented by Robert Attanasio and Hsieh. 91 Siskin, “Still Doing Time,” 76. 87

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Biding Time – “Rope Piece” Hsieh’s fourth One Year Performance, carried out from July 4, 1983 to July 4, 1984, continued to explore the time of a life lived in relation, this time placing his body in that most basic unit of relation, the relationship to another person. Breaking his trend of performing alone, Hsieh performed “Rope Piece” with Linda Montano, an artist whose own “Art/ Life” performances (Montano’s term) had included prior to their joint piece several collaborative durational performances, such as Handcuff (1973), in which she was handcuffed to the artist Tom Marioni for three days, and whose work since has included such extended life works as her 7 Years of Living Art, performed twice in succession from 1984 to 1998.92 Having seen a poster for one of Hsieh’s previous One Year Performances, Montano contacted Hsieh to propose working together. Hsieh had been thinking about doing a collaborative piece for a while, and so the match was made.93 For this performance, collaboratively titled, Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (thus combining both artists’ nomenclature), Hsieh and Montano were connected at the waist by an eight-foot rope that, once wound around their bodies, permitted them to be never more than five and a half feet away from one another.94 For the duration of the piece, they remained in the same room and never touched. Resembling an umbilical cord and also a reversible structure joining two adults, the rope suggests the kind of relationality at stake here: both an originary state of human dependency and interconnectedness and a voluntary entry into a reciprocal partnership with another individual. “Rope Piece” made explicit the concerns of relationality  – questions of power and submission, freedom and dependence, support and abandonment – present in Hsieh’s first three pieces. It also made explicit Hsieh’s ambivalence toward such a fundamental relationality. For him, “Rope Piece” was about acknowledging a simultaneous dependency on others and a desire to be free of them: I feel that to survive we’re all tied up. We cannot go in life alone, without people. Because everybody is individual we each have our own idea of something we want to do. But we’re together. So we become each other’s 92

For documentation of Montano’s early work, see her Art in Everyday Life (Los Angeles, CA: Astro Artz, 1981). Further information about Montano’s art, including 7 Years of Living Art + 7 Years of Living Art = 14 Years of Living Art, can be found at www.lindamontano.com. 93 Alex Grey and Allyson Grey, “The Year of the Rope: An Interview with Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh,” in The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena, ed. Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland (New York: Critical Press, 1998), 30. 94 Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 47.

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cage. We struggle because everyone wants to feel freedom. We don’t touch, and this helps us to be conscious that this relationship connects individuals, but the individuals are independent. We are not a couple but two separate people.95

Tied to each other literally, the artists experienced the tensions between their reliance upon one another and their desire to act autonomously for an entire year. At a basic level, they depended upon one another for their safety, as photos of them standing before the open door of a subway car or riding bikes together make clear. Had one of them forgotten to take care of the other at such times, the outcome could have been deadly. They also depended upon one another to fulfill any of their needs or desires. For either of them to do anything required the cooperation of the other. From going to work, to running errands, to visiting friends, to using the toilet in the middle of the night, to getting a glass of water, they needed the other’s agreement and willingness to go along. The necessity to make room for one another to live, and the recognition that they each depended on the other to do so, would have been constant lessons. If life is endurance through time, this piece showed that how one passes that time is often contingent upon those to whom one is bound, whether by love or another form of commitment. In his usual fashion, Hsieh emphasizes the abstract form of “Rope Piece” and the more “universal” questions of relationality at stake in it. According to him, he and Montano were not a couple but “two people, equal before the law of the work.”96 Yet, as with Hsieh’s other performances, the structure of the performance, with its binding together of a heterosexually gendered pair of adults, invokes a social institution: marriage (which, at the time of this performance, would only have been possible between a man and a woman). Furthermore, as others have noted, in its forming of an international partnership that explicitly excluded sex, the performance opens itself to being read as a symbolic “green card marriage.”97 In its exploration of the interpersonal, then, “Rope Piece” also invokes institutions that seek to manage human relationships, reminding us that the “private” sphere of intimate relations is never in fact separate from the “public” domain of the state, which regulates and restricts the relationships of those who reside within and across its borders. The documentation also performs this tension between the private 95

Hsieh quoted in Grey, “Year of the Rope,” 31–2. Jill Johnston, “Hardship Art,” Art in America (September 1984), 178. 97 Langenbach, “Statutory Obligations,” 50; Ward, “Alien Duration,” 14. 96

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and the public. The pair took daily photographs, stamped with the date, which might remind us both of ordinary family snapshots – we see the pair engaged in everyday activities: at a museum, at home cooking, out with friends and family  – and of the kinds of documentation required to prove the longevity of international relationships when one member of the couple is applying for a green card  – documentation that must, in its candidness, confirm the reality of a shared life. In addition, Hsieh and Montano recorded all of their conversations throughout the year, then sealed the tapes, never to be heard by anyone, in this way invoking both a sense of surveillance and the “privateness” of the marriage bond. In performing a relationship between the “foreign” and the “domestic” (Heathfield notes that the piece was built around the cohabitation of strangers98), “Rope Piece,” which stretched between Independence Days, explored intimacy and separateness as both personal and political concerns. The wider social and political issues raised by “Rope Piece” are also discernable in the differences between how the two artists articulated the meaning of the work. Montano’s explicitly feminist reading of the piece contrasted strongly with Hsieh’s more universalizing statements. Montano “was interested in the power structure of their relationship within the work, the morality or quality of the alliance, issues of character, cooperation, compassion, and her personal survival in the face of danger and violence,” as Jill Johnston reported.99 For Montano, this was about the form of the work. She saw herself as having entered the performance in much the same way that many women entered into marriage: she had “joined him, agreeing to do his piece, accept his terms, live in his loft, in effect, take his name, much the way any woman joins a man as his wife.”100 Given this, she felt that much of the work was about figuring out how to become an equal partner in such an arrangement.101 Hsieh, not oblivious to differences in privilege, was, for his part, astonished that Montano would see herself as socially subordinated to him, since she was white and a citizen while he was Asian and without legal status in the United States.102 While they may have been “two people, equal before the law of the work,” their specific social positions meant that they each experienced it differently. 98

Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 52. Johnston, “Hardship Art,” 178, Johnston’s italics. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Gedin, “Passing Time,” 68. 99

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Certainly, to be equal partners in this piece would have had something to do with having equal influence over how the pair spent their time. Looking at the daily photographs, one might wonder who prompted any given activity. Of course, this is generally impossible to determine, though one might search for clues in cultural signifiers, in knowledge about each artist’s interests and commitments, and in observing differences in their apparent level of engagement. Even if one could tell, however, the single photograph per day offers far too limited a view of how the artists spent their time. It is also hardly a neutral window onto their life. Montano clearly understood this and insisted on taking turns with the documentation. For one month, she would take the photographs and Hsieh would record their conversations; then they would switch.103 Looking at photos where one or both of them look disengaged or angry, or at the blank images that mark days when they fought, one can’t help but wonder who framed the shots. Thus the images, capturing just a single second of each day, open up complex questions about how the artists spent their time, and how they each felt about that time. What is clear from Hsieh’s and Montano’s comments about the piece is that the issue of how they would spend their time was a primary site of struggle. As the piece progressed, the daily tug-of-war over the couple’s plans for the day increasingly resulted in a standstill as both artists refused to do what the other wanted. Interestingly, through their withholding measures, the artists attacked each other at the core of basic needs related to their individual identities. Montano refused to go to Chinatown, where Hsieh liked to eat; Hsieh refused to walk Montano’s dog, who Montano described as “obviously an extension of herself.”104 Thus they refused to give their own time to those activities most closely associated with the other’s life. These tactics, undoubtedly born of the frustration of constant togetherness, ultimately prevented either of them from using their time as they wished: “On some days the vetoes became retaliatory and accumulated till the two were immobilized for hours in sullen hatred of one another.”105 Nevertheless, equally committed to the rules of the performance – the critical third term governing this piece, and ultimately that to which both artists were most committed – neither artist would have dreamed of ending it, even while they were subjected to an interpersonal relationship 103

Johnston, “Hardship Art,” 178. Ibid., 179. 105 Thomas McEvilley, “Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano,” Artforum International 23.3 (November 1984), 99. 104

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and daily situations that were difficult to endure. Their dedication to the rules might also remind us that all legally recognized relationships involve a long-term commitment to rules, including to rules that govern how one spends one’s time. Returning to the metaphor of the green card marriage, for instance, international couples must remain married and living together for two years before the noncitizen partner can achieve permanent residency. Both the state’s investment in marriage as a lifetime commitment that is intended to structure all relations for the couple thereafter and its interest in controlling who is able to remain within its borders and for how long are at stake here. As for Hsieh and Montano, “Rope Piece” consumed a year of their lives and most likely limited their capacity to forge meaningful relationships with others during this period. Relationships, after all, as “Rope Piece” made abundantly clear, take time.

Keeping Time – “No Art Piece” and “Thirteen Year Plan” As I have attempted to show, Hsieh’s first four performances demand consideration of a variety of institutions that differently shape the time of individual lives  – the prison system, labor, property, marriage. In doing so, they both enact a blurring of the boundary between art and life and force a reevaluation of that project by suggesting that “life” as endurance through time, far from being a homogenous medium, is always already implicated in ambivalent sets of relations that differently enable and constrain, sustain and neglect, individual lives. Hsieh’s next two pieces would move away from the referentiality of these performances. There are no recognizable metaphors structuring Hsieh’s actions, and any concrete sense of what Hsieh did for the duration of each of these performances is absent. The daily photographs and other forms of record that were central to each of the previous four performances cease; only Hsieh’s “Statements” serve to indicate that the performances took place. In their abstraction away from concrete activities, Hsieh’s final two performances would seem to have moved closer to the ideal toward which he was always aiming  – an art comprising a pure passage of time in which “it doesn’t matter” what he did. Yet, both performances also staged a crucial relationship for Hsieh, one that was there all along but which these pieces make explicit – a relationship to the institution of art. The first was Hsieh’s final One Year Performance. For this piece, Hsieh embarked upon a radical abstention from the art world in the name of art. All that remains of this performance is the statement of intent and

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the poster, which presents a black square in place of an image and an unmarked calendar noting the dates of the performance. Hsieh’s statement for this performance reads: I xxxx not do ART, not talk ART, not see ART, not read ART, not go to ART gallery and ART museum for one year. I xxxx just go in life.106

Blocking out what is presumably the word “will,” Hsieh simultaneously invoked his own non- native English (reminding us once again that behind these words is a specific body, however marked by opacity) and seemed to equate the endeavor of this piece to “just go in life” with the yielding of deliberate intentions and desires. By canceling “will”  – the very power of perseverance that Hsieh claims enabled him to perform his previous pieces107 – Hsieh embarked upon what has been described as a negation of his other works.108 It could seem that the “Statement” for this piece were a purely conceptual exercise far removed from the sustained, embodied exertion of Hsieh’s previous pieces. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that this piece required little effort in comparison to Hsieh’s earlier performances. While to some extent releasing him from the kinds of strictures that had defined his One Year Performances up to this point, “No Art Piece” nevertheless presented a strict set of conditions that would have been difficult, if not impossible, for Hsieh to follow and would have had major consequences for his life. As others have noted, the rules of the performance meant abandoning the spaces and forums of the art world, where his work had just begun to gain recognition.109 They also most likely meant severing whatever artistic connections and friendships he had.110 As Heathfield observes, Hsieh’s complete abstention from all artistic phenomena would have been “a major alteration of his living conditions.”111 The piece would have been nearly impossible in other ways as well: if Hsieh’s eyes landed upon an exhibition announcement or review in a newspaper, wouldn’t that have been “reading art”? Could Hsieh really 106

Hsieh, “Statement,” July 1, 1985. In describing his ability to withstand the difficulty of his performances, Hsieh says, “What is determinant is the will” (Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 324). 108 Gedin, “Passing Time,” 68. Hsieh also describes his last two performances as “denials of the previous four pieces” (Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 335). 109 Langenbach, “Statutory Obligations,” 53. 110 Ward, “Alien Duration,” 19; and Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 55. 111 Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 55. 107

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have avoided ever seeing any piece of public art, even if he didn’t go to galleries and museums? If someone said something to him about art and he responded, even just to say that he wasn’t currently speaking about art, wouldn’t that have been “talking art”?112 Assuming that Hsieh followed his rules as meticulously as he did in his previous performances, there must have been points at which the rules were broken. Indeed, Hsieh acknowledges that “accidents sometimes happened.” 113 These minor breaches of the rules would hardly have been failures though. Rather, as with all of Hsieh’s One Year Performances in which the rules were sometimes broken (he wrote on the walls in “Cage Piece” to mark the passing of time; he missed 133 punch-ins out of 8,760 in “Time Clock Piece”; he was forced inside for fifteen hours of “Outdoor Piece”; and Hsieh and Montano touched accidentally roughly sixty times during “Rope Piece”114), these mistakes show how truly at the edge of possibility he was working, and they mark the limits of his control. “No Art Piece” is the same, except that there is no record of Hsieh’s mistakes because the record itself would have been making art. At the same time, the possible breaches of “No Art Piece” extend beyond those of the other performances. Because Hsieh was still living his life according to a rule established by art, we could say that he was always breaking the rule of not “doing” art. It is here that Hsieh’s investigation of the project of blurring the boundary between art and life reflects back on itself most staggeringly. One is compelled to ask, what is the “ART,” capitalized throughout the “Statement,” that is abstained from in this piece? Is art so clearly identifiable that it can be delimited and avoided? Certainly, “No Art Piece” invites the inevitable answer to that question. At the same time, Hsieh’s capitalization of “ART” and his explicit association of it with institutions such as galleries and museums also suggest a particular understanding of art: like the prison system, labor, property, and marriage, “ART” is a domain of power, the “art world” that Hsieh had moved to New York to join and which had the ability to support or neglect him. In creating an artwork around not doing art, Hsieh held in tension an ambivalent relationship between art and life, exposing that relation as one always structured by power: the

112

Ward asks, “Could he have the conversation about not having the conversation?” (Ward, “Alien Duration,” 19). Strictly speaking, the answer would have to be “No.” 113 Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 336. 114 Thomas McEvilley reports that there were “about 60 brush-bys and one brief hug by Montano” during the year (McEvilley, “Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano,” 98).

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power maintained by “ART” to decide what does and does not belong, and what does and does not have value. Hsieh continued to perform an ambivalent relationship to “ART” in his subsequent performance, a “Thirteen Year Plan” that would mark the conclusion of his work as an artist. For this piece, timed to conclude on the eve of the millennium (also Hsieh’s forty-ninth birthday), Hsieh vowed “to make ART” but “not show it PUBLICLY.”115 Here, rather than abstaining from art altogether, Hsieh proposed the notion of a private art that would operate outside recognized institutional frameworks. Over the course of this long period of time, Hsieh ceased to participate in the art scene in New York, and his work largely disappeared from public consciousness.116 When, on January 1, 2000, he revealed what he had done for thirteen years in a “public report” at Judson Memorial Church in New York, Hsieh declared: “I kept myself alive. I passed the Dec. 31, 1999.”117 While some have interpreted Hsieh’s statement as a continuation of secrecy about what he made during those thirteen years,118 we might also take it at face value: what Hsieh did for thirteen years was to live; the art that he made was his life. Though Hsieh has revealed little about what this life involved, a few things can be surmised. Over the course of these thirteen years, he addressed his legal status, becoming a US citizen in 1988; he worked, presumably continuing to do the carpentry and other odd jobs that he had done before119; he maintained two buildings, which he both rented out for income and provided for free to visiting artists as part of a residency program that he established120; he may have gotten married121; and he participated in the 115

Hsieh, “Statement,” December 31, 1986. Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 58. 117 This statement appears on a poster made by Hsieh to mark the conclusion of his performance. Martha Wilson unveiled the poster and read the statement to the assembled audience before Hsieh came out to speak and respond to questions. A video of the proceedings is included in Hsieh’s One Year Performance Art Documents, DVDRom. 118 For instance, in an article about an exhibition of “Time Clock Piece” at Carriageworks in Sydney in 2014, Kathy Marks, describing “Thirteen Year Plan,” writes, “Even now, he declines to explain the content” (Kathy Marks, “Tehching Hsieh: The Man Who Didn’t Go to Bed for a Year,” The Guardian, Australian Culture Blog, April 29, 2014, www.theguardian.com. 119 During “Rope Piece,” Hsieh did carpentry work, and he and Montano often did jobs for other artists, such as hanging shows, doing mailing lists, or cleaning lofts (C. Carr, “Roped: A Saga of Art in Everyday Life,” in On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century [Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1993], 3). Following “Thirteen Year Plan,” Hsieh reports continuing to do jobs such as painting houses (Bajo and Carey, “In Conversation”). 120 Bajo and Carey, “In Conversation.” 121 Although Hsieh reveals very little about his personal relationships, he has stated that he met his third wife in 2001 (Deborah Sontag, “A Caged Man Breaks Out at Last,” The New York Times, February 25, 2009, www.nytimes.com). 116

