The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art 9781350057579, 9781350057593, 9781350057586

Citation preview

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Methuen Drama Handbooks is a series of single-volume reference works which map the parameters of a discipline or sub-discipline and present the “state-of-the-art” in terms of research. Each Handbook and Companion offers a systematic and structured range of specially commissioned essays reflecting on the history, methodologies, research methods, current debates and future of a particular field of research. Methuen Drama Handbooks provide researchers and graduate students with both cutting-edge perspectives on perennial questions and authoritative overviews of the history of research. The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies edited by Sherril Dodds ISBN 978-1-350-02446-5 The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography edited by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson ISBN 978-1-3500-3429-7 Forthcoming The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre edited by Sean Metzger and Roberta Mock ISBN 978-1-3501-2317-5 The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance edited by Daphne P. Lei and Charlotte McIvor ISBN 978-1-3500-4047-2

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Edited by Bertie Ferdman and Jovana Stokic

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Bertie Ferdman, Jovana Stokic, and contributors, 2020 Bertie Ferdman, Jovana Stokic, and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image: Alexandra Pirici, Threshold (2017), photograph by Liz Legon, courtesy of the artist All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5757-9 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5759-3 eBook: 978-1-3500-5758-6 Series: Methuen Drama Handbooks Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix

PART I Introduction 1.1

Squaring Performance Art Bertie Ferdman and Jovana Stokic

3

PART II  Issues and Problems: Future Directions in Performance Art Research 2.1

Reruns or New Turns Jovana Stokic

2.2

Cross-disciplinarity and Antitheatrical Historiographies of Performance Art Bertie Ferdman

19

26

PART III Essays 3.1

3.2

How Performance Art Makes History: Artists’ Auto-histories of Happenings and Fluxus in the 1960s Heike Roms

37

Queer Performativity: A Critical Genealogy of a Politics of Doing in Art Practice Amelia Jones

58

3.3

Taking Up Instructions for Becoming Rebecca Schneider

81

3.4

Caring for Black Corporealities: Experimental Black Performance Thomas F. DeFrantz

93

vi

CONTENTS

3.5

Between Contemporary Art and Performance: Dramaturgy and Flow Peter Eckersall

104

3.6

Acting Ethical: Performance Art Goes Public Malik Gaines

120

3.7

Compassionate Acts: Performance as Radical Care T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko

129

3.8

The Labor of the Artist, Feminist Practices, and Troubles with Infrastructure 148 Bojana Kunst

3.9

Gestural Study Sven Lütticken

3.10 Stomaching It: Testing Endurance in Black Performance Art Danielle Bainbridge 3.11 Performative Bodies and Artists/Spectators: The Case of Radical Latina and Latin American Women Artists in Exhibition Cecilia Fajardo-Hill

165 182

190

3.12 Framing Live Art Lois Keidan

204

3.13 From the Institution of Performance to the Performance of Institutions Jonah Westerman and Catherine Wood

220

3.14 Performance in the Age of the Technosphere Chris Salter

247

PART IV  Annotated Bibliography and Resources Annotated Bibliography Eylül Fidan Akıncı

267

Notes on Contributors 285 Index 290

FIGURES

3.1.1

George Maciunas, Fluxus (Its Historical Development and Relationship to Avant-garde Movements), c. 1966

47

Wolf Vostell, Pre-Fluxus New York Avant 1962; Pre-Fluxus Cologne Avant 1962; Fluxus Wiesbaden 1962 (n.d.)

50

3.1.3

Nam June Paik, Fluxus Island in Décollage Ocean, 1963

51

3.1.4

Mieko Shiomi, Spatial Poem No. 2, 1966

53

3.2.1

Fayette Hauser, photograph of the Cockettes performing, 1970 62

3.2.2

Nao Bustamante, Indigurrito, 1992

74

3.2.3

Zackary Drucker, The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See, 2008–9

75

3.1.2

3.3.1 and 3.3.2  Emilio Rojas, Instructions for Becoming (Indio Desnudo), 2019 82 3.3.3 and 3.3.4  Emilio Rojas, Heridas Abiertas (A Gloria) 84 3.3.5

Rebecca Belmore, Fringe, 2008

85

3.3.6

Soldier’s Arch, Brown University

88

3.4.1

Leroy Eldridge in Monèt Noelle Marshall’s “Buy My Soul and Call It Art”

96

3.4.2

Shireen Dickson in “reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW”

101

3.5.1, 3.5.2, and 3.5.3  Complexity of Belonging 112 3.8.1 3.8.2

Else Tunmeyr, When We were Weary/The Loneliest Whale in the World, 2017

149

Catalina Insignares, us as a useless duet, 2017

161

3.9.1 and 3.9.2  An early Laban pupil demonstrating a “well-shaped body in expressive position,” combined with an effort graph

170

3.9.3

Alexandra Pirici, Aggregate (2017), at NBK

173

3.10.1

Albert Chong, “Natural Mystic,” 1982

183

viii

FIGURES

3.11.1

Patssi Valdez, Limitations beyond My Control, 1975

194

3.11.2

Cecilia Vicuña, El Zen Surado, 1960s–2013, collage

195

3.11.3

Maria Evelia Marmolejo, 11 de marzo, 1981

198

3.12.1

La Pocha Nostra, Ex-Centris (A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others), Live Culture, 2003

206

3.12.2

La Ribot, Panoramix, Live Culture, 2003

207

3.12.3

Sybille Peters, KAPUTT, 2017

211

3.12.4

Liberate Tate, Human Cost, 2011

215

3.13.1

Carlos Amorales, Amorales vs. Amorales, 2003

235

3.13.2

Tania Bruguera, Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008, performed as part of UBS Openings: Live—The Living Currency

238

3.13.3

Boris Charmatz, Public Warm Up at Tate Modern, 2015, part of BMW Tate Live: If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse? 239

3.14.1

Chris Salter and TeZ, Haptic Field, 2017

3.14.2 and 3.14.3  Kurt Hentschlager, Feed.X, 2018

254 256

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Amelia Jones for sending this project in our direction and to all the authors who contributed so much of their time and effort to this volume: Eylül Fidan Akıncı, Danielle Bainbridge, T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Peter Eckersall, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Malik Gaines, Amelia Jones, Lois Keidan, Bojana Kunst, Sven Lütticken, Heike Roms, Rebecca Schneider, Chris Salter, Jonah Westerman, and Catherine Wood. We would also like to thank Claire Bishop and Ana Janevski who, in the initial stages of this book, recommended sources and contributors. We are extremely grateful to friends and colleagues who gave us support, feedback, and conversation throughout this process: Peter Eckersall, Naomi Lev, Jill Samuels, Erika Latta, and Andrew Weiner. Exchanges with the following artists were especially inspiring: Anna Ostoya, Irena Haiduk, and Alexandra Pirici, as well as panels about the book held at the following conferences: IFTR Belgrade, CAA New York, and PSi Calgary. In particular, Jovana would like to thank her students from the MFA Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts. All these aforementioned exchanges helped us to shape our understanding of the field of performance in art contexts today. We would also like to thank Mark Dudgeon and Lara Bateman at Methuen Drama for their invaluable help throughout all the stages of this project, as well as the peer reviewer whose thorough feedback fostered productive revisions. Finally, to our families and life partners, without whom this book would not have been possible. Franck Lesbros: you are the vita activa to my vita contemplativa. Julien Jourdes: tu es mon amour, ma vie. Paloma y Talia: siempre serán las luces de mi vida.

x

PART I

Introduction

2

CHAPTER 1.1

Squaring Performance Art BERTIE FERDMAN AND JOVANA STOKIC

I  SETTING THE STAGE Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s film The Square, winner of the 2017 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, includes a stunning scene that features performance art in all its glory. In it, we witness a fancy fundraiser gala dinner for a contemporary art museum go awry by the presence, or shall we say performance, of an artist named Oleg, inspired by the notorious Ukrainian-born Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik.1 Played by actor and movement coach Terry Notary, of Planet of the Apes fame, the bare-chested Oleg goes too far in his impersonation of an ape. Notary is an extraordinarily skilled performer and compellingly virtuosic as Oleg. What starts out as a seemingly inoffensive and almost amusing ape reenactment gradually turns askew as Oleg grows in intensity as an increasingly wild and untamable animal. His gestures grow large and his screams even louder. He growls at the well-dressed diners, singles them out, throws chairs around, smashes a wine glass and forces some guests out of the room. The tension mounts as he knuckle-walks his way, eyeing his next prey. Completely transformed as ape-man, he pounds his chest, mounts a table, and slowly begins to caress and eventually grabs a woman by her long blonde hair. He drags her across the floor, forces her down, pulls up her skirt, and violently mounts her. She audibly wails and shrieks for help. After what seems like too long of a wait, an older man rushes to save her, eventually another arrives, and then all the well-dressed men in suits appear, taking turns bashing Oleg to the ground. The scene, meant to make the mostly wealthy art patrons uncomfortable and test the limits between spectacle versus danger, plays with the inability to distinguish art from what is real, which we might say of performance art itself. But the scene also seems to replicate the conditions under which much of performance art is consumed today in first world countries: in fancy banquets, as a form of social standing, as philanthropic tax breaks for the rich, as a pretense of subversion hidden under the veil of a potential economic profit margin. The scene is a dramatic rendering of performance art: scripted, acted, and edited for a movie. It was filmed under somewhat particular circumstances—the almost 300 film extras in the room were not pretending to be art patrons, but were actual millionaire donors, gallery owners, artists, and wealthy art scene personalities—to maintain a sense of uncertainty and authenticity (unrehearsed reactions) from the gala guests, as well as from Notary himself (Kelley 2018).2

4

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Oleg’s performance is mesmerizing, which is perhaps why it takes so long for guests not to intervene and stop the action earlier. But it is unsettling for exactly this reason: his performance is too enthralling to give up. It’s supposed to provoke and make its audience uncomfortable, yet at the same time it is a spectacle of itself. The through line gets lost in translation. This might tell us more about the current state of affairs regarding performance art than anything else. Oleg’s scene in The Square is but one example of the myriad ways that performance art—or art that has historically used bodies, actions, and/or the live to subvert, disturb, and/or critically reassess our reality and question political and cultural norms and boundaries—has in the last decade of the twenty-first century increasingly become popularized, in particular through mass media, digital technology, and celebrity culture, emerging as highly profitable and cachet. The retrospective of Marina Abramović’s work and her seminal performance The Artist Is Present (2010) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in which Abramović sat motionless for almost 750 hours in the museum’s atrium to lock eyes with one spectator at a time, was a turning point in the presentation and popularization of the form. Spearheaded by MoMA’s then chief curator Klaus Biesenbach, only one year after the museum added performance art to its department of media, its inclusion was part of a strategy of placing performance at the center of the art institution. Abramović’s retrospective (in particular the reperformance of her past work), brought forth questions regarding affective labor conditions and compensation, and raised issues around how to archive, display, produce, and preserve a medium otherwise resistant to preservation, issues that had already been taken up by many contemporary art and performance scholars.3 Its presentation confirmed performance art not as a challenge against the institution, but as exactly the opposite: a lucrative, collectible, and established art form, to be protected by the museum and its guards. As Diana Taylor has pointed out, “the retrospective was the mega commercial art event of the season, and no police were likely to interrupt the show” (2016: 196). As popular as the show was, it was its dissemination and aftermath—including an unprecedented amount of museum attendees, countless social media posts that went viral (Instagram was released the same year), an HBO documentary (released in 2012), and a music video Picasso Baby with Jay Z and other high-profile artworld personalities set at Pace Gallery (released in 2013)—that cemented this work, and performance art along with it, across mainstream culture. The year 2010 was also the year that film and television actor James Franco, of ABC’s General Hospital stardom, made headlines with an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, called Soap at MOCA. It was conceived by Franco as both a live taping for the TV soap opera and a performance art exhibit rolled into one. The fictional “Franco” (whose TV character happened to be a deranged performance artist—because how else can a performance artist be described) hosted a pretend show called “Francophrenia” at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center. The exhibit, according to the real Franco, was meant as an attempt to “both blur and define the lines between [. . .] representations of the self as both performative character and as non-performative self ” (in M. Schneider 2010). It was covered by the mainstream media and attended by special

SQUARING PERFORMANCE ART

5

VIP museum guests, “a slew of art-world types”—not unlike the guests at Oleg’s fictional performance in The Square—who watched from the balcony above the plaza as they drank champagne (Goodyear 2010). Far from its political and critical aspirations, performance art was now both a form of high art amusement to be consumed among like-minded wealthy patrons and a popularized form of entertainment distributed through an American commercial broadcast television network and subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Reacting to Abramović’s The Artist Is Present in 2010, and the rise of “work that worships at an altar of so-called presence,” Rebecca Schneider asked us to consider what might be at stake as “the live” became increasingly integrated into visual arts programming: If the historical avant-garde turned away from the object toward performance in order, at least in part, to challenge the broad social investment in the production and circulation of commodity objects (including commodified art), in what ways does “dematerialized art” (though that phrase is problematic as the living body is clearly material) offer an arena for the critique of a neoliberal service economy that trades in the circulation, purchase, and expenditure of live experience, or affective engagement? (2010: 66) Writing at the height of the experience and affect-driven economy, and right at the moment performance became embraced within the art institution as a claim to engagement and a way to attract younger patrons (but not necessarily a more diverse audience), Schneider was essentially calling for an increased criticality of how performance might be positioned and therefore curated within the museum in relation to a global system of advanced capitalism and consumption. She was sending a warning sign: “Will the curate interrogate the neoliberal conditions of this passage? Or serve those conditions? Or both?” (67). Almost a decade later, we can begin to see the implications, and results, of Schneider’s question. To accept that performance art is now commissioned, programmed, and collected means that the form itself has undergone a complete transformation. Performance art may have once had a difficult relationship with art institutions because of its ephemeral nature, and more accurately, as Claire Bishop explains, “because of performance’s content, which historically tended toward the transgressive: disrupting the performer/audience boundary, exceeding the limits of the body, unsettling gender norms and expectations, refusing the digestible temporality of entertainment, staking out oppositional politics, and operating with guerilla tactics. This unruliness exacerbated the problem of granting visual art performance a home within museums” (2018b: 27). But this uneasiness is long gone. Highly influenced by money, power, celebrity culture, the lure of social, cultural, and economic capital, the mainstreaming of performance art today constitutes a huge double standard: using performance art’s very ontology as innovative, political, or marginal to pose as socially motivated and/or experimental art. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization of performance and its methods of display and mediation in the wider cultural sphere, we understand “performance art” as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label, genre, or

6

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

object. Our book identifies a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art and its curating practices over the last decade of the twenty-first century, reflective of an advanced stage of capitalism that approaches art production in tandem with event production. Although this compromising status might on the surface constitute performance art’s contemporary being, many of the essays in this book claim that it is possible to build a resistant front to this neutralization. The very term “performance art” has come to refer to an expanding form—often inclusive of hybrid art and performing arts practices such as dance, music, sound, set design or installation art, spoken word, theater (once performance art’s oppositional category by excellence), film and video, architecture, social and participatory art—as visual art museums have favored the more encompassing term “performance.”4 In other words, performance art has become subsumed by the broader turn to performance. As such, one could even question whether “performance art” as a genre still exists in the twenty-first century or whether it is a historical relic. It could be argued that quite a number of the essays in this volume are not obviously or centrally about performance art—as opposed to about “contemporary performance” (what one might refer to as “live art” in the UK) or “the performing arts.” Many of the case studies are drawn from dance and theater precisely as a response to the art institution’s interest in the performing arts over the past decade. It is crucial that this phenomenon be examined critically so that it is not simply subsumed and/or co-opted by visual art discourse. Read together, the essays seek to specify both what performance art is and what it does (in genealogical, institutional, and biopolitical terms), while also deliberately disperse the given object of study, as the name “performance art” has itself come to refer to a blurring of multiple forms and disciplines: a shifting and expanding framing device. Our companion seeks to allow for this porousness. In Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, published in 2012, Amelia Jones perfectly captured what was to come in the next decade after the book’s publication, a premonition in synch with Guy Debord’s historic but all too prescient notion of the all-consuming spectacle ([1967] 1994). Jones acknowledged how, “rather than its abrasive refusal of the structures of late capital,” performance constituted “a packaging of the live as commodity, as the perfect spectacle” (14) and how “certain modes of live public art [. . .] function[ed] precisely to recontain, paralleling the commodification of ‘performance’ in the currently dominant service economy of big business” (15). And yet, she nevertheless saw “from an art historical point of view, a rumination on the potential of liveness to disrupt the containing function of aesthetics” (14) against Western Kantian established forms of so-called good taste. Jones, along with Bishop and Schneider in their aforementioned quotes, are not alone in exposing the contradictory conditions of performance (in both its methods of display and its ontology) and valuing what many still see as its transgressive potential to counter institutionalized practices and societal norms from within. In a similar vein, Andre Lepecki in Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance reminds us how already in 2001, Jon McKenzie in his book Perform or Else, “had identified a constitutive ‘paradox’ in the word ‘performance’” (2016: 8) where the term could “be read as both

SQUARING PERFORMANCE ART

7

experimentation and normativity” (McKenzie 2001: ix).5 Lepecki notes how almost fifteen years after McKenzie made this distinction, the fusion of these two strands had become “central to neoliberal societies, their institutions, and corporations” (2016: 8). Given the current state of performance in the art context, we should not overlook this (com)promise. It must constantly be retooled, reexamined, relocated, recreated, and reconditioned. In a special issue of TDR, co-editors Beth Clapper and Rebecca Schneider interrogate the relationship between performance and social reproduction. As per Marxist-feminist theory, they understand social reproduction not as a way to reproduce capitalist systems of power and labor, but as a way to resist and refute these. They ask: In what ways are performances uncritical mediums for the reproduction of capitalist social relations and, conversely, how might performance practices interrupt the reproduction of the conditions of exploitation, immiseration, and domination that structure our world? (2018: 8) Performance art is being used, not as a way to circumvent the art market and/or critique mainstream culture and the political status quo, but alternatively, as a standin for actually rebellious art. As many of the essays in this volume show however, performance simultaneously still provides a possibility for criticality. In line with our conviction that performance art has become increasingly commodified while at the same time maintaining its transgressive potential as an expanding, diversified, and politically resistant practice, it is this questioning that interests us in this book. We initially posed a broad set of themes to our contributors to trace the varying historiographies, genealogies, curating and collecting practices, technological and posthumanist realms, and ethics surrounding performance art. These lines of inquiries include questions about the way that performance has been linked to ideas of distance that formed new pathways for understanding art history and new ways of understanding art as a medium for critical theory. How can performance art be rethought in a time of heightened populism, global conservative revolutions, and the rise of white nationalism? What is its political strength? Can performance art be linked to an alternative poetic productivity? How can performance art act (again) as a powerful catalyst for social change, as well as inform a way of being that extends beyond the circulation and interests of capital? In what ways is the containment of performance art (its histories, its genealogies, its academic and disciplinary affiliations, its architectural spaces, its criticism) perpetuating longstanding structures of whiteness, heteronormativity, and colonialism? Finally, on the transformation of the human subject, what can performance offer to a world where human experience is being radically reshaped by forces beyond it (such as technological advancements that have brought climate change, data control and surveillance, DNA replication, and artificial intelligence)? This book thus emerges at a time when performance art has become institutionalized by both the art establishment and the mainstream culture, while retaining its activist and interventionist appeal. This must be seen in the context of a pivotal moment in our history when nationalistic movements are on the rise (again), we have a global

8

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

humanitarian crisis at the borders, a pervasiveness of institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia, a current political climate of encroaching extremes and divides, rampant inequalities of haves and have nots that have been exacerbated in the last decade, and the very real environmental threat to our planet. We embrace this “oxymoronic status” of performance art—where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable. The essays here thus map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction.

II  A CONTRAPUNTAL ARRANGEMENT This book brings together a collection of research by performance, dance, and theater scholars, curators, and art historians covering a wide range of disciplines beyond art history and performance studies, to include curatorial studies, cultural theory, eco-critical concerns, queer theory, affect theory, and economics. The contributors offer a range of contemporary analysis of aesthetics, economies, curatorial and labor practices of performance art while emphasizing the radical possibilities of performance as an evolving social and cultural intervention. Art history, performance studies, dance and theater scholarship migrate and populate each other’s territories in order to provide a merging of the disciplines within and between the humanities. Our approach activates an interdisciplinary perspective to better attend to performance art’s legacies and its current practices. Performance art today is often predicated upon notions of difference inherent to the study of performative intersectionality. The book thus takes an intersectional approach that allows for off-center positionings to actively question sites of power. As editors who come from different disciplinary backgrounds (theater and performance studies, and art history), we argue for disciplinary diversity in modes of inquiry, in particular as these relate to performance art scholarship, and we aim to account for the varied social/political/economic contexts in which performance art evolves today. We see this book as a collection on the theme of performance art as mediated by art institutions, that is, the containment of performance art and its slippages into dance, theater, and other realms of performing arts practices. The volume’s organization embodies the porousness of multiple thresholds. Its multiple threads and intertwining themes are purposely employed to underline a dynamic exchange among scholars from different points of views, meant as horizontal and nonhierarchical. Each of the essays presented employs multiple intertwining methodologies to analyze contemporary performance in art contexts and engage in what we might call a contrapuntal polyphonic structure. To borrow from music theory, counterpoint refers to the logic of a horizontal musical simultaneity of many melodic lines (as opposed to a vertical harmonic hierarchy)—differing in voices, styles, and length—that are all treated equally. Authors were given the same latitude, and the resulting perspectives, when read together, provide an interdisciplinary mapping and epistemological framework that delineates key areas of performance art practice in recent decades. This collection of essays engages with performance art by examining broad phenomenological registers of presence and co-presence, agency and containment,

SQUARING PERFORMANCE ART

9

dramaturgy and curatorship, gesturality and movement, and the technological and digital realms. As editors, we are aware that the concept of intersectionality has to account for the very difference in approaches and positions that have diverse methodological problems within performance art scholarship. Acknowledging that the majority of performance art scholarship is predominately centered on Western paradigms, we sought to address cultural diversity in relation to performance art practices and their intercultural and cross-cultural impact. Therefore, the book’s structure positions intersectional vectors as they are located within frameworks of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and does not single out the domains of the Other: in black, feminist, or queer performance practices. We hope the diverse heterogeneous performances analyzed in this volume will prove relevant in a broader context and critical reception. It is beyond the scope of this book to provide a global overview of the field; with a few exceptions, the majority of the contributors are writing from a North American perspective. The vibrancy of international contexts for performance art (historically and in the present)— especially in the Global South—should be acknowledged, as we are currently learning about performance art histories from the most vibrant and challenging geopolitical contexts for performance art in the last decades.6 A look at cross-cultural currents might analyze how the performances of Chinese artists in Beijing’s East Village in the 1990s (e.g., Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, He Yunchang, Zhao Lu), or Petr Pavlensky’s actions in Russia, muddy the claims for performance art’s near-total containment, for example. How might we recognize Butoh in Japan (still vibrant though often institutionally ignored), or the street performances of Jelili Atiku in Nigeria or Maya Rao in India, as extending or dissolving Western assumptions about the genealogical pasts and formal potentials of performance art?7 In her essay titled “Curating Carnival? Performance in Contemporary Caribbean Art,” Claire Tancons (2012) writes about performance art’s positioning within the mainstream Euro-American canon and asks: “Is performance the last bastion of Eurocentrism in contemporary art discourse and practice? Or, in other words, is performance art a Eurocentric concept?” Questioning the relevance of terminologies that have historically excluded a large number of artists and practices seems crucial; questioning our own roles as scholars and teachers in perpetuating such exclusions even more so. In a footnote in his chapter, Thomas DeFrantz calls out the shortcomings of tacitly universal claims for performance art’s sites, functions, and histories, even within the very pages of this volume, “where theorists write about universal (white) performance norms, without bothering to note the white supremacist perspective that inevitably excludes Black innovations.” Our approach carries the realization that the methodologies of performance art research of the past decade did not keep pace with the practice of art’s interdisciplinary breadth, inclusivity, and diversity. We see this book as a call for the further opening of our disciplines toward the Global South, not as a geographical direction, but as a pointing away from Western hegemony. The essays in this volume propose a new set of activations in relation to performance art’s historiographies and genealogies. In her contribution, Heike Roms reaffirms performance art not as a genre or movement but rather as a set of practices whose definitions and delineations have themselves undergone historical

10

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

change. Her analysis of Happenings publications and Fluxus maps, including visual-textual material, diagrammatic images, and multimedia displays, shows that performance art’s inherent means of historization and its attempt to develop nonnarrative, embodied, and performative histories are not recent concerns, but were in fact already being considered in the 1960s. Roms argues that these artifacts “can be considered as forms of a ‘self-’ or ‘auto’-historicization practice that has been integral to the history of performance art.” Whereas Roms focuses on how performance art practice played a role in its own historicization, Amelia Jones looks at the genealogy of the theoretical concept of “performativity.” Her essay, part of her book In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance, rigorously repositions the concept of “performativity” as inherently and historically related to the notion of “queer.” She contextualizes how homophobia was ingrained in performance criticism, a bias she unearths stems from the 1970s onward, and that was until now, largely ignored in art historical accounts of performance art. Jones emphasizes “the importance of relationality in determinations of ‘queer,’ of ‘performativity,’ and in fact of this genealogy itself, which [. . .] takes shape through negotiations with texts about and practices of queer performance.” Featuring the work of Emilio Rojas, Laura Aguilar, and Rebecca Belmore, Rebecca Schneider’s essay offers a poetic musing on ways of being. She connects history with (personal) memory as a way to move forward, charting new becomings. This new stance enables her to revisit the larger issues of historiography in relation to performance’s ephemerality and its remnants—how performance writes history. Schneider claims that the persistence of performance art challenges our understanding of the links between the material and the immaterial, living and nonliving, and the human and nonhuman. “Movement moves,” she writes. “It is intraaction that finds its rhythms among animate and inanimate alike, rendering any definitive direction that would delimit a form and flow of time (such as forward and linear) impossible.” Her essay can be read alongside Chris Salter’s in that they both address the interconnectedness of past and future in relation to concepts of gestures and movement, micro-performativity, and the technosphere. Salter highlights how the human being and the body are no longer at the center of performance art as a result of environmental changes and the rise in artificial intelligence occurring in the twenty-first century. In its place, he offers a dynamic new conceptualization of performance as a “matter of passing through thresholds—between living and nonliving, machinic and organic, technical and human.” Amid the influx of hybrid visual arts and theatrical performance practices in museum contexts, as well as the rise of immersive-like exhibitions, Peter Eckersall’s essay asserts the need for dramaturgical thinking to the art critical lexicon. Taking on Boris Groys’s notion of “entering the flow” as the current state of spectating in contemporary art institutions, Eckersall addresses how an understanding of dramaturgy—as the linking factor to crosscurrents in form, structure, composition, material, and techniques—has become crucial to help us link aesthetic relations to artistic intention. The dynamics of flow between visual arts and performance are enlivened, argues Eckersall, by this new attention to questions of structure, form, and contextual spaces for a work, so much so, that these works are made with “an

SQUARING PERFORMANCE ART

11

awareness of space, time, and spectatorial sensibility.” Historicizing how performance has been part of the museum since the 1960s, Catherine Wood and Jonah Westerman contest the notion that “performance has been tamed by being institutionalized,” or, that this is a new phenomenon at all. Instead, they argue, “its newly enunciated centrality is the result of a steady, decades-long process of interaction,” where “performance has produced new institutional forms.” They caution against viewing the museum as a homogeneous entity and likewise, also caution against ascribing performance to something necessarily “wild, anarchic, protean, [or] fleeting.” Building on previous scholarship by Shannon Jackson regarding performance in museums along with Rebecca Schneider’s work on temporality and reenactment,8 their essay accounts for a specific history of contemporary performance art practice in relation to art institutions, from the early 2000s until today. Addressing the institutional embrace of ephemeral practices in the UK over the last decade, Lois Keidan provides a firsthand testimony of curatorial practices and partnerships. As cofounder of the Live Art Development Agency in 1999, and its director ever since, Keidan details how “live art,” which is a term she herself has positioned as different to “performance art” for its inclusion of multiple forms of time-based and performing arts, went from “being very much the runt of the litter [. . .], ignored, disregarded, or trashed by most funding bodies, academies, critics, and institutions” to “an unprecedented and unparalleled institutional engagement with experiential and ephemeral practices.” Although the embrace of live art within institutional contexts has provided such performance practices with legitimacy, Keidan warns that such “institutional representation might sanitize and stifle radical and challenging practices.” Cecilia Fajardo-Hill’s “Performative Bodies and Artists/Spectators” reflects on her experience as co-curator of the exhibit Radical Latina and Latin American Women Artists: Latin American Art, 1960–1985.9 Speaking directly to the practice of performance art by these artists as an inherently anti-institutional one, in particular in relation to marginalized communities, Fajardo-Hill emphasizes the fact that most of these artists had been excluded by the art institution, “their body subjected to violence and marginalization” as a result of authoritarian political regimes, so their aesthetic impulse does not respond to an otherwise “normalized”—colonizing or Eurocentric—concept of art. “It is the case that still today,” she writes connecting this history to the present moment, “art by feminists, queer, and artists of color, dealing with identity, politics, gender, is considered irrelevant as a form of art.” Thomas F. DeFrantz’s essay “Caring for Black Corporealities: Experimental Black Performance” also asserts how the universalizing rhetoric of white performance norms is prescient both in institutionalized spaces of art and in its theoretical and historical constructs. “Organizational logics surrounding experimental performance and dance presume a Eurocentric model of creative modernity,” explains DeFrantz, “one that pushes ‘beyond’ concerns of asymmetrical social access or aesthetics of affiliation and affirmation that might define Black life.” His essay thus considers how the notion of care might be implemented as a way of reviving live art forms, in order “to restore an elided Black humanity to contexts that continue to disavow Black presence.” What Fajardo-Hill and DeFrantz do is emphasize the power of

12

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

performance in art contexts that stand to resist its predominantly white patriarchal and heteronormative institutional containment. Malik Gaines illustrates how questions of ethics have animated performance art. Acknowledging how US performance art from the 1960s and 1970s has elaborated itself through a Eurocentric art historical model, Gaines activates a set of structural propositions—from redefinition to redistribution—that performance art has used to carve an institutional (and inter- and intradisciplinary) status. “Redefinition expands categories, challenges values” he writes, “and thus suspends judgment, while modeling the agency of definition for its doer. Redistribution puts things in unexpected places, and democratizes the experience of performance art’s specialized forms.” Through close analysis of William Pope.L’s ritualistic performance Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) and Albert Chong’s performative photograph Natural Mystic (1982), Danielle Bainbridge takes up the question of ethics by highlighting how these artists use their body to engage the audience, viscerally. “After the ravages of excess, either organic or unnatural, what will endure?” She argues how the black body becomes the site of ritual that provokes the audience into an emphatic response: “Performance becomes a test of endurance, but also ultimately becomes the thing that does endure when the black body succumbs.” Building on the work of Sara Ahmed and Christine Sharpe, T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko looks to genealogies of care to formulate a critical methodology predicated on affect theory’s interactions with race studies and identity politics. The essay, which stands as a feminist critical intervention, provides an intricate and thorough analysis of Franko B’s stitched canvas not a number (2015), in its beautiful and horrific representation of the Syrian refugee crisis, along with Nona Faustine’s series of self-portraits, White Shoes (2012), whose performance takes place at sites of the slave trade in the northeastern United States. Cesare Schotzko demonstrates how such performance artworks, which “disrupt, more or less explicitly, the viewer’s gaze,” can be predicated on affective strategies that evoke xenophobia and racism in order to provoke radical resistance and care. Both Sven Lütticken and Bojana Kunst discuss and position the performing body in relation to production and productivity, automation (from the standardization of movement and gestures to data economies), as well as agency effort and labor. Kunst offers a feminist post-Marxist analysis to explore the relations between labor and poetics in contemporary performance art and film. The main affirmation of artistic practice, she argues, must today happen through (the thinking about) the conditions and the status of the artist’s labor. She proposes that performance art research explores the artist’s labor in more poetic ways, such as how to think about rhythms, consumption of energy, and temporality as a specific working state. For Kunst, this will enable a critique of the capitalist mode of production. Linked to this inquiry is Lütticken’s essay that focuses on the role of gesturality in contemporary culture. “Performance has moved to the forefront of contemporary culture,” explains Lütticken, “not because it is exempt from commodification, as a certain kind of discourse used to claim, but quite the opposite: precisely because it is in the vanguard of commodification not of objects but of subjects.” The essay charts how

SQUARING PERFORMANCE ART

13

the gesture reasserts itself into our performative culture as a form of evaluation, as opposed to a form of resistance. As editors who come from different disciplinary backgrounds, we see this volume’s dialogical approach to performance art as an encounter with the Other, in its broadest sense. The essays draw the potential for aesthetic, political, and ethical questions from a point of encounter as an open interchange that is in constant negotiation, activation, and multiplication. This is our nod to Amelia Jones’s dynamic notion of encountering, where she calls for an intersubjective analysis (of both our intellectual and our corporeal aspects) to fully deploy and unlock performance art’s agency (Jones 2018).10 In this light, the essays collected in this book, which resist established histories, move beyond one disciplinary genealogy, and interweave numerous methodological approaches, account for vulnerability, inclusiveness, and difference to reactivate performance art’s transgressive potential.

NOTES 1. In the 1990s, Kulik was notorious for performing as a dog. Kulik’s animal performances were extreme, and could involve defecating inside the gallery space, biting spectators, chaining himself to objects and/or people. Enacting the role of a vicious dog, Kulik’s actions were often unpredictable and provoked disgust. The scene from the film seems to draw upon one controversial event: Kulik’s attack on an audience-participant during the opening night of the exhibition Interpol— a global network from Stockholm and Moscow, that occurred on February 2, 1996, at the Fargfabriken Centre for Contemporary Art and Architecture in Stockholm. 2. Östlund did not tell the extras what exactly Notary would do, nor did he tell Notary who these extras were. 3. See, in particular, Jones and Heathfield (2012); Schneider (2011); Taylor (2003); Roach (1996), and Phelan (1993). 4. Roselee Goldberg and Catherine Wood, for example, no longer include “performance art” in their most recent titles, choosing instead the more expansive terminology: “Performance.” See Goldberg (2018) and Wood (2018). 5. Writes Lepecki: “McKenzie analyzed how the constitutive ambiguity of the word performance had emerged, throughout the twentieth century in two separate spheres: what he called ‘organizational performance’—linked to the implementation of ‘efficiencies’ in state, institutional, corporate, and industrial environments; and what he called ‘cultural performances’—denoting those that ‘foreground and resist dominant norms of social control’ (McKenzie 2001: 9)” (in Lepecki 2016: 8). 6. See Eylul Fidan Akıncı’s Annotated Bibliography: Section titled “Global Performance: Histories and Theories at the Edge of the West.” 7. The authors would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer for these thoughtful questions. 8. See, in particular, Jackson (2011), Jackson (2014), and Schneider (2011). 9. The exhibition was organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, under the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. See the exhibition catalog: Fajardo-Hill and Giunta (2017).

14

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

10. Specifically, Jones introduces the verb: “to propose encountering rather than encounter as a more useful term because it insists upon the relationship between art and makers or receivers as one of action rather than stasis” (2018: 14).

REFERENCES Bishop, Claire (2018a). “Palace in Plunderland: Claire Bishop on the Shed.” Artforum 57, no. 1 (September): 93–6. Available at: www.a​rtfor​um.co​m/pri​nt/20​1807/​palac​e-in-​ plund​erlan​d-763​27 (March 2, 2019). Bishop, Claire (2018b). “Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention.” TDR/The Drama Review 62, no. 2 (Summer): 22–42. Capper, Beth and Rebecca Schneider (2018). “Performance and Reproduction: Introduction.” TDR: The Drama Review 62, no. 1 (Spring): 8–13. Davis, Ben (2018). “There Is a Dystopian Cultural Vision Hidden in Michael Bloomberg’s Multimillion-Dollar Art Shed.” Artnet, May 14. Available at: https​://ne​ws.ar​tnet.​com/ o​pinio​n/the​-dyst​opian​-cult​ural-​visio​n-hid​den-i​n-mic​hael-​bloom​bergs​-mult​imill​iond​ollar​-art-​shed-​12827​99 (February 14, 2019). Debord, Guy ([1967] 1994). The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books. Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia and Andrea Giunta (eds) (2017). Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. Los Angeles and Munich: Hammer Museum and Del Monico Prestel. Expanded digital archive available at: https://hammer.ucla.edu. Goldberg, Roselee (2018). Performance Now: Live Art for the Twenty-First Century. New York and London: Thames & Hudson. Goodyear, Dana (2010). “Francophrenia.” New Yorker, July 12. Available at: https​://ww​w.new​yorke​r.com​/maga​zine/​2010/​07/12​/fran​cophr​enia (March 23, 2019). Groys, Boris (2016). In the Flow. New York: Verso Books. Jackson, Shannon (2011). Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge. Jackson, Shannon (2014). “The Way We Perform Now.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 (December): 55–61. Jones, Amelia (2012). “The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History,” in Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (eds), Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History, 1–3. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. Jones, Amelia (2018). “Conceptual Body, or a Theory of When, Where, and How Art ‘Means.’” TDR/The Drama Review 62, no. 3 (Fall): 12–34. Jones, Amelia and Adrian Heathfield (eds) (2012). Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. Kelley, Sonaiya (2018). “Artist Terry Notary Explains that Uncomfortable Dinner Scene in Oscar Contender ‘The Square.’” Los Angeles Times, March 1. Available at: https​://ww​w.lat​imes.​com/e​ntert​ainme​nt/mo​vies/​la-et​-mn-t​erry-​notar​y-the​-squa​re20​18030​1-htm​lstor​y.htm​l (March 23, 2019). Lepecki, André (2016). Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. New York: Routledge.

SQUARING PERFORMANCE ART

15

Malzacher, Florian and Joanna Warsza (eds) (2017). Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy. Berlin: House on Fire and London: Live Art Development Agency. McKenzie, Jon (2001). Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge. Phelan, Peggy (1993). Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge. Roach, Joseph (1996). Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Schneider, Michael (2010). “James Franco’s ‘General Hospital’ stunt doubles as MOCA art exhibit.” Variety, June 21. Available at: https​://va​riety​.com/​2010/​tv/ne​ws/ja​mesf​ranco​s-gen​eral-​hospi​tal-s​tunt-​doubl​es-as​-moca​-art-​exhib​it-14​826 (March 23, 2019). Schneider, Rebecca (2010). “Dead Hare, Live: The Curate and the Service Economy.” Frakcija 55: 62–7. Schneider, Rebecca (2011). Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge. Serota, Nicholas (1997). Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art. New York: Thames & Hudson. Tancons, Claire (2012). “Curating Carnival? Performance in Contemporary Caribbean Art?” in David A. Bailey, Allissandra Cummins, Axel Lapp, and Allison Thompson (eds), Curating in the Caribbean, 37–62. Berlin: The Green Box. Taylor, Diana (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Diana (2016). Performance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wood, Catherine (2018). Performance in Contemporary Art. London: Tate Publishing.

16

PART II

Issues and Problems: Future Directions in Performance Art Research

18

CHAPTER 2.1

Reruns or New Turns JOVANA STOKIC

COMMUNALITY OF PERFORMANCE ART Art history and theater/performance studies are now bridging the bifurcated epistemological inquiry that reflects contemporary performance art practice. At the core of this discursive converging is an emphasis on “performativity” in particular, as the term relates to performance as a collective, experiential act. Judith Butler has defined performance as “an action or event that involves a number of people, objects, networks, and institutions, even when performance takes place without a stage and in the briefest of moments, gathered up and dispersed in evanescence” (2016). She philosophically unpacks the notion of performance, not as an expressive vehicle stemming from one individual, but instead as a network of relations that brings to mind new materialism’s views in which humans and nonhumans come together and all matter—even air and water—is not taken for granted. Reread in this light, this concept of performativity allows all particles in the world to be considered.1 The newly emphasized communality in the context of performance art claims the fundamental theatrical concept of formal gathering and group collaboration. In order for performance to come forth as “performance” at all, it always has to rely on “a ground or background, or social world—a fleeting act for a passing crowd” (2016). The preeminent cultural status of visual art institutions dictates communality as a contemporary mode of artmaking and experiencing that, in turn, influences new forms of spectatorship, all-encompassing participation, and critical reception. As artists are engaged in creating new ways of coming together through performance and as performance, performance art research has followed this trajectory by establishing a new subjectivity. Butler writes: So performance is not the self-constituting act of a subject who is grounded nowhere, acting alone. If performance brings a subject into being, it does so only in terms of the social and material coordinates and relations that make it possible or that form its scene of intervention. The boundaries of the body that establish singularity are precisely the means by which sociality comes into being. For every question of support and tactility depends on a body that is, from the start, given over to the material and social conditions of its own persistence, bound up with that human and nonhuman support without which . . . nothing. (2016)

20

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

This implies a shift from the ontological focus on the body as performance in a presentational/confrontational frame to varying practical modes of engagement and/ or creating social networks as performance art. In a word, even a solo performer is an act of many—this dictum implies methodological changes in the approaches of both art history and performance studies in exploring the technologies of (artistic) self. Many thus becomes the ultimate subject. In relation to the act of making performance art, the current art historical interpretative models increasingly rely on Butler’s model of performativity, which does not, of course, lie outside of social reality. Dorothea von Hantelmann follows both Butler and Boris Groys to explain how the paradox of a work of art only gains its singular power through a certain degree of quotations and repetitions (2010: 105). This formulation of performance art’s status is related to Shannon Jackson’s concept of “the intermedial” in performative art. In her essay “Performativity and Its Addressee,” for the Walker Art Center’s scholarly platform, Jackson posits that the “intermedial puzzles” of contemporary art create new performative realities (and new performative problems) for receivers trying to make sense of them—that is, curators, scholars, and audiences (2017). Going back to art’s singular power to change the institutions, Jackson’s optimistic narrative instructs scholars to look more closely at these potentially fruitful co-productions: A museum context does something to these intermedial works, but these works also do something back to the museum. They require new presenting apparatuses; they ask the institution to make new kinds of promises. It will be exciting and intriguing to see whether and how intermedial panic can be turned into intermedial transformation. The performativity of art will, in the end, perpetually transform the institution that houses it. (2017) Performativity is here interpreted as a multidirectional and recursive quality that allows mobility and flexibility in institutional contexts.

RERUNS OR NEW TURNS In his contribution to the collection of essays Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive?: The New Performance Turn, Its Histories and Its Institutions, Andre Lepecki is always repeating their newness (2019: 12). Lepecki’s critique of this notion of newness of the perceived “new performative turn,” since it implies that the other turns have happened before it in scholarship. It can be said that new performative turns have been proclaimed repeatedly only to signify that performance art has been accepted by institutions with such enthusiasm. Such turns imply a certain perceived dizziness of the critical discourse that tends to go past historical contextualization, as a symptom of performance art’s supposed heroic status in the neoliberal context of spectacle production. Consequently, new scholarship should cast the net both wider and tighter, pointing to the necessity for historical contextualization of all relationships between performance art and institutions. In a recent essay published for the occasion of the ambitious inaugural symposium for The Shed—the cynically named grand new space dedicated solely to

RERUNS OR NEW TURNS

21

performance—von Hantelmann positions the new performance-oriented institution in relation to an ancient form of ritual (and the locus of forum) and suggests that future scholars will look more closely at these intertwined links as fruitful coproductions (2019). There is nothing new in this kind of vested interest in scholarly disciplines learning from the interdisciplinarity of practice itself. Shannon Jackson’s call for institutional recognition of performance art’s intermediality, which is complementary to Amelia Jones’s 2013 essay “Unpredictable Temporalities: The Body and Performance in (Art) History,” reminds scholars of the potential of performance art to pressure how one writes art history and questions its structures. Art historical discourse has conventionally depended on the predictability and commodifiability of static objects that can be neatly categorized, archived, displayed, and placed in the art-market context (2013: 53). Jones explains “how performance art’s potential to thwart the structure of art history and aesthetic judgment is linked to is temporality and ephemerality” (54). Whereas dominant modes of art history and criticism tend to reduce performance art into single iconic objects, scholars should be aware of textures and a logic of performance art that does not neatly fit into the art world’s value system. Jones persuasively calls for new modes of art historical and critical writing that focus on durational quality and the circuits of desire they open up in order to produce more nuanced histories that convey the complexities of a performance artwork (54). Performance art has been influencing art historical and critical value systems by refusing easy commodification. A self-reflexive art historian’s stance leads to political argument of keeping unfixed tensions at play as a crucial gesture in the study of ephemeral practices while applying aesthetics of possibilities (54–5). However, it is not clear that yet another turn would open these possibilities. In her essay “The Experiential Turn,” von Hantelmann dissects the notion of the performative to argue its value in understanding the experiential turn in contemporary art. Von Hantelmann emphasizes contemporary art’s concern with creating a/effects on its viewers: A concern with an artwork’s effects on the viewer and with the situation in which it takes place has indeed become a dominant feature of contemporary art since the 1960s. Although I am aware that a new notion will cause new problems, I want to suggest the experiential turn as a term that might be more appropriate and useful to describe these ongoing tendencies in contemporary art. (2017) Barbara Bolt argues against the introduction of yet another turn. She poses the question: “What does this slippage of the ‘performative’ into ‘experiential’ in contemporary art mean for art?” (2016) This methodological positioning of reception theory onto the realm of experiential is more of a symptom of the dominance of the experience economy than some undefined art’s liberatory potentiality. Taking into consideration Butler’s position of the collective, as well as Jones’s emphasis on the aesthetics of possibilities, the current prescient epistemological questions thus cluster around problems of how the collective can be invigorated and individuality reconfigured, outside of neoliberal conservative impulses of the reified autonomous art realm.

22

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Certain performance art histories have tended to glorify the “relational” and to equate a sheer presence with social good.2 In their introduction to the anthology of collaborative art, Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art, Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen apostrophize the assimilation of practicable approaches to a philosophy of action in several words: “Effects. Events. Openings. Participation. Relationships” and define “the communal” as an equitable sharing of bodies that transcend delegated performance with an understanding of the possibility for exploitation in this “communal” hierarchy of bodies (2016: 16). This theoretical discourse is interlinked with contemporary artists who are working within this premise that builds on the notion of community and also toward equitable economies that do not mimic the exploitative hierarchies of the experience economy.

NEW MODALITIES OF SPECTATORSHIP, CRITICISM, AND ARTIST AGENCY This section charts the possible implications of these methodological stances when applied to spectatorship, criticism, and artist agency in contemporary performance art. In terms of spectatorship, an issue in performance art scholarship that has to do with the promise of social practice’s “do goodism” has been debunked by Claire Bishop. Her critique of relational aesthetics brings the problem back to the question of the audience’s role and responsibility. Klaus Biesenbach explained the role of the audience in today’s performance culture as inextricably linked to digital technology: It “looks different to younger people used to filming the world around them,” he says, “and constantly posting and checking social media to see what else has happened.”3 He sees this as a main reason for coming together at art fairs and contemporary museums, where performance, participation, and time-based art have become central to today’s digital age. In capitalist constant need for consumption, the passive absorption of the image is linked with the new ultimate participation in the global spectacle—selfie-taking in the contemporary art museum. How then, does performance art play the social service role for which many theorists and historians passionately argue? Focusing on the notion of a contemporary spectatorship of performance art, Claire Bishop sees the contemporary museum’s “gray zone” as a productive one, as she positions today’s ideal subject of consumer capitalism who has to thrive within structural contradiction: the computer is the apparatus of both work and nonwork, and the distinction between attention and distraction is equally blurred (2018: 37). She further establishes that today’s spectatorship takes place on several levels: it is perfectly possible for full, embodied attention and absorbed thinking to exist alongside the process of continuous archiving and communication with others (39). There is much to be done in future scholarship regarding this issue. Ever more, there is an urgency to posit the lines of inquiry into the new subjecthood of the spectator, as liminally set in the domain between institutional and virtual. The newly evolving networked presence of the spectator should be analyzed as a challenge and a potential agent of change in all of its “uncontrollably distracted multiplicity” (40).

RERUNS OR NEW TURNS

23

New critical formations have recently emerged in art discourse as related to performance art practice. The summer 2018 issue of the critical art journal Texte zur Kunst, titled Performance Evaluation, was dedicated to performance art. The editors historicized current performance’s status, its omnipresence, and its dissemination to nearly every aspect of existence in the last two decades of the twenty-first century (Buchmann et al. 2018: 6). Their critical examinations of performance as a term and practice relate it to the contemporary global economic sphere where the notion of evaluation as a discursive mode of art engagement with performance is connected to financial models based on how a business performs, or to pedagogical tools for rating the performance of students. Performance art scholarship has already established the implications of the interconnectedness of this causality—how performance has become a universal trait of those who evaluate and those who are to be evaluated.4 In order to distinguish the porousness of terms in relation to performance in art and performance’s connotation of an activity linked to (monetary) benefit, one can start by identifying the practices that “define the features of performance with that in mind, lines of inquiry are required to evaluate these practices in the face of a society itself dominated by evaluation” (2018: 6). Following this critical line of inquiry, new directions in scholarship should allow for analysis of performance “outside of limited purview of art,” as the inherent “tensions and contradictions may yet turn out to be productive” (6). Even as we are reminded that performance art was historically interdisciplinary, this new interdisciplinary approach should not allow its strategies of crossovers and feedback mechanisms to be employed only as marketing strategies to target performance art audiences in art institutions, but should provide clear guidance to rethinking, redefinition, and its reevaluation. If we accept that contemporary performative modes of perpetual evaluations have influenced critical discourse, we can continue to examine newly constituted evaluating subjects. To answer this challenge, many scholars are activating diverse critical mechanisms. For example, Sabeth Buchmann proposes that scholars and critics should be attuned to the processes of artist-audience interchanges as they were established in foundational performance art practices in the 1950s and 1960s. More than ever, the historical examination and application of feedback mechanisms can illuminate the consequences for performance art criticism today (2018: 34). This activation brings us back to the social reproduction’s criticality of the site of the artist’s body. In her artist statement “Performance as Conjuring,” Alexandra Pirici testifies that “the body as performative agent imagined only as a reduction to that which is exclusively human and alive, biologically speaking, overlooks both the historical and contemporary manifestations of an ever-increasing complexity of agency” (2018: 74). She proposes how to re-chart contemporary performance art’s agency: The political, social, and economic terrain remains difficult to navigate, the situation unfavorable, value predicated on exclusivity and appropriation games turns whatever seems radical on one day into a branding practice or a norm on the next. Thus, one needs to look for leaking, elusive ways out or around, for alliances: between the analog and the digital, the living and the non-living,

24

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

between objects and subjects, individuals and larger aggregates. Financial, economic performance has well subsumed and understood the use of dramatic performance. In order to realize its other potential, to imagine new narratives, to conjure and carve a space for an entangled, complicated, and complex reality working for potentially fairer ends, performance needs all the help it can get. (74) Pirici suggests how in practice it is necessary to incorporate multiple agencies, ready to react and adapt, not closing the representational frame or fixing the format. New directions in scholarship point to the tasks of conjuring and interpreting that can be done together, collaboratively and performatively, in the way that audiences get involved in her work Threshold (2017)—co-present across time and space—artists, spectators, and scholars joined by care for performance art. Issues and problems constantly emerge as we, scholars of performance art, occupy ourselves with all of them simultaneously: from networked presence to notions of the new hierarchies and resistances in relation to the flow of people and data; the concepts of biopolitics and exploitation vs. digital disembodiment; new materiality, immateriality, and virtuality; as well as the contradictions of new populism and posthumanism, along with environmentalists’ urgent concerns. Without giving in to the exhaustion of criticality, there is a possibility of a turn toward care as a major concern and a shared methodological approach. Our handbook proposes many possible ways in which performance art and its scholarship remain caringly involved in exchanges between artists, works, and audiences.

NOTES 1. For further application of the new materialism in relation to performance, see Rebecca Schneider in a Special Issue of TDR: New Materialisms and Performance Studies, where she explains: “Contemporary questions about the agency of objects and the forces of materialization have increasingly blurred the borders modernity had built up between the animate and the inanimate. Brackets formerly demarcating the living from the nonliving, like the human from the nonhuman, have widened exponentially—with almost everything involved” (2015: 7). 2. For a systematic overview of social practice and socially engaged art, see Burton et al. (2016). 3. Quoted in “The Rise of Performance Art” (2017).​ 4. This was already discussed almost two decades ago in McKenzie (2001). This topic has since gained even more prescience.

REFERENCES Bianchini, Samuel, Erik Verhagen, Nathalie Delbard, and Larisa Dryansky (eds) (2016) Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bishop, Claire (2018). “Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention.” TDR/The Drama Review 62, no. 2 (Summer): 22–42.

RERUNS OR NEW TURNS

25

Bolt, Barbara (2016). “Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm.” Parse Journal, no. 3: 129–44. Available at: https​://me​tapar​.se/a​rticl​e/art​istic​-rese​arch-​a-per​forma​tive​parad​igm (accessed March 23, 2019). Buchmann, Sabeth (2018). “Feed Back: Performance in the Evaluation Society.” Texte zur Kunst: Performance Evaluation, no. 110 (June): 34–53. Buchmann, Sabeth et al. (2018). “Preface.” Texte zur Kunst: Performance Evaluation, no. 110 (June): 6–33. Burton, Johanna, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Willsdon (2016). Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Butler, Judith (2016). “Performativity.” Available at: http:​//int​ermso​fperf​orman​ce.si​te/ ke​yword​s/per​forma​tivit​y/jud​ith-b​utler​ (accessed March 23, 2019). Costinaș, C. and Ana Janevski (eds) (2018). Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The New Performance Turn, Its Histories and Its Institutions. Hong Kong: Para Site/ Berlin: Sternberg Press. von Hantelmann, Dorothea (2010). How to Do Things with Art: The Meaning of Art’s Performativity. Zurich: JRP/Ringier. von Hantelmann, Dorothea (2018). What Is the New Ritual Space for the 21st Century? A booklet for “Prelude to The Shed.” New York: Arts Center. Jackson, Shannon. (2014). “Performativity and Its Addressee.” Walker Living Collections Catalogue. Available at: http:​//wal​kerar​t.org​/coll​ectio​ns/pu​blica​tions​/perf​ormat​ivity​/ perf​ormat​ivity​-and-​its-a​ddres​see/.​ Jones, Amelia (2013).“Unpredictable Temporalities: The Body and Performance in (Art) History,” in Rune Gade and Gunhild Borggreen (eds), Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, 53–72. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. Jones, Amelia (2018). “Conceptual Body, or a Theory of When, Where, and How Art ‘Means.’” TDR/The Drama Review 62, no. 3 (Fall): 12–34. Lepecki, Andre (2017). “Affective Geometry, Immanent Acts: Lygia Clark and Performance.” Available at: https​://po​st.at​.moma​.org/​conte​nt_it​ems/1​031-p​art-3​affe​ctive​-geom​etry-​imman​ent-a​cts-l​ygia-​clark​-and-​perfo​rmanc​e (accessed March 23, 2019). McKenzie, Jon (2001). Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge. Pirici, Alexandra (2018). “Performance as Conjuring, Artist Statement.” Texte zur Kunst: Performance Evaluation, no. 110 (June): 74–9. Schneider, Rebecca (2015). “New Materialism and Performance Studies.” TDR: The Drama Review 59, no. 4 (Winter): 7–17. “The Rise of Performance Art” (2017). The Economist, June 22. Available at: https:// www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2017/06/22/the-rise-of-performance-art.

CHAPTER 2.2

Cross-disciplinarity and Antitheatrical Historiographies of Performance Art1 BERTIE FERDMAN

Performance2 has flourished in the visual arts world in the past, but only over the past few years has it increasingly come to occupy its own distinct cross-disciplinary space. We have, on the one hand, artists working within the contemporary art world, whose works circulate in the economy of galleries and museums, incorporating strands of mimesis and spectacle they otherwise seem to abhor (often precisely to break free from those preconceptions); and on the other, artists working within experimental theater and dance who incorporate critiques of representation and counter artifice. There is an ongoing desire in contemporary art to de-emphasize the material object, and a parallel desire in contemporary theater to de-emphasize the show (stemming from Jerzy Grotowski’s past paratheatrical activities to processbased work, the current use of untrained performers, dramaturgies of the real, the staging of failure, etc.).3 Shannon Jackson has extensively addressed this notion of cross-disciplinarity, what she terms “medium specificity” in performance, in particular as theater and visual art scholars apply different critical criteria to their interpretations of works. In Social Works, Jackson explains how “medium-specificity structures the perceptual apparatuses of different viewers who might disagree about what in fact they are seeing” (2011: 19). Medium specificity thus refers to the numerous reference points and vocabularies people use to discuss “what traditions of interdisciplinary art works remain blind to us due to our own artistic itineraries” (2014a: 56). This “cross” phenomenon, where we view one discipline from the perspective of another, affects not only how we approach performance criticism (Cody and Cheng 2016), but also how it gets funded, marketed, and valued; how it is commissioned, collected, exhibited, and displayed;4 and how it is performed and trained.5 Essentially, how is performance in art contexts “disciplined” when it is itself an inherently interdisciplinary practice (integrating methods from various disciplines)?

CROSS-DISCIPLINARITY AND ANTITHEATRICAL HISTORIOGRAPHIES

27

More than just precursors of taste, scholars and curators position or frame performance within a specific set of disciplinary and institutional frameworks that have lasting repercussions. This positioning changes the way a work circulates and gives it value. It affects funding and presenting paradigms, as well as how much artists get paid for their labor and who gets “credit” for the work. It also creates a form of ambiguity—what Jackson calls “intermedial panic” about how that work is received by audiences, interpreted by critics, and commissioned by presenters and, increasingly, museum curators (2014b). As arts producers increasingly position performance in diverse institutional spaces, the questions we ask of the work must equally engage with not just the disciplines these spaces occupy, but how the relevant citings overlap. What histories? What legacies? What frameworks? In an interview before the March 2010 premiere of The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramović expressed her dogmatic, and by now, outdated position on the difference between performance art and theater: Theatre is fake: there is a black box, you pay for a ticket, and you sit in the dark and see somebody playing somebody else’s life. The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real. It’s a very different concept. It’s about true reality. (in Ayers 2010) The disciplinary divide between authenticity (what is real) and representation (what is staged) has everything to do with the histories that define (and separate) disciplinary categories of art and theater, binaries that are completely fluid as contemporary performance—the live, the ephemeral, the transcendent—continues to join the two conversations. These two fields of knowledge (theater and art) are intertwined but are not necessarily incorporating each other’s legacies. In her article “Unhappy Days in the Art World: De-skilling Theatre; Re-skilling Performance,” Claire Bishop expands on the anxieties surrounding the labeling of something as “authentic” versus “inauthentic.” Whereas visual art discourse, she writes, has denounced “mimicry” and “representation,” the performing arts camp has taken up a defense of craft and skill. As such, she historicizes how these categories came to be perceived, explaining how performance art emerged from the generative union of abstract painting and Cageian composition to mount a critique of traditional theater. From an art history perspective, performance art’s coming into being already included a bias against any form of spectacle or artifice, and by default, a bias against any training that goes along with stagecraft. This antitheatrical bias is predicated on “a visible excess of staging,” and, as Bishop explains, engendered “a particularly queasy relationship to mimesis” (2011), in other words, an abhorrence of psychological realism—something that pretends to be real when it clearly isn’t. However, as Jackson has pointed out, artists represented by visual art institutions whose work circulates in the artmarket economy incorporate the very “inauthentic” tactics they critique (such as acting, mimesis, illusion, and spectacle).6 Inversely, theater artists are increasingly employing practices to counter established conventions of craft and making representation itself the object of inquiry.

28

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Theater scholars, for example, know that Hans-Thies Lehmann (1999) grouped such experimental theatrical practices under the term “postdramatic theatre” in the late 1990s. A few years prior, Marianne Van Kerkhoven was writing about processoriented methodologies in experimental theater and dance—a practice she called a “new dramaturgy” (1994). Around the same time, Bonnie Marranca and Elinor Fuchs, in The Theatre of Images and Death of Character, respectively, wrote about the need to clarify the critical vocabulary used in reference to experimental theater practices that challenged the conventional use of language, used acting styles that were presentational rather than representational, and adhered to the predominance of stage pictures (1996). In other words, absent from Bishop’s antitheatrical historiography is the fact that artists within theater were also experimenting with similar concerns to those visual artists who were moving toward the live. It is important to keep in mind here that, as Marranca explains in her review of Mariellen Sandford’s Happenings and Other Acts (published in 1997), in the postwar period, the term “theater” was in fact “used to describe ‘events’ or ‘actions,’ ‘performance’ not yet having become the catch-all phrase for live art” (1997: 115).7 This new form, “new theater”—an allusion to Michael Kirby’s influential text from 1965— was thus a precursor of what would eventually be referred to as either “postdramatic theater,” “new dramaturgy,” “live art,” “visual art performance,” or “contemporary performance,” depending on how it was marketed, where it was performed, and who was writing about it. Already, in a review from 1999, Marranca articulates the heightened attention that art institutions were paying to performance art (as opposed to theater), anticipating by a decade the current onslaught of crossdisciplinary discourse on “the live” and how it already positioned theater within a certain hierarchy relative to performance art. “There appears to be a full-scale, ongoing attempt to legitimize performance and establish its position within art history,” she writes, adding that “it should be noted that among visual artists and their critics, performance history is tactically linked to the history of painting and sculpture—art history—rather than to theatre history” (1999: 12). Amelia Jones, a scholar whose own body of work moves between and across disciplines (as an art historian writing about performance), alludes a decade later to the predominance of art history in performance research. “These official histories,” she writes in the introduction to “Theories and Histories” of Perform Repeat Record, “which have themselves constituted the field of performance art proper as a separate discipline (of making and of study)—have been dominated by a visual arts (art historical) rather than a theater studies perspective, although both function as the twin ‘parent’ disciplines of the practices of performance and live art. The ‘art’ perspective in official histories has encouraged the focus on determinable lineages and individual authors, as the art market demands these in order to turn cultural into economic value” (2012: 39). We can talk about similar threads in different parts of the world, such as the UK, Australia, and Japan for example—all associated with what is now commonly referred to as the “performative turn.”8 We can see how discourses surrounding performance practice divorced themselves from theater genealogies and, by doing so, reinforced the assumption that “theater”—in its most conventional form—was something performance art was aggressively working against.