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art market, selling all of his paintings from the years prior to his arrival in the United States at auction in 1994.122 In other words, in keeping himself alive (still within the framework, though out of sight, of art), Hsieh continued to negotiate very real relations to the law, to labor, to property, to marriage, and to the art world. A fitting conclusion, Hsieh’s last performance encompassed all that his previous performances had explored.123 Rather than blurring the presumed boundary between art and life, Hsieh’s final two performances staged a complex relationship between them. Far from achieving an ardently hoped for unity, both performances work through an ambivalence about whether Hsieh was making art or “just” living life, which reignites the very question of their relation. Soon after the conclusion of “Thirteen Year Plan,” Jill Johnston wrote, “From 1985 to 1999 Hsieh really did nothing artwise, but he divided this period into two works anyway.”124 Suggesting that Hsieh did not actually make art during this period, Johnston’s comment begs the question once again of what art is and who gets to decide that. Significantly, she recuperates any doubts about the artistic status of these performances by noting that “such Duchampian lessons would perhaps not be so interesting had Hsieh not previously provoked awe and amazement with several tours de force challenging the limits of human endurance.”125 Locating the value of Hsieh’s earlier performances in what Johnston describes as their masterful, even triumphant execution (“tours de force”) of extreme difficulty (at the “limits of human endurance”), and staking this as grounds for taking seriously his final two performances, Johnston seems to both invoke and respond to a familiar condemnation of avant-garde art: that it is too easy, that it requires no specialized skill, and that it is therefore not really art at all. It is thus the incontestable labor and meticulous execution of Hsieh’s earlier performances that appears to validate him as an artist and consequently legitimate his later works as art. 122

Bajo and Carey, “In Conversation.” In his dialogue with Heathfield, Hsieh reveals that he did embark upon a “concept” (which he distinguishes from an artwork) during his “Thirteen Year Plan.” In 1991, he “tried to disappear” by moving West and attempting to lead a fully anonymous life. He made it to Seattle (his ultimate goal was Alaska), where he survived by doing low-paid odd jobs, but he abandoned the project after six months, realizing that, “if I stayed in this double exile status for such a long time just for art’s sake, it was not my ideal response to life and art” (Hsieh in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 338). It seems fitting that Hsieh decided against disappearance as the conclusion to his work. To disappear would have been to sever his relations, to leave his identity behind. Instead, he continued to endure in relation, with all of his ambivalence sustained. 124 Johnston, “Art’s Willing Captive,” 140, my italics. 125 Ibid., 141. 123

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That hard work might be a prerequisite for something to be considered art returns these performances to a trajectory linked to Hsieh’s status as an undocumented immigrant. If resistance to avant-garde art following Duchamp has often taken the form of an accusation “that the artist has not worked hard enough or put enough effort into his art,” as Barbara Rose noted in 1965, this accusation takes on a special valence in the United States when the artist is an immigrant, and especially one without legal status.126 In order to gain entry into the United States, immigrants must often prove (for example, through employer sponsorship) their usefulness to the country and their potential to contribute to its economy. A negative characterization of undocumented immigrants is that they take from, and benefit from, the US economy without giving back to it (for instance, via the erroneous charge that undocumented immigrants do not pay taxes127). From this perspective, to spend a year or thirteen doing “nothing,” and then to call this “nothing” art, would seem to contravene not only the conventions of art but what it means to be a contributing member of society. The suggestion that Hsieh had to “work hard” in order to become an artist who could “waste time” indicates once again that art has the capacity to differently qualify the times of individual lives. This is not to suggest that Hsieh’s final two works function simply as a “radical and inassimilable critique of the institutions of the global art world and its legitimating discourses” as Heathfield proposes (and rejects).128 Johnston describes these performances as Duchampian, and considering them in light of that quintessential gesture of blurring the boundary between art and life, the Duchampian readymade, suggests a more complicated, less straightforwardly oppositional relation. In Peter Bürger’s classic account, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) – a porcelain urinal that Duchamp signed with a pseudonym, first to have the work rejected for “not being art” and later to be heralded as the most influential artwork of the twentieth century  – was both exemplary of the avant-garde and emblematic of its ultimate failure “to do away with art as a sphere that is separate from the praxis of life.”129 For Bürger, the 126

Barbara Rose, “ABC ART,” reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1968), 277. 127 This charge has recently received renewed scrutiny and critique. See Alexia Fernández Campbell, “The Truth About Undocumented Immigrants and Taxes,” The Atlantic, September 12, 2016, www.theatlantic.com, which reports that undocumented immigrants in fact contribute billions of dollars a year to Social Security even though most will never receive any benefits from it. 128 Heathfield, “Impress of Time,” 12. 129 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 53.

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problem epitomized by Fountain (and other readymades) was that “now the protest of the historical avant-garde against art as institution is accepted as art.”130 Rather than seeing this as a failure, however, we might note that the incorporation of the readymade within the museum allowed it to do something critical – namely, to expose the institution’s role in defining an object’s existence and assigning it value. In other words, Fountain reveals that a urinal can be “art” as long as it resides within a framework that recognizes it as such. Rather than doing away with art as a unique institution with the power to shape the lives of things, the readymade makes clear its capacity to do so.131 In framing his life (without art) as art, Hsieh repeated and transformed the avant-garde gesture, not in an attempt to overcome the supposed gap between art and life, nor in protest against art as an institution, but in an exploration of art’s active potential to sustain and value life. As he says, “I believed, and still believe, art can be of value, a good thing to do. So I just wanted to say what art could be. Art is one way to live, an energy or power that gives you a way to be.”132 If this hope for art’s ability to stimulate and nourish life  – this hope that art could itself be a way to live – remains tempered by an awareness of art’s capacity to mark “life” as its opposite, it is no less devoted for that. Far from an indictment of art, Hsieh’s long-enduring, difficult relationship to art stands as a continuing testament to art’s capacity to shape a life. When, at the conclusion of his “Thirteen Year Plan,” Hsieh was asked by a member of the audience what he would do now, he responded: Tough question, and is good question.  . . . Actually, I will not do art  – I will do – I will not do art anymore. But, I’ve already said that before [he gestures to the poster for “No Art Piece”]. To me, I will not lose my art spirit or ability. But I have to find something to do, and that is just my choice.”133

The hesitation in Hsieh’s speech is certainly related to his difficulty with English, but the equivocation of his announcement  – the movement from “I will not do” to “I will do” and back to “I will not do”  – combined with the gesture to “No Art Piece,” also suggests that Hsieh’s life might continue to be inflected by art after all. In his dialogue with Heathfield, Hsieh continues to reaffirm this paradox: “I haven’t finished 130

Ibid., Bürger’s italics. See Foster, Return of the Real, 15–20, for another reworking of Bürger’s thesis. 132 Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 328. 133 My transcription from the film documentation in Hsieh’s One Year Performance Art Documents, DVDRom. 131

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my art, but I will not do art any more.  . . . The only thing I’m sure about is that I’m still in the process of passing time, as I always am. Life becomes open and uncertain again.”134 Continuing in the art of enduring life, he opens himself once again to a life lived in relation and all of the uncertainty that that entails.

134

Hsieh quoted in Heathfield, “I Just Go in Life,” 338.

chapter 4

Enduring Documents

Is There Life After Performance? ... There is nothing left after live art but the documentation. – Lynn Zelevansky1

In the twenty-first century, a great deal of energy has been spent asking how and in what forms performance art lasts. Such questioning has been bound up with concerns about the life of performance that have been central to the discourse on performance art since its emergence. Intricately tied to this conversation are questions around performance documentation. For a long time, as Lynn Zelevansky asserts in the epigraph above, the only thing thought to remain after the ephemeral event of performance was the documentation. Yet, in being thought of as performance art’s only remainder, documents have also been a source of ongoing discomfort. From anxieties about their insufficiency as records to despair that documents are easily commodified, unease with performance documentation has gone hand in hand with the notion of performance art’s ephemerality. More recently, an interest in reenactment in the art world has challenged the idea that performance remains only in and as its documents. Yet even here, as we will see, a vexed relationship to documents persists. In this chapter, I explore what the practice of endurance has to offer to this conversation by turning to Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces (2005), a seven-day-long exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York during which Abramović “reperformed,” in her words, six works of performance art from the late 1960s and 1970s as well as one new piece designed for this occasion. Described as an attempt to 1

Lynn Zelevansky, “Is There Life After Performance?” Flash Art (International Edition) December 1981–January 1982: 38–42. The quote, “There is nothing left after live art but the documentation,” appears on page 39.

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“examin[e] the possibility of redoing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral,”2 Seven Easy Pieces included performances of Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974), Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), VALIE EXPORT’s Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), Gina Pane’s The Conditioning (the first action of Autoportrait(s) [Self-Portrait(s)], 1973), Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), and Abramović’s own Lips of Thomas (or Thomas’ Lips, 1975). As a prominent early work amid a growing fascination with reenactment in the art world, Seven Easy Pieces quickly became a key text in the discourse on reenactment.3 However, Abramović’s were not strict reenactments if we take that term to imply a faithful replication of original acts as they were performed the first time. Rather, Abramović transformed all of the works regardless of their original form – from Nauman’s conceptual art piece to her own grueling Lips of Thomas, which ended after two hours in 1975 – into seven-hour-long durational performances. She did this, I propose, by subjecting all of them to an endurance structure designed for this occasion. As I will discuss, this structure involved a bodily commitment to act in relation to the documentation of each performance for a period of seven hours. Abramović has been working with endurance for over forty years, and it is perhaps for this reason that the form of her “reenactments” has garnered little attention. Yet, rather than an incidental aspect of her performances, endurance, I argue, is paramount to what Seven Easy Pieces offers to a conversation about the continuing life of performance. In reading Seven Easy Pieces as a series of performances of endurance  – and specifically, as a project of enduring documentation – this chapter offers a distinct perspective from the discourse of reenactment that has surrounded this work. In the process, I aim to show that endurance, as practice and theory, posits another way of understanding how performance art lasts and the uncomfortable role of documentation in that process. Far from overcoming a difficult relationship to documents, endurance will emerge as a process of sustaining these discomforts.

2 3

Marina Abramović: Seven Easy Pieces, Exhibition Announcement, New York: Guggenheim Museum, http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/abramovic. Amelia Jones points to Seven Easy Pieces’ central position: “Re-enactment [is] currently a hugely popular strategy in the art and performance worlds and beyond (as signaled, importantly, by Abramović’s own Seven Easy Pieces)” (Amelia Jones, “‘The Artist Is Present’: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR: The Drama Review 55.1 [Spring 2011], 19).

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The Discomforts of Documents But why, one might ask, should documents be so difficult to endure? Before turning to Seven Easy Pieces, I begin with a brief account of documentation’s discomforts. Perhaps, the greatest unease stems from the evidentiary crisis that performance documents produce. Assertions that performance art is dependent upon documentation  – both to prove that the performance took place and as a means through which to circulate beyond its immediate audience – are ubiquitous.4 Yet, equally pervasive is the acknowledgment that documents cannot be relied upon: they are partial, incomplete, and they have the capacity to lie. As Tracey Warr writes in relation to the photographic document in particular: “The photograph as document usually assumes authenticity and authority, yet it is neither objective, necessarily factual nor a complete record. . . . There is plenty that the photograph leaves out (sound, time, space, often the audience).”5 This makes the photograph’s tendency, as Catherine Grant puts it, to “appear to authenticate, and ultimately stand in for, the initial action,” all the more worrisome.6 Such uncertainties could seem to be an external threat to the integrity of performance art. Yet, performance art has been invested since its beginnings in the conundrums of documentation. After all, the conventions for documenting performance art established in the 1970s tended to resist an evidentiary approach. Until quite recently, one of the most common formats for presenting performance art documentation consisted of a single photograph with a brief accompanying text. Jenni Sorkin has credited Linda Frye Burnham, founder and editor of the influential performance art magazine High Performance (1978–97), with having “invented a standard format for the documentation and 4

For example, Amelia Jones refers to body and performance art’s “dependence on documentation to attain symbolic status within the realm of culture” (Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56.4 [Winter 1997], 13, my italics); Kathy O’Dell asserts that “for the performers, photography was an imperative, the chief record of their otherwise ephemeral performances” (Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s [Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998], 13, my italics); and Henry Sayre notes that “conceptual and performance art . . . have come to rely on the medium [of photography] as a mode of ‘presentation’” (Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 2, my italics). 5 Tracey Warr, “Image as Icon: Recognizing the Enigma,” in Art, Lies, and Videotape: Exposing Performance, ed. Adrian George (Liverpool: Tate, 2003), 32. 6 Catherine Grant, “Private Performances: Editing Performance Photography,” Performance Research 7.1 (2002), 34.

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dissemination of live and ephemeral artworks, creating single- or doublepaged spreads that paired a photograph with an artist- supplied text chronicling the live event.”7 Burnham herself states that she borrowed the design from Chris Burden’s documentation methods from the early 1970s.8 This format has been used again and again in books and catalogues, as well as in exhibitions.9 For Warr, this distilling of performance pieces down to a singular image (“the ‘good’ image from a picture editor’s point of view  – reproduced over and over in surveys”) produced something akin to religious icons.10 As icons, performance art photographs transformed the never fully determinable event of the performance into a single image both “purport[ing] to show us something real and actual” and “encouraging the development of legend by giving us enough but nothing too definite.”11 If Warr’s analogy sheds light on the evidentiary uncertainties that attend performance documents, it also illuminates another frequent concern about performance documentation: if performance photographs are comparable to religious icons, they have also occasioned iconoclastic debates. Here, rather than assertions of performance art’s uneasy dependence upon an unreliable guarantor, the document, we find pronouncements of performance art’s absolute distinction from it. Peggy Phelan’s oft-cited assertion that “performance art cannot be documented (when it is, it turns into that document  – a photograph, a stage design, a video tape  – and ceases to be performance art)” can be read as both an acknowledgment of and a resistance to the photograph’s capacity to become, like the icon, an entity in its own right.12 The problem for Phelan and others was not so much the document’s inadequacy as evidence as the document’s potential to be commodified. Certainly, it was the photographs of early performance art that first came to be bought and sold. As Roy Bongartz noted in 1974 in a New York Times article with the headline “How do you buy a work of art like this?” above three photographs of Burden’s Shoot, the answer was 7

Jenni Sorkin, “Envisioning High Performance,” Art Journal 62.2 (Summer 2003), 37–8. Linda Frye Burnham, “‘High Performance,’ Performance Art, and Me,” TDR: The Drama Review 30.1 (Spring 1986), 24. 9 In more recent years, the availability of digital photography and video as means of recording, and the Internet as a means of dissemination, have changed practices of documenting performance art considerably. 10 Warr, “Image as Icon,” 32. 11 Ibid., 36. 12 Peggy Phelan,  Unmarked:  The Politics  of Performance (London and  New  York:  Routledge,  1993), 31. 8

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simple: “with a check,” Bongartz asserted along with a picture of one made out to Burden for $1,750 for the very photographs featured in the article. Thus, like “the icon [which] makes the intangible and invisible accessible in portable form and therefore creates a market for the priceless and the immaterial,”13 the document threatened to “betray” the live event by usurping its inherent value. The solution advocated influentially by Phelan was to embrace “disappearance,” positing the live event as vanishing and intrinsically opposed to material remains.14 Conversely, Philip Auslander has argued that, rather than being distinct from performance, “the act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such.”15 Rather than supplanting the value of the live event, the act of documentation denotes it as an event of worth. Yet even here one gets a sense of why such an approach to documentation could feel like a betrayal to the spectator who places particular value in the live event. For, in arguing that “the purpose of most performance art documentation is to make the artist’s work available to a larger audience,” Auslander submits, as I noted in the Introduction, that “the presence of [an] initial audience has no real importance to the performance as an entity whose continued life is through its documentation.”16 Once again, it would seem that it is this notion, that performance is an entity whose continued life is through its documentation that has been at the heart of our ongoing ambivalence toward documents. If performance art “disappears,” it has seemed that the document, and the document alone, remains. Since the turn of the millennium, this assumption has been questioned by scholars and live artists turning to reenactment as a way of preserving performance art. Rebecca Schneider’s critique of an archival logic that “demand[s] that performance disappear in favor of discrete remains,”17 and her argument that we ought instead to “approach performance not as that which disappears (as the archive expects), but as both the act of remaining and a means of reappearance,” has been influential 13

Warr, “Image as Icon,” 35. See Phelan’s oft-cited passage: “To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being  . . . becomes itself through disappearance” (Phelan, Unmarked, 146). 15 Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28.3 (September 2006), 5, Auslander’s italics. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 Rebecca Schneider, “Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6.2 (2001), 102, Schneider’s italics. See also Schneider’s “redo” of this essay in Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), 100. 14

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for those investigating performance’s own modes of remaining.18 The twenty-first century has seen a flourishing of reenactments of performance art works from the 1960s and 1970s, from the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London’s A Short History of Performance Part 1 (2002), which re- presented performances by Stuart Brisley, Bernsteins, the Kipper Kids, Hermann Nitsch, Bruce McLean, Jannis Kounellis, and Carolee Schneemann, to André Lepecki’s restaging of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) at Munich’s Haus der Künst in 2006, to the reenactments of Abramović’s and Abramović and Ulay’s early performances that were part of the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s retrospective Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2010), among others. For some, such reenactments have promised to overcome the limitations of mediatized forms of documentation and return past works to the realm of the “live.” Yet many of these events have remained tangled up with documentation nevertheless, both relying upon documents as source material for their reenactments and photographing and filming the reenactments themselves. For Amelia Jones, such exhibitions’ continuing “dependence  . . . on documentation (before, during, and after the actual time of the exhibition’s display) . . . points to obdurate contradictions in the recent obsession with live art, its histories, and its documentation and re-enactments.”19 Clearly, even in the turn to reenactment, performance makers and scholars continue to find ourselves in a troubled relationship to documents.