CROSS-DISCIPLINARITY AND ANTITHEATRICAL HISTORIOGRAPHIES

29

In his chapter on “The Arrival of Performance Art and Live Art,” Simon Shepherd singles out the slipperiness of RoseLee Goldberg’s conveniently vague history of performance art as an ideological and trans-historical construct (2016: 123). He mounts a pointed critique of Goldberg’s journalistic “story of live art performance,” which assimilates performance art to a notion of the avant-garde and ties it to a specific and Eurocentric art historical narrative (127). Shepherd cites artists such as Terry Fox and Kenneth Coutts-Smith, who were highly critical of Goldberg’s account, in particular for her positioning of performance art within “the cultural domain of ‘art.’” Their “dissenting opinions,” Shepherd notes, were “marginalized in the process of institutionalization” (130). The narrative of performance art, highly marketed by RoseLee Goldberg, will tell you that it stems from the historical avant-garde—primarily Dada and the Futurists—with its apotheosis in the 1960s and 1970s experimental art movements such as Fluxus, body and endurance art, with such well-known artists as Yoko Ono, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneeman, among many others. For theater scholars, performance art emerges a little later, with the solo performance monologues of Spalding Gray, the visual pictures of Robert Wilson (Carlson 1996), when “in the 1970s and 1980s, [performance] repealed the Aristotelian notion of a clear beginning, middle, and end” (Schechner 1988: 164). As with postdramatic theater, performance art for theater scholars breaks with theatrical conventions tied to script, linear dramatic structure, and dramaturgies of Western drama. These disciplinary positionings, as Shepherd points out regarding Goldberg’s account of performance art, are just that: narratives. They are not organic, certainly not universal, but on the contrary: highly selective and partial. As Diana Taylor reminds us in Performance, “it is important to recognize that what has been called ‘performance art’ has roots in many artistic forms” (2016: 46), among them the fields of visual arts and theater, and has “many antecedents, many interlocutors, many disciplinary ties” (45). Indeed, “official” histories of performance art have excluded the work of countless artists in their formation of “a canon.” In Embodied Avatars, Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, Uri McMillan focuses on black women performers beginning in the nineteenth century and calls out the “Eurocentric narrativization of performance art” that “elides the presence of black artists as historical coconspirators” (2015: 3). As many scholars have pointed out, performance art as an institutionalized genre is therefore not productive when it operates on exclusionary practices that are predicated on erasure and white privilege.9 Performance art as a historically set, geographically finite genre is counterproductive to any form of radicality. Scholars and critics, as well as artistic directors and art curators are responsible for positioning contemporary performance in art contexts within specific disciplinary/ historical lineages and genealogies. In her essay “Reproducing the White Bourgeois: The Sitting-Room Drama of Marina Abramović,” Eleanor Skimin counters such a divide, incisively looking to theater history, in particular pertaining to twentiethcentury European modernism, to compare Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with the sitting-room drama. She argues, and it is worth quoting in full:

30

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

histories of 20th- and 21st-century performance have commonly excluded white bourgeois theatre as part of the genealogy of performance art, except to see it as the object of performance art’s parody or critique against spectacle, against fakeness, against illusion, against the separation of spectator to performer, against commodification, against normativity, against the bourgeois. In other words, we are used to thinking about performance art as a self-conscious celebration, or reimagining, or exploration of, say, ancient Buddhist ritual, or the anarchic spirit of Dada and Cabaret Voltaire, but less often, if at all, as assuming the mantle of the spirit of bourgeois realist theatre. This blind spot, which positions performance art as invariably the critique of bourgeois theatre, appears in art history accounts too. (2018: 89) The past two decades have seen a surge in such scholarship dedicated to researching historiographies and genealogies from multiple vantage points. The recent appointment of ruangrupa, the ten-member core collective of artists and creatives from Indonesia, as the artistic direction of documenta 15, represents this shift toward inter-communal, interdisciplinary, and nonhierarchical curating models of art production: “We want to create a globally oriented, cooperative, interdisciplinary art and culture platform that will have an impact beyond the 100 days of documenta 15,” Farid Rakun and Ade Darmawan of the collective stated. Our curatorial approach aims at a different community-oriented model of resource usage—economical, but also taking ideas, knowledge, programs and innovations into account. If documenta was launched in 1955 to heal war wounds, why shouldn’t we focus documenta 15 on today’s injuries, especially ones rooted in colonialism, capitalism, or patriarchal structures, and contrast them with partnership-based models that enable people to have a different view of the world. (qtd. https​://un​ivers​es.ar​t/en/​docum​enta/​2022/​, 2019) The same could be said of how we critically engage with performance in art contexts. Future scholarship should continue this emphasis on interdisciplinarity and intercommunality to locate de-centered and inclusive historiographies and genealogies for “performance art” as an ever-expanding form.

NOTES 1. Portions of this text are taken from my book Off Sites (Ferdman 2018). 2. I use the word “performance” here purposefully, rather than “performance art,” to refer to a broader set of practices now subsumed under the more expansive term “performance” within the visual art context. 3. See Bailes (2011); Martin (2010, 2012); Romanska (2012); Kroeber and Quillen (2014); Behrndt and Turner (2008). The reference to Grotowski’s paratheatrical activities is from the early to mid-1970s, a period in which he and his collaborators sought to overcome the division between participants and spectators and leave the theater as an end-product. See, in particular, Grotowski and Moos (1995).

CROSS-DISCIPLINARITY AND ANTITHEATRICAL HISTORIOGRAPHIES

31

4. See Bither (2016); Gronau et al. (2017), and Collecting the Performative (2012–14), a research network initiated by Tate Modern to examine emerging practice for collecting and conserving performance-based art. Available at: https​://ww​w.tat​e.org​. uk/a​bout-​us/pr​oject​s/col​lecti​ng-pe​rform​ative​. 5. See Giannachi, Kaye, and Shanks (2012). 6. See, for example, Shannon Jackson’s chapter titled “Staged Management: Theatricality and Institutional Critique” in Social Works (2011), where she focuses on the work of Allan Sekula, Andrea Fraser, and William Pope.L., as well as Young (2014). 7. The “live art” Marranca refers to here is not the Live Art Lois Keidan would make prevalent in the UK. 8. For more on this antitheatrical bias in the historiography of Live Art in the UK, see, in particular, Hoffmann (2005). See also Shalson (2012) for a critique of Hoffmann. In contrast to performance art, Shalson argues “that theatre persists as an object of endurance in Live Art” (106). 9. See, for example, Muñoz (1999); Fusco (2000); Cheng (2002); Phelan (2012); Schneider (2014); Tancons (2015); Gaines (2017); Nyong’o (2018); Altinay et al. (2019); Laster (2019).

REFERENCES Altinay, Ayse Gul, Maria José Contreras, Zeynep Gambetti, and Alisa Solomon (eds) (2019). Women Mobilizing Memory. Performances of Protest. New York: Columbia University Press. Ayers, Robert (2010). “The Knife Is Real, the Blood Is Real, and the Emotions Are Real.” A Sky Filled with Shooting Stars. Available online: http:​//www​.asky​fille​dwith​shoot​ingst​ ars.c​om/wo​rdpre​ss/?p​=1197​. Bailes, Sara Jane (2011). Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Behrndt, Synne and Cathy Turner (eds) (2008). Dramaturgy and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bither, Philip (2016). “Collecting,” in Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola (eds) In Terms of Performance. The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia Arts Research Center, University of California, Berkeley Credits and Artist Index. Available online: http:​//www​.inte​rmsof​perfo​rmanc​e.sit​e/key​words​/coll​ectin​g/phi​lip-b​ither​. Bishop, Claire (2011). “Unhappy Days in the Art World? De-skilling Theatre, Re-skilling Performance.” Brooklyn Rail, December 10. Carlson, Marvin (1996). Performance: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Cheng, Meiling (2002). In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cody, Gabrielle and Meiling Cheng (eds) (2016). Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres. New York and London: Routledge.

32

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Ferdman, Bertie (2018). Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Fuchs, Elinor (1996). The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fusco, Coco (ed.) (2000). Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas. London and New York: Routledge. Giannachi, Gabriella, Nick Kaye, and Michael Shanks (eds) (2012). Archaeologies of Presence. London: Routledge. Gaines, Malik (2017). Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible. New York: New York University Press. Gronau, Barbara, Matthias von Hartz, and Carolin Hochleichter (2017). How to Frame: On the Threshold of Performing and Visual Arts. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Grotowski, Jerzy and Michel A. Moos (1995). “From the Theatre Company to Art as Vehicle,” in Thomas Richards (ed. and trans.), At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions, 115–35. London and New York: Routledge. Hoffmann, Beth (2005). “Radicalism and the Theatre in Genealogies of Live Art.” Performance Research 14, no. 1: 95–105. Jackson, Shannon (2011). Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge. Jackson, Shannon (2014a). “The Way We Perform Now.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 (December): 55–61. Jackson, Shannon (2014b). “Performativity and Its Addressee.” Walker Living Collections Catalogue. Available at: http:​//wal​kerar​t.org​/coll​ectio​ns/pu​blica​tions​/perf​ormat​ivity​/ perf​ormat​ivity​-and-​its-a​ddres​see/. Jones, Amelia (2012). “Theories and Histories: Introduction,” in Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (eds), Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History, 1–3. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. Kirby, Michael (1965). “The New Theatre.” The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter): 23–43. Kroeber, Gavin and Robert Quillen (2014). “Postshow Theatre.” Theater 44, no. 3: 19–29. Laster, Dominika (2019). Decolonial Gestures: A Symposium on Indigenous Performance, University of New Mexico in collaboration with the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art (MoCNA), Tricklock Company, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the UNM Art Museum. Available at: https://www.decolonialgestures.com/about (accessed April 1, 2019). Lehmann, Hans-Thies ([1999] 2006). Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen JürsMunby. New York: Routledge. Marranca, Bonnie (1996). The Theatre of Images. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Marranca, Bonnie (1997). “Book Review: Happenings and Other Acts.” PAJ 19, no. 2: 115–20. Marranca, Bonnie (1999). “Bodies of Action, Bodies of Thought: Performance and Its Critics.” PAJ 21, no. 1: 11–23. Martin, Carol (2010). Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CROSS-DISCIPLINARITY AND ANTITHEATRICAL HISTORIOGRAPHIES

33

Martin, Carol (2012). Theatre of the Real. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McMillan, Uri (2015). Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. New York: New York University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nyong’o, Tavia (2018). Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. New York: New York University Press. Phelan, Peggy (ed.) (2012). Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983. London and New York: Routledge. Romanska, Magda (2012). The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor. London: Anthem Press. Schechner, Richard (1988). Performance Theory. New York: Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca (2014). Theatre & History. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shalson, Lara (2012). “On the Endurance of Theatre in Live Art.” Contemporary Theatre Review 22, no. 1: 106–19. Shepherd, Simon (2016). The Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skimin, Eleanor (2018). “Reproducing the White Bourgeois: The Sitting-Room Drama of Marina Abramović.” TDR/The Drama Review 62, no. 1 (Spring): 79–97. Tancons, Claire and Krista Thompson (eds) (2015). EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean. New Orleans: Contemporary Art Center New Orleans. Available at: https​://ww​w.cla​ireta​ncons​.com/​curat​ing/e​n-mas​-carn​ival-​and-p​erfor​mance​-art-​of-th​ecar​ibbea​n-2/ (accessed April 3, 2019). Van Kerkhoven, Marianne (1994). “On Dramaturgy.” Theaterschrift 4/5, no. 12: 8–32. Available at: http://sarma.be/docs/3108. Young, Paul David (2014). NewARTtheatre: Evolutions of the Performance Aesthetic. New York: PAJ Publications.

34

PART III

Essays

36

CHAPTER 3.1

How Performance Art Makes History: Artists’ Auto-histories of Happenings and Fluxus in the 1960s HEIKE ROMS

To begin at what many consider to be the beginning: when art publisher Thames & Hudson brought out RoseLee Goldberg’s Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present in 1979, the book was advertised as the “first history of performance” (Goldberg 1979: back cover), a claim that has since become widely accepted in the literature on performance art. However, Goldberg’s considerable achievement in surveying more than half a century of artistic practice notwithstanding, the assertion that she was the first to do so was already debatable in 1979. After all, five years earlier, the very same publishing house had issued Adrian Henri’s Environments and Happenings (or Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance in its US edition; both 1974), a book that, like Goldberg’s study, traced the roots of contemporary performance practices back to the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century1 and beyond. And Henri wasn’t the first to do so either. The earliest attempts to historicize the emerging performance-based artworks of the 1960s and 1970s (even before the term “performance art” was coined in the early 1970s) developed near concurrently to these works. They occurred not as part of recognized art historical publishing, teaching, or scholarship, but instead formed part of the performance, publication, or documentation practice of the artists themselves (and sometimes of the critics and curators who worked closely with them).2 I want to propose that they can be considered as forms of a “self-” or “auto”-historicization practice that has been integral to the history of performance art. In this chapter, I will examine two key instances of these early “auto-histories.” I will begin with a discussion of what is possibly the first major body of critical writing

38

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

about performance-based art, namely the cluster of publications on Happenings that appeared in 1965–6 in the span of just over a year (Becker and Vostell 1965; Hansen 1965; Kaprow 1966; Kirby 1965a; Kirby and Schechner 1965). Each publication combined discursive accounts with visual material in an attempt to chart the development of the form. My second set of examples is the various mapping and timeline projects carried out by artists affiliated with Fluxus (George Maciunas; Wolf Vostell; Nam June Paik; and Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi) in the mid- to late 1960s, which applied cartographic and chronographic techniques to figure the evolution of the network. While the Happenings publications and the majority of the Fluxus maps were not explicitly conceived as histories of their subjects, they nonetheless historicized them with the help of documents, descriptions, and diagrams. By “historicize,” I refer here to conceptions of origin, identifications of ancestry, and the modeling of developments that sought to frame performance practices historically as well as programmatically. They proved to be influential: enduring tropes such as the connection with the historical avant-gardes, the positioning of New York as the birthplace of performance-based art, and the general American–European bias of its history were all introduced by these early auto-histories (although, as we shall see, not uniformly accepted even then). What are the wider stakes in seeking out these early auto-historicization practices associated with performance? The relationship between performance and its historicization has frequently been considered paradoxical, although the nature of that paradox is differently understood. Amelia Jones, who posed it as a question (“Live Art in Art History: A Paradox?”, Jones 2008), has examined how the notion that a history of performance may be paradoxical is in effect the product of a certain art historical orthodoxy, which has “systematically ignored” (151) time-based and body-based practices as these challenge entrenched ideologies of art as timeless and disinterested. Peggy Phelan, on the other hand, has located the issue more fundamentally within the very nature of performance. For her, “the ontological quality of performance rests on its ephemeral nature” (2005: 500) (or, as she famously put it elsewhere, “Performance’s being [. . .] becomes itself through disappearance”; 1993: 146). The ambition to capture a history of performance that takes a narrative form is therefore “paradoxical” for Phelan because it “risks missing the performative force of the art it seeks to comprehend”—“performance lives in the now,” she contends, “while narrative histories describe it later” (2005: 500). And Adrian Heathfield, in a text that “quietly dialogues” (2012: 34, footnote 3) with Phelan’s equation of performance with disappearance, also takes an ontological approach, but he identifies the quality of performance itself as bearing a paradox due to its specific temporality: “it exists both now and then, it leaves and lasts” (2012: 27). Imprinting itself on the memories of its spectators or leaving behind objects, spaces, and documents, performance, Heathfield concludes, already “carries with(in) itself the means of its historicization” (2012: 28). Performance’s capacity for self-historicization has been widely examined in relation to twenty-first-century reenactment practices or new curatorial approaches to the exhibition of performance art. This capacity is, however, not the outcome of a recent “historical turn” in performance art, but rather has always been a feature of it. Attempts to develop

HOW PERFORMANCE ART MAKES HISTORY

39

non- or even anti-narrative, embodied, and performative forms of accounting for performance’s histories began, I suggest, with the auto-histories in the 1960s and 1970s. There are other examples for these early auto-histories of performance art that possibly would have represented such attempts more obviously. Among them are early reenactments, including those of Joseph Beuys’s 1965 action Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt by artists Vettor Pisani (Il Coniglio non ama Joseph Beuys [The Rabbit does not like Joseph Beuys]) and Clive Robertson (The Sculptured Politics of Joseph Beuys), both in 1975; or exhibition projects such as the Happening & Fluxus retrospective curated by Harald Szeemann in Cologne in 1970 (Holdar 2017). Compared to their recognizably embodied and performance-based nature, the paper-based publications and maps or diagrams I have chosen to analyze seem much closer in format to conventional historical accounts. It is precisely this, though, that makes them worth examining. The page was already a familiar space for both Happenings and Fluxus artists: their auto-histories were extensions of the Happenings script and the Fluxus score that transformed the specific visualdiscursive qualities of these artistic practices into practices of historiographical operation. In his work on the writing of history, Michel de Certeau has defined the “historiographical operation” as “the combination of a social place, ‘scientific’ practices, and writing” (1988: 57; original emphasis). In the case of the early autohistories of Happenings and Fluxus, I wish to suggest, the common places of historymaking that were being used were the “book” and the “timeline.” I will subject the examples to a close reading in order to identify what attendant “‘scientific’ practices” (i.e., historiographic procedures for the production of historical knowledge) were evoked in each case. I will focus on four such practices, which I will term the “anthological,” the “archival,” the “anecdotal,” and the “curatorial.” An anthological approach creates a history by assembling the most representative occurrences of its kind; an archival approach collects a body of material and subjects it to different orders (alphabetical, typological, etc.); an anecdotal approach foregrounds the personal and social fabric of historical developments; and a curatorial approach establishes and makes public thematic and motivic connections. I will examine how by approaching the historiographic place that is the book or the timeline through adapting one of these four practices, the artists “wrote” (in the widest sense, as this involved showing as well as telling, visual as much as discursive material) their own histories of their evolving performance work. And they involved their readers/ viewers in this historiographical operation, encouraging them to engage with the documents, descriptions, and diagrams on display in ways that often mirrored the participatory nature of their artistic practice. However, I will also explore how this created a certain tension around the position of the artists themselves. After all, these auto-histories of performance belonged to a broader development in the 1960s that saw artists of all disciplines increasingly taking charge of the discourses about their work, foremost through practices of self-publishing and self-documentation. They thereby also reinforced their own authorial position over their work and its histories at a time when the participatory nature of their performance practice might otherwise have challenged it.

40

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

DOCUMENTING PERFORMANCE ART’S HISTORIES: ACCOUNTING FOR HAPPENINGS In 1965, four surveys of the performance-based art events collectively known as Happenings were published within a few months of one another by some of the key artists and observers of the scene: Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology by Michael Kirby; Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art; Jürgen Becker and Wolf Vostell’s German language Happenings. Fluxus—Pop Art—Nouveau Réalisme. Eine Dokumentation; and a special issue on the topic co-edited by Kirby (with Richard Schechner) for one of the leading theater journals in the United States, the Tulane Drama Review (TDR). They were closely followed in 1966 by Allan Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environments & Happenings.3 Why was there such an upsurge of publications in such a short span of time? Ostensibly, it was to do with the contemporaneity and novelty of the form: each publication declared Happenings to be excitingly “new” (Kirby in his editorial for TDR; Kirby 1965b: 23), “young” (Kaprow 1966: 150), “of our time” (Hansen 1965: 1), and “in motion” (orig.: “in Bewegung”; Becker in Becker and Vostell 1965: 7). Such newness needed to be validated through a reference to past practices: a recurrent trope was that of Happenings as a reprisal, extension, or culmination of the radical attitudes and approaches of earlier art practices, especially (though not exclusively) those of the early twentieth-century European avant-garde. However, by the mid-1960s—a good six or seven years after Kaprow had shown his 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, often considered to be the first Happening (although Kaprow had staged similar events the year before), on October 4, 1959, at New York’s Reuben Gallery—this new form had also accumulated a brief history of its own. Becker (in Becker and Vostell 1965: 7), for example, notes that in New York by this time Happenings were already thought to be undergoing a “renaissance” after having temporarily fallen out of fashion. Kirby identifies as the “classical period” (orig.: “klassischen Periode,” Kirby 1965c: 351) of Happenings the period between 1959 and 1962, and thus by 1965 already in the past. The publications therefore historicized Happenings in two distinct ways: they connected contemporary artistic practices to historical ones; and they tracked the development of the present practices themselves as a history that already possessed distinctive points of origin and periods of evolution. These auto-histories of Happenings adapted the commonest place of historymaking: the book. In his study of the history of history books, Reading History in Early Modern England, historian D. R. Woolf argues that “we now take it for granted that history is to be found principally in books. Yet that is a matter of practice, and has not always been the case” (2000: 1). Woolf tracks the rise of the book as historiographical place in the modern period in its close relationship with the emergence of new institutions of historical knowledge-making such as universities, libraries, and publishers, and a growth in general readership. He is particularly interested in how the history book is embedded in many different cultural practices, beyond writing and reading, to include editing, printing, publishing, marketing, collecting, storing, and annotating. A proper study of the commissioning, distribution, and reception history of the mid-1960s books on

HOW PERFORMANCE ART MAKES HISTORY

41

Happenings is beyond the scope of this chapter; however, it is worth noting that the different publication outlets and intended readerships indeed impacted on the respective formats of the books—especially on whether the publication was approached primarily as discursive content or visual content or both. The double identity of the book as a carrier of discourse and as a visual material object is often linked to two different ways of engaging with it: reading as a practice that is seen as linear and successive, and viewing as one that is more immediate and simultaneous. It is this double identity of the book and the concomitant double address to a reader/ viewer that was exploited to different degrees in the Happenings publications. But these publications also have to be considered more specifically in relation to the rise of publishing as a means of artistic practice in the 1960s and 1970s (MœglinDelcroix 2016). While only Kaprow’s book possessed the visual and object qualities commonly associated with an artist book, and while only Hansen’s book was published with an artist publisher (Something Else Press), all four books discussed here were part of the wider movement in the 1960s that saw artists becoming the published authors of texts and commentators on and historians of their own work. Michael Kirby’s Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, compiled for generalist New York publishing house E. P. Dutton, addressed itself to readers who had “heard of Happenings but never seen one,” and for whom the book would convey “the sense of the experience itself as fully as possible in the printed word” (Kirby 1965a: dust jacket). For this purpose, as Philip Auslander has observed, the publication is “presented as a collection of happenings rather than a book about happenings” (Auslander 2018: 74). It follows the common format of a play anthology: five New York-based (male) Happening protagonists (Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg) are represented with scripts of selected works created between 1959 and 1963, during the aforementioned “classical period” of Happenings according to Kirby. The scripts are combined with artists’ statements and detailed descriptions of their performance (unattributed but likely provided by Kirby himself, at the time a writer, teacher, and theater director who had been a spectator at many Happenings) alongside photographic documentation (with captions allowing for cross-referencing to the descriptions). The unified style in which each of the works is documented through the connections made between discursive and visual material (artist statement, script, description, and photographs) helps to render their formal diversity into an identifiable Happenings aesthetic, defined by Kirby’s introduction (programmatically as well as analytically) as a “compartmented structure” of “diverse alogical elements” (Kirby 1965a: 21; his emphasis). But this style of presentation also historicizes the works: by using the past tense throughout and illustrating specific moments with captioned black-andwhite images in the manner of newspaper reportage, the book emphasizes that the events it documents are in the past, and that the experience it tries to convey of them in the present is always mediated through these words and images. (Despite the detail of the documentary record making it potentially possible, there is also no indication of the Happenings being offered to be restaged in the future.) The “historiographical operation” that is used by Kirby, I want to suggest, is that of an “anthological” history (an approach he repeated, with some modifications, in his

42

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

co-edited special issue on Happenings for TDR later that year; Kirby and Schechner 1965).4 Such an approach documents the history of its subject by collecting the most representative occurrences of its kind between the covers of a book. Yet by doing so, it presents the defining moments of this history as already having occurred, which implicitly contradicts Kirby’s portrayal of Happenings as a form of “new theater” with a future history yet to come. Covering the same New York Happenings scene, but from the perspective of having been one of its core artists, Al Hansen wrote A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art for Dick Higgins’s imprint of artists’ books, Something Else Press, with the more future-focused intention that the book may not only “inform” but also inspire its readers to try their “own experiments” (Hansen 1965: dust jacket). Yet, Hansen’s book is not just a primer but also a memoir: its portrayal of the evolution of Happenings is told through Hansen’s own development as an artist. The “historiographical operation” that is at work here is that of an anecdotal approach, which foregrounds the personal and social fabric of historical developments. Theater historian Jacky Bratton has examined how anecdotal histories such as those written by actors, for example, frequently served to create group identities among them (Bratton 2003). And from Hansen’s account—supported by photographs that are captioned with personalized details on the people as much as the events shown, evoking the tone and format of a photo album—there emerges indeed a lively impression of the Happenings community. The artistic networks that Hansen records in this way reached beyond New York and involved artists in the United States, Europe, and Japan (Tomas Schmit, Wolf Vostell, Nam June Paik, and the Gutai group are named). Recognizing a much wider spectrum of possible artistic involvements in Happenings than Kirby, Hansen also features the work of female artists, whether in the role of the author of the works (Carolee Schneemann, Betty Thomson, or Simone Forti) or as performers to whom he attributes considerable compositional input (Meredith Monk and Phoebe Neville). Hansen’s approach too implied a contradiction, however, as the New York scene is portrayed as exemplary for Happenings’ emergence across the globe at the same time as being celebrated as exceptional and unique. Leading German Happenings protagonist, Wolf Vostell, and his coeditor Jürgen Becker in their appraisal of the international scene, Happenings. Fluxus—Pop Art— Nouveau Réalisme. Eine Dokumentation—published as an affordable paperback for the major German publisher, Rowohlt, and evidently also hoping for a general readership—paid, not unsurprisingly, greater attention to European examples of Happenings than either Kirby or Hansen by including the works of artists such as Bazon Brock, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Hermann Nitsch, and Vostell himself. Moreover, Becker and Vostell consider Happenings as exemplary for a wider “tendency toward action and event” (orig.: “Tendenz zur Aktion, zum Ereignis”; Becker in Becker and Vostell 1965: 18) in artmaking that connected it to the other art practices with which it shares the book’s title. As in Kirby’s publication, works are documented through discursive material such as artists’ writings, biographies, scripts, scores, and notations, which are combined with extensive visual material and (a distinct feature of this book) reprints of newspaper coverage. But Becker and Vostell’s historiographic

HOW PERFORMANCE ART MAKES HISTORY

43

approach, I want to propose, is more archival than that of Kirby. “Archival” here refers not just to possessing the qualities of a comprehensive collection. It also, in Foucault’s sense, stands for the structure behind such a collection that determines the terms of discourse (Foucault 1972: 129). Contrary to Becker’s claim that the book did not attempt to cover Happenings in their totality but rather with the help of “extreme examples” (orig.: “an extremen Beispielen”; Becker in Becker and Vostell 1965: 18), the book includes an almost overwhelming wealth of documents. Very little narrative framing is provided, professedly so that the events would “present themselves” (orig.: “stellen sich selber dar”; 18). But the editors intervened in this collection through other means, by using archival tools such as alphabetic ordering, chronologies, and indices. And they redefined what might justifiably belong to such an archive by including additional material, most notably photographs of recent significant political events such as the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War. The discourse that is being shaped in this way positions Happenings not merely as artworks but also as a vital and expansive cultural practice that was persistently reflecting on and intervening in the real. Finally, Allan Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environments & Happenings, from art book publisher Harry N. Abrams, is the most formally inventive of the publications, and the one that comes closest to approaching the book as an artwork in itself. Oversized and bound in tactile hessian, it is an object to be handled as well as viewed and read. The book is divided into three distinctive sections. The final section features, similar to Kirby’s anthology, a “selection of Happenings” (Kaprow 1966: 210): scenarios, instructions, and photographs document forty-two works by international artists or groups (the Gutai, Lebel, Vostell, George Brecht, Kenneth Dewey, Milan Knízák and Soňa Švecová, and Kaprow himself). Preceding it is a critical essay (originally written in 1959 and since revised), printed on brown paper, in which Kaprow delivers an overview of the “recent development in the arts” (Kaprow 1966: 150) that gave the book its title. The most intriguing section comprises over 100 black-and-white photographs of works by dozens of (mostly US-based) artists that open the book without any preamble other than the invitation to “Step right in” (Kaprow 1966: 1–2). They are ordered not chronologically or by creator but through suggesting motivic links between them, occasionally interrupted by black or white pages, some with dots in the center, offering momentary repose. Poetic headings identify shared themes such as “Entrances and Enclosures,” “Hanging Things,” “Animals,” or “Drink Paint Enjoy Work.” The nonnarrative approach creates a sense of synchronicity and interconnection: Kaprow hoped that it would cause a “reverie” for the reader that approximates “the character and meaning of the individual works, as well as their larger relations to each other and to a moment in time” (Kaprow 1966: 21). Within that synchronous space, however, there are also subtle suggestions of evolutionary trajectories, to which I will return later. The book’s approach to the history of Happenings, I want to suggest, is curatorial, establishing and making public different thematic and motivic connections between works, artists, and processes in a space of display that here takes the form of a photo essay on the page. The books’ chosen formats also shaped the accounts they advanced about the origins, historical roots, and development of Happenings. The origin story of the

44

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Happening was generally portrayed in two ways: one presumed its evolution from a single geographic source, the other as a parallel development emerging from multiple sources (e.g., Osaka, Paris, Cologne). Kirby represents the first: for him the “germinal development of the Happening was in New York” (Kirby 1965a: 10). He was careful, though, not to single out any particular work as the origin event: Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was significant for Kirby because it gave a name (“Happening”) to emergent performance practices that were being developed simultaneously by several artists in the city, who “know each other and each other’s work” (10). It is not the origin of the Happening in a single work, therefore, but its origin in a singular scene that was anthologized by Kirby: with this he hailed the Happening as an art form distinctive to New York, from where its “widening aesthetic ripples” (Kirby 1965b: 41) eventually spread to other places. Kirby’s anthological approach of collecting and documenting the exemplary works of this scene underscored his argument about “formative propinquity” (Kirby 1965a: 10). The multi-origin approach that considered Happening’s emergence to have occurred in different geographical sites simultaneously was represented by Becker and Vostell, who list an event by Vostell (Das Theater ist das Ereignis auf der Strasse, Paris, 1958) alongside one by Kaprow (without title, Douglass College New Jersey, 1958) as the first parallel occurrences of the form (Becker and Vostell 1965: 36). The archival format of Becker and Vostell’s book, with its inclusion of a greater diversity of material on a larger selection of works from a broader range of locations, supports the argument about Happening’s multisource origins. However, looking at it from another perspective, Becker and Vostell were committed to identifying singular origin events (including Vostell’s own) albeit across multiple locales, while Kirby was concerned with multiple significant works albeit created in the same place—the relationships between singularity (of origin) and multiplicity (of events that evolve from it) are here figured in seemingly opposite but in fact complementary ways. Kirby and Becker and Vostell also differed in the way they conceived of the antecedents of Happenings. Like many other histories of the Happening since, Kirby’s book locates these in the avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s, in particular in futurism, Dada, and surrealism, from where he drew a “clear progression” to the Happenings via the work of John Cage (Kirby 1965a: 32). Kirby thereby considers Happenings to be grounded in past artistic practices; though, importantly, not determined by them. He forges a European lineage for the Happening at the same time as portraying it as a new and distinctly American avant-garde of the present.5 A differently nuanced history is offered by Becker’s introduction. He regards the Happening as the final manifestation of a growing desire for the real in art (“Erfassung von Wirklichkeit”; Becker in Becker and Vostell 1965: 9) that reaches back to the nineteenth century and thereby connects Happenings to realism and naturalism via Dada in the 1910s–1920s and pop art in the 1950s–1960s—a point further emphasized by Becker and Vostell’s inclusion of political photography among the performance documents. An entirely different evolutionary model for the Happening was proposed by Kaprow and also expressed visually. The introductory photographic section of the book ends with the juxtaposition of two

HOW PERFORMANCE ART MAKES HISTORY

45

images (Kaprow 1966: 142–3): on the left-hand side is one of Hans Namuth’s famous portraits of Jackson Pollock at work in his studio (1950), and on the righthand side of the double-page spread is a photo of Kaprow (and his son) standing in the middle of his environment for Yard at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1961, awaiting the visitors who would populate and activate the work.6 Art historian William Kaizen has suggested that “These two images bookend a trajectory, marking an origin on the left and its logical outcome on the right” (Kaizen 2003: 81). They embody an evolution that Kaprow discussed in one of his early essays as “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (Kaprow [1958] 1993): from the abstract expressionism of Pollock and his use of the canvas as a space for action, to assemblage, to environment, and, finally, to the Happening, every step performing an “extension” (Kaprow 1966: 184) of the previous one in a process that was an “almost logical progress” (165). With these three evolutionary models, Kirby, Becker, and Kaprow also advanced three distinct conceptions of where Happenings “belonged” in the genealogies of art. For Kirby, the Happening is part of the history of theater, where it helped to redefine traditional theatrical logics of acting, material hierarchies, and static performer-audience divisions to bring theater in line with contemporary experimentations in other art forms. For Kaprow, the Happening belongs to the traditions of visual art, where it helped to expand the accepted spaces and materials of artmaking through the blurring of art and life. And for Becker, the Happening contributed to the history of modernism in general, where it was the radical apotheosis of modern art’s perpetual effort to break down the barriers between art and life.

DIAGRAMMING PERFORMANCE ART’S HISTORIES: MAPPING FLUXUS In the late 1960s, George Maciunas, principle organizer and chronicler of the international network of artists known as Fluxus, contributed to a yearlong experiment in art education by submitting “A Preliminary Proposal for a 3-Dimensional System of Information Storage and Presentation” (Maciunas 1970). Maciunas proposed the “major fault” in the educational system to be the “inefficiency” with which an everincreasing body of knowledge was conveyed through the “slow, time-consuming, linear-narrative method” (Maciunas 1970) of using books or lectures. He sought to counter it with a “time-saving, speedily comprehensible, chart-like, 3-dimensional system of information storage and information presentation” (Maciunas 1970). Being something of a polymath, Maciunas had, for many years, kept stock of his own expansive studies into history and art history with just such a system: charts and timelines that extended over multiple sheets of paper, and even expanded into the third dimension with the help of notes stuck vertically onto the horizontal flatness of the page. Among his charts were several that pictured the history of Fluxus. In 1966, he published Fluxus (Its Historical Development and Relationship to Avantgarde Movements) (Maciunas 1966), which will be the focus of my discussion (and referred to in the following as the Fluxus-chart). It was followed in the same year by the Expanded Arts Diagram (1966), which applied similar design principles; and in

46

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

1973 by his never completed magnum opus, Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and other 4 Dimensional, Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial and Tactile Art Forms (Incomplete).7 Maciunas was not the only Fluxus-affiliate at the time who used chronographic or cartographic techniques to account for the development of the network: other such diagrammatic accounts are Wolf Vostell’s trio of maps, PreFluxus New York Avant 1962, Pre-Fluxus Cologne Avant 1962, and Fluxus Wiesbaden 1962 (n.d.);8 Nam June Paik’s Fluxus Island in Décollage Ocean (1963); and Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi’s long-term Spatial Poems (1965–75) project. They were extensions of the scoring practices that played a key part in Fluxus’s artistic output. As in many of the Fluxus scores—which are printed objects as well as worded instructions—text is present but condensed and incorporated into the visually defined field of the page.9 The diagrams too were often distributed and sold, alongside scores and performance notations, as limited edition multiples. As was the case with the Happenings publications, the Fluxus charts and maps were partly attempts to establish an artistic genealogy by laying claim to past art practices, and partly accounts of Fluxus’s own short history. The desire to do so, I will suggest in what follows, was likely inspired by the wrangling in the mid-1960s over the future directions of the network that led to a split in the group and to changes in its artistic activities. These diagrammatic auto-histories of Fluxus adapted one of the common places of history-making: the timeline. In Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, historians Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton propose that “from the most ancient images to the most modern, the line serves as a central figure in the representation of time” (2010: 14). It was through the timeline’s modern form developed in the eighteenth century, “with a single axis and a regular, measured distribution to dates” (14), that a visual scheme was found to communicate the particular conception of historical time associated with Western modernity: history as linear, uniform, directional, and irreversible (19). Maps, on the other hand, seem to have a different, spatial, and thus atemporal relationship to the line. However, cartographer Denis Wood, in The Power of Maps, proposes that maps are not visual depictions of spatial terrain “as it really is,” but they make “present—they represent— the accumulated thought and labor of the past” (1992: 1, original emphasis). Their lines emerge from the histories of navigating, exploring, conceptualizing, and communicating that terrain. It is this close connection between chronography and cartography as practices with a shared temporal dimension that was explored in Fluxus’s charts and maps. Maciunas’s Fluxus-chart (Maciunas 1966) (Figure 3.1.1) is in the form of a slim, upright image, the lower part of which depicts the “historical development of fluxus and related movements” with the help of a diagram—because this history, Maciunas proposed in a short introduction that is part of the chart, is “not linear as a chronological commentary would be, but rather planometrical.” On the right-hand side of the diagram are vertically arranged boxes that list the names of artists associated with Fluxus (e.g., Maciunas, George Brecht, and Shiomi) and its various contemporary “avant-garde movements,” which include Happenings (e.g., Kaprow), “Kinetic Theater” (e.g., Ann [i.e., Anna] Halprin), and “Independents” (to which Maciunas counts Joseph Beuys and La Monte

HOW PERFORMANCE ART MAKES HISTORY

47

FIGURE 3.1.1:  George Maciunas (1931–1978), Fluxus (Its Historical Development and Relationship to Avant-garde Movements), c. 1966. Offset, sheet: 17 × 5 9/16” (43.2 × 14.2 cm). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Acc. no.: 2454.2008. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/ Scala, Florence.

48

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Young). Their respective aesthetic affiliations are set against a timeline leading from 1959 to 1966; but the boxes are left open on one side to indicate their continuation into the future. To the left and perpendicular to the timeline are boxes indicating historical influences; they are aligned along an axis that ranges from “Baroque Theater” on the one side to “Natural Events” and “Jokes and Gags” on the other and are only very loosely staggered to indicate historical spread. Between the boxes run connecting and overlapping lines of different thickness that represent the relative strength of influence each historical source had on the movements in question. The upright format of the Fluxus-chart tilts the horizontal shape commonly associated with timelines into the vertical, thereby placing the focus not on the (horizontal) expansion of historical time but on the (vertical) extension of the present, which is defined by the plurality of interrelated yet nonetheless distinct avant-garde artistic practices. The past is temporally compressed and figured chiefly as shared ancestry that is there to explain and validate the present—the Fluxus-chart is really a genealogical rather than a chronological diagram, more family tree than timeline, focusing on people rather than events. However, it does not follow a modernist version of art history as teleogical development that leads from one art movement to another, which in turn supersedes it—too many and too multidirectional are the possible paths that Maciunas plots between the various forms and movements, and no point of origin is identified. But there is, nonetheless, an impression of lineage: Fluxus, prominently placed at the top of the chart, is presented (and thus legitimized) as an heir to Dada, Duchamp, and Cage. Its sources, though, are also nonart: as Maciunas’s introduction states, “Since fluxus activities occur at the border or even beyond the border of art, it is of utmost importance to the comprehension of fluxus and its development, that this borderline be rationaly [sic] defined.” The lines of influence leading from nonart categories such as “Jokes” and “Natural Events” to Fluxus are indeed depicted as being stronger than those connecting Fluxus to any of its artistic predecessors. In summary, instead of a timeline’s representation of time as irreversible and to be read in one way only, the Fluxus-chart has no clear entry point and no singular linear path. To read it, we, too, must tilt our heads, tracing the branching and crisscrossing lines back and forth in multiple directions. What at first glance may look like a regular timeline-cum-family tree, in effect adopts a more complex rhizomatic structure that demands an active engagement from the reader/ viewer. While the adoption of this nonlinear and nonnarrative approach suggests that the chart may be used for creating diverse and potentially divergent accounts of Fluxus, art historian Hannah Higgins has proposed that the Fluxus-chart was used by Maciunas, conversely, to exert his authority over the history of the network. Higgins argues that the chart “graphically presents Fluxus to the world as a historically validated form of avant-garde activism that is consistent with Maciunas’s own view of the historical-avant-garde” (2002: 80). It figures the exclusion from Fluxus of artists who “either chose a nonlinear relationship to the historical avant-garde or denied the relationship altogether” (78), among them Nam June Paik and Higgins’s parents, Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles. Their

HOW PERFORMANCE ART MAKES HISTORY

49

lines of involvement with Fluxus are depicted by Maciunas’s chart as terminating in 1964, and Maciunas justified this by suggesting the artists had “detached themselves” as a result of their “excessive individualism,” “opportunism,” or “competitive attitude” (Maciunas 1966). Their “detachment,” whether voluntary or not, followed a period of intense conflicts in 1963–4 over the aesthetic and political direction of Fluxus and its relationship to traditional cultural institutions.10 And the Fluxus-chart clearly represents its creator’s version of events. Hannah Higgins contrasts Maciunas’s chart with the Intermedia Chart designed thirty years later in 1995 by Dick Higgins, which depicts the many forms of what the latter famously termed “intermedia” art practice (e.g., Fluxus, Happenings, Dance Theater, or Concrete Poetry) and their intersections as concentric overlapping circles of different sizes: its “bubbles hover in space, rejecting an art/anti-art historical framework such as Maciunas used in his time line” (Higgins 2002: 88–90). While not without an implied sense of temporality (as-yet-unknown future developments are hinted at by the use of question marks), Dick Higgins’s chart avoids a historicization of Fluxus altogether, instead mapping formal intersections between different art practices, which may or may not have been historical contemporaries. The diagrams by Vostell, Paik, and Shiomi also differ from Maciunas’s Fluxuschart in using spatial-cartographic rather than temporal-chronographic tools for figuring the development of Fluxus. Wolf Vostell’s contribution is three linked drawings, captioned Pre-Fluxus New York Avant 1962; Pre-Fluxus Cologne Avant 1962; and Fluxus Wiesbaden 1962 (n.d.) (Figure 3.1.2). They depict one of the origin moments of Fluxus—the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik festival in Wiesbaden in 1962, the first event to use the name in its title—alongside the artistic scenes of New York and Cologne prior to it. Vostell uses winding and twisting line drawings to represent the career paths of a group of artists, suggesting that Fluxus emerged when those meandering paths crossed one another within the context of a specific place. He gives equal historical weight to the Cologne roots of Fluxus (where Vostell, Paik, and Ben Patterson were based, and whose influences are identified as Stockhausen and Kagel) as to the New York ones (with Maciunas, Brecht, and Henry Flynt, whose influences are named as Cage, Dada, and the Futurists/Marinetti). And the depiction of individual paths with their own trajectory, sometimes touching, other times drifting apart, suggests that Vostell did not equate the development of Fluxus with a singular course. Vostell’s drawings have an ambiguous form—lacking any recognizable underlying spatial or temporal measure, they can be read as both map and timeline. Yet, however ambiguous, dynamic, and open-ended, Vostell also used them to assert his own place in Fluxus’s origins, in fact portraying the axis emerging from his name and that of Kaprow’s in a line marked “Happenings” as thicker and more prominent than that emanating from Maciunas. For his Fluxus Island in Décollage Ocean (1963), first published as a poster in 1963, Nam June Paik represents Fluxus not as a network of artists nor as a timeline of events or a family tree of influences, but as a very personal place in the shape of an imaginary island (Figure 3.1.3). As Rosenberg and Grafton have shown (2010),

50

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURE 3.1.2:  Wolf Vostell (1932–1998), Pre-Fluxus New York Avant 1962; Pre-Fluxus Cologne Avant 1962; Fluxus Wiesbaden 1962 (n.d.). Courtesy of Happening Vostell Archive. Government of Extremadura. © The Wolf Vostell Estate.

HOW PERFORMANCE ART MAKES HISTORY

51

FIGURE 3.1.3:  Nam June Paik (1932–2006), Fluxus Island in Décollage Ocean, 1963. Offset lithograph, 15 3/4 × 22 9/16” (40 × 57.3 cm). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Acc. no.: 3211.2008.x1-x7. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

visual analogies between historical time and geographic space have a long tradition in the graphic representation of time. And Paik’s map too depicts not actual landscape features but territories of history and autobiography. Internally divided by both the 38th parallel north and the Berlin Wall (then partitioning Paik’s two home countries, Korea and Germany), Paik’s island has places named after historical events (Stalingrad; Auschwitz) and personal life events, and after scenarios both utopian (“The Temple of united religion”; “the School of indeterminate LOVE”) and apocalyptic (“Assassinated place of N.J. Paik”). Art history is closely mapped onto autobiography and both are jointly intertwined with the key instances of violence and conflict in the twentieth century. Historiographically speaking, the past, present, and future are indistinguishable on this map—Paik represents them as contemporaneous presences that share the same autobiographical terrain. Mieko Shiomi’s approach to the charting of Fluxus also applied cartography as a historiographic strategy by mapping events as well as locations. Her ten-year-long work, Spatial Poem (1965–75), comprised nine separate instructions, which were mailed as performance scores to artist colleagues around the world. These artists then realized an action in response, documented it, and mailed the documentation back to Shiomi, who collated the responses in diagrammatic form, including as maps and calendars. While these were then published under Shiomi’s name, they retain an acknowledgment of their distributed authorship.

52

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

SPATIAL POEM No. 2 Around the time listed below What kind of direction are you moving or facing toward? - either performance or spontaneous please send me a report about it which will be edited on a world map (Shiomi 1966) Below the score was a table that listed the precise time for the requested action for twenty-six different locations, from Hawaii to Sydney, and their respective time zones. The mostly textual “reports” or documentations Shiomi received in return were distributed by her in the form of a limited edition multiple, entitled A FluxAtlas (1966), which she designed with the help of Maciunas (Figure 3.1.4). Not only are the brief texts placed on a map of the world to indicate the locations of the reported actions, but their letters also run in the direction in which the artists were moving at the time, taking the reader’s eye along on their journey. Performance historian Kristine Stiles has proposed that Shiomi’s “text-object-action [. . .] marks out the terrain” (Stiles 1993: 94) of Fluxus performance in the mid-1960s, a terrain Stiles defines as “a sort of metaphysics of the dynamics of social exchange and human action that extends from the infra to the supra—from the personal to the political, from the regional to the international” (93). The map also figures Fluxus’s transformation from being a close-knit group that regularly performed together in the early 1960s to becoming a transcontinental network of artists that kept in communication primarily through the distribution of joint publications projects. For art historian Jessica Santone (2014), Spatial Poem highlights the concurrent shift in Fluxus’s attitudes toward collectivity and community, and to a greater valuing of diverse artistic responses instead of a singular artistic program. I want to consider Spatial Poem No. 2/A FluxAtlas as a further instance of an auto-historicization: the history of Fluxus, Shiomi’s work implies, is not to be equated with past influences or artistic careers, but rather it is the sum of all the actions and events that are being carried out in its name, accessible through the momentary snapshots captured by their documentation.

THE “TOMORROW’S PASTS” OF PERFORMANCE ART Over the past decade or so, performance art (once considered “the runt of the litter of contemporary art,” Phelan 1993: 148) has enjoyed a surge in the critical and institutional attention it receives. And much of this attention is retrospective in nature: whether major museums stage survey exhibitions of pioneering performance artists or important performance scenes, or artists reperform past works of their own or that of others, or scholars reappraise the genealogies of performance art, they are united in looking back at the history of the art form, especially its “classic” period in the 1960s and 1970s. And they frequently do so in a manner that is essentially historiographic—examining how we in the present have come to know,

FIGURE 3.1.4:  Mieko Shiomi (b. 1938), Spatial Poem No. 2, 1966. Offset lithograph, sheet: 14 1/2 × 32 1/2” (36.8 × 82.6 cm). Designer: George Maciunas. Producer: George Maciunas. Publisher: Fluxus. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Acc. no.: 2726.2008.x1-.x102. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

54

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

understand, and represent this history, and how performance itself can be a means for historical knowledge, understanding, and representation. I have argued that such historiographic attention is not the result of a recent “historical turn,” but has always been part of the history-making practices of performance art. In the 1960s and early 1970s, when performance-based art such as Happenings and Fluxus first emerged, artists themselves took charge of historicizing it—what I have termed “auto-histories” of performance. They did so to validate their present work by referring back to past ways of working; the politics of this “return” to the historical avant-garde in particular may have been widely critiqued by theorists of the avant-garde from Peter Bürger to Hal Foster, but it established an enduring template for future performance art histories. In the case of Happenings and Fluxus, their early auto-histories were largely page based, and as such closely aligned with the artistic practices of publishing, documenting, scripting, and scoring of the period. Referring to de Certeau’s understanding of “historiographical operation” as “the combination of a social place, ‘scientific’ practices, and writing” (1988: 57; original emphasis), I have examined how Happenings publications and Fluxus diagrams have put the common pagebased places of history-making that are the “book” and the “timeline” to their own historiographic use. The Happenings books thereby adapted certain historiographic procedures or “scientific’ practices,” which I have distinguished as the “anthological” (Kirby), the “archival” (Becker and Vostell), the “anecdotal” (Hansen), and the “curatorial” (Kaprow). Fluxus charts and maps also invoked similar practices: it is possible to distinguish the “archival” approach of Maciunas, who sought a comprehensive coverage of Fluxus’s history and ancestry in order to delineate its future terms of discourse; the “anthological” approach of Vostell, with its focus on representative artists and their relationships; the “autobiographical” approach of Paik, with its intersection of personal and collective histories; and the “curatorial” approach of Shiomi, which brought into public visibility connections between events, locations, and artists. The resulting auto-histories displayed a high level of self-reflexivity about how they engaged their readers/viewers in their history-making, as may be expected from artists whose work was investigating participation as artistic strategy. The readers of the different books on Happenings were invited to (re)experience the events imaginatively through the medium of print (Kirby), conceive of their own performances in response (Hansen), or find the connections in traversing (perceptually as well as imaginatively) a diverse set of documentary materials (Becker and Vostell) or images (Kaprow). And in order to behold the Fluxus maps and charts, viewers had to tilt their heads to read densely covered diagrams (Maciunas) or trace meandering lines (Vostell), territories of personal history (Paik), or imaginative footsteps (Shiomi) across the page. Yet, for all their participatory address, they remained “auto”-historicizations in the true sense—historizations over which the artists themselves sought to exercise control, often placing themselves at their origins or in their very center. Since what was at stake was not just a concern for the past or even the present of their work,

HOW PERFORMANCE ART MAKES HISTORY

55

but a concern for the “tomorrow’s pasts”11 of performance art, which we now have come to know as its histories.

NOTES 1. For a comparative reading of Goldberg’s and Henri’s books and their different approaches to performance art history, see Hudek (2014). 2. Henri and Goldberg too were, respectively, an artist and curator-critic at the time they published their books. 3. Other notable publications on Happenings that appeared during this period were Susan Sontag’s essay, “An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” written in 1962 but not published until 1965; two of Dick Higgins’s influential articles brought out either side of the year, “Postface” (1964) and “Intermedia” (1965); and Jean-Jacques Lebel’s French-language account, Le Happening (1966). They have been left out of this brief discussion as they would not substantively alter the argument. There had also been earlier publications, including several essays by Allan Kaprow (Kelley 1993), but the publications under discussion, I wish to propose, form the first coherent set of historicizations of Happenings in the period. 4. TDR’s special issue on Happenings, co-edited by Kirby with Richard Schechner, largely dispensed with extensive descriptions in favor of a variety of documentation (including interviews, scores, and visualizations), referring to more recent as well as “classical” Happenings and expanding to include examples of Fluxus (George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, and Letty Eisenhauer) and experimental dance (Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer); Kirby and Schechner (1965). 5. For the unacknowledged influence of African-American performance traditions on the American avant-garde see Schneider (2005). 6. The activation of Yard through visitors was shown on the following page, which concluded the photo essay and was captioned with the words “So Step Right In” (Kaprow 1966: 144). 7. Schmidt-Burkhardt (2003) provides a comprehensive discussion of Maciunas’s many charts. 8. The creation date for Vostell’s drawings is not known, and it is possible that they were produced after the 1960s. 9. For a full discussion of the material and conceptual ambiguities of Fluxus scores see Kotz (2001). 10. Higgins (2002: 71ff) includes an in-depth discussion of the two main disputes among Fluxus-affiliates during the period: the first ignited in connection with a 1963 concert by Karlheinz Stockhausen in New York, which was boycotted by Maciunas and participated in (although critically) by Higgins, Knowles, and Paik; and a 1964 programmatic newsletter, in which Maciunas called for iconoclastic actions directed at museums and other art organizations, an anti-institutional policy not shared by all members of Fluxus. 11. This phrase was coined by Kirby in an editorial for TDR in 1971: “A concern for tomorrow’s past is one reason for documentation of contemporary performances” (Kirby 1971: 3).

56

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

REFERENCES Auslander, P. (2018). Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Becker, J. and W. Vostell (eds) (1965). Happenings. Fluxus—Pop Art—Nouveau Réalisme. Eine Dokumentation. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Bratton, J. (2003). New Readings in Theatre History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Certeau, M. (1988). The Writing of History, translated by T. Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock Publications. Goldberg, R. (1979). Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. London: Thames & Hudson. Hansen, A. (1965). A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art. New York, Paris, Cologne: Something Else Press. Heathfield, A. (2012). “Then Again,” in A. Jones and A. Heathfield (eds), Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, 27–35. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. Henri, A. (1974). Environments and Happenings. London: Thames & Hudson. Higgins, H. (2002). Fluxus Experience. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Holdar, M. (2017). “Doing Things Together: Objectives and Effects of Harald Szeemann’s Happening & Fluxus, 1970.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 6, no. 1: 90–114. Hudek, A. (2014). “In Local News: Adrian Henri’s Total Art,” in C. Marcangeli (ed.), Adrian Henri: Total Artist, 150–69. London: Occasional Papers. Jones, A. (2008). “Live Art in Art History: A Paradox?,” in T. C. Davis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, 151–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaizen, W. (2003). “Framed Space: Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting.” Grey Room 13: 80–107. Kaprow, A. ([1958] 1993). “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” in J. Kelley (ed.), Allan Kaprow: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 1–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaprow, A. (1966). Assemblage, Environments & Happenings. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Kelley, J. (ed.) (1993). Allan Kaprow: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kirby, M. (1965a). Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Kirby, M. (1965b). “The New Theatre.” TDR: Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (T30; Special Issue on Happenings): 23–43. Kirby, M. (1965c). “Das Happening: Ursprünge in New York,” translated by T. Schmit, in J. Becker and W. Vostell (eds), Happenings. Fluxus—Pop Art—Nouveau Réalisme. Eine Dokumentation, 351–5. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Kirby, M. (1971). “An Introduction to T52: Documentation, Criticism and History.” The Drama Review: TDR 15, no. 4 (T52): 3–7.

HOW PERFORMANCE ART MAKES HISTORY

57

Kirby, M. and R. Schechner (eds) (1965). “Special Issue on Happenings.” TDR: Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (T30). Kotz, L. (2001). “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the ‘Event Score.’” October 95: 55–89. Maciunas, G. (1970). “A Preliminary Proposal for a 3-Dimensional System of Information Storage and Presentation,” in S. Simon (ed.), Proposals for Art Education, from a Year Long Study Supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York 1968–1969, 24–26. New York: Carnegie Corporation. Available at http:​//geo​rgema​ciuna​s.com​/wp-c​onten​t/ upl​oads/​2011/​02/Bi​nder1​.pdf (accessed February 15, 2019). Mœglin-Delcroix, A. (2016). “Some Preliminary Observations Toward a Study of the Varieties of Artist Publishers in the Sixties and Seventies,” in A. Gilbert (ed.), Publishing as Artistic Practice, 40–51. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked—The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Phelan, P. (2005). “Shards of a History of Performance Art: Pollock and Namuth Through a Glass, Darkly,” in J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz (eds), A Companion to Narrative Theory, 499–512. Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell. Rosenberg, D. and A. Grafton (2010). Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Santone, J. (2014). “Archiving Fluxus Performances in Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Poem,” in C. Townsend, A. Trott, and R. Davies (eds), Across the Great Divide: Modernism’s Intermedialities, from Futurism to Fluxus, 120–36. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Schmidt-Burkhardt, A. (2003). Maciunas’ “Learning Machines”: From Art History to a Chronology of Fluxus. Berlin: Vice Versa. Stiles, K. (1993). “Between Water and Stone—Fluxus Performance: A Metaphysics of Acts,” in J. Jenkins (ed.), In the Spirit of Fluxus, 63–99. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center. Wood, D., with J. Fels (1992). The Power of Maps. New York: Guildford Press. Woolf, D. R. (2000). Reading History in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 3.2

Queer Performativity: A Critical Genealogy of a Politics of Doing in Art Practice AMELIA JONES

It is taken for granted in the late 2010s that “queer” and “performance” or “performativity” go naturally together. Exploring why we tend to think gender is a performance or performative, and to assume that the more performative it is the more queer it is, I critically examine here the historical intertwining of these terms, as well as of related discourses addressing the concepts of relationality, theatricality, and trans in performance theory and practice, particularly in the United States. I explore the narrowness of these discourses in their hegemonic forms as US-based, most often normatively white and class-privileged, often academic but becoming more common in popular media, clearly linked to late-capitalist and postcolonial formations in European-dominant but especially anglophone cultures. The critical part of the genealogy is thus a relentless attempt to denaturalize in order to better understand the seemingly obvious and true claims of queer theory and performance theory as these have unfolded and become intertwined from their prehistory (I date this to around 1950) to their fully developed hegemonic forms (since the late 1980s).1 This genealogy is assertively partial and itself performative rather than claimed as “truth.” Postcolonial theorist Édouard Glissant wrote parenthetically of his concept of a “poetics of relation,” in which “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” ([1990] 1997: 11). Glissant articulates precisely the forceful yet self-reflexive quality I hope to convey here: “(We are recapitulating what we know of these movements [i.e., shifting relations within and among cultures], in an attempt to consider how they have come into our view. And frequently we make mistakes. What is important is that we start retracing the path for ourselves.)” (48). In this acknowledgment of my partiality and my role in determining a genealogy of queer performance I enact what I am examining—the importance of relationality

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

59

in determinations of “queer,” of “performativity,” and in fact of this genealogy itself, which, paralleling the initial theoretical formulation of the queer performative around 1990, takes shape through negotiations with texts about and practices of queer performance.

POPULAR/ACADEMIC DISCOURSES OF GENDER PERFORMANCE OR QUEER PERFORMATIVITY The concept and enactment of gender performance or queer performativity (two sets of terms that slide together) have become mainstream.2 We now see popular formulations in magazine and newspaper profiles of artists exploring genderqueer sexualities in their work—in 2016–17, for example, performative transwoman Hari Nef appeared on the cover of major fashion magazines and she and Cathy Opie, photographer of Los Angeles queer communities in the 1990s, have been profiled in the New Yorker—and in public debates on social media and television shows starring gender-fluid and transwomen characters (Orange is the New Black and Transparent among them). Even the complex philosophical and psychoanalytically charged theory informing the crystallization of the concept of gender performativity around 1990 by queer feminists Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and then many others, is now relatively mainstream—one sees the word “performative” in the mainstream media in relation to linguistic power or even gender and other identifications.3 The popularization of Butler’s ideas in particular (with Nef noting, “I can Judith Butler my way . . . out of this” in the New Yorker article [2016]) makes it clear that queer feminist theory’s concept of gender performance or queer performativity has become part of at least the North American liberal urban elite lexicon of the rights necessary to live well. I leave aside here the difficulties of understanding the links among radical queer feminist politics, popular culture versions of gender fluidity, transgender politics and performance, and neoliberal late capitalism. Suffice it to say, as William Turner has commented in his 2000 book A Genealogy of Queer Theory, “paradoxically, queer [feminist] theory both depends on and critiques the liberalism of the twentieth-century United States” (2000: 17). This now seemingly natural trajectory of discourse around queer performance/ performativity first crystallized with Butler’s 1988 article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” published in 1990 in revised form as part of the final chapter of her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Perhaps even more crucial to the suturing together of performativity and queer was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work in her 1993 book Tendencies and other publications on gender performativity around the same time—in particular her 1993 article, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” the first text to energetically connect “queer” directly to ”performativity” and to elaborate the latter as a technical term from J. L. Austin’s linguistic philosophy of the mid-1950s (1993a, 1993b). Butler’s 1988 article signals Austin’s term in its title, but, in fact, does not define the term and has little to do with Austin’s concept of the performative—

60

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

rather it focuses on embodiment, via a much-needed attention to phenomenology (the subtitle of the article is “An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”).4 It also eschews the word “queer.” Rather than “queer performativity,” then, Butler mobilizes instead the term “gender performance” (with “queer” surfacing only in a footnote to the original publication of Gender Trouble, in publications such as “Critically Queer” [1993a]—published in the same issue of GLQ as Sedgwick’s “Queer Performativity” article—and in her revised preface to the 1999 version of Gender Trouble). Furthermore, not only does Butler not define the concept of performativity in the 1988 article, but she also fails to explicitly reference or acknowledge Jacques Derrida’s concept of “iteration” (the way in which language as performed comes to mean or signify through repetition or iteration) from his hugely influential examination of Austin’s work in his essay “Signature Event Context” ([1971] 1988), although she makes use of “reiteration” and clearly deploys performativity in a Derridean fashion in “Critically Queer” (1993a). Butler would only acknowledge her debt to Derrida later, specifically in her 1997 book Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997: 49–51). Butler was not inventing anything entirely new in her influential texts on gender performance, but was offering a brilliant synthesis of Austinian, Derridean, phenomenological, and sociological ideas. In addition to the key elaboration of Austin’s concept of performativity by Derrida, she also strategically slights the important earlier research of social scientists elaborating identity and gender in particular as relational and in process (and thus, arguably, as “performative,” although they did not use that term)—distancing herself from the putative essentializing tendencies in work by social scientists such as Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman. In the 1988 article and in Gender Trouble, for example, Butler’s performativity takes on a loose meaning not unlike the significance of gender as a performance in the work of Goffman, who had theorized the social relationality of human identifications and behaviors in works such as his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and gendered selfhood in the articles “Gender Display” (1976) and “The Arrangement Between the Sexes” (1977).5 Performativity in Butler’s “Goffmanian” sense relates to gender/sex identity as taking place over time, in social situations, through performances that are intersubjective or relational: gender is (famously) a “stylized repetition of acts,” and identity is constructed as “a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief ” (1988: 519–20). By clarifying this genealogy of ideas crystallized in Butler’s model, I question the common tendency today to value this now naturalized conflation of terms (queer performativity) as completely new as of 1990, or as inherently “radical.” Most influential in Butler’s model was her linking of performativity to the idea of “subversion” in the subtitle to Gender Trouble, although she also explicitly notes in the book that performative imitation or parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

61

which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony. A typology of actions would clearly not suffice, for parodic displacement [or performativity] . . . depends on a context and reception in which subversive confusions can be fostered. A key follow-up question for Butler is “what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire?” (1990: 139). Historicizing Butler’s and Sedgwick’s models, and looking at the matrix of concepts from an art and visual culture point of view, key questions become: why have we since the late 1980s assumed that exposing the performativity of gender destabilizes or “subverts,” that this destabilization epitomizes “queer,” and why do we think (or do we still think) this queer destabilization of gender is a progressive or desirable goal? There is, among other things, an obvious connection between such claims and the banal post-2000 commodification of performance (queer or not) by art museums, seemingly as a means of bolstering their validity as institutions that are au courant. Arguably, the assumptions that performance determined to be queer or that gender enactments understood as queer performatives are radical come equally from examples in film, television, and other forms of popular culture—from the countercultural drag queens in Jennie Livingstone’s 1991 film Paris is Burning to the more mainstream drag queens in the highly commercially successful reality TV show, RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present). In this regard, it is worth noting that Butler celebrates the gender-fluid or trans figures of Paris is Burning as exemplary of anti-normative gender performances in her codification of her gender performance arguments in the chapter “Gender is Burning” in her 1993 book Bodies That Matter (121–40). We need to ask: what are the stakes in this conjunction of terms, and to what contexts do these stakes attach? Clearly, US scholars have dominated queer feminist theories of gender performance or queer performativity while US examples have long dominated models of drag performance and one of the goals of this chapter and the larger book project is to point to the cultural specificity of these theories and practices.