Re-Documentation As a project, Seven Easy Pieces was deeply bound up with documentation, and this proved to be one of the most difficult things about it. I write this having seen Seven Easy Pieces “live.” I attended nightly for the duration of the performances, and although I did take breaks to eat and to use the bathroom, I was present for most of the forty-nine hours of the exhibition. It is fair to say that my discussion of the work would be different had I not been there in person, experiencing the effects of those sevenhour-long durations repeated over seven days: the feelings of anticipation and concern, discomfort and boredom, and occasional jubilation that Abramović’s exhausting performances produced; the sense of temporary community that emerged as the same audience members returned to 18 19

Schneider, “Performance Remains,” 103, and Performing Remains, 101, Schneider’s italics. Jones, “The Artist Is Present,” 17.

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the Guggenheim night after night; and the palpable transformation that occurs in a space after such prolonged and focused activity. Yet, to “be there” was also to be constantly aware of documentation, both of the well-known images and accounts of performances past, which were being evoked, and of the ever-present surrounding documentary apparatus. As much as the framing discourse of Seven Easy Pieces might have seemed to propose reenactment as an alternative method of preserving performance art for future generations, which could overcome the limitations of mediatized forms of documentation, the project was continually preoccupied with documentation. Abramović relied upon existing documents to generate her performances, and the event itself was extensively documented by a crew led by Babette Mangolte, a well-known filmmaker and photographer of live art since the 1970s. Every second of its forty-nine hours was filmed, photographed, and audio-recorded to produce a 240-page book and a ninety-minute film.20 For some commentators, this permeation of the event with documentation was contrary to the ostensible aims of reenactment.21 Yet, it is worth remembering that an overt relationship to documentation was in keeping with the practices of at least some of the artists whose works were being recreated. Gina Pane, for one, was very deliberate about her use of documentation during her performance actions in the 1960s and 1970s. As she explained: In my case photography is introduced even before the action begins, as a sort of means to an end. It has what we might call a conceptual function. It creates the work the audience will be seeing afterwards. So the photographer is not an external factor, [s]he is positioned inside the action space with me, just a few centimeters away. There were times when [s]he obstructed the view! This related directly to the theoretical and conceptual reading of the work. I did nothing to deceive them; the audience understood very clearly that they would have this photographic reading afterwards.22 20

See Marina Abramović, 7 Easy Pieces (Milan: Charta, 2007), and Babette Mangolte, dir. 7 Easy Pieces by Marina Abramović (Microcinema, 2007). 21 Jones, for instance, focusing on the potential commodification of documents, writes: Re-enactments, like the live in general, might seem to promise an escape from commodification – certainly Abramović does not by all appearances aim primarily to promote the historical performance first and foremost as a commodity. But of course, . . . that is what her re-enactments (and thus by extension the “originals,” through her) become, particularly as they circulate out from such a major art institution as the Guggenheim, and via the carefully choreographed professional photographs, film, and book that she produced in relation to Seven Easy Pieces. (Jones, “The Artist Is Present,” 34–5) 22

Pane, quoted in O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 28, italics in original. While this quote is rendered with masculine pronouns, Pane generally worked with Françoise Masson as photographer, a fact that I have attempted to make visible through my insertions of [s].

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In Pane’s description, the documentary apparatus was an integral component of her work, not only serving to extend it beyond the live event, but also operating centrally in the experience of the live performance.23 Similarly, the documentation of Seven Easy Pieces got in people’s way. For example, in their review of the work, T. Nikki Cesare and Jenn Joy describe the experience of walking around the stage and “stepp[ing] over cords of the many video cameras surrounding the event, [their] process interrupted by the mechanisms of documentation.”24 Rather than seeing this as a detraction from Abramović’s reperformances, we might acknowledge that, to the extent that Seven Easy Pieces was a “reenactment,” it was also a reenactment of the act of documenting these performances by both a performance artist and a filmmaker/photographer revisiting their past practices. More troubling, it would seem, were Abramović’s personal reasons for the exhaustive documentation. In re-performing and re-documenting earlier performance art works, she claimed to have been motivated by a desire to avoid “repeating the mistakes of the ‘70s” – mistakes with documentation that had, in her estimation, obscured the history of performance art.25 Having chosen performances that she had not seen herself, Abramović was in the position of many who encounter performance art works through their fragmented records. She researched the performances she chose, speaking with the artists who created them (or with family members of deceased artists), and uncovering heretofore unseen documentary footage to help her reconstruct the performances. In her research, Abramović reports having been dismayed to discover that some performances had not in fact been the way she imagined. For instance, with regard to Chris Burden’s Trans-Fixed (1974) (which Abramović had hoped to perform but didn’t because Burden refused to give her the permission that she sought for every piece she did26), Abramović had thought 23

Here, I take a different approach to Auslander, who uses part of the same quote from Pane as evidence that “the presence of [an] initial audience has no real importance to the performance as an entity whose continued life is through its documentation” (Auslander, “Performativity of Performance Documentation,” 3, 6). For an excellent analysis of the ways in which Pane’s use of photography and video served “not simply to record an ephemeral event for posterity, but also, and perhaps even primarily, to emphasize and solicit from the spectators an understanding of their role in the action,” see Jennifer Blessing, “Gina Pane’s Witnesses: The Audience and Photography,” Performance Research 7.4 (2002), 14. 24 T. Nikki Cesare and Jenn Joy, “Performa/(Re)Performa,” TDR: The Drama Review 50.1 (Spring 2006), 171. 25 Abramović quoted in Johanna Burton, “Repeat Performance: Johanna Burton on Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces,” Artforum International 44.5 (January 2006), 56. 26 See Jones, “The Artist Is Present,” 35, n. 29 for Abramović’s and Burden’s respective accounts of this refusal.

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“that Burden crucified himself on a Volkswagen, that somebody drove the Volkswagen through Los Angeles, and that he was arrested”; she was disappointed to find out that, actually, a doctor had carefully pulled the nails through Burden’s hands and the car had only been rolled out of the garage briefly so that the photograph could be taken before Burden was removed from the car.27 Part of Abramović’s stated motivation for doing Seven Easy Pieces was to set such legends straight. As she explained in an interview, “I found that there has been so much misunderstanding and mystification based on recordings of the time that we need to do something about it.”28 In her apparent aim to “correct” the record, it would seem that Abramović was trying to manage the difficulties presented by the relationship between performance and its documentation in a fairly traditional way, both wanting to confirm the truth of what happened and to ensure that the documentary evidence would support that truth. Critiquing such a project, Schneider has described Abramović as embarking upon “a unidirectional art march toward an empiric future of preservation.”29 Yet, to whatever extent Abramović may have been motivated by empirical aims and a linear conception of history, the process in which she engaged was far more convoluted. Although Abramović expressed concerns that the documentation of performance art has been inadequate and prone to producing inaccurate recollections of the events, it was nevertheless the photographic, filmic, and written documents of these early works, in conjunction with those potentially unreliable accounts circulated orally, that provided the source material for her performances. Responding to the outcomes of this process, a number of commentators lamented that Abramović neither corrected the record nor reanimated the performances, but simply recreated the documentation. Not only did many of the most widely circulated photographs of Seven Easy Pieces reproduce the photographs of the earlier works by explicitly resembling 27

Janet A. Kaplan, “Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramović,” Art Journal 58.2 (Summer 1999), 14. 28 Aaron Moulton, “Marina Abramović: Re: Performance,” Flash Art (International Edition) 244 (2005), 89. Here, Abramović would seem to reject the mythic potential of performance art documentation. This is surprising given that Abramović’s own documentation practices have often participated in what Warr describes as the production of iconic images. As Abramović said of her own work: From the early days when I was working in Yugoslavia and didn’t have video, only photography, I found that the most interesting way to present my work was not to look at sequences of how the performance developed, but rather to decide which photograph had the energy by itself as a photograph and then show just that one. The photograph then has power itself. (Kaplan, “Deeper and Deeper,” 11) 29

Schneider, Performing Remains, 6.

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the iconic images associated with those works,30 but Abramović’s live performances themselves seemed to function, as Cesare and Joy put it, as “embodied documentation.”31 For these critics, rather than revealing the empirical “truth” of the original performances or reopening the works to a live encounter not available in the documentation, the performances and their re-documentation simply reiterated the documents. Thus, for Johanna Burton, the live performances “c[a]me to work like images,” belying the supposed “presence” of the live performance.32 This sense that the performances were “like images” corresponds with Jones’ critique of all reenactments’ “potential to flatten out or aestheticize the act  . . . and thus to reduce or erase the act’s potential for provoking awareness or for transformation or change.”33 Accordingly, for Jessica Santone (who also notes that the “reperformances work[ed] as documentation” 34), Abramović’s performances functioned “as a controlling, stabilizing mechanism,” in which “Abramović slowly continue[d] to fix” the images associated with the pieces she performed.35 Thus, for a number of observers, Abramović’s reperformances – as re-documentations – did not serve to return the past performances to the unpredictability of the live but contributed to their fixing within history.36 Implicit in these accounts is a particular view of documents characterized most notably by a sense that documents are not open to contingency and change. Rather, documents (and, by extension, reenactments that “work as documentation”) fix actions, lifting them out of time and preserving them by remaining the same across time. Documents thus appear to persist without duration. They appear to carry on unaffected by lived time and unattached to any circumstances. Concomitantly, the (live) encounter with the document also seems to fall out of time, to occur in “no time.” Hence, for Cesare and Joy, “the contradictions entwined in [Seven Easy Pieces] bec[a]me the excuse to not watch, bec[a]me permission to leave because an intact, documented memory w[ould] still exist.”37 30

For Jones, the documentation of Seven Easy Pieces did not just reproduce but threatened to usurp the original documents. See her discussion in “The Artist Is Present,” 34. 31 Cesare and Joy, “Performa/(Re)Performa,” 170. 32 Burton, “Repeat Performance,” 56. 33 Jones, “The Artist Is Present,” 25. 34 Jessica Santone, “Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation Strategies for Preserving Art’s History,” Leonardo 41.2 (2008), 148. 35 Ibid., 149. 36 Furthermore, Jones argues that Abramović’s lavish documentation of Seven Easy Pieces demonstrates “her clear concern with its ‘fixing’ in history in a very particular way” (Jones, “The Artist Is Present,” 31). 37 Cesare and Joy, “Performa/(Re)Performa,” 175, Cesare and Joy’s italics.

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However, as I aim to show, in performing documentation, Seven Easy Pieces reconfigured assumptions about both performance and documents. Rather than seeking (and failing) to displace mediated forms of documentation as means of maintaining performance art  – a move that accords with an affirmation of performance as live and contingent over and against mediated forms of documentation as flat and fixed; a move, in other words, that maintains old binaries between performance and documentation even while it strives to grant performance a kind of staying power  – Seven Easy Pieces presented endurance as an ongoing, embodied relationship to documentation. As I will explore, what Abramović did in Seven Easy Pieces was act both willfully and receptively (for endurance is always both something done and something undergone) in relation to the documentation of each performance for an extended period. In doing so, she did not replicate the original performances exactly, nor did she virtuosically reinterpret them to create new “originals.” Rather, she engaged in a project of sustaining an ongoing relationship between performance and documentation. In the process, she both endured the documents’ uncertainties and incompleteness and helped the documents, as well as the performances, endure into the future, not as permanent and fixed but as contingent and changing, too. In arguing as much, I see Seven Easy Pieces, despite Schneider’s critique that it was an attempt at a “linear transmission of ‘seminal’ works of performance art,”38 as participating in what Schneider describes as “the inter(in)animate tangle between liveness and documentation,”39 and as “troubling the habitual line of binary opposition between ‘the live’ and the ‘archival remain.’”40 At the same time, I propose that the concept of endurance can help us to think through this tangle differently from the concept of “remaining,” which Schneider claims for performance over and against the notion of disappearance.41 Interestingly, when Schneider defines remaining, she suggests that enduring might be one synonym: “If ‘to remain’ means to endure  . . .” she begins at one point when she explicitly states what it means to remain.42 Yet these terms have different 38

Schneider, Performing Remains, 6. Ibid., 29. 40 Ibid., 144. 41 Schneider first uses the phrase “performance remains” in her 2001 article by that name. There, and in her redo in Performing Remains, Schneider describes performance as “remaining” (103 and 102, respectively) and asserts that “performance does not disappear” (103, 105 and 102, 104, respectively). 42 Schneider, Performing Remains, 22. 39

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connotations. One important difference lies in their perceived relationship to contingency. For Schneider, the celebration of contingency associated with the performance art practices that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s is inextricably linked to a linear conception of time and to the notion that performance disappears. She writes, “the faith that linear time is the one true time couples with an investment in the contingency offered by that temporal model [my italics] to reassure that any true temporal return or overlap would be impossible because different.”43 Thus, for Schneider, the notion of contingency – the sense of being in relation and therefore subject to external forces and chance occurrences – depends upon a linear model of time and is tied to a notion of performance as fleeting and lost, as well as to a valorization of the “original” nonreproducible event  – precisely the long-held ideas about performance that Schneider is attempting to move beyond.44 In linking contingency with disappearance, Schneider’s notion of “remaining” emerges as opposed to both. In contrast, that which endures (including both documents and performance) does not “disappear,” but nor does it “remain” independently of the effects of time and the contingencies that time involves. That which endures always does so in relation to numerous factors including an uncertain future that is full of contingency and change. In the sections that follow, I turn to the individual performances within Seven Easy Pieces in order to consider how they reworked performance art’s ongoing relationship to three different kinds of documents: instructions, photographs, and narrative accounts.

Following Instructions For a project exploring the preservation of performance art, Abramović made a counterintuitive choice to open Seven Easy Pieces with a piece that has not usually been considered a work of performance art at all. When it was first exhibited in 1974, Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure consisted of a set of instructions printed in duplicate on a number of pieces of pink paper. One copy was posted on a wall, and other copies were distributed to gallery visitors who were invited to perform the instructions, which direct readers to push their bodies against a wall in various 43 44

Ibid., 30, Schneider’s italics. Ibid. See also p. 28, where Schneider writes, “Until recently, most ‘60s and ‘70s performance art work was considered non-reproduceable [sic], existing only in time as one-time events, and in this way was arguably seen as ‘auratic.’ Such work was considered completely contingent, lost to an irretrievable ‘then’ that was only fleetingly ‘now’ at the time of its singular articulation.”

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ways, themselves.45 As instructions, the piece may never have been performed by the artist (there is no indication that it was), and audience members may have chosen not to perform it, too. If Seven Easy Pieces was a proposal for how to maintain performance art, why begin with a performance of Body Pressure? One answer, I propose, lies in its exploration of the relationship between instructions and performance and how these two persist over time. In beginning with an instruction piece and describing her own performances as being similar to interpretations of musical scores, 46 Abramović’s challenge to the ostensible unrepeatability of performance art recalled the instruction pieces and event scores of Fluxus artists such as George Maciunas, George Brecht, and Yoko Ono (whom I discussed in Chapter 1). For these artists, instruction pieces and event scores were able, and intended, to be performed multiple times, by different people, and according to any number of possible interpretations. These interpretations resisted distinctions between original performances and reenactments. Consider, for instance, the following exchange between Brecht and art critic Irmeline Lebeer concerning Brecht’s work, Piano Piece (1962), the score for which consists of the single word, “center”: GB: How would you realize this? IL: Me? Oh ... for example by pushing the piano into the centre of the room. ... You could also strike a note in the middle of the piano. Or drop something on the strings in the middle of the piano. GB: Yes. There are lots of possibilities, aren’t there? IL: And you? What did you do? You’ve already realized it yourself, no? GB: Yes. With my two index fingers I began to play the notes of the piano starting from the two ends until I found the note in the centre. IL: Oh, of course. That’s fantastic. In that case, that’s the piece? GB: No, no – it’s completely open. The realisations you’ve just made up are as good as any other.47 45

Janet Kraynak describes the installation as such: “For Body Pressure, Nauman built a false wall, similar in shape and dimensions to an existing gallery wall, and hung the text – which was produced as a large, bright pink poster with a single column of text running down the center – on an adjacent wall. According to Dorothee Fischer, a large number of these posters were printed; thus they were most likely also distributed to gallery visitors” (Janet Kraynak ed., Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words: Writings and Interviews (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 83). 46 Marina Abramović, “Reenactment: Introduction,” in 7 Easy Pieces, by Marina Abramović (Milan: Charta, 2007), 11. 47 David T. Doris, “Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1998), 102.