TRACING A GENEALOGY In tracing this critical historiography and writing this episodic (not comprehensive) history and theory of queer performativity, I rely on Michel Foucault’s model of archaeology, which in turn relates closely to his concept of genealogy (1966, 1969, 1971). Foucault’s model is particularly appropriate, given the importance of his genealogical work to queer theories and histories—his The History of Sexuality, published in multiple volumes in the late 1970s and 1980s, uses both archaeology and genealogy to sketch a history of European discourses around and beliefs about sexuality. Accordingly, my larger project involves pinpointing key moments at which terms relating to what we now call queer and performance or performativity circulated and crystallized into arguments or belief systems—micro-ruptures that

62

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

have ultimately defined what we can view retrospectively as a larger epistemic break from the dominance of forms of modernism attached to singular and heteronormative white masculine subjectivity within (in our case) art and performance discourse. One of the fortuitous side effects of this examination is that we might see performance art itself as an “iteration” of art that moves it performatively beyond modernism’s restrictions. There are different ways to trace this genealogy in the United States alone. For example, we could look at tendencies in gay male cosmopolitan cultures and creative modes of expression in the 1960s in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, sites in which artists and writers began performing and theorizing performance in relation to the visual arts. We could then look at the way in which a growing attachment to theatrical self-displays on the part of gay-identified male or queer artists in the 1960s and 1970s (New York-based artist, performer, and filmmaker Jack Smith, for example, or the Cockettes, a multi-gendered queer theater group working in San Francisco) paralleled and expanded upon Susan Sontag’s publication of her epically influential 1964 essay “On Camp,” where she famously explored the connections among “camp,” theatricality, and gay male artists and cultural figures (Figure 3.2.1).6 Connected to this rise of interest in camp and its relationship to gay urban culture, US theater and art critics in the 1960s focused on theatricality (as implicitly connected to gay men, most of whom were white) to excoriate certain works or movements. Thus, in a 1962 essay on the plays of Edward Albee (who was openly gay), Richard Schechner, theater critic and later cofounder of the discipline of

FIGURE 3.2.1:  Fayette Hauser, photograph of the Cockettes performing, including Sylvester (second from left), 1970.

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

63

performance studies, connected gay men to theatricality, deploring the “decadence” and “corrosive influence” of the “impotent and homosexual theatre” of Albee’s work. He goes on to lambaste Albee’s homosexual and feminized (“call girl,” “virginity,” “womb seeking”) vision: “Self-pity, drooling, womb-seeking weakness . . . I’m tired of morbidity and sexual perversity which are there only to titillate an impotent and homosexual theatre and audience” (1963: 8–9).7 These alignments were also active in mainstream art criticism. In 1967, Michael Fried published his influential “Art and Objecthood” in Artforum, in which he mobilizes similar language to critique the embodied force of minimalist art (which he calls “literalist art”). As theater scholar Stephen Bottoms has noted, “Fried’s article functioned to separate the minimalists from their hard-drinking, macho forebears in the New York School (such as Pollock and de Kooning), and to align them instead with the more flamboyantly theatrical spirit of other 1960s art-world developments such as pop art and ‘neo-Dada’” (2003: 180). “Art and Objecthood” violently and repeatedly dismisses what otherwise would appear to be an unthreatening movement and its banal industrial objects, noting its disruption of modernist “presence” through its theatrical insistence on addressing the spectator’s body and on opening art to durationality. To this end, Fried laments “the special complicity that that work extorts from the beholder,” which he suggests makes even an art form as seemingly mute in its abstraction as minimalist sculpture threatening to his sense of authority ([1967] 1998: 155). Fried is explicit about the threat of durationality as a perversion of modernism’s putative purity: “the experience [of literalist work] in question persists in time, and the presentment of endlessness that . . . is central to literalist art and theory is essentially a presentment of endless or indefinite duration.” Duration troubles the “wholly manifest” quality of modernist painting and sculpture (“it is by virtue of their presence and instantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture defeat theater”; [1967] 1998: 166–7). Fried cites Morris from the artist’s “Notes on Sculpture” essays numerous times and answers Morris’s phenomenological assertions in the following way: “the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder,” continuing, with absolute disdain, “‘the entire situation’ [citing Morris] means exactly that: all of it—including, it seems, the beholder’s body” ([1967] 1998: 155). A close examination of Fried’s hyperbolic evaluations in relation to the claims made by minimalists (in particular, Morris) makes clear that the threat of theatricality also lies in the feminizing and queering effects of theater as understood in the AngloAmerican tradition and in contemporaneous discussions of art and theater in New York and beyond (viz., Schechner’s anxieties previously noted). It is no surprise, given the strength of (white straight male) opinions about these values at the time that Fried names names, and includes precisely the artists I note in my book (including Allan Kaprow, Rauschenberg, and Yayoi Kusama) as part of the genealogy of “theatrical” (and relational and performative) practices counting the claims of modernism, a number of whom are gay or female ([1967] 1998: 170, note 13). In sum, theatricality is Fried’s code word for a new mode of art that solicits desires and embodied relations rather than allowing the critic to suppress them.

64

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Fried applies “theatricality” to signal queer and effeminate aesthetic relations with literalist works that, relationally, demand an audience (anyone could watch them!8) and thus threaten his authority, as signaled in his famous clarion calls toward the end of the essay, written—again, hyperbolically—almost entirely in italics: The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre.[. . .] Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre.[. . .] The concepts of quality and value—and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself—are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theater ([1967] 1998: 163–4). For decades, I have taught “Art and Objecthood” to undergraduates, drawing out their understanding by allowing them to note the gap between Fried’s extreme rhetoric and the seemingly nonthreatening metal slabs and blocks of the “literalist” art he excoriates, a gap explicable only if one understands Fried’s implicit misogyny and homophobia. Imagine my fascination, then, when I was apprised of new research by art historian Christa Robbins, who unearthed in the Archives of American Art a March 16, 1967, letter from Michael Fried to Philip Leider, editor of Artforum, regarding the imminent publication of “Art and Objecthood” in the magazine in June of that year. Here, Fried references his use of the term “theatrical” in the article and notes to Leider: “I keep toying with the idea, crazy as it sounds, of having a section in this sculpture-theater essay on how corrupt sensibility is par excellence faggot sensibility, and how even if the faggots didn’t kill Kennedy (and I love this guy Garrison for insinuating they did) they ought to be kicked out of the arts and forced to go to work on Wall Street or something” (2018: 450, note 2).9 This extraordinary passage, sadly, confirms as explicit the homophobia I had assumed all these years to be implicit and unknowing on Fried’s part. Here we see the power of tracing a genealogy of terms associated with queer performance—close archaeological attention to the discourses connecting theatricality with gay men in the 1960s clearly exposes the homophobic and misogynistic anxieties underlying mainstream art and theater critics’ dismissal of “theatrical” (i.e., gay or effeminate) work. Focusing in an archaeological way on such parallels (digging into images, archives, texts, performances, art, and personal remembrances of the period) enables a historicizing move that opens to a deeper understanding of how and why these terms come together and how they have been mutually enacted, particularly in art and performance theory and practice.

PERFORMATIVITY IN LINGUISTICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND ART: “SAYING” (OR MAKING) AS DOING Theatricality opens art to time, and the notion of the “performative” enters in this same space. Many exhibitions, conferences, and publications in Europe and North America since 1990 have foregrounded the problem or the promise of the performative in relation to the visual arts and performance art, but with very little

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

65

examination of how, exactly, performativity functions in relation to the artist/ performer, site, and audience. When and why did the term develop? How has it been linked to queer and feminist explorations of how to enunciate oneself creatively? The invention of the term “performativity” occurred in the mid-1950s in a series of lectures by British language philosopher J. L. Austin, which were published posthumously in his 1962 book, How To Do Things With Words.10 Here, Austin elaborated the concept of a kind of language that “performs” what it asserts rather than “stating” a fact (as a constative would do): [Performatives] do not “describe” or “report” or constate anything at all, are not “true or false”; and the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as “just,” saying something. . . . [T]o utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. . . . What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, a “performative.” (1962: 5–6) It is of great interest in this intellectual history of concepts around queer performativity that other scholars elaborated very similar concepts in other fields around the same time. For example, Austin’s Oxford colleague R. G. Collingwood had theorized the writing of history as a “reenactment” (with performative implications) in his 1946 book, The Idea of History, also posthumously published. And Goffman famously theorized social interactions as performances, deploying a very closely related logic, in his 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, arguing: [the] self . . . is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location . . . it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented . . . . [The body] merely provide[s] the peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time . . . . [T]he firm self accorded each performed character will appear to emanate intrinsically from its performer. (1959: 245) By the early 1960s, we can see a cluster of concepts coalesce that challenge early modern and Cartesian to modern concepts of the subject, wherein the self is understood as a more-or-less coherent and willful origin of meaning. As Goffman makes clear, the self is fluid and enacted, but a “product of a scene” not its “cause”— this is a radical shifting of agency from individual will to a relational situation, though an idea of performance that is close in overall thrust to Austin’s performative. The concept and activation of gender performativity are clearly linked not only to broader social, theoretical, and cultural articulations but also to particular developments in the visual arts. There is a deeper history relating to the rise of explicitly queer and feminist performance art in the 1960s onward, in turn complementary to the development of queer feminist performance theory around 1990. For example, Austin’s concept of the performative and Goffman’s idea of the “self ” as a performer link historically to the moment around 1950 when artists such as those in the Gutai group in Japan and Georges Mathieu in Paris, inspired

66

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

by Japanese calligraphic traditions as well as by the photographs of Jackson Pollock painting disseminated at the time in magazines from Art News to LIFE, were beginning to enact their bodies in their works (see Jones 1998). Even as Austin was theorizing the performative as a mode of speaking-as-doing, process or performativity itself was coming to be viewed as the art, as would be made even more explicit with the rise of the performance-based Happening and Fluxus movements from the late 1950s onward.11 This is a crucial point in terms of the genealogy of performativity: the opening of art to performance (or the articulation of art as performance) could be said to have put the artist’s body in the middle of the work as a specific enunciating agent—clearly gendered, sexed, raced, and otherwise. Works such as John Cage’s untitled 1952 “Event” at Black Mountain College in North Carolina thus involved a series of more-or-less simultaneous actions loosely choreographed by Cage, who assigned each performer/artist a time bracket as determined by chance procedures. These actions evoked, in Cage’s words, a “purposeless purposefulness.”12 Spectators were immersed in the midst of the actions, which included projections onto Robert Rauschenberg’s “white paintings,” David Tudor playing Cage’s music, and Cage reading a lecture on Zen Buddhism and the Declaration of Independence from a podium.13 In this sense, paradoxically the newly rendered visibility of the agent of art as the work—via the artist’s performing body (e.g., Rauschenberg visibly engaged in performative, temporal actions and projected imagery bringing his paintings to “life”)—decentered or dislocated the agency of art from the artist and opened meaning to process in a fashion we might now call “performative.” The activation of performance in the visual arts elaborates a deep interrogation of the idea in artistic modernism of meaning as originating expressively from a singular, determinable artistic subject—an idea that had become reified in the modernist formalist criticism that was dominant in art discourse in Western Europe and North America in the 1950s into the 1960s. This belief system had relied precisely on the erasure of the visible body of the artist from the field of the work (among other things, this erasure served to legitimate the unspoken and naturalized normativity of the artist as white, male, middle class, Euro-American, usually heterosexual; it legitimated in turn the authority of the formalist art critic, whose interpretations were presented as truthful renderings of the hidden artist’s expressed intentions). Within these modernist structures, Jackson Pollock, for example, occupied the now clichéd position of “white male genius,” ratified by the modernist formalist criticism of Clement Greenberg, whose value systems abstracted the work from its embodied attachment to this particular artist in order to secure its supposedly transcendent values. As I wrote about in a chapter on “The Pollockian Performative” in my 1998 book, Body Art: Performing the Subject, the case of Pollock, however, perfectly demonstrates how discourse can change the meaning and value of art, acting as a hinge between one belief system and another. While Pollock marked the apotheosis of the centered, fully intentional artist/genius (always already white male), Pollock—in his opening of art to process—also opened the door for new performative modes of artistic subjectivity to be articulated by younger artists.

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

67

Due to the international dissemination of images of Pollock painting, as noted, and the rise of existentialist art criticism by Harold Rosenberg, who claimed in his 1952 “American Action Painters” (via the unnamed Pollock) that New York artists were turning the canvas into an “arena in which to act,” Greenberg’s Pollock was rejected and Pollock was repositioned (or—in Austinian/Derridean terms—iterated differently). This shift was accelerated in the writings of emerging artist Allan Kaprow, who, in his influential 1958 article “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” reinterpreted the artist’s work as a radically new action-based painting that profoundly questions the modernist idea of the artist as singular agent of the artwork and thus of its meaning. Kaprow thus famously argued: I am convinced that to grasp a Pollock’s impact properly, we must be acrobats, constantly shuttling between an identification with the hands and body that flung the paint and stood “in” the canvas and submission to the objective markings, allowing them to entangle and assault us. This instability is indeed far from the idea of a “complete” painting. The artist, the spectator, and the outer world are much too interchangeably involved here. (Kaprow 1958: 5)14 Kaprow, radically, not only understands the performativity of Pollock as the key innovation of Pollock’s practice (a performativity that Kaprow himself enunciates), but also sees that what we now might call performative artmaking splits agency between the artist and the interpreters of the work: this is a model of making and interpretation as relational. This formulation is compatible with Goffman’s model of the self as performed in social situations or exchanges, and with Austin’s analytic philosophical view of the performative as enacting promises or vows for receivers. We could hypothesize that the performative subject is thus a key concept in younger generations of artists’ explorations of new models of art to think beyond modernism. We see a confluence of ideas and practices. The articulation of the linguistic philosophical idea of the performative around the same time Kaprow elaborated his arguments about Pollock and Goffman was theorizing social performance points to a profound shift going on in experiences, definitions, and understandings of subjectivity itself in the English-speaking part of the so-called Western world—this might signal a genealogical cluster, pointing to an ongoing or immanent epistemic break in Foucault’s terms.

PERFORMATIVITY AND QUEER/FEMINIST PERFORMANCE AND THEORY As my earlier mention of Jack Smith and the Cockettes makes clear, the parallels are striking between the theoretical development of performativity or social selfperformance in these texts and its virtually simultaneous development as a mode of self-presentation and creative expression, particularly in exaggerated forms in a broad range of literary, musical, theatrical, and artistic practices—all of which have gender/sex implications. These practices were linked in complex ways to gay/ lesbian, feminist, and ultimately queer urban creative cultures and their related rights movements. In this light, performativity is both a name for how enunciation can

68

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

work and a concept that aligns with a mode of creative expression—in particular, one that opens up art to gendered/sexed (and thus otherwise identified) embodiment as well as to time and space, to specific social (economic, gendered/sexed) situations that can be intervened in through activated embodiment. In this way, the concept of performativity allows us to understand how art practices exploring action and embodiment begin to articulate art as something far different from the modernist concept of artistic creativity, where a singular subject intends and expressively executes an object to extend his or her intentionality materially through time in a relatively fixed way. Performativity as a concept parallels performativity as a mode of making, where the “saying” is the “doing,” and wherein not only action, time, and space are at issue in the work, but also the relational aspects of meaning making are activated (in my earlier work on this turn to performativity, such as Self/Image [2006], I use the term “reciprocity”). In this new way of thinking, the performativity of the creative act served to join subjects across temporal and spatial registers in structures of overtly relational co-determination (or, as Goffman puts it, in a social structure of “collaborative manufacture,” where selves articulate in relation to each other rather than establishing firm identities in relation to a preexisting norm). This relationality—like the enunciative activating of performativity—has feminist and/or queering effects, as artists who produced performances in the 1960s such as Yoko Ono, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, and Valie Export clearly understood. In a related way, the theatrical, campy, queer self-articulations by a figure such as Jack Smith, who performatively enacted his sensibility as his film, performance, and artwork, continually hailed those around him to configure themselves in relation to his overtly nonnormative masculinity, tapping into a new suturing of “theatricality” to feminine and gay male (or queer) urban experience. Theatricality, as Sontag argued in “Notes on Camp,” was connected to a special “creative sensibility,” an aestheticizing attitude—she makes explicitly clear—most often expressed by a “vanguard” of “homosexuals” ([1964] 1966a: 286, 290). (It is worth noting that Sontag knew and wrote about Smith’s infamous queer film, Flaming Creatures, around the same time as writing “Notes on Camp”—Sontag’s writing enunciates as the self-performances of Smith enact queer performativity in a reciprocal fashion [(1964) 1966b].) Creative communities we now identify as queer in their shared politics and creative impulses were formed in this context, which allowed groups of like-minded people living in places such as London, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, or Los Angeles ways of putting their creativity to work as a lived experience that could also, in some cases, be understood as art, film, or performance—such as the Cockettes, a multi-gendered theatrical performance group in San Francisco. The Cockettes included diverse participants from “Hibiscus,” the psychedelic founding member whose birth name was George Edgerly Harris, to costume-maker Fayette Hauser, to Sylvester, the flamboyantly gay Black performer who became a disco star a few years later. If, in the 1960s, theatricality was used in art and theater criticism to excoriate works that the author deemed too feminine or too gay, by the 1970s, overt theatricality would thus come to be understood as explicitly queer and/or

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

69

feminist and often to be connected directly to queer performance and activism. This conjunction of terms reached its height with groups such as the San Francisco-based Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a “leading-edge order of queer nuns,” responsible for “Promulgating Universal Joy Since 1978,” as their active website claims. Attending to theatricality understood as performatively enacting in order to “do” queer/feminist subjectivities, which relationally open selves to others vis-à-vis creative fields—allows us to begin to understand how performativity works and has worked not only in queer feminist theory but also in relation to a range of creative practices and identifications (leaning toward the queer)—which give a specific context in Butler’s terms to gender performance or the queer performative. It allows us further to understand the significance of the fully articulated theory of performativity that emerged around 1990 in Butler’s and Sedgwick’s arguments, which crystalized a queer theory of performativity, which in its inception in these arguments was also feminist. Aptly enough, this way of looking at the relationship between performance or performativity and gender or queer reinforces a genealogical understanding of history—of the way in which performative enunciations inform one another. As Foucault’s genealogical model allows us to see, there is no “origin” of gender performance or queer performativity, only overlapping enunciations of gender/sex embodiment that come to be viewed as gender performance or queer performatives through the later models.

WHAT IS QUEER? WHAT IS THE PERFORMATIVE? WHAT IS QUEER PERFORMANCE? Butler’s and Sedgwick’s models are themselves explicitly critical of origin stories, rejecting the concept of a fully intentional and expressive creative subject at the origin of a work of art or culture. And, in fact, the issue of agency haunts the earliest formulations of the self as performer or of performativity. In their famous public debate over performatives, philosophers Jacques Derrida and John Searle thus took sides in debating whether the performative was fundamentally an act of intentional locution or a way of understanding how we never have full control of what we say. I cannot address the complexity of their debate here, but suffice it to say that Searle’s insistence on intention was not convincing to later scholars: “[The] essential constitutive feature of any illocutionary act is the intention to perform that act. It is a constitutive feature of a promise, for example, that the utterance should be intended as a promise . . . . its being a promise consists in its being intended as a promise” (1989: 544; my emphasis). It was, rather, the underlying deconstructive impulse of Derrida’s arguments in his 1971 paper on Austin’s theory (“Signature Event Context”), where he nuances performativity in relation to the complexity of the iterative nature of all human expression and its communicative dimension, which most deeply informed Butler’s and Sedgwick’s queer feminist theories of the performative. Derrida argues, in contradistinction to Searle, that the “performative does not have its referent . . . outside of itself or . . . before and in front of itself ” and “outside of language,” such as a fixed subject or intentionality. He continues, reaffirming his distance from

70

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Searle: it is a “‘communication’ which is not limited strictly to the transference of a semantic content that is already constituted and dominated by an orientation toward truth (be it the unveiling of what is in its being or the adequation-congruence between a judicative utterance and the thing itself)” ([1971] 1988: 13–14). For Derrida, the meaning of the performative or of any utterance takes place through its repetition or iteration—always already eschewing origins or proclamations of final meaning. Each of the philosophers struggles to gain the upper hand in defining a nuanced version of the performative—it will be clear that, like Butler and others, I find Derrida’s arguments far more compelling. Taking up Derrida’s version of performativity as iteration, Butler’s highly influential late 1988 formulation in the “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” article articulates a concept of gender as not originary but performative, “tenuously constituted in time” through the very comportment of the body (519). Gender, she asserts, “is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519). The key Derridean terms in Butler’s theory, repetition or iteration, are evoked through the now famous phrase: “stylized repetition of acts.” Moving then in a slightly different direction from Derrida’s abstractions, Butler gestures toward implicating the materialities of the body in performativity (she explicitly cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory of the “body in its sexual being” as a “historical idea” or a construction) (520). This focus on embodiment and stylized repetition has made her theory extremely useful for artists deploying performance, either live or in self-imaging practices, and for the theorists exploring how these practices work—but I have noted that it does not give her precedence in the theorization of gender as interactively and socially determined or of identity as performative and meaning iterative (that would be Goffman and Derrida).15 And, of course, the artists enacting themselves (as gendered, raced, classed, and so on) in and as their art in the 1960s also precede Butler’s model by decades, mobilized by and sparking the identity politics movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Butler’s theory, however, in particular her 1990 book Gender Trouble, where she fully elaborates on her idea of gender as a “performative accomplishment,” as she notes in the 1988 article, is internationally known and has been hugely influential through many translated versions as a—or even the—key source for a theory of queer that is tied to the performative, to gendered/sexed embodiment, and to visuality (520). While Butler’s theory has been broadly influential, it is not fully self-reflexive in its theorizations; it tends to repeat the binaries it critiques—pointing at every turn to her intellectual roots in Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalysis—and arguably to reify rather than loosen gender as a socially constructed and experienced aspect of our sense of self.16 In contrast, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work, not as internationally known as Butler’s and coming out of literary theory rather than philosophy, is more self-reflexive and nuanced, itself performatively enacted and understood to be connected to stories about bodies in the world being discursively positioned and articulated. Sedgwick’s theory is also explicitly focused on determining the relationship between the theory of performativity and queerness, which for her always already calls forth aspects of ethnic, class, racial, and other identifications.

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

71

In their co-written introduction to the 1995 anthology Performativity and Performance, Sedgwick and Andrew Parker note of Austin’s own analysis that, while resistant to moralism, he inadvertently links “the excluded theatrical . . . with the perverted, the artificial, the unnatural, the abnormal, the decadent, the effete, the diseased” (1995: 5). Parker and Sedgwick point out that, with Austin’s theory, we are thrown into very materialized and embodied circumstances: specifically his exclusion of the “etiolated” language of theatricality from performativity, which targets specific kinds of bodies and subjects. They emphasize that, strikingly, this etiolated expressiveness is connected by Austin, “dandyish” as he was himself, anxiously with theatricality and “the Gay 1890s of Oscar Wilde”—such that “the performative has thus been from its inception already infected with queerness” (5). Through such analysis (here of Austin’s text itself), Sedgwick performs the performative in a performative way that is also queer. Or, differently put, Sedgwick performs the complex significations of the queer performative through performatively queer interpretations. She “says” in order to “do” a kind of queer performance of meaning that is profoundly performative, in process, and relational. In a provocative definitional moment that will come to be frequently cited in queer and performance theory, Sedgwick interconnects sexuality to performativity: “That’s one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, or anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (1993b: 8). Due to this mobility of concept and generosity of tone, Sedgwick’s suggestive articulation of queer and the performative has come to be mobilized relationally in similar ways in some of the most interesting contemporary art and performance criticism—not least through the work of her former students such as José Esteban Muñoz and Jennifer Doyle—and has thus started to change not only the critical language around theories of performance and the performative but also the ways in which this work is motivated and made.17 The important thing for us here is that Sedgwick’s interpretive method is clearly performative and queer and feminist—it enacts what it describes and discusses, and in doing so implicates Sedgwick in its very determinations as well as performatively inspiring new ways of thinking and making: as in the quote here, queer is process and an “open mesh of possibilities,” as understood through relational interpretation.

WHAT CAN THE QUEER PERFORMATIVE DO FOR US? CONCLUDING THOUGHTS In spite of the fact that Butler does not tend explicitly to analyze performative works in their deep contextual expression, she did, as noted earlier, explicitly argue for attention to context in analyzing gender performances in Gender Trouble. We can return to Butler’s key point about context as determining performative effects in order to understand the importance of what Sedgwick’s model offers to interpretations and understandings of the visual arts and performance art—in turn generating final thoughts about the performative potential of these creative acts to transform. This is a crucial move in attending to how queer performativity takes

72

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

place in a mutable and interactive way—performative enunciations (or performance artworks) never have a determined or final queer significance. They can only mean in relation to who interprets and engages them, according to the specific time and place of both the work and the interpreter.18 Performativity, then, Butler notes, “by itself is not subversive.” The meaning and effect of any performative expression or gesture—or performative work of art—is contingent on how, when, and where it is articulated, and how, when, where, and by whom it is engaged (1990: 139). Adopting Butler’s abstract (and unfulfilled) concept, we might turn performatively and self-consciously to Sedgwick’s work to argue that queer could be understood to be precisely the articulation of a subject’s mode of being in a particular place and time; it hinges on “a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation” (1993b: 9). Ultimately, queer functions as an enunciation—again as explicitly performative and relational, contingent on context—and, Sedgwick asserts, “a part of its experimental force as a speech act is the way in which it dramatizes locutionary position itself ”; for Sedgwick, this speech act has signification through its embodied, emotional valence—this “dramatization” is linked to “performative acts of . . . filiation” (1993b: 9). Filiation—the very opening of the body to others—is what makes performance (and performativities) queer. Per the debates about agency in gender performance, this is the way in which we might have some agency vis-à-vis our gender and sexuality: through a self-reflexive understanding of the inaccessibility of our own “center,” our “intentionality,” a final meaning for our “gender” or “sexuality”—an understanding that takes into account the relationality of how we experience and are understood in terms of sex/gender identifications. As Butler has rightly and many times insisted, we cannot “choose” gender as a lifestyle or style without reiterating gender codes we already know.19 But, as Sedgwick’s example suggests, we can choose to be thoughtful and to acknowledge the open-ended, relational, and performative aspect of our identifications (if given the chance). I stress here that, in the visual arts and performance art, some of the most interesting works since the rise of theories of gender performance involve the insistence on the relational and thus the contextual aspect of queer performatives, which in the most interesting cases also foreground the intersectionality of gender/ sexuality with other myriad forms of identification. Works by artists from Yoko Ono, Ron Athey, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña to Zackary Drucker, Nao Bustamante, and Rafa Esparza thus enact aspects of selfhood that call forth spectators as participants, literalizing our role in determining meaning and value in relation not only to the work but also to the body/person enacting it. Engaging several of these practices will serve as an ending to this examination of the genealogy of performativity in relation to the visual arts, and how it can be useful in understanding the relationality of meaning that can be dramatically foregrounded through performance art, because of its live aspect. Gómez-Peña and his La Pocha Nostra collective have long implicated viewers in directly interactive encounters that queer identification. In their Ethno-Techno series begun in the 1990s, they cross-dress so as to exaggerate signifiers of race/ethnicity and

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

73

sexuality/gender, proffering their hyper-identified bodies to spectators on pedestals that mark them as ethnographic objects. In one version of this project, which I attended at the Frida Kahlo Theater in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, Gómez-Peña stood in blatantly fake and gender-fluid “Indian” accoutrements with cowboy hat and a skirt, a collar around his neck. He attached a leash to the collar and then handed it to me, proceeding to lean back, making me responsible for holding him up. I was viscerally aware of my role in sustaining his body in space, and indirectly interpellated into his excessive performative self-marking as an “ethnographic” subject. In a similar fashion, Nao Bustamante’s 1992 performance Indigurrito in San Francisco also activated relational circuits of meaning (see Jones 2018). Indigurrito explicitly negotiates the colonial histories Diana Taylor influentially examines in her model of “archive” versus embodied “repertoire,” as well as the sexed/gendered nature of the bonds between racialized self and other.20 Motivated by the swell of celebrations of Columbus’s “discovery” of “America” going on in the United States that year, which sparked the commission of her piece, Bustamante enters the stage, scantily clad in some sort of vaguely S/M garb, and states: “I was told this year, that any artist of color must complete a performance based on 500 years of oppression in order to get funded, so this is my version” (see Bustamante 1992). Bustamante then challenges all the white men in the audience to apologize, strapping what she narrates as a “vegetarian and . . . no dairy” burrito, “ordered . . . without chili out of consideration for the white folk” onto her crotch like a dildo, and then urging the “white men” or “anyone with an inner white man” to come and nibble off a piece to show their contrition as participants in white privilege. Once the participants come to the stage, she commands that they kneel one by one, introduce themselves, and take a bite in an amusing and campy yet pointed polemic, a playful version of postcolonial, feminist, and queer critiques, and a skewed version of Catholic ritual: “I would like to offer you a bite of my burrito to absolve you of the sin . . . . [as a] ritual purification” (Figure 3.2.2). Bustamante’s burrito-dick is humorously, but also pointedly, offered to audience members, who find themselves enlisted and their identifications activated, by invitation and only to the white male participants, or those “with an inner white man” presumably struggling to break free, one of whom announces: “I am a girl . . . [and] Hispanic.” White masculinity is both aggressively essentialized in Bustamante’s enunciation of white men’s presumptive guilt in relation to her objectification as a Latina (“I would like to ask any white men who would like to take the burden of the last 500 years of guilt to report to the stage now . . .”) and exposed as a construction. It is blamed for possession of phallic authority while at the same time potentially detached from its privileges and its related guilt. It is, after all, Bustamante’s gorgeously zaftig body, her face made up and sporting a black wig (José Esteban Muñoz describes her here as a “post-modern Aztec Priestess/Dominatrix”) which wields this ridiculous, edible prick, crumbling into pieces as the various kneeling “men” chomp or nibble off pieces (2006: 196). And in a stroke of inspiration, the self-proclaimed “Hispanic girl” tries unsuccessfully to apply a condom at the end to keep its remaining ingredients intact and in coherent penis formation.

74

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURE 3.2.2:  Nao Bustamante, Indigurrito, 1992; performed in San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist.

Similarly, the work of transwoman feminist artist Zackary Drucker performs gender/sex performatively as fluid and trans, and her life/work exhibits the interrelatedness of gender and sexuality in self-perceived and elicited identifications. The power of this invitation, and its complex de-essentializing thrust, is evident in Drucker’s “Relationship” project with her then partner Rhys Ernst, a series of photographs documenting their lives together as an “opposite-oriented transgender couple” (Drucker a transwoman, Ernst a transman) (see Drucker and Ernst 2016). As well, Drucker’s 2008–9 performance The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See (performed three times in California, once in London, once in New York) expresses a body that can only be identified in dramatic relationship with those of us who apprehend, desire, identify with, and/or manipulate it (see Drucker 2008–9). Drucker invites visitors into a room in which she lies, almost naked (she wears only underpants, and sometimes a pair of strappy sandals), with

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

75

a large silver ball in her mouth. Her voiceover addresses visitors: “clear your mind . . . , look at the body on the table in front of you; while you’re concentrating, try to feel that you yourself are this body . . . Now, approach the table . . . . Thank you . . . Gently rest your hands on the body . . . . Locate a five inch radius [of skin and] . . . remove these hairs one by one through extraction . . . . Don’t be afraid. The bitch can take it.” Laughing in response to the sardonic self-labeling as “bitch,” visitors commence plucking, uprooting “all of the ugly things that are growing inside of you,” as Drucker’s voiceover intones. Suddenly the mood shifts: “This body is a receptacle for all of your guilt and shame and trauma. The art you make is derivative. Your world is collapsing into a scum filled puddle of lard ass thighs. You will never be desirable” (Figure 3.2.3). In this work, Drucker performs an actively transgender feminine body. She marks the complexity of trans experience by asking those who engage in the piece to imagine ourselves as turned inside out (our inner “ugliness” expiated through the act of touching and plucking her body; her body a “receptacle” for our otherwise internalized shame and trauma). One imagines the title to refer to her reluctance to “be looked at,” and the “horror of nothing to see” reflects back on our tendency to project our own fears onto others. By turning against us (or rather against herself— since she could well be talking to herself in the third person) at the end of the piece, Drucker reminds us that all identifications are reciprocal and mutable. Bodies might appear to be identifiably gendered (as well as raced, etc.), but their perceived gender has everything to do with how they are engaged and embraced or repulsed by others.

FIGURE 3.2.3:  Zackary Drucker, The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See, 2008–9. Courtesy of the artist.

76

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Drucker’s splitting of her voice from her body (where the mouth is literally blocked) also complicates our tendency to believe in bodies as clearly “spoken” in one way or another, as coherent and fully identified within themselves. If her voice comes from elsewhere, clearly we cannot trust this body to reside firmly in a singular category of identity and meaning. The materiality of the body is offset by the immaterialities of vocal timbre, which metaphorically point to the immaterialities of desire, identification, and other modes of relational engagement with gendered/ sexed bodies (in performance). Such practices that explicitly make audience members aware of the pressure of context and relational bonds on identification and conceptions of self allow us to see how we can affiliate, relate to, and allow ourselves to be intimate with, penetrated by, other bodies and texts and performances in “queer” ways that do not confirm us but further our awareness of our own contingency, and open-endedness. This resonates with Sedgwick’s model, in which performativity opens to queer in that it puts the subject in a relational framework, not oppositional but always in motion and contingent. Sedgwick notes in her 2003 book Touching Feeling: “The ‘queer’ potential of performativity is evidently related to the tenuousness of its ontological ground” (3). In this way, we are urged to drop our desire to protect ourselves with an “ontology” of self, and develop our self-reflexivity, whether as interpreters and historians of performance art or as people in the world identifying ourselves in relation to others. Given the current binarizing contentiousness of Europe and the United States, this might be the most valuable enactment of the potential of the queer performative to transform at this moment in time.

NOTES 1. This chapter is drawn from my forthcoming book, In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. 2. A recent article by Molly Fischer offers a good overview of some of the popular versions of Butler’s theory in particular; see Fischer (2016). 3. A fascinating example of the former is a recent editorial on the political debacle in the United States that directly cites the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin’s initial definition of the term “performative” in relation to Donald Trump’s mode of locution. See Virginia Heffernan (2018). 4. Butler does explicitly introduce Austin’s role in developing the term performative utterance slightly later, in her text “Critically Queer,” published in two slightly different versions in 1993, in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (1993a) and in slightly revised form as chapter 8 in Bodies That Matter (1993b). 5. Butler cites Goffman in passing in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (1988: 528), where she dismisses his work as essentializing (noting that he provides a theatrical account of gender performance as the taking of a “role which either expresses or disguises an interior ‘self,’” which he patently does not). She does, however, use this case to differentiate “gender performance” (Goffman’s term) from “gender performativity” (her preferred term). Notably, in the revised version of the arguments of the 1988 essay published as part of the final chapter of Gender Trouble,

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

77

the reference to Goffman has been removed. Heather Love has also noted Butler’s misreading of Goffman, and generously calls it “strategic,” in her talk focusing on Goffman’s insights in his work on stigma (2013). For another critique of Butler’s ambivalent use of Goffman as well as of Esther Newton’s important field work on “camps” in 1960s United States (female impersonators), see also Trask (2013: 166–71). 6. See chapter 4, “Theatricality,” of my forthcoming book, In Between Subjects. 7. This review first came to my attention as cited by Bottoms (2003: 176); on this tendency, see also Folland (2017). 8. Fried is explicit on the threat of a kind of art that demands an audience and his language reveals that the threat is this dependence, the way in which it opens to “any” (democratized, non-specialist, maybe even queer or female-identified) viewer, and the intimacy this relationship implies: “For theater has an audience—it exists for one—in a way the other arts do not; in fact, this more than anything else is what modernist sensibility finds intolerable in theater generally. Here it should be remarked that literalist art too possesses an audience: that the beholder is confronted by literalist work within a situation that he experiences as his means that there is an important sense in which the work in question exists for him alone, even if he is not actually alone with the work at the time” ([1967] 1998: 163). 9. I am deeply grateful to Professor Robbins for sharing this article in manuscript with me (2017 and 2018 draft versions), and to my USC colleague Megan Luke for apprising me of Robbins’s project. Fried’s letter is cited from “Philip Leider papers, 1962–1997,” Archives of American Art, Washington DC. 10. As Diana Taylor (2017) kindly pointed out to me, there is no evidence that Austin ever used the term “performativity” himself, querying as well what we lose by transferring a concept of language as acting to one of bodies as acting (the move that Butler makes in the 1988 article). The term “performativity” was developed as far as I can tell by the gender theorists around 1990; most notably Judith Butler deploys it of course as part of the title and throughout in “Performative Acts” (1988), and Eve Sedgwick foregrounds it in her “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel” (1993a). 11. Shannon Jackson’s 2014 exploration of these interrelations builds on my 1998 arguments in Body Art: Performing the Subject. She adds an interesting point by noting that Austin’s interest in “dissolv[ing] . . . the referential relation” between act, gesture, or object and the thing to which it refers parallels the foregrounding of action over object in US art from this period, and argues that both Austin and US painters reoriented speech/painting by stressing representation’s capacity to transform. 12. Originally from Martin Duberman’s interview with John Cage, April 26, 1969; Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina, Asheville, NC, as cited by Erickson (2015: 299). 13. Many conflicting descriptions exist in published accounts of Black Mountain College. This one is taken largely from Harris (1987: 226–8). See also the account in Erickson (2015: 298–303); and an extended description of the event appears in Fischer-Lichte ([2004] 2008: 131–2). 14. Kaprow (1958: 5). 15. On “self-imaging,” see Jones (2006).

78

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

16. Butler wrote her dissertation on Hegel, and this was revised into her first book (Butler 1987). 17. See, for example, Muñoz (1999) and Doyle (2013). 18. I elaborate this point in “Relationality,” chapter 3 of In Between Subjects. 19. See, in particular, her response to oversimplistic readings of Gender Trouble in the 1993 follow-up book, Bodies That Matter. 20. In The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Taylor compellingly argued that the “archive” is a Western and colonizing mode of knowledge production, wherein shreds of former activities are deposited and viewed as static representations of past actions. The archival mode contrasts to the performative, bodily forms of knowledge of colonized others.

REFERENCES Austin, John L. (1955/1962). How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bottoms, Stephen (2003). “The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance Studies/Theatre Studies Dichotomy.” Theatre Topics 13, no. 2: 173–87. Bustamante, Nao (1992). Indigurrito [videotape]. Available at Hemispheric [Institute] Digital Video Library: http:​//hid​vl.ny​u.edu​/vide​o/000​50951​0.htm​l (accessed August 13, 2018). Butler, Judith (1987). Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith (1988). “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December): 519–31. Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge Press. Butler, Judith (1993a). “Critically Queer.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring): 1–15. Butler, Judith (1993b). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (1999). “Preface to ‘Anniversary Edition,’” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, i–xxvi. New York: Routledge. Collingwood, Robin G. (1946). The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques ([1971] 1988). “Signature Event Context,” translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc., 1–23. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Doyle, Jennifer (2013). Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Drucker, Zackary (2008–9). The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Available at: https​://ww​w.zac​karyd​rucke​r.com​/perf​orman​ce/20​18/11​/27/n​z2pli​ k6kwt​9aq7s​s3bun​vqf4h​xw0k (accessed March 16, 2016). Drucker, Zackary and Rhys Ernst (2016). Relationship. London: Prestel.

QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

79

Erickson, Ruth (2015). “Chance Encounters: Theater Piece No. 1 and Its Prehistory,” in Helen Molesworth (ed.) with Ruth Erickson, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, 298–303. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art and New Haven: Yale University Press. Fischer, Molly (2016) “Think Gender is a Performance? You have Judith Butler to Thank for That.” New York Magazine, June Available at: https​://ww​w.the​cut.c​om/20​16/06​/ judi​th-bu​tler-​c-v-r​.html​ (accessed November 21, 2017). Fischer-Lichte, Erika ([2004] 2008). The Transformative Power of Performance (2004), translated by Saskya Iris Jain. New York and London: Routledge. Folland, Tom (2017). “Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Red Show’: Theater, Painting, and Queerness in 1950s Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity 24, no. 1 (January): 87–115. Foucault, Michel ([1966] 1994). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel ([1969] 1972). Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel ([1971] 1984). “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, 76–100. New York: Pantheon. Fried, Michael ([1967] 1998). “Art and Objecthood,” in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, 148–72. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glissant, Édouard ([1990] 1997). Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Goffman, Erving (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday. Goffman, Erving (1976). “Gender Display.” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 3: 69–77. Goffman, Erving (1977). “The Arrangement Between the Sexes.” Theory and Society 4, no. 3 (Autumn): 301–31. Harris, Mary Emma (1987). The Arts at Black Mountain College. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heffernan, Virginia (2018). “President Trump Is His Own Wiretap.” Los Angeles Times, May 18. Available at: https​://ww​w.lat​imes.​com/o​pinio​n/op-​ed/la​-oe-h​effer​nan-t​v-typ​es20​18051​8-sto​ry.ht​ml (accessed November 21, 2018). Jackson, Shannon (2014). “Performativity and Its Addressee.” Available at: http:​//wal​kerar​t.org​/coll​ectio​ns/pu​blica​tions​/perf​ormat​ivity​/perf​ormat​ivity​-and-​ its-a​ddres​see (accessed February 24, 2019). Jones, Amelia (1998). “The ‘Pollockian Performative’ and the Revision of the Modernist Subject,” in Body Art/Performing the Subject, 53–102. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, Amelia (2006). Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject. New York and London: Routledge Press. Jones, Amelia (2018). “Archive, Repertoire, and Embodied Histories in Nao Bustamante’s Performative Practice,” in Joanna Linsley and Simon Jones (eds), Artists in the Archive: Engagements with the Remainders of Art and Performance, 143–67. London: Routledge Press. Jones, Amelia (forthcoming). In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. New York: New York University Press.

80

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Kaprow, Allan (1958) “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” Art News, 5. Love, Heather (2013). “Queer Method and the Postwar History of Sexuality Studies.” Talk given at State University of New York, Stony Brook. Available at: https​://ww​w.you​ tube.​com/w​atch?​v=qkk​ZV6Gk​kKo (accessed September 10, 2018). Muñoz, José Esteban (2006). “The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante and the Sad Beauty of Reparation.” Women & Performance 16, no. 2: 191–200. Muñoz, José Esteban (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Robbins, Christa (2018). “The Sensibility of Michael Fried.” Criticism 60, no. 4 (Fall): 429–54. Schechner, Richard (1963). “TDR Comment: Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?” Tulane Drama Review 7, no. 3, 8–9. Searle, John (1989). “How Performatives Work.” Linguistics and Philosophy 12, no. 5 (October): 535–58. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1993a). “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 1, no. 1: 1–16. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1993b). Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky and Andrew Parker (1995). “Introduction: Performativity and Performance,” in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker (eds), Performativity and Performance, 1–18. New York and London: Routledge. Sontag, Susan ([1964] 1966a). “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 275–91. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sontag, Susan ([1964] 1966b), “Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 226–31. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Taylor, Diana (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Diana (2017). Personal email to the author (October 26). Trask, Michael (2013). Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America, 166–71. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Turner, William (2000). A Genealogy of Queer Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

CHAPTER 3.3

Taking Up Instructions for Becoming REBECCA SCHNEIDER

Gesture puts history in motion. Gesture extends iteration, jumping from one body to another, tracing one time in another time, one space in another space. Movement rolls through bone, flesh, coursing limb to limb—not unlike the way a beat is held in song or text, or the way an image passes across a field of vision, jumping frame to frame, screen to screen, or passing hand to hand. Movement, inevitable even in the seeming stone-still of statuary, shuffles events across time in intra-active waves of expressive form as stone meets flesh meets stone.1 Movement jumps from stone to human body and back, as in the nature self-portraits of Laura Aguilar in which Aguilar and a desert boulder trade in indistinguishability. It irrupts as mimesis among stick and insect or spin between architecture and human body and back.2 Movement takes place between paint and canvas and might jump again to intra-act with light at light’s own speed as painting is filmed, or taken up by a dancer, or translated into a poem. Movement percolates among water and stones in a creek bed or is held as 40,000 years of bated breath in the drip of a stalactite or the waveform of a negative hand stencil, moving in geologic time within the unlit bowels of the earth in Indonesia, in France, on the exuberant rock face of the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina.3 Jumping body to body, limb to limb, mouth to mouth, movement articulates variant registers of time that carry histories of intra-action and make intra-action anew. History, which is to say memory,4 courses along in curves and folds. It takes repercussive waveform, or tendrilous branch form, or irrupts in tuberous, rhizomatic explosions of call and response as response becomes call again.5 Movement moves. It is intra-action that finds its rhythms among animate and inanimate alike, rendering any definitive direction that would delimit a form and flow of time (such as forward and linear) impossible. Consider Emilio Rojas’s Instructions for Becoming in this vein. (See Figures 3.3.1 and 3.3.2.) Between human body and tree in this 2019 performance artwork subtitled Indio Desnudo, the weight of a limb might bend to the weight of a limb without distinction as to which limb bends first, which second, or where one limb begins and another ends. Human and nonhuman come undone in each other. As in Aguilar’s nature work, in this series Rojas’s intimate and queer laminations place precise jointure in question.6 Which first, which second, which human, which non are in limbo.

82

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURES 3.3.1 and 3.3.2:  Emilio Rojas, Instructions for Becoming (Indio Desnudo), 2019. Amatlan, Mexico, from the series Instructions for Becoming. Courtesy of the artist.

TAKING UP INSTRUCTIONS FOR BECOMING

83

Rojas grew up in Mexico and as a migrant moving in conditions of precarity between Mexico and the United States. Beginning this series while living and working in Chicago and wanting to experience something he describes as “return,” he literalizes the metaphor of roots in Mexico and simultaneously works to bend time. Rojas has written: I’m thinking of trees as witnesses, and also both as landscape and beings which are interconnected through intricate root systems. I’ve been obsessed with trees since I was a little boy, so it’s not just returning to my roots as a migrant in the metaphorical sense but also as a child. (2019) If “returning” implies movement from one time to another time, one place to another place, Rojas provocatively suggests intra-action, finding (his) roots in (his) limbs. Performance here is homage that branches in multiple directions—homage to the tree and the land and the artist’s migrant “roots,” and homage to artist Laura Aguilar with whose nature works Rojas’s Instructions explicitly resonate. Instructions for Becoming take up Aguilar’s gesture as if to respond in kind, like a wave of the hand is met with a wave in return, or instructions are met with reiteration. In this way, Aguilar’s call is recalled through Rojas (though she herself may be read not as origin but as responding to stone, just as Rojas responds to tree). In other words, Rojas’s performances take and pass instruction along a vast relay of branchwork, limb to limb, call to response to call. As photographs, limbs-becomeimage move as pixels of light. They branch out to find me where I encounter them even as I, in turn, pass them along in a gesture of transmission of my own (here in essay form). In another work ongoing since 2014, Heridas Abiertas (A Gloria), or Open Wounds (to Gloria), Rojas traces the long border between Mexico and the United States in blood (see Figures 3.3.3 and 3.3.4). Having carved the borderline into his back as an inkless tattoo, he reopens the wound annually, reopening, recarving the line so that it moves like a long branch, bending and bleeding in tandem with his spine. Across this piece and others, Rojas carries the work of Gloria Anzaldúa whose 1987 book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, fundamentally called him to response. She writes: “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta (an open wound) where the third world grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (1987: 3). Against his head, like a pillow, he literally lies upon her words, relying upon and relaying the queer woman-of-color feminism— the Chicana feminism—Anzaldúa set into gesture as he becomes or bodies forth the wound she articulates. One time in another time, one’s words in another’s mouth, Rojas literalizes the ongoing, reopening lives and afterlives of historical trauma that move in spinal time among us, limb to limb, reaching for redress. Rojas’s Open Wounds brings to my mind an earlier, similarly decolonial work by the Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore, who also uses performance as a mode to render literal the embodied tracks of historical dispossession. In Fringe (2007), Belmore’s back faces the camera/viewer. A long bleeding wound traverses her spine, moving laterally across the length of her torso. But what at first appears to be blood, on second look

84

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURES 3.3.3 and 3.3.4:  Emilio Rojas, Heridas Abiertas (A Gloria). Courtesy of the artist.

becomes a fringe of beadwork. What at first appears to be an open gash, on second look is on the mend—all of it rendered in make-up, thread, and beads. Oscillating between open and closed, the wound evokes both ongoing Anishinaabe heritage (beadwork) and, no less real, the ongoing trauma inflicted on indigenous peoples by the extractive expansionism of white settler colonial-capitalism (Figure 3.3.5).7 Less an open wound than a wound caught in the half-life process of becoming a scar, Belmore’s body meets her viewers in between times of historical trauma and what scholar Saidiya Hartman, writing of the slave trade, terms trauma’s ongoing

TAKING UP INSTRUCTIONS FOR BECOMING

85

FIGURE 3.3.5:  Rebecca Belmore, Fringe, 2008. Cibachrome transparency in fluorescent lightbox, 81.5 × 244.8 × 16.7 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Purchase, 2011. © Rebecca Belmore.

“afterlife” (2008: 6). This is a wound both open and closed. Not entirely open and not entirely closed. It is also a wound dressed and redressed by performance. Belmore’s body is simultaneously performer, performance, and document. In fact, the work renders lines of distinction between performance and document moot. Belmore’s performing body is already a witness, as if document, standing as statuary or testament to the history it carries (the history that “bleeds” in the artwork of beads). It is important to note that in this work (as in Rojas’s) the camera and resultant image doesn’t do the documenting of some otherwise “live” performance, because the body is already, itself, both live and nonlive, bloody and beaded, animate and inanimate. The body and the performance are already document, just as the document performs. The photographic image is simply a means to jump form, to branch limb to limb and, thus, extend, as in waveform, body to body. The camera, that is, carries or amplifies or moves something of the body to pass among us, as a gesture moves or, perhaps, as a sound is carried forth from a body as a wave.8 The body is carried through photography as it would be through the gesture of a hand-wave, say, crossing space and time in a repercussive medium of call inviting response, address beckoning redress regarding the ongoing (after)lives of colonial dispossession. Even as the turned back is a mode of refusal, as in the performance photography work of Lorna Simpson, Belmore’s wound faces a viewer, simultaneously calling for and responding as body-jumping historical witness.9 This, too, is memory moving—limb to limb, spine to spine. We might be moved to ask, without the promise of a precise answer: what of history passes in the jump among bodies, limb to limb? What of the animate and the inanimate, or of the living and the nonliving or the no-longer-living, intra-mingle in the imprecise form of performance-based gesture, the jump of movement, the pulse of pose? How does a gesture, like a body, open and close—move—across time, through media, in the ricochet of matter, among historical ruins, or toward otherwise futures? To think about this question, I’d like now to make an odd segue and take up a brief segment of mid-century European film. Though the move from explicitly decolonial work to work that roots around in European ruins might seem jarring, the jar is intended to loosen further questions and concerns, including the

86

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

matter of the “animacy hierarchy” that Rojas after Aguilar is undoing (Chen 2012: 24). So, for a few pages, let’s imagine that we could sit together, now, and watch the entirety of Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 film Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia). Sitting in a position of viewing, making space and time for the film to take place, darkening a room to allow the film light to wash across our faces as the images enter our eyes as the sound enters our ears—we are spectating actors’ one-time live performances preserved on film. What, if anything, of the “live performance” remains in the film, is carried by the film, enters our bodies through the medium of film and the light it rides? This is in part to ask, what do we see when we watch the no longer live, live? When one live replicates another live (as film light reflects across a spectating face, laminating face to face as it were), who is host and who is hosted? What passes limb to limb? This might also be to ask, of Rojas’s wound or Belmore’s fringe, what bleeds from one time to another time in the passage via performance across bodies in time? What of the live—or the live/nonlive interinanimation—jumps among bodies or beings across time? Journey to Italy asks this same question in the narrative of the film by chasing something elusive that appears to pass among statuary—body to body—and to jump between human and stone. At first view, on the surface of the narrative, the film is “about” a dying marriage. A middle-aged white (northern European) couple, played by Ingrid Bergman and George Sander, are on a trip to southern Italy. They have inherited some property, it appears, that brings them to the country, but the film concerns a kind of creeping boredom or ennui that has rendered their marriage inert. In the film, we repeatedly see the actors, particularly Bergman, walking about in the ruins of the ancient Roman Empire. In viewing the film, we view Bergman viewing, because an inordinate number of shots are intent on the actress’s gaze, and often her general confusion about the wreckage of empire around her. But it’s not just her gaze. Her body, too, bends and contorts, her head barely stable upon her neck in some shots, as if craning her neck might address the wreckage in some way. We view Bergman viewing the detritus of empire—skulls in the catacombs, shards of once erect pillars, and crumbling fallout of monumental architecture. Or, more accurately, we watch the filmic traces of her viewing when she was alive to view. In one scene, Bergman goes to an art museum in Naples, accompanied by a docent who points out various statues to her gaze. As she looks at the statues, curious almost hyper-theatrical expressions pass across her face and her head tilts or her shoulders shift in subtle ways that look as though she is literally taking the statue into her body. At one point, the film works to “capture” a gaze explicitly exchanged between seemingly inanimate statue and seemingly animate Bergman, as if animacy and inanimacy could jump across bodies interchangeable with each other. Watching the film, we seem to be spectating over Bergman’s mid-century shoulders as the gaze of the statue arrests her into stillness even as the statue itself moves across our viewing faces. Many of the statues are in ruins. At one moment the camera settles on a limbless Venus and jumps to Bergman’s affect-filled face—she looks as if she might prefer to run away but her own limbs have been amputated by the close-up. In fact, the relationship set up by the film—between the actress, the stone statuary, and we as viewers—is complex. Not only are we seeing Bergman seeing ruin/statuary, but we are also seeing her as ruin/statuary, and all of it—stone ruin and living actress—are, of course, seen as

TAKING UP INSTRUCTIONS FOR BECOMING

87

film—or seen as film sees, passed across our faces in the half-life of half-light. The stone statuary “sees,” the actress “sees,” and the viewer sees that seeing until a kind of vertigo sets in and Bergman has to literally run off screen. What is interesting to me here is not so much the focus on the gaze (a twentieth-century obsession), but on the way that Rossellini repeatedly brings to our contemplation the question of what is live and what is not, until eventually this question ricochets against us— the audience—prompting us to question our own status among the various varieties of detritus: The detritus of stone, the detritus of marriage, the detritus of film. At moments—still, silent, watching—we viewers may resemble more the statuary than the actress who walks (and then runs) among them. Among the ruins of stone, and in the light of film, do we all, together with Bergman, partake of the question: What does it mean to (be or become) live? What might becoming be? Bergman and her semi-estranged husband visit Pompeii for a scene in which the conventional Western divide between live and nonlive further comes undone. In the ruins of natural disaster that is Pompeii, affect bounces back and forth between stone “remains” of the live (in this case the holes left in the shape of bodies in lava) and the privileged, white, heterosexual couple struggling with their dead, or almost dead, marriage. Journey to Italy bounces filmic scenes of animate-meets-inanimate, inanimate-meets-animate into our eyeballs and our ears. The light and sound are material—they enter our bodies as we watch—becoming live parasitically by living in/with/through another body as host, much as Mel Y. Chen might write of metal toxins, animate and inanimate mingling to the point of indeterminacy.10 So which is it? None of it is live or, as Rossellini suggests, all of it is live?11 Document or performance? As with the indeterminate line between Rojas’s body and the limb, or the slip of vision between blood and bead in Belmore’s Fringe, the difference becomes vital but undecidable. The movie presents a marriage (as it presents modernity, heteronormativity, and whiteness) literally “on the rocks” as the “living” couple are more devoid of affective connection to anything live (including each other) than are ancient stone effigies, pillars, skulls, and dust. Even by the end of the film, we are left unsure of whether Bergman and Sanders will resuscitate their marriage—and in fact we can only hope that they do not. At the close, nothing decided, a random carnival full of dark-skinned reveling Italians sweeps the whiter couple up in their ecstatic, pulsing crowd, reminding the viewer that the film is indelibly steeped in modernity’s romantic and racializing primitivisms even as it, just possibly, poses some questions about the insufferability of modernity’s capital-colonial assumptions. As mentioned previously, it may have seemed odd to have moved from the queer intimacy of Rojas’s and Belmore’s decolonial work to a mid-twentieth-century European film about white heteronormativity that roots, and perhaps fetishizes, the ruins of ancient Rome. And yet, the ongoing afterlives of empire are perhaps shared topics across these works, though touching on privilege and dispossession differently. I think about this as I walk to work on my campus in Providence, Rhode Island, in the twenty-first century. To get to my office to write this chapter, I walk beneath a monumental triumphal arch that leads me onto an open yet enclosed campus green (see Figure 3.3.6). The arch stands on land that, like the whole of the state, is Narragansett territory. Thus, the when, where, and who of my daily walk are populous, composed of syncopated times,

88

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURE 3.3.6:  Soldier’s Arch, Brown University. Photo credit: Nick Dentamaro for Brown University.

places, peoples, and things. Signatures of supposedly bygone Rome sit atop supposedly bygone Narragansett land. The resurrected classical “ruins” refuse the myth of their disappearance and perpetuate the ethos of “triumph” on and as the so-called “new” world. One time laminates another time; one place cites another place. Ancient Roman and Narragansett territory, both supposedly bygone, are both clearly intrainanimate (or the symbol of triumph would not be necessary).12 The arch conducts me through its liminal passage as if to say, in essence, “walk this way.” Though I am scripted into position by the monument and the histories of European expansion that it reinscribes, what other possibilities might the passageway pronounce? If I listen against the grain of expansive triumphalism in the shape of the arch, what else might I hear—of other genres of being human, other lifeways, other modes of becoming live? (Wynter 2015: 31).13 That is, might the stones themselves sing of alternatives if we learn to listen? Might they be acknowledged to gesture to the hole left in their quarry and perhaps articulate an elsewhere or an otherwise to the remarkable myopia of “triumph”? In What is Latin America, Walter Mignolo raises an open question about whether the degree to which we live in the twenty-first-century, late-capitalist “developed” world is the degree to which we have been “globalatinized” or subjected to globalatinization through Christianity and the colonial-capitalism that followed in the wake of conquest.14 Many habits, gestures, words many of us use, and architectures we inhabit circulate in the ongoing gyre of empire and reperform/ deperform bits of empire’s gestic jetsam. To the degree that we reperform those habits, those words, those architectures, we are not only living in ruins but also

TAKING UP INSTRUCTIONS FOR BECOMING

89

living as ruins—the living ruins of empire’s exploitive disproportion. Of course, and importantly, the movements and gestures of those who have been colonized, enslaved, exploited, or otherwise unwillingly subjected to empire circulate and recirculate as well, moving inexorably as “the past that is not past” (Sharpe 2016).15 But as Rojas’s and Belmore’s decolonial works makes clear, though globalatinization may be a wound that runs along the spine to fuse (or be refused) with movement, nevertheless in time globalatinization will have failed. In this vein, and in the shape of a near dead marriage between miserable white elites, it is interesting to consider what Journey to Italy suggests—that the ruins of white Western empire include the living. Living ruins, Bergman and Sander still attempt, in zombie form, to walk this way. That is, Bergman tries to keep walking until—just perhaps—her own body rebels against the ruse of triumph, the myth of productivity, and the (heteronormative) reproduction of the capital relation that her failing marriage seems to exemplify. Flickering across our faces, the film suggests she might (but only might) leave her dubious inheritance uncollected. Perhaps the hope of the film is that the songs the stones sing, even in the cracks and rubble of crumbling monuments they support, might gain in volume to somehow be heard over the thrall to ownership and mastery that “triumph” assumes. Somehow, in the mischievous smile of a crumbling statue, for example, might reside alternatives to empire’s monumentality and instructions of becoming otherwise. In 2018, Rebecca Belmore made a journey to Greece for Documenta 14. Her piece for the exhibition, Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside), was a refugee tent carved out of white marble. As part of the exhibition situated in the landscape, the marble tent was located on Filopappou Hill, positioned to overlook the Acropolis with the Parthenon at its top and the Theatre of Dionysus at its base. To sit inside the tent, as the sculpture clearly beckons a body to do, is to make the tent a stage like the theater it faces. To enter the tent or to stand with it and see what it sees is twofold and complex. It is both to be contained by white marble and the cultural significance that such classical “whiteness” manifests, but it is also, and paradoxically, to take up the view from precarity, to adopt, across the body, the position of a refugee or a migrant and to look at the Parthenon as a refugee might view the legacies of Western empire and the ongoing urgencies of empiric colonial-capitalism that have rendered so many dispossessed. The work, rendered in marble, may itself be a monument, but it is one that, in Julia Bryan-Wilson’s words, “partakes of a counter-monumental vocabulary which we might understand not only as a grammar born in the aftermath of trauma, but also a minoritarian resource for those speaking back against human rights violations and structural racism” (in Steyn 2018: n.p.). The both/and aspect of the work renders it undecidable, like reopening a wound. Ready to jump, to move, it is pitched (like a tent) at the intersections of performance, sculpture, and embodied activism.

CODA Belmore has said that many people look at Fringe and see a corpse. That may be, she says, but for her that body is still life, healing in some way, resurgent, “on the

90

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

mend.”16 To me, at third view, the wound begins to look like a wing. I take up Rojas’s Instructions for Becoming again and think of his limbs held in limbs. The tree I’m climbing is the medicinal tree known “scientifically” as Bursera Simaruba, commonly known as Indio Desnudo (Naked Indian), because it sheds its bark as a way of getting rid of parasitical/simbiotic species, so its barren and it looks naked. (Rojas 2019) I can almost hear the wind as the performance lifts, like shedding bark, into and out of my hands.

NOTES 1. I take the word “intra-active” from Karen Barad (2003: 803). 2. See Laura Aguilar (2015). Another example of human and nonhuman mimesis is Valie Export’s Korperconfiguren, or “body configuration” photographs in which her body and architectural objects such as stone steps or traffic medians shapeshift with each other. Humans are not required of course. The example of stick and insect is manifest in the scholarship of Roger Caillois. In his provocative 1935 essay “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” surrealist Roger Caillois wrote compellingly if enigmatically on the power of copying, situating mimesis as mutual displacement. To my reading, he invoked a widespread cross-creativity where living and nonliving engage in mutual “photography.” See Caillois (1935); and also Schneider (2018a) and Taussig (1992). 3. On negative hand stencils created by “prehistoric” humans around the world, see Schneider (2018b). 4. History and memory are generally considered in distinction to each other, much like document is considered, still, in distinction to live performance. But both could be said to be modes of each other—ways of holding or telling or moving one time into, through, or with another time. Imperial determinations of what cultural modes constitute memory (often considered embodied, ephemeral and constituting “repertoire”) and what modes constitute history (often considered narrative, image, or object based, archival, and even monumental) have been vexed and riddled with privilege and disprivilege along the lines of gender and race. The history/memory line is a ruin of colonialism that, like a bloody border in Rojas’s work, continues to haunt sedimented distinctions between performance and document that this chapter aims to blur. See Taylor (2003) and Schneider (2011). 5. For a theory of gesture that explores call and response in greater depth, see Schneider (2018b). 6. On the “queer intimacy” of human and nonhuman or inhuman see Mel Chen (2012: 1–12, 114). On Aguilar and the queer inhuman see Mel Chen and Luciano (2015: 183–208). 7. Throughout this chapter, I follow Glen Coulthard (2014) and hyphenate colonialcapitalism to underscore the connection. 8. Belmore has worked on waveform with her piece Wave Sound, 2017. 9. See the special issue on “Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform” in Women and Performance (Mengesha and Pradmanabhan 2019).

TAKING UP INSTRUCTIONS FOR BECOMING

91

10. In the film there is a liveness, a livingness, that irrupts as nonhuman. In fact, the liveness of Bergman’s body-in-relation occurs acutely in relationship to her encounter with the inanimate—or that which is conventionally given to be inanimate: stone. It’s rendered explicit, of course, in the human-shaped sculpture, but the liveness is broader than anthropocentrism can delimit. It is suggested throughout the film by landscape, architecture, and rubble itself. But again, there is no stone. There is no living actress. There is only film—light and screen that play or perform across our bodies as we watch. Elsewhere, I have discussed this as “intrainanimacy” (Schneider 2017). 11. When asked by Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut about Journey to Italy in a Cahiers du Cinéma interview, Roberto Rossellini described the importance of Naples: “that strange atmosphere which is mingled with the very real, very immediate, very deep feeling, the sense of eternal life,” in Jim Hillier (1985: 211). On the neovitalism of some strands of new materialist criticism as it impacts performance theory, see Schneider (2015). 12. On the triumphal arch and legacies of conquest in the “new world,” see Carolyn Dean (1999). 13. Like Sylvia Wynter, Elizabeth Povinelli argues for writing of modes of human rather than human per se. The white “settler late liberal” mode of human that has retroactively and nostalgically fetishized its roots in ancient Greece and Rome even while romanticizing indigeneity as lifeways disappeared to modernity has been, Povinelli reminds us, a mode that is radically exploitive of some humans over other humans, some humans over animals, and some humans over the earth, air, and water that holds us all. “We” have not always been settler colonial capitalists. And in fact, “we” (among so-called humans) are not all so today. She writes: “I stake an allegiance with my Indigenous friends and colleagues in the Northern Territory of Australia. Here we see that it is not humans who have exerted such malignant force on the meteorological, geological and biological dimensions of the earth but only some modes of human sociality. Thus we start differentiating one sort of human and its modes of existence from another” (2015: 16). 14. See Walter Mignolo (2005: 92). I take “globalatinized” from Derrida, who Mignolo also references (Derrida 1998: 11). 15. Sharpe is explicitly referencing the wake of the Middle Passage and the circumAtlantic slave trade. 16. Belmore, http://www.rebeccabelmore.com/fringe. On resurgence, see Simpson (2011).

REFERENCES Aguilar, Laura (2015). “Human Nature.” Boom 5, no. 2. Available at: https​://bo​omcal​ iforn​ia.co​m/201​5/08/​11/hu​man-n​ature​. Anzaldúa, Gloria (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Barad, Karen (2003). “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28, no. 3: 801–31. Bergs, Steyn (2018). “Material Relations: Interview with Julia Bryan-Wilson.” Open!: Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain. May 29, 2018. Available at: https​://on​lineo​pen.o​rg/ma​teria​l-rel​ation​s.

92

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Caillois, Roger ([1935] 1984). “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” translated by John Shepley. October 31: 12–32. Chen, Mel Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chen, Mel Y. and Dana Luciano (eds) (2015). Special issue: “Queer Inhumanisms.” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 21, nos. 2–3. Coulthard, Glen Sean (2014). Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dean, Carolyn (1999). Inka Bodies and the Bodies of Christ. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Gianni Vattimo (1998). Religion. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Hartman, Saidiya (2008). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hillier, Jim (ed.) (1985). “Interviews with Roberto Rossellini.” Cahiers du Cinema 1: 211. Mengesha, Lilian G. and Lakshmi Padmanabhan (eds) (2019). Special Issue: “Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform.” Women and Performance 29. Mignolo, Walter (2005). The Idea of Latin America. London: Blackwell Publishing. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. (2016). Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rojas, Emilio (2019). Personal correspondence, March 17. Schneider, Rebecca (2011). Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca (2015). “New Materialism and Performance Studies.” TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies 59: 7–17. Schneider, Rebecca (2017). “Intra-inanimations,” in Christopher Braddock (ed.), Animism in Art and Performance, 191–212. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schneider, Rebecca (2018a). “Appearing to Others as Others Appear: Thoughts on Performance, the Polis, and Public Space,” in Ana Pais (ed.), Performance in the Public Sphere. Lisboa: Centro de Estudos de Teatro and Per Form Ativa. Available at: https://performativa.pt/. Schneider, Rebecca (2018b). “That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up.” Theatre Journal 70, no. 3: 285–306. Sharpe, Christina (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simpson, Leanne (2011). Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. Taussig, Michael (1992). Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge. Taylor, Diana (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wynter, Sylvia (2015). On Being Human as Praxis. Dur­ham, NC: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 3.4

Caring for Black Corporealities: Experimental Black Performance THOMAS F. DEFRANTZ

As we wait in the lobby, the gallery space beyond our view pulsates with sound. After hanging our coats, a fantastical performer, shirtless, but wearing a pink tutu, greets our small group and offers to escort us. Brimming with anticipation, we move close to one another. Inside, we can’t possibly account for all that happens. Music, flashing lights, flags displaying projections of events happening on the other side of the space, enlarged but still mysterious. Smiling people. We greet other audience members, then meet other performers fantastically clad as they will be, wondrous and indescribable. Joy permeates even as the room is heavy with a funky Afrofuturist sheen somehow. Unexpected lighting shifts guide us here and there, moving us among the glorious dancers who move slowly, now quickly, forming lines and groupings that materialize and dissipate. They change clothes at times, becoming naked in between, without concern for the revelation. They enjoy this performance deeply, and we are invited toward care, smiling and beginning to experience a certain joyfulness alongside them. We note well that the collaborating artists are all People of Color . . . and that we in the audience roaming through the gallery are overwhelmingly white. (“Let ‘im Move You,” January 2019)

* * * This chapter has two intertwined subjects: Black experimental performance in the context of gallery and museum spaces, and the contemporary motivation to construct systems of ethical care among artists and audiences. Organizational logics surrounding experimental performance and dance presume a Eurocentric model of creative modernity, one that pushes “beyond” concerns of asymmetrical social

94

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

access or aesthetics of affiliation and affirmation that might define Black life.1 How, then, have experimental artists found ways to remain “Black” even as they push boundaries of performance forms seemingly unrelated to core values of Africanist performance? If Black artists engage experimental performance with an unstated responsibility to represent the imaginary group of Africans in diaspora, how do these artists construct care as a vector of creative craft, and especially care for Black people who may not encounter their work? How are Black artists shifting the terms of experimental dance performance toward an ethically engaged possibility? This chapter explores the intersections of these fault lines to consider how care might be imaginatively resuscitated in live art formations. We might all understand that Black artists still face an unconscionable double bind of working as artists, who might stretch the normative conditions of social encounter, while also being expected to represent Black life in its infinite diversity. Black subjectivity remains embattled as a social possibility; unfairly constrained even as it expands in unexpected ways (DeFrantz and Gonzalez 2014; Gaines 2017; Mbembe 2017). In a difficulty as awkward as the enactment of slave trading, Black artists engage an extra layer of activity in the micro-decisions that determine whether their work will be recognized in relationship to a Black assembly, or as presumably white inventions disinterested in the struggles and disavowals of Black life. Dance, as a theatrical practice, faces awkwardness when ported into museum and gallery spaces that were not designed to accommodate its features. Many modes of theatrical and experimental dance were created to suit presentation in bespoke circumstances: places where audiences might sit comfortably and direct their attention toward dedicated performance space. In museums, and gallery circumstances, audiences typically have no particular place to sit or even stand. Dancers in these architectures tend to perform in makeshift circumstances: on rented flooring or concrete parquet. Dance enlivens the galleries where it appears, even as its practice is transformed by the displacement from stage to the close quarters of a standing, and moving, audience. Black performance artists working with dance face a very difficult circumstance within this politicized space. What sorts of dancing might be possible in a museum/ gallery, and who might recognize that dancing in its Blackness? Does it matter that white audiences often misinterpret the dancing as simple narratives of spectacle, when concerns of, say, religious practice, mixed-race identities, or family lineage might actually be on offer? How can Black performance imagine forward for its audiences as structuring logics worthy of placement in museums that will only count small numbers of Black people as witnesses? Artists respond to these difficult circumstances in a variety of ways that bring challenges as well as possibilities. While curators and education/audience coordinators might construct context for the performances that are offered to audiences of live art, my concern here rests with the accommodations that artists enact in order to participate in the awkward social and physical economies of toooften indifferent venues (DeFrantz 2019). Some artists take the asymmetrical starting point of Black artistry amid largely white audience venues/environments as the initiating action of invention. Durham,

CARING FOR BLACK CORPOREALITIES

95

North Carolina-based live artist Monèt Noelle Marshall crafted a three-evening invention performed in galleries and warehouses around town. The first of these, “Buy My Soul and Call It Art” (Marshall 2018), deployed a cast of twenty Black and white performers in an immersive performance that unfolded throughout a sprawling assembly of gallery spaces, conference rooms, and lobby areas of the Living Arts Collective, a small arts complex in a trendy area of bars and restaurants in Durham. We arrive with the heady excitement of encountering something unknowable. The work has been described by the artist as being about “Black art, Black bodies and Black people [who] are undervalued in mainstream (white) arts spaces, the unpaid emotional labor of Black people and the relationship between the arts market and slave market” (Marshall 2018). We eye each other excitedly as a mixed-race audience. Surely mostly of the crowd present as white, but we encompass a healthy array of proud, young Black people. We make small talk and admire fashions, until two docents at a table ask us, as a group, how much we think Black performance is worth. We giggle nervously, until it becomes clear that this will set the terms of our admission to the show. Singly, and in pairs, we approach the table to answer the question; we are given that amount of cash in a play denomination. As we move through the installation at our own leisure, we pause to witness scenes of subjection: an “emerging Black woman artist” offered up by a white curator/auctioneer who accepts our play money; an extremely adept, virtuosic Black male social dancer trapped within a glass booth while two white curators/presenters collect money offered to him, clearly taking the money without his consent. We wonder, resist, guffaw, cry a bit, and wish for something else to happen as we wind our way through the horrorshow of racialized disavowals. (“Buy My Soul,” January 2018) Marshall and her collaborators effectively demonstrated how Black artistry often lands in untenable relationship to practices of assigning monetary values to the sharing out of Black creativity. One installation in the show did not rely on money to determine its worth. A “Black Joy” room allowed only audience members who cared to identify themselves as Black to enter a closed-off space, where two Black women hosts played soulful songs while they and the audience danced together. Docents at the door to this room allowed only those who identified as Black to enter; whether or not those audience members presented as Black. Inside the Black Joy room, we sang together and danced, telling each other stories about our day and our hopes for tomorrow and tomorrow. We instinctively understood this room to be precious and concerned with our well-being; we were not asked to monetize the encounter among ourselves that pointed toward a shared possibility of collective emotional resource. “Buy My Soul” cast Black performance as the explicit subject of a racialized encounter among art, artists, and audience. Dancing in the show arrived bifurcated: as the expert soloist dancing for our money in the awkward circumstance of a glass booth, or in social dances offered up by performers amid audience in the closed-off “Black Joy” room. In this, the work effectively mirrored the social circumstance that

96

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURE 3.4.1:  Leroy Eldridge in Monèt Noelle Marshall’s “Buy My Soul and Call It Art.” Photography by Derrick Beasley.

cordons off urgent everyday Black creativity from general white scrutiny. Audiences who didn’t care to identify as Black at the beginning of the performance saw only the expert dancer working very hard in the impossible, glass-walled container. But Black audiences saw this performance in relationship to the context of their own social dancing together in the “Black Joy” room, enhancing an embodied connection among dance practice from social to theatrical. Placing the expert dancer in a veritable cage also underscored the awkward spatial limitations that nontheatrical spaces bring to bear on dancing. Here, the

CARING FOR BLACK CORPOREALITIES

97

performer was forced to contain his gestures within the dancing booth, denied the opportunity to move through space or even to the ground, as his dance training might have predicted. In this, Marshall reminded us of the ways that dance in the museum and gallery space is often contained beyond its grounding suppositions, required to emerge in cordoned-off spaces or on platforms created specially, and contingently, for the small run of performances alongside the collectible objects that will remain long after the performance. This difference in the liveliness of the dancing and its ephemerality from the seeming stability of objects that might surround it—or even, the real estate of the gallery or museum that houses it—creates a dynamic tension that works against dance and its particularities. By its very nature, dance is hard to see—in that its nuances are best appreciated by other dancers or experienced participants in ways that are beyond the means of many audiences. Dance exists outside of language, so it is extremely difficult to talk or write about its contents. And trajectories and legacies of dance have been historicized and theorized sporadically and incompletely, in a manner entirely more modest than visual art or even performance art. To combine these deficiencies that hound dance with the difficult theoretical apparatuses allowed Black performance is to understand the yawning gulf surrounding Black performance art. Because Black people have vibrant and complex relationships to dancing as a social practice and a theatrical form of expression, Black audiences tend to value the particularities of dance practices in nuanced manner. We notice the difference between social dances such as the Dougie from the Nae-Nae, and understand how to shift our critical attention between the forms of dance in order to assess their execution in performance. Black audiences grow up witnessing each other as social dancers, and performance art that arrives embedded within Black social life that draws on Black social dance might enjoy a critical Black audience familiar with the specific qualities and possibilities of different modes of dance. Amid its many propositions, Marshall’s show leaned into the fault line of divergent aesthetic familiarity with Black social dance, a dividing notion deployed to foreground intentional care for Black audiences to enjoy a rich and variable experience in the art gallery. Some contemporary Black artists imagine their work as an opportunity to move experimental Black performance closer to Black audiences who might not be drawn to gallery or theater spaces. jumatatu m. poe and Donte Beacham’s multipart performance project “Let ‘im Move You” (L’IMY 2014–19) embraced the quasitheatrical practice of J-Setting as its primary mode of physical technique (poe and Beacham 2019). J-Setting, a practice set in motion by female dancers/cheerleaders at Southern United States college football events in the 1970s, involves posing, punctuating sinuous recognizably feminine movements with hard accents, and a follow-the-leader format that realizes a hierarchy of available roles. J-Setting migrated from its practice by high-heeled women in football stands to a nightclub form danced by queer men of color; it has more recently spawned the basis for reality television programming and the physical style of many contemporary music videos. Beacham, poe, and their collaborators worked with J-Sette as the refracting agent for an expansive project with various modes of address and realization. J-Sette calls

98

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

for a leader and a group of followers, casting complex dance combinations as a sort of follow-the-leader game that draws on shared knowledge of intricate passages of movement (DeFrantz 2017). J-Sette is deeply rehearsed, so that all participating dancers understand the short sequence of movements that become its phrase material. As in the calls from pitcher to catcher in baseball, the J-Sette leader makes signals to the team, defining the order in which the material will be danced and by whom before performing the sequence themselves. J-Sette offers a hypnotic, kaleidoscopic effect in performance. Dancing, complex movements seem to pass from one dancer to the others in waves of sinuous complicity accented by hard recoils and bounces of the hips and pelvis. The form was designed to be legible across the vast distances of the football field; as it has been moved into nightclubs, public parks, and now museum and gallery spaces, its stark theatricality has only been enhanced by the close proximity of the audience to its performers. poe and Beacham created their L’IMY platform with a unique, three-pronged performance format that encompassed its realization in nightclubs, outdoor public spaces, and galleries/experimental theaters. The artists considered all three sites of performance equivalent in their explorations, and were careful to coordinate each type of encounter into their practice. The twelve-member L’IMY company rehearsed and traveled across the country—to Philadelphia, PA; Portland, OR; Boston, MA; Durham, NC; Dallas, TX; Tallahassee, FL; and New York City—to engage audiences as partyers, passersby, and audience in each city. The project’s dispersal through these three sites of encounter intended to disrupt the seeming impossibility to organize largely Black assemblies in museum or art gallery spaces. In the context of the United States, Black people, who constitute about 13 percent of the population, rarely constitute more than this share of a museum or gallery audience. But Black performance artists such as poe and Beacham might enjoy sharing their work in majority Black circumstances, or at least among viewers who might understand the deep structures of citation and legacy operating in their work. L’IMY engaged Black audiences in places where those audiences gather: in nightclubs and outdoor parks and street corners in Black neighborhoods. This modular approach to experimental performance ensured that the project would reach a larger Black audience than would come to a museum, gallery, or experimental performance space. L’IMY also imagined itself toward an ethics of care for queer Black people in its rehearsal process and museum performance modes. In rehearsals, poe and Beacham engaged Shani Akilah and Abdul-Aliy Abdullah Muhammad as ethical artistry guides, tasked with accounting for the dimensions of communication and power among the collaborators, as well as considerations of the implications of the work in the world. Akilah and Muhammad’s labor made palpable the desire for the project to engage Black artmaking in dance through a lens of thoughtful engagement. Within the contemporary moment of considering sexual assault and purposeful diversity as foundational concerns of ethical human interaction, in the context of #MeToo and #blacklivesmatter, the project’s insistence on social justice as an aspect of its creative emergence underscored the shifts in process that artists engage in order to dance, ethically, in emergent traditions of live art.

CARING FOR BLACK CORPOREALITIES

99

To care for Black people in their danced encounters with art-house audiences as well as among each other might be an urgent radical shift in the conception and execution of contemporary live art. Too often, Black bodies in the white spaces of galleries and museums have represented a cipher of difference from an assumed white norm. Black artists were called upon to recount the terms of that difference through the dancing of the spectacular novelty of a temporary self-rule. Dancing, the bodies of Black artists hinted at an emancipated possibility where Black gestures could be valued in a privileged relationship to rhetorics of commerce. But performances in these white galleries inevitably collapsed into the demands of commerce as examples of museum programming selected to demonstrate a sort of vivid difference of the world. Too easily, Black artists become a cordoned-off identity of their own, removed from connection to Black people in the locale of the museum, or even in relationship to the world, now placed only in connection to other artists and aesthetic antecedents. But Black artists do indeed feel a special connection to Black communities, and especially those populations who never come to museums or gallery spaces. After all, we are aware of our many extended family members who have little interest in museums, or with few reasons to be concerned with experimental performances. Collectively, we are seldom cast as the inciting reason for the gallery space to exist, nor do our interests provide the impetus toward a curation process that might include us as artists or audiences. Our creative work as Black artists, then, includes and encompasses a dimension of education, affirmation, and care that extends beyond a desire to answer aesthetic inquiry as its own end. Black artistry tends to circle back to the perceived needs of a larger Black community, an imaginary community in some ways, but one built out from the shared awareness of struggles and disavowal too-commonly experienced by Black people. It really doesn’t take much for Black artists to feel implicated in the many shooting deaths and microaggressions regularly reported in the context of the United States, the UK, Europe, or Latin America; or in the migratory crises that force too many Black Africans into the impossible status of lifelong refugees. We find ourselves connected to these experiences through our own constant distresses, working in the majority white circulations of power and privilege brought forward by contexts for live art. In this circumstance, we can begin to understand that Black dancing in contemporary performance spaces arrives in response and relationship to daily life that renders its contours as unpredictable, uncontrollable incidents of potential disenfranchisement. Considered in this light, we can begin to understand how Black dancing in live art circumstances bears a double burden of responding to the various histories that might surround live performance in museum and gallery spaces, as well as the legacies that contribute to the recognition of Black life. Doubled, experimental Black performance expands in contradictory directions, attempting to satisfy desires too often disinterested with the depths of field that encompass Black living. In response to this double duty, some live art performances in museum spaces elaborate Black presence through mediated layering. The SLIPPAGE: Performance Culture Technology performance work “reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW,” created in

100

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

response to visual works by celebrity artist Kara Walker, demonstrated a bifurcated possibility in live processing and dance performance (The SLIPPAGE: Performance Culture Technology 2017). The work drew on Walker’s 2005 series “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated),” a collection of fifteen prints that place odd and aggressive silhouette figures atop images appropriated from the nineteenth-century newspaper. Walker’s annotations interpellate Black figures—as silhouettes of recognizably Black people—atop print images that she chose. The fifteen large prints that Walker created render black silhouettes as the undiscovered focus of the Civil War imagery, in most cases overwhelming the historical renderings of white subjects. Walker’s work points toward an under-recognized aspect of Civil War journalism: the fact that Black lives and loves were indelibly impacted by the war and its affect, even as their voices were virtually nonexistent in the public record of the war and its operations. The mostly-white audience gathered in the museum gallery displaying Walker’s provocative series. Milling among the images, an outrageous male curator character in a striped seersucker suit chatted up the audience, greeting some directly and loudly, while pointedly ignoring others. Proclaiming in half-truths, he became an unreliable narrator of historical events, even as he exhorted the audience to think about Black women’s activities in the events of the US Civil War and Walker’s exquisite interventions into that history. Subtly, the audience became aware of two Black women dressed in all-black who moved surreptitiously throughout the space, sliding across the floor and dancing slowly between standing groups of unnoticing attendees. The curator character led the group into a gallery where his voice became irrelevant as the dancing women moved through a forty-minute dance performance that cast them in mediated recordings of varying scale, projected with contrasting white and black shadows onto large projections of Walker’s prints. (“reVERSE-gesture-reView,” January 2017) “reVERSE” engaged a live processing interface that captured the improvised movements of dancers Shireen Dickson and Brittany Williams and rendered them as white shadows moving through Walker’s images. Dickson and Williams’s dancing, viewed live by the audience in the space, was rendered as an opposite negative that animated the black silhouette figures projected onto a wall. In a spooky effect, Black women projected white shadows onto black silhouettes transposed onto the blackand-white reporter’s renderings of contemporary scenes from the Civil War. The forty-minute performance visited several of Walker’s works, animating the figures with dance movement distinctive for each selection. A sort of “pimp walk,” trap-music dance accompanied “Banks’s Army Leaving Simmsport,” suggesting a submerged Black rhythmic invention behind the neat lines of soldiers moving away from the viewer; “Lost Mountain at Sunrise” turned into an ironic pose of supplication mixed with an image of a Confederate flag and a recording of “Dixie” played by a marching band; “Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats” became a whirlwind of bodies in disorientation, accompanied by the dissonant strains of Hungarian composer György Sándor Ligeti; “Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp” arrived as an erotic sex play by two adolescent girls testing the limits of

CARING FOR BLACK CORPOREALITIES

101

FIGURE 3.4.2:  Shireen Dickson in “reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW.” Photo by J. Caldwell, Nasher Museum.

propriety with props of furry phalluses. “An Army Train” proposed a phantasmagoric layering of a dancing smoke cloud menacing a woman working toward spiritual deliverance through motion, while a capella chorus sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” against the sounds of rioters and gunshots. The layered effect of the whole confused and amazed audiences who witnessed the performance, confounded by the deployment of technology that suggested

102

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

an evermore futuristic haunting of shared understandings of the Civil War and its legacies. Walker initiated these rethinkings in her visual objects; “reVERSE” extended the implications of Black silhouettes as foreground with the construction of white-negative shadow dancing projections, moving out of time from the live bodies that created their contents. In this layering, “reVERSE” proposed a technologically driven reclaiming of US history that might accommodate contemporary Black women dancing as the source material of creative encounter in the museum. In this, the work effectively cared for the embodied thinking of at least these two Black women dancers, centering their improvised inventions in a shared exploration of historical possibility. The three works referenced in this chapter demonstrate how Black artists test vectors of care for Black people that extend beyond the singular encounters of audience and artist in live art circumstances. In tilting toward care as an abiding concern for the creation of performance, artists expand the work that their creations can do, moving beyond a reflection on detached artistic practice and toward a possibility of social justice as foundational to creative craft. In this, experimental Black performance artists who place their work in gallery and museum contexts can, at times, explore the urgent capacity of performance to model complex worlds in motion. This may be the inevitable work of Black performance, to restore an elided Black humanity to contexts that continue to disavow Black presence.

NOTE 1. A quick review of the literature related to “experimental performance” demonstrates a white tendency to universalize the terms of theoretical encounter, while resisting the presence of Black or Latinx innovations that will not easily “fit” into these terms. This tendency is demonstrated even within this very volume, where theorists write about universal (white) performance norms, without bothering to note the white supremacist perspective that inevitably excludes Black innovations.

REFERENCES DeFrantz, Thomas F. (2017). “Switch: Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership, and Black Popular Culture,” in Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, 477–98. New York: Oxford University Press. DeFrantz, Thomas F. (2019). “Dancing the Museum,” in Dena Davida, Marc Pronovost, Véronique Hudon, and Jane Gabriels (eds), Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice, chapter 8. New York: Berghahn Books. DeFrantz, Thomas and Anita Gonzalez (eds) (2014). Black Performance Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gaines, Malik (2017). Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible. New York: New York University Press.

CARING FOR BLACK CORPOREALITIES

103

Marshall, Monèt Noelle (2018). “Buy My Soul and Call It Art.” Living Arts Collective, Durham, NC, January 26. Mbembe, Achille (2017). Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. poe, jumatatu and Beacham Donte (2019). “Let ‘im Move You.” EMPAC, Troy, NY, February 24. SLIPPAGE: Performance Culture Technology (2017). “reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW.” Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC, January 17.

CHAPTER 3.5

Between Contemporary Art and Performance: Dramaturgy and Flow PETER ECKERSALL

As the art critic and philosopher Boris Groys notes, contemporary art is now in a state of flow: museums are no longer concerned with the display of static objects. Instead, the contemporary museum is a space of collaboration and curation; it is mobile and unstable. Groys argues, “Traditional art produced art objects. Contemporary art produces information” (2016: 4). What Groys calls “entering the flow” is, for the visitor to the contemporary museum, an experience of immersion and metaphysics and an expanded awareness of space and time. As a place of atmospheres, embodiment, and theatricality, the question of how museums and art galleries have become spaces of performance is a new point to consider. Moreover, and more of the focus of this chapter, is the need to consider the situation in reverse and to look at how trends in contemporary performance draw from and are informed by visual arts practices and installation art. The state of flow, which, according to Groys, is a primary feature of recent visual art, has also become a crucial aspect of the creation and reception of contemporary performance as well. We can see this most evidently in the trend of showing contemporary dance in galleries and in performing artists making art installations and bringing visual media into the foreground of their mainstage performance works. What should we take from these crosscurrents in form, structure, composition, material, and techniques? Questions of flow and aesthetic practice become more complicated when they start performing: aesthetic relations to artistic intention, and to time, bodies, audiences, and spaces work differently in a multiplicity of ways. As I will argue here, a linking factor is their “dramaturgy,” a term that I will explore in more detail in this chapter. In the first part of the chapter, I provide an overview of performance in galleries and discuss Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas company’s production of Work/ Travail/Arbeid (2015), a piece made for presentation in art spaces that has been performed at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and, most recently, Mudam-Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg. In the second part of the chapter, I consider the collaborative

BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ART AND PERFORMANCE

105

performance work of choreographer Anouk van Dijk and theater maker Falk Richter who have created hybrid theater-dance-performance works over the last decade. Their collaborations explore the complexity of human relations and the social dynamics of power through the use of fragmented dramaturgical techniques, and their performances can seem raw and unnerving. Van Dijk–Richter performances feature expressive design elements, stark lighting, and atmospheric soundscapes. While Work/Travail/Arbeid comes from the mainstage world of theater and dance and was remade expressly for presentation in visual arts environments, van Dijk and Richter’s work is made for theaters but looks more like an art installation. I read their 2014 work Complexity of Belonging as an example of the way that contemporary performance has become more connected to the politics of the visual economy. In my analysis, Groys’s emphasis on flow leads me to revisit the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and his prescient conception of contemporary social relations as being tenuous and liquid. My reading of Complexity of Belonging therefore explores how the work is an investigation of the condition of fragmentation and alienation that Bauman famously calls “liquid modernity” (Bauman 1999). The visual arts is becoming an expanded media that includes a more developed dramaturgical awareness of performance. The dynamics of flow between the visual arts and performance are enlivened by a new attention to questions of structure, form, and contextual spaces for a work, so much so, that these works are made with an awareness of space, time, and spectatorial sensibility; in other words, a mixing of curatorial and dramaturgical practices. With the advent of the performative turn in museums and galleries, there is now considerable crossover between the practice of dramaturgy and curatorship (see Eckersall and Ferdman 2018). Following from this, it is productive to think about how the practice of “new dramaturgy,” after Marianne van Kerkhoven (2009), the late Belgian dramaturg who coined the term in the 1990s, has become crucial in the rise of hybrid visual arts-theater performance practices. Dramaturgy is a creative practice that bridges an idea, a worldview, an activist message with its presentation or representation in and through live performance. It is an agent in a creative process that draws attention to the structure, means of expression (language, sensibility, aesthetics, form), framing, and conditions of performance. It has become very important to the idea and practice of contemporary performance, so much so that the medium itself is expressly dramaturgical (Eckersall 2018: 241). Thus, for van Kerkhoven, who was a pioneering dramaturg and political thinker in the field of practice that began to link performance, installation art, and contemporary dance, dramaturgy is about complexity and interweaving both as a statement of practice and as a political tactic (van Kerkhoven 2009: 11). The artist and the spectator look for and follow dramaturgical threads that draw us into an awareness of performance as a medium that embodies social relations. In this way, the creative use of bodies, text, spatial relations, design, atmosphere, and music are legible and discursive dramaturgical practices that are made to engage the spectator dialectically. In this way too, a performative event, no matter if it is presented in a gallery, a theater, or a nontraditional space for the display and presentation of visual and performing arts, offers affective experiential moments that invite critical readings and activate an awareness of politics and/or participation.

106

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

PLAY, PERFORMANCE, AND RETHINKING EXPERIENCE IN THE SPACE OF ART Scholars have long drawn attention to how the experience of the museum can be evermore performative; augmented by cafés and concerts, and by interactions with social media to produce personalized, simulated new forms of intimacy with art. In this regard, the innovative and personalized programming of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, is a telling example. MONA went so far as to develop a phone app that has location mapping software for one’s journey through the museum and for giving options on various forms of commentary and experiential contexts for each of the artworks.1 It also provides information about cafés and restaurants on-site, and options for staying in boutique accommodation nearby. One can choose to listen to a personal story about an artwork narrated by David Walsh, the unconventional owner of the museum and of its entire collection. One can also select a curatorial comment (called “art wank”—in deference to the tone of irreverence in much of Australia’s art and culture), or one can listen to a specially curated piece of music to accompany viewing the work. Having completed one’s visit to MONA, the app has an option to send a report about the visit in the form of a map showing the location of artworks that one visited and the period of time, in minutes and seconds, that one engaged with the pieces installed. MONA’s pioneering use of digital media has been replicated and further developed elsewhere. Exhibitions such as David Bowie Is (beginning at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2013 and ending at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018, with more than 2 million attendances) and the critically disappointing but technically advanced Björk MoMA (2015) utilized apps to substantially augment the viewing experience by playing music and including soundscapes of interviews, atmospheres, and ephemera at specific locations in the exhibit. The use of apps in these exhibits was intrinsic and without them the experience of viewing them would have been much reduced, even out of synch, like watching a 3D film without the special glasses. The focus on traveling through the exhibit and the structured unfolding of an experience comes from techniques developed in promenade performance and headphone theater.2 The way that a new exhibition is installed as an experience is what Groys calls “the theatricalization of the museum” (2016: 19); it produces not an experience of looking at art, but rather the sense of being inside and experiencing its sensory and metaphysical qualities. For a definition of theatricalization, Groys turns to the gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, best known in connection to Richard Wagner’s ambition to make his operas into completely absorbing theatrical experiences. As Groys notes, a larger hope was to collapse the border between art and the spectator, with the contemporary museum supposedly achieving this. The implication is that modern theater has not yet achieved a comparable effect, while the museum has become theatrical in a way that integrates the public into the context of art (Groys 2016: 19) and, for Groys, the theater remains curmudgeonly resistant to change. If by theater we mean the production and staging of the modern canon in staid artificial ways, then it is easy to find agreement with Groys. Following this logic, his

BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ART AND PERFORMANCE

107

depiction of the museum space as one of information installations and experiential design is helpful. But, in fact, this is an oversimplification and does not account for the vast range of genres of performance nor how they often address ideas of the everyday, what the scholar Carol Martin calls the “dramaturgy of the real” (2010). Theater in diverse times and places has always sought to create aesthetic and social spaces that bridge the worlds of art and everyday life and to foster community participation in art. Groys’s argument that contemporary art is innovative, inclusive, and revolutionary, while theater is too much bound up in commercial concerns or too mimetic and stuck in presentation and, therefore, unable to remake its cultural economy or relationship to audience is reductive. The hint of antitheatrical bias is simply not warranted.3 Audiences, too, have vastly different expectations for the theater across time and place. Theater is an arbiter of class and gender, but it also produces its own radical communities by dint of its collective modes of production. Throughout history, theater has always been concerned with questions of spectatorship and the transforming experience of performance, so much so that to talk of performativity and interaction in museums, one cites cornerstone ideas from theater and performance worlds. To name but a few suggestions that are associated with the work of theater makers, critical terms that are essential to understanding the performative transformation of museum culture include “ephemerality” (Zeami), “alienation” (Bertolt Brecht), “immersion” (Antonin Artaud), “viewpoints” (Anne Bogart), “embodiment” (Suzuki Tadashi), “space” (Peter Brook), “extinction/repetition” (Samuel Beckett), “deconstruction” (Heiner Müller), “dramaturgy” (Brecht again), “decoloniality” (Suzan Lori-Parks), “indigeneity” (Lemi Ponifasio), and “anthropomorphism” (Kris Verdonck). From performance theory, we are also informed by paradigm shifts such as the social turn (Jackson 2011), the post-dramatic (Lehmann 2006), and the aforementioned importance in the contemporary moment of new dramaturgy (van Kerkhoven 2009).4 In short, many of the artists referenced here work/ed in cross-disciplinary ways and their thinking about visuality, design, and architecture is intrinsic to their artistic practice. Yet, the importance and centrality of these performing artists and the ideas that they have developed in their work and in their theoretical writing are often ignored in visual arts criticism and curatorial practice. Furthermore, theater is less connected to the idea of art in relation to the market. In comparison to the economy of visual art, theater is a vastly smaller economy and not a pathway for investment portfolios, high society hobnobbing, and the accumulation of high cultural capital. This is not to mention the degree to which the performative turn in museums is, at least in part, an example of the neoliberal economy and something that flattens artistic practice into an experience-centered and commodified activity.5 The case for gesamtkunstwerk is also too pat. A crucial aspect of the performances that are discussed here is their intermedial dramaturgy that creates space for dialogue and critical eruption. As the art historian Kristine Stiles writes in her overview of performance art, in contrast to the synthesis inherent in the idea of total art, “intermedia empathizes the spaces between media” (2012: 803). After Dick Higgins, the idea of intermedia “conjoins aesthetic formalism, new social

108

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

institutions, growing literacy, and new technologies into a hybrid that acts between traditional practices rather than fusing them” (Stiles 2012: 803). Art historians sometimes wrongly assert that the idea of bringing the artwork and the spectator into a unified space of contemplation is about collapsing difference, whereas for theater makers, the sought-after sense of imbrication is often about tactics such as rupture and difference. We are in the space of theater by dint of consciously recognizing this fact and this is reinforced in the medium of contemporary performance. What Stiles relates to as intermedia tendencies in performance art could easily, in a slightly different context, be called dramaturgy. Thus, for example, a combination of haze, lighting, and soundscapes or projections in live performance is not about swallowing or absorbing an audience. Rather, it is a tactic for creating radical contrasts that are hypersensitized to the political dynamics of mise-en-scène. “The drive to the live,” to breaking tradition and activating audiences (Heathfield 2004: 7), performance crossing into installation art (Bishop 2005), and the rendering of performance as a material condition and a producer of affect (Eckersall, Grehan, and Scheer 2017), have been the drivers of performance over the last two decades. Major art galleries and museums have reinvented themselves as spaces for this work. For example, Olafur Eliasson’s sublime, contemplative The Weather Project (2003) installed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern created a microclimate of superfine mist and radiance to represent the sun and the sky. People sat or lay on the floor of the vast space for long periods in an auratic mediation on the sun as life force. The work materialized atmospheres and climates as if to come face to face with the creation of weather itself.6 Another example was Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present (2010) at MoMA; a daily durational performance held over three months in which a single member of the public—taking their turn after waiting in a long line—sat in a silent repose of mutual contemplation with the artist. Working with the idea of co-presence and a statement about performance as an act of encounter and charisma, The Artist Is Present was a hugely popular work. Audiences reported experiences of awe, empathy, essence, and elation.7 These works, and many like them that we now see in museums and galleries, produce mood and sensation. They imagine the audience as a collective in contrast to the singularity of a viewer and are designed to draw spectators/participants into an encounter with art that is moody, embodied, and visceral. Their formal compositions invite phenomenological contemplation and responses of awe, but such effects-based work can also be criticized as mere sensation and the manufacture of experience.8 In the last decade, dance has been a feature in the programming of a great many galleries and museums. Works by choreographers such Maria Hassabi, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Trajal Harrell, and Xavier Le Roy (for example) have been prominently placed in museums and a number of performance makers now specialize in making work for these non-theater spaces in dialogue with the institutions and practices of visual arts.9 Art historian Claire Bishop notes that this has produced anxieties and disapproval among some visual artists, scholars, and critics, while she also notes the need to further investigate this performative turn in new ways (Bishop 2018: 22–23). For Bishop, “dance exhibitions,” as she

BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ART AND PERFORMANCE

109

calls them—performance works taking place during the regular opening hours of a museum—are part of a concern with the changing nature of spectatorship and the increasing ubiquity of personalized forms of social media that are so much a part of how we identify with and experience the world around us. Bishop argues that dance exhibitions are paradigmatic of new “gray zones” for performance that have developed from the convergence of the theater’s “black box” and the gallery’s “white cube.” Completing this picture is the way that smartphones and social media are now an integral part of spectatorship, emerging, as Bishop notes, at the same moment as the rise of dance exhibitions (Bishop 2018: 24). The fact that one can take photos and especially “selfies” of/in performances in galleries—and not in theaters—adds an important new dimension to the dynamics of these performances. Bishop argues that this changes the temporality of art and transforms the nature of attention for the spectator. There is a re-temporalization of art that is intrinsically linked to technology and data and the spectator’s attention can be divided between viewing the work and photographing the fact of being there and communicating this to friends (Bishop 2018: 32, 38). This, in turn, offers “a zoom lens onto the conflicts underlying technology’s reshaping of our sensorium” (2018: 40). As Bishop’s essay reveals, performances shown in gallery spaces tend to be multidirectional, ambiently scopic and can be watched for varying lengths of time and from vastly different, individuated perspectives. To this, we can also add the fact that such performances must “fit the space,” thereby making challenges for sound and lighting designers and musicians as well as performers. The audience is also constantly moving and interrupting the integral structure of the work. A recent example of a work doing this is by the renowned contemporary dance company Rosas and their production Work/Travail/Arbeid, choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, with music from the contemporary ensemble Ictus, that premiered at WIELS in Brussels in 2015. Work/Travail/Arbeid stretches a onehour long performance made by the company in 2013 called Vortex Temporum (choreographed to Gérard Grisey’s musical composition of the same name) into a nine-hour cycle designed to be staged in an exhibition space. Each day, the piece is shown for seven hours following the pattern of an average working day of a gallery to a constantly changing audience of people, only some of whom have come to the gallery to see De Keersmaeker’s piece. There are nine parts to the work and seven are shown each day, picking up where the cycle ended in the previous day’s performance. It is structured as an elongated, cursive, and cyclic dramaturgy. Work/Travail/Arbeid greatly extends each element of the music, movement, and technical aspects of Vortex Temporum, enlarging them into a piece about the question: “What would it mean for a dance piece to perform as an exhibition?” (Filipovic 2015: 17). It places the Rosas dancers and the Ictus musicians in an open space with a freely moving audience. When performed at MoMA in 2017, the piece moved in undulating spirals and fully paced traverses around and through groups of spectators who gathered in the atrium. The performers traced arcs on the floor in chalk that were better viewed from the floors and bridges overlooking them from above. At floor level, the company negotiated the unpredictable assemblages of people sitting, standing, and moving around. In fact, the Yoshio Taniguchi-designed

110

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

building is a perfect venue for viewing the work, creating, as it does, multiple viewpoints for the constantly shifting dramaturgy and changing directions of the work.10 The art historian Elena Filipovic writes about the tension that is played out between the highly structured compositional elements and the unpredictable movements of spectators (2015: 20). From my own viewing of the work, several times, I saw how people seemed to place themselves intentionally in the way of the dancers, as if to see Work/Travail/Arbeid as some kind of a game. Or perhaps there is something about the experience economy reflex of people in the gallery, as if to make it all about them and not about the work. As with the example of the absorption of the gallery spectator in their own selfie image that Bishop describes, for these spectators the work exists only as a means of self-referentialism. Its substance as a thing and an activation of something larger that can rupture is diminished in their privatized world. Work/Travail/Arbeid (“work” in three languages), with its durational and performative demands on everyone involved—artists, spectators, and gallery staff— draws our attention to art as a form of labor, something that in this case is highly skilled and, yet, like all labor, has finite time, energy, and attention. The musicians, with their instruments—including a grand piano, cello, viola, violin, flute, and bass clarinet—have to negotiate the difficulties of standing for long periods and playing while adjusting their position in relation to the dancers. Work/Travail/Arbeid makes huge demands on bodies and concentration. It is what Filipovic calls a “vertiginous temporal rethinking” and “a durational operation that yields neither an event nor a performance, and even less a concert, despite the live music and the fact that music plays a crucial role but a live exhibition” (Filipovic 2015: 18, my emphasis). The liveness is the visible laboring to sculpt bodies, space, acoustics, and motion. These stresses in the work are acknowledged in an essay by the artist Nick Mauss who ponders: “Who dances all day?” He thinks of the work in terms of atomized, compartmentalized, and specialized actions: “a clock on the wall, a piece of chalk hanging from a string, each dancer, each musician, each visitor, every piece of clothing, haircut, bracelet, decision trembling,” thus making, what he calls, the “radical austerity of the dramaturgy” (Mauss 2017: 2). And amid the vortex, a sound technician with a mixing device hanging around his neck moved around the space, adjusting the directionality and balance of the amplified sound from the musical instruments. With the musicians and performers constantly moving in relation to each other, the ensemble was unstable, the dynamic balance of the sound kept changing which necessitated small adjustments lest the aesthetic complexity of the music be degraded. This was a demonstration of the commitment to maintaining subtle qualities and dramaturgical intensities in the performance, sensibilities that would otherwise be lost to the unpredictable nature of the gallery space. Work/Travail/Arbeid was exposed to the ambient qualities of the museum atrium, but the skill of the artists and technicians was put to work to make the most of this open atmospheric space. The fact that dramaturgical and technical skills of presentation are brought into play here is an important point of difference to many previous iterations of performance in the gallery; iterations that often intentionally elide or lack compositional and/or structural-dramaturgical

BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ART AND PERFORMANCE

111

thinking. On the other hand, Work/Travail/Arbeid shows that there is an increasingly shared understanding of performance between museum and performance spaces, not only in terms of idea but also as a medium that can handle the particular demands of staging performance. While there are limitations, especially in the area of text-driven performance, the field of dance has been an influential part of the new thinking about the visual arts. On the Rosas website, the company discuss how the performance aimed to “extend itself across a new time and space . . . creating a new form of choreographic writing” (Rosas 2018). At the center of this is a new and vital recognition of dramaturgy. From this vantage point, we can also look at the situation in reverse: where exhibition bleeds into dance and attention to visuality feeds the dramaturgy and politics of a contemporary performance.

THE COMPLEXITY OF BELONGING With its mix of dance, spoken word, projected images, and music, a good way to think about Complexity of Belonging (premiered Melbourne 2014) is in terms of performance installation.11 It is a performance in which actors and dancers share the stage, slipping between spoken word and choreography. It is also an art installation in which stage design, music, and lighting have an intrinsic presence that substantially contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. The idea for Complexity of Belonging is that it shows the audience some of the processes that artists use in developing their work. The piece slips in and out of modes of performance that range across theater, dance, conversations, and even manifesto. The mixture is intentionally not resolved into a unified aesthetic, and the texts, dance, and visuality sometimes collide into each other. The dramaturgy is therefore partial and fragmented, as a way to “explore the shaky foundations and mechanisms of human bonds against the background of current crises” (Schaubühne 2009). Richter and van Dijk bring their respective skills as writer-director and choreographer-director to their collaborations that explore how young people deal with the challenges of twenty-first-century life in the capitalist West. Their approach draws on everyday experiences and they devise their performance text by drawing from the languages, subcultures, fashions, and music of the participating artists. Their collaborative works—Nothing Hurts (1999), TRUST (2009), PROTECT ME (2010), RAUSCH (2012), and Safe Places (2016)—depict human responses to precarity, violence, and techno-capitalism, themes that are further explored in the context of a multiethnic, socially divided Australia in Complexity of Belonging. The overarching theme of human relations, shown as a state of personal and political alienation and desperation, is a common thread in all of their work, considerably heightened in Complexity of Belonging due, in no small part, to the authenticity and conviction of the stories of the performers and the fact that they are all playing versions of themselves. The shared dramaturgy of Richter and van Dijk’s seems to intentionally create moments of pressure and violence: the performative elements of each artist provoke responses and even seem to cut across each other’s creative spaces. Richter shows the raw energy of protest and anger in his texts, while van Dijk generates a similar

112

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURES 3.5.1, 3.5.2, and 3.5.3:  Complexity of Belonging. Installation shots photographed by Jeff Busby and Chunky Move.

BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ART AND PERFORMANCE

113

energy in the equally strong physical interactions between performers and their use of objects such as microphones, moveable lights, seating, desks, and other design elements. Van Dijk states that “the main reason why the audience can accept the diverse topics addressed from scene to scene, and can easily transport into the next reality [is movement]. Movement literally and metaphorically connects each scene to the next, from performer to performer” (van Dijk 2019). Complexity of Belonging explores human relations and connections to place. It makes statements about the confusions and disappointments that people face in a world of complexity. The piece is largely comprised of scenes in which the performers are shown talking about their mix-raced parentage, friendships and lovers, sexuality, stressed-out work, and living life in a constantly frazzled state. It is charged with political questions about race, indigeneity, relationships, humanity, and the pressures of living in the contemporary moment of extreme capitalism, micro attention spans, social media, and miscommunication. Complexity of Belonging is also about the experience of living in Australia and being connected to the world. It is made by two principal artists, neither of whom are Australian. Richter is German and is based in Europe and van Dijk is Dutch and moved to Australia to take up the role of artistic director of Chunky Move Contemporary Dance Company in 2011.12 The performance has a directness shown in the way that each of the performers addresses the audience in their own words and its flatness conveys an almost distanced view of Australia. This bluntness is also conveyed in scenes that show performers playing the roles of partners and lovers trying to communicate via video feeds and projections in which their faces appear on a large screen. Like a billboard on the side of a highway moving past the window of a fast-moving car, the screen is moved around the performance space and is part of the work’s choreography. The close-up images and angry acts of miscommunication shown on the screen heighten the sense of unease. Meanwhile, the whole stage is enfolded by a semicircular widescreen onto which images, textures, and colors of the Australian outback are projected. Taken as a whole, these actions reinforce the general sense of emotional distance and observational dramaturgy, even while the performers share the same stage. In the words of Tara Jade Samaya, one of the performers in Complexity of Belonging, the plea to “Look beyond the broken places” speaks to the need for belonging in a system that, through the normative constraints of hegemonic power structures, rejects notions of belonging for people who appear different, even while it celebrates them on a superficial level. This is not only the result of an innate conservatism or mean-spiritedness in the Australian mainstream, but it is also the defining political strategy of power elites in our time. A pivotal figure in the piece is the performer Eloise Mignon who plays the role of an artistic investigator working on a creative development project. She wants to “meet real people and find out who they are” as a basis for making a new performance. Sitting at a desk, as if giving a lecture, Mignon introduces her theme, which is also taken to be the overarching thematic for the piece as a whole. It is a manifesto for the atomized world.

114

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Since the beginning of the 21st Century, the world has been losing its stable and well-defined models of life. Relations, work, linages, traditional normative ways of belonging; language, ideology, religion, nation, culture, gender and sexual identity dissolve, become more fluid and flexible. Utopian freedom of choosing where to belong is one of this new world’s promises, the struggle to find a place, a sense of being one of its challenges. At the same time, reductionist senses of belonging continue to be misused for political purposes. To gather groups of people against others. To discriminate and kill. Where do I fit in there? Where do I belong?13 In pointing to the sense of there being no stable politics or ethics and an undermining of the foundations of community, Mignon’s text resonates with the contemporary condition and is a version of critiques of society that are now seen across the political spectrum. The humorous gambit of the artist coming back from an overseas trip to take up an arts grant is also bitingly self-referential. There is a pretentiousness to the cliché of the globalized artist seeking to find something authentically “real” in the local and one cringes at the brittle satire on contemporary art’s expedient focus on dystopia and identity as a set-up for the piece. To the critical spectator, it is intended that we should be unnerved. Other performers join Mignon on stage and begin to develop their own responses to the situation of finding one’s way in the world. While Mignon speaks, they underscore the details of her text in small jarring gestures and bodily ticks. One is made to feel uncomfortable, but the statement that Mignon makes to establish the groundwork for the piece is serious and relevant. It describes the very unhinged nature of contemporary society and the nadir of cultural politics more broadly. Although made before the current populist wave, it makes visible its seeds and tactics and asks the important question about how people are so susceptible to reductionist senses of belonging. How can people be so conned? The fluid dramaturgy of the work makes visible, and stages on multiple levels, the awkward discussion of politics in Complexity of Belonging. While sharing some similar approaches to the “radical austerity” (Mauss) and “flow” (Groys) of performance in galleries and museums, it deals with these ideas in a different way. For Mauss, the austerity of Work/Travail/Arbeid was about its radical simplicity and sectioning of time. In Complexity of Belonging, it is more about the austerity politics that over-code the race-baiting and closing down of the imagination in neoliberal society.14 The way that Complexity of Belonging introduces its performers sociologically, through exploring the limits of their participation and the censure of identity pluralism very much accords with Groys’s notion of art being a source of information. But Richter and van Dijk’s work goes further with its critique of society by showing us how uncertainty is a part of the present day and—expanding on the idea of flow—is a symptom of what Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” Bauman’s work, although not directly concerning the visual or performing arts, is a touchtone to better understand the fluid dramaturgy of Complexity of Belonging. Bauman shows how modernity has moved from a solid to a liquid phase in which social forms and human relationships (such as those shown in Complexity of

BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ART AND PERFORMANCE

115

Belonging) no longer keep their shape because they decompose and melt faster than the time it takes to cast them. Forms of social life do not have time to solidify with the result that they no longer serve as frames of reference for human actions (Bauman 2007: 1). Fluidity in the social sphere results in the atomization of the individual and produces new intensities of time and space that become faster and privatized in the shift from “heavy” to “light” modernity. Liquid modernity also speaks to the precarity of work, the “gig economy,” and to the reformation of communities along neoliberal divisions that are further sustained by nativist fearmongering and populism. Liquid modernity has created a hollowed-out and inequitable situation of remote and unreachable power structures coupled with the “unstructured and fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics” (Bauman 1999: 8). The themes explored in Complexity of Belonging are most closely connected to Bauman’s work on human relations and the rising politics of exclusion. His book Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (2013) offers a series of reflections on friendship, desire, sex, and the fading of lifelong attachments. A liquid society in which older forms of social organization have dissolved produces what Bauman calls a “vexing dialectics of two irreconcilables . . . reefs of loneliness and commitment, the scourge of exclusion and the iron grip of bonds too tight” (Bauman 2013: 707). Such a “duality of postures” leads to a spiraling sense of contradiction and schizophrenia: deeper desires for belonging, while belonging itself becomes increasingly tenuous. The consequent “complexity of belonging” is explored in van Dijk and Richter’s performance in the depiction of relationships as uncertain through fragments of touch—bodies in and out of synch with each other—and small scenes of raw exposed people in relationship meltdown. The incompleteness of the dramaturgy shows what Bauman calls the “permanence of transitoriness”—an embodiment of what it means to be “an insertion into the flow of life without an anchor” (Bauman 2013: 2597). In other words, to reprise the thematic set-up of Complexity of Belonging, the utopian freedom of choosing and the real political condition of being unable to do so is enacted in the text-dance. Bauman’s thesis is also relevant to considering the many issues about exclusion that Complexity of Belonging explores. For Bauman, the failure of love leads directly to the scourge of rant-refugee politics of xenophobia; we have, as a result, two segregated life-worlds and “mixophobia” (Bauman 2013: 1973). There is good reason that the set design for Complexity of Belonging is a vast open outback space. In contemporary critical parlance, this is a space of colonization and camps: of US military bases, refugee camps (now moved off-shore), and spaces for the extraction of minerals and the exploitation of land on a vast scale. To maintain power and dominion over these often colonial and expropriated spaces, conservative politicians have long used a rhetoric of nativist intolerance to difference, including a rejection of climate science and identification with a military-refugee complex. With cruel insight, Bauman wonders: “to what extent the refugees’ camps are laboratories where (unwittingly perhaps, but no less forcefully for that reason) the new liquid modern ‘permanently transient’ pattern of life is put to the test and rehearsed” (Bauman 2013: 2601). Certainly, the ideology of exclusion is powerful in Australian

116

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

society—a complexity of belonging that requires the acts of refusal and difference that are explored in van Dijk and Richter’s performance and visual design. The way that the visual, audial, and presentational forms of Complexity of Belonging are shown as separate and yet together is important to the sense of politics that the work develops. They are dramaturgical forms that show their material presence, thereby adding to the levels of signification in the work. The viewer is asked to respond to these levels as affective registers: stories, image, and sensation coexist and are not completely resolved. In this way, Complexity of Belonging is a good example of how installation art practices are now mixed with performance in theatrical presentational settings. This is grounds for a new relationship to dramaturgy, and from dramaturgy to politics, and perhaps community activism and possibilities for resistance in and through the performing arts.

DRAMATURGY: VISUALITY AND PERFORMANCE Dramaturgy—the question of structure, more the question of legibility—is important because of the need to handle the complexity of images, the information about people and things, and the advances in technology in live performance. In my discussion of Work/Travail/Arbeid, I highlighted the example of the sound technician who moved around the cavernous space of the atrium at MoMA, sculpting the amplification of the music in time with the motion of the dancers, musicians, and spectators. From this, we see how it is now necessary to include sound and other atmospheric, acoustic, and visual media into the range of expressive practices in the dramaturgical superfield (see Eckersall, Grehan, and Scheer 2017: 135–60). Whereas, in the past, there was a tendency to view performance as a localized, antitheatrical statement as part of a wider claim to its authenticity, as Work/Travail/Arbeid shows, the trend of inviting dramaturgically and technically complex contemporary performance into visual arts spaces requires changes in the curatorial understanding of performance as well as the acquisition of different skills for gallery workers. It anticipates the need for technically demanding levels of production and staging and it shows the need for more thinking about performance’s framing and the many different ways that spectators see and experience a live work when staged in a gallery space. These are all dramaturgical questions. There is also another important reason for giving attention to dramaturgy. This relates to the question of politics and the relationship that it has with art and performance. We have already noted how art is the expression of an idea and a source of information. But there is also the nature of power itself that art makes visible. Whether highlighting questions of time, labor, and collaboration as in Work/Travail/ Arbeid, or in Complexity of Belonging, where human relationships, communities, and work in an era of “liquid love” are explored—these performances show something about the nature of power. They make visible the instances and sensibilities of power as it is located in the bodies, scenes, and events that we watch. We see how things and people are made to move, speak, and think. We see how performance draws on visuality, lighting, sound, and architecture in equal expressive relations to the

BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ART AND PERFORMANCE

117

performing bodies. We also see how the act of performance is an expression of active social formation, if not outright resistance. As André Lepecki has so effectively argued, mobility in performance expresses a call to activism and is an action directed in and through the body—a mobilization that is a critically efficacious response to the current dystopian political times (Lepecki 2016: 5). His call for performance to be “the bearer of strangeness” (2016: 6) is particularly relevant in considering the way that these performances connect to post-Brechtian and new dramaturgy ideas of critical distance (verfremdungseffekt) and the need for performance to show our alienated life force. In this sense, performance is enabling because it both shows and is the expression of a situation and a political condition. And it is the fact of the dramaturgy that makes this possible. This is why there is an urgent need for museums and galleries (and our intransient theaters) to become more dramaturgical at the creative, operational, and institutional levels of their work.

NOTES 1. See Franklin and Papastergiadis (2017) on how MONA’s performative design and emphasis on experience has eclipsed “highbrow” forms of cultural experience. 2. For discussion about the development of headphone theater and auditory participation in theater, see Home-Cook (2015). 3. For example, Jonas Barish’s The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (1981) shows how an ingrained enmity to the theater in Western cultural history has led to an amount of willful ignorance of theater on the part of scholars and critics. 4. See also Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola’s edited online resource In Terms of Performance (2016), “a keyword anthology designed to provoke discovery across artistic disciplines.” As they note, borrowing terms (and they mention their own borrowing from Raymond Williams’s publication of Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 1976) from one disciplinary field and applying them in another can be productively unsettling and its naivety can be liberating. Available at: http:​// int​ermso​fperf​orman​ce.si​te/in​trodu​ction​/ (accessed February 1, 2019). 5. For example, Kundu and Kalin (2015) argue that the very notion of participation in art museums is a buzzword that cloaks the transformation of the museum from a public space to one regulated by the logic of privatization. 6. For related discussion, see Scheer (2017) exploring how manufactured atmospheres are artistic entities. 7. Other examples of performance work as installation include (to mention only a few): Ann Hamilton’s The Event of a Thread at Park Avenue Armory (2012); Ant Hampton’s The Extra People, FIAF (2015); Anne Imhof ’s Faust, Venice Biennale (2017); and Kris Verdonck’s Exhibition #1 at House for Contemporary Art Z33 (2011). 8. For wider discussions of the history and critique of performance installation arts, see, for example: Schechner (1994) on environmental theater, Bishop (2012) on participation, Ferdman (2018) on site-specific performance, and Pearson and Shanks (2001) on memory and place. 9. Examples include Xavier Le Roy, Retrospective, MoMA PS1 2014; Maria Hassabi, Staging, Documenta 14, 2017; Trajal Harrell, Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning

118

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

at the Judson Church, New Museum, 2009. Most of Hassabi’s work is shown in galleries while Harrell and Le Roy—and many other contemporary performance makers—move between showing work in theaters and visual arts settings. See also the Institute of Contemporary Art’s installation of William Forsythe’s Choreographic Objects, which is designed as an environment in which spectators create their own choreography (ICA, London, 2018–19). 10. Documentation of the performances of Work/Travail/Arbeid at the Tate Modern and WIELS Contemporary Art Centre shows similar architectural relationships to the work. See documentation in Filipovic (2015). Also see Filipovic (2015: 24–7) for examples of patterns drawn on the floor that are produced in the work. For a list of performer and production credits, see https​://ww​w.mom​a.org​/cale​ndar/​exhib​ition​ s/162​6. 11. Concept, choreography, and direction: Anouk van Dijk and Falk Richter; text Falk Richter; dramaturgs Nils Haarmann and Daniel Schlusser; performers Eloise Mignon, Josh Price, Stephen Phillips, Karen Sibbing, James Vu Anh Pham, Tara Jade Samaya, Alya Manzart, Joel Bray, and Lauren Langlosis. A full credit list is available at: https​://ch​unkym​ove.c​om/ou​r-wor​ks/cu​rrent​-repe​rtoir​e/com​plexi​ty-of​-belo​nging​/. 12. Van Dijk stepped down from the role of artistic director in December 2018. 13. Complexity of Belonging, unpublished text transcribed from performance documentation by Eckersall. 14. See, for example, Bhattacharyya (2015) for a study linking neoliberal economic austerity with techniques of exclusion and what she calls “extending the racial state.”