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By beginning with Nauman’s instruction piece (which, as Nancy Spector comments in the catalogue for Seven Easy Pieces, was “the closest to Fluxus,” among the pieces that Abramović performed), Abramović felt that she had “permission  . . . to re-perform the work” and that she “was really free to make the piece, and without contradicting in any way the concept.”48 More than just establishing the legitimacy of reperformance by recalling the precedent of instruction pieces, however, Abramović’s performance of Body Pressure was key to the overall project, I suggest, for the ways in which it acted upon and made evident a blurring between score and document, which enabled Abramović’s subsequent nights’ performances to interpret not the instructions but the documents of past performances “as one would a musical score.”49 Overturning a linear movement from score to performance to document, Abramović’s Body Pressure made manifest a temporal confusion between score and document that resists fixity and opens up to an ongoing invitation to performance. To consider this further, let us linger for a moment on the status of the event score. John Cage’s methods of indeterminacy are generally considered to provide the basis for Fluxus event scores, and in particular Cage’s silent piece 4′33″ (1952) has often been considered the prototypical event score. What is striking about 4′33″ for the present discussion is that even this most famous, founding event score was, from the moment of its first publication, the documentation of an event that had already occurred. The score, as published, reads “I. Tacet; II. Tacet; III. Tacet,” followed by this note from Cage: NOTE: The title of this work is the total length in minutes and seconds of its performance. At Woodstock, N.Y., August 29, 1952, the title was 4′33″ and the three parts were 33″, 2′ 40″, and 1′ 20″. It was performed by David Tudor, pianist, who indicated the beginnings of parts by closing, the endings by opening, the keyboard lid. However, the work may be performed by any instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time.

What we learn from this note is that the now-standard title for the work (and its now standard duration), 4′33″, is in fact a reference to a specific performance: the David Tudor performance of 1952. Though the score is open to an infinite number of interpretations, the common 48

Nancy Spector, “Marina Abramović Interviewed,” in 7 Easy Pieces, by Marina Abramović (Milan: Charta, 2007), 23. 49 Abramović, “Reenactment: Introduction,” 11.

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understanding of the piece has come to be tied to one particular manifestation of it. The score for 4′33″ is thus both a prompt to performance and a document of a performance already past. Cage’s “Note” offers instructions for how to understand the score in part by providing an example of how the score was performed for one specific event. Is the “Note,” then, part of the score, or is it something separate and subsequent? What is the score’s relationship to the David Tudor performance? Is it a script that precedes the performance, or a document that follows it? What is Tudor’s performance in relation to the score? Is it one articulation that follows from the score, or is it the performance that defines the score? Furthermore, if the score is open to multiple interpretations, what do we make of subsequent performances, which often recreate the Tudor timings and gestures? Are such performances purely instances of Cage’s piece, or are they reenactments of Tudor’s performance? The difficulties of answering questions like these have engendered much debate about where the work of art resides in relation to Fluxus event scores. As Liz Kotz writes: What are these texts? They can be read (and have been read) under a number of rubrics: music scores, visual art, poetic texts, performance instructions, or proposals for some kind of action or procedure. Most often, when they are read at all, these “short-form” scores are seen as tools for something else, as scripts for a performance, project, or production that is the “real” art.50

Here, Kotz suggests that Fluxus event scores are most often interpreted as prompts for a performance that is the actual work of art. Of course, event scores have also been interpreted as precursors to conceptual art, and as such, as not requiring any physical action at all to be realized. Yet, even in this case, the score has been imagined as a prompt for a conceptual event that occurs in the act of being read. As Brandon LaBelle writes, “The event score is authored by the reader because it is the reader who ultimately performs the act described, initially and completely, as a mental construct.”51 Thus, whether prompts to performance or conceptualization, the event score is always an event in potentia. As David T. Doris writes, they are “indices of phenomena yet to occur, virtual events waiting to be perceived or enacted.”52 50

Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2010), 61, Kotz’s italics. 51 Brandon LaBelle, “Reading between the Lines: Word as Conceptual Project,” Performance Research 7.3 (2002), 49. 52 Doris, “Zen Vaudeville,” 105, Doris’s italics.

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At the same time, Fluxus event scores are also considered to be the remains of events, which become objects in their own right: One of [Fluxus’s] key products are Event scores, taut little propositions, exercises, or word-objects, usually printed on small, often disposable, cards or sheets of paper. . . . Hundreds of these event scores have been published over the past thirty years, and in many cases, they are all that remain of the events for which they served as the original impetus.53

In Doris’s account, the event score that precedes the live event also remains as its only document. Notably, Doris also describes the event score (a disposable, material object) as one of the key products of Fluxus, reminding us that the ephemera produced by Fluxus artists eventually became sought-after commodities, much the same way that performance photographs came to be bought and sold.54 Returning to Body Pressure, it is worth considering the status of the instructions for this piece and how the work circulates. In early installations of the work, the posters upon which the instructions were printed clearly resisted the condition of art objects: as copies that were freely distributed, they had no particular value; by taking a print, one did not come to “own” a piece by Nauman because the very form of the offset duplicate refuses the status of an original. However, as the work has been re-exhibited over time, the poster itself has come to be seen as having more object-like qualities. As Laurence Sillars notes in the catalog for the Tate Liverpool exhibition, Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think (2006), “The visual and compositional qualities of the text are still highly considered through the layout, typeface and the pink paper on which it is printed. Although the language is functional, it retains an object-like presence.”55 The language on the poster is functional insofar as it (continues to) communicate instructions for performance (instructions that one can also find freely reproduced in various books and on the internet), but these instructions as printed on a pink poster also become over time something other than their message: less a medium 53 54

Ibid., 99. As Dick Higgins lamented in 1969: They want our artifacts, which they treat as those of a bygone race of beings. But not the evidence of our existence or even of those activities which produced the artifacts. . . . What is so spooky is the veneration in which the accidental commodities we have produced are held. It is surely the ultimate reduction of a commodity-oriented society well past the point of absurdity. (Quoted in Owen Smith, “Avant-Gardism and the Fluxus Project: A Failed Utopia or the Success of Invisibility?” Performance Research 7.3 [2002], 3)

55

Laurence Sillars, “Bruce Nauman: Keeping Busy,” in Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think, ed. Laurence Sillars (Liverpool: Tate, 2006), 21 n. 16.

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for communicating a set of actions than a material artifact of a valued artwork. It is for this reason that, although anyone can currently take a pink poster from the permanent exhibition of Body Pressure at Dia:Beacon in New York, copies of the pink flyers also sell for considerably more than the value of their material support.56 By beginning with Nauman’s Body Pressure, Seven Easy Pieces encouraged the audience to take seriously the notion that a performance score is always an event in potentia – an action waiting to be realized – and not simply a document of an event firmly in the past, an object to be exhibited, which accrues increasing value the more time goes by. By beginning with a piece that explicitly addresses its spectator, whom it implores to act, Abramović seemed to insist that performance scores call out for such an embodied response as fundamental to the work and to its ongoing vitality. She also positioned herself as an active receiver performing in response to the instructions of another artist, rather than as a singular artist/genius recreating the work in her own name. At the same time, in activating Body Pressure’s primary document and artifact, she established a framework for understanding other documents as also prompts for performance. Importantly, Abramović’s performance suggested that bodily engagement is crucial to the survival of this work precisely because it maintains the work’s openness. Though some might imagine that acting out Nauman’s instructions as a performance would be deadeningly literal, blunting their in potentia status, Abramović’s seven-hour-long performance of the instructions gave form to an openness and unpredictability founded in the contingency of a specific body acting in relation to a series of limitations  – both its own and those of the material environment. Performing to a prerecorded soundtrack of her own voice reading Nauman’s instructions repeatedly, Abramović interpreted Nauman’s text in various ways over the course of seven hours. The instructions begin: “Press as much of the front surface of your body (palms in or out, left or right cheek) against the wall as possible. Press very hard and concentrate. Form an image of yourself (suppose you had just stepped forward) on the opposite side of the wall pressing back against the wall very hard . . .” The instructions continue for a while in a similar manner until reaching their conclusion: “concentrate on the tension in the muscles, pain where 56

For example, on June 25, 2015, an unsigned print estimated to be from a 2004 exhibition of the work at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York was sold by Bukowskis auction house in Stockholm for 1,300 Swedish Krona (roughly $150). www.bukowskis.com/en/lots/672342-bruce-nauman -offsettryck-poster-body-pressure-onumrerad-upplaga-ej-signerad.

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bones meet, fleshy deformations that occur under pressure; consider body hair, perspiration, odors (smells). This may become a very erotic exercise.” Pressing herself against a large pane of glass instead of a wall, so that her contortions and squashed face were visible to the audience, Abramović endured Nauman’s instructions for seven hours straight. If the instructions themselves seemed “fixed”  – something highlighted by the prerecorded soundtrack to which Abramović performed – the performance of them was open to contingency and change: the glass wall shook precariously every time Abramović threw herself against it, prompting murmurs among audience members about whether or not it would hold; Abramović’s body became continuously more sore and fatigued. After the first fifteen minutes, Abramović had begun to sweat. After an hour, she was swaying a bit on her feet. After two hours, she had begun to make vocalizations of exertion with every thrust of her body against the wall. As though in an effort to negotiate the trembling pane of glass and her own increasingly tender body, Abramović began to press herself differently with each repetition, sometimes lying sideways on the floor against the glass, sometimes abandoning the wall altogether and pressing herself flat against the floor instead. By the end of the performance, the “tension in her muscles, the pain where bones meet, and the fleshy deformations that occur under pressure” were clearly visible in the gingerly way that she moved between sets, and Nauman’s instructions had been transformed into a grueling set of commands. Endurance, as a sustained embodied engagement by a particular individual in a particular context, thus opened Body Pressure up to different interpretations as Nauman’s instruction to imagine oneself stepping through a wall resounded against the realities of a woman’s body repeatedly up against a wall it could not pass through. Watching a female body continuously constrained by a glass wall also modulated Nauman’s suggestion that an encounter with such limits could be erotic, as Nauman’s words, spoken in Abramović’s earnest voice, transmogrified from being teasing and playful, to sounding rather ironic, to taking on an almost menacing tone when, by the end, Abramović’s perspiring body and strained face had the appearance of someone long past the point of titillation.

Performing Photographs If Abramović’s performance of Body Pressure involved her endurance of its primary document, her subsequent night’s performances enacted a similar gesture toward the photographs that are so frequently our main

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form of access to past performances. Three of the performances that Abramović recreated for Seven Easy Pieces – VALIE EXPORT’s Action Pants: Genital Panic, Gina Pane’s The Conditioning, and Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare – are known primarily through their iconic photographs. Abramović’s performances of each of these works took the photographs as instructive and involved extended acts of posing in the positions captured in these images. They also involved the production of new pictures, some of which overtly resembled these earlier images. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was these three performances that earned the most strenuous critiques that Abramović’s performances functioned “like images” and served to “fix” the performances in history. However, whereas the photograph has frequently been perceived as an object that freezes a moment in time and preserves it by remaining the same across time, Abramović’s performances shifted such understandings by interpreting the photographs like scores as indicative of events not only past but in potentia. As I aim to show, by making an extended bodily commitment to them, she responded to the photographs’ own openings toward undetermined futures. By posing in response to the photographs, Abramović’s performances challenged any sense of a unidirectional relationship between performance and photography, reversing what is usually presumed to be the temporal progression from performance to photographs. At the same time, her acts of posing recalled tableaux vivants (“living pictures”), a theatrical practice usually traced to the medieval period. Though separated from photography by a gulf of time and technology, the production of tableaux vivants anticipated photography. As Schneider points out, “the camera obscura evolved from the arts of the Western Stage.”57 Roland Barthes, too, noted the relationship between tableaux vivants and photography: “Photography is a kind of primitive theater,” he wrote, “a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”58 By performing tableaux vivants based on photographs of prior performances, Abramović’s performances worked through a complex intertwining of photography and performance that resists typical oppositions 57

Rebecca Schneider, “Still Living: Performance, Photography, and Tableaux Vivants,” in Point and Shoot: Performance and Photography, ed. France Choinière and Michèle Thériault (Montreal: Dazibao, 2005), 66. See also, Schneider’s chapter, “Still Living” in Performing Remains, which incorporates elements of this essay within a longer chapter. 58 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 32, Barthes’ italics.

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between them. Here, I find Barthes’ notion that “photography is a kind of  . . . theater” helpful. Yet, Schneider, who also questions oppositions between performance and photography, rejects Barthes’ linking of theatre and photography on the basis that both allow us to “see the dead.” Rather, she argues that: what photography and performance share is not (or not only) the model of Death-as-loss romanced by Barthes as the impossibility of return, but that they also share the rowdier processional or street theatre legacy of theatrical irruption – instability, repetition, the processional freeze, the bypass – that undoes too easy archive driven determinations of what disappears and what remains.59

Opposing an association of theatre and photography with death because death implies loss and disappearance, Schneider emphasizes that theatre and photography are both structured by repetition. However, Barthes’ text can also be read as confounding oppositions between disappearing and remaining. As I read Barthes, the link between photography and tableau vivant is to be found, not so much in the two forms’ mutual relationship to death as in the centrality of the pose to both forms  – a pose which itself troubles easy distinctions between liveness and death. For, it is the maintenance of the pose that leads Barthes to the surprising conclusion that photography has more in common with theatre than with film. As Barthes writes: In the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the pose is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images: it is a different phenomenology, and therefore a different art which begins here.60

If we usually think of performance as an action that passes, we might imagine that it is more akin to film than to still photography. Yet Barthes insists that the quality of the pose, which makes the photograph, is of the theatre. It is a living stillness that resides in the photograph.61 By taking on the poses in the photographs, Abramović performed this living stillness. In doing so for an extended period of time, her 59

Schneider, “Still Living,” 64. See also, Schneider, Performing Remains, 144. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 78, Barthes’ italics. 61 This reading chimes with Schneider’s arguments in “Still Living.” Yet, although the notion of the pose is central to Schneider’s later working through of her ideas in Performing Remains, she continues to oppose her argument to Barthes’: “For Barthes it is neither the shared architecture of a screenal vision nor the history of the gestic still that conjoins theatre and photography, but Death the Leveller” (Performing Remains, 143). 60

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performances also reactivated the temporality of photography itself. Although we have come to think of photographs as instantaneous snapshots, stilling and lifting moments out of the flow of time, photographs were once the traces of extended acts of posing. As Barthes writes, “in order to take the first portraits (around 1840) the subject had to assume long poses under a glass roof in bright sunlight; to become an object made one suffer as much as a surgical operation.”62 To be photographed, in other words, was an act of endurance. For Walter Benjamin, this act of endurance translated into an affectively resonant image with its own enduring power. Explaining why early photography continued to have “a more penetrating and lasting effect on the spectator than more recent photography,” he wrote: “The procedure itself taught the models to live inside rather than outside the moment. During the long duration of these shots they grew as it were into the picture.”63 Thus, for Benjamin, it was the endurance of the pose, rather than the mechanical apparatus of the camera, which gave early photographs their lasting quality. Through that pose, the subject of the photograph was not “fixed” either temporally or physically; s/he grew into the picture. Astonishingly, then, while the act of remaining still taught the one who posed how to live inside the present moment, this act also allowed the individual to endure into the future. At the same time, the endurance of the pose had a particular effect on the observer, who would feel an “irresistible compulsion to look for the tiny spark of chance, of the here and now, with which reality has, as it were, seared the character in the picture; to find that imperceptible point at which, in the immediacy of that long-past moment, the future so persuasively inserts itself that, looking back, we may rediscover it.”64 By posing in response to the images of prior performances, Abramović performed this complex temporality, residing in (the long duration of ) the moment not to fix the past, but to find that relationship with the future that is rediscovered by looking back. The Endurance of the Pose Benjamin’s sense that the posing subject is not “fixed” in the act of being photographed but grows into the picture, inserting the future there, was 62

Barthes, Camera Lucida, 13. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13.1 (Spring 1972), 17. 64 Ibid., 7. 63

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perhaps most clearly activated in Abramović’s performance of Gina Pane’s The Conditioning. In Pane’s performance, The Conditioning was the first part of a longer work titled Autoportrait(s) (Self-Portrait(s) in English). Performed by Pane in 1973, Autoportrait(s) consisted of three parts. In the first, Pane lay on a steel bed frame over rows of burning candles for as long as she could bear it. After thirty minutes, she got up and proceeded to slice her lips, brows, and cuticles with a razor blade while images of a woman painting her nails red were projected on the wall behind her. A live-feed camera simultaneously displayed the reactions of female audience members on a monitor. In the final part of the performance, Pane gargled with milk until it mixed with the blood from her lips and she choked on it, subsequently expelling it from her mouth. A series of photographs taken by Françoise Masson form the piece’s constat d’action, or “action report,” Pane’s term for the panels of images that she created from photographs of her actions. These constats were clearly aimed toward future readings. More provocatively, as Alice Maude-Roxby has suggested, they “read somewhat like a step-by-step instructional guide for future use.”65 Autoportrait(s) has often been understood as a comment on the beauty rituals to which women subject themselves: the juxtaposition of images of the painting of a woman’s nails with Pane’s live cutting of her cuticles, lips, and brows is interpreted as a critique of the ways in which women are taught to paint their nails and faces – in other words, of the ways in which women are encouraged to make pictures of themselves.66 Such interpretations remind us that the imperative to make a (pretty) picture of oneself is gendered. But, while artists such as Hannah Wilke and Cindy Sherman have used the pose as a form of mimicry in order to critique gender norms by alienating viewers from the supposed naturalness of what is presented, Pane’s use of the pose in the first part of her performance and Abramović’s subsequent reenactment of that pose invite other interpretations as well.