REFERENCES Barish, J. (1981). The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bauman, Z. (1999). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Blackwell. Bauman, Z. ([2003] 2013). Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Wiley, Kindle edition. Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity. Bhattacharyya, G. (2015). Crisis, Austerity, and Everyday Life: Living in a Time of Diminishing Expectations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bishop, C. (2005). Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate Publishing. Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Arts and the Politics of Spectatorship. London and New York: Verso. Bishop, C. (2018). “Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention.” TDR/The Drama Review 62, no. 2: 22–42. Eckersall, P. (2018). “On Dramaturgy to Make Visible.” Performance Research 23, no. 4: 241–43. Eckersall, P. and B. Ferdman (2018). “Curating Dramaturgies.” Paper presented at American Dramaturgies for the 21st Century, Sorbonne, Paris, France, March 15. Eckersall, P., H. Grehan, and E. Scheer (2017). New Media Dramaturgy: Performance Media and New Materialism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ART AND PERFORMANCE

119

Ferdman, B. (2018). Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Filipovic, E. (2015). “Vertiginous Force/The Exhibition as Work,” in E. Filipovic (ed.), Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker Work/Travail/Arbeid Rosas and Ictus. Brussels: WIELS, Mercatorfonds & Rosas. Franklin, A. and N. Papastergiadis (2017). “Engaging with the Anti-Museum? Visitors to the Museum of Old and New Art.” Journal of Sociology 53, no. 3: 670–86. Groys, B. (2016). In the Flow. London: Verso. Heathfield, A. (2004). “Alive,” in A. Heathfield (ed.), LIVE: Art and Performance, 6–15. London and New York: Routledge. Home-Cook, G. (2015). Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, S. (2011). Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London and New York: Routledge. Jackson, S. and P. Marincola (eds) (2016). In Terms of Performance. The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia Arts Research Center, University of California, Berkeley Credits and Artist Index. Kundu, R. and N. M. Kalin (2015). “Participating in the Neoliberal Art Museum.” Studies in Art Education 57, no. 1: 39–52. Lehmann, H. (2006). Postdramatic Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. Lepecki, A. (2016). Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Martin, C. (ed.) (2010). Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mauss, N. (2017). “What Remains When You Take It All Apart? Considering Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/Arbeid.” Available at: https​://ww​w.mom​a.org/​ d/pd​fs/W1​siZiI​sIjIw​MTgvM​DQvMj​MvMXB​sOW0z​NG9lM​F9OaW​NrX01​hdXNz​ X0ZJT​kFMLn​BkZiJ​dXQ/N​ick_M​auss_​FINAL​.pdf?​sha=a​c7df6​fa837​167fe​ (accessed December 20, 2018). Pearson, M. and M. Shanks (2001). Theatre/Archeology. London and New York: Routledge. Rosas (2018). Work/Travail/Arbeid. Available at: https​://ww​w.ros​as.be​/en/p​roduc​tions​/388-​ workt​ravai​larbe​id (accessed September 13, 2018). Schaubühne (2009). “TRUST.” Available at: https​://ww​w.sch​aubue​hne.d​e/en/​produ​ktion​ en/tr​ust.h​tml?m​=312 (accessed September 13, 2018). Schechner, R. (1994). Environmental Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. Scheer, E. (2017). “Animate Atmospheres: Art at the Edge of Materiality,” in C. Braddock (ed.), Animism in Art and Performance, 131–49. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stiles, K. (2012). “Performance Art,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, 798–954. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Van Dijk, A. (2019). Email communication with author, April 4. Van Kerkhoven, M. (2009). “European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century: A Constant Movement.” Performance Research 14, no. 3: 7–11. Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3.6

Acting Ethical: Performance Art Goes Public MALIK GAINES

“After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” (Ukeles 2003: 918). So asks Mierle Laderman Ukeles in her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art. Ukeles’s work has placed specific emphasis on labor, its locations, energies, modes of compensation, gendered outcomes, and aesthetics. In her iconic performance and photo set, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (1973), the artist scrubbed the steps of Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, offering an early definition of work that decades later came to be known as “institutional critique” and “social practice” modes of artmaking (Jackson 2011: 15). The former draws critical attention to the physical, economic, and political structures that support the private presentation of art; the latter offers public interactions and political processes as artistic materials. With her trailblazing work, grounded in the acknowledged experience of being both an artist and a caretaking parent, Ukeles transported the role of maintenance, which is typically undercompensated and misrecognized in capitalist life, into the place of artistic production. Ukeles represents a generation of artists working in the late 1960s and 1970s who redefined art with a personal repertoire of actions, gestures, and behaviors in social relation. She is a paradigmatic artist for thinking about the transformative role performance has played in a visual art tradition premised on autonomy and aesthetic judgment. Performance works on the boundaries of this fine art tradition, jeopardizing the disciplinary status of an art world, or following Pierre Bourdieu and his sociological approach, an “artistic field” (1993: 37). At the same time, the proposed containment of this field and its institutional operations offers the conditions for testing an Arendtian notion of a place of the “political,” a limited public sphere distinct from the “social” where people may negotiate the terms of the project of being together (Arendt 1958: 28). For artists like Ukeles, an art field offers a metonymic relationship to a much broader social field of operations, a public sphere inclusive of political power and differently determined spaces than those ideated for the presentation of autonomous art. This relationship between

ACTING ETHICAL: PERFORMANCE ART GOES PUBLIC

121

art’s provisional autonomy and the surround of a larger sociality anticipates the position in which artist Andrea Fraser situated herself when she wrote: “I would like to understand art practice . . . as a form of counter-practice within the field of cultural production” (2005: 4). With its counter-position, Fraser’s statement borrows the revolutionary spirit of the avant-garde and a modernist dialectical mode to describe art as a set of actions that operate beyond the cultural space already prepared for art’s presentation. This movement beyond ushers in a change in the ethical framework, as it inevitably exposes the world’s ethics to the ethics of the work. The refined arrangement of objecthood and viewership is pulled apart when the gallery doors are opened wide. “A turn to ethics is a turn to the affirmative question of art, not art as negation, allegory or critique, but the description of an art that operates directly upon the world it is situated in; it is a definition of art that is not at all premised on representation” (Beshty 2015: 19). Observers of this turn in art’s progress narrative have rightly pursued the question of ethics as art has progressively dispelled illusions around the conditions of its presentation since the twentieth century. Reflective of a specific Euro-American art and art history disciplinary apparatus, Beshty’s genealogy attributes this modernist ethical turn to the sculptures of Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi, and pits presence against representation, as if the world we are situated in—our languages, our workplaces, our national democratic structures, our productive environment, our racial-political hierarchies—is not itself premised on representation. In performance, however, it is easy to locate examples outside of this patrimony that work directly on the world, are more ambivalent than affirmative or negative, and employ various literary and rhetorical styles at once. Further attention to the groundbreaking performance works that emerged at the end of the 1960s offers other important strains of ethical inquiry. One relevant example is Asco, a collective of artists from Los Angeles who drew on fine art training, an underground music and culture scene, alternative publishing, Mexican and Mexican-American histories of Muralism, and fantasies of Hollywood and other major media, to create performances, photos, films, and other ephemera. Between 1972 and 1987, its four key members, Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, Willie Herón, and Patssi Valdez, acted out stylized mythic images, merging public and mediatized spheres in the act of world-making, making art out of a scene, and innovating an aesthetic that outperformed institutional expectations. Instigated by the politics of their time, the group named themselves after the Spanish word for nausea, reflecting the results of the US war in Vietnam and other crises. Their imaginative and campy projects exceeded both the nascent mainstream art scene in Los Angeles and the nationalist style of the emerging Chicano movement. As a collective with various interests and abilities, their work decentered the antique notion of the genius artist, offering rather a world of artistic possibilities. The group’s No Movies, photographic performances staged as film stills, set up cinematic scenes in public spaces in Los Angeles and documented them, marking both an exclusion from nearby Hollywood and the freer creation of such images made possible without that industrial apparatus. The group’s Spraypaint LACMA performance of 1972 is one of these No Movies, and took specific aim at a public

122

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

cultural institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which at that time had presented few Chicano artists’ work. Several members tagged their names on a feature of the museum’s architecture one night, and a photo shot the following day depicts Valdez posing on a bridge near the spray-painted signatures. The group’s action commented on the ways nonwhite artists may imagine participating in high art culture. Defying the law of private property, the group also pushed against the laws of racial exclusion. Acts such as these combined a public intervention with radical imagination, redefining both the categories of art and artist. Collaborative and disciplinarily promiscuous, these simple performances dismantle autonomy as they take on ethico-political problems of representation. For the action “Stations of the Cross” (1971), the group dressed in elaborate costumes and carried a fifteen-foot cardboard cross down a busy avenue, mimicking sincere public processions of the kind, “iconoclastically transforming the Mexican Catholic tradition of Las Posadas into a ritual of remembrance and resistance against the deaths in Vietnam” (Chavoya and Gonzalez 2011: 48). Followed by a gathering crowd, they took the cross to an army recruitment center in East Los Angeles and temporarily blocked the entrance. This work can be put in productive dialogue with the action-based photo series “Gas Stations of the Cross” (1971), by legendary New York performance artist Jack Smith, in which he inserted his own costumed body into the semipublic spaces around him, honoring few distinctions between his loft (from which he was evicted for nonpayment of rent), the street, and venues appropriate for art’s presentation. Smith’s titular pun adds a layer of camp to the idea of ritualized action. Indeed, a shared sense of ironic critique animate these otherwise distinct works and artists, who nonetheless each use imagination to turn theatrical artistic actions onto a larger social sphere. A prolific artist, writer, filmmaker, and performer, Smith made a ritual of paying his monthly rent check to a lobster. Lobsters appear as agents of capitalism throughout his campy and experimental oeuvre. These enforcers of “landlordism” are guardians of confounding economic norms that Smith criticizes throughout his work (Johnson 2012: 2). Smith was a purveyor of dreamy, incomplete narratives, in essays, monologues, illustrations, and wherever language may be used. The ways time and space are monetized in New York City formed a consistent subject matter, as imagined through Smith’s “moldy” fantasia of dilapidated old Hollywood symbols (Smith 1997: 26). Smith’s work from the 1960s into the 1980s made an anti-capitalist ethos into an aesthetic, observing the places where aesthetics and economics collude, and always preferring trashy-baroque, over-adorned assemblages freighted with the artificial orientalist fantasies of bygone genres to the ascendant taste for the minimal, noting that “rectangles are the preferred shape of capitalism” (Smith 1997: 117). One such rectangle, the rent check, was an object through which Smith himself confronted capitalism’s regulating order, and as a series of photos from the 1970s show, he would parade his check through the downtown streets as a performance, like the presentation of a holy relic, to lampoon its power. In another photographed performance, Smith himself acts as the lobster, in a draped gown of boldly patterned terrycloth and maneuvering giant glittery pincers. Smith’s all-encompassing vision suspended a boundary between public and private,

ACTING ETHICAL: PERFORMANCE ART GOES PUBLIC

123

guarded by money, by which not only the mainstream world but also arts institutions organized value. Using fantasy to critique reality, populating his works with the marginal comrades around him, and dismissing disciplinary expectations that might have made his work marketable, Smith innovated a particular queer performance ethic that both served and disserved his artistic ambitions. A screen-printed brochure from a leftover grant application on view in Artist’s Space’s 2018 exhibition of Smith’s ephemera declares “Aloha from the exotic fantasy-world of socialistic art!” playing on that Hawaiian word’s dual role as hello and goodbye. As emphasis shifts in performance from visuality to action, artistic autonomy and aesthetic judgment set up a problem of ethics: Against which codes may action be evaluated? How may we understand the intention behind an expression? A classical ethics, tracing its genealogy to the philosophers of ancient Athens, contends with these constraints: One might ask, concerning an action, how successfully that action satisfies the agent’s existing desires and goals. Thus, if someone wishes to become wealthy, one might well view his investing in the low-priced shares of a newly privatised industry as an appropriate action. In this mode of practical assessment, the success of an action is determined by considerations which are internal to the agent himself. Alternatively, one might assess an action by reference to criteria whose applicability is not circumscribed by facts about the agent’s own motivations. Thus, if one judges an action to be, say, unjust or greedy, then the force of this judgement is not dependent upon whether the agent himself has any desire to act justly or to avoid acting greedily. In this sense, moral reasons are “categorical”: their normative force is not derived from reasons of other kinds, and so, in particular, is not dependent upon the motivational states of the agent to which they apply. (Everson 1998: 9) The economic example here is especially apt for thinking through the ethical problems of modernity, where capital frames each so-called choice, where the place of politics is commodified space. Given the amounts of money that circulate through the world of art, and the contested and precarious status the artist occupies in relationship to regulated labor, the economic relation surfaces as a primary site of ethical difficulty. With her focus on labor, Ukeles has deployed this relation of work and compensation and turned it into an aesthetic. Several early pieces mimicked the style of legal contracts. In one such signed document, drawn up for Maintenance Art Event I at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in 1974, Ukeles grants herself the authority to hire a babysitter so that she may do her work, challenging a societal expectation about good mothering and women’s labor. Her manifesto of 1969 abolishes the distinction between kinds of work, claiming “Everything I say is art is art” (Ukeles 2003: 918). As a decades-long unsalaried artist-in-residence in the New York City Department of Sanitation, Ukeles has immersed herself in the institutional structure of maintenance, drawing attention to a hyper-capitalist society’s waste, and the undervaluing of the work with which it is associated. In the work Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–80), Ukeles shook hands with and personally thanked

124

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

over 8,500 Department of Sanitation employees, offering moments of intimacy and recognition to people whose essential labor places them in daily contact with untouchable materials, completing a chain of relation that class-based custom has severed. Ukeles’s work directly confronts value and status, including those of the artist herself, upending the usual place of art in such ranked orders. Like his contemporary Ukeles, the artist Tehching Hsieh also used a simple contract form to outline the terms of each his five One Year Performances (1978– 86). He signed each type-written contract before embarking on the work, affirming his obligation to follow through. His commitment to the concepts, each of which demanded extreme determination to maintain an action, outweighed other competing social expectations and customs of behavior, let alone ideas about the proper materials, production, and location of artworks. These works made evident a real body that must undergo strenuous conditions to follow the arbitrary laws, norms, and customs of daily life. There is some irony to performance art’s insurgent status and place of radical ethics. Beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Western visual art, performance is an expansive term capable of describing many human interplays, from aspects of interpersonal relations to larger social spheres of groups in action, such as the marketplaces, legal regimes, and organizations of state and colonial power that have shaped capitalist life. The series of acts that constitute these orders have offered one ethical test after another, writing and revising scripts of conduct. More specifically, performance describes details of expressive culture that involve formalized physical presentation and spectatorship. The list of performance forms in this sense is long, and these too have often offered moral lessons, images and narratives of right and wrong, and other complexities of sociality. When performance is finally admitted into a system of Western visual art, which many historians describe as part of the avant-garde turn in early-twentieth-century Europe, it brings with it these ethical questions, and poses them, through living bodies, against a system founded in static objects. What may function as a conservative normalizing moralism in many modes of theater and ritual arrives as a radicalizing ethicality in Western visual art. Art historically, then, performance art has been supercharged with the transformative energy of the modernist project. The powers of transgression, redefinition, and redistribution associated with art movements in Europe and the United States have found in performance some of their most active agents. Performance art’s various modes test boundaries: of the statuses of subjects and objects, of disciplinary categories, of social behavior, and of the physical spaces and times that contain them. Performing on those boundaries, an artist’s materials come to include the palpable shifts and breaks between regimes that separate public from private, body from sculpture, fact from fiction, permitted from disallowed, art from theater from dance from music, and so on. It is in the shifts and breaks that the ethical codes that guide one or the other discipline or mode confront the other. Such contrasts and combinations put pressure on these codes, often exposing the fallacious assumptions, arbitrary laws, and customary habits that have too tidily separated one regime from another in the first place. Performance acts that transgress boundaries, redefine forms, and redistribute access, whether

ACTING ETHICAL: PERFORMANCE ART GOES PUBLIC

125

they come from artists pursuing any particular agenda, doctrine, or program, or not, tend to unsettle our inherited modernist discourses nonetheless, implicating the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions they constitute and facilitate. As such, performance art can work as an ethical inquiry, examining the ways humans may or may not live together. The durational performance of Tehching Hsieh pressured such life conditions, further demonstrating a radical revision of the time, place, and status of art’s presentation. Importantly, Hsieh transformed performance’s theatrical tendency through an intensification of the mundane and the everyday. These pieces are both astoundingly ambitious, as in the most intense devotional ritual practices, and strangely normal, as they act out simple routinized concepts with complete regularity. Hsieh’s work reaches further than most into the idea that life is art, and that a body in time and space can perform as artistic materials. His One Year Performances staged in New York City took basic elements of daily existence to form very simple propositions that nonetheless required saint-like devotion to carry through. These too put pressure on codes of conduct, challenging the tidy separations of public and private, labor and leisure time, singularity and collectivity, and pleasure and pain, that organize social life. These works ask beholders to reconsider the values we associate with these terms and their distinctions. In the first of these works, Cage Piece (1978–9), Hsieh lived silently for a year in a wooden cage slightly larger than his body, with minimal furnishings and without entertainment. A collaborator came daily to deliver food, remove waste, and photograph Hsieh in his cell. This act of extreme privation came to resemble the punishment of legal incarceration. The second performance, Time Clock Piece (1980–1), demanded of Hsieh that he punch in hourly using a time clock for the year’s duration. Mimicking the aesthetic of regulated labor, the incessant demand interrupted all other life functions. Hsieh produced a photo at each hourly interval, his growing hair tracking physical change over time. For the third in the series, Outdoor Piece (1981–2), Hsieh remained outdoors for the duration of a year, carrying a sleeping bag and a backpack. Refusing the fundamental architecture of civilization, Hsieh’s transience referenced both the precariousness of homelessness and a kind of bare life status that exceeds our social arrangements. Hsieh’s year outside tested legal limits: he went indoors only once, when he was dragged kicking and screaming into a police precinct, having been arrested for a public altercation. Judges, however, allowed him to remain outdoors for his two required court appearances, to protect the integrity of his art. The fourth performance, Rope Piece (1983–4), was a collaboration with the artist Linda Mary Montano, during which the pair were tied together using an eight-foot rope. They were required to stay in the same room and were not allowed to touch each other. This piece dismantled the radical individuality of the previous performances, intensifying the problem of people being together. For the final of these yearlong works, No Art Piece (1986–6), Hsieh would not see, talk about, read about, or make any art, refusing the very category through which his own actions had been made legible. These practices connect to an idea of body art associated with performances of the 1970s, in which the artist’s body is both the material and the image. Adding to this

126

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

notion, the artist Kim Jones tested such boundaries with his iconic performance of the Mudman, using his own body as a foundation for transgression, redefinition, and redistribution. In a 1976 performance, Kim Jones appeared in a gallery at California State University Los Angeles as the Mudman character he had invented for public actions. In works such as his walk from downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean using the entire length of Wilshire Boulevard, he appeared as a hybrid semi-human figure, his skin covered in mud and some bodily fluids, with a geometric structure of sticks attached to his body as an enlarging armature. Part sculpture, part monstrous body, and fully abject, Mudman is, among other things, an avatar for alienated masculinity. Jones’s work of this period responded directly to his experiences as a US soldier during the war in Vietnam, a proximity to that conflict unusual among art-world participants. In the Cal State LA performance, Jones reenacted a practice he learned in Vietnam, which he has described as a form of entertainment among isolated young men stationed there, which was to set a rat on fire. An outrageous act, the performance caused controversy as well as institutional problems. Other artists in Los Angeles’s trailblazing performance art scene were called upon to take sides; Barbara T. Smith, whose own work brought a feminist perspective to ritual acts, was one who defended Jones. Rat Piece (1976) displaced one ethical context into another, revealing the disturbing mutability of concepts such as human, animal, violence, gallery, and theater. What may have been described as a juvenile act in a dehumanizing warzone in Southeast Asia rises to an atrocious level in a humanist art space on a public university campus in California. This transposition reveals the slipperiness of ethical codes when affected by scale, context, and location. Decades later, during a public discussion about the works of Jones and Smith, the choreographer Simone Forti asked Jones if he had seen people burn to death in Vietnam. He answered, “I don’t want to talk about that.”1 This reticence signals a complicated masculinism to Hsieh’s and Jones’s works, which appropriate a feminized position of objectification and looked-at-ness to demonstrate a body more real than reality, too real to mention. Others who turned to performance during this transformative era present the body itself as dubious proof in a cultural field founded on misrepresentation. Adrian Piper is one notable example of an artist whose work has used the art viewing position to pressure what Denise Ferreira da Silva has called the ways “racial difference performs its role as an ethico-political signifier” (2015: 91). Of the Mythic Being, Piper’s mustachioed male philosopher persona that she played in local newspaper advertisements between 1973 and 1975, Tavia Nyong’o has commented that Piper gave “a great deal of thought to the masculine privilege of looking rather than being looked at” (2018: 93). Several of Adrian Piper’s performance pieces have probed the public sphere, interrogating the unwritten codes of conduct that prevail there, and importantly, foregrounding the distorting force that race and gender exert on such codes. Her piece, (My) Calling Cards (1986), was enacted through two business card-sized prints, each containing a simple text that Piper would hand out in public situations. The first announced “I am black,” and discouraged its reader from continuing to participate in whatever casual conversational racism had just occurred. The second alerted its reader to Piper’s disinterest in being “picked up,” flirted with, or come on to sexually, and thanked its reader for respecting her privacy. Handing these out allowed

ACTING ETHICAL: PERFORMANCE ART GOES PUBLIC

127

Piper to mark moments of racism and sexism that are typically seamlessly integrated into our social fabric. The handing out of these cards temporarily halts the exchange, and the shift from conversation to printed text concretizes Piper’s resistance. The simple act subtly changes the artist’s position in such exchanges from passive recipient to aggressor, while limiting the expression of that resistance to a predetermined form. Piper’s remarkable body of work, inclusive of drawings, videos, installations, texts, and other forms, is notable for many reasons, among them being the innovative role of performance in expanding modes and premises founded in the conceptual art approaches of the late 1960s and early 1970s. That approach tended to propose art as an experimental model, setting up predetermined conditions that author the work, rather than allowing a work to unfold through a series of expressive artistic choices. Piper’s training in philosophy paired with her bold politics put pressure on the cultural assumptions that support ideas of agency and autonomy, required ingredients for the production of the expressive artist. While many of Piper’s works have played out as predetermined scenarios that limit recourse to transcendent aesthetics, her idiosyncratic performances have offered a playful model for performance art as critical inquiry. In performances from the early 1970s, such as the Catalysis series, Piper used her own body as a provocation in public spaces, wearing wet paint on her clothes, or covering herself in smelly materials, or holding a rag in her mouth, or dancing to Aretha Franklin, while negotiating spaces of the city such as subways, department stores, and other public locations. Later works innovated the relationship between performance and video, such as Cornered (1988), an installation in which Piper delivers an uncomfortable speech that confronts viewers’ own situations within racial histories. Similarly, the video documentation of her Funk Lessons (1982–4) shows a series of events in which Piper offers lessons based on African American social dance, placing non-black participants in a compromising position in relationship to the repertoire they are awkwardly attempting to embody. Piper’s works in performance have consistently revealed the ethical thicket that race, gender, art, and its viewership find themselves in, and how impossible it is to disentangle these terms in order to come to a satisfying resolution. Ukeles, Asco, Smith, Hsieh, Jones, and Piper are but a few of the many artists whose works transformed the place of performance in art during the crucial years of the 1970s. They each brought with this transformation a reconsideration of the ethical conditions of artmaking. The terms I am attributing to their performance art—“transgression,” “redefinition,” and “redistribution”—synthesize many other arguments about modernism, and suggest a revolutionary ethos attached to its avant-garde. Consistent with this vision is the human-centered project that promotes individuals to agents-of-history, a role attributed to the artist in that tradition, and crystalized in the performance artist, who literally acts on his or her own behalf as a matter of form. That I am describing this performance art tradition as drawing on the early-twentieth-century avant-garde and European modernism is to acknowledge a Eurocentric art historical model as a real set of institutional conditions through which US American performance art has elaborated itself. Indeed, such conditions allow for the incorporation of extra-European forms (and sometimes their colonial appropriation), and reflect comparable movements in Latin America, Asia, and

128

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

elsewhere. Attention to examples of US American performance reveals how these ethical inquiries, freighted with Western philosophical and cultural problems, play out across our particularly contested terrain, populated by a world of differences. While disciplinary spaces, such as museums and theaters, work to narrow viewership and participation, these tendencies I identify have pushed past those spaces’ limiting edges. Transgression describes the breaking of laws and conventions, the violation of taboos, and where power has been temporarily suspended, a sophisticated test of its reassertion. Redefinition expands categories, challenges values, and thus suspends judgment, while modeling the agency of definition for its doer. Redistribution puts things in unexpected places, and sometimes democratizes the experience of specialized forms. Rather than offering a specific ethics of performance art, these tendencies pose open questions about the ethical conditions they attempt to amend, and those their articulations propose. A history of performances after the 1960s makes a distinct claim that the ethical condition of performance art is the critique of ethics.

NOTE 1. Kim Jones, in conversation with Barbara T. Smith, LAXART, Los Angeles, January 17, 2012.

REFERENCES Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beshty, Walead (2015). Ethics. London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993). The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Chavoya, C. Ondine and Rita Gonzalez (2011). Asco: Elite of the Obscure, a Retrospective, 1972–1987. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Everson, Stephen (1998). Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferreira da Silva, Denise (2015). “Before Man: Sylvia Winter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme,” in Katherine McKittrick (ed.), Sylvia Winter: On Being Human as Praxis, 90–105. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Fraser, Andrea (2005). Museum Highlights: The Writing of Andrea Fraser. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Jackson, Shannon (2011). Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York and London: Routledge. Johnson, Dominic (2012). Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Nyong’o, Tavia (2018). Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. New York: New York University Press. Smith, Jack (1997). Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, edited by J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell. New York and London: High Risk Books. Ukeles, Mierle Laderman (2003). “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 917–19. Malden, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.

CHAPTER 3.7

Compassionate Acts: Performance as Radical Care T. NIKKI CESARE SCHOTZKO

RADICAL INTIMACIES The figure is removed from any context on the otherwise blank ground, and of any color other than the stark red of the thread. Simultaneously an outline of a toddler in child pose, maybe sleeping, and a tracing (and trace) of a photograph of a boy who drowned, the unfilled figure interrupts and disrupts the Western mainstream story about him. This image, and this boy, now exists in both narrative contexts: the political and the aesthetic. The blankness on which he lies speaks as much to the unstated reality it implies as to the explicit materiality of the unprimed canvas. In Italian-born, UK-based performance artist Franko B’s stitched canvas not a number (2015), the silhouette is of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian boy traveling with his mother Rihan, father Abdullah, and five-year-old brother Ghalib as they attempted, on a rubber raft, to cross the Mediterranean Sea from the northern Syrian town of Kobani to the Greek island of Kos, en route to Abdullah’s sister Teema Kurdi in Vancouver, Canada. Franko B posted not a number on Facebook on September 4, 2015, two days after Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir’s photographs of Kurdi appeared in the international mainstream press and social media, often, initially, with the hashtag #KıyıyaVuranİnsanlık (Turkish, “Flotsam of Humanity”; Clarke and Shoichet 2015).1 In this photograph by Demir, Kurdi’s small body lies on the wet, pebbled sand, half in and half out of the tide. Wearing a red T-shirt, slightly hitched up on his chest, navy shorts, and small, white-soled navy sneakers, he is in the center foreground of the photograph; the sea fills the majority of the frame and in the background there is what seems to be the limit of a rocky incline. Just a foot or two behind Kurdi stands a Turkish police officer, in uniform in a dark green cap, a red and navy jacket, and greenish-tan khaki pants tucked into combat boots. The officer’s back is to the camera, and he seems to be holding something in his hands blocked from our view.2

130

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Noting that Kurdi is only one of many casualties of such crossings she has seen in the past twelve years, including those seeking refuge from Syria as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, Demir, a correspondent for Dogan News Agency in Turkey, commented, “On the one hand, I wish I hadn’t had to take that picture. I would have much preferred to have taken one of Aylan playing on the beach than photographing his corpse.” She continues, “I hope that my picture can contribute to changing the way we look at immigration in Europe, and that no more people have to die on their way out of a war” (in Küpeli 2015).3 Demir’s photograph came, at least temporarily, to stand in for the Syrian refugee crisis. Through the prone body of a three-year-old child, it made that crisis all the more real to a broader international audience—as if it was not, even though it was, real enough before. Franko B is well known within visual and performance art audiences for work that challenges boundaries—of bodies, of politics, and of emotions—including, in particular, I Miss You (2003). In this performance at the Tate Modern, Franko B, naked and covered entirely in white paint, traversed a catwalk, blood flowing from cannulas inserted into each arm at the elbow.4 Jennifer Doyle notes how Franko B’s broader repertoire of work “explores the affective dynamics of the interaction between artist and audience” as she emphasizes the uncomfortable assertion of emotion she experienced during I Miss You. “The tears provoked by Franko’s performance made me think about the radical intimacy that sometimes attends to live art,” Doyle writes, “which cannot be fully read without an account of its appeal to its audience and the invitation to experience it as, on some level, about our investment in the artist.” She goes on: “The risk we take in attending such a performance is that we might actually feel something. The truly shocking thing, is that we have been so deeply trained to expect to feel nothing” (2006). Doyle’s evocation of feeling and investment—that “radical intimacy”—she experiences through Franko B’s work, which comprises 2D and 3D media, photography and video, and design,5 not only gestures toward a more slippery relationship between affect and emotion than affect studies might affirm, but it also speaks to what feminist theorists identify as an “ethics of care” that is, in part, “a compelling moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility,” as Virginia Held describes (2006: 10). Ethical care is inclusive of the care work associated with professionally or privately attending to others—children, the elderly, and people with disabilities, among a range of examples—as well as care practices more broadly associated with “medical practice, law, political life, the organization of society, war, and international relations” (9). Here, I am transposing the affective labor of care work to performance in the intersubjective and interdependent relationship it engenders between artist and audience. Demir’s photographs of Kurdi operate within photojournalism’s complex ecologies of reportage and ethics; Franko B’s rendering of the child, removed from the specific circumstances of his life and death, however, enacts a performative shift away from mainstream media’s unsubtle dramaturgy in its aestheticizing of the refugee crisis and toward what I argue is a radical act of care.

COMPASSIONATE ACTS: PERFORMANCE AS RADICAL CARE

131

Franko B’s stitched canvas not a number, alongside two other artists’ restagings, or reperformances, of culturally marked trauma that I am considering—Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s reenactment of Aylan Kurdi’s pose, re-moved to the Greek island Lesbos (2016), and Black artist Nona Faustine’s self-portrait From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth (2013), part of her White Shoes (2012–) series in which Faustine stages photographs on several sites, known but unmarked throughout New York City, of the North Atlantic slave trade—become performances of compassion. Successfully or not, they outline in their enactment or our resistance to it potential methodologies of care. They become performative disruptions of and interventions into how the story of these crises are told. In them, compassion and care are wrapped up in rage and resistance. In their animation of both affect and emotion, these pieces also provide an opportunity to revisit methodologies at work within contemporary scholarship related to affect studies and its too easy dismissal of emotion as an effective political tool. These pieces, through the histories and contemporary crises they performatively take on, demonstrate what has been evident throughout a state of ongoing global crisis since the Second World War, but has become increasingly more explicit since the Arab Spring in 2011: that the settler narrative of these crises is not one of facts and statistics, but rather is undeniably predicated on affective strategies equally representative of xenophobia and racism on one end of the global social and political spectrum, and, on the other, of resistance and care.6

METHODOLOGIES OF CARE Brian Massumi, in the Preface to his collection of interviews The Politics of Affect (2015), writes that “Affect is proto-political [. . .] Its politics must be brought out” (loc. no. 203). The fundamental trope of affect studies, however, Baruch Spinoza’s postulation of affect as the concept of and the means by which the body affects and is affected in the world, situates the body in the world as an actor, one I read as inherently political—whether passive or active: “By affect I understand affections of the Body by which the Body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the idea of these affections” (Spinoza 1994: 154). Significant to Spinoza’s distinction between affect’s capacities—the simultaneity of “the Body’s power of acting” and “the idea of these affections”—however, is not the conflation or denial of the interrelationship of affect and emotion, but rather the relationality of the body in the world as it exists affectively in the complicated intertwining of the two. While I can follow Massumi’s definitions of emotion as personal (“a subjective content; the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience” [2002: 28]) and affect as prepersonal (“an ability to affect and be affected; a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” [1987: xvi]), I cannot consider one without the other. Or, as Rebecca Schneider writes, comparing the affective turn to the performative turn, “The affective turn resists replicating the body/text binary, but situates itself more

132

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

interestingly in spaces between such binaries—including self/other—as much affect is situated, like atmosphere, between bodies” (2011: 35). Resisting Massumi’s autonomy of affect, Schneider instead moves to queer theorists’ work, including Sara Ahmed’s understanding of “emotion as sticky” and Kathleen Stewart’s suggestion that “affect jumps between bodies,” among others (36; see also Ahmed 2004; Stewart 2007). In their thinking of affect through circuits of mobility, Ahmed and Stewart allow affect to “circulate, bearing atmosphere-altering tendencies, in material remains or gestic/ritual remains, carried in a sentence or a song, shifting in and through bodies in encounter” (Schneider 2011: 36). Affect, having acquired mobility, can be mobilizing; in resisting situated binaries, affect can become a tool of resistance. Yet, affect and emotion are also too readily animated for and as oppressive forces. Referencing specifically how hate—hate crimes, hate speech, and, particularly hate as an emotion, working in tandem with its cousin in arms, fear—motivates communities and collective action, Ahmed accords hate an “economic” property: “it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement.” She continues, “In such affective economies, emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments” (2004: 119). Ahmed’s articulation of emotions’ capacity to do resonates with Werner Binder and Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky’s sociological analysis of the iconic treatment of the refugee crisis through visual media: “How does an image gain the necessary currency to sway public opinion or even policy making? Why do some photographs elicit profound compassion that transcends the borders of its particular context?” (2018: 1–2; emphasis added). The economic metaphor here is not only rhetorical but it also provides a measure by which to quantify the actual and affective response to the photograph on the part of its viewers.7 Yet, the disparity in response, and the brevity of public concern for the Syrian refugee crisis after mainstream distribution of Desir’s photograph of Kurdi, demonstrates the instability and inequity of empathy at work in public moral consciousness. This is not a new argument among visual and performance studies theorists. In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), her comprehensive account of the history and lasting effects of war photography, Susan Sontag spends considerable time negotiating the pull between documentation and aestheticization, noting as well how, through such a conflation of horror and artistry, viewers become politically implicated in the dissemination of war photography. Who are the “we” at whom such shock-pictures are aimed? That “we” would include not just the sympathizers of a smallish nation or a stateless people fighting for its life, but—a far larger constituency—those only nominally concerned about some nasty war taking place in another country. The photographs are a means of making “real” (or “more real”) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore. (7) Peggy Phelan, too, writing about the photographs of victims of torture at Abu Ghraib, emphasizes the resignification of trauma, or at least of the point of trauma,

COMPASSIONATE ACTS: PERFORMANCE AS RADICAL CARE

133

that displaces from view the subject of the original photograph in favor of the subjective response the viewer experiences, what Phelan refers to as the “original failure-to-see” of the photograph itself (2009: 379–80).8 That the photographs these theorists consider so often depict at-risk and marginalized people with little geographic or socioeconomic proximity to viewers further complicates the role the photograph plays beyond a superficial, though highly emotional, response. In “Regarding the Pain of the Other: Photography, Famine, and the Trace of Affect,” Kimberly Juanita Brown puts more pressure on this, asking, “What is it we want black bodies to illuminate for us photographically? And why do we ask in such visually violent ways?” (2014: loc. no. 3994). For Brown, such spectatorship augments the distinction between the subject of the photograph and that of its viewing, rendering the viewer complicit not only in the ideological (and affective) abandonment of the political project that may have motivated the photograph’s circulation, but also in the exploitative nature implicit within such photographs: “The viewer straddles the space between the witness (reluctant or testimonial observation) and the spectator (participatory and invested). Both are complicit in the absorption of othered flesh, and feed off it for evidence, interest, or entertainment” (loc. no. 3991). Binder and Jaworski, with reference to other studies, further emphasize this, noting that Kurdi’s “white skin as well as his Western clothing make it easier for spectators in Western societies to view him as a representative victim [. . .], which in principle could have been their own child.” They add, matter-of-factly, “It is unlikely that a black child, drowned during the crossing from Africa to Europe, would have attained a similar iconic status” (2018: 6–7; see also Mortensen and Trenz 2015: 354; Burns 2015; Olesen 2018; El-Enany 2016). Agency, artistic and emotional, in the hands of the photographic subject, however, does something different. Ann Cvetkovich, in “Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice” (included in the same collection as Brown’s chapter), considers photographers’ Tammy Rae Carland’s 2008 exhibition An Archive of Feeling (titled after Cvetkovich’s 2003 book) and Zoe Leonard’s 1998–2009 project Analogue, both featuring photographs of objects that resonate “with particular attention to [their] queer dimensions” (2014: loc. no. 5735). Cvetkovich writes of Carland’s and Leonard’s work, “[I]n making photographs of objects, both photographers move between the visual and the material as archival forms in order to explore the photograph’s haptic qualities, its capacity to create feelings in the literal form of sensory experience” (loc. no. 5743; emphasis added). These photographs, identifiable, or citational, as queer in both content and context, perform a methodology of care in their (artistic) production and engagement. They not only recreate images of objects as objects in themselves, but they also recreate space for an alternate, queer archive that might retroactively include the circulated image of Franko B’s appropriation of Nilüfer Demir’s photograph of Aylan Kurdi in not a number (moving, as it does, from news media photograph to stitched canvas to social media image). Cvetkovich indicates, “As an archival object, the photograph’s power derives as much from its affective magic as from its realist claims, and ultimately from the powerful combination of the two” (loc. no. 5776).

134

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Contemporary critical and sociological analyses of the effects of visual depictions of traumatic and traumatized subjects—including both photojournalistic documentation and the ensuing appropriations that circulate via social media—demonstrate the complicated ethics that attend such an attending to. The fact that social media renders even the material virtual, further distancing the circumstances of the original photograph, and therefore its subject, from the immediate act of its viewing, increasingly complicates the ethics of spectatorship—and of its potential to perform care. That the very act of “sharing” on social media relegates the complexity of affective and emotional response to emoji-ridden feels compromises any remaining intimacy possible with the original photograph. Brown identifies the “transference of affect” as removed from the subject of the photograph to the photographer, who, one presumes, “felt” for the subject: “The emotive affect of this photographic humanitarianism lies in its gesture of distanced absorption and empathy,” she writes. “While the viewer supposes that the evidentiary value of the documentary photograph allows him or her to feel what the subject of the photo feels, this is a fallacy of liberal intention” (2014: loc. no. 3930). Cvetkovich, though, provides an alternate understanding of the transfer, wherein the shift from material object to photograph increases the object’s durational as well as affective value: “Photographs often function like iconic or sacred objects when they hold memories and feelings—the materiality of the paper is as important as the indexicality of the image in providing a tangible connection to a lost place, person, or object” (2014: loc. no. 5881). Providing a connection, tangible or even somewhat less so, to another—a place or object often acting as a surrogate for a person—is fundamental to an understanding and application of a feminist ethics of care. In addition to the “moral claims of particular others,” such care, as Virginia Held iterates, “values emotion rather than rejects it,” and “respects rather than removes itself from the claims of particular others with whom we share actual relationships” (2006: 10, 11). A feminist ethics of care “reconceptualizes traditional notions about the public and the private,” and conceives of “persons as relational” (12, 13). Care is critical and necessitates a critical engagement with its ethical application. Care is not abstract. Care is also not delimited by familial or kinship relations. Building on the work of feminist scholars dealing in care studies, Joan Tronto notes a relationality between domestic and sociopolitical spheres of care: “[W]e have misunderstood politics as if it were a part of the world of economics,” she writes. “Instead [. . .] politics has historically been, and rightfully should be, closer to something we think of as part of our households: a realm of caring” (2013: loc. no. 75). This is not unlike Lawrence Grossberg’s “affective investments,” whereby the degree of affective investment toward an object or issue not only “determines how invigorated people feel at any moment of their lives,” but also assigns the object a certain potential, “as if simply willing something to happen were sufficient to bring it about” (1992: 82). Reworked within a feminist context, though, simply willing is not enough. Taking a broader view of divisions of labor, Tronto writes, “political life is ultimately about the allocation of caring responsibilities, and that all of those relationships and the people engaged in them need to be part of the ongoing political discourse” (2013: loc. no. 118).

COMPASSIONATE ACTS: PERFORMANCE AS RADICAL CARE

135

It is possible to argue that there is a turn within a feminist ethics of care concurrent with the affective turn, whereby emphasis on care work shifts into the more critically applicable overlap of feminist care studies and disability studies (see Kelly 2013; Garland-Thomson 2002; Davis 2005; Tronto 1993; Gilligan 1982; among others). It is also possible, in a longer project, to note the tangential paths of feminist care studies and motherhood/-ing studies (see Gumbs, Martens, and Williams 2016; Kinser, Freehling-Burton, and Hawkes 2014; Vandenbeld Giles 2014; among others). But to reduce care to an academic matter both participates in the abstraction of emotion from affect that affect studies actively engages in, and denies the political work these feminist scholars argue that care might do. Speaking specifically of the position of affect studies within the academy, Sara Ahmed notes, “[t]he affective turn has thus come to privilege affect over emotion as its object,” determining that such distinction between affect and emotion is operative not only as a theoretical methodology, but also as an exclusionary tactic. Ahmed continues, “It might even be that the very use of this distinction performs the evacuation of certain styles of thought (we might think of these as ‘touchy feely’ styles of thought, including feminist and queer thought) from affect studies” (2014: loc. no. 4772). Ahmed’s critique of the affective turn affords a more inclusive consideration of affect’s own turn back to emotion in a twenty-first century already marked by immeasurable social and personal precarity. Affect, rethought through this uncertain and imbalanced world context, and reimagined through performance and performative work, becomes an effective and efficacious mode of a feminist and queer compassionate transfer of knowledge putinto-action. Even more so, affect effects a transfer of knowledge through and as care, put-into-action through and as performance: through the amassing of bodies in the streets, in airport terminals, in museums, on the steps of government institutions and agencies, and online in performative acts and performances of solidarity with and in support of those whose very bodies are at risk.

THE SPACE BETWEEN BODIES “It is a remarkable psychological fact that though we distinctly feel the object and distinctly feel our own body and its surface, yet they do not touch each other completely,” Paul Schilder writes in The Image and Appearance of the Body (1950). “There is a distinct space in between” (86). To place oneself in the position of another is not synonymous with being in their position; to feel something for someone is not to know them; reenactment is not necessarily fueled by empathy.9 Writing about civil war reenactments in Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011), Rebecca Schneider addresses the at times contradictory motivation engendering historical reenactment—an act that collapses not only space and time but also bodies. Comparing both performative and scholarly modes of (re)engaging with the past—that is, both the historical battle reenactments Schneider attended and the (somewhat) more staid archival research—Schneider considers the “immaterial labor of bodies” of such work to function intangibly yet still with tactility: “In both cases—archive and battlefield—interaction with (and as)

136

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

traces exercises a cross- or multi-temporal engagement with im/material understood to belong to the past in the present. Said more simply: inside the archive or out, times touch” (35; emphasis added). Schneider continues: The status of touch is problematic, not least because it suggests bodies at least partially merged across difference—even, in this instance, temporal difference. To touch is not to become coextensive, to fully become that which is touched or which touches, but it is to (partially) collapse the distance marking one thing as fully distinct from another thing. (35) Times may touch, may merge figuratively or performatively; bodies do not collapse into each other so easily, in the present moment or through memory. Not unlike the project of reenactment as a means to “access what [participants] feel the documentary evidence upon which they rely misses—that is, live experience” (10), renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s positioning himself as Aylan Kurdi, in a different place and time, made evident how problematic such an endeavor is, and how morally fraught the space between the political and the artistic is when crossed over the actual body that remains. On February 1, 2016, India Today ran a black-and-white photograph by Rohit Chawla of Ai lying facedown on a pebbled beach. The article, while including Aylan Kurdi’s image from Demir’s photograph (though not citing Demir), is primarily about Ai’s work, specifically his plan to create a memorial in Lesbos to the refugees, as well as the news outlet’s own commitment to art “not just for art’s sake, but for culture’s sake, for society’s sake, and for politics’ sake.” In an opinion piece for Al Jazeera, Habid Dabashi not only asserts the improbability of viewers identifying the Syrian refugee crisis through Ai’s reenacted pose—“What does it exactly mean,” he asks, “when a world renowned artist, a rather portly middle-aged man, poses as the malnourished dead body of a Syrian refugee child washed ashore as he and his family were trying to escape the slaughterhouse of their homeland?”—but also casts doubt on the efficacy (and presumption) of any artistic effort “to represent tragic realities in this time of terror and in this age of visual saturation” (2016). Mette Mortensen, in “Constructing, confirming, and contesting icons: the Alan Kurdi imagery appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo” (2017), similarly interrogates the capacity for appropriations of iconic images to participate adequately in the dialogue between an original photograph and the political context it signifies. Even as Mortensen stresses that “[a]ppropriations help shape and delimit the publics and discourses surrounding visual icons by raising questions about morality and political obligations” (1143), the issue remains of displaced agency within the circulation of such images—that is, as Sontag, Phelan, and Brown take up, the issue of whose subjectivity is animated in the images’ viewing.10 Not only is the photograph of Ai’s reenactment “reproduced in a more esthetically refined black and white,” but Ai’s own status overwhelms the very tragedy he attempts to represent (Mortensen 2017: 1154). As “the photograph of his reenactment became an icon in its own right” (1154), the emotional proximity between the viewer and Kurdi, and therefore between the viewer and the Syrian refugee crisis, is widened rather than narrowed.

COMPASSIONATE ACTS: PERFORMANCE AS RADICAL CARE

137

While Mortensen limits his analysis to a relatively stoic assessment, Dabashi, like many other vocal critics of Ai’s reenactment, does not resist passing judgment on the artist’s gesture: The very act of representation is here suspect, indecent, grotesque. There are moments that only superior artists can realise, when the mourning must remain in blinding darkness, where in silence the quiet cry is the loudest scream, the harshest explosion of the fact that something is horridly amiss about the world. (2016) Something is horridly amiss, and, in Chawla’s photograph of Ai, something is correspondingly missed. What is missed, I believe, is Kurdi, who is lost within Ai’s posturing not only through the fact of Ai’s own positioning within the international art world but also through the means by which Ai achieved such infamy. Ai’s reputation for an “equivocating mix of irreverence, brashness, and posturing, characteristic of his evolving public identities through a series of roles he inhabits,” as Meiling Cheng writes in “Ai Weiwei: Acting is Believing” (2011: 9), undermines even the barest potential of sincerity remaining for or within the appropriation, and therefore undermines as well its capacity to act either performatively or politically. Cheng goes on, “Ai is a consummate performance artist, whose most fascinating trait is his play with the gray areas between seeming and being, simulation and earnestness” (10). While Franko B’s crimson-threaded outline of Kurdi is evocatively not enough, and, in being deliberately incomplete, asks of the viewer not just emotion but work in looking at the image, Ai provides far too much and ultimately gives very little in this photograph. In deriving this consideration of Ai’s reenactment of Kurdi in Demir’s photograph from Schneider’s work on civil war reenactments, I do not mean to conflate Ai’s act or position in relation to Kurdi with that of historical reenactors; to do so would be neither accurate nor critically sustainable. Further, having spent this amount of time on the idea of reenactment, I wonder if reenactment is not an entirely functional means by which to think, and to feel, through these photographs—though it is a necessary methodological critique. Rather, it is necessary to consider Chawla’s photograph of Ai within the rhetoric of appropriation and participating in the practice of reenactment. But, it is just as, if not more, urgent to consider Ai’s act of positioning himself as Kurdi less as reenactment and more as portraiture—to separate Ai’s performance from Chawla’s photograph of it. Ai’s lying down on the Greek beach may have been an act of protest and tribute, as well as an attempt to rekindle the conversation about the global refugee crisis beyond the obsequiousness of the mainstream press’s accounts; but I understand the image not to be so much an appropriation of Kurdi as—and I take this as much from my own close engagement with the image as with Dabashi’s opinion piece, titled, tellingly, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Boy” (2016)—a portrait of Ai, the artist, as himself. Yes, a refugee, too, but also not the same. It would be unfair to deny Ai the capacity for this act to have been one of care—to participate in the ethics of care I accord Franko B’s stitched canvas. However, such capacity for care is not found in the photograph of Ai but rather, if it is to be found at all, in his performance.

138

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

The distance between Ai’s lying down on the pebbled Greek beach and Chawla’s black-and-white photograph marks not only the literal and problematically figurative distance between artist and drowned child but also the distance between affect and emotion, measured in part by viewers’ response to the photograph. That is, the response both to Demir’s photograph of Kurdi and to appropriations of it is predicated on emotion. Franko B’s not a number and Ai’s performance, while certainly eliciting emotional response, also animate a particular affect in their decontextualization of Demir’s original photograph and, in doing so, enact a performative disruption of the (primarily white, almost exclusively Western) viewer’s gaze. Such a disruption anticipates how affect studies engages with the ethical dilemma of its proximity to “bodily matters” and, more specifically, to bodies in the geopolitical world called on to perform affective labor. The affective turn “foreground[s] the question of what do we mean when we invoke, examine, and enact the body in body-studies,” Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn write in their Introduction to Body & Society’s special issue on affect; affect becomes a means to “gesture towards something that perhaps escapes or remains in excess of the practices of the ‘speaking subject’” (2010: 8, 9ff). Not a number refers to the Syrian refugee crisis, but neither explicitly represents nor repeats it in its rearticulation of Aylan Kurdi’s silhouette. It refuses to provide narrative context, and therefore refuses to lean on the emotional labor to which mainstream press puts photographs like Demir’s. Not a number also refuses the subjectivity of the viewer, who is left to do both the emotional and affective work of filling in the outline of this boy’s story. Franko B’s stitched canvas releases the affective, rather than emotional, potential of Demir’s photograph, and, in its performative doing so, repurposes the political potential of affect itself toward the subject in the image rather than the subject of the viewing. Ai’s performance, in contrast, misses the performative potential of conveying emotion by assuming such failed performativity through the overt presence of his own “portly, middle-aged” body. These two pieces demonstrate, respectively, then, the possibilities and limits of applying affect studies to emotionally wrought work. When Michael Hardt, in the Foreword to Patricia Ticineto Clough’s edited collection The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007), summarizes Baruch Spinoza’s two “correspondences” of affect as, “[f]irst, the mind’s power to think and its developments [. . . as] parallel to the body’s power to act” and, second, “between the power to act and the power to be affected,” neither Hardt nor Spinoza, in Hardt’s reading, makes explicit the inequity of power afforded to bodies, even when considered specifically within a broader political project. In Franko B’s not a number, viewers may not know that they are seeing the outline of a three-year-old child who drowned, but they do see a child; in Ai’s performance, the trace of which circulates as Chawla’s photograph, what we see is Ai Weiwei, no matter what else we may know.

THE LATITUDE OF A BODY “I am more than what you see,” Nona Faustine says, speaking of her performancebased self-portrait series White Shoes (2012–) at New York City’s International Center of Photography (2015). White Shoes comprises images of Faustine posing,

COMPASSIONATE ACTS: PERFORMANCE AS RADICAL CARE

139

wearing little to nothing more than a pair of white heels (to “represent the white patriarchy that we can’t escape”) at sites throughout New York City whose avid participation in the eighteenth-century slave trade remains otherwise uncited (Faustine in Dunne 2015). Faustine’s work is reminiscent of Carrie Mae Weems’s autobiographical photographs, as well as Weems’s contemporary Lorna Simpson, whose photographs of Black women in pieces such as Twenty Questions (1986) portrays what curator Lauri Firstenberg describes as a “refused portrait” (2003: 317). In Isabelle (2016), Faustine looks straightforwardly, maybe confrontationally, toward the camera, in a diaphanous white skirt with a rope belt of four white baby shoes at her waist and a black cast-iron skillet hanging from her left hand. Naked from the waist up, she stands before the Lefferts House in Prospect Park—part of what was the Lefferts Homestead, “owned by the largest slaveholding family in Kings County” (New York Times 1990). In Over My Dead Body, Faustine, wearing only the eponymous white heels, is facing away from the camera as she ascends the steps of Lower Manhattan’s Tweed Courthouse, whose construction was funded by the notoriously corrupt “Boss” Tweed in the mid- to late 1800s above the African Burial Ground in which 20,000 enslaved and free African men, women, and children were buried (see Frohne 2015; Moore n.d.). In Like A Pregnant Corpse The Ship Expelled Her Into The Patriarchy (2012), Faustine, again naked but for the heels, lies prostrate on rocks jutting into the Atlantic Coast in Brooklyn where, Faustine says, “[e]ven after slavery was supposedly officially over, people smuggled slaves over the Atlantic off the coast of Brooklyn” (in Dunne 2015). Johanna Fateman, writing about Faustine’s solo exhibition “My Country,” describes the artist as “a time traveler, an indictment, a raced and sexed body exposing a fundamental truth about our country and its vaunted landmarks” (2018: 179–80). Faustine’s counter-monuments resonated throughout this poisonous year, as the president defended Confederate statues and the neo-Nazis who rallied around them; as his chief of staff suggested the Civil War might have been averted by compromise; and as protesters, adopting visual and performance strategies not unlike hers—or [Ana] Mendieta’s or [Emma] Sulkowicz’s—used their living bodies to pry open history’s closed books. (180) In each of the performance portraits in White Shoes, Faustine is simultaneously an affective point of becoming and of being: a portal into an otherwise disappeared history while also a Black woman positioning herself to be seen in her intervention into such disappearance—effectively mapping these histories through her explicit body (see Schneider 1997).11 In From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth (2013), Faustine, in the eponymous white heels and, this time, shackles, on a wooden box-as-auction block that does not seem substantial enough to hold all of this history, stands at the intersection of Water Street and Pearl Street on Wall Street, which “operated from 1711 to 1762 as the city’s first slave market, where in one day fifty Native and African men, women, and children could be bought and sold” (artnet 2015). The

140

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

city breaks behind her, Faustine’s naked body meeting the apex of buildings opening up to her figure. A yellow cab, the only sign of movement in the photograph, turns left but feels like it is veering off away from Faustine’s formidable presence. There is an early morning glow, the lightening sky juxtaposed with a single orange-hued street lamp still shining; it looks very cold. “That morning when I got there I looked out at the site and my stomach did a flip and roll,” Faustine recalls. “Feeling weak, I didn’t think I had the strength to do it. To stand in the exact spot where Africans were sold, African men, women, and children 185 years ago” (2016: 61–62). Though Faustine describes an almost tangible connection to the histories she evokes in other pieces from this series— “at times I swear that I can reach out and touch it” (61)—here, on Wall Street, she describes not being able to access the undisclosed history beneath her feet. She continues, What I did feel was the energy of New York, and I felt like a free woman of some degree naked in the world, on display in my city. I felt fear and fascination, and my eyes were wide open—and still I had a sense I was there and not there. (62) Faustine also notes the uncanny experience of realizing the subtext written into the before of the photograph, when her white, male friend Davis assists her into her pose—unseen in the image but felt in its aftermath. Only later did I realize the significance of this white man leading me, a black woman, out to the site of a former slave market and up to the block in shacks and unveiling me to the world. Was this the only time and perhaps the last time that a white man has done this in 185 years since the last slave was sold there on that spot? The action of him extending his hand and mine taking it as I stepped up to the block. Did that simple act ever happen? (63; emphasis added) Faustine slips between past and present, and slips too between past and present tense—Was this the only time and perhaps the last time that a white man has done this. I trip over her grammar trying to situate time and place, but grammar cannot work here. Grammar alone cannot do the work of standing in, as Faustine does, for the necessary exhaustion and exertion of emotional labor in the task she takes on of standing in for this untold history. Faustine moves in the in-between space of what Christine Sharpe considers, in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), to be an anagrammatical blackness: “the moment when blackness opens up into the anagrammatical in the literal sense”— that is, into the anagram; and “the metaphorical sense in how, regarding blackness, grammatical gender falls away and new meanings proliferate” (75). Anagrammatical blackness is that which Black life and Black bodies become subjected to in the photographs and descriptions of them that Sharpe describes throughout her book: “blackness as a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made” and against which the realities of Black bodies are reimaged and reimagined through the telling of a colonialist history (76). In stepping up onto that block, stepping into history yet also out of it

COMPASSIONATE ACTS: PERFORMANCE AS RADICAL CARE

141

through the agency of “a free woman of some degree,” Faustine is participating in the anagrammatical blackness of the marked Black body while also claiming a new grammar though the act and through the image. Noting work by women, and particularly that of women of color, that addresses systematized assault, Fateman asks, “Could art help to relieve the accusers’ burdens, the sheer weight of representation that they are asked to bear?” (2018: 180). Sharpe, too, addresses such capacity for art to disrupt historical and ongoing narratives of oppression, looking specifically to “Black expressive culture.” However, the work such works do, according to Sharpe, is not intended to afford relief or resolution, but rather to “depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradox of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity” (2016: 14). This is the work and site of the wake in Sharpe’s title. For Sharpe, “to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (2016: 13). The wake is a form of consciousness, a trace, an attribute, and a consequence. It is a condition of contemporary Black life conditioned and made manifest by “the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery” (1). It is also a “method of encountering a past that is not past”: a “wake work” (13). The wake thus becomes a new methodology for encountering affect through an encounter with the body, providing a (en)counterpoint to what, in 1995, Brian Massumi introduced as intensity: “the strength or duration of the image’s effect [. . .] embodied in purely automatic reactions most directly manifested in the skin— at the surface of the body, at its interface with things” (Massumi 1995: 84, 85). Things like the block in this photograph; things like bodies. Faustine’s work is both durational and temporal, the absented histories and Black bodies made liminally and limitedly present through her standing in for and as them. It is at once historical and immediately contemporary. From Her Body, especially of Faustine’s series, resonates with the Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) sitin during Toronto’s 2016 Pride parade, where, for thirty minutes, members of the organization stalled the parade to address the “anti-blackness” practices of Pride Toronto (see CBC 2016). BLMTO’s actions sparked controversy within Toronto’s queer community, literally disrupting the flow of parade traffic while also disrupting the superficially celebratory affect to give time and space for the politics of Black queer being. As Laine Zisman Newman points out, the outrage in the white queer community was not a result of BLMTO’s demands, “but rather the insistence that their voice and presence within the Pride Parade be ongoing—where they were invited to be seen momentarily, they had demanded to be heard and to take up space beyond a single moment.” Newman continues, “The assumption that BLMTO was ‘taking over’”—one of the critiques leveled at the group for stopping the parade—“was an implicit assertion that Black queer people remain outside of political resistance, despite the historically fundamental role Black transgender, lesbian, and gay activists have played in combating homophobia and transphobia” (2018: 81, 83). Faustine stands at a crossroads of Wall Street, her body a performative disruption that makes

142

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

visible the history of violence against Black bodies, Black culture, and Black daily life that New York City renders otherwise invisible. BLMTO members sat in a different crossroads, also disrupting a historical narrative of disappearance—here, that of the Black queer and trans bodies whose efforts made the very fact of Pride possible. From Her Body is at once representational and literal. Like Franko B’s not a number, it represents, stands in, for a political circumstance both located within and exceeding one particular body. Yet, like Ai Weiwei in his assumption of Aylan Kurdi’s pose, it is indicative of, even indexical of, Faustine’s own particular body. However, as I engage Franko B’s and Faustine’s images, their materiality compromised and decontextualized by the virtual nature of my own viewing of them via online resources, I can find my way back to the story of Aylan Kurdi and the Syrian refugee crisis, and to a history of slavery and ongoing violence against Black men and women through Franko B’s and Faustine’s respective refusals to provide the specific context for that story. It may be a contradictory methodology— or, to borrow Sharpe’s terminology: a paradoxical one. It is, though, effective and affective.

WHAT HOLDS US In an interview with Desiree Nault, when asked what she means by “the love of my life is performance art,” Canadian-born Czech-Iraqi performance artist Adriana Disman responds, “Because it holds what I need held” (in Nault 2018). Performance art, both in its enactment and its performative documentation—which, via the ongoing liveness its circulation through social media makes possible—creates an affective space that is quantifiable in emotional response and also removed from an identifiable context of the always moving (in multiple senses of the word), yet always still, original. Franko B’s not a number and Nona Faustine’s From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth tell a different story from that of their original sources, yet also narrate a continuity within those stories that resonates in an immediately contemporary moment. Ai Weiwei presumes a relationality to a story that speaks to his own, but is not his own. He comes too close, is too visibly seen, and, in such presumptive proximity, undermines the political potential of his own project. Franko B’s and Faustine’s works deny the presumption of proximity, and therefore of familiarity or intimacy to the viewer, while also demanding of the viewer not a kinship assumed through the act of looking but rather a realization of their own lack of centrality to the image. In effect, these pieces repurpose affect, repurpose its embedded notions of pre-personal or proto-political, by denying the personal and political after the fact of its having been established. They deny the viewer the right to feel an emotional pull, and in that pull, the right to pull away, by resituating the site of affect to the site of damage done: to Aylan Kurdi’s body that is not yet or still is his body; to the body of the slave on the auction block that is not a slave’s body but rather that of a “free woman of some degree.” By disrupting, more or less explicitly, the viewer’s gaze—which is already disrupted by the elusive present the medium of photography feigns to offer—these works work to re-place the previously denied

COMPASSIONATE ACTS: PERFORMANCE AS RADICAL CARE

143

subject. Their work, which becomes then the viewer’s work—our work—is both careful, and full of care. This work, artistic and affective, becomes part of “ongoing political discourse” and takes on the attending responsibilities of care such attending to demands. In doing so, these artists do the performative work to reestablish the site of subjecthood and subjectivity to the particular bodies depicted within their pieces, and to reestablish the possibility of care.