65

Alice Maude-Roxby, “Past  – Present  – Future,” in Double Exposures: Performance as Photography, Photography as Performance, by Manuel Vason (London and Bristol: Live Art Development Agency and Intellect, 2015), 34. 66 See for example Blessing, who writes that Autoportrait(s) “addresses the social repression of femininity” (Blessing, “Gina Pane’s Witness,” 24), and Juan Vincente Aliaga, who suggests that “[Pane] was saying that the image of the woman, associated with superficial appearance and the trivial as supposedly natural attributes, is nothing more than a fabrication used to compose a stereotyped notion of the feminine” (Juan Vincente Aliaga, “The Folds of the Wound: On Violence, Gender, and Actionism in the Work of Gina Pane,” ArteContexto 7 [2005], 79).

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Pane, whom we know was profoundly interested in how her actions would circulate after she performed them, was also very interested in the period of preparation before her actions began. She called this period “se mettre en condition” (getting into condition).67 It was a period marked by “methodical and rigorous thought  . . . indicated by the sketches and drawings she made of every aspect of her action.”68 In Autoprotrait(s), this period of preparation was made an explicit part of the performance. Usually translated into English as “The Conditioning,” Pane called this first part of her performance mise en condition (setting into condition). By performing only this part of Pane’s action, and by maintaining it for seven hours, Abramović’s performance of The Conditioning lingered on this period of preparation – a period we might understand as the preparation for a (self-) portrait.69 Watching Abramović lying absolutely still over rows of burning candles in a reenactment of a work by an artist herself no longer living (Pane died in 1990) gave this performance the inescapable impression of being a vigil (a period of watch over the body of a recently deceased or dying person) or a wake for Pane. Reading Abramović’s enduring pose as both the preparation for a portrait and a preparation for the passage into death could seem to return us to familiar oppositions between performance and photography, if we understand the “preparation” to be the lived experience of posing and the portrait as what remains afterwards. Yet a wake is also a call to attend to the passing of time, to be with the body lying still. Abramović’s performance of the photograph thus suggested that to properly attend to the still image, we need to give our bodies and our time to it. Significantly, rather than a linear progression forward through time where what is live passes into stillness once and for all, Abramović’s performance made visible the continuous (live) effort it takes to maintain the still image. Because of the extended duration of the performance, Abramović had to come out of her pose roughly every hour and fifteen minutes to replace the candles underneath the platform (Figure  4.1), Consequently, the stillness of the pose was also regularly interrupted by the labor of maintaining the piece  – labor that was directed toward the periods of stillness on the bed, so that the candles would continue to burn close to Abramović’s back, so that we could experience the time it 67

Aliaga, “Folds of the Wound,” 78. Ibid. 69 To be clear, I do not mean to imply any intentionality on Abramović’s part. External factors influenced this choice: namely that Gina Pane’s Estate refused permission to Abramović to recreate the entire work (Spector, “Marina Abramović Interviewed,” 24). 68

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Figure 4.1. Marina Abramović, Seven Easy Pieces, performing Gina Pane’s The Conditioning, First Action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973). Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, 2005 Photo: Attilio Maranzano. © Marina Abramović, Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives, DACS 2017.

took for the candles to burn down. At the same time, the periods when Abramović changed the candles also became the moments when one saw most vividly the effects of her act of endurance on the bed, as her careful rolling off so as not to catch her clothes on fire became more and more clumsy with exhaustion, her movements more and more fatigued. Thus, the repeated ritual of changing the candles became both the preparation for and the aftereffect of the still image: the live pose on the bed that was both the preparation for and the portrait itself.

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As the night approached its end, my friend whispered to me, “I’ve been looking at this for so long, I think the image has burned itself into my retina.” We had been there for over six hours. “And yet,” she continued, “I don’t want to stop watching.” As Mangolte and her crew shot photographs and film around us, we knew there would be pictures afterwards. However, this performance also asked its audience to attend to the experience of being there. It was the investment in documentation, combined with Abramović’s celebration of the “here and now,” that some reviewers found contradictory. Yet, remaining with the posing body “growing into the picture” invoked Barthes’ claim that “the Photographer’s ‘second sight’ does not consist in ‘seeing’ but in being there.”70 Rather than proposing embodied engagement as opposed to photography, Seven Easy Pieces suggested that embodied engagement is needed to bring out what Barthes called the “subtle beyond” of the image,71 its punctum: “what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.”72 This notion of a thing added through the effects of being there  – a thing that is, regardless, already there  – was most palpable for me in Abramović’s performance of Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. In the two most reproduced of Ute Klophaus’s photographs of Beuys’ action, we see a forlorn-looking man, his face covered in a shiny substance that turns out to be honey and gold leaf. He wears a white collared shirt and a khaki fishing vest. Behind him on the wall hang multiple frames, the pictures inside them indecipherable. In his arms, he cradles a dead hare, much like a sleeping child. In one photograph, both his arms encircle the animal. In the other, his right hand is raised, his index finger pointing skyward. There is much that these iconic photographs of this performance leave out. We know from the title that the hare was dead and that Beuys “explained” the pictures to it. But what we cannot see in the photographs is how he did this or what he whispered soundlessly during his three-hour-long performance. We cannot see, for instance, how Beuys carried the hare over to the pictures as he explained them, how he touched its paws against them. How does one explain pictures to the dead? How do we explain these pictures? Beuys is quoted as having said that he explained the pictures to the hare because it could comprehend “more than many human beings with their stubborn 70

Barthes, Camera Lucida, 47. Ibid., 59, Barthes’ italics. 72 Ibid., 55, Barthes’ italics. 71

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rationalism.” He said that he told the animal “he needed only to scan the picture to see what was important about it.”73 But Beuys’ performance suggests something else: we understand pictures not only by looking at them, but by touching them as well. Abramović’s performance made this clear not only because she reenacted Beuys’ actions, carrying her hare over to the black slate boards that she used instead of pictures (presumably in honor of Beuys’ own recurrent use of slate boards); not only because she enacted parts of the performance not reproduced in the familiar photographs (such as the intimate act of holding the hare’s ears in her mouth);74 but because her embodied engagement with Beuys’ work also brought out something else, something in the photographs but which required a particular kind of attention to be perceived. How do we (be)hold that which has passed? Something about the hare seemed to suggest an answer. As road kill, it was rather unromantically dead and probably quite literally frozen at the start. One can see its stiffness in the photographs taken near the beginning of Abramović’s performance: its forelegs extend rigidly into the air. Yet, over the course of the seven hours, the hare, symbol of resurrection and rebirth, underwent a moving transformation as it was warmed by Abramović’s body and her manipulations of it. Over the course of that time, it became increasingly lifelike and responsive until it had softened so completely it was just a rag doll in her arms. When I look at the photo of Beuys now, I understand something about the relationship between his (then) living body and the hare’s (already) dead body that I did not before. I understand how a living body might transform that which is still through an extended embodied engagement with it. I understand this because I was at the Guggenheim thirty years after Beuys’ performance when Abramović performed his actions and posed in the postures held by him in the images captured by the camera all those years before. For me, rather than supplanting the photograph or exposing its inadequacy, Abramović’s performance of endurance served to extend the image. In this way, Seven Easy Pieces affirmed that our relationships to documents are contingent and changing, too. Rather than imagining that that which “remains” is stable and unchanging; rather than 73

Ursula Meyer, “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare: Joseph Beuys’s ‘Actions,’” Art News 68 (January 1970), 57. 74 Interestingly, Abramović remembers this as her own innovation: “I took the freedom to interpret aspects of the piece, like how I held the hare with my teeth, which I decided to do on the spot” (Abramović quoted in Spector, “Marina Abramović Interviewed,” 23–4). However, footage from Beuys performance posted on YouTube four years after Abramović’s performance shows Beuys holding the hare’s ears in his teeth as well. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4ZkR1X6s7E.

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imagining that if it remains, we “have” it, what Seven Easy Pieces demonstrated is that all understanding occurs through embodied acts of attendance, which occur in time and must be repeated.75 Still in the Future Abramović performed pictures in her versions of The Conditioning and How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, but these performances did go some way toward reenacting the earlier pieces. Pane’s performance did involve her lying still over rows of candles, and Beuys’ performance, which spectators watched through a window, did function somewhat as a (moving) picture to be viewed at a distance. Thus, the element of posing in each of these reperformances was arguably in keeping with the original actions. In contrast, Abramović’s reperformance of EXPORT’s Action Pants: Genital Panic was most clearly a tableau vivant of the iconic photographs and not a reenactment of the legendary performance that they have been taken to represent. As is well known, the two most reproduced photographs of Action Pants: Genital Panic are not documents of a performance per se; they were staged to produce a particular kind of object: a poster, which was distributed in Vienna in 1969. In these photos, taken by Peter Hassman, EXPORT appears wearing dark crotchless trousers and a black leather jacket. Her hair is teased into a wild mop. She sits with her legs apart, holding a machine gun and staring directly at the camera. In one picture, she sits on a wooden chair, with one leg raised up on another chair next to her. In the other, she sits on a wooden bench with her back against a wall. In both, she appears to be stationed for defense, on the watch against possible intruders. The legendary action, circulated in various accounts, was something else altogether. As the story goes, EXPORT walked through the audience in a film house (sometimes described as a pornographic cinema, other times as an experimental art film house) wearing trousers with the crotch cut out and challenged the mostly male audience members to “look at the real thing,” rather than passively and anonymously enjoying images of naked women on the screen. In some versions of the story, EXPORT carried a gun in the live performance; in the more widely held account, she did not.76 75

In this, it could be seen to answer Schneider’s call to “rethink the site of history in ritual repetition” and “to resituate the site of any knowing as body-to-body transmission” (Schneider, Performing Remains, 104). 76 See Mechtild Widrich, “Can Photographs Make It So? Repeated Outbreaks of VALIE EXPORT’S Genital Panic since 1969,” in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 89–104, for further discussion of the various accounts.

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In researching the performance, Abramović and her team were confronted with numerous uncertainties. Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector recounts: Even with the extensive research we did for VALIE EXPORT’s Genital Panic – we couldn’t even confirm the year it was performed. There have been various years cited for the piece, and very different descriptions about what actually happened – whether there was a gun, for instance, since she posed in a photograph after the fact with a gun.77

Faced with a lack of clear evidence about the performance, Abramović decided “it was best for me to create an image.”78 The result was that, rather than recreating the celebrated performance – for instance by circulating in her crotchless trousers among the viewers who had come to see the Guggenheim’s more conventional main exhibit at the time, Russia!79 – Abramović remained for all seven hours on the round platform that served as her stage in the rotunda of the museum, posing in the positions struck by EXPORT some thirty-six years before in her posters. Abramović did not approach museum-goers, confronting them up close with her exposed body; moreover, a grey tape line on the floor ensured that viewers were kept at a distance. According to the head guard at the museum, the line, which was not present on other evenings, was installed by the Guggenheim in response to concerns about the provocative nature of a performance involving a machine gun in an age of terrorism.80 The tape, it seems, aimed to manage the potential threat of the performance – a performance famous for disrupting the comfortable division between viewers and the objects of their gaze  – by encouraging viewers to see Abramović’s living body as just another artwork in the museum. For seven hours, then, Abramović posed like EXPORT in the pictures and gazed out at the onlookers. Aside from a particularly intense episode of eye contact with an individual audience member – part of Abramović’s signature mode of “energy dialogue”  – and a brief, unsuccessful effort by another audience member to mount the platform (he was swiftly removed by guards), very little happened. In contrast to the transgressive thrill associated with EXPORT’s purported action, Abramović’s performance was staid and reserved. Of all her reperformances, this piece 77

Spector, “Marina Abramović Interviewed,” 22. Ibid. Russia! was described by the Guggenheim as featuring “the greatest masterpieces of Russian art from the 13th century to the present” (Russia!, Exhibition Overview, New York: Guggenheim Museum, available at http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/russia/overview.html). 80 Personal conversation on the day. 78 79

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opened itself most to the critique that Abramović contained the unpredictability of the live by flattening the prior performance into an image. However, reading Abramović’s performance as an act of enduring (and asking her audience to endure) the documents, with all of their limitations, suggests how this act may have contributed to the work’s ongoing vitality. One outcome of Abramović’s performance has been a renewed consideration of the evidence surrounding EXPORT’s piece. In 2012, Mechtild Widrich published an essay arguing that EXPORT’s legendary performance of Genital Panic most likely never happened.81 Widrich’s essay could seem to confirm all the anxieties about performance documentation with which I began, particularly its unreliability and its ability to generate legends not always grounded in fact. Yet her revelation also confirms an understanding of the pose in the photograph not as “fixed” in the past, but as tending toward the future. Widrich’s key piece of evidence is an anthology from 1970 in which an image of Action Pants: Genital Panic appears with a caption describing the performance in the conditional tense – “should happen” – indicating that the work remained at that point in its planning stages. In other words, EXPORT’s photos were always aimed toward a future performance. Suggestively, Widrich notes that “should (in German sollte) can also be taken as an imperative.”82 Perhaps, without knowing it, Abramović’s performance answered to that command, responding to the compulsion that Benjamin found in the endurance of the pose to look back and rediscover its future. Though she may not have fully realized the promise of the image, her performance reopened its sense of potentiality – its demand that something should happen and still could in the future perfect of the image.

Continuing Narratives I have been arguing that Seven Easy Pieces provided the opportunity to experience the (ever unfolding) future of performances through Abramović’s embodied engagement with their documents. But what was the audience’s role in this? As we have already seen, part of the criticism of Seven Easy Pieces as a “flattening” or “fixing” of past performances came from the sense that it excluded audience interaction from works that had once included it. Here we encounter a final frustration with performance documents: the sense that an audience is unable to influence the course of events when 81 82

Widrich, “Can Photographs Make It So?,” 101. Ibid.

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encountering a documented performance. As Peggy Phelan wrote in 2004, responding to Abramović’s House with the Ocean View (2002) and updating her own arguments about the disappearance of performance: People can often have significant and meaningful experiences of spectatorship watching film or streaming video. But these experiences are less interesting to me because the spectator’s response cannot alter the pre-recorded or the remote performance, and in this fundamental sense, these representations are indifferent to the response of the other. . . . In live performance, the potential for the event to be transformed in unscripted ways by those participating (both the artists and the viewers) makes it more exciting to me. This is precisely where the liveness of performance art matters.83

I have been arguing that documents are not indifferent to the other but call forward to those who will spend bodily time with them. This is how they endure. However, did Abramović’s performances enable viewers to participate in the future of these works? Could we contribute to their histories in unscripted ways? At stake here, I want to suggest, is not simply whether audience members were able to participate but how they participated. In her catalogue essay for Seven Easy Pieces, Erika Fischer-Lichte argues that the power of much early performance art arose from the ways in which it forced its spectators to negotiate the conflicting pressures of ethical and aesthetic demands. Writing specifically about work in which artists “inflicted violence on their bodies in various ways, and even exposed themselves to actual risk of death in and through their performances,”84 FischerLichte contends that such works required spectators to make explicit choices about their engagement with the work by confronting them with a dilemma: did respect for the artist mean that they should not intervene and risk “destroying” the work? Or, did the “laws of humanity” demand that they not “observe in silence how she inflicted injury on herself?”85 Raising questions for spectators about whether they ought to break aesthetic convention in order to act upon ethical imperatives, early performance art plunged spectators into a productive crisis. In contrast, Fischer-Lichte argues, Seven Easy Pieces only attended to aesthetic demands because the performances were specifically designed to eliminate such crises (as with the grey tape line around Abramović’s 83

Peggy Phelan, “Marina Abramović: Witnessing Shadows,” Theatre Journal 56 (2004), 575, my italics. 84 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Performance Art  – Experiencing Liminality,” in 7 Easy Pieces, by Marina Abramović (Milan: Charta, 2007), 33. 85 Ibid., 35.