NOTES 1. There were originally two photographs of Kurdi by Demir that circulated through mainstream press, that of Kurdi’s small body on the beach and also of the Turkish coast guard carrying Kurdi. The former, particularly the detail of Kurdi, was most frequently cited and appropriated after the photographs’ publication (see Mortensen 2017: 1147). 2. Various appropriations of Nilüfer Demir’s photographs were subsequently posted and shared on social media with the hashtag #humanitywashedashore appended (see Mortensen 2017). 3. Of the other twenty-three people crossing the sea in two boats that day, eleven people died when the boats capsized, including Aylan Kurdi, and his mother and brother. At the time of the photograph, more than 2,600 people were known to have died in 2015 in such crossings (Smith 2015). 4. See also Doyle (2013); Gormley (2015); Heathfield (2004). 5. For access to an online archive of Franko B’s work, see http://www.franko-b.com/ home.html. 6. See Ngai (2004); Tuck and Yang (2012); Dauvergne (2016). 7. As part of the Visual Social Media Lab’s project “The Iconic Image on Social Media,” researcher Francesco D’Orazio reported that, following the mainstream publication of the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, there was a quantitative shift in social media from the use of “migrant” to “refugee” in reference to Syrian refugees. (D’Orazio 2015; EJO 2015). 8. I take this up at length in Learning How to Fall: Art and Culture after September 11 (2015). 9. See Susan Leigh Foster (2011) on the settler colonialist rhetoric of empathy. 10. Mette Mortensen denotes two characterizations at work within appropriations of iconic images: “Decontextualization isolates the figure of the drowned child and includes appropriations within the genres of realistic drawings and photo documentations of reenactments. Recontextualization inserts the figure into new contexts . . . Recontextualization is by far the most frequent mode in terms of unique images and their circulation” (2017: 1150). 11. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987): “Affects are becomings. Spinoza asks: What can a body do? We call the latitude of a body the affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power, or rather within the limits of that degree. Latitude is made up of intensive parts falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive parts falling under a relation” (256–7).

144

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara (2004). “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22, no. 2: 117–39. Ahmed, Sara (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. artnet (2015). “African-American Artist Poses Nude at New York’s Historic Slavery Sites.” Artnet, July 6. Available at: https​://ne​ws.ar​tnet.​com/a​rt-wo​rld/a​rtist​-pose​s-nud​e-new​ -york​s-his​toric​-slav​ery-s​ites-​31436​4 (January 21, 2019). Binder, Werner and Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky (2018). “Refugees as Icons: Culture and Iconic Representation.” Sociology Compass 12, no. 5: 1–14. Blackman, Lisa and Couze Venn (2010). “Affect.” Body & Society 16, no. 1: 7–28. Brown, Kimberly Juanita (2014). “Regarding the Pain of the Other: Photography, Famine, and the Transference of Affect,” in Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phy (eds), Feeling Photography, 181–203. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burns, Anne (2015). “Discussion and Action: Political and Personal Responses to the Aylan Kurdi Images,” in Farida Vis and Olga Goriunova (eds), The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi, 38–9. Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab. CBC (2016). “Black Lives Matter Stalls Pride Parade.” CBC, July 3. Available at: https​://ww​w.cbc​.ca/n​ews/c​anada​/toro​nto/p​ride-​parad​e-tor​onto-​1.366​2823 (January 21, 2019). Cesare Schotzko, T. Nikki (2015). Learning How to Fall: Art and Culture after September 11. London and New York: Routledge. Cheng, Meiling (2011). “Ai Weiwei: Acting Is Believing.” TDR 55, no. 4: 7–13. Clarke, Rachel and Catherine E. Shoichet (2015). “Image of 3-Year-Old Who Washed Ashore Underscores Europe’s Refugee Crisis.” CNN, September 3. Available at https​://ed​ition​.cnn.​com/2​015/0​9/02/​europ​e/mig​ratio​n-cri​sis-b​oy-wa​shed-​ashor​ein-​turke​y/ind​ex.ht​ml (January 21, 2019). Cvetkovich, Ann (2014). “Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice,” in Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phy (eds), Feeling Photography, 273–96. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. D’Orazio, Francesco (2015). “Journey of an Image: From a Beach in Bodrum to Twenty Million Screens across the World,” in Farida Vis and Olga Goriunova (eds), The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi, 11–18. Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab. Dabashi, Hamid (2016). “A Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Boy.” Al Jazeera, February 4. Available at: https​://ww​w.alj​azeer​a.com​/inde​pth/o​pinio​n/201​6/02/​portr​ait-a​rtist​-dead​ -boy-​ai-we​iwei-​aylan​-kurd​i-ref​ugees​-1602​04095​70147​9.htm​l (January 21 2019). Dauvergne, Catherine (2016). The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Societies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Ann (2005). “Invisible Disability.” Ethics 116, no. 1: 153–213. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Doyle, Jennifer (2006). “Critical Tears: Franko B’s ‘I Miss You.’” Franko B. Available at: http://www.franko-b.com/texts.html (January 21, 2019).

COMPASSIONATE ACTS: PERFORMANCE AS RADICAL CARE

145

Doyle, Jennifer (2013). Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Dunne, Carey (2015). “Artist Nona Faustine on Posing Naked at New York’s Former Slave Trade Sites.” Brooklyn Magazine, July 15. Available at: http:​//www​.bkma​g.com​/2015​ /07/1​5/bro​oklyn​-arti​st-no​na-fa​ustin​e-on-​posin​g-nud​e-at-​forme​r-sla​ve-tr​ade-s​ites/​. El-Enany, Nadine (2016). “Aylan Kurdi: The Human Refugee.” Law and Critique 27: 13–15. European Journalism Observatory (EJO) (2015). “Research: How Europe’s Newspapers Reported the Migration Crisis.” European Journalism Observatory, November 9. Available at: https​://en​.ejo.​ch/re​searc​h/res​earch​-how-​europ​es-ne​wspap​ers-r​eport​edth​e-mig​ratio​n-cri​sis (January 21, 2019). Fateman, Johanna (2018). “Fully Loaded: Johanna Fateman on Power and Sexual Violence.” Artforum 56, no. 5: 176–83. Faustine, Nona (2015). “After the Fact, a Symposium.” International Center of Photography-Bard College, New York. Faustine, Nona (2016). “White Shoes,” in Martha Naranjo Sandoval (ed.), After the Fact, 57–65. New York: ICP Publications. Firstenberg, Lauri (2003). “Autonomy and the Archive in America: Re-examining the Intersection of Photography and Stereotype,” in Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (eds), Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, 317–19. New York: International Center of Photography. Foster, Susan Leigh (2011). Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Frohne, Andrea E. (2015). The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Garland-Thomson, Rosemary (2002). “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal 14, no. 3: 1–32. Gilligan, Carol (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gormley, Claire (2015). “Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art.” Tate. Available at: https​://ww​w.tat​e.org​.uk/r​esear​ch/pu​blica​tions​/perf​orman​ce-at​-tate​/case​-stud​ies/f​ranko​-b (January 21, 2019). Grossberg, Lawrence (1992). We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams (eds) (2016). Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Toronto: Between the Lines. Hardt, Michael (2007). “Foreword: What Affects Are Good For,” in Patricia Ticineto Cough (ed.), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ix, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Heathfield, Adrian (2004). Live: Art and Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Held, Virginia (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelly, Christine (2013). “Building Bridges with Accessible Care: Disability Studies, Feminist Care Scholarship, and Beyond.” Hypatia 28, no. 4: 784–800.

146

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Kinser, Amber E., Kryn Freehling-Burton, and Terri Hawkes (eds) (2014). Performing Motherhood: Artistic, Activist, and Everyday Enactments. Bradford: Demeter Press. Küpeli, Ismail (2015). “We Spoke to the Photographer Behind the Picture of the Drowned Syrian Boy.” Vice, September 4. Available at: https​://ww​w.vic​e.com​/en_u​s/ art​icle/​zngqp​x/nil​fer-d​emir-​inter​view-​876 (January 21, 2019). Massumi, Brian (1987). “Foreword,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, NC and London: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, Brian (1995). “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31, no. 2: 83–109. Massumi, Brian (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, Brian (2015). Politics of Affects. Cambridge: Polity Press. Moore, Christopher (n.d.). “New York’s Seventeenth Century African Burial Ground in History.” National Parks Service. Available at: https​://ww​w.nps​.gov/​afbg/​learn​/ hist​orycu​lture​/afri​can-b​urial​-grou​nd-in​-hist​ory.h​tm; http:​//www​.nps.​gov/a​fbg/l​earn/​ histo​rycul​ture/​uploa​d/New​Yorks​Seven​teent​hCent​uryAf​rican​Buria​lGrou​ndHis​tory.​pdf (March 21, 2019). Mortensen, Mette (2017). “Constructing, Confirming, and Contesting Icons: The Alan Kurdi Imagery Appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo.” Media, Culture & Society 39, no. 8: 1142–61. Mortensen, Mette and Hans-Jörg Trenz (2015). “Media Morality and Visual Icons in the Age of Social Media: Alan Kurdi and the Emergence of an Impromptu Public of Moral Spectatorship.” Javnost—The Public 23, no. 4: 343–62. Nault, Desiree (2018). “Interview with Adriana Disman.” M:ST News, September 14. Available at: https://www.mountainstandardtime.org/ (January 21, 2019). Newman, Laine Yale Zisman (2018). “Placefull Spaces: Queer Women and Non-Binary Artists Resisting an Emptied Stage.” PhD diss., University of Toronto. New York Times (1990). “Lifestyle: Sunday Outing; Deep in Brooklyn, a Slave Plantation Illustrates How Both Sides Lived.” New York Times, June 24. Available at: https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/1​990/0​6/24/​style​/life​style​-sund​ay-ou​ting-​deep-​brook​lyn-s​ lave-​plant​ation​-illu​strat​es-bo​th-si​des.h​tml (January 21, 2019). Ngai, Mae M. (2004). Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Olesen, Thomas (2018). “Memetic Protest and the Dramatic Diffusion of Alan Kurdi.” Media, Culture & Society 40, no. 5: 656–72. Phelan, Peggy (2009). “Afterword: ‘In the Valley of the Shadow of Death’: The Photographs of Abu Ghraib,” in Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon (eds), Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes, 372–84. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schilder, Paul (1950). The Image and Appearance of the Human Body. New York: International Universities Press. Schneider, Rebecca (1997). The Explicit Body in Performance. New York and London: Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca (2011). Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York and London: Routledge.

COMPASSIONATE ACTS: PERFORMANCE AS RADICAL CARE

147

Sharpe, Christine (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Helena (2015). “Shocking Images of Drowned Syrian. Boy Show Tragic Plight of Refugees.” Guardian, September 2. Available at: https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/wo​rld/ 2​015/s​ep/02​/shoc​king-​image​-of-d​rowne​d-syr​ian-b​oy-sh​ows-t​ragic​-plig​ht-of​-refu​gees (January 21, 2019). Sontag, Susan (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. Spinoza, Benedictus de (1994). A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, translated by Edwin M. Curley. Princeton and Chichester: Princeton University Press. Stewart, Kathleen (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tronto, Joan (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York and London: Routledge. Tronto, Joan (2013). Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York and London: New York University Press. Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang (2012). “Decolonization Is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1: 1–40. Vandenbeld Giles, Melinda (ed.) (2014). Motherhood in the Age of Neoliberalism. Bradford: Demeter Press.

CHAPTER 3.8

The Labor of the Artist, Feminist Practices, and Troubles with Infrastructure BOJANA KUNST

In 2017, I had the pleasure of attending performances that brought another perspective to the paradoxical mixture of exhaustion and precarious labor conditions on the one hand, and the desire to collectively and politically belong to something, on the other. I was aware that this complex mixture of feelings can produce even stronger dependence and can deepen the crisis of subjectivity. These works were deeply engaged in the practice of working and rethinking labor issues in proximity to care, which, when practiced, actually change and reconfigure social relations and the infrastructural environment in which the very works of art take place. For example, young choreographer Else Tunemyr addressed the complexity of care and the notion of repair in her performance When We were Weary/The Loneliest Whale in the World at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, in 2017 (Figure 3.8.1). In this performance, she was influenced by the feminist approach to care and labor and related it to choreographic practice and performance production. During the work process, she challenged the notions of rehearsals and researched the ways in which the intersubjectivity of the performance could be organized differently, by caring about the bodily and mental state of the collaborators. She developed alternative methodologies of work and sharing that also changed the way the final work was attended and perceived. The entire working process and the rehearsals were scheduled so that care was taken of the participants, for their mental and bodily condition. This also directed the rhythm of the rehearsals and the temporality of the work process, influenced the participants’ relationships with one another, and the way they approached the production process. The relationship between the process and the final outcome is challenged because of the very different affective and embodied relation to work, one which cares for the renewal of the body, for the time and space of rehearsals, and mixes up the processes of work and life in a very

LABOR OF THE ARTIST, FEMINIST PRACTICES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

149

FIGURE 3.8.1:  Else Tunmeyr, When We were Weary/The Loneliest Whale in the World, 2017. Photo by David Rittershaus.

political way. In the process of the performance, methods of care were developed and dance was explored as an embodied practice that could support the practitioners in their working and living environment. At the center of this performance was an artistic process that would take care of the needs of those involved and include public feelings such as anxiety, depression, and so on, which are often related to a projective and accelerated work, coming from a project-driven production and the precarious situation of artists. Tunemyr expanded on gender scholar Ann Cvetkovich’s observations that feelings should be included within political discourse and also become part of the processes of artistic production (Cvetkovich 2012). Some dance practitioners and performance makers have recently been researching the notion of practice, through which they are challenging the notion of production in performance and opening performance to another temporality, related much more to repetition, to taking care, and to enabling support for the individual and the collective processes of work and observation. This shift toward practice can be observed not only in Tunmeyr’s work, but also in the work of other choreographers, such as Catalina Insignares, Alice Chauchat, and Miriam Levkowitz. In my text, I would like to show how this shift has its historical genealogy in the feminist critique of the Marxist notion of reproduction and can help us to better understand the notion of labor in performance. From this perspective, the focus on the practice of work opens up many similar questions, already explored in the feminist practices of the 1970s, which can be approached as a fertile background for understanding the labor of artists today.

150

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Already in the 1970s, scholars and artists explored the consequences of precarious and flexible work on female subjectivities. This artistic work is feminist because it politically approaches the question of female work and always tries to reflect on the situation of an artist from a political and gendered perspective. It is connected to the theoretical exploration of the ways of working and labor, like affective work and care work, which have traditionally been connected to the labor of women. Such issues came to the forefront in the 1970s in the political and feminist debates about labor (such as the movement around Wages for Housework, Federici, Dalla Costa, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, etc.).1 In this text, I will focus on one artist: German feminist activist Helke Sander, who in her films examined the situation of the independent, emancipated women of the late 1970s and 1980s, playing them mostly herself; some of her characters are also artists and performed female subjectivity. Sander developed a sharp political feminist analysis in her film essays, disclosing the paradoxes of the autonomous and independent life, showing the difficulties of the process of emancipation. These were related not only to autonomous subjectivities but also to the development of an entire infrastructure that could support the forms of emancipated life. Here are significant similarities between feminist debates from the 1970s and the contemporary analysis of artists’ labor, especially in relation to the precarity and flexibility of her labor. An emancipated, self-organized, and independent subjectivity, which we can find since the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, shows, in the examination of Sanders, many of the problems that can be detected when analyzing the contemporary subjectivity of the artist: emancipation, independent work. These qualities do not necessarily mean a better life. The analysis from this time connects to the observation of the contemporary of the artist, who works mostly independently and from project to project, in what can be termed a “project culture.” The similarities in the articulation of political problems suggest other ways of addressing and politically grasping the precarity of artistic labor today, of rethinking the politics of emancipation. Artistic and professional emancipation does not necessarily mean emancipation from traditional stereotypes and expectations, nor does it enable a better economic status because the disappearance of the border between life and labor is part of the contemporary development in the exploitation of artistic labor, very much present in the expansion of service work and affective labor in the development of late capitalism. It is haunting to observe how Sander’s analysis in her films is still pertinent today, especially with the rise of self-organized and flexible production in art, related to project-based freelance work, where it is often difficult to differentiate between work and life. Contemporary artistic work is structured through the creation of projects, the project is the main form of work in the cultural field and this imposes a particular temporality and organization on work and life, characterized by precarity and flexibility (Kunst 2015). Helke Sander is a well-known figure in Germany’s feminist movement, founder of the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Council for the Liberation of Women) in 1968, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s she was strongly involved in feminist activism.2 She is also an inspiring filmmaker, the author of many works in which she deals with the living and working situation of women and their emancipatory fights and desires. Her filmmaking is in-between document and

LABOR OF THE ARTIST, FEMINIST PRACTICES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

151

fiction: mostly filmic essays concerned with the political and existential situation of women, always located in the changing urban landscape of cities. Her films show the situation of women in the period of rapid post-industrialization (still ideologically defined by the split between East and West), confronted with the disappearance of public space and simultaneously occurring emancipatory feminist movements. Her unique focus on the living situation and labor of women artists, on the politicization of their private life, can still reveal a very accurate analysis of the crucial role of labor and new modes of the production of subjectivity today. Since her work deals with the paradoxes of the politicization of the private, it shows life out in the open, in the public space, in the city, on the street. The women in Sander’s films deeply challenge the notion of the public feminist (artistic) work. In them, we watch a particular exhibition of artistic subjectivity and observe how female artists are living. The films are a performance of life and work, in which her actions, her labor, her desires, are deeply related to the infrastructural surrounding of emancipated female subjects at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. Her films observe and analyze how women live their emancipated life and how this life, in all its dimensions, becomes visible in public. These films open the performativity of the artistic work in the middle of the fight for women’s emancipation: showing how independent, activist, freelance work can be easily subjugated to the accelerated notion of time, project-based freelance work, the lack of infrastructure of care, and the precarious feeling of the future.

I Helke Sander’s films can be approached through a performative lens, since they disclose the relationships between performance and feminist subjectivities, especially the agency of these subjectivities who live their daily lives and the ways they perform their work. The films show an awareness of the specific entanglement of life and work balance through the films’ protagonists. At the same time, they show how the liberation of the field of reproduction is not enough; it has to be continuously repoliticized to resist new forms of control. One film by Helke Sander, from her series of short films entitled Aus Berichten der Wach- und Patrouillendienste (Excerpts from Reports of the Guard and Patrol Service) (1985), is based on a newspaper report about a real event, in which a woman threatens to throw herself and her children from a crane if she does not find an affordable apartment by the end of the day. The film, which opens with a giant advertisement slogan on the glass structure of Hamburg train station, shows only this gesture of a woman climbing the crane with two young children. When they reach the top, they start to throw leaflets from the crane. The dedicated stamina of the mother, who is vigorously climbing to dangerous heights with her children, reminds us of the figure of Medea. The film affects us immediately with its surgical observation of the tenacious gesture of climbing. The rhythm of the sound of the iron steps as they are climbing provides a poetic but persevering virtuosity, which never stops even for a moment, despite the rigorous climbing. There is no hesitation, only a firm series of steps to the most vertiginous point of the crane. It also affects us with

152

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

a mixture of care and cruelty. With every step, the film is more difficult to watch; it becomes dizzy in its vertical clarity. This careful but resolutely performed gesture of climbing, of the strenuous labor of the woman climbing up with her children, this determined female embodiment of the virtuous Man on Wire,3 is a gesture of protest toward the lack of ground and environment, toward the crisis of the chosen and autonomous life’s infrastructure, understood here in the way cultural theorist Lauren Berlant defines it: Infrastructure is not identical to a system or structure, as we currently see them, because infrastructure is defined by the movement or patterning of social form. It is the living mediation of what organizes life: the life-world of structure. Roads, bridges, schools, food chains, finance systems, prisons, families, districts, norms [sic] all the systems that link ongoing proximity to being and a world sustaining relation. (2016: 393) In its simplicity, the film addresses the failure of this infrastructural proximity, which happens in the fight for autonomy and emancipation. The crane on which the woman is climbing is not only a symbolic or iconic machine of the expansion of the city and its spectacular economic progress, but also part of this infrastructural surrounding, an operational machine, a means of production, through which the vertical elevation of the city is enabled. With its help, buildings can press higher and grow faster into the sky. At the same time, with the growing exposure of the elevated abundance of wealth, the scarcity of living conditions on the ground is made even more invisible.4 The crane is also a means of production that, in recent decades, has become fully automatized and, in this way, has greatly increased its productivity. It is also an object around which the flows of a badly paid, precarious, mostly immigrant, workforce are organized: this is often an illegal workforce that works in its proximity mostly to enable the basic reproduction of their lives and the lives of their families.5 Therefore, the crane is a machine pressing into the sky in between the production of abundance and scarcity, rotating around this paradoxical dynamic of labor, recognizable also nowadays. The examination of the self-organized life of women discloses the paradoxes appearing with the new forms and modes of emancipated life. In Sander’s films, we are confronted with female characters (whom she often plays herself), who strongly believe in and practice a self-organized and autonomous life. However, the characters are subsequently caught in the new forms of exploitation, invisibility, and subjugation arising from unstable, precarious work and the destruction of the common public infrastructures that would enable a decent living in the city. There is a clash in the urban space between the autonomous forms of life—which are giving value and attraction to the city (today very much recognized through the processes of gentrification)—and with the lack of support for this kind of life (the lack of infrastructures that support and enable such a life). But the action of the climbing mother is not just a symbolic one. There is something else at work in this vertiginous persistence. She gives insight into a particular dynamic of the capitalist economy, which can be described with the words of Berlant: “a glitch has appeared in the re-production of life” (2016:

LABOR OF THE ARTIST, FEMINIST PRACTICES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

153

393). Her stubborn climbing, her micro-political action observed through the lens of Sander’s camera, also discloses a dangerous and unsolvable collision between different spheres of production, or different spheres of labor: reproductive labor and productive labor of commodities and profit.6 Inside this collision, the woman persisting in her rhythmical stubbornness and dedication is already beyond vertigo: in this endeavor, the explosive and ambivalent political gesture of care is disclosed. A labor of care resists the new modes of subjectification and flexibility and does not subordinate to the marginalization to which subjectivity is forced if she wants to live an autonomous and independent life. With her action, she also protests against the scarcity of living conditions and discloses the crucial role of reproduction in the expansion of capitalism. Abundance (which can be defined here as a continuous expansion of production and the accumulation of wealth) is closely related to the extraction of reproductive means: accumulation happens through the capturing of the means of reproduction the people have to maintain themselves, the means through which they themselves and their communities can endure.7 In tandem, the accumulation of wealth cannot be divided from the processes of precarization, where the ontological insecurity of life is transformed into a mode of government, which philosopher Isabel Lorey names “governmental precarization” (2015). These processes are also close to domination through dispossession, which feminist thinker Silvia Federici sees as the main reason why capitalism still endures today (2017). The resilience of the woman climbing up into the sky can therefore also be described as the very particular gesture of the precarious subjectivity to radically address exactly this endurance—to meet resiliently with the forces of dispossession, but this time in the air—on the precarious thinness of the crane. In this situation, it is not possible to lose the ground under her feet, because there is no ground for her anyway, there is no house and the space of living has become inaccessible. Because of the progress and growth of the city, the infrastructure of her life is radically changed and demands another environment, a change of relations through which she moves, without subordination to the disappearance of the public space and the marginalization of her independent life. Autonomy, so much praised and practiced, is suddenly missing its support: its space, its place, but also its time, the capacity to live and work together, the ways it is possible to be bound to the world. Feminist authors such as Federici and Dalla Costa were aware of the paradoxical relationship between abundance and scarcity in capitalist production. They showed that if we wanted to comprehend the processes of capitalist accumulation that go hand in hand with the production of scarcity, we could not do this without a thorough reflection on the field of reproduction. Marxist feminists were rethinking the notion of reproduction in a manifest way in Federici’s well-known essay “Wages Against Housework” (1974) and in the movement of the same name, which presented an important, but also controversial attempt to tackle gender difference organized through the division of labor. In the same period, the labor of reproduction became visible in the work of feminist artists, such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles with her performance Touch Sanitation (1978),8 performed with the sanitary employees in New York, as well as Mary Kelly, whose conceptual art piece Post-Partum Document (1979) had a

154

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

psychoanalytical approach to motherhood and pregnancy.9 The drives, modes, ways, and attitudes of reproductive labor became visible in the performances and artworks of feminist artists, but the focus that Helke Sander adds to these explorations is different and opens up another problematic. The sphere of reproduction and its invisible, non-valued role in capitalist production is the one producing the gendered division of labor and forms of oppression originating from it. But that does not mean that the new forms of living that have sprung from the resulting processes of emancipation will necessarily bring freedom and happiness to the protagonists. With her subtle yet analytic visual approach, Sander detects the complex relationship between post-industrialization, the rise of precarious jobs and flexible subjectivities, and the relationship between new developments of capitalism and gender relations, which are closely related to the development and transformation of the flows of capital. In his analysis of capital, Marx observed how the employment of women and children as wage laborers not only “provided a new foundation for the division of labor” (Marx 1990 [1876]: 615), but also new forms of family relations and the emancipation of women. But parallel to these processes, Marxist scholar David Harvey reminds us that new forms of domination and subjugation also appeared, and gender roles were reconstructed in a “distinctively capitalist way” (2000: 106). At the time when Sander created her films, the fight for employment and an autonomous life was tightly intertwined in the shift in postindustrial capitalism to more flexible, service-oriented, and precarious jobs. New forms of employment and the rise of globalization processes originated from the changes in the accumulation of capital. The emancipatory processes that opened up interest in subjectivity were thus closely related to the then “new” modes of production of subjectivity and can only be valuable if they are observed inside such complexity. This relationship between new modes of production and emancipation also continues to be present in art production, in the ways that art production and the labor of artists have developed in the last decades. Sander’s full-length film Die Allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit—Redupers (The All-round Reduced Personality— Redupers) (1978) emphasizes the sociopolitical situation of the emancipation of the female artist. The film shows the shift to a more self-defined and self-managed life, which brought changes to the way that reproduction is organized. It also shows how a self-managed life produced new divisions and hierarchies, which greatly influenced the ways subjectivities were managed and organized, and how, in their daily lives, women became precarious, dependent, and isolated. The reorganization of the sphere of reproduction did not allow for a liberated, independent, emancipated life. In the film, Helke Sander plays a young, independent, single mother, a photographer, an artist and activist named Edda, who is unable to manage her self-organized life, switching among many jobs to maintain her autonomy, to live the life she has chosen for herself, and to give this life a social, political dimension. She lives with her ten-year-old son in an apartment in Berlin, which she shares with a roommate, her friend. Involved in many projects, she is active and politically aware of the situation of living and working as an artist in a city split between two political systems. In the film, we observe her daily life: how she moves between many occupations, from voluntary jobs and the occupations of childcare, to the work that she does

LABOR OF THE ARTIST, FEMINIST PRACTICES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

155

for survival and the work she performs with her artistic collective. For survival, she works as a photographer for the local newspaper’s night chronicle, for which she must often wake up in the middle of the night. She is also a member of a collective with whom she takes part in a competition for the best political public artwork in the city. We see how the idea of an emancipated life has slowly turned into its opposite: a precarious, accelerated, and scattered dependence on projects, local politicians, part-time jobs, simple life demands, running between different locations, engaging with the organization of daily life. In this exhaustive rhythm, which Edda somehow stoically embodies, even the strongest political and social desires are drowned in the daily management of the preoccupied life. But Edda never loses her strong-willed persistence, even if there is less and less public space and visibility for her ideas and less time for her life. Sander, in this way, tackles the paradox of a famous feminist political dictum of her time, the personal is political, and shows how the pollination of the private, the reorganization of life, must also be thought of as a sphere of labor if we really want to politicize it. In this sense, women are emancipated subjects but are caught in the paradoxes of their emancipated position, which goes hand in hand with the dissolution of their political hopes and desires. The sphere of reproduction, for which women fought to be differently organized, combating against old hierarchies, turns itself into another form of dependency. This time, the dependency lies on continuous work, which erases the differentiation between different spheres of life and the possible politicization of such difference. Curator and researcher Marion von Osten, in her response to the film, describes this situation: “The emancipatory struggle that had the good life as its objective now reappears in the unsatisfied longing for change and the struggle to survive” (2009: 7). Female subjectivities can only maintain the reproduction of life if it is more and more capitalized. The subjects are precarious and flexible, investing deeply and taking care of what they do. They are self-organized, self-managed, but nevertheless increasingly dependent on the precarious conditions in which they live. The subjectivities are progressively isolated and divided, and instead of belonging to the commons, reproduction becomes the sphere of individualization and isolated time management. As Von Osten describes: Although the economic field, in a double sense, mobilizes and controls the social realm, the paradigms of capitalist production remain the same. They do not inform the “resources” of our social lives themselves, even (and especially) if cognitive capitalism has parasitically positioned itself at the side of reproduction. Acceleration and maximizing profit continue to be advanced as the necessary logic of the market. Life itself is subsumed under the rules of efficiency and optimization that were first encountered under the regime of automated industrial work in order to synchronize the body with machines. Today, it is our cognitive capabilities that we are expected to optimize and our self-relation (to our work) that we are expected to correct in the interest of lifelong learning. (2009: 8) In another of Sander’s full-length films, Redupers (1978), the performance of female subjectivity is even more present, opening up the performativity of the independent and self-organized life as a series of accelerated projects, which

156

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

deepen the feeling of precarity and loss of control over reproduction as well as over production. In this film, we see how Edda experiences her emancipatory dreams as they turn into dependence, invisibility, and marginality. This portrait of a feminist artist reminds us of the contemporary artistic subjectivity of women, on the dependence on too many different projects on a daily basis, and on the organization and acceleration of time. Like Edda’s, our subjectivity is scattered among an affective dedication to collaborators, friends, and in tandem, on the continuous demand for professionalization, self-organization, and competition in the market. The biggest problem of such subjectivity is not actually the individual course of her life, but how such structures are also disintegrating the formations of the commons, disabling the time for political and social activities, and thinking together about how such a life dissolves the space and time for politics. In this sense, such a daily life also shows the collapse of relations, the collapse of infrastructural environment. It is a life in crisis. Collaborations turn into professional networks, public visibility is organized institutionally and mostly through intermediators (like curatorial decisions), the infrastructure of the artist becomes more and more a net of paradoxical and destructive relations, based on friendships and investments, which, at the same time, linger in between the private and professional sphere. Most of the emancipated women in Sander’s films are struggling for public visibility, but in a different sense than exhibiting their work in an art institution. Instead, they are struggling for the public visibility of their life and work, they want to leave a trace and mark a territory (this can be, for example, in the form of an affordable apartment in the city or a place to exhibit photographs). The struggle of these women is close to the claim of the feminist initiative Precarias a la Deriva (Precarious Women Adrift), a feminist initiative situated between art, activism, and research in Barcelona from 2002, who nowadays observe how neoliberalism has to change the feminist responses and shift the focus from subjectivity to the general infrastructural problems (Precarias a la Deriva 2004). Here, especially, their observation about how the process of precarization has devastating consequences for social bonds, is important: “The territory for the aggregation (and perhaps combat) for mobile and precarious workers is not necessarily the workplace, but also not the home, but rather this metropolitan territory we navigate every day, with its billboards and shopping centres, fast food that tastes like air, and every variety of useless contracts” (Precarias a la Deriva 2004).10 This is exactly where the women from Sander’s films are moving and discovering the contradictions of their life, and where many of today’s contemporary artists, not only women artists, are mostly living and trying to show, open, and exhibit their practices, works, and performances.

II Helke Sander’s films present a rich reference for comprehending the labor of an artist today, because they give insight into the essential political similarities between the early feminist critique of the emancipatory processes and the critique of labor of the artists today. They persuasively show how new forms of capitalism were positioned on the side of reproduction and how, with the shift of capitalism into the service

LABOR OF THE ARTIST, FEMINIST PRACTICES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

157

economy, into the post-Fordist work, “reproductive activities have been organized as value producing services that workers must purchase and pay for” (Federici 2012: 100). Thus, the forms of oppression have not disappeared; they have only taken different shapes. “Part of what a creative history of capitalism has been about is discovering new ways (and potentialities) in which the human body can be put to use as the bearer of the capacity to labour” (Harvey 2000: 104). This recognition was especially relevant for the black feminist movement in the United States and their critique of the mostly white feminist approach to housework, expressed through the Wages for Housework movement. In the poignant chapter from her book Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis addresses the issues of household and reproductive work of black women. She writes about the important differences that exist in the field of reproduction between black and white women, who, enslaved, were often non-worthy even of reproduction. There is also a long history of black women’s employment in the household, even if the wage was minimal or did not exist at all (Davis 1982: 127–39). Davis shows how this important demand to focus on the non-waged labor of reproduction, which was at the center of the feminist Marxist critique of feminism, is not itself without problems. The movement around Wages for Housework does not take into the account that, through capitalism, reproduction was also organized, exploited, and controlled differently for black women. Capitalism has the control over reproduction, organizing it with the creation of divisions and the production of differences between gender, class, race, etc. In the conclusion of her text, Davis explains that what is important is a socialization of reproduction, shifting the field of reproduction inside the processes of the commons. This could be related to another later statement of Federici, where she herself critically re-examines the history of the feminist movement in the 1970s, and writes that what is needed is “the reopening of a collective struggle over reproduction reclaiming control over the material conditions of our reproduction and creating new forms of cooperation around this work outside of the logic of the capital and the market” (Federici 2012: 111). In Helke Sander’s films, the question of control or lack of control over the material conditions is very present, either in the form of a protest or as a continuous attempt to give life a collective political sense. This is a difficult process, because with the capitalist re-shifting of reproduction, the emancipatory and autonomous processes continuously lack the common infrastructure in which they could practice their art and live. Inside the city, time and space slip away from exhausted and multitasking protagonists. The lack of control over their own material conditions originates from dispossession which, in this case, is not directly related to material resources, but rather results from the dispossession of the films’ characters from their powers and capacities to live (an autonomous life). When thinking about the labor of the artist, this dispossession is important, especially in order to understand the paradoxical structure of artistic subjectivity. I am referring here to the notion of dispossession as developed by Harvey (2004) and also Federici (2012). They compellingly showed how contemporary capital works through accumulation by dispossession, and how control over reproduction is one of the main characteristics of capitalist processes: what is dispossessed are exactly the resources that constitute not only the

158

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

infrastructures of life, such as water and soil, but also space in the city, temporal rhythms, the pace of the body, communities, etc. Dispossession also operates in the field of art, and this can be observed in contemporary networks, modes of coproduction, and systems of financing and supporting artistic projects, which are mostly oriented toward continuous invention and production, existing and being shared through immaterial networks. An artist has to be prepared for continuous mobility, precarity, and a flexible rearrangement of life, which often might also be combined with the continuous work of care, embodied and affective labor, because only in this way can his or her work persist and produce value (for the others and for artists themselves). This can be described as the performance of contemporary artistic subjectivity. In the case of artists, accumulation by dispossession happens as practices of care, embodiment, and imagination transform into continuous productivity. This transformation atomizes creation and relates specifically to a particular kind of, even if continuously connected, artistic subjectivity. Such subjectivity produces projects that might expand aesthetically and formally to many different issues—political, participatory, engaged—but it does not actually change how the artist works (and lives) (Kunst 2015). The film Redupers touches us today with an early image of artistic subjectivity, which seems to be a must image nowadays, especially in relation to the creation of projects and network-based artistic labor, loaded with care and affective investments, which are, of course, oriented toward production. Helke Sander approached this problem with her activist insight into the lives of the women of her time, showing how forms of oppression persisted through the erasure of relations and the destruction of the infrastructural environment for the autonomous life. It would be important to examine therefore, what are the ways and means of taking control over the material conditions for reproduction for artists today. The question becomes: how is it possible to repoliticize the field of reproduction, when thinking about artistic subjectivity and artistic labor? This is not an easy task, due to the very thin line that exists between the artist’s work and his or her life. This fine line can be historically related to the avant-garde idea of the artist, but today, it resonates mostly with the new ways of production and coincides well with the spread of affective work. At the same time, artistic subjectivity itself (and not so much the work of an artist) is a generator of value, especially with her or his lifestyle and her or his ways of living. Artists add value to cities or parts of cities, by example with their lives, not so much with their work. In such a production of value, artistic subjectivity generally does not have a name (a recognizable name only belongs to the few who have made it on the market and shifted the value of their subjectivity also to their work). The general presence of the artist suffices to add extra value to the space and time of living (the accumulation by dispossession happens in the gentrification processes). The labor of an artist is deeply intertwined with the ways that the value of artworks is created, how they become present (and presentable) and get their public and institutional visibility. The question of control over reproduction is thus also related to the structural and temporal condition of the production of artworks, the way they can leave traces and mark the time and space in which they are created. This problem was present in the

LABOR OF THE ARTIST, FEMINIST PRACTICES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

159

feminist movement from the late 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s, especially with female artists’ fight for visibility. Nowadays, however, I am convinced that the feminist movement has a different political goal. What is important is not only the visibility of the work of women artists, but how the visibility of their work also changes the economic, social, and political structure of institutions. Taking control of reproduction, taking care of time, life, space, the environment of creation, social and life processes and relationships, is therefore related to the institutional question in the sense that it is challenging its structures of containment and closure: showing how other modes of being together exist, which are not necessarily related and defined through productivity and growth. The goal is not better and more efficient productivity, even if productivity in the arts can have a positive social value and it can be seen as a sign of democratization. The question about the labor of the artist also intervenes with the ways that art projects and works are received, evaluated, and shared today. This opens the need to think about the possibility of poetic processes (temporal, spatial, imaginative, collaborative), which can change institutional dynamics, and how artworks can (and should) be attended to. Since the artworks are happening through movement and usage—they are intersubjective, related to the ways we work, watch, inhabit, perceive, and share—this topic could also be approached as the question of infrastructure. Infrastructure is namely also defined through its use and movement, it relates to our movement in the world. Infrastructure only becomes visible inside its very own crisis, which originates from the collapse of the relations and uses that actually enable the very infrastructure. The infrastructural crisis portrayed in Helke Sander’s film springs from the collapse of the uses and relations practiced with the political autonomy and collapse of independent life. Despite the desire for the collective political sense, there is also a clash between emancipation and loss, independence and dependence, autonomy and marginality, etc. Berlant writes how from the beginning of the twenty-first century, a specific political awareness was formed on the left, which reacted to the politics of austerity and governance through precarity, and understood them as “an infrastructural breakdown of modernist practices of resource distribution, social continuity and affect distribution,” for which it is believed should be repaired and reinvented anew, especially with the rethinking of the notion of the commons (2016: 394). This need to repair is also strongly present in both art discourse and practice, which have continuously tried to reflect differently on labor and work (Bourriaud, Esche). Artistic institutions, such as production centers, museums, and independent houses, are often experimenting with different ways of commissioning performances, and disseminating and circulating works. They are supporting collaborations and inventing movements of bodies, creating different possibilities of reaching out and participating, exploring how the artwork can be communicated and attended. In this way, the art field and especially its institutions engage themselves in the repair of the social bonds with participative practices, opening up art spaces, exploring intersubjective relations, and bringing diversity into focus. These various approaches to repair can be understood in relation to the dispossession of the commons that is happening in the late-capitalist period. They deal with infrastructural failure as a consequence of dispossession. Berlant recognizes the need for repair, but, at the

160

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

same time, she is also skeptical, especially when thinking about it in relation to the infrastructures of daily life. For her, this repair can also be a compulsive need, especially at work in leftist politics, in which repair and resilience do not necessarily “neutralise the problem that generated the need for them, but might reproduce them” (2016: 393). We can observe the same problems that reappear inside the repair structures in art also within the labor of contemporary artists. Along with their participatory, political, and intersubjective work, as well as their increased artistic freedom and imagination for opening up different political issues, their work is now even more dependent on project proposals and project temporality. Their work is precarious and overrun by continuous flexibility. Under the constant pressure of social visibility and impact, artists are thus dispossessed of their knowledge and practices. Sometimes, writes Berlant, such compulsive repair only “collapses what’s better into what feels better” (2016: 399). This collapse into a good feeling can also be a very accurate description of political and social dynamics in the ways we as spectators attend to art projects today and how they are also made visible for us. This collapse into a good feeling is very present in the formulation of relational aesthetics and many participatory projects. It is one of the main outcomes of the relationship between art and politics. How is it then possible to think about control over the material conditions of reproduction, but not in the sense of repair of that which is lost, but rather in the sense of what political potential is there, especially when we think about the labor of the artist? Here, it again becomes important to rethink the thin line between art and the life of the artist and to repoliticize labor again. It is crucial to imagine new ways for the entanglement between work and life that are not necessarily related to productivity and effect, but also not a priori characterized by social and public visibility. Else Tunemyr, a young choreographer, for example, who was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, addressed the complexity of care and the phantasmatic notion of repair in When We were Weary/The Loneliest Whale in the World. The centrality of care in her artistic practice opens another insight into what the work on a performance can be and how it can change the attendance of the spectators. This shift toward explorations of the notions of care explored through embodied practices, choreographic work, experimenting with the temporality and spatiality of artistic production, can be a way to take control over the material conditions of reproduction and shift the practices to other infrastructural dynamics of support. It can help to change the ways the performances as collaborative structures are produced, but this can only work if it does not function just as a repair (and achieving better productivity again), but also changes the ways the work is actually presented and attended (to). Another work that tries to challenge the labor of the artist and relates deeply with its infrastructural surrounding is the work of young choreographer Catalina Insignares, us as a useless duet, from 2017 at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt. It developed through different iterations and collaborations, originating from Insignares’s own dancing practice and her wish to meet other people inside her

LABOR OF THE ARTIST, FEMINIST PRACTICES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

161

practice (Figure 3.8.2). In this performance, one is invited to meet with Insignares and commit to dance with her once a week for two hours, for five consecutive weeks. For these duets, each of the dancing partners/audience members brings a proposal and prepares the material. This is then negotiated between Insignares and the duet partner when the two meet and exchange. The duets have a clear structure and they are open to the many unknown dimensions of exchange. From the perspective of this chapter, it is very interesting to observe how deeply these dances challenge both the labor of the artist and the frame of visibility of the project itself. It also enables one to think about the audience of this project, which somehow appears as neither public nor private. The duets exist on the limits of public visibility, as a peculiar secrecy that can be shared through rumors or with the net of imaginations, lingering in between the public and private spaces. The performances produce abundance during the time of the dance exchange, but as Insignares explains in an interview with Carolina Mendonça, they are also useless, nothing is used afterward, there is no reinscription or confirmation of their value, no obsessive wish to repair something, visibly, socially (Mendonça 2018: 58–9). The duets provide insight into the paradoxes of the performer’s labor (in this case Insignares herself), who has to continuously negotiate between care and aversion, proximity and distance. She must also schedule the duets in the complex relationship to her daily life and work as an artist. Similar questions emerge for the participant, the one who commits to dancing

FIGURE 3.8.2:  Catalina Insignares, us as a useless duet, 2017. Photo by Catalina Insignares. Cards by Zuzana Zabkova.

162

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

for five weeks, changing what it means to attend (to) the artistic work and what kind of reorganizations of everyday relations it can produce. These pieces by Tunemyr and Insignares are aware that infrastructure appears, with interpersonal encounters and social relations, through practices that are maintained and supported in their durational temporality and usefulness. Only in this way can it also be possible to change the ways that performance artworks are happening to us, and how and where do we meet them. This awareness was at the core of the feminist explorations at the end of the 1970s, and it is hauntingly present in the films of Sander even today, especially in their atmosphere and feeling. All these works, even if made in different periods, show that a political problem exists in those practices, a problem of subjectivity, which can be detected by the failure of the environment and support structures for autonomous life. But what they offer is a stubborn persistence and desire to continuously shift the ways that it is possible to do something and be together differently. These works examine and experiment with the ways that art can be attended to in our precarious, troubled, and unstable world. They confirm how fruitful it is to think about the labor of the artist in proximity to a feminist understanding of both the labor of care and the labor of reproduction. Performances that challenge the labor of artists are mostly works that exist with limited infrastructural support, but exactly because of that, they establish a set of new relationships. They exist within instability; they disable and live with it at the same time. They challenge the lack of support without obsessive need for repair. Instead, they are simply ambivalently there, persisting, resonating, and caring.

NOTES 1. Similar issues were recently addressed in “Performance and Reproduction,” special issue of TDR (Capper and Schneider 2018). 2. As a representative of the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Council for the Liberation of Women), she held a historic speech at the conference of young representatives of the German Socialist Democratic Party in 1968. This speech is known as the Tomato Speech (Tomatenrede) and marks the beginning of the feminist movement in Germany. Before her speech, Sander threw some tomatoes on the stage, because all the speakers at the conference were men. 3. Man on Wire alludes to the work of the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit who gained fame for his high-wire crossing between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City (1974). See http://www.manonwire.com for details. 4. The crane as a means of production is similar to another iconic object of trade and global economic growth—the container. Its function reminds us of the minimalist invention, which was so thoroughly analyzed in the film The Forgotten Space of Allan J. Sekula and Noël Burch, where the container is positioned as the central agent and as the embodiment of the organization of large quantities of commodities and social, migratory, and economic flows (The Forgotten Space 2010). 5. “Reproduction” here is used as a term that comes from Marxist analysis and describes something Marx terms a simple reproduction: the reproduction of labor power and a reproduction of the base capital for the capitalist. It was further developed in the feminist Marxist analysis as a core part of how capitalist creation

LABOR OF THE ARTIST, FEMINIST PRACTICES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

163

of the surplus value is created. Marx writes about simple reproduction in his Capital ([1876] 1990: vol. I, chapter 23). 6. The division of reproductive labor (which is related to the labor of care, the reproduction of family and a variety of domestic roles) and productive labor (wage labor, production of goods), was theoretically reexamined in the Marxistfeminist work in the 1970s. In the work of Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Selma James, reproductive labor was approached as an integral part of the capitalist production, which was overlooked in Marx’s analysis of labor. In this text, I use the notion of reproductive labor and reproduction as it was thematized in Marxist feminism, and which is closely related to labor in the private sphere, the maintenance of life, and community, related also to the common. 7. A crucial dimension of accumulation is today related to extractive capitalism. Such production extracts the natural resources to bring them to the global market. Some theorists (Mar Daza, Esperanza Martinez, and others) have recently shown how such extractivism must be studied to open up insight into how the economy actually runs in the exporting countries, for example, in South America. This notion is also related to the deregulation of reproductive means, to the destruction of natural resources, traditional communities, infrastructure, etc. 8. Touch Sanitation is a one-year durational performance with the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY). See Ukeles (1979–80). 9. Post-Partum Document is a six-year exploration of the mother-child relationship; see Kelly (1973–9). 10. Precarias a la Deriva is an initiative between research and activism, which arose from the feminist social center La Eskalera Karakola in Madrid, in 2002. See: https​://si​ndomi​nio.n​et/ka​rakol​a/ant​igua_​casa/​preca​rias.​htm for details.

REFERENCES The All-round Reduced Personality—Redupers/Die Allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit—Redupers (1978). [Film] Dir. Helke Sander. Germany: Basis-Film-Verleih GmbH and ZDF. Berlant, L. (2016). “The Commons, Infrastructures for Troubling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3: 393–419. Capper, Beth and Rebecca Schneider (eds) (2018). Performance and Reproduction, special issue of TDR 62, no. 1. Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression. A Public Feeling. Harrogate: Combined Academic Publishers. Davis, A. (1982). “Women, Race and Class, The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective,” first published in The Women Press. Available at: https​://ww​w.mar​xists​.org/​subje​ct/wo​men/a​uthor​s/dav​is-an​gela/​house​work.​ htm (accessed September 4, 2018). Federici, S. (1974). “Wages against Housework.” Available at: https​://ca​ringl​abor.​files​.word​ press​.com/​2010/​11/fe​deric​i-wag​es-ag​ainst​-hous​ework​.pdf (accessed September 4, 2018). Federici, S. (2012). “A Feminist Critique of Marx,” in Revolution at Point Zero (Common Notions). Oakland: PM Press. Available at: https​://wo​min.o​rg.za​/imag​es/th​e-alt​ernat​ ives/​ecofe​minis​m-soc​ial-r​eprod​uctio​n-the​ory/S​%20Fe​deric​i%20-​%20Fe​minis​t%20C​ ritiq​ue%20​of%20​Marx.​pdf (accessed September 4, 2018).

164

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

The Forgotten Space (2010). [Film] Dir. Allan Sekula and Noël Burch. Amsterdam: Doc. Eye Film. Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harvey, D. (2004). “The New Imperial Challenge: Accumulation by Dispossession.” Socialist Register 40: 65–87. Kelly, M. (1973–9). Post-Partum Document [Artwork]. Documentation available at: http:​ //www​.mary​kelly​artis​t.com​/post​_part​um_do​cumen​t.htm​l (accessed September 4, 2018). Kunst, B. (2015). Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism. London: Zero Books. Laderman Ukeles, M. (1979–80). Touch Sanitation [Performance], New York. Available at: https​://mo​nosko​p.org​/Mier​le_La​derma​n_Uke​les (accessed September 4, 2018). Lorey, I. (2015). State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. New York: Verso Books. Marx, K. ([1876] 1990). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Classics. Mendonça, C. (2018). “Using Dance, Interview with Catalina Insignares.” Watt, Contemporary Dance Magazine, March: 66–93. Precarias a la Deriva (2004). Adrift Through the Circuits of Feminized Precarious Work. EIPCP—European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, April. Available at: http:​//eip​cp.ne​t/tra​nsver​sal/0​704/p​recar​ias1/​en (accessed September 4, 2018). Silvia, F. (2017). Against the Grain: Silvia Federici on How Capitalism Endures. [Radio program] KPFA 94.1, April 26, 12:00 p.m. Available at: https​://kp​fa.or​g/epi​sode/​again​stth​e-gra​in-ap​ril-2​6-201​7 (accessed September 4, 2018). Von Osten, M. (2009). “Irene ist Viele! Or what we Call Productive Forces.” E-Flux Journal, September: 1–10.

CHAPTER 3.9

Gestural Study SVEN LÜTTICKEN

Performance has moved to the forefront of contemporary culture not because it is exempt from commodification, as a certain kind of discourse used to claim, but because it is in the vanguard of commodification—not of objects but of subjects. Performance in art here has to be seen in the context of a more general culture of performativity in which the theatrical and economic meanings of the term “performance” become conjoined.1 Is it a lecture? No, it’s a lecture-performance, in which the speaker’s embodied live presence is at least as important as the content of their speech. But even in the case of a massive open online course (MOOC), the lecturer is always more than a talking head; in fact, MOOCs, as enabled by the performance—the execution—of digital codes and protocols, magnify the physical tics and touches of the speaker for the laptop- or smartphone-bound listener/ viewer.2 In this and many other contexts and registers, the gesture reasserts itself in our culture of “general performance.” Performance art research not only provides tools for studying and critiquing this development, but it also needs to reassess and reassemble its toolkit in the process. A reassessment of gesture in theory has become noticeable since the 1970s. Several authors have identified a waning of gesturality as a significant feature of capitalist modernity. In his 1974 The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett commented on the atrophying of gesture in the bourgeois-capitalist era, noting that gesturality eroded when movements started to be seen as symptomatic traits revealing an individual’s true self, rather than as instantiations of a shared vocabulary of gestures (Sennett 1974: 104). The industrial revolution went hand in hand with the development of a bourgeois habitus that curtailed earlier forms of subjectivity; as work became repetitive and subject to the diktats of efficiency, public self-presentation underwent a transformation and was shorn of much of its theatricality. Sennett effectively presents this as a breakdown of the true gesture as culturally codified symbol and its collapse into mere symptom. By contrast, in the early twentieth century, Henri Bergson had defined gestures in symptomatological terms as “the attitudes, the movements and even the language by which a mental state expresses itself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no other cause than a kind of inner itching” (Bergson 1914: 143). At the theoretical level, the modern crisis of gesturality manifests itself precisely in the oscillation between gesture-as-symptom and gesture-as-symbol. Like Sennett, Vilém Flusser tended to privilege gestures’ semiotic and coded aspect. If, according to Flusser, a gesture is “a movement of the body or of a tool

166

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

attached to the body, for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” this means that gestures transgress the mechanical mode to which Fordism attempted to reduce human movement (at least in the sphere of production) in the name of efficiency (Flusser 2014). It is only when an element of codification enters into the causal link, when a movement it moves from pure expression of inner compulsion or outer force to representation, that it becomes gesture. A gesture, then, is a “symbolic representation” that refers to “something other than reason.” This other than reason affects the viewer; it is affect. The observer is touched: “if I accept that affect is a state of mind transformed into gesticulation, my primary interest is no longer in the state of mind but in effect of the gesture” (Flusser 2014: 5–6). We could summarize this by saying that for Flusser, gesture is a codification of affect. One should stress, however, that gestures are effective only insofar as they themselves are in turn affective. They may invite codification, but they fail once they become visible as pure convention. Their sign value can only be transmuted into exchange value because they are under- and overcoded. In the mode of the gestural, semiotic labor can only work if it is also affective labor. Authors such as Flusser, Sennett, and—slightly later—Giorgio Agamben published their thoughts on gesture in a period marked by debates about a rupture with modernity and modernism, with industrialism and Fordism, and about the rise of services and “immaterial labor.” In what follows, I will identify a partial reversal of the modern decline of gesture in post-Fordist networked culture, arguing that value extraction has moved from standardization to specificity; from conveyor belt to dance moves. Looking into the work of modern as well as contemporary choreographers, scientists, and performance artists, from Frank and Lilian Gilbreth to Hito Steyerl and from Rudolf von Laban to Alexandra Pirici, allows for an analysis of this transformation—precisely through paying close attention to the ways in which modern techniques and tropes are repeated with a difference.

REGIMENTATION AND RECORDING Gesture of even the most carefully articulated kind always ran the risk of registering as little more than noise in industrial capitalism, with its Gutenbergian notion of authorship as ownership. In this regime of intellectual property, it was far from obvious how dance—choreographed gesture—could be codified, and count as authored art. In the 1890s, Mallarmé famously noted that a ballet dancer could suggest, “through a kind of corporeal writing that would require paragraphs of dialogue and descriptive prose to be rendered in writing: a poem disconnected from any scribe’s apparatus.”3 Here, the physical gesture of dance becomes a fleeting vision of a future language beyond writing. However, the problems Loïe Fuller encountered in trying to protect her dances—and Mallarmé came under the spell of Fuller in 1893, writing about her repeatedly—suggests the problems of attempting this within a print-based, Gutenbergian cultural framework. The previous year, the New York judge who rejected Fuller’s copyright claim for her Serpentine Dance had stated: “An examination of the description of [Fuller]’s dance, as filed for copyright, shows that the end sought for and accomplished was solely the devising of a series

GESTURAL STUDY

167

of graceful movements, combined with an attractive arrangement of drapery, lights, and shadows, telling no story, portraying no character, depicting no emotion.”4 Fuller’s Serpentine Dance was a privileged subject for early cinema—though, with Fuller refusing to cooperate and her dance being unprotected, filmmakers moved to hire her imitators, often passing them off as “La Fuller” herself. The Brussels-based art practice Agency, founded by Kobe Matthys, which collects and presents “things” that have been subject to an intellectual property dispute, has archived Fuller’s failed endeavor to protect her dance as Thing 001557 (Serpentine Dance). Agency’s Thing 001504 (Magician’s Coat Sequence) concerns an early case in which choreographed movements became legally protected. A slapstick sequence by Harold Lloyd from his 1932 film Movie Crazy was later restaged by the film’s director without permission in a film for Universal, So’s Your Uncle; the Harold Lloyd Corporation sued for copyright infringement and won.5 What emerges from Agency’s gesture-based things is that the movement of gestures across time and space—as analyzed by Aby Warburg—is curtailed as they become private (corporate) property. This becomingproperty involves a becoming-authored and a becoming-codified. In words that apply perfectly to the “Magician’s Coat” sequence, Bergson explained that it is the automatism of gesture that generates comedy: “About gesture, however, there is something explosive, which awakes our sensibility when on the point of being lulled to sleep and, by thus rousing us up, prevents our taking matters seriously. Thus, as soon as our attention is fixed on gesture and not on action, we are in the realm of comedy” (Bergson 1914: 144). Bergson’s “without any aim or profit” is questionable, now more than ever: what marks the gestural turn in contemporary capitalism is precisely the economic exploitation of gestures. If gestures are surplus, they are not the surplus value generated in industrial capitalism, which was dependent on labor power expressed in abstract labor-time, but rather an excess that Fordism found difficult to mine, and which has become key in recent transformations of capitalism. The cinema proved adept at mining this surplus early on; the Hollywood studio system may have mimicked industrial production methods, but film as entertainment was the dialectical counterpoint of its use in the Fordist factory. Giorgio Agamben has argued that the arrival of the cinema was double-edged: the cinema was a means both of reclaiming gestures and of recording their loss (Agamben 2000: 49, 53). The years 1911–16 are crucial here, being marked by the rise of “scientific management” in industrial production and by the crystallization of the formats and techniques that came to define Hollywood filmmaking. Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, and Frank Gilbreth The Principles of Motion Study in the same year, still under the aegis of Taylor.6 In 1913, Henry Ford adapted the system of assembly-line production from the slaughterhouses of Chicago for his car production conveyor belt. The year 1915 saw the release of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (for which the director tried to atone the next year with Intolerance) and Chaplin’s The Tramp, as well as the opening of the Universal City studio in Hollywood, with Thomas Alva Edison personally turning on the electrical system during the dedication ceremony (Schatz 1988: 14).

168

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Less of an immediately visible event, but noteworthy nonetheless, was Frank and Lilian Gilbreth’s break, in 1914, with Taylor’s time study and its stopwatch-driven focus on pure temporal quantification, without due attention to actual movement. It is in the Gilbreths’ use of media technologies more conventionally associated with the culture industry that we can get closer to identifying the dialectic of loss and recovery of the gestural. The Gilbreths used both photography and film to map work movements as spatiotemporal activity; they further spatialized the time of the stopwatch by, for instance, outfitting test subjects with small lights on their limbs, which resulted in light patterns in front of a dark grid; in contrast with other data, these so-called cyclegraphs and chronocyclegraphs revealed whether a movement pattern was efficient or wasteful. In the chronocyclegraph, the light is not on continuously but flashes at regular intervals; this allows for a representation of the changing speed within movements. Stereoscopic versions of such chronocyclegraphs add the third dimension. Film, however, made a movement’s exact internal rhythms more directly sensible. Here, then, we have film not as medium of entertainment but of regimentation and productivity, and of course this has been a key element in proto-cinematic practices such as Marey’s, which fed into time and motion study. The movements are not the gestures of the exceptional stars—however much they may themselves have been standardized—but an ideal of efficiency to be applied to all workers. Film thus proved suitable for two very different types of recording, two seemingly opposed yet complementary forms of capture. While the Gilbreths’ films and photographs of the typist champion Anna Gold used a rigid norm of efficiency, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd provided exceptional slapstick. The dream factory of film thereby introduced a form of value creation that transcended the abstract and quantifiable labor-value of the Fordist factory. Hollywood developed conventions and clichés that were distinct from the stage, and that had to be actualized in the star’s ineffable idiosyncrasies of speech, gaze, and gesture. The Hollywood studio system thus prefigured and inaugurated an intensification and qualification of labor—even while doing its best to ensure full ownership and legal protection for its properties. If Chaplin mimicked the alienating shock of industrial production while the Gilbreths tried to optimize it out of existence by recording superhuman “Stakhanovists” such as Anna Gold, others attempted to use optical media to record seemingly authentic and organic artistic gestures. Ironically, some of these attempts to reclaim media technology for the registration and transmission of uniquely aesthetic gestures came straight out of the military-industrial complex. The constellation of Anna Gold and Charlie Chaplin needs to be completed with Pablo Picasso drawing with light, as seen in the famous 1949 LIFE magazine photographs. These pictures were taken by Gjon Mili, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) alumnus who had worked with Harold Edgerton on the development of stroboscopic devices that could document the phases of machine movement (rather than the motions of human workers). Edgerton’s timer mechanisms proved to have important military uses during the Second World War and in the inauguration of the nuclear regime; he used the insights and technical breakthroughs of his industrial work as the basis

GESTURAL STUDY

169

for the high-speed timer mechanism in the “Fat Boy” bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and its offspring. Mili’s photography is indebted to and largely parallels Edgerton’s, but he had a greater interest in “qualifying” what was a quintessentially quantitative method. By outfitting Picasso with a small flashlight bulb at the end of a cable and using a long exposure, Mili made the apparatus and the artist collaborate on creating nonstandard movements. Here, the point was no longer to standardize and optimize a worker’s performance but to allow a unique and privileged artist-subject to trace arabesques with a light bulb; arabesques that, while presumably originating from a dialectic of the artist’s powerful mind and capacity for physical expression, would only become truly visible on the photographic plate. Picasso here emerges as the anti-Gilbrethian subject par excellence, but captured by directly related technologies. However, during these same decades—the 1930s and the 1940s—the choreographer Rudolf von Laban proposed an alternative to the Gilbreths’ motion study that was predicated on closer attention to the body and its energies (Figures 3.9.1 and 3.9.2). Laban was not content with creating dances that countered industrial alienation in the rarefied register of high art. His early practice had been profoundly implicated in the Lebensreform movement and its attempts to create more natural forms of Körperkultur; Laban’s activities at Monte Verità in Ascona in 1913–17 are a case in point. For Laban, there had to be a eurythmic continuum between choreography and Lebenspraxis. Such a project proved open to fascist co-optation, and it was only after Laban’s pageant for the 1936 Berlin Olympiad was rejected by Goebbels and Hitler, that he opted to emigrate to the UK. What unites Laban’s earlier work and his UK-based effort study from the late 1930s onward is the desire to develop sustainable rhythms that mediate between the individual’s possibilities and limitations and the demands of modern society. His observation that “[effort-rhythm] was the cohesive medium of all living styles of architecture, painting, sculpture and fashion in ancient times,” and that “[our] age and civilization are definitely on the poor side, both in effort-expression and effort-reading,” are toned-down echoes of his earlier attempts to recreate the lost total “effort-rhythm” with totalitarian means (Stadler 1980: 126–35). Taylor- and Gilbreth-style “scientific management” having raised concerns that mechanical efficiency exhausted and destroyed the worker, Laban analyzed “the effort capacities displayed in the functions of man’s bodily engine, and [. . .] the rules which govern their economic and efficient application” (Laban and Lawrence [1947] 1967: 2). While the “engine” metaphor is very much of its time, Laban proposed a more “holistic” focus on individuals and their potential as well as defects, pioneering a “human resources” approach that pointed beyond the Gilbreths’ horizon. While fatigue study was an element of the Gilbreth’s motion study, and they even opened a “Fatigue Museum” to showcase designs and solutions that combat fatigue, the measure of fatigue remained the efficiency of work as registered in chronocyclegraphs and on film, in combination with the actual output produced by the worker (Gilbreth and Gilbreth 1916: 99–113).

170

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURES 3.9.1 and 3.9.2:  An early Laban pupil demonstrating a “well-shaped body in expressive position,” from F. H. Winther, Körperbildung als Kunst und Pflicht (1919), combined with an effort graph from Laban and F. C. Lawrence, Effort (1947).

As might be expected from the creator of kinetography or Labanotation, which he had developed in the 1920s, Laban set out to construct a notation system instead of using photography and film in order to capture and analyze effort and movement in the workplace. In contrast to kinetography, which he had developed in the 1920s, the complementary effort graph system Laban elaborated in the UK is synchronic rather than diachronic. Whereas Labanotation shows a linear unfolding of movements in time, effort graphs seek to give a hieroglyphic encapsulation of the

GESTURAL STUDY

171

“rhythms of [a worker’s] bodily motion” as indicators of the (efficient or wasteful) effort involved (Laban and Lawrence [1947] 1967: xi). When trying to improve the manual packaging of Mars bars on a conveyor belt during the Second World War, Laban used a linear kinetographic notation to chart the exact Bewegungsablauf. However, when it came to analyzing the nature of the effort involved in an action (rather than specific movement patterns), the effort graph needed to be deployed. These graphs use a vertical axis to indicate the level of exertion, from light (top) to strong (bottom), and a horizontal axis to indicate control, from fluent (left) to bound (right). There are added “time indications” and “space indications” that increase the complexity. With this system, Laban mapped not only manual and industrial labor but also the exertions of “mental workers,” noting for instance—in a book coauthored with his associate F. C. Lawrence—that “[when] the office worker has become used to the burning up of nervous tissue without the relief by bigger movements, his performance will be less disturbed by the addition of emotional shadow moves. It is the same with a child who has become used to sitting quietly at a desk” (Laban and Lawrence [1947] 1967: 81). “Shadow moves” is Labanese for (mostly) involuntary movements that frequently accompany a primary physical exertion, and that can take on the characteristics of symptomatic tics in office work where no real visible rhythm appears to exist. In all cases, whether of mental or physical labor, Laban considers “rhythmic control” essential in order to prevent “effort-habits” from getting out of hand. Individuals may have different abilities and “biases,” but these must be managed in accordance with their capabilities. His belief in the superiority of the graphs notwithstanding, Laban evinced great descriptive powers in some of the almost theatrical passages that dot his major text on effort study. It is almost like a description of a scene from a silent film: the choreographer as observer of what remains of the gestural—often in the form of pathological outbursts—in the industrial regime. In Brechtian terms, one could characterize Laban’s written tableau as a social gest uniting symbolic and symptomatic traits. In his “Short Organum for the Theatre” (1948), Brecht proposed this notion of the social gest as key to the actor’s craft in his epic theater: “The realm of attitudes adopted by the characters towards one another is what we call the realm of gest. Physical attitude, tone of voice and facial expression are all determined by a social gest: the characters are cursing, flattering, instructing one another, and so on” (Brecht [1948] 1964: 198). These gests are social precisely insofar as they are symptomatic of wider economic, social, and political issues. This also sets them apart from Bergson’s “inner itching”; with Brecht, the itch has been socialized, as subjectivity and its falterings are socially produced and reproduced. Different degrees of control and of conscious coding are involved in Brecht’s examples; a beggar desperately struggling against guard dogs is markedly different from a bureaucrat using an excessive flourish to sign papers. However, when they are staged in the theater, all social gests need to be represented with legibility. It is because of this that Roland Barthes, in his 1973 essay “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” linked gesture to the tableau, the pictorial scene that fetishistically condenses complex narratives into “decisive moments.”

172

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Laban and Brecht both attempt to make gestures legible with their graphs and tableaus. Whereas Brecht’s tableaus were in the service of dialectical didacticism, prefiguring the revolutionary negation of the bad life, Laban’s project was ameliorative: combating dysfunction, whether on the level of Mars bar wrappers or their managers. Embedded in modern industry, Laban’s work thus marks the shift from a rigidly quantitative conception of motion study into the affective domain—in the name of a more encompassing notion of corporate and organizational rationality.

THE AFFECTORY When people today are supposed to “give it 110 percent,” this is only seemingly a Stahkanovist embrace of pure quantity, of raised production quota. What such workers are asked to do is to allow their lives to be colonized ever more fully; to be available 24/7 and to not just work hard but be good sports and invest their personality in the job: this time, it’s personal. This is no longer labor management, but performance management. In this context, we have a return of gesturality, no matter how impoverished the repertoire may still be. The (self-)management of gestures moves into a new phase as they come to be seen not merely as indices of character but of this character’s performative commitment to intense (self-) exploitation. As part of If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse? (2015), Frank Willens redanced and discussed Chaplin’s parodic and spasmodic gestures in Modern Times. Standing in a room dedicated to black-and-white photographic portraits, Willems performed “dances of alienation” that included work by Meg Stuart as well as the Chaplin segment. Here, Bergsonian slapstick was unpacked in a way that stressed the social production of the “itch.” Chaplin’s mimetic take on industrial labor and its pathologies was itself a product of Hollywood as “dream factory,” whereas Willens’s version of it occurred within the museum as a post-Fordist site of accumulation. The museum is no longer the extra-economic zone as it was once conceived, in which the residues of capitalist accumulation were given a semiautonomous refuge; rather, it is fully integrated into the “fabbrica diffusa” or social factory—a term introduced by Mario Tronti in the 1960s, signifying that in advanced capitalism, production is no longer limited purely to the site of the (industrial) factory, but takes over the whole of society. The notion of the social factory has become a popular theoretical trope as Western economies “deindustrialized”—even though, obviously, neo-Fordist factories still proliferate, often with horrendous working conditions. The iPhones we use to take pictures in museums have to be produced somewhere. The diffuse factory can be both Taylorist drudge and ongoing dance. In line with their 2013 Immaterial Retrospective at the Venice Biennale, in 2014 Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmuş developed Public Collection of Modern Art for the Van Abbemuseum’s exhibition Confessions of the Imperfect. For the duration of the show, groups of young performers enacted artworks from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These included Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe and a painting by Mondrian as well as avant-garde manifestos. Harun Farocki was included both with Videograms of a Revolution (1992, his collaboration with Andrei Ujică) and Workers

GESTURAL STUDY

173

Leaving the Factory (1995). The latter includes a scene from Modern Times in which Chaplin accidentally causes a riot outside the factory gate; Farocki presents this as one of the repetitions of cinema’s primal scene (Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Factory from 1895). The Pirinci/Pelmuş reenactment had the performers marching from the central room of the old museum building toward the entrance opposite. This they did four times in a row, acknowledging the repetition in Farocki’s piece, but without actually exiting the building. In contrast to the Lumière workers going for their lunch break, these workers did not leave the museum-as-factory but continued the program. After all, you can’t really leave the diffuse factory anyway. Recent pieces by Pirici continue to be grounded in a performative activation of the cultural archive—or rather, of specific, carefully curated cultural archives (Figure 3.9.3). Recurring in several pieces are references to NASA’s Voyager Golden Record, sent into space in 1977 to give aliens a sense of life on earth via a selection of symbols, images, and sounds. The problematic universalism of such a summa of the planet, courtesy of NASA’s technoscientific elite, is acknowledged by Pirici in her week-long 2017 performance-exhibition at NBK in Berlin by including Gil Scot-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” among the materials enacted by her more than eighty performers. Other “performative actions” included “Ocean-Floor Eels Colony,” “Bird Song (the extinct Huia—Heteralocha acutirostris),” “Skype Login Sound,” “Michelangelo: David,” “Wooden Bodhisattva from Shanghai,” and “Depeche Mode: Song Excerpt—Enjoy the Silence.” Performers segued in and out

FIGURE 3.9.3:  Alexandra Pirici, Aggregate (2017), at NBK.

174

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

of these actions in waves. At times, this meant that progressively more and more dancers took on a static pose such as that of Michelangelo’s David—without the human body ever truly ossifying into petrified stillness, of course. In other cases, such as that of “Occupy” movement hand signals, the action was more properly gestural, rather than an exercise in precarious, breathing stillness. Throughout, visitors moved and stood in between (groups of) performers— sharing the floor of the affectory, so to speak. As evinced by performances such as Pirici’s, there is a premium on physical presence in the field of art; as Hito Steyerl has argued, the art world is an economy of presence. On the other hand, bodies and their gestures and movements become doubled as they produce data traces and data doubles in real time. In fact, the proliferation of “dance exhibitions” in recent years almost appears as a compensation for the tracking of visitors’ movements. Carefully watching Pichet Klunchun walk along the perimeter of a space at Tate Modern, one becomes engaged in an act of embodied, reciprocal surveillance. Meanwhile, viewers and spaces alike are becoming progressively wired; viewers become their own data doubles, moving dots, as museums and exhibition spaces become “smart buildings.” In Pirici’s performances, the sequencing may be due to an algorithm or online requests, and in her piece Leaking Territories at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017, visitors could use the performers as an embodied Google by calling out search terms. A term would always first be met by the line: “We will now take a few moments to profile you to present the most relevant answers based on your age, gender, appearance.” The performance took place in the old town hall where the Treaty of Münster was signed, laying the foundations for a “Westphalian” order of nation states, and indeed the entire piece revolved around territoriality and sovereignty from the seventeenth century to the present and indeed the future. Even as the audience shared a space with the performers, the piece emphasized that presence is never pure presence when physical space is always also the geodesic space of data networks; when the exhibition or performance space is also a triangulated space of signals.

THE COMING BODY LANGUAGE From the 1974 video lectures Les gestures du professeur (made with artist Fred Forest) to the posthumously published book Gestures, Vilm Flusser dveloped his philosophy of gestures in a period marked by the rise of semio-affective labor. While he acknowledged that gestures are overdetermined, ultimately Flusser maintained that unconscious and symptomatic moves could not be truly gestural. A gesture is symbol, aesthetic artifice, rather than a symptom (Flusser 2014: 4–5). Time and again, through various attempts to theorize gesture, the notion of a “language of gestures” faces off against gesture as symptomatic outburst, as tic, as obtuse surplus or lack. This tension cannot be wished away; within a social and cultural regime marked by the erosion of traditional gestural forms and the elaboration of new convention, the gesture is this tension. This is precisely why contemporary forms of surveillance and crowd control can also be said to move beyond Fordist motion

GESTURAL STUDY

175

study toward gestural study—a gestural study pioneered by Laban in his countermodel to the Gilbreths’ work. MIT’s DoppelLab project uses the MIT Media Lab as its prototype, visualizing and “sonifiying” the data generated by the building (including its motion sensors, humidity sensors, etc.) and by its many phone-carrying users in real time, again abstracting the physical building’s denizens and turning them into located dots in a navigable virtual space: “DoppelLab is an immersive, cross-reality virtual environment that serves as an active repository of the multimodal sensor data produced by a building and its inhabitants. We transform architectural models into browsing environments for real-time sensor data visualizations.”7 In addition to carrying their phones, the Media Lab/DoppelLab’s denizens may also be wearing fitness trackers that produce yet more data—about their vital functions. In the 1990s, at the height of net utopianism, the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) sounded a sobering note in arguing that “With the virtual body came its fascist sibling, the data body—a much more highly developed virtual form, and one that exists in complete service to the corporate and police state.” Arguably, the entire development from Fordist motion study to post-Fordist motion tracking has been one of virtualization and datafication, entailing an effacement of the physical body and its gesturality in favor of data bodies. Dead labor in the form of algorithmic intelligence mines human activities and extracts values from pattern recognition and prediction. As the CAE argued, while the data body has a long history, it matured with digital technology: “From the moment we are born and our birth certificate goes online, until the day we die and our death certificate goes online, the trajectory of our individual lives is recorded in scrupulous detail. Education files, insurance files, tax files, communication files, consumption files, medical files, travel files, criminal files, investment files, files into infinity.”8 Some critical art practices attempt to appropriate such mechanisms, making visible the swarm-like gesturality of aggregated data bodies. Harun Farocki showed swarms of such moving dot-subjects in a number of video films and installations, including I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000), The Creators of Shopping Worlds (2001), and Deep Play (2008). In the 2001 film, we see an eye-tracking study in which the test subject’s eye movements predict their route through a shopping center, which can thereby be optimized; another shopping center has been outfitted with cameras that register visitor movement from above, showing individual consumers to be part of swarm-like flows of mobile points. The museum is the new mall: Jonas Lund’s piece Gallery Analytics (2013) is able to track any Wi-Fi-enabled device (i.e., a smartphone) on its path through the exhibition space in real time. This is done via a mesh Wi-Fi network; receivers are distributed across the building, allowing for a triangulation of coordinates. Lund uses the Indoor Triangulation Service (ITS) provided by Navizon—a company that provides services for the Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as for major corporations. Presumably, they provide businesses as well as government agencies with the tools to track individuals—individual employees, as with mail and courier services, or subjects of legal or extralegal surveillance— while also enabling museums to chart swarm movements and “optimize” routes and displays.

176

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Dora García has created a more reflexive and embodied engagement with visitor tracking in her performance/installation Instant Narrative (2006). Here, the visitors see a description of themselves and their movements, perhaps with added literary speculations about them, appear in real time on a screen, typed by a writer behind a laptop elsewhere in the space. The typist, usually a member of the cultural-academic precariat hired to sit in the gallery all day, becomes a literary Laban who engages with the data body’s analog analogue, and becomes observed in turn. Gestures trigger gestures—moves and shadow moves. In its elementary bluntness, Lund’s piece does little more than reveal in the exhibition what would otherwise only be visible to the institution—but this little shift does make a difference. As Trevor Paglen has noted, operational images such as that in Gallery Analytics, designed to be seen and interpreted by human eyes, are transitional artifacts: translations of the “real” machine vision, which is increasingly dominant. Insisting on making translations for the human eye may itself be a political act. Meanwhile, captured by operational machine vision our gestures, too, become operational. Taking cues from Harun Farocki, Claus Pias has analyzed the rise of “operational gestures” that are discreet and standardized enough to operate computers from the first graphic tablets and sketchpads of the 1960s down to today’s smartphones. With its user surface being a touchscreen, the smartphone is controlled through “a few basic gestures: the familiar tap, swipe, drag, pinch and spread” (Greenfield 2017: 15). Making gestures purposive and profitable is part of the remit of contemporary capitalism, and Apple and other corporations have indeed attempted—with mixed success—to patent gestures required for operating their smartphones and other devices. These gestures have been inventorized and choreographed by Julién Prévieux in his project What Shall We Do Next, which constitutes an “archive de gestes à venir” based on patent applications for specific movements, for gesture-controlled mobile devices and computers. Formerly fleeting gestures have become codified; the symbol is patented. Even if many such patent applications have been struck down in court, such legal codification is one indication of the growing importance of gestures in digital communication, which seemingly reverses the industrial-capitalist decline of gesturality in the register of post-Fordist capitalism. In the case of the phone, gestures need to conform to type to enable a productive use of the device; however, these few types open up a great variety in functions, effectively and affectively blurring the boundaries between work and play—in contrast to Chaplinesque conveyor-belt motions. The “gestural turn” of contemporary capitalism, however, is not limited to such hand movements. The entire body, as data body, is monitored for its gestural data. Several companies offer “wearables” that stores can make their sales staff wear, with the most advanced models able to register “tone of voice, posture and body language, as well as who spoke to whom for how long.” This is no longer Taylorist or Galbraithean efficiency but rather, as Adam Greenfield observes, the installation of “an ‘ambient factory’ where decisions one thought to be purely personal—sleep cycles, nutritional patterns, exercise habits—become subject to employer monitoring and intervention” (2017: 197). Effective movement is reconfigured as affective gesture. Tone and posture matter, as does everything that was once considered to be

GESTURAL STUDY

177

the private realm of reproduction. The private, domestic sphere was once considered a refuge where the gesturality that was stinted in the regimented bourgeois public life could find an outlet of sorts; now, we see the creation of a new “public man” (to invoke Sennett once again) whose gesturality is not so much repressed in one sphere and tolerated in another as it is subject to management and value extraction across the board. This also means that—tacit or explicit—norms need to be formulated. The political implications of this are made explicit in Nina Støttrup Larsen’s lecture-performance The Teacher and the Sensors (2017), which can be seen as synthesis of Lund’s Gallery Analytics and García’s Instant Narrative. Støttrup Larsen instructs the audience members how close to stand to her and each other while holding forth on surveillance technologies with names such as Sorama, Vinotion, MILESTONE HUSKY, or ATOS. At some points bumping into or leaning on audience members while looking at her smartphone, Støttrup Larsen details that Sorama learns through acoustic triangulation in order to “create the perfect 3D image of me,” while MILESTONE HUSKY reacts to specific words and combinations of words and ATOS studies walking patterns. These and twenty-five other systems are in use in an area of Eindhoven (an old industrial town that has reinvented itself as a hub of design and smart technology) called the Stratumseind, which borders on the Van Abbemuseum and the Designhuis. One night, the director of the Designhuis opened a slightly creaking gate so that partying students of the Dutch Art Institute—where Støttrup Larsen was a graduate student, and I was a teacher—could quietly catch some air outside; two minutes later, two police officers showed up, leading the artist to realize that in this part of town, as part of a “Living Lab” public-private partnership, “my every move and every word was being recorded, triangulated, studied and unknowingly offered as lessons free data and labour for future crowd control technologies and a future re-colonization of open urban space on a planetary scale.” The city as DoppelLab, with citizens as unremunerated workers cum guinea pigs. What is striking here, in the shift from motion study to algorithmic crowd control, is that a norm is posited that is no longer that of industrial effectiveness but of social policing: excessive gestures are no longer “merely” regarded as uneconomic and wasteful in the context of the workplace, but as potentially dangerous in “public” space. A certain word, an intonation, an accent, the fact that three people are standing in a certain spot, or that a person is moving at a certain pace—all of these may come to be read as troublesome gestures demanding instant intervention. The criteria may be obviously biased in terms of class, gender, and especially race: the intersectionality of surveillance. Networked capitalism does its best to erode the distinction between production and consumption and between labor and leisure. Both Facebook and art spaces hosting lectures and reading groups throw a spanner in the works of the labor theory of value, as participants outside of any labor-wage relation are actively adding value.9 In the process, what is labor and what is not becomes almost impossible to determine, as value may be extracted from a chance encounter in a bar after an event, an audience member’s cough, or an act of refusal and defiance. We can, with Steffen Mau, see this as part of the progressive quantification of all aspects of life;

178

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

in a society of control and performance management, we produce our data doubles and becomes “metric selves” (Mau 2017). However, the progress of quantification from Fordist motion study to the present has reached a dialectical tipping point: as the ineffable is mined for information, a qualification of the quantitative occurs. If it’s no longer about the pure optimization of output but about the management of sleep patterns, dietary habits, movements in digital and physical spaces, then we have moved from motion study to forms of gestural study that are about managing the affective and social gestures of humans. Quantification itself undergoes a qualitative turn. In the case of motion tracking in galleries and shopping centers, or on the street, the extraction of value takes the form of monitoring and policing by the public-private security industry. Now that human living labor may indeed be in the process of becoming a “nostalgic remnant,” as many types of jobs face looming obsolescence and machinic value extraction from human subject matter moves into overdrive, population control will only become more important. Individual and collective movements likewise need to fit into certain patterns to be considered normal and acceptable behavior, but again a sense of productive play is factored into the equation: explore the exhibition, the shops, the bars! Have a consumerist derive; just don’t be surprised if algorithmic cops show up when a gate creaks in the night. One truly cannot exit the affectory—least of all one’s data body.

OPEN ENDING For Bergson, the gesture was defined precisely in opposition to the act: “Gesture, thus defined, is profoundly different from action. Action is intentional or, at any rate, conscious; gesture slips out unawares, it is automatic. In action, the entire person is engaged; in gesture, an isolated part of the person is expressed, unknown to, or at least apart from, the whole of the personality” (Bergson: 143). In the realm of contemporary performance—in its economico-techno-theatrical sense— this distinction seems overly neat and schematic. The term “action,” of course, plays an important role in the twentieth-century avant-garde—from Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion to postwar action painting, Beuys’s Aktionen, or the political “Aktionismus” of the Subversive Aktion group with Dieter Kunzelmann and Rudi Dutschke.10 This was a post-Situationist German group; Kunzelmann had been a member of the SPUR group, which was the Situationist International’s (SI) German section. In Guy Debord’s words, the SI famously strove for “new forms of action in politics and art” (Debord 1963). One of the SI’s bêtes noires was the cybernetician Abraham Moles, who seemed to stand for everything the SI rejected: a carefully controlled society of homeostatic feedback in which political and cultural action was robbed of any revolutionary potential.11 In 1977, Moles and his partner Élisabeth Rohmer published Théorie des actes, subtitled vers une écologie des actions; the book’s title could almost be seen as a polemical appropriation of Situationist jargon, as their “acts” could not be more different from those theorized by Debord.

GESTURAL STUDY

179

Moles and Rohmer present a sociocybernetic “ecology of acts” that focuses on actions within certain milieus (they use Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt) (Moles and Rohmer 1977: 33). While they oppose the behaviorist reduction of acts to their environment, and maintain that acts stand out against their temporal and spatial background, with individual or collective actants introducing something new into the world, such newness is, nevertheless, distinct from revolution (Moles and Rohmer 1977: 15, 12). Proposing a “praxeology” that decomposes actions into “actomes” (in analogy to phonemes), the authors discuss the Gilbreths and Laban, Therbligs and Labanotation, and present a diagram of a “rational organization of a kitchen” as an example of an ecology of acts. They also include flow charts of selecting and buying a necktie, leaving for work, and forgetting important papers; or obtaining the correct number for a long-distance phone call. The world becomes plannable and programmable, which is for the better: daily life depends on the dependability of certain acts. Only 10–20 percent of people would prefer an unpredictable, adventurous life. The Situationists, of course, would be in that minority. Moles and Rohmer’s actions are acts of pure immanence. This is adaptive rather than transformational practice; in many cases, one could rather speak of performance under the ruling conditions. If today’s cultural economy is crucially dependent on the affectivity and effectivity of gestures, gestures might set to become actions when they fail to synthetize contradictions into acceptable performance. When the tensions that produce contemporary subjectivity are articulated as graceful breakdowns, as asemiotic surplus, as suggestive lack, the gesture springs into action. At a symposium in Spain, artist Jon Mikel Euba abandoned the written text he had been made to supply to the translator, instead riffing about the impossibility of providing a text that would contain what he wanted to say in advance, before actually being in the situation, before beginning to speak. Aided and abetted by the English interpreter, Euba’s intervention could be regarded as a lecture-gesture in that it exacerbated the lecture as temporal unfolding that goes off-script every single moment, using a loose score rather than a written text. It abandons the linearity of print for a different linearity—the linearity of language as avalanche. Its speech act opens up an event zone. While one could analyze details such as his playing around with a drumstick much more fully, Euba’s talk more fundamentally restored the gesturality of speech insofar as it foregrounded its mediality and materiality. This is communication as the breakdown of protocol; the breakdown becomes gesture. Gesturality goes beyond and against Flusser’s “symbolism” when it cracks under the pressure; overdetermination goes into overdrive. The process of subjectivation stutters and generates forms of nonnormative transsubjectivity, or transindividuality. In gestures, our cultural economy of general performance can become a material or medium for forms—forms of life, and potentially forms of resistance. In gestures, the economic becomes material or medium for forms—forms of life, and potentially forms of resistance. Performance can spring into action when it becomes gesture. That such acts will rearrange the post-Fordist furniture rather than blow up the social factory can be safely assumed—for now.

180

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

NOTES 1. This chapter is partly derived from talks I gave in 2016 at The Power Plant in Toronto, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, and CENDEAC in Murcia. A different version of this text has appeared in Grey Room 74 (winter 2019). On the relation (and progressive merger) between theatrical and economic performance, see Lütticken (January 2012). See also Pirici (2018: 74–9), who uses a passage from Anna Tsing’s book Friction (2008) to theorize the relation between economic and dramatic performance, as well as Sabeth Buchmann’s “Feed Back: Performance in the Evaluation Society” in the same issue (34–51). 2. Jon McKenzie adds technological performance to theatrical (or “cultural”) and economic (or “organizational”) performance in Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2001). 3. Mallarmé (1893: 73). Author’s translation. This passage is evoked by Rancière (2004: 23). 4. Judge Lacombe, Circuit Court of New York, verdict in the case Fuller v. Bemis, June 18, 1892, quoted from Agency’s text on Thing 001557 (Serpentine Dance). 5. Thing 001504 (Magician’s Coat Sequence) was presented and discussed by Matthys at the Jornadas de Estudio de la Imagen, June 27–30, 2016, CA2M (Madrid), organized by Leire Vergara. 6. Frank (1911) contains highly laudatory references to Taylor’s work (see especially p. 94). The book documents Gilbreth’s method in its infancy; there are photo sequences of bricklaying, but not yet any chronocyclegraphs. 7. http​s://w​ww.me​dia.m​it.ed​u/pro​jects​/dopp​ellab​-expe​rienc​ing-m​ultim​odal-​sensordata/​ove​rview​/. 8. Critical Art Ensemble (1998: 145). On the CEA, see also Holmes (2012: 11–16). 9. On the attention economy and the labor theory of value, see, for instance, Beller (2006). 10. Adorno accused the partly SI-inspired (via the Subversive Aktion) student movement of “Aktionismus.” See, for instance, Adorno ([1969] 2003: 760–82). 11. On the SI and Moles, see the December 1963 “Correspondance avec un cybernéticien,” in Internationale Situationniste no. 9 (August 1964): 44–48. On March 17, 1965, the Situationists staged an interruption of a conference with Moles and Nicolas Schöffer, distributing the pamphlets The Tortoise in the Window (Dialectic of the Robot and the Signal) and Correspondence with a Cyberneticist.

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. ([1969] 2003). “Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis,” in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II (Gesammelte Schriften 10.2), 760–82. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Agamben, Giorgio (2000). Means Without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesara Casarino. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Beller, Jonathan (2006). The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.

GESTURAL STUDY

181

Bergson, Henri (1914). Laugher: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, translated by Clousley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan. Brecht, Bertolt ([1948] 1964). “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” in John Willett (ed.and trans.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 179–205. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Critical Art Ensemble (1998). Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, & New Eugenic Consciousness. New York: Autonomedia. Debord, Guy (1963). “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art,” translated by Ken Knabb. Available at: http:​//www​.bops​ecret​s.org​/SI/n​ewfor​ms.ht​ m. Flusser, Vilém (2014). Gestures. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Gilbreth, Frank B. (1911). Gilbreth’s Motion Study: A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company. Gilbreth, Frank W. and Lillian M. Gilbreth (1916). Fatigue Study: The Elimination of Humanity’s Greatest Unnecessary Waste. New York: Sturgis & Walton Company. Greenfield, Adam (2017). Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London and New York: Verso. Holmes, Brian (2012). “Three Keys and No Exit: A Brief Introduction to Critical Art Ensemble,” in Critical Art Ensemble: Disturbances, 11–16. London: Four Corners Books. Laban, Rudolf and F. C. Lawrence ([1947] 1967). Effort. London: Macdonald and Evans. Lütticken, Sven (2012). “General Performance.” e-flux Journal, no. 31. http:​//www​.efl​ux.co​m/jou​rnal/​31/68​212/g​enera​l-per​forma​nce. Mallarmé, Stéphane (1893). “Ballets,” in Divagations. Paris: Charpentier. Mau, Steffen (2017). Das metrische Wir. Über die Quantifizierung des Sozialen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. McKenzie, Jon (2001). Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge. Moles, Abraham A. and Élisabeth Rohmer (1977). Théorie des actes: Vers une écologie des actions. Tournai: Casterman. Pirici, Alexandra (2018). “Performance as Conjuring.” Texte zur Kunst, no. 110: 74–9. Rancière, Jacques (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum. Schatz, Thomas (1988). The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. London: Faber and Faber. Sennett, Richard (1974). The Fall of Public Man. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press. Stadler, Richard (1980). “Theater und Tanz in Ascona,” in Harald Szeemann (ed.), Monte Verità. Berg der Wahrheit. Locarno and Milan: Armando Dadò/Electra.

CHAPTER 3.10

Stomaching It: Testing Endurance in Black Performance Art DANIELLE BAINBRIDGE

In his 2000 performance “Eating the Wall Street Journal,” performance artist William Pope.L sat perched atop a toilet that was placed on a 10-foot-high platform. Dressed in a jockstrap and a dusting of white flour, audiences watched as Pope.L (using ketchup and white milk as condiments) pushed strips of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) into his mouth, chewing and swallowing them before regurgitating the lurid mixture of edible and inedible objects in front of the observing crowd. Addressing the plasticity of these man-made and natural items that refused to be consumed and digested, “Eating the Wall Street Journal” and its photographic afterlives (which along with reviewers’ and audience accounts make up the record that I’ll be discussing in this chapter) remain as testaments to Pope.L’s cutting social commentary on the durability and fragility of black corporeality in performance. Conversely, Jamaican visual artist Albert Chong’s 1982 “Natural Mystic” turns away from the critique of plasticity that occupies Pope.L’s work, instead looking to the rhizomatic1 visual enmeshment of the human, spiritual, and environmental planes. Staging himself in a series of self-portraits he’s named “I-traits”2 (of which “Natural Mystic” is one), Chong attempts to perform an uprooted identity after his departure from Jamaica in 1977 (Figure 3.10.1). The portrait, set against a rippling brown backdrop reminiscent of the expansive trunk of a tree, with smaller plants and pots placed in the foreground, turns Chong the artist into the title’s named mystic. The mystic is at once one with his surroundings and also in danger of being visually subsumed by the same organic matter in the photograph that provides connections to the natural world. And yet, despite his hidden face and his disappearing figure, the mystic endures in the midst of a visual environment of ecological stagnation. Both Pope.L’s plasticity as critique and Chong’s organic matter transformed into ancestral longing point to the instability of using a black body as a conduit of meaning making in performance. Many twentieth-century black performers and performance artists have utilized their bodies as the focal point of their works (Adrian Piper,3 Sherman Fleming,4 and Coco Fusco among many others). However, the work of

STOMACHING IT: TESTING ENDURANCE IN BLACK PERFORMANCE ART

183

FIGURE 3.10.1:  Albert Chong, “Natural Mystic,” 1982. Courtesy of Albert Chong.

Chong and Pope.L share a common language that includes the critique of endurance as a lens for black performance. Pope.L’s use of the WSJ, ketchup, milk, and a toilet as props brings to mind the glut of American late capitalism coupled with the equally gluttonous (and oft parodied) Wall Street business culture of the 1980s and 1990s. With the inclusion of cheap (and in the case of milk, state-subsidized) food products, the piece also bears the weight of that same time period, with attempts to slash, burn, and gut the structures of social safety net programs nationwide. And in Chong’s blending of the organic world with ancestral hauntings remains the potential for the body (and especially the black body) to become reabsorbed into the earth that colonial bioprospecting has attempted to tame, trim, and conquer. Chong’s “I-traits” point to a need to create other kinds of enduring imprints of amorphous ancestral realms that have escaped the spectrum of traditional colonial record keeping. Each performance piece is an artistic exercise in endurance that points to a reckoning with bodily and cultural excess. In these works, the performer uses their body to engage us in the questions: After the ravages of excess, either organic or unnatural, what will endure? And how do the methods and strategies of performance

184

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

help us to reckon with what ultimately remains after consumption? The ritual act itself becomes the thing that endures when the body does not, whether it’s the staging of a self-portrait or performing tasks laced with the bitter strains of abdominal pain. Performance in each case not only becomes a test of endurance, but also ultimately becomes the thing that does endure when the black body succumbs. The mystic fades and the wastes of the body are disposed of, but the performance stands as a testament to the act of resistance against obliteration, creating a record of ritual. Testing the capacities and limits of the human body has long been a focus of black performance praxis. Works featured in the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s 2014 retrospective “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art” (which also featured Pope.L’s “Eating the Wall Street Journal” both in the exhibit and on the cover of the catalog) highlight the work of black performance artists from the 1960s onwards.5 In an exhibit that featured the works of contemporary black performance artists, many of whom often centered their bodies in the midst of environments constructed on chaos, it’s easy to see how Pope.L’s work was comfortably at home and in conversation with that of his peers. His performance methodologies are in conversation with works like Senga Nengudi’s “R.S.V.P.” sculpture and performance series (1977–8/2014), where the artist activates the work by weaving herself through webs of taut stockings and tights, which are weighted on one end with sand. Nengudi pulls and contorts the strands, which alternate between being pliable and incredibly taut, depending on the contours of her shifting body. Additionally, pieces like Sherman Fleming’s 1997 “Pretending to Be Rock” (part of his “States of Suspense” performance series) feature the artist crawling on the floor of the space while a grid suspended above his head drips hot wax onto his bare back. The work of black performance artists, and indeed the work of performance as a practice, often tests the tense boundaries of the human figure. The contradictions of the body’s ability to appear almost superhumanly expansive and elastic while also remaining undeniably mortal and therefore vulnerable to threat are centered in these works. The tensions between these two realities of impenetrable endurance and human fragility exist not only in the actions of the performers, but also in the spectatorship of audiences. This tension exists in the breathless way we continue to watch performance artists as they test the tensile strength of their mortality through acts that collide the superhuman with the almost suicidal, and in turn exercise a mastery over their craft through the manipulation of pain. Pope.L knowingly draws together the full landscape of these traditions of black performance and endurance in “Eating the Wall Street Journal.” The pages of the famous financial periodical are saturated by factory mass-produced ketchup and plain state-subsidized white milk. Both of these items are commonly viewed as the kinds of inexpensive food eaten by the American poor, even while they are also celebrated as part of the dietary staples of mainstream Americana. Viewers’ and reviewers’ accounts of Pope.L’s piece describe him dipping or otherwise saturating strips torn out of the paper in his milk and ketchup, creating a sickening pulp of edible and indigestible matter that made itself repeatedly felt as he regurgitated in front of the waiting crowd.6 In a 2000 article in the New York Times by Michael Rush, Pope.L is quoted saying, “our consumer society promises

STOMACHING IT: TESTING ENDURANCE IN BLACK PERFORMANCE ART

185

power and wealth simply by owning certain objects, which harks back to primitive magic and voodoo. I figured if I also eat it, just how much power can I drain from this fetishized object!” (Rush 2000). So, instead of extracting nutrients from his contentious feast, Pope.L attempts to extract the page’s mysterious “voodoo” and “primitive magic.” In this way, his props (the milk, the ketchup, the WSJ, and especially the toilet) serve more as a magician’s sleight of hand, distracting our attention from the physical act of his embodiment. The props never fulfill their purpose (to moisten the paper enough that Pope.L could digest it, or to serve as a receptacle for waste). The viewer knows subconsciously that Pope.L’s body cannot, in fact, process the WSJ or retain any of the nutrients available in the food products because of the introduction of ink and paper. Instead, they become transfixed by this spectacle, which holds the same grotesque wonder of American excess evidenced in competitive eating contests. Similar to the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest held every year on Independence Day at Coney Island (where hotdog guzzlers saturate wieners and buns in waiting cups of warm water in order to consume as many as possible in ten minutes before a leering crowd), there’s a potent cocktail of revulsion and Americana in Pope.L’s actions that held audiences enraptured. His toilet as both a perch and an extension of his platform, counterintuitively becomes an object of less disgust than the food onstage, precisely because viewers know that he’ll never be able to pass any of the food he’s eating, and therefore will never get far enough along in the digestive process of his task to need the toilet. And because the white bowl would have hidden from sight the fecal evidence of completed digestion instead of forcing viewers to witness Pope.L’s aborted attempts again and again, it is oddly apparent that it would have been less revealing to watch him use the toilet than to vomit onstage. By confronting the results of Pope.L’s digestive failings, we can’t help but remember that old adage, “It’s better out than in,” which still holds true here. But in examining the performance stills and recorded accounts, I can’t help but wonder if it would have been better and gentler on the audience’s senses if “it” stayed in (the toilet, mouth, or stomach) rather than coming out (of mouth, into crowd, onto podium and floor)? The spectatorship of the audience in this case becomes an equal act of endurance to Pope.L’s performance aesthetic. Along with the usual requirements of witnessing a live performance, Pope.L’s work tests the limits of audience expectations through the visceral way he engages their other bodily reactions (smell, gag reflex, psychological revulsion) in conjunction with their gazes. Chong’s “Natural Mystic” eschews the question of overtly grotesque or painful bodily endurance favored by Pope.L in favor of a more gradual slope of decay that encompasses a critique of Caribbean geography, ancestry, and ecology. Chong poses himself against the backdrop of a browning topography, with his head slightly bowed and his two palms facing outwards to the viewer. His gestures are caught halfway between an indication to stop and an open palmed greeting, transforming his appendages into two divining rods trying to locate water in this visually parched landscape. Chong’s engagement in the natural and spiritual world (evidenced both in the staging of his subject matter in the “I-traits” series [1979–85] and the title of

186

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

this piece) speaks to the larger traditions of Caribbean thought and art that meet at these intersections. The process of bioprospecting (or the transplantation of plant life to places where it is not native for the purposes of colonial landscaping, trade, and profit) is well documented throughout the region, including in Chong’s native Jamaica.7 And yet, in his interview with literature professor Lisa Yun, Chong turns his attention not to the transplanting of flora and fauna, but the migration (forced or otherwise) of human life when he says in response to her question “What role does your Chinese heritage have for your children, your construction of self, and an Afro-cultural identity?”: I don’t believe the question for someone of my background would be any different than say an American with Polish and German ancestry, there would be limits to the understanding of those cultures based on ignorance or lack of fluency with those languages. For that American and for myself the situation would best be summarized by the following statement. Heritages of all kinds whether ethnic, cultural, national, or political, if they exist within the vacuum of the individualized consciousness or outside of the context of the societies that originated them, then they are naught but abstractions. (Yun et al. 2008: 202–3) Although his heritage is often the central node of his work, Chong also performs it as an embodied and disembodied abstraction that is also aligned with the natural world (without making the human figure synonymous with plant life). Indeed, part of the legacy of colonial bioprospecting in the Caribbean is the ecological adaptation and success of some of its transplants, to the point where these non-native plants assume a sense of false nativism in their new homes over time. One such example in Chong’s own Jamaica is the hibiscus flower, which may have horticultural roots that stretch to Asia and the Pacific Islands but today is significantly associated with cultural production on the island, including in a hibiscus tea drink known colloquially throughout the region as sorrel, “Agua de Jamaica,” or simply “Jamaica.” The search for a national iconography in the wake of Jamaica’s independence on August 6, 1962, led to the rise of prominence of such hybrid symbols as the hibiscus. Chong doesn’t position his body and his identity here as analogous with the botanical rhizome, but rather as existing metaphorically alongside transplanted, thriving, and visually abstracted ecological matter. As a result, Chong’s body (faded and open postured but with its face obscured) exists in alignment with the fragile endurance of the plant life that surrounds him. The two trees in the image (one represented by the large trunk-like brown backdrop behind Chong and the other sitting to his left in a mesh bag surrounded by smaller empty pots) stand in here not only as symbols of being uprooted, but also as a reminder of stunted or conflicted growth. They aren’t lush, overwhelming, and fecund, but small and cramped, crowded into our line of vision by the borders of the photograph. The “I-traits” series were, by Chong’s own account, an attempt to reckon with his migration to the United States, his personal history as a descendant of colonialism and slavery, and also to mirror his feelings of displacement and longing through recreating mystic rituals.

STOMACHING IT: TESTING ENDURANCE IN BLACK PERFORMANCE ART

187

In her monograph Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, M. Jacqui Alexander writes of nature’s spiritual transplanting and migration (themes that are echoed in Chong’s performance aesthetics): I couldn’t live Caribbean feminism on American soil, and Caribbean soil had grown infertile to the manufacture of the needs of those to its north. Caribbean people had docked one ship too many; waved one goodbye too many to women recruited for the war in Britain or for work as domestics in Canada or the United States. They had grown one banana too many, thin and small—not Chiquita, not Dole—that would turn to manure before being eaten; heard one demand too many to smile for tourists because they presumably provided one’s bread and butter. . . . We have walked these dusty tracks before. (Alexander 2005: 259) Alexander speaks here of soil that has exhausted its potential. Dried up and overworked, there is no further potential for literal or metaphorical growth. Alexander’s words are clearly meant to invoke the extractive narrative of imperial and colonial desire from Western European notions of modernity. The “war in Britain,” domestic work in the United States and Canada, and large banana conglomerates such as Chiquita and Dole are all lined up as the sources of resource extraction from the Caribbean. And the resources here are both ecological and human. Each of these elements has caused Alexander to question the potential fertility of Caribbean soil. Because the question of fertility and reproduction of both plant and human life was central to the colonial project in the Caribbean, Alexander’s theorizations of the impossibility of growing full roots in either Caribbean or American soil become especially poignant in relation to Chong’s photograph. The trees and the ancestor staged in the photograph have endured, but their roots and figures have failed to take up in new soil. Instead, they are truncated either by the boundaries of pots or by the limitations of the frame. But the ancestral and spiritual realms of the Caribbean (those spaces less likely to be captured in colonial records) endure here in the staged realm of Chong’s performance and photograph. He holds in suspension the dry, but not barren, earth in black and white. The mystic and the plant life survive but curiously do not grow. Both Chong and Pope.L’s performances, staging, and photographs remain as evidence of anxious and unsettled rituals. In the center of each is the black body, enduring against the crippling pain of indigestion or the slow decline of ancestral memory. And in each case what remains after the excess of glut or ecological fecundity is the displaced body of the black performer and the archival evidence of their work, which acts as an extension of the original act of performance.

NOTES 1. See Deleuze and Guattari (1987). 2. In her essay “The Absence of Writing or How I Became a Spy,” M. Nourbese Philip writes how the forced adoption of Western languages by enslaved persons of African descent has created a rupture in what she terms the “i-mage.” Playing on the concept

188

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

of the Rastafarian “I,” Philip’s i-mage is the creation of artistic representations of the self by an artist (in her case the poet) (Philip 1997: 43). Philip goes on to argue that because the black artist has now come to adopt languages that not only ignore her but also actively create negative i-mages of her and remove her from languages that would allow for positive i-mage making, the black artist is tasked also with addressing language at its deeper level of meaning (44–5). 3. See Bowles (2011). 4. See Fleming (1997). 5. See Cassel Oliver (2013) and Tavecchia (2014). 6. See Connors (2002), Pope (2000), Rush (2000), and Smith (2010). 7. Casid (2005), Schiebinger (2004), and Mitchell (1994).

REFERENCES Alexander, M. Jacqui (2005). Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bowles, John P. (2011). Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Casid, Jill H. (2005). Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Cassel Oliver, Valerie (ed.) (2013). Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Chong, Albert (n.d.). “I-traits.” Available at: https://www.albertchong.com/i-traits (accessed June 25, 2019). Connors, Philip (2002). “The Man Who Ate the Wall Street Journal.” The Wall Street Journal, April 9. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), “Introduction: Rhizome,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 3–28. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Fleming, Sherman (1997). “Pretending to Be Rock.” Filmed May 24, 1997 in Washington DC. Video. 05:57. Available at: https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=mbg​npo8I​OBc. Mitchell, William J. T. (1994). “Introduction,” in Landscape and Power, 5–34. Chicago: University of Chicago. Philip, Marlene Nourbese (1997). “The Absence of Writing,” in A Genealogy of Resistance: And Other Essays, 41–56. Toronto: Mercury. Pope, L. William (2000). “Eat Notes.” Eating the Wall Street Journal, Vol. 2. Rush, Michael (2000). “Performance Hops Back Into the Scene.” The New York Times, July 2. Schiebinger, Londa L. (2004). Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Peter (2010). “Eating the Wall Street Journal.” Good, October 10. Tavecchia, Elena (2014). “‘Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art’ at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.” Available at: http:​//mou​ssema​gazin​e.it/​ radic​al-pr​esenc​e-mus​eumst​udioh​arlem​-newy​ork/ (accessed January 25, 2019).

STOMACHING IT: TESTING ENDURANCE IN BLACK PERFORMANCE ART

Yun, Lisa, William Luis, Albert Chong, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Alejandro Campos Garcia (2008). “Signifying ‘Asian’ and Afro-Cultural Poetics: A Conversation with William Luis, Albert Chong, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Alejandro Campos García.” Afro-Hispanic Review 27, no. 1 (Spring): 18–217.

189

CHAPTER 3.11

Performative Bodies and Artists/Spectators: The Case of Radical Latina and Latin American Women Artists in Exhibition CECILIA FAJARDO-HILL

My body    zen-ses you Cecilia Vicuña, March 19711 In the fall of 2017, the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 premiered at the Hammer Museum. Organized under the Getty initiative, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the exhibition also traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in April of that year and to Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo in 2018.2 Two-thirds of the 126 artists in the exhibition dealt with performance or body art in one form or another. The central thesis of the exhibition was that during the period between 1960 and 1987, Latin American and Latina women had contributed some of the most powerful foundations of experimental languages for contemporary art, by placing the body at the center of their art. As co-curators—Andrea Giunta and myself— we conceptualized this body as a “Political Body,” a radical, expansive, conceptual, contingent, and specific body, which could, on the one hand, resist and question the widespread violence of the period (both political and toward women, as well as the established political, social, and artistic structures), while on the other hand, situate, imagine, and experience an embodied present and future. In order to discern how performance by radical women may be understood historically during the 1960s and 1970s, it is important to know that in Latin America, with the exception of Mexico, artists during this period did not define themselves as feminist artists, even if, in retrospect, their work may be seen as functioning this way, and secondly, that many artists did not use the term “performance” to describe

PERFORMATIVE BODIES AND ARTISTS/SPECTATORS

191

their body art practices. Instead, artists used terms such as acción plástica (plastic action), arte acción (action art), arte corporal (body art), acción colectiva (collective act), arte no objetual (non-object-based art), and arte vivo (live art). The reasons for rejecting the English terminology and the feminist label were rooted in the leftleaning and anti-colonial position toward Eurocentric culture (seen as imperialist and bourgeois), as well as because the term “performance” did not circumscribe to their specific forms of body art. One of the arguments of this text is that the political body in performance is rebellious to any institutionalization, and thus, at times, subverts established norms of performance and feminism. Nevertheless, the work by radical women is often read as feminist, and their body art is described as performance; therefore, we need to be cautious in understanding that both terms carry different nuances in their original historical and geographical context of production and reception3. In this chapter, we will thus address the concept of the political body in performance as it relates to radical women artists in Latin America and Latina artists between 1960 and 1985, and how this political body engenders a spatial performativity, an embodied experience for the spectator, and also, a form of performative curating. Transfeminist performance artist and scholar Julia Antivilio (Chile, b. 1974) argues from a feminist perspective that the 1970s feminist premise, “the personal is political,” was transformed by Latin American feminist artists into “the body is political,” because it articulates their experiences visually and viscerally, placing the body literally in a political position (Antivilio 2015: 40). She writes: “the feminist artists have inscribed on their bodies the textual performativity of their discourses. [. . .] Body art offers the possibility that the actual body of the artists in action, erase or reverse the frontiers of presentation and representation, questioning the definitions, the uses and the stigmas that the gender system has imposed on the body.” Performance is therefore “a political act done by the body” (Antivilio 2015: 40).4 The political body, described as feminist or not, is an investigative and epistemological space of resistance to violence, marginalization, and patriarchalism. It is a body that reconceptualizes and reimagines the female body, its role and possibilities. As performance scholar Amelia Jones aptly explains: “body art does not strive toward a utopian redemption, but rather, places the body/self within the realm of the aesthetic as a political domain (articulated through the aestheticization of the particularized body/self, itself embedded in the social) and so unveils the hidden body that secured the authority of modernism” (Jones 1998: 13–14). The political body in performance by radical women constitutes a political and aesthetic ground for emancipation against the structures of modernity—including dictatorship and oppressive governments—that controlled and violated their body. Artist Mónica Mayer, in her book Rosa Chillante: Mujeres y Performance en México, describes her need to speak in the first person while writing her publication. Given the absence of documentation, her book recounts the performances she experimented and saw, as well as relaying intimate conversations. In other words, her book conveys her subjective perspective. Importantly, for Mayer, performance is an art in the first person. She writes: “As the main support of action art is the body of the artist, it always has something autobiographical. Let’s not forget that

192

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

performance does not pretend to represent reality, but to intervene in it with actions. In general, performance is an art in the first person and it is logical to analyze it from an analogous structure” (Mayer 2004: 6).5 It is from this position of a necessary and potential involvement in the first person that the performativity of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960– 1985 proposed a shared and transformative experience for the public. The first person, in past, present, or future tense, of all involved, was the catalyst for the potentiality of an embodied emphatic experience, one that, though historical in nature, was actualized and relevant in the present. It is appropriate (relevant) to ask the question: How does the personal, autobiographical perspective articulated by Mayer, both by performance artists and herself as an author, imply a summoning for an intimate involvement on the side of the spectator? The response to this question is manifold but concentrates on two issues: First, resistance to institutionalization and second, the actualization of the past in the present. One key point is that their radical body art transcends and counteracts any institutionalization of their body and therefore of performance art, especially in contrast to today’s tendency to spectacularize performance. Their work offers the possibility of a personal and emotional experience beyond a learned institutionalized response to art. Many of these artists’ performances were born in contexts and with an urgency unbound by institutionality—political, social, or artistic. If the political body of radical women has the potentiality to engage and situate us in the present, it is because their creative exercises of liberation, resistance, and recontextualization of the body were born from a contingent experience of life, the same that many of us face day to day in a patriarchal society that continues to categorize and oppress us as gendered, social, and racialized beings. In her book Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, feminist writer, curator, and scholar Jennifer Doyle urges that “We need to allow ourselves to be moved” (2013: xvii). Doyle proposes an expanded conversation about difficulty, emotion, and identity in controversial artworks, “and how emotion circulates in and around art in flows that are directed by histories that are simultaneously personal and political” (xvii).6 The aesthetic impulse of the radical women in our exhibit did not respond to a binary or institutional concept of art or the body. After all, most had been excluded by the art institution, and their body had been subjected to violence and marginalization. A meaningful example is Peruvian Victoria Santa Cruz’ Me gritaron negra (“They shouted black at me,” 1978), a choreographed declarative piece in the first person that recounts her struggles with racism and discrimination to later embrace and affirm her blackness. The piece concludes with the artist forcefully uttering the words “¿Y qué? Soy negra!” (“So what? I am black!”) while dancing in collectivity to the rhythm of clapping hands, affirming both her personal emancipation and black culture. Until recently, this work by Santa Cruz was not considered in the context of contemporary art, or performance. Similarly, Yolanda López’s series Tableaux Vivant (1978), showing the artist with running attire and sneakers (she was a committed runner for many years) and paintbrushes in hand posing as the Virgin of Guadalupe. These photographic images were displayed by projecting them on a wall, while the public responded

PERFORMATIVE BODIES AND ARTISTS/SPECTATORS

193

with insults and throwing things at her. This series pokes fun both at the stereotype of the artist as painter and at the sanctified image of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a religious and cultural symbol for Chicano people. López’s work was rejected both by her community for disrespecting one of their most important symbols and also by the wider arts community that equated her images with the very symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a restrictive and stereotypical way, thereby discarding it as a radical form of photo performance. Their body was—and continues to be—a site of political denunciation, signification, resistance, and poetics. Their art is profoundly unselfconscious and personal, offering the spectator the possibility of both self-identification and affirmation beyond the trappings of the art institution. Ultimately, it is about the body as the expansive and imaginative mediator of experience, and the exhibition the shared ground for an embodied experience of art and life that becomes a vital form of empowerment and a dialogical space for exchange. Globally, we live in a time of reversal of human rights7 (for women, migrants, people of color, and transgender and queer people), when it is difficult to face reality, find sense, and act against the injustices and political and social turmoil that assail us every day. The body in performance may be the most direct and powerful form of agency in contemporary art, one to which the public may respond, be moved, interpellated, allowed to become vulnerable, and make it possible to have agency with the real world. Doyle analyzes how overtly political and transgressive work by queer, feminist, anti-racist, and migrant artists is either rejected or neutralized by declaring that “it’s only art” (2013: xvi). The affirmative acknowledgment of a difficult work as “Art” implies that it cannot transcend the boundaries of art institutionality, limiting the possibility for the body in performance to activate life and the human beyond a framed experience. Because of the urgent, undiluted, political, and unselfconscious nature of their performative work, many radical women artists were not even acknowledged as artists, their work was not seen as Art with a capital “A,” or participated in a particular historical moment either inside or outside the art world to be then marginalized and erased from historical accounts. Artists such as Luz Donoso (Chile), Rosa Navarro (Colombia), Celeida Tostes (Brazil), and Sylvia Salazar Simpson (US) are examples of artists who have been recuperated in recent times. They were either censored, marginalized, trivialized, or silenced. It is for this reason that presenting their work thirty-five or forty years later, given their unselfconscious attitude, intrinsic political urgency, and experimental aesthetics, their radicality may finally be revealed and understood in the present.8 Radical Women was an attempt at introducing the performance and body practices of Latina and Latin American artists in the canonical accounts both of the history of performance and of the history of contemporary art. In the United States, for example, the resistance to Chicana’s performance is rooted in class and race issues, as well as notions of “good taste.” For example, Patssi Valdez’ photograph Limitations beyond My Control (1975), showing an image of a glamorous Patssi against a wall, harassed by a man, speaks both of the constant police harassment she was subjected to as a Chicana in East Los Angeles, and also about her deconstruction of the stereotypical notion of Chicana as an unsophisticated maid on the other (Figure 3.11.1). For a

194

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURE 3.11.1:  Patssi Valdez, Limitations beyond My Control, 1975. Courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum.

white feminist, or the art world for that matter, Valdez’ race and class dilemmas, both determined by stifling stereotypes and social restrictions, was not a “good” or understandable subject for art. Today, within the notion of the Global South, decolonial exercises of expansion of canonical narratives of art that exclude Latina and Chicana performance artists for example, are both urgent and necessary. Curating their work in Radical Women was an exercise in specificity as well as a dialogue with the broader international performance practices during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the staging of a collective political body for an embodied empathy. Cecilia Vicuña’s body of work is a key example to illustrate this point (Figure 3.11.2). Vicuña, a poet and multidisciplinary artist from Chile born in 1948, pioneered a unique form of performative erotic poetry and performance actions in the 1960s, which included site-specific ephemeral sculpture in landscape such as the Precarios,9 from 1966 to the present. In her introduction to the 2013 edition of Cecilia Vicuña’s book of poems El Zen Surado, 1965–1972, contemporary Latin American literature and culture scholar Juliet Lynd explains how the poems in this book were not understood in the early 1970s given their erotic nature, and were either dismissed or censored. Celebrating sensuality, sexual pleasure, and the female body was at the time not considered a political gesture, particularly in the context of the revolutionary government of Salvador Allende (1970–3),10 to which Vicuña was profoundly committed. For Vicuña, her erotic poetry was part of the political revolution. She often wrote naked with open legs, letting the rays of the sun penetrate

PERFORMATIVE BODIES AND ARTISTS/SPECTATORS

195

FIGURE 3.11.2:  Cecilia Vicuña, El Zen Surado, 1960s–2013, collage. Photography by Claudio Bertoni. Courtesy of the artist.

her body. Writing her poetry or creating her Precarios was an expression of both a feminine, ancestral (indigenous), and political form of art that was embedded in life and the female body. This may be further illustrated in her New Erotic Designs for Furniture (1972); to position the naked body for the embodied enjoyment of erotic poetry. Conventionally, furniture determines a normative behavior, instead here the

196

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

artist proposes a performative experience of her erotic poems. By directing the reader both to get naked and to free the body in a sensual position, she would expand a poetic experience into an embodied experience. Similarly to Vicuña, Brazilian artist Teresinha Soares defined her artistic practice as “an erotic art of contestation.” She conceived Eurotica (1970), an album of twenty-five drawings printed on warm lightand dark-colored paper exploring sexuality beyond any social taboos. The artist has explained that “Eu” refers to the self/first person and “Erótica” to the erotic, meaning “eroticism in me” (Soares in Gotti 2015a: 72).11 For this album, Soares printed a short poem that celebrates female beauty through her sexuality: “I see beauty in sex. I discover sex within me. I’m beautiful, I live and love Love”12 (1970, in Gotti 2015a). The artist explained that the way this portfolio of prints was to be displayed was on the floor on a bed of red cushions in the shape of a heart, forcing the spectator to bend and lower the body and enter a complicit and sensual enjoyment of the poems. This work is not a performance per se, but it was conceived in the context of the artist’s performative practice, and for this reason it encompasses an embodied experience for the spectator. Expanding on the idea of the political role of sexuality in radical performance by women is Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene (1973), which the artist created in her apartment in Iowa City. Mendieta, originally from Cuba, conceived this piece while she was a student at the University of Iowa in response to the brutal rape and murder of Sara Ann Otten that same year. For Rape Scene, Mendieta recreated the murder scene as described by the press and surprised her fellow students when they came to visit her apartment by finding her naked, tied, and bent over a table with blood dripping from her body and on the floor in a scene of disarray. As stated, Mendieta created this work while still a student and in the containment of her own dorm room. Images of Mendieta’s Rape Scene are to this day some of the most enduring and haunting in conveying the horrors of sexual violence. This work was created out of a profound sense of urgency on the part of the artist, and outside of the confines of the art institution, and as such it embodies the full power of the brutality of real violence. If it is accepted to think of photo performance as an important form of body art, particularly of works from the 1960s and 1970s, what happens when what we encounter is a bowl with bloodied tampons in lieu of the body? This is the case of Sophie Rivera’s Rouge and noir (Red and Black) (1977–8), a series of photographs that function as personal portraits by depicting and celebrating the most intimate and abject of bodily fluids: menstrual blood. These are images seen from afar resemble large abstracted oval shapes in pink hues, but when observed closely surprise us for their baseness, which confronts our own taboos regarding the female body. This work is not only performative in nature—it documents an action—but it also promotes an embodied experience that highlights a key aspect of femininity that concerns all of us: since menstrual blood makes our very existence possible. Although Rivera is mostly recognized for her series of portraits of Nuyoricans (1976), particularly since the Smithsonian purchased some important works from this series, much of her work still remains in obscurity, such as her intimate and unconventional portraits of her naked husband every Valentine’s Day. The exclusion of Rivera’s more radical work is because of art institution’s tendency to invisibilize “difficult” art, particularly involving the emotional or sexualized body. One of the important reasons why a

PERFORMATIVE BODIES AND ARTISTS/SPECTATORS

197

larger body of Rivera’s work has remained invisible, or has made it difficult and at times impossible for artists such as Maria Evelia Marmolejo, Carolee Schneeman, Vaginal Davis, or Ron Athey to be exhibited, is because of the existing societal and art institutional taboos toward unbound sexualities that are truly personal and intimate, defying the still largely normative notion of the neutral heteronormative, disinterested, modernist body. The performative notion of the political body is both uncensored and unrestricted, therefore bypassing, in the case of Rivera, both the absence of her body and in lieu celebrating her menstrual blood as an affirming performative gesture. The embodied, creative, and political resistance and urgency of such radical women’s performances make them irreducible to a defined and bounded institutionalized experience of art. Doyle explains that when we experience emotion through art in a museum or gallery setting, we are nevertheless taught/trained to remain cool and controlled, a result of Western historical and social conditioning of aesthetic experience and notions of taste. She writes: “Galleries, museums and magazines sell this marriage of the impenetrable and the unmovable as Art, as if those of us who go to galleries and museums (or become art historians) are doing so in order to be relieved of the burdens of an emotional life” (Doyle 2013: 4). The author asks why it is so much more difficult in contemporary art to present challenging, political issues (feminism, race, gender, violence, etc.) related to a reality that is problematic, than for example in literature and in cinema.13 The limits between art, politics, and the body continue to be predetermined by a set of codes that exclude certain artistic practices, chiefly forms of performance and body art.14 Many radical women—including African American women in the United States and women from countries with a colonial history in Asia and Africa—were not only marginalized in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but were erased from art history. Our intent to recover and visibilize the work of Latinas and Latin American women artists in the twentyfirst century was for several years an extremely difficult task ridden with opposition and rejection from colleagues and institutions. It wasn’t until the Hammer Museum and the Getty Foundation—both established institutions—took on the project, that we were able to legitimize the validity of this project and make it happen. It is a paradox that ultimately radical and marginalized art such as the one included in the Radical Women exhibition needed the validation of mainstream institutions to be appreciated both in their countries of origin and abroad and to become a tangible opportunity for new scholarship, collecting, and further exhibition. The project began with controversy. The initial venue for Radical Women canceled the exhibit and fired me. At the heart of the cancellation was Colombian artist Maria Evelia Marmolejo’s 11 de marzo (1981),15 a performance involving menstrual blood (Figure 3.11.3). The artist had suffered heavy menstruation from a young age and had endured the ridiculing of her brothers and also humiliating public staining of her clothes. 11 de marzo was a performance ritual to exorcize menstruation of its taboos, and to celebrate a Chocó indigenous myth of creation maintaining that men were born out of mixing mud and menstrual blood, reverting the negative associations in menstruation as well as countering Christian patriarchal notions of women’s inferiority and dependency. For this performance, Marmolejo walked on rows of white paper lining the floor while dripping menstrual blood, as

198

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURE 3.11.3:  Maria Evelia Marmolejo, 11 de marzo, 1981. Courtesy of the artist.

well as rubbing her pubis against the walls to leave bloodied pubic hair imprints. There is no bodily fluid as stigmatized as menstrual blood and 11 de marzo was a clear demonstration that the art of radical women was not only unpalatable, but also unworthy of institutional support. If the first argument for the embodied experience, in the first person, of radical women’s political body art is its capacity to resist and investigate reality beyond institutionality, a second case needs to be made for the powerful resonance that we find in this work in the present, for the ways the artists confronted, fought, and resisted with their bodies, patriarchalism, violence, political oppression, and social injustice between the 1960s and 1980s. On the one hand, we have history and how it repeats itself and on the other, how unresolved its traumas are. During this period, several countries in Latin America were under dictatorship or civil war, and in the United States the civil rights movement focused on fighting against human rights abuses and racial discrimination.16 Radical Women opened after the inauguration into office of Donald Trump, a proud misogynist, womanizer, and racist president, an event that is reversing many of the civil rights gained in this country over many decades of struggles. In Latin America, democracies gone wrong such as Venezuela, the rise of nationalism and the right in countries such as Brazil, and the humanitarian crisis in several countries in Central America and the Caribbean as a result of natural disasters such as hurricanes in Puerto Rico, speak of a profound social and political crisis in the continent. We are witnesses and participants not only of our reality in the present tense, but also of the repository of the histories before us, of our families’, countries’, and colonial past. Radical Women in this sense was a catalyst

PERFORMATIVE BODIES AND ARTISTS/SPECTATORS

199

for experiencing multiple temporalities in the present. This exhibition was viewed by half a million visitors between the three venues in Los Angeles, New York, and Sao Paulo, and the overwhelming feedback we received was that it was experienced as transformative embodied participation of the past collapsing in the present; as a collective inclusive political body that is affirmative, hopeful, resourceful, imaginative, and insubordinate. As curators, we embodied the performativity of the artists’ works as a performativity of curating, and in turn the exhibition proposed a performativity of the public’s participation. French philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of duration, where he proposes that we exist in a continuum with no beginning or end, changing continually, is relevant in thinking of the embodied experience of Radical Women’s body art ([1907] 1911: n.p.).17 The past is actualized constantly as every new experience is accumulated, making them both the same and different. In this way there is no repetition but duration, a past that constantly informs the present and vice versa. In thinking about trauma and neurosis—the colonial past and our personal histories of pain—revisiting and embodying the traumatic past is an opportunity to revise, to understand, to come to terms with, and to heal the painful past and to actualize it meaningfully in the present. When we observe Chilean artist Gloria Camiruaga’s video Popsicles (1982), where the artist’s young daughters appear licking popsicles while the Hail Mary is playing in the background until toy soldiers emerge from the popsicles, we as mothers and daughters and women experience the fragility of the female body as the power of the military and the church, still today, determines the roles of women and their oppression. When we are faced with Anna Maria Maiolino’s photographs from the series Fotopoemaçao (Photo poem action) (1973–2017)—produced during Brazil’s dictatorship—where the artist points a pair of scissors toward her eyes (X, 1974) or threatens to cut her tongue or her nose (É o que sobra [What is left over], 1974), we are reminded of how much we are still silenced today, and how much we still do not know about our mothers or sisters, given the level of repression that women have endured and continue to endure all over the world. When we encounter the photographs from Graciela Carnevale’s Acción de encierro (Lock-up Action) (1968), a performance that took place during the Ciclo de Arte Experimental in Rosario, Argentina, we are reminded of the conditioned and surveilled existence that we experience still today. For the original performance, the artist invited the public to an opening, locked them up, and left them to find a way out. A passerby who broke the glass door by throwing a stone finally liberated them. By subjecting the public to a real situation of oppression and forcing passersby to participate, Carnevale hoped to instill a consciousness of the day-to-day violence Argentinians endured during the Onganía dictatorship (1966–70). Camiruaga’s, Maiolino’s, and Carnevale’s are only some of the works that exemplify how performance in Radical Women embodied an opportunity to experience, reenact, heal, or simply identify as women and humans through trauma in the present. Along with my co-curator, Andrea Giunta, we experienced and received feedback from a wide public, ranging from young Latina artists, old Jewish women who had been affected by the Holocaust, to men of all backgrounds, who responded emotionally and with empathy to the exhibition.