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performance of Action Pants: Genital Panic, for instance).86 Jones, too, laments the “aestheticizing” of the work, objecting that “the power of the works she redoes initially came from the various ways in which they surprised, confused, pressured, or otherwise destabilized [viewers]. All such potential to provoke a productive feeling of unease in viewers is, of course, lost in reenactments such as those of Seven Easy Pieces.”87 For both Fischer-Lichte and Jones, the power of early performance art arose from the ways in which it confronted its spectators with unexpected situations that challenged their habitual responses. As we have seen in previous chapters, how audiences responded to such crises (whether they allowed the performance to continue, as with Burden’s Shoot, or intervened to protect the performer, as in Abramović’s Rhythm 0) are crucial parts of these performances and the stories told about them. These stories are also another key form of performance documentation. In addition to artists’ statements, performance scores, photographs, and films, one of the primary ways in which performances circulate is through accounts by audience members, critics, scholars, and artists of how the events played out. To encounter Seven Easy Pieces was thus also to endure these narratives of past audiences’ actions, with their sense of risk and responsibility, but also their uncertainty and incompleteness. In an interview with Abramović when Seven Easy Pieces was still in its planning stages, Adrian Heathfield asked if knowledge about how audiences acted in the past would “act like a score” for audience members of Seven Easy Pieces, and what that would mean for what were once spontaneous actions. Abramović responded that her performances would be “a new version,” and therefore she didn’t know what would happen.88 Yet the notion that the stories of past audience members’ actions might become a score for subsequent audiences is worth considering. How could an audience engage with such “scores”? It seemed clear that the audience wanted to be a part of this work. The man who tried to mount the stage during Abramović’s performance of Action Pants: Genital Panic, for instance, felt that he had been invited: “There are two chairs on the stage, so she is inviting someone to join her,” he explained to the guards who apprehended him.89 Other attempts to participate were more successful. For example, during Abramović’s performance of The Conditioning, an audience member provided a knife 86

Ibid., 44. Jones, “The Artist Is Present,” 40. 88 Marina Abramović in conversation with Adrian Heathfield, “Elevating the Public,” in Live: Art and Performance, ed. Adrian Heathfield (New York: Routledge, 2004), 151. 89 Personal conversation with the head guard on the day. 87

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to Abramović after her own broke while digging out the spent candles. Further attempts included leaving small gifts on the stage, performing Bruce Nauman’s instructions against the walls of the museum in concert with Abramović, and calling out to Abramović during several of the performances. Largely an informed audience who were familiar with the pieces being performed and with the challenges that they had once presented, the spectators knew that audience interaction was central to what some of these performances were. It seemed to me that, in experiencing Abramović’s “reenactments,” the audience did exhibit a desire to reenact the kinds of audience participation associated with this work. Did such audience “reenactment” transform what were once spontaneous and ethical responses into something conventionalized and aesthetic? Can we so easily distinguish between ethical and aesthetic demands? The piece that opened itself most to audience participation (though not without difficulty, as we will see) was Abramović’s performance of Vito Acconci’s Seedbed. In Acconci’s performance, the artist masturbated under a constructed ramp in the Sonnabend Gallery in New York for eight hours a day (making this the only one of the six pieces recreated by Abramović which had originally lasted longer than her reperformance). As visitors to the gallery walked about on the ramp, Acconci spoke about his fantasies into a microphone and broadcast them into the space via a speaker in the corner of the room. Responding directly to the viewers’ movements, Acconci implicated them in his sexual act. As art critic David Bourden recounts: “I not only listened but also stomped across the ramp a few times, which produced whimpering pleas of: ‘Oh step on me, step on me harder.’”90 Audience members’ actions were therefore a fundamental part of Acconci’s piece. Yet, despite this formal inclusion of the audience in the work, the Guggenheim struggled to accommodate audience participation during Abramović’s performance. When, early in the evening, one of Abramović’s audience members attempted to interact with her by lying down and pounding on the platform under which Abramović was hidden, he was quickly escorted from the building. Likewise, in the early hours of the performance, audience members who attempted to sit down on the platform to listen to Abramović’s monologue were instructed by the guards to stand up91 – even though one of the principal photographs of Seedbed depicts a woman sitting near the speaker, presumably listening 90

David Bourdon, “An Eccentric Body of Art,” in The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984), 192. 91 The speaker at the beginning of the performance was small and quiet, requiring audience members to be very close to it in order to hear anything. After about an hour, the speaker was replaced with

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to Acconci, indicating both that sitting on the platform was a verifiable mode of participation in Acconci’s performance and that the seated audience member is a significant element in the visual aesthetics of this work. In response to the restrictions placed upon them, the audience actively rebelled: individuals argued with the guards, and people continued to sit on the platform. By the end of evening, the audience had won the right to sit and lie on the stage, and many pounded in response to Abramović, who increasingly spoke directly to the people above her as she built toward her orgasms (Figure 4.2). How can we understand this insistent action on the part of the audience? In some ways, their actions were a reenactment of the types of actions described by Bourden and depicted in photographs of Acconci’s piece. At the same time, they were also charged actions in the present, since, in their desire to contribute to the making of Seedbed (both into the work they already imagined it to be and into something that demanded their response in the present), the audience acted in opposition to the Guggenheim’s (aesthetic and ethical) expectations in order to insist upon fulfilling another set of (aesthetic and ethical) principles. In doing so, the audience helped to transform this piece. The group dynamic that emerged as the audience collectively persisted in engaging with the performance contrasted with the most circulated photographs of Acconci’s Seedbed, which present images of a solitary woman in the gallery space. These images make the artist/spectator interaction produced by Seedbed appear both dyadic and heterosexual, things that Bourden’s description  – which notes that “people actually seemed to be listening,” and which gleefully reports his own active engagement with the piece – reminds us are not the whole truth of how the piece played out.92 The audience response to Abramović’s performance thus had the quality of being both a ritualized reenactment of accounts of previous spectators’ acts and an intervention in its own right, which both challenged the museum’s instincts (to evict anyone who appeared to be causing trouble) and opened Seedbed up to further reflection on its audience dynamics – dynamics in which questions about gender and sexuality were newly highlighted by a woman performing, and in which the presence of a large group disrupted the imagined “couple” of the artist/spectator. Of course, Seedbed did not present the same ethical challenge as that described by Fischer-Lichte; any danger posed by the performance would seem to have been directed outwards to the unsuspecting viewer who may one that amplified the sound throughout the museum, making it possible for spectators to hear Abramović while observing from the upper levels of the museum. 92 Bourdon, “An Eccentric Body of Art,” 192, my italics.

Figure 4.2.

Photo: Attilio Maranzano. © Marina Abramović, Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives, DACS 2017.

Marina Abramović, Seven Easy Pieces, performing Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972). Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, 2005

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not have wanted to be a part of Acconci’s (or Abramović’s) sexual act rather than toward the artist. In contrast, Abramović’s final reenactment was of a piece in which the original audience was very much faced with the kind of dilemma that Fischer-Lichte describes (indeed, this piece is one of FischerLichte’s primary examples). First performed on November 14, 1975 (thirty years to the day prior to her Guggenheim performance), Abramović’s own Lips of Thomas involved the ritualistic eating of honey and drinking of wine, followed by a series of actions including cutting a five-pointed star into her abdomen with a razor blade, whipping herself “until [she] no longer [felt] any pain,” and finally, lying on a crucifix made of blocks of ice with a heat lamp suspended above her so that the ice froze her body while the heat kept the wound on her stomach open and bleeding.93 After thirty minutes on the ice, Abramović’s first audience ended the piece by removing the blocks of ice from underneath her. How to redo such a performance in which the audience’s ethical actions played such a pivotal part in the aesthetics of the piece? If Abramović’s “reenactments” were intended to restage the original works as they happened, one could imagine performers being planted in the audience to ensure the now legendary audience response to the work. Surely, this would fix what was originally a spontaneous, ethical reaction. Abramović, however, made a different choice. Instead of reperforming the piece as she had done it the first time, she took the main components of the piece and broke them down into smaller parts through which she cycled repeatedly (and in varying order) over the course of the seven hours: rather than eating a kilo of honey and drinking a liter of wine all at once, Abramović ate and drank just a bit at a time; rather than whipping her back until she could no longer feel any pain, she flogged herself for five or six minutes at a time; rather than cutting the star all at once, she cut (and later recut) one line at a time; and so on. She also introduced a new component to the sequence, during which she stepped into a pair of heavy boots and waved a white cloth blotted with her blood while the Russian song “Slavic Souls” played. These changes made it possible for Abramović to sustain her actions over a much longer duration than she had in 1975. Despite the careful, controlled nature of Abramović’s performance, the sight of blood and the ritualized acts of cutting pushed beyond the comfort zones of some audience members: a number of people cried, several fainted, and many left the museum in response to Lips of Thomas. One woman cried out as Abramović raised a razor blade to her stomach for the third time during the performance, “You don’t have to do it again. Stop!” Was this woman 93

Marina Abramović, Artist Body (Milan: Charta, 1998), 98.

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responding to the present moment on its own terms? Or was she familiar with the original performance and responding to the ethical demand that that performance made on its audience? If she was familiar with the previous performance, was her response aesthetic or ethical? Certainly, we cannot decide the answer to this question. “You don’t have to do it again,” may have been a response to the repetition of cutting that evening, but it could also have been a response to the project as a whole: “You don’t have to do it again,” might have meant, “You do not need to re-inflict the injuries to which you subjected yourself thirty years ago.” If we take the statement this way, it becomes clear that the reperformance of Lips of Thomas caused its spectators to endure a crisis that was both ethical and aesthetic. In the end, the audience did find a way to affect this version of Lips of Thomas. At five minutes before midnight, the guards began, as they did every night, to usher out the audience. As she had on the previous nights, Abramović carried on performing as the audience started to leave so that, as with the previous nights, we would not see the performance end. This is a technique that Abramović has used often in an effort to “allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works.”94 By not allowing spectators to see the performances end, she aimed to create the impression of a stable object that would remain after the audience had gone. But something unexpected happened on this night. The audience refused to leave. Instead, everyone began to applaud loudly, to cheer and shout. The stunned guards, not sure what to do, stood dumbfounded facing the standing spectators as the applause continued for ten minutes.95 Finally, the audience got what it desired. Visibly moved, Abramović ended her performance, stopping the metronome that had beat time for the entire seven hours and bowing her head in a gesture of surrender. Significantly, it was not by breaking with aesthetic convention but by calling upon the aesthetic conventions of performance that the audience managed to intervene. Specifically, they called upon that convention that marks and celebrates the breaking of autonomy, the moment when the illusion of a coherent, “timeless” object is ruptured. In other words, the audience affected the story of this performance by calling upon that moment when, in the most traditional forms of Western theatre, the fourth wall is 94

Museum of Modern Art, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is present (March 14–May 31, 2010), 2010. www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitIons/965. See also my discussion of this sense of “timelessness” in Lara Shalson, “On Duration and Multiplicity,” Performance Research: A Journal of Performing Arts 17.5 (2012), 98–106. 95 This is the length of time reported by Roberta Smith in the New York Times (Roberta Smith, “Turning Back the Clock to the Days of Crotchless Pants and a Deceased Rabbit,” New York Times, November 17, 2005, www.nytimes.com. I myself would be unable to give an estimate of the time; it was a moving and sustained ovation.

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broken, the actors present themselves to the audience, the audience communicates back, and everyone acknowledges the work that has taken place and the fact that all have been there together in order to make it happen.

After Performance So, is there life after performance? Certainly. But it is likely to be a life with documents. Not because documents are the only thing left after live art, but because documents  – plans, scripts, scores, instructions, photographs, films, descriptions – have so often been part of performance art from the beginning. To this extent, documents and performance endure together in an ongoing relationship in which performance art does not simply depend upon documentation for its longevity, but documents also depend upon performance to endure. In that endurance, both documents and performance continue being subject to change. Rather than static remains set apart from the vagaries of time, preserving fragments of the past intact and fixing them so that they remain the same, documents too are contingent, open to future embodied encounters where they will be experienced and responded to differently. In that ongoing engagement, performances continue to evolve. Whatever Abramović’s aims were  – whether she was motivated by a desire to “fix” the pieces she performed (both to correct misunderstandings from the past and to preserve a single version for posterity) or not – in responding bodily to their documents for an extended duration, she made it possible to see and experience these pieces differently. In the process, and despite attempts to limit audience participation, the performances opened back up to improvisations (Abramović’s own and those of the audience) and to unexpected outcomes. Finally, Seven Easy Pieces confirmed that endurance requires bodily exertion over time. As the audience applauded at the end of Lips of Thomas, I had the sense that we clapped not to celebrate Abramović’s virtuosity or her “creative genius”; we applauded the effort made and the time put in – hers and ours. We applauded, in other words, acts of endurance in the present that enabled some parts of the past to keep going on. Which pasts we want to keep going on and whose versions of those pasts we attend to are questions we must continue to ask. But one thing is clear: it will be a bodily commitment, and a commitment of time, that allows any performance to endure.

Epilogue

This book was first inspired by performance art works and protests that I had only experienced as documentation, but whose effects seemed to me still to reverberate. As I have explored performances of endurance from the past and reflected on their continuing endurance, their history has also carried on. Interest in the artists considered here surged over the course of my research. Tehching Hsieh went from being a relatively obscure performance artist, admired by those who knew his work but excluded from many key texts on performance art (including, for instance, RoseLee Goldberg’s defining survey Performance: Live Art Since 1960 [1998]), to having his first major monograph and exhibitions of his One Year Performances in major museums, including the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and others internationally. The first large-scale exhibition of two of his One Year Performances, curated by Adrian Heathfield, was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Major retrospectives of the work of Marina Abramović, Chris Burden, and Yoko Ono have also been mounted in the second decade of the twenty-first century (at MoMA in 2010, the New Museum in New York in 2013, and MoMA in 2015, respectively). And, in the years since Seven Easy Pieces, various other reenactments of pieces by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, VALIE EXPORT, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys, Abramović, and others have been performed.1 Meanwhile, a wide 1

For example: Naama Tsabar organized a performance of Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974) at ThierryGoldberg gallery in New York in 2012; the Reformance: Recycled Performance Festival in Madrid in 2011 included “reinterpretations” of Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) by Sven Goyvaerts and EXPORT’s Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit  (From the Portfolio of Doggedness, 1968) by Super Nase & Co; in Reflect Soft Matte Discourse (2011), Malin Arnell reenacted Gina Pane’s Discours mou et mat  (1975); in Explanation Attempt (2010), Whitney Lynn reenacted Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), replacing the dead hare with a live rabbit; and Abramović’s early work (including her work with Ulay) has been reperformed multiple times, often in versions “authorized” by Abramović, such as the reperformances that were part of the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s retrospective on Abramović’s work, The Artist Is Present (2010).

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range of artists – some of whom identify with the term “endurance” and others of whom do not – have continued to take up practices of endurance in unique ways. Artists as distinct as Cassils, Amanda Coogan, Regina José Galindo, Martin O’Brien, Preach R Sun, and Amber Hawk Swanson are just a few of the people not named elsewhere in these pages who have been making significant work employing structures of endurance in the past decade. Amidst all of this, some of the most striking acts of endurance in recent years have been undertaken in the name of political protest. Extending the practice of the sit-in, numerous long-term acts of inhabitation have taken prominent place on the political landscape in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The year 2011 was a watershed for what are often referred to as “protest camps,” a mode of political action that can be traced to the 1960s civil rights movement.2 From the eighteen-day occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, to the month-long “acampada” in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, to the months-long occupations of New York’s Zuccotti Park and the grounds outside London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, among many others, 2011 saw thousands of people make long-term bodily commitments to protest against unjust governmental and economic systems. In the years since, many more protest camps have taken place, including camps established in 2012 by asylum seekers and refugees in Austria and Germany to contest the living conditions forced upon them and to demand changes to asylum law; the Hong Kong tent protests of 2014, which formed to fight for freer elections; various camp protests against homelessness in US and UK cities; a number of antifracking camps in both countries; and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest camps in North Dakota, which lasted for ten months until the protestors were forcibly evicted in February 2017. While discrete in their aims, these protests are linked by their use of a shared form of endurance. All are built upon a basic premise: the inhabitation of a particular site (usually a practically and/or symbolically significant site) for an indefinite duration. And, like all performances of endurance, they involve the embodied carrying out of that plan in the face of unknown outcomes. Furthermore, in taking on these actions, the protestors place themselves 2

In their book Protest Camps, Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy note that while actions resembling protest camps occurred in the seventeenth century and before, “protest camps emerged in the late 1960s as a distinct political practice, often deployed intentionally” (1). Specifically, they refer to the Resurrection City protest camp in Washington D.C. spearheaded by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1968. They also mark 2011 as a significant turning point, asserting that “in 2011 protest camps became a global phenomenon” (1). See Feigenbaum et al, Protest Camps (London and New York: Zed Books, 2013).

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in relation to a range of people and power structures: from the strangers with whom they set up and maintain the camps, to the disparate groups who might support or oppose them, to state forces such as the military and police who may ultimately evict them. While embodied attendance is key to these protests, they also incorporate various forms of news and social media to extend their actions beyond the immediate site of the camp, and to ensure that their actions do not disappear but continue to inspire further action. Like sit-ins, these actions put bodies in the way – especially those bodies that prevailing systems neglect. As a result, and as we have seen before, the protestors invariably endure aggressions meted out against them, from verbal denunciations to violent efforts to remove them. (In November 2016, as I was writing this epilogue, the Dakota Access Pipeline protestors were attacked with dogs, rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons in subfreezing temperatures.) In their persistence, they confront with their obdurate bodies the objectification that aims to mark certain bodies as less equal or as less deserving of support, and they refuse the tactics of dispersal that aim to scatter and remove these bodies from view. At the same time, the force of the protests does not only come from such scenes of confrontation. It also comes from the more mundane, sustained acts of living that the protest camps entail. For the protestors do not just occupy space, they inhabit it. They pitch tents and sleep, they cook food and eat, they set up toilets and use them. Such acts not only enable the protestors to carry on; they are also central to the very demands of these protests insofar as such daily, continuous acts of inhabitation expose the needs that mark every body as relational and raise fundamental questions about the systems that differentially support and abandon human lives. The passive act of sleeping is thus crucial to these actions. If one had any doubt about this, one might recall that the right wing media in the UK attempted to undermine the Occupy London protest by reporting that the protestors were not in fact sleeping on site.3 The implications of the claim were 3

Less than ten days into the occupation, conservative newspapers including The Telegraph and the Daily Mail published articles claiming that thermal imaging cameras had shown that 90% of the tents at St Paul’s were empty at night. See for example Richard Alleyne, “Only one in 10 St Paul’s protestors stay overnight,” The Telegraph, 24 October 2011, www.telegraph.co.uk. These claims were disputed by scientists and by the protestors on the basis that the cameras used by the media would not in fact have been able to “see” inside the tents. See for example Patrick Kingsley, “Occupy London empty tent claims based on ‘rubbish science,’” 26 October 2011,  www.theguardian .com/uk.

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clear: these were not really acts of living; the camp was just for show. That the media sought to discredit the protest by suggesting that the tents were purely symbolic – not actual shelters for actually sleeping people – should alert us to how profound an act sleeping in public is. But why should this be? Could it be that the passive state of sleep – a bodily phenomenon necessary to everyone’s survival, and one over which we have little control – exposes a shared vulnerability and dependency? Importantly, while acknowledging bodily vulnerability, these acts of inhabitation also enact the structures of relation that they fight for. In other words, they both make evident and respond to fundamental needs: not only for shelter, food, and toilets, but also for the opportunity to learn, to have a voice, and to participate in creating the conditions of one’s own life. Therefore, in addition to establishing infrastructures for sleeping, cooking, and managing waste, they develop procedures for communication and decision-making, and they give space and time to education and entertainment. At their best, they are inclusive, even when inclusion means being in relation to strangers one did not choose, with all of the ambivalence that that can produce. (I am thinking here, for example, of the much-debated inclusion of homeless people in the Occupy London camp, which some felt detracted energy from the aims of the protest, and which others felt was essential to them.4) In sustaining such relations, these acts are also ethical, for they recognize, as Judith Butler (via Emmanuel Levinas) asserts, that “we are bound to those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen.”5 The protest camp is thus a practice of living that is also a striving to build the conditions necessary to sustain all lives. And, while it would be right to say that the protestors are brave in this endeavor, we could also say that, in their demand upon governments for “forms of enduring support,”6 they act not as heroic or triumphant individuals, but as people who recognize that no one endures alone. At a moment when world-changing political moves are being made on the basis of dividing an “us” from so many alleged “thems,” such a recognition of human interdependency seems ever more important. In this context, acts of endurance in art and protest could provide opportunities 4

For one discussion of this tension, see Kieron Monks, “Occupy must embrace the homeless and marginalized, not shun them,” The Guardian, Opinion, 7 February 2012, www.theguardian.com. 5 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 107. 6 Ibid., 137.

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to reside with and respond differently to a bodily vulnerability and shared dependency that too easily arouse aggression. This is no small thing. As Butler writes, “we have not yet been able to think about the unmanageability of dependency at the level of politics – to what fear, panic, repulsion, violence, and domination it can lead.”7 Perhaps, through the art of endurance – an art that may also be realized in protest – we might find the persistence and the patience required to build a world that everyone can endure.

7

Ibid., 120.

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Index

abjection, 100 Abramović, Marina, 2, 80n13, 183 comments on own work. See titles of pieces House with the Ocean View, 30, 30n90, 175 Rhythm series, 68–69 (see also Rhythm 0) See also Lips of Thomas; Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present (exhibition); Rhythm 0; Seven Easy Pieces Abramović, Marina, and Ulay, 2, 4, 82, 151, 183n1 The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk, 5n13, 31 Nightsea Crossing, 5n13 Acconci, Vito, 41, 44, 78, 82, 183. Following Piece, 183n1 Step Piece, 11 See also Seedbed Action Pants: Genital Panic (VALIE EXPORT/ Marina Abramović), 147, 172–174 Abramović’s performance, 172, 173–174, 175–176 audience involvement, 173–174, 176 EXPORT’s performance: alleged events, 172 doubt/uncertainty surrounding, 173, 174 photographs of EXPORT, 164, 172 activism. See protest Ader, Bas Jan, 41 Agamben, Giorgio, 130–131 agency, 13, 101–102 denial of, 88 See also authority; authorship aggression toward objecthood, 23–24, 55–57, 61, 68 toward performers, 45–46, 49–50, 52, 62–65 toward protestors, 99–103, 185 toward racialized others, 99–103 aging, 122, 126–127 Alexander, Elizabeth, 102n81 Aliaga, Juan Vincente, 167n66 alienation, 20–22 and identification, 24–25, 93, 105–106 and proximity/complicity, 75–76

ambivalence, 23–27 Ames, Jessie Daniel, 89n42 Amini, Abbas, 5n13 Anderson, Patrick, 13–14, 23 Antin, Eleanor, 14, 42 Arnell, Malin, 183n1 art, relationship with life, 38, 109–145. See also life asylum seekers/refugees, protests by, 28, 79, 184 Athey, Ron, 5n13 Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle, 27 Attansio, Robert, 133n90 audience active vs. passive, 72 aggression/hostility, 23–24, 45–46, 49–50, 62–65 anxiety/discomfort, 75–76, 180–181 applause (prolonged), 181–182 complicity, 72 demands for active role, 178 ethical dilemma, 175–176 exclusion, 174–175 gendered behaviour, 49–50 incorporation, 53–58, 75–76 influence of earlier behaviors on later audience, 176–177, 180–181 intervention/non-intervention, 34, 175–177, 180–182 and liveness, 31–32 modes of interpretation, 37, 48–50, 64–66 as part of performance, 177–178 participation, 44–46, 54, 175–182 and reenactment, 176–177, 180–181 responsibility, 65–66, 67–68, 70, 74–75 sense of community, 151–152 unplanned responses, 67, 181–182 voyeurism. See voyeurism Auslander, Philip, 33–34, 54, 150, 153n23 authority, and gender, 52–53 authorship, 70, 88–89 distinguished from control, 89 autobiography. See under life

199

200

Index

“bare life,” 130 Barthes, Roland, 164–166, 165n61, 170 Bataille, Georges, 131 Bedford, Christopher, 33n98 Benglis, Lynda, 42 Benjamin, Walter, 166, 174 Bergner, Gwen, 93 Bergson, Henri, 119–121, 119n37, 124 Bernsteins, 151 Beuys, Joseph, 183. See also How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare Bhabha, Homi, 97–98 Bilal, Wafaa, Domestic Tension, 16n46 biopolitics, 18, 31, 117 The Birth of a Nation, 89n42 Blackwell, Fred, 99, 101 Blair, Ezell Jr., 80, 83–84, 88, 90 Blessing, Jennifer, 167n66 Blocker, Jane, 15n42, 78, 109, 112 bodily ego, 18, 24–25 and race/racism, 93, 95–96, 97, 105 body/ies, 16–28 audience interaction with, 44–46 “fragmented,” 25, 95–96 “in the way,” 91, 185 as objects, 40–77 and gender, 42–44 unease relating to, 41–43 See also embodiment; objecthood body art critical appraisals, 40 usage of term, 4n10, 19–20 See also body/ies: as objects Body Pressure (Bruce Nauman/Marina Abramović), 147, 157–163, 177 Abramović’s performance, 158–159, 162–163 circulation of instruction papers, 161–162, 162n56 later performances, 183n1 original format, 157–158, 158n45 Bongartz, Roy, 149–150 Bourden, David, 177, 178 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 12, 13 Brecht, George, 158 Piano Piece, 158 Brentano, Robyn, 4, 79n5, 109 Brisley, Stuart, 151 And for today . . . nothing, 14n40 Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think (exhibition), 161 Bryan-Wilson, Julia, 48–49 Burden, Barbara, 9 Burden, Chris, 2, 4, 13–14, 41, 148–149, 149, 183 Trans-Fixed, 153–154 See also Shoot

Bürger, Peter, 143–144 Burnham, Linda Frye, 23n67, 148–149 Burton, Johanna, 155 Butler, Judith, 18, 26, 27, 72, 117, 186–187 Cage, John, 110 4′33″, 159–160 “Cage Piece.” See One Year Performance 1978-1979 Capitol Crawl, 27–28 Carlson, Marvin, 6–7n18 Carr, Cynthia, 9 Cassils, 184 Cesare, T. Nikki, 153, 155 Chafe, William H., 83n19 civil rights movement, 28, 82–83, 103. See also lunch counter sit-ins class, 103–106 Colo, Papo, 32 colonialism, 93, 95–97, 105–106. See also racism Concannon, Kevin, 46n20, 52 conceptual art, 10–12, 34 The Conditioning, First Action of Autoportrait(s) (Gina Pane/Marina Abramović), 147, 166–180 Abramović’s performance, 168–170, 172 audience responses, 170, 176–177 Pane’s performance, 167 photographs of, 164, 167, 170 renewal of setting/pose, 168–169 as wake for Pane, 168 consequentiality, 35 contingency of documents, 155–156, 182 of performance, 162–163 of the subject, 19–20 and time, 157 Coogan, Amanda, 184 Crow, Thomas, 46 Cunningham, Merce, 110 Cut Piece (Yoko Ono), 27, 36, 36n106, 38, 44–53, 50n43, 51n47, 55–56, 62–68 compared with political protest, 81–82, 89, 91 compared with Rhythm 0. See Rhythm 0 ending, 64–65n96 contextual readings, 48 feminist interpretations, 46–47, 52–53 filmed performance, 62–68, 71 gendered/aggressive audience responses, 64–65, 66, 67 indeterminacy, 50–51 inspiration, 47–48 minimalism, 57–58 and objecthood, 61–68, 76–77

Index Ono’s comments on, 47–48, 51, 55, 66 performances by Ono (listed), 45n17 performances by others, 51n48, 52–53, 77 responsibility of audience, 65–66, 67–68 responsibility of performer, 66–67 staging, 71–72 still photos of, 47n27 unplanned audience responses, 67 and voyeurism, 46–47, 48, 50 Dakota Access Pipeline protests, 184–185 dependency, 18–19, 25–26 interdependency, 22, 186–187 and relationality, 134–135 disability, 27–28 “disappearance” (of performance), 32, 34, 150, 157, 175 discomfort of audience, 75–76, 180–181 with documentation, 148–151 with duration, 58, 66–67, 120 with objecthood, 20–21, 23n65, 66–67 documents/documentation, 146–182 as constituting performance, 150 and contingency, 155–156, 182 discomforts of, 148–151 as evidence, 148–149, 153–154 as fixed/frozen, 155 formats for presenting, 31–32, 31n92 impact of digital technology, 149n9 openness to audience intervention, 174–175, 182 as opposed to performance, 149–150 as part of performance, 33, 147f, 152–153, 182 potential for commodification, 149–150, 152n21, 161–162 as prompts for performance, 160, 162 re-documentation, 154–155 and reenactment, 33, 146, 151–157 relationship to performance, 5, 32–35, 149–151, 156, 157–182 as supplanting performance, 33–34 types of, 157 See also photographs Doris, David T., 160–161 Doyle, Jennifer, 24n72, 57 “drama” metaphor, 38, 86–91, 106 Duchamp, Marcel, 142–144 Fountain, 143–144 Dunlap, Bruce, 9–10, 16 duration, 5, 28–35, 58–62, 66–67, 72–73, 119–121 and body art, 29 discomforts of, 58, 66–67, 120

201

and embodiment, 29, 119–121 and eventhood, 29–30 and life, 31 and objecthood, 58–62, 66–67 See also time ego. See bodily ego Elwes, Catherine, 14 Menstruation II, 14n40 embodiment, 18–19 Endurance (exhibition), 32 endurance, form of, 8–16 and agency, 13 and conceptual art, 10–12 and consequentiality, 35 and documentation, 33–34 and duration, 5, 28–35 and gender, 14–15 and heroism, 13–15 and indeterminacy, 9–10, 12 and liveness, 31–33 and living, 28–29 and mastery, 15–16 and pain, 4–7 and plans, 9–12, 31 as relational, 12–13 endurance art, usage of term, 2–4 English, Darby, 107n92 ephemerality, 32–33. See also “disappearance” ethics, 16–18, 25–27 event scores. See scores EXPORT, VALIE, 4, 14, 183 Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit, 183n1 TAPP und TASTKINO, 27 See also Action Pants: Genital Panic Fanon, Frantz, 95, 98n75, 105–106, 106n90 February One (documentary), 83n19 Feigenbaum, Anna, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy, Protest Camps, 184n2 feminism, 42–44 analyses of performance pieces, 46–47, 52, 136 Festa, Angelika, Untitled Dance (with fish and others), 58–61 Fischer, Dorothee, 158n45 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 6–7n18, 175–176, 178–180 Flanagan, Bob, Visiting Hours, 27 Fleetwood, Nicole R., 95n58 Fluxus, 158–159, 160–161 Forte, Jeanie, 43 Foster, Hal, 53, 53n54, 112 Foster, Susan Leigh, 90, 91–92 Foucault, Michel, 31 Franko B, 80n13

202

Index

Freud, Sigmund, 18, 75 Fried, Michael, 53–57, 54n61, 58, 60, 61, 66, 72, 75, 76, 81 Fuss, Diana, 96–97 Galindo, Regina José, 184 Gandhi, Mohandas K. (Mahatma), 81 gaze, (non)reciprocal, 60, 76, 173–174 gender, 14–15, 20 masculinity, 14, 15–16 and performance analysis, 14–15 Gillibrand, Kirsten, 2 Goldberg, RoseLee, 3, 4–5, 15n43, 183 Gonzalez Rice, Karen, 5, 5n16, 6–7n18 Goyvaerts, Sven, 183n1 Grant, Catherine, 148 Greensboro. See lunch counter sit-ins Griffith, D. W., 89n42 Happenings, 54, 110 Harding, James, 48, 50n43 “hardship,” use of term, 3, 35 Harris, Clarence, 83–84 Hassman, Peter, 172 Heathfield, Adrian, 5–6, 29, 30, 37, 112, 113, 119–120, 125, 129, 139, 142n123, 143, 144–145, 176, 183 Heddon, Deirdre, 14, 14n40, 80, 109 Henderson, Clarence, 84, 106 Hendricks, Jon, 51n48, 52–53 heroism, 13–15 Hershman-Leeson, Lynn, 51n48 Higgins, Dick, 161n54 Higgins, Hannah, 47 homelessness, 131–133, 186 homo sacer, 131 How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (Joseph Beuys/Marina Abramović), 147, 170–172 Abramović’s performance, 171–172 Beuys/Abramović’s performances compared, 171n74 later performances, 183n1 photographs of Beuys’ performance, 164, 170–171 Hsieh, Tehching, oeuvre, 1978–1999, 2, 30, 111–145 ability to watch performances, 111, 118 (lack of ) autobiographical content, 113–114 breaking of rules, 140 continuity/development, 117 contradictoriness, 116 endurance structure, 36, 113, 116–117 financial support, 132n85 hair growth, significance of, 29, 113, 127 Hsieh’s comments on, 114–115, 139n107, 144–145

plans/statements, 31, 113, 138–139 proof of fulfilment of conditions, 113 relationship of art and life, 38, 111–117, 140–145 relationship to Hsieh’s undocumented immigrant status, 114–115, 143 retrospectives, 183 See also One Year Performances; Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 icons, photographs as. See photographs ideality, 24 contest over, 93–94, 98, 101, 103 identification and alienation, 24–25, 26 and class, 104–105 and race, 93–94, 105–106 See also mirror stage Iles, Chrissie, 50, 56 Ince, Kate, 23–24 indeterminacy, 12, 50–51, 89–90 Ingberman, Jeannette, 22–23 instruction pieces. See Body Pressure; scores intentionality, 6, 10 ability to perform beyond, 53, 68 interobjectivity, 22–23n65 intersubjectivity, 19–20, 57–58 Jameson, Fredric, 93 “Jim Crow” laws. See United States: racial legislation Johnson, Dominic, 6–7n18 Johnston, Jill, 113n19, 136, 142, 143 Jones, Amelia, 6–7n18, 80n13, 151 on body art, 4n10, 8n21, 15n42, 19–20, 43, 60, 78–79, 107 critique of Fried, 54n61, 57 on Seven Easy Pieces, 37, 147n3, 148n4, 152n21, 155, 155n30, 155n36, 176 Joy, Jenn, 153, 155 Judd, Donald, 57n76 Kaprow, Allan, 54, 110 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 151 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 184n2 Kingsley, Patrick, 185n3 Kipper Kids, 151 Klein, Jennie, 3, 5 Klophaus, Ute, 170 Kotz, Liz, 160 Kounellis, Jannis, 151 Kowal, Rebecca, 87, 88–89, 89n41, 90 Kozloff, Max, 40, 41–42 Krayanak, Janet, 158n45 Kristeva, Julia, 100 Ku Klux Klan, 87–88, 106

Index Kuong, Cheng Wei, 118, 122 Kusama, Yayoi, Anti-War Naked Happening, 79 LaBelle, Brandon, 160 labor, conditions of, 124–126 Lacan, Jacques, 24–25, 56–57, 93, 94, 95, 98 Langenbach, Ray, 115 Le Va, Barry,Velocity Piece, 41, 44 Lebeer, Irmeline, 158 Lennon, John, 7 Lepecki, André, 151 Levinas, Emmanuel, 8, 26, 72, 186 LeWitt, Sol, 12 life, 109–145 and autobiography, 113–114 as homogenous, 38, 117 as “opposite” of art, 112, 144 of performance, 32–34, 146–147 and time, 113–114, 116–117 and work, 124–126 See also art, relationship with life; living Lippard, Lucy, 42n10, 44 Lips of Thomas (Marina Abramović), 6–7n18, 147, 180–182, 181n95 1975/2005 performances compared, 178, 180 audience responses, 180–182 literalism, 60–61, 75–76 critiques of, 53–57, 58, 75 discomforts of, 53–57, 58–61 and proximity/distance, 56 Little, Ken, 51n48 liveness, 31–33 living, 28–35, 185–186 as art, 141–145 as enduring, 113 See also aging; life Living Theatre, 110 Luna, James Artifact Piece, 27 lunch counter sit-ins, 28, 36, 38, 80–82, 83–92, 98–108 and class, 103–106 and “drama” metaphor, 86–91, 106 and objecthood, 98–103 protestors’ calmness, 101–103 (see also passive resistance) public dialogue about, 104–105 racial diversity, 85, 91, 100–101, 102–103 reasons for impact, 86–92, 105–106 social/legislative context, 94–95 training for, 91–92 uncertainty of outcome, 89–90 unfilled seats, 102 violent responses to, 99–103

203

Lutjeans, Alfred, 9 lynchings, 87–88 Lynn, Whitney, 183n1 Ma, Ming-Yuen S., 51n48 MacDonald, Claire, 6–7n18 Maciunas, George, 158 MacRitchie, Lynn, 72 Mangolte, Babette, 152, 170 Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present (exhibition), 151, 183n1 Marioni, Tom, 134 Marks, Kathy, 141n118 Marx, Karl, 125–126 masculinity. See gender “masochism,” use of term, 3–4 Masson, Françoise, 152n22, 167 mastery, 15–16 Maude-Roxby, Alice, 167 Maysles, David/Albert, 62, 67, 71, 74 McCain, Franklin, 81, 83–84, 106 McEvilley, Thomas, 3, 6–7n18, 140n114 McLean, Bruce, 151 McNeil, Joseph, 81, 83–84, 106 Merlau-Ponty, Maurice, 58n77 minimalism, 53–58 critique of, 53–57, 61 mirror stage, 24–25, 56–57, 93–94, 95, 98–99 Montano, Linda, 28, 69, 111, 114, 134–138, 134n92, 140, 141n119 7 Years of Living Art + 7 Years of Living Art = 14 Years of Living Art, 31, 134 comments on “Rope Piece,” 136 Handcuff, 134 See also One Year Performance 1983–1984 Moody, Anne, 99–101, 102n82 Moorman, Charlotte, 51n48 Morris, Robert, 57 Untitled (L-beams), 53 Moten, Fred, 20–22, 76 Mulvey, Laura, 46–47 Nauman, Bruce, 2, 44, 177, 183. See also Body Pressure Nemser, Cindy, 40–41 New York City/State, public decency laws, 131–132, 131n80 Nitsch, Hermann, 151 Niven, Alaster, 64–65n96 “No Art Piece.” See One Year Performance 1985–1986 objecthood, 19–28, 40–77, 95–98 aggression toward, 23–24, 55–57, 61, 68 and alienation, 75–76 ambivalence toward, 20–23 coming to terms with, 76–77

204

Index

objecthood (cont.) discomfort of, 20–21, 23n65, 66–67 and duration, 58–62, 66–67 effort to “discover and project,” 61–62 and gender, 42 and interiority, 55–56 performance of, 52, 55–56, 58–62, 68, 92 and race, 95–98 and relationality, 19–22 resistance by/to, 22 and subjectivity, 97 objectification, 26, 41–42, 67 gendered, 42, 48–49, 167 racial, 93–98 O’Brien, Martin, 184 Occupy movement, 184–186 sleeping, controversy over, 185–186, 185n3 O’Dell, Kathy, 3–4, 5n13, 6n18, 9, 46–47, 78, 79–80, 82, 148n4 Oliver, Kelly, 26n83, 98n75 One Year Performances (Tehching Hsieh), 28–29, 32, 111, 117 “life pictures,” 114, 114n20 symbolism, 115–116 titles, 111n8 See also individual titles One Year Performance 1978–1979 (“Cage Piece”), 114, 115–116, 117–123, 127 dependence on assistance, 122 and duration, 119–121, 122–123 Hsieh’s comments on, 115, 119, 121, 123 marking of passage of time, 122–123, 140 photographs, 118 prison symbolism, 115–116, 121, 122–123 and solitary confinement, 121–122 One Year Performance 1980–1981 (“Time Clock Piece”), 123–127, 140 film documentation, 126–127 Hsieh’s comments on, 125 and time discipline, 124, 125, 126–127 and work time, 125–126 One Year Performance 1981–1982 (“Outdoor Piece”), 114, 127–133, 140 and bodily functions, 131–132 contrasted with earlier pieces, 127 documentation/maps, 127–129 engagement with homelessness, 131–133 and freedom, 129–130 Hsieh’s arrest/discharge, 133 Hsieh’s financial position, 131 legal/financial consequences, 132–133 relationship to Hsieh’s undocumented immigrant status, 130–131, 133 and time, 129

One Year Performance 1983–1984 (“Rope Piece,” with Linda Montano), 111, 114, 134–138, 140 commitment to the rules, 137–138 conflicts between performers, 137 documentation, 135–136, 137 Hsieh’s/Montano’s comments on, 134–135, 136 (“green card”) marriage symbolism, 135–136, 138 and relationality, 134–135 relationship to Hsieh’s undocumented immigrant status, 136 One Year Performance 1985–1986 (“No Art Piece”), 111, 114, 138–141, 144 conception of “ART,” 140–141 contrasted with earlier pieces, 117, 138 difficulty of adhering to conditions, 139–140 Ono, Yoko, 158, 183. See also Cut Piece Ono, Yoko, and John Lennon, Bed-Ins for Peace, 7, 7n19, 79 opacity (of subject/object), 22, 52, 60, 76, 116 Oppenheim, Dennis, 44 Rocked Circle – Fear, 41 “ordeal,” use of term, 3–4, 35 O’Reilly, Kira, Untitled Actions, 27 ORLAN, The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN, 23–24 “Outdoor Piece.” See One Year Performance 1981–1982 Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object (exhibition) 79n5 pain, 4–7 Pane, Gina, 4, 14, 82, 152n22, 153n23, 183 use of documentation, 152–153, 167 Autoportrait(s), 167–168 (see also The Conditioning) Discours mou et mat, 183n1 Parr, Mike, Close the Concentration Camps, 79 participation, 82. See also under audience passive aggression, 22 passive resistance, 28, 81–82, 86, 101–103 training for, 91–92 See also lunch counter sit-ins passivity, 18–19 performances of, 52 See also passive resistance Peaches (Merrill Nisker), 51n48 Pellegrini, Ann, 93 performance art relationship with protest. See protest resistance to formal definition, 7–8, 109 usage of term, 4n10 Phelan, Peggy, 32, 58–61, 149–150, 150n14, 175 photographs, 163–166 buying/selling, 149–150 as icons, 149 limitations, 148

Index orientation toward the future, 166, 174 as performance documents, 148–149 See also documents/documentation Piper, Adrian, Catalysis Series, 20–22 plans, 9–12 Pollock, Jackson, 110 Pope. L, William, Crawl performances, 107n92 prison(s), 115–116, 121–123 protest, 78–108 camps, 184–187, 184n2 and “drama” metaphor, 38, 86–91, 106 relationship with performance art, 38, 78–80, 106–108 See also asylum seekers; Capitol Crawl; lunch counter sit-ins; Occupy movement; Sulkowicz, Emma, Mattress Performance proximity. See under alienation; literalism racism dramatization of, 86–89 protests against. See civil rights movement; lunch counter sit-ins See also Ku Klux Klan; lynchings; United States: racial legislation; segregation readymade, 143–144 realness, 34–35 reenactment(s), 33, 146–147, 150–151, 182, 183, 183n1. See also Seven Easy Pieces refugees. See asylum seekers relational aesthetics, 12, 13 relationality, 12–13, 18, 19–22, 57–58, 134–135 remaining, 156–157 responsibility, 16–18, 25–26 question of, 65–66, 67–68, 70, 74–75 See also ethics Rhee, Jieun, 48, 48n35 Rhythm 0 (Marina Abramović), 36, 36n106, 38, 44–46, 49–53, 55–56, 68–77 Abramović’s comments on, 55–56, 70, 74 Abramović’s gaze, 74, 76 audience-performer interaction, 75–76, 176 compared with Cut Piece, 68, 70, 71–72, 74, 75–76, 76–77 compared with political protest, 81–82, 89, 91 compared with rest of Rhythm series, 69–70 duration, 72–73 ending, 74–75 indeterminacy, 50–51 minimalism, 57 and objecthood, 61–62, 76–77 staging, 71–72 temporality, 71–72 violent/polarized audience responses, 46n19, 49–50, 68, 71, 72–73, 74–75 Richards, Mary, 80n13 Richmond, David, 81, 83–84

205

rights discourse, 103 risk, as component of performance art, 4–5 “Rope Piece.” See One Year Performance 1983-1984 Rose, Barbara, 143 Rosenberg, Harold, 110 Rosenthal, Rachel, 39 Russia! (exhibition), 173n79 Salter, John, 99–100 Santone, Jessica, 155 Sayre, Henry M, 8n21, 54n61, 148n4 Schneemann, Carolee, 2, 15n42, 42, 151 Eye/Body, 43 Schneider, Rebecca, 15n42, 43, 52, 150–151, 150n17, 154, 156–157, 156n41, 157n44, 164–165, 165n61, 172n75 Scores (also event scores, instruction pieces), 158–161 for audience, 176 Seedbed (Vito Acconci/Marina Abramović), 147, 177–180, 177–178n91 Abramović’s performance, 177–178 Acconci’s performance, 177 photographs of Acconci’s performance, 177–178 role of audience, 177–180 segregation, 92–98. See also United States: racial legislation Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana, 106n91 Seven Easy Pieces (Marina Abramović), 37n111, 146–147, 151–182 Abramović’s comments on, 154n28, 171n74, 176 Abramović’s reasons for performing/documenting, 153–156, 182 audience responses, 151–152, 170, 173–174, 174–182, 182 centrality to reenactment discourse, 147n3 performance of photographs, 163–174 relationship with documentation, 147, 151–182 See also Action Pants: Genital Panic; Body Pressure; The Conditioning; How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare; Lips of Thomas; Seedbed Sharp, Willoughby, 40 Sherman, Cindy, 167 Shoot (Chris Burden), 8–11, 8n22, 11–12, 15n43, 28, 31, 33–35, 33n98, 82 audience role/responses, 23, 34, 176 and conceptual art, 10, 11–12, 34 and consequentiality, 35 documentation, 31–32, 149–150 and embodiment/objecthood, 15–18, 22 and masculinity/vulnerability, 26–27 role of marksman, 16–18 A Short History of Performance Part 1 (exhibition), 151

206

Index

Sillars, Laurence, 161 Silverman, Kaja, 25n80, 97 Siskin, Jonathan, 130 sit-ins, 184 usage of term, 36n107 See also lunch counter sit-ins sleeping, 132, 185 Smith, Barbara T., 9 Feed Me, 27, 71n106 Smith, Billy, 84, 106 Smith, Roberta, 37, 181n95 Smith, Tony, Die, 53 Sobchack, Vivian, 22–23n65 solitary confinement, 121–122 Sorkin, Jenni, 148–149 spectatorship. See audience Spector, Nancy, 159, 173 Stiles, Kristine, 46, 65, 79 Stoops, Susan L., 57n75 subject/subjectivity contingency of, 19–20 and gender, 42–43, 50 as needy/incomplete, 61 negation of, 114 opacity of. See opacity “prehistory of,” 18 and race/racism, 26, 56, 93–99, 100–101 and object/objecthood, 19, 26–27, 40, 56–57, 61, 75–76, 97, 101–102 See also authority; authorship; intersubjectivity; objecthood Sulkowicz, Emma, Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), 1–3, 7 Sun, Preach R, 184 Super Nase & Co, 183n1 Swanson, Amber Hawk, 184 tableaux vivants, 164–165, 172 Tanner, Marcia, 46, 62 tears, 483 Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (“Thirteen Year Plan”), 28–29, 111, 114, 141–145, 141n118 activities during, 141–142 contrasted with earlier pieces, 117, 138 “disappearance,” planned, 142n123 Hsieh’s comments on, 144–145 theatre, relationship to performance art, 34–35. See also “drama” metaphor “Thirteen Year Plan.” See Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 Thompson, E. P., 123, 124 Till, Emmett, 88, 102n81 time, 28–35, 109–145 and embodiment, 119–121 labor time, 123–127

lifetime, 29, 113–117 linear time, 157 as quantifiable/homogenous, 123, 124–125 relationality of, 116–117, 120–121, 135 spatialized, 119, 123 as subject to power, 120–123 time clock, 124–125 time discipline, 123 See also duration “Time Clock Piece.” See One Year Performance 1980-1981 Trojańska, Weronika, 51n48 Trumpaur, Joan, 99–101 Tsabar, Naama, 183n1 Tudor, David, performance of 4′33″, 159–160 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, Touch Sanitation, 7 Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen), 69, 80n13. See also Abramović, Marina, and Ulay United States immigration law, 138, 143, 143n127 racial legislation, 92–95 “one-drop rule,” 92–93 protests against. See civil rights movement; lunch counter sit-ins See also segregation violence. See aggression; lunch counter sit-ins: violent responses to; Rhythm 0: violent/ polarized audience responses voyeurism, 40, 41 and gender, 42, 46–47, 62 vulnerability, 15–16, 19, 22, 69–70, 76, 117, 186 and gender, 15–16, 46, 52–53 WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (exhibition), 66 Waldron, Jeremy, 132 Ward, Frazer, 9, 11–12, 22, 36n106, 50, 51, 56, 82, 114, 130, 130n75, 140n112 Warr, Tracey, 14–15, 148, 149 Widrich, Mechtild, 174 Wilding, Faith, Waiting, 43 Wilke, Hannah, 42, 43, 167 What does this represent/What do you represent (Ad Reinhardt), 42 willfulness, 13–14, 91–92, 156 willpower, 69–70 Wilson, Martha, 141n117 Wittstock, Herma Auguste, 51n48 Wolff, Miles, 83n19 Young, Harvey, 88 Zelevansky, Lynn, 146