200

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

It was my personal urgency that the show not subscribe to a clinical white cube historical account. The works in Radical Women demanded to be museographed in a dialoguing structure, to be experienced as a large body that was emerging en masse after being historically repressed and excluded—and not with the purpose of solely highlighting individual voices. The exhibition avoided establishing hierarchies— some artists such as Lygia Clark or Marta Minujín, for example, were much more recognized than others who were completely unknown, and some countries have been historically more visible than others in art historical accounts of performance art. At the Hammer Museum, where the show was carefully museographed over the course of many months,18 the thematic structure of the show was woven into the space to create an embodied experience that had an emotional tempo that was performative in nature. The public entered through the theme of self-portrait (metaphorically the head) where they were confronted with a declarative moment, to move through the expansive poetics of the body in landscape, and slowly experience the body in performance, the mapping and the reconceptualization of the body. A more emotionally intense zone was titled “Repression and Fear.” Once the spectator moved through this area, which displayed works in response to violence and oppression, they then slowly encountered humor, empathy, and collectivity in “Feminisms” and “Social Places,” eventually ending in the section titled “Erotic.” The exhibition concluded with the affirmative power of female sexuality. Metaphorically, the structure of the exhibition can be seen as a female body, and the experience of traveling through the show as entering through the head and coming out of the vagina, a sort of rebirth. The political body is embodied in each work, and as a totality it becomes a monumental body of work both radically experimental and emotionally transformative. Liliana Porter, an Argentine artist featured in the show, and artist Ana Tiscornia, from Uruguay, described the exhibition as “a grand chorus and a great forum” (Artists’ personal comment, September 2017). The aesthetic, conceptual, political, and experiential is embodied, performed, lived, unselfconsciously, while being in the first person. Through the experience of the political body, the first person in us may be liberated from the patriarchal gaze and institutional authority. Given the dialogical and noninstitutional nature of the political body, the experience of radical bodies in performance may awaken the emancipation and decolonization of our own bodies in the present. The spectator’s body ultimately becomes the site of emancipation.

NOTES 1. Translated by the author. Original poem reads: Mi cuerpo es  zen-tir-te Marzo 1971 Spanish reprinted from El Zen Surado, 1965–1972 by Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago de Chile: Catalonia, 2013), p. 147. Copyright by the author, and by Catalonia Ltd, 2013. English translation previously unpublished. Permission granted by the author.

PERFORMATIVE BODIES AND ARTISTS/SPECTATORS

201

2. The exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 was organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, under the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA and inaugurated at the Hammer Museum in the fall of 2017, traveled to The Brooklyn Museum, New York, in April, and in August 2018 at Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo. For a full list of artists and documentary information on the exhibition, see the exhibition catalog (Fajardo-Hill and Giunta 2017) or visit the expanded digital archive at https://hammer.ucla.edu. 3. It is important to acknowledge the pioneering work in recognizing the role of women artists in the history of performance by scholars and authors such as Amelia Jones, Lucy Lippard, Moira Roth, Peggy Pelan, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Rebecca Schneider, Kristine Stiles, and Lea Vergine. Nevertheless, with the exception of Ana Mendieta, and more recently Lygia Clark, Latin American and Latina artists have been largely absent from their studies. Some of the key authors on Latin/a American performance are Deborah Cullen, Coco Fusco, Mónica Mayer, Nelly Richard, and Diana Taylor. 4. Personal translation. Original quote reads: “La premisa lo personal es político, propia del feminismo de los setenta fue transformada por las artes visuales feministas en ‘el cuerpo es político,’ pues articulan las visualidades de sus experiencias poniendo literalmente el cuerpo en una posición política . . . Las artistas feministas han inscrito sobre sus cuerpos la textualidad performativa de sus discursos. . . . El arte del cuerpo da la posibilidad para que el cuerpo propio de las artistas o los artistas en acción, corre o desdiga las fronteras de la presentación y la representación, cuestionando las definiciones, los usos y los estigmas que el sistema de género ha impuesto al cuerpo. . . . el performance es ‘un acto político hecho por el cuerpo’.” 5. Personal translation. Original text reads: “Como el principal soporte del arte acción es el cuerpo de la artista siempre tiene algo de autobiográfico. No olvidemos que el performance no pretende representar la realidad, sino intervenirla a partir de acciones. En general, el performance es un arte en primera persona y resulta lógico analizarlo a partir de una estructura análoga.” 6. Doyle’s book focuses on the work of artists such as Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Franko B, Nao Bustamante, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. 7. With Donald Trump’s presidency, we have seen the reversal of important civil rights in the United States, such as forbidding the participation of transgender people in the army, attempts to close down Planned Parenthood and to ban abortion, as well as immigration laws against Mexicans, Central Americans, and people from the Middle East. Femicide in countries such as Brazil and Mexico is on the rise. See Federici (2018) on globalized institutional violence against women today. 8. In this text, I’m referring to Latina and Latin American performance artists and not to the wider context of radical performance by women internationally, such as Eleanor Antin, Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, Claude Cahun, Niki de Saint Phalle, Valie Export, Emmy Henning, Shigeko Kubota, Yoko Ono, Mierle Ukeles, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Martha Wilson. Particularly since the 1990s, many of these artists have been presented in exhibitions and scholarly publications have explored their contribution.

202

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

9. “One day in January 1966, I was at the Con cón Beach when I felt that the sea sensed [CF1] me as I did her. I fell to the ground in awe of the realization. I picked up a stick and planted it on the earth as a form of writing so that she, the sea, could see that I saw. The high tide would erase this writing, completing it. This way my Arte Precario (precarious art) was born. I made signs in the sand and gathered sticks and stones, feathers and bones, plastic and metal, building a small ‘city’ to be erased by the waves. As if they were the remains of an ancient civilization, or the beginning of a new one, capable of hearing the sea and the consciousness of all living things.” Personal correspondence with the artist, August 14, 2018. 10. Allende’s presidency ended abruptly with his US-backed assassination and the installation of the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990, which led to Vicuña’s exile. 11. Soares also stated: “free sexual exercise demands social and political freedom.” 12. The original version reads: “Vejo beleza no Sexo. Descubro o sexo em Mim. Sou bela, vivo e amo o Amor.” The first lines of the second page long poem reads: “Don’t be mediocre, don’t be modest, penetrate my venter.” The original poem reads: “Não seja mediocre, nem seja modesto, penetre no meu ventre.” 13. The art institution, the history of good taste and canonicity, even in contemporary art, are still profoundly shaped by a complex ambiguity in regard to the potential transgressiveness of art. It is the case that still today, art by feminists, queer, and artists of color, dealing with identity, politics, and gender, is considered irrelevant as a form of art. 14. Art enters an institution and academic and critical discourse when it is possible to somehow naturalize its radicality. Critics are often part of a system that defends the status quo, and their defense of patriarchal notions of good taste and quality often dismiss overtly controversial and political work as bad art, panfletarian, propaganda. The same goes for institutions that feel ill at ease with truly political and “unpopular” art, often closing their doors on “difficult art.” 15. Artist title description: March 11—ritual in honor of menstruation, worthy of every woman as precursor to the origin of life. This performance took place at the now defunct Galería Santa Fe in Bogotá, Colombia. 16. Argentina (1976–83), Brazil (1964–85), Chile (1973–90), Paraguay (1954–89), Peru (1968–80), Uruguay (1973–85), and Venezuela (1948–58); or civil war: Colombia (1964–2016) and Guatemala (1960–96). In the United States, this is the time of the civil rights movement (1950s–1970s), particularly the fight for the rights of women, African Americans, and Latino people who were subjected to brutal discrimination and violence. Though we could not challenge that the United States was a democracy during this period of time, the civil rights of many people, such as African Americans and Latinos, were denied. In 1964, after decades of segregation, the US government passed the Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, only in theory ending segregation. A powerful example of abuse of human rights in the United States was the practice of nonconsensual sterilization of Latina women that ended with the 1975 moratorium. In Puerto Rico between 1937 and 1960, sterilization endorsed by the United States in order to exercise control over population growth, left more than one-third of Puerto Rican women sterilized. Also, we cannot ignore that between 1947 and 1991 during the Cold War, the United States waged proxy wars in Latin

PERFORMATIVE BODIES AND ARTISTS/SPECTATORS

203

America, supported coup d’états, civil wars, and right-wing dictatorships, and led covert operations such as Operation Condor intended to undermine any left-wing tendencies in the region. 17. Bergson writes: “Nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that which I have just had, even if only because the one is an instant older than the other. My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates.” 18. The Hammer Museum hired Sebastian Clough, director of exhibitions at the Fowler Museum, to design the museography of “Radical Women” in dialogue with the curators, Andrea Giunta and myself, and the Hammer’s chief curator Connie Butler and curatorial fellow Marcela Guerrero.

REFERENCES Antivilio, Julia (2015). Entre lo sagrado y lo profano se tejen rebeldías: Arte feminista latinoamericano, Serie Feminismos Nuestroamericanos. Bogota: Ediciones desde abajo. Bergson, Henri ([1907] 1911). Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell. Project Gutenberg EBook [EBook #26163]. Doyle, Jennifer (2013). Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia and Andrea Giunta (eds) (2017). Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. Los Angeles and Munich: Hammer Museum and DelMonico, Prestel. Federici, Silvia (2018). Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Gotti, Sofia (2015a). A Pantagruelian Pop: Teresinha Soares’s “Erotic Art of Contestation.” Tate Papers no. 24, Global Pop. Available at: http:​//www​.tate​.org.​uk/re​ searc​h/pub​licat​ions/​tate-​paper​s/24/​a-pan​tagru​elian​-pop-​teres​inha-​soare​s-ero​tic-a​rt-of​ -cont​estat​ion. Gotti, Sofia (2015b). “Eroticism, Humour and Graves: A Conversation with Teresinha Soares,” n. paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal 36 (July): 67–73. Available at: https://www.ktpress.co.uk/nparadoxa-volume-details.asp?volumeid=36. Jones, Amelia (1998). Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mayer, Mónica. (2004). Rosa Chillante: Mujeres y Performance en México. Mexico City: Producción Editorial Ana Victoria Jiménez. Vicuña, Cecilia (2013). El Zen Surado, 1965–1972. Santiago de Chile: Catalonia.

CHAPTER 3.12

Framing Live Art LOIS KEIDAN

Over the last few decades in the UK, there has been an unprecedented institutional embrace of “event art,” experiential art, and “live” art, with high profile, mainstream museums, galleries, theaters, and festivals increasingly engaging with Performance Art and Live Art through their public programs, educational initiatives, and outreach projects. While such institutionalization can bring rich rewards to previously marginalized and misunderstood areas of practice, it also comes with a range of challenges, including concerns that the embrace of the institution might compromise artists’ disruptive intentions. In their questioning of proscribed cultural spaces and occupation of all kinds of public places, the kinds of time-based practices known as Performance Art and, particularly in the UK, Live Art, have always been on the frontline of enquiries into where art can be located and what it can do there. Live Art is, in many ways, all about framing, and is itself a framing device, but I am going to specifically look at its framing within institutional contexts—what does this mean, what does it do, what does it do to both Live Art and to the institution? I realize that I have used both the terms “Performance Art” and “Live Art,” so before we enter the institution and to avoid confusion, I should say what I mean by Live Art and its relation to, and distinction from, Performance Art (which may in turn differ from what others in this book mean) and the different understandings, contexts, and frames we might have for such practices in the UK and the United States. Put simply, Live Art is a more expansive practice than Performance Art. It is a practice that has evolved from the late twentieth-century ideologies and methodologies of Performance Art, where visual artists, in a challenge to the institutions and markets that controlled the production and consumption of art, turned to their own bodies as their site and material. But Live Art has been equally influenced by late twentiethcentury theater and dance makers—artists working at the edges of their disciplines, breaking their rules, testing their limits, and rewriting their languages. From these beginnings, a range of practitioners in the twenty-first century continue to develop new ways of working that explore the possibilities of the body, space, and time, and make art that invests in ideas of process, presence, and experience more than the production of objects or things. Stage-based productions by Forced Entertainment that disrupt the conventions and destroy the pretense of theater; choreographies by Project O that reimagine the nature of dance and dancers; visceral durational performances revealing the sick body’s flesh, blood, and frailties by Martin O’Brien;

FRAMING LIVE ART

205

immersive encounters with experiences of trauma, displacement, and violence by Tania El Khoury; poetic acts of civil disobedience by Richard Dedomenici; high trash queer shows for low cultural spaces by David Hoyle; interactions inviting conversations across racial divides by Selina Thompson; public disturbances by The Disabled Avant-Garde challenging stereotypes of “disability art”; screenbased performances by George Chakravarthi that break apart representations of gender and racial difference; citywide participatory projects by Joshua Sofaer; and activist practices advancing environmental and social justice by Liberate Tate, all demonstrate that Live Art does not conform to any one form, function, or mode of presentation, but is a means for artists to investigate the nature, role, and experience of what art (in the broadest sense of the word) can be and can do. As Joshua Sofaer proposes in his short film What Is Live Art? (2002), Live Art represents “an explosion of conventional aesthetics,” and is a “haven” in which a gene pool of artists can take formal and conceptual risks, create a context to look at different mediums of expression, open up new strategies for intervening in public life, engage audiences as complicit partners in the making and reading of meaning, and explore the responsibilities of our collective and individual agency. The term “Live Art” is not therefore a name for a new art form, but more of a description of an approach to an artistic practice. In one sense, the term Live Art could be understood as a cultural strategy to include the kinds of exploratory processes and practices that might otherwise be excluded from more traditional curatorial, cultural, and critical discourses. In another sense, the term Live Art could be understood to represent a way of thinking about art—what it can be and do, how it can be produced and experienced, and who it can be made by and for. And, in the context of this chapter, the term Live Art could be understood as a framing device for a spectrum of process-based, experiential practices by itinerant and interdisciplinary artists who operate within, in between, and at the edges of a range of artistic disciplines and cultural contexts. Until the tail end of the twentieth century, Live Art was very much the runt of the litter in the cultural life of the UK, ignored, disregarded, or trashed by most funding bodies, academies, critics, and institutions—under-resourced, undervalued, underrepresented, under-taught, and generally misunderstood. But the early twentyfirst century has seen an unprecedented and unparalleled institutional engagement with experiential and ephemeral practices, as many previously impenetrable “mainstream” museums, galleries, theaters, and festivals began to open their doors to what the UK artist Chris Goode refers to as “upstream” artistic practices. These days, Live Art is increasingly recognized as one of the most vibrant, urgent, and instrumental areas of artistic practice in the UK, and more and more widely acknowledged as a research engine that is driven by artists who are working across forms, contexts, and spaces to open up new artistic models, new languages for the representation of ideas and identities, new ways of animating spaces and places, new approaches to engaging audiences and intervening in public life, and new strategies for activism and creative resistance. In recent years, there have been some profound cultural shifts that have had a hugely significant impact on the profile and potential of Live Art, and that

206

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

have, in turn, contributed to, or been a catalyst for, this heightened recognition. Perhaps the biggest shift that has affected almost everyone involved with Live Art is technology. Developments in technologies allow us all to create and access online platforms to research, connect, share, catalog, publish, and disseminate Live Art in unprecedented ways. Technology has been instrumental in shifts in the critical thinking and popular profile of Live Art, and a critical factor in the heightened level of interest and developments in the histories and archiving of Live Art, allowing artists and audiences to bypass the gatekeepers of culture, enabling artists, scholars, and curators to both research and create new contexts for underrepresented artists and untold histories. The impact of technology, particularly in advancing access to, and engagement with, Live Art’s documentation, archives, critical discourses, and offer of new audience experiences has also, I would suggest, played a key role in another profound shift of recent years—the institutional embrace of Live Art. The Live Art Development Agency (LADA) and Adrian Heathfield’s 2003 collaboration with Tate Modern, London, on Live Culture is just one example of an early institutional embrace of Live Art. Live Culture was a four-day, buildingwide program of performances, debates, lectures, screenings, and installations representing an array of contemporary practices that employed “liveness” as a generative force to break apart traditions of representation, open different kinds of engagement with meaning, and activate audiences1 (Figures 3.12.1 and 3.12.2). The project took place within the first few years of Tate Modern opening and was, for

FIGURE 3.12.1:  La Pocha Nostra, Ex-Centris (A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others), Live Culture, 2003. Photo by Manuel Vason.

FRAMING LIVE ART

207

FIGURE 3.12.2:  La Ribot, Panoramix, Live Culture, 2003. Photo by Manuel Vason.

LADA, a timely and critical intervention to consider questions of legitimacy through institutional affiliation, as well as the nature and role of Live Art within the museum, and the nature and role of the museum in Live Art. Nicholas Serota, Tate director at the time, said the project “gives an audience the chance to experience new forms of artistic engagement, and also enables Tate Modern to consider its role not only as a site for preservation and interpretation, but as an active generator of performance work” (2003: 2). Live Culture was not the first performance intervention at Tate Modern, nor, thankfully, the last. Catherine Wood, who has been the museum’s curator of performance since 2003, initiated Tate’s Performance Room in 2011, and led the opening in 2012 of Tate Tanks, the first dedicated space for live performance in any major museum in the world. In 2012, Tino Sehgal’s performative piece These Associations occupied Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall for four months, and in 2016, Tate extended its invitation to audiences through its offer of new encounters with art and ideas with the opening of Tate Exchange. Why would Tate, that most rarefied and grand of UK institutions, want to offer its audiences “the chance to experience new forms of artistic engagement” or to be “an active generator of performance”? How did Live Art go from the runt, to the prodigal child, to the golden one? What can Live Art “do” to the institution, and what does that say about the shifting nature of our institutions and of our culture? By disrupting conventions of form and representation, and distinctions between artist and spectator; by representing different ways of being in, and seeing, the world; and by giving voice to the unheard and visibility to the unseen, Live Art questions who and what makes up “a culture,” problematizes how art can be produced and

208

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

consumed, and has a tendency to ask “what is the place of this kind of art in this kind of place?” As such, in this age of online connectivity, of the experience economy, of younger audiences’ desires for new encounters and ideas, Live Art provokes museums to rethink what art is and can do, about the values they place on different cultural ideas and experiences, about the audiences they want to talk to and how they might reach them. Live Art is attentive to the complexities of our modern social fabrics; understands the sophistication of contemporary audiences’ cultural values, identities, and expectations; invests in ideas of immediacy; and creates spaces to explore the experience of things, the ambiguities of meaning, and the responsibilities of individual agency. The social effect and cultural impact of Live Art practices and approaches have been critical to the resurgence of interest in experiential and performative practices within mainstream culture and contributed to the transformation of many flagship museums and galleries into animated and socially engaged places, and in encouraging them to consider the different kinds of conversations they can facilitate between artists and audiences, and what those conversations might be about. The same can be said about some of the transformations we have seen in more traditional theater venues and festivals in the UK. In 2009, LADA published Programme Notes: Case Studies for Locating Experimental Theatre, a collection of essays that explored the ways in which contemporary theater was changing through new relationships between mainstream venues and experimental practices (Keidan and Mitchell 2009). The case studies included Neil Bartlett’s visionary tenure as artistic director of the grand Lyric Hammersmith theater in London; Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal’s introduction of innovating international theater makers to the staid London theater scene with the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT); John McGrath’s radical approaches to young peoples’ theater at Contact Theatre in Manchester; and Keith Khan’s bold reimagining of the arts center of the future at Rich Mix in London. The book proved to be prescient as more and more previously conservative cultural centers became interested in exploring different ways of working and new artistic relationships. It was, therefore, swiftly followed by a second, expanded edition, in 2013, co-published with one of the UK’s leading theater publishers, Oberon Books (this collaboration is itself a signifier of the changes that were taking place across theater culture at the time). Programme Notes Volume 2 illustrated some of the seismic shifts that had taken place since 2009, most notably the impact of the radical, artist-led, festival-within-a-festival model of Forest Fringe2 on the tired Edinburgh Festival format, and the influence of the innovative and adventurous commissioning policy of the newly formed Manchester International Festival (MIF) on what “a major international arts festival” could look like and the kinds of ambitious performative installations, participatory projects, and stage-based works it could make possible. I hope I have illustrated some of the ways in which Live Art can offer museums, galleries, theaters, and festivals, strategies, methodologies, and frameworks to engage with new forms of art, new kinds of artists, new kinds of audiences, and new cultural experiences. But what does this kind of institutional embrace and framing do to Live Art?

FRAMING LIVE ART

209

The context of the institution brings the possibilities of heightened profiles for artists and artworks, and access to previously unimaginable resources and opportunities. It introduces “upstream” artists to the kinds of “mainstream” audiences that they might not otherwise encounter. It affords a “legitimacy” to illegitimate, unclassifiable practices, and a “safe” cultural context to test new approaches to the presentation, representation, and experience of art. It can give permission to, and through its clout, protect precarious work. It places a kind of critical currency and cultural value on Live Art, and increasingly, a financial one. It can uncover and open up access to Live Art’s lineages, help place it within both wider art histories and contemporary cultural landscapes, and position it within “officially sanctioned” archives in ways that might preserve its legacies. In other words, an institutional presence can reframe Live Art from a marginalized, peripheral practice to an authorized one. Since Live Culture, LADA has worked with Tate on a number of occasions and with a range of departments. We partnered with Tate Publishing on Live: Art and Performance (2004), a publication edited by Adrian Heathfield and developed from Live Culture, in which artists and thinkers assessed the impact of Live Art within the broader cultural sphere. In 2008, we worked with Tate Research on Legacy, offering substantial awards to two artists, Anne Bean and Tim Etchells, to consider the legacies of performance in art historical contexts, and examine the processes and challenges of archiving live work through the lens of their own practices. Most recently, we collaborated with Tate Britain in 2017 on a presentation of A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, Neil Bartlett’s one-man homage to the pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon, to celebrate the inclusion of Solomon’s work in the museum’s Queer British Art 1861–1967 exhibition. Originally created in 1987 at the height of the British AIDS epidemic and performed in warehouses and fringe theaters, A Vision of Love was one of the defining queer works of that decade. It would have been inconceivable for a piece like this to be performed at an institution like Tate in 1987, so to see it, thirty years later, in the grand nineteenth-century gallery of Tate Britain said so much about the transformations we have seen in both societal attitudes to queer culture and “weird” art and the culture of our national institutions. However, LADA’s most unexpected, radical, and instrumental relationships have been with Tate’s Families and Early Years Programs. In 2016, LADA and Susan Sheddan, of Tate Families, co-commissioned the artist and researcher Sibylle Peters (of Theater of Research, Germany) to create PLAYING UP,3 an artwork that explores the potential of Live Art to bridge generations and see the world differently. PLAYING UP takes the form of a card game that draws on key Live Art themes and works and is played by adults and children together. Each of the thirty-six cards illustrates a seminal performance work that players are instructed to reenact or reimagine—together. Through her practice-based research with children, Sibylle Peters understands the parallels between the characteristics of childhood and Live Art. For Sibylle: kids are explorers of the everyday. For them to light a match can be something extraordinary that needs focus and time and creates an experience. The same is

210

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

true for everyone who practices Live Art. For us, kids are perfect accomplices. And in return Live Art can provide something that is essential to all of us, but especially to kids and their wellbeing: the acknowledgement of their action and their thinking, the reassurance that everything counts, that everything can make a difference, the frame of beauty and reflection and the experience that we can set it up anytime and anywhere we want. (PLAYING UP website 2016) Susan Sheddan was interested in these ways of thinking, and in looking at what is possible when work that is made for, with, or about children considers Live Art as a strategy: the challenge in creating art for children is that in devising the frameworks that support their engagement, unchallenged preconceptions about children and their capacities often inform the design of the work, and ironically, limit the very engagement it aspires to open up. Therefore, we would like to share Live Art approaches, which construct accessible, and carefully considered frameworks for kids, whilst remaining open to all kinds of possibilities, no matter how difficult or challenging. (PLAYING UP symposium audience freesheet 2016) PLAYING UP was published as resource-cum-box set artwork in an edition of 500. It was launched with a symposium at Tate Modern and a mass public play-in of the game itself that occupied Tate’s Turbine Hall for three days, attracting intergenerational audiences in their thousands who reenacted famous performance works across the length and breadth of Tate Modern. This play-in was simply intended to mark the launch of the game itself, but we have since been invited to collaborate with other museums in the UK and internationally on public play-ins of PLAYING UP that have used Live Art to widen public engagement, while at the same time engaging children and adults alike with what Live Art can do through the doing of Live Art. The writer Mary Paterson wrote in her response to PLAYING UP (for the PLAYING UP website 2016): whilst benefiting from Tate’s cultural capital, PLAYING UP also bestows the cultural licence of Live Art onto Tate as an experimental strategy [. . .] With every provocation, the game sheds another skin of institutional control—the control of the artist, the control of the art institution, the control of the people with money, of the mediated politics of consent, of the image, the advertising industry, the CCTV network, the schools examination system, or the control of the imaginary limits of adulthood and childhood and the ways they are kept apart. Our collaboration with Sibylle Peters and Tate Families continued with KAPUTT: The Academy of Destruction, which took place in Tate Exchange at Tate Modern in late 2017 (Figure 3.12.3). KAPUTT was another framing device by Sibylle Peters, this time in the form of an intergenerational academy with six children and six adult artists “performing” as academicians—undertaking research, giving lectures—working together, and paid, as equal partners. Inspired by, and dedicated to, Gustav Metzger, KAPUTT was about the creative potential of destruction, and again used the histories, methodologies, and practices of Live Art to dismantle the hierarchies of cultural power and knowledge, and to

FRAMING LIVE ART

211

FIGURE 3.12.3:  Sybille Peters, KAPUTT, 2017. Video still credit Katharina Duve.

introduce intergenerational audiences to different ways of thinking about art, about intergenerational relations, and about what destruction is and is not. Tate Families and Early Years not only take their work with children and families seriously, but they also take Live Art seriously, and as a consequence are rolling out one of the most groundbreaking (re)framings of Live Art within a museum context that I am currently aware of. However, in spite of, and often because of, some of the opportunities and rewards that may come with the institutional embrace of Live Art, the challenges and problematics of an institutional context, and the institutionalization of Live Art, are legion—challenges and problematics that are at the core of key critical, aesthetic, ethical, and scholarly issues for performance practices. Many artists do not want an institutional embrace or crave institutional approval: they are concerned that it will compromise Live Art’s disruptive intention and regard it as antithetical to everything that Live Art represents. Live Art is synonymous with interdisciplinary and itinerant art and ideas that are difficult to accommodate or place, whether formally, spatially, culturally, or critically. It represents practices and approaches that expand the formal and cultural frameworks that art is allowed to operate within and that do not necessarily fit, or even belong, in the received contexts and frameworks that art is understood to occupy, and particularly the rarefied spaces of museums, galleries, theaters, and festivals where the production, representation, and experience of art are so rigorously contained and controlled. Few contemporary practices are as alert and responsive to their context, site, and audience or have a more heightened sense of place than Live Art and this can

212

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

be a challenge to the formal and restricted cultural spaces found in most traditional institutions. When Live Art asks “how can we think and operate differently in a place like this?,” the answer is often “you can’t.” Between 2009 and 2012, LADA collaborated with Adrian Heathfield of the University of Roehampton and Gavin Butt from Goldsmiths, University of London, as cultural sector partners on Performance Matters, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded creative research project that brought together artists, curators, activists, and academics to investigate the challenges that contemporary performance presents to ideas of cultural value. The project moved through three themed years of research activity: Performing Idea explored the production and circulation of discourse through, and around, the event of performance; Trashing Performance focused on marginal and degraded practices that often willfully refused respectability; and Potentials of Performance embraced unrealized and emergent performance values. As Adrian Heathfield put it in the catalog for Performance Matters Archive,4 the project “navigated a complicated relationship to the assimilation of the radical forces of performance and to institutionality” (Butt, Heathfield, and Keidan 2014). We had always intended that the public talks, debates, workshops, and performances commissioned for Performing Idea (2009–10) would be located within an institutional context, to both reflect and advance the institutional embrace of Live Art, and consider questions of value within the frame of, and in relation to, the institution. However, it soon became apparent in our negotiations with our chosen institutional partners that they would simply not be able to accommodate or frame our proposed program in ways we had planned. The unwieldy and inflexible institutional production process threatened to kick our curatorial structure out of shape and posed too many irreconcilable challenges (financial, representational, ethical, equitable, interdepartmental, technical, and spatial, to name a few). We relocated to Toynbee Studios, an independent venue in East London run by Artsadmin who not only worked with us as equal partners, but also gave us artistic agency and were able to support and represent the challenging practices and curatorial approaches of the project in entirely appropriate ways. The critical success of Performing Idea attracted invitations from other institutions to collaborate on the second themed year of the project, Trashing Performance. We declined their invitations. We realized that Performance Matters didn’t need institutional permission or approval, and that how some institutions conduct their business not only compromises the integrity of interdisciplinary approaches but is also actually unnecessary and prohibitive to the kinds of creative freedoms much contemporary art and thinking demand. Adrian Heathfield also said in the Performance Matters Archive: I think we’ve had a complicated and ungainly relationship to other cultural institutions, because in the year (Performing Idea) in which we were supposed to be really engaging with institutionalisation we were somewhat expelled from institutionalised relations, and in the year (Trashing Performance) in which we were supposed to be addressing the margins and outcasts, we were somewhat more embraced. This tells us quite a lot about the complexity of one’s relationship to institutionalisation. (2012: 10)

FRAMING LIVE ART

213

While an institutional frame might place a more rarefied kind of cultural capital on Live Art, it also increasingly affords it a commercial one that is problematic in all kinds of ways. As growing numbers of curators, scholars, writers, historians, and archivists engage with Live Art, there is a direct impact on its artistic, historical, and financial value—its “collectability” and relationship to the art market. Documents, photographs, films, tapes, drawings, instructions, relics, traces, and a host of other materials and records generated by performance-based works in the late twentieth century now carry significant weight in the art market, as demonstrated by the number of gallery stands selling performance memorabilia at the first Frieze Masters Art Fair in London in 2012. Furthermore, a new generation of visual artists working performatively have found ways to commodify and sell a practice that was originally grounded in a rejection of the object and the market. The market will always find a way. But as well as complicating Live Art’s already complex relationship with the art world, this kind of market-driven institutionalization and materialization also distorts what Live Art is and does, and almost inevitably decontextualizes it. Performance Art emerged as a politically invested methodology in which visual artists turned to their bodies as the subject and object of their work in a radical rejection of the dominant culture and the art market, so to see such transgressive work being tamed in inanimate displays in public galleries, or “monetized” by the market at art fairs, is problematic. The art world’s privileging of the object over the experience, the product over the process, also has implications for the understanding and interpretation of Performance Art’s nature, role, and value. The legendary East Village Performance Artists in Beijing in the 1990s, for example, furiously documented their work through photography because it was the only material evidence of its existence and the only means to reach an audience. With the explosion of the Chinese art market in the 2000s, those documents gained a financial value that had little relationship to the cultural value of the original performances. Even worse was that in many cases it was the photographer and the photographs, not the subjects of the photographs, that were being placed within art-historical and market contexts, and the actual performance events were being written out of history. A resurgence of interest in archival practices and underrepresented histories, coupled with the market’s appropriation of Live Art, threatens to reduce its institutional representation to authorized forms of “dead records,” and in the process to distort, depoliticize, and compromise it, and ultimately to blunt its sharp teeth. In its defiance of cultural orthodoxies and societal norms, Live Art has always been an implicitly politicized and politically volatile practice and continues to be a potent and loaded site. Queer, black, disabled, women, trans, displaced, and other socially and culturally marginalized artists work with performance to embody the lived experiences of cultural difference, to break apart traditions of representation, to speak of the unspoken, to rewrite dominant narratives, to explore different kinds of strategies for the construction and performance of identity and different ways of being in the world, and to place peripheral bodies at the center of art. For other artists, the body in performance is a generative force to place themselves at the

214

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

center of charged, visceral, immersive, and transgressive works to open up different kinds of engagement with the body in all its difficulties, fluids, and functions, to test its limits and ask what is permissible, and to lay bare the human condition. And then there is a younger generation of activists who, empowered by the fearless artists of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and AIDS activists of the 1990s, and shaped by Live Art’s ways of intervening in civic life and animating all kinds of publics, are exploring new strategies of creative resistance and civic protest to effect changes in relation to social and environmental justice. Is it possible for the institution to accommodate and contextualize such radical artists, practices, and experiences in ways that retain their integrity and their agency? Many would say not. The collective Liberate Tate5 was founded in 2010 during a workshop on art and activism at, and commissioned by, Tate Modern. So far so good. However, Tate curators informed the workshop leaders that they were not allowed to make interventions against Tate’s sponsors, and effectively “policed” the workshop to ensure this didn’t happen. As such a directive seemed counter to the very notion of activism, a group formed to dedicate themselves to enacting creative disobedience against Tate through unsanctioned Live Art actions in its spaces until it ended its sponsorship relationship with BP (which eventually happened in 2016) (Figure 3.12.4). This brings issues of the ethical leadership of our institutions into the frame. Unlike the United States, the arts in the UK have enjoyed over seventy years of state subsidy and the benefits are manifold in terms of who is resourced to create, and empowered to access, culture. However, in recent years, as austerity kicks in and artists and arts organizations are increasingly being asked to seek support from corporate sponsorship and individual philanthropy, questions about cultural values, the ethics of arts funding, and who we are prepared to take money from are becoming more urgent, and there has been a groundswell of debate and growing dissent about the conflicts and contradictions between commerce and culture. Many of London’s major institutions, such as Tate and the South Bank Centre, readily accepted sponsorship from the oil companies BP and Shell, whose dubious corporate values and business practices around human rights and environmental sustainability were at odds with the art, artists, and audiences those very institutions purport to serve. They have been accused of being complicit in greenwashing the reputations of discredited corporations by giving them a social license to operate, and in turn have brought their own reputations into disrepute. Many artists, understandably, do not want to be associated with these kinds of sponsors or with the institutions that choose to accept their money. As the playwright Mark Ravenhill wrote in the program notes for “Take The Money And Run?,” a symposium LADA co-organized on the ethics of fundraising: it’s necessary that we start taking action on one concrete issue now: arts organisation’s sponsorship by Oil. Here the case seems as stark as it can ever be. To halt climate change, the world needs to move away from fossil fuels. The fossil fuel industry wants to carry on promoting its product. Arts organisations,

FRAMING LIVE ART

215

FIGURE 3.12.4:  Liberate Tate, Human Cost, 2011. Photo by Amy Scaife.

which take their money, are playing a part in the destruction of the environment. Artists should have no part in this. That’s something we can and must act on today. (2015) The cultural leadership of our institutions can also be called into question regarding their efforts to engage with more diverse artists and audiences, whether through curatorial or outreach programs.

216

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

The work of black, queer, women, and disabled artists—artists who are not what the artist Grayson Perry once defined as “Default Man”—hasn’t always been encouraged in our national institutions, and there is an understandable degree of cynicism among artists when institutions do attempt to diversify their programs, a cynicism that sometimes seems to take institutions by surprise. The Barbican Centre in London is not known for its advocacy of radical work by artists of color exploring complex issues of race. It therefore had little context to draw on, or to deal with, the unprecedented level of public protest at its 2014 presentation of South African artist Brett Bailey’s controversial living installation Exhibit B, which reenacted the human zoos and ethnographic displays of nineteenth-century colonialism and slavery. Surprisingly, the Barbican, which had offered no context as to the lineage of such work or why it could be significant to wider discourses, were surprised by the baying crowds, called the police and canceled the show. Accusations of tokenism and a box-checking attitude to diversity and inclusion can also be leveled at the ways some institutions approach ideas of outreach, community, and social inclusion. Drives toward a more inclusive, participatory, and diverse culture now inform most art organizations, funding bodies, and institutional policies in the UK, and are reinventing the cultural offer of many institutions as they reposition themselves as inclusive places, working to reflect the diversity of our society, and sometimes achieving remarkable transformations, as we have seen with Tate Families. However, the drive to inclusivity can be at odds with the actual diversity of representation across some institution’s programs, audiences, leadership, and workforces. Of more concern is that while divisions of class and privilege pervade UK society, the arts still reek of exclusivity and elitism where the rich and privileged wield enormous influence and exert disproportionate power, and where the poor and socially ostracized run the risk of being subjected to occasionally misguided, sometimes patronizing, and often under-resourced projects that manage to check all the right funding boxes, or help a rich patron feel good about themselves, or improve the brand of some questionable corporation. Many artists are keenly alert and attentive to the dangers of the culturally disempowered being instrumentalized by institutionally led community initiatives—denied agency, authorship, and responsibility, and exploited as cultural capital, yet rarely afforded the critical value or cultural status given to received and revered forms of institutionally sanctioned art. While, on the one hand, Live Art has been instrumental in developing approaches to socially engaged methodologies and strategies that are clearly contributing to institutions’ capacity to “reach out” beyond the limited spaces of restricted culture, on the other hand, the instrumentalization of the disempowered is at odds with Live Art’s increasingly inclusive approaches to culture, and acutely illustrates more challenges and problematics of an institutional context. Live Art breaks the rules about who is making art, how they are making it, where they are making it, what they are making it about, and who they are making it for and with. Disrupting distinctions between artist and spectator, between popular and restricted culture, and between art and politics, Live Art questions assumptions and defies expectations about what relationships between artists and publics can

FRAMING LIVE ART

217

be, and what they can do. As such, Live Art opens up all kinds of ways for people to engage with, participate in, and make art; to empower the disempowered to shape art from their own experiences; to give agency to different ways of being in the world, and imagining how it could be changed. These kinds of questions and provocations do not always sit easily within most rigid and hierarchical institutional frameworks. I have focused on cultural institutions rather than public bodies or academies, and taken a narrow position on what an institution can be—large, grand, rigid, traditional, and exclusive. But new forms of cultural institutions are being invented all the time, and discussions about Live Art and the institution must also look at the institutionalization of Live Art from the other direction—not how Live Art has entered cultural institutions, but how it has spawned its own. Mary Paterson wrote that “the generic freedom of Live Art rubs off on the texts that are written about it” (2010), so the generic freedom of Live Art also rubs off on the frameworks that are placed around it. New York’s Performa (describing itself as an “organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth-century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century”)6 and Pacitti Company in Ipswich (running a year-round program of events and research initiatives from its think tank as well as the biennial SPILL Festival of Performance7), could both be cited as examples of new forms of institutions in the service of Live Art. As could LADA. I had never thought of LADA as an institution, especially as we had launched it in 1999 to counter the institutional neglect of Live Art, and to find ways of responding to practices and approaches that were about thinking and operating differently. We set up LADA as an independent organization to support and champion underrepresented artists and practices; to develop new forms of artistic development, research, and discourse; and to create the conditions in which risk, innovation, and diversity could thrive. We saw ourselves as a different kind of model, or even as a non-model—an agent of change creating frameworks to set new artists and ideas in motion, and contexts and resources through which Live Art could be more widely accessed and appreciated. But I’ve come to realize that LADA is not a non-institution; it is just a different kind of institution. In her essay on “Live Art and the Institution,” Jen Harvie writes that one of the advantages of institutions is that they have a “kind of critical mass—and therefore power” (2019). She goes on to describe LADA as an institution that uses its critical mass, “to promote Live Art but, in doing so, to change the world, to make it fairer, while also preserving its capacity to take risks and to embrace change. LADA actively shares its power—its agency—with those whom big, conservative institutions would exclude, exploit, or simply fail to see. LADA’s work is a very, very long way from the exclusivity, self-interest, bureaucracy, and conservatism of those worst kinds of institutions.” I understand the difference around LADA’s role in the institutionalization of Live Art to be that Live Art informs, shapes, and frames what we do and how we do it as much as we try to shape and frame Live Art.

218

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

For those invested in the teaching and study of Live Art, I think that it is important to be aware of some of the opportunities and challenges of the institutionalization of Live Art that I have touched on in this chapter. Many of our institutions now provide scholars and students with access to the primary sources of lived, experienced performance. An institutional embrace can give legitimacy to previously marginalized ways of thinking about, making, and historicizing art, and can generate all kinds of invaluable resources (archives, publications, and other research materials). But it is equally important to understand the ways that institutional representation might sanitize and stifle radical and challenging practices, to recognize that the institutional histories of Live Art are not the only ones, or the only ones that matter, and to acknowledge institutional exclusion and even erasure and the necessity to always look beyond the institutional frame. Live Art doesn’t need institutional approval and, however central Live Art practices may now be to contemporary cultural discourses, and however much Live Art is accepted, assimilated, or appropriated in our mainstream museums and theaters, its radical approaches to the making and framing of art will always be at the edges of culture and society—those potent places where risk, dissent, and danger are still possible. As Mary Paterson writes in “Live Art, Potential and Changing the World” (a provocation for the audience freesheet for the 2015 Live Art UK Associates Gathering), Live Art’s “relative anonymity can give Live Art a spurious sense of marginalisation. In fact, it is proof of the opposite. Live Art is everywhere. Each time one of its ideas is assimilated into the language of the mainstream, it’s a sign of Live Art’s strategic success. And it’s also a spur to Live Artists to dive back into the pools of the in-between and the yet-to-be-defined, in order to invent new pockets of potential” (2015).

NOTES 1. For more info, see: http:​//www​.this​isliv​eart.​co.uk​/proj​ects/​live-​cultu​re-at​-tate​-mode​rn 2. http://forestfringe.co.uk 3. http://playingup.thisisliveart.co.uk 4. http:​//www​.this​isliv​eart.​co.uk​/reso​urces​/coll​ectio​ns/pe​rform​ance-​matte​rs-ar​chive​ 5. http://www.liberatetate.org.uk 6. http://performa-arts.org 7. https://spillfestival.com

REFERENCES Butt, Gavin, Adrian Heathfield, and Lois Keidan (2014). “Performance Matters: Gavin Butt, Lois Keidan and Adrian Heathfield in Conversation.” Contemporary Theatre Review 24, no. 1: 102–14. Harvie, Jen (2019). “Live Art and the Institution,” in Theron Schmidt (ed.), Agency: A Partial History of Live Art. Bristol: LADA and Intellect Books.

FRAMING LIVE ART

219

Heathfield, Adrian (2012). Performance Matters Archive. LADA and Performance Matters. Available at: http:​//www​.this​isper​forma​ncema​tters​.co.u​k/. Keidan, Lois and C. J. Mitchell (eds) (2009). Programme Notes: Case Studies for Locating Experimental Theatre. London: Oberon Books and Live Art Development Agency. Live Art Development Agency in collaboration with Live Art UK (eds) (2010). In Time: A Collection of Live Art Case Studies. London: LADA and Live Art UK. Paterson, Mary (2015). “Live Art, Potential and Changing the World.” Weathering the Storm. Bristol: The Annual Live Art UK Associates Gathering, February 12. Available at: http:​//www​.live​artuk​.org/​uploa​ds/do​cumen​ts/Ma​ry_Pa​terso​n_on_​Weath​ering​_the_​ Storm​_2015​.pdf.​ Ravenhill, Mark (2015). “Artists Often Take the Money and Run—But We Must Say No to Oil Companies.” Guardian, January 28. Serota, Nicholas (2003). Live Culture catalogue. Available at: https​://ww​w.thi​sisli​veart​.co. u​k/pro​jects​/live​-cult​ure-a​t-tat​e-mod​ern/.​ Sofaer, Joshua (2002). What Is Live Art? [film].

CHAPTER 3.13

From the Institution of Performance to the Performance of Institutions JONAH WESTERMAN AND CATHERINE WOOD

The suspicion that there is something dirty about performance seems to be on the rise again. This renewed fear of artistic obscenity, however, does not derive from a rekindled faith in the form’s fabled tendency to anarchy, unpredictability, and transgression. This twenty-first-century abreaction is not a safeguard against the kind of volatile bodies so much at the center of 1960s and 1970s art. Rather, performance is now imagined indecent for apparently being domesticated, programmable, and (perhaps most of all) profitable. That is, performance stands accused of transgressing too far—in moving from the margins to the museum, it ends up (again, but for new and diametrically opposite reasons) as matter in the wrong place. This chapter comprises a reckoning with the notion that performance has been tamed by being institutionalized, that it has taken up residence behind the gates of good taste and, as a result, become disgustingly respectable. This critical disgust usually takes one of two rhetorical forms. Some critics explain performance’s institutionalization as an index and reflection of art’s submission to the dictates of the experience economy, suggesting it exists merely to manufacture and fulfill a consumer “need.”1 Others treat performance’s new visibility as less speculative than merely spectral—a work of art that purports to be live figures in these accounts as something more like undead.2 This second critical tack imagines that performance’s apparent institutionalization in and by art museums is somehow monstrous, existentially voiding the works themselves by suspending them between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Against these prevailing assessments of performance’s imbrication in the institution(s) of art, this chapter will look closely at how performance works interact with, move through, and even change the structures they engage—how they summon audiences and choreograph processes of historical and cultural inheritance. In so doing, we will demonstrate that performance’s place in museums is none of the things it is imagined to be. It is not an epiphenomenal reflection of market forces; nor is it a generic or ontological aberration that betrays an art form’s

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

221

supposedly essential nature. And least of all is it new. Performance has been part of museums’ stories and canons, entwined with institutional behavior, since at least the 1960s. Its newly enunciated centrality is the result of a steady, decades-long process of interaction, not the sudden fashionable adoption of a parvenu practice. Far from becoming institutionalized (and thereby captured, contorted, or otherwise deformed by “the museum”), performance has produced new institutional forms.3 This chapter will detail selected key examples of this dialectical history of codetermination, focused around the history of Tate, and illustrate how performance and live art practice has reshaped contemporary museology—its structures, aims, and self-understanding—in ways that scholarship and criticism have yet to articulate. Searching for this new mode of articulation requires both a reappraisal of academic orthodoxies concerning art’s social and political utility and a careful reconsideration of what museums are for, as well as for whom. Central to this discussion, we will argue, is a deep anxiety not about performance, but about the audiences it assembles, and what the contemporary museum represents in terms of being a public space. Although the bulk of this chapter will discuss different ways in which performance enters, agitates, and reconfigures the functions of a museum, we will first address the interlaced concerns about speculation and spectrality that have recently surfaced. Before analyzing these in detail, however, it is important to note that these two modes of assessing (and accusing) performance in the museum rely on (and perpetuate) a binary opposition central to this problematic: “the museum”/“performance.” Conceiving of this relationship as an opposition between two self-contained entities might seem intuitive, but this is a historical formation, not a necessary or natural one. The discourse of speculation imputes to the museum not only a singular motive (profit, or a derivative false-consciousness), but also a singular identity: “the museum.” Museum professionals know very well (as does any artist that has ever dealt with them) that no two museums are alike in how they balance the multifaceted demands of mission, marketing, and money, and, what is more, they also know that any single arts institution is polyvocal in negotiating that relationship in its best moments and riven by discord at its worst. Between curatorial, media, learning, marketing, community and enterprises, and other departments, there exist a host of interrelated concerns. If not exactly chimerical, “the museum” as a homogeneous entity is an outmoded conceptual construct with little explanatory power here.4 The discourse of spectrality also imagines “the museum” as a monolith, but does more to solidify an idea of “performance” as its equally integrated opposite number—in this case a counterintuitive one, as the singular identity ascribed to “performance” is that it is wild, anarchic, protean, fleeting, beyond categorization, and above all free. “Performance” is conjured as a (one-time) unstoppable force running headlong into “the museum” as immovable object.5 The outcome can only be disaster, an extinction-level event that poisons the atmosphere, voiding the artworks and irradiating bystanders. The discourses of speculation and spectrality both deploy this outmoded binary pair; by setting the stage for this existential combat, each also positions the audience as a figure of danger. The audience, imagined as a homogeneous mass, in turn endangers the artwork with its lack of initiated acumen or by its sheer presence and

222

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

is endangered by the artwork’s deformed, undead lurching from time-space to timespace. Anxiety over these theorized public hazards motivates the two predominant modes of disgust levied at “performance in the museum,” displacing critical and scholarly worries about art’s meaning, function, and reception in a contemporary landscape overwhelmingly hostile to art and humanistic endeavor more broadly onto caricatured stereotypes of both art and its institutions.

THE FEAR OF “SPECULATION” Sven Lütticken’s article “Dance Factory” (2015) is paradigmatic of the discourse of speculation. Nominally an investigation into why dance has (in the second decade of the twenty-first century) experienced a relatively privileged position within the already increasingly centralized role of performance in museum exhibitions, the essay is predominantly a lament of the indignities suffered by dance at the hands of the institution. Dance suffers for being instrumentalized, subjected to the exogenous and base dictates of the museum, which Lütticken describes as “the temporalized and eventized museum, in which something (anything) must happen almost all the time” (91). According to him, this “museum-as-factory” lies “at the heart of the culture industry,” offering exercised bodies for the same reason that “contemporary capitalism frequently stages spectacles of labor” (92, 96). The “museum-as-factory” mirrors, extends, and even readies the individual for the demands of contemporary capitalism. The echoes of Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s excoriating essay of 1944, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” are unmistakable. Where those theorists of culture under twentieth-century capitalism argued that the culture industry offered “something for all so that none may escape” and that “amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work,” Lütticken would have it that under twenty-first-century capitalism little has changed, save perhaps that something (anything) must happen so that none will want to escape (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2001: 123, 137). “After all,” he adds, “you can’t really leave the diffuse factory anyway” (Lütticken 2015: 97). Another salient difference between the mid-century and millennial models— bracketing entirely that Lütticken moves artists and museum professionals into a role formerly reserved for the likes of The Walt Disney Company without remark—is the agency attributed to the audience. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the mass is deceived, seduced by products that seem to succor while reinforcing exploitative ideology and systems. For Lütticken, the mass in the museum wills its own exploitation, embraces it. For him, the museum is a “three-dimensional Facebook,” meaning differences between production and consumption are elided as all value generated by events and their prosumers is extracted by and for the institution (96). The museum’s speculation pays off when the museumgoer perpetrates their own exploitation. This is perhaps why, along with this suspicion of the museum as capitalism concentrated, Lütticken evinces a distaste for the mass that would constitute its public. Indeed, the two figures are almost interchangeable for him. For example, he describes the weekend-long mounting of Boris Charmatz’s Musée de la danse at Tate Modern, If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse? (2015), as “the massification—or, Tate-

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

223

ification—of culture” (91). Even more, it was not just a “mass event,” but a “mess of an event” (96). The people at the museum, now seen as its tentacular apparatus, get in the way of the art: “the crowd was so thick that performers had to carefully negotiate their way through the throng” (91). Performance is in the wrong place when it’s in the museum, it would seem, because there are lots of people there. Lütticken ends up with a contradictory position. On the one hand, performance should not enter the museum because the museum tames and disciplines performance, subjecting it to “historicization . . . canonization and collecting,” the culturalindustrial (or simply academic) mechanics of value production and codification; these prevent it from direct interaction with a co-present audience (91). On the other hand, once in the museum, performance is subjected to the overwhelming onslaught of direct encounter with its audience, only successful when it can retain its distance. First, the museum threatens performance’s heteronomous fluidity; then, the museum endangers its autonomous integrity. In this way, Lütticken mistakes a question (about museums and their functions) posed by the works for a problem that invalidates their existence there. That is, people are indeed the problem, but not because they get in the way of the art. Or, more precisely, people—the crowd, the audience, the contemporary public, its assemblages and assemblies—are the problematic, the terrain to be investigated by these artworks and what we make of them. To be fair, however, it is not Lütticken who creates this contradictory set of demands that asks a work of art on display both to intimately engage with its context and to speak for itself. He is only wrong in thinking this contradiction is born of a clash of unlike entities.6 Indeed, each term of the ordinary binary (museum/ performance) is split this way, endeavoring to be both responsively heteronomous and responsibly autonomous.

MEASURING MUSEUMS, OR THE INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE Museum studies scholar Stephen Weil argues that a profound shift in how museums the world over negotiated these competing claims began crystallizing in the 1970s. Further, this formation centers on a rigorous rethinking of what it means for a museum to serve its public. As encapsulated in the title of an article published in 1999, this rethinking entails a movement from “being about something to being for somebody” (1999: 229). Weil elaborates: In place of an establishment-like institution focused primarily inward on the growth, care, and study of its collection, what is emerging instead is a more entrepreneurial institution that . . . [has] shifted its principal focus outward to concentrate on providing a variety of primarily educational services to the public, and will measure its success in that effort by the overarching criterion of whether it is actually able to provide those services in a demonstrably effective way. (229–30) If this passage makes it sound like the contemporary museum is subject to the greater shifts in political economy we usually describe as neoliberalism, this is no accident.

224

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Weil is quick to point out that an outward focus on public service and contextual responsiveness travels hand in glove with the necessity to measure outcomes: here emerges “performance” of a second type.7 The question that arises, critically, is the extent to which a museum can exist in this world while pushing against the overriding character of our historical moment. The same question applies to artists’ practices. What a museum does is always a balancing act between its institutional goals and the resources it has or can attain. Artists, of course, find themselves in the same bind; all the artists discussed here also try to make sense of that situation in their work. The aim of this chapter is to add nuance to the ways in which these imbrications can be discussed and, therefore, to our explanatory models for approaching what happens when performance enters and moves through art museums as well. To that end, it is important to stress how Weil focuses on both mission and measurement becoming outward looking. Drawing on the work of Kenneth Hudson, Weil states that “at least three-quarters of the world’s currently active museums were established after 1945. In no way has the level of direct governmental assistance . . . kept pace” (Weil 1999: 232). Even at the time of that writing, the situation was far worse than a failing to “keep pace.” In the United States—Weil’s main focus—support had actually declined in real terms compared to previous decades; in the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s government had led a massive withdrawal of funding from the public sector, as well as a general drive to privatization and a culture of individualism. This general trend has only accelerated in the wake of the financial crises of 2008. For example, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, threatened with a 28 percent cut to its budget in 2012, was lucky to escape with an 11 percent reduction, while the Netherlands Media Arts Institute (a crucial hub for the conservation and distribution of new media works) shuttered on December 31, 2012, when the government withdrew all funding. These are only a few examples, but Weil avers that “the result, almost worldwide, has been the same: to change the mix in the sources of support for museums with a decrease in the proportion coming directly from governmental sources and a corresponding increase in the proportion that must be found elsewhere” (232). This shift in museums worldwide toward newly accountable and self-supporting economies is the context in which that large-scale shift to an outward-looking museum takes place. It is undeniable that a new economic reality produces a new set of imperatives. As Weil puts it, when “a museum must rely for some portion of its support on ‘box office’”—including not only ticket sales, but also revenues from museum shops, cafes, and so on—as well as on corporate donors, “it should hardly be surprising that museums are increasingly conscious of what might be of interest to the public” (232). Another way to describe the turn toward the audience, then, is a move from a “selling” mode to a “marketing” one. In the selling mode, their efforts had been concentrated on convincing the public to “buy” their traditional offerings. In the marketing mode, their starting point instead is the public’s own needs and interests, and their efforts are concentrated on first trying to discover and then attempting to satisfy those public needs and interests. (233)

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

225

And we should note that contemporary artists who are being newly commissioned to make work for museums often intervene in this dynamic: neither selling nor marketing, but perhaps conjuring new “needs” and desires by inventing new formats. Artists are imagining, and asking us to imagine with them, how the art encounter happens in this newly emerging context. Instead of taking the audience for granted, they are also summoning that audience and proposing its shape and its position in relation to objects of history. At any rate, this description of museums under neoliberalism’s pressure to hustle, monetize, and extract in order to survive might make it seem as though speculation is indeed what all this performance is about, that the museum has no choice but to dance for its dinner. And yet Weil insists that “something more profound than mere box-office appeal is involved in this change of focus” (233). As a direct result of this changed funding environment, the museum ecosystem has rearranged itself around the need to demonstrate effectiveness—that is, to develop ways of articulating and evaluating organizational performance. In terms of this chapter and the question of museums’ relationships to performance (in both senses), it is important to note that Weil refers to this evolutionary mutation as a “tremendous increase of professionalism” (233–4). By this, he intends the mounting importance of professional organizations—like the United Kingdom’s Museums Association (est. 1889), the American Association of Museums in the United States (est. 1906), or the International Council of Museums (ICOM; est. 1946)—that set “best practices” and offer institutional accreditation to museums that meet standards. While it would be overreaching to suggest that position papers or resolutions adopted by these formal associations (e.g., ICOM) in any way directly set programming priorities at individual museums—indeed, the remit of those listed previously covers a variety of types of museums, not just those focused on art— these documents do provide a window on how these large-scale shifts within the sector have played out. Two consistent elements are instructive. First, museum culture has moved on from precisely the notions of “the museum” with which this chapter began. Already in 1971, the assembled membership at the Ninth General Conference of ICOM adopted a resolution “rejecting as ‘questionable’ what it called the ‘traditional concept of the museum’ with its emphasis ‘merely’ on the possession of objects of national and cultural heritage, the conference urged museums to undertake a complete reassessment of the needs of their publics” (Weil 1999: 237). It is tantalizing in the context of a materialist analysis like this one to note the synchronicity between this shift within the field of museum professionals and the coeval development of institutional critique as a signal art practice of that same decade. Daniel Buren’s seminal text, “The Function of the Museum,” for example, had been written only one year earlier in 1970 and was not published until 1973, two years after the resolution passed.8 The notion that these two modes of critique might be rooted in the same funding shifts for the arts and what these caused to become visible and valuable, however, will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say for now that Weil’s notion of a museum’s “marketing” should now appear in its full complexity—we can begin to appreciate the difference between simply giving people something they will like (which is the suspicion underlying Lütticken’s

226

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

warmed-over critique of the “culture industry”) and working to discover who the public is or could be and what they need—or indeed, experimenting with these unstable possibilities. The second consistent emphasis is on the museum’s changing role as a new kind of educator, one notionally in the service of social change, or at least focused on its own role in facilitating sociality as a good in itself. This new museum would seek to banish the notion that museum education tutors in the top-down fashion described by Tony Bennett in The Birth of The Museum. He describes how the earliest nineteenth-century exhibitions and museums open to the public (read: the working class) in the UK trained viewers not only in technological advances, or important histories, or taste, but also in “the modes of deportment required” (Bennet 1995: 73). In reimagining the educational service role of the museum and eschewing “any monolithic approach,” that same ICOM resolution of 1971 “urged [museums] to develop programs that addressed ‘the particular social environment[s] in which they operated’” (Weil 1999: 237). Beginning in the 1970s, then, the museum becomes not only outward facing, but also two-faced—focused on developing programming from the bottom-up in order to demonstrate worth to potential benefactors surveying the field (and its performance indicators) from on high. Any museum subject to these economic imperatives operates under an insoluble double bind. For a museum of contemporary art, add to this fundamental internal contradiction the need to convey art histories productively (in a way that is relevant, responsible, and innovative with respect to current scholarship and general audiences), to discover and nurture emerging artists, and to make plain the social value of how all these activities are conducted (to those same scholars and audiences, as well as to funding bodies, who or whatever those might be), and then one begins to develop a sense of any such museum’s polyvocality. This litany should not be confused, however, with an apology. We offer this contextual elaboration only in paving the way to a more incisive set of criteria for evaluating success and failure with respect to performance’s place in the museum. This notion of “service” operating here is replete with pitfalls—for example, the potential for pandering to performance metrics as ends in themselves or for (intentionally or unintentionally) condescending to audiences when attempting to produce greater accessibility. And to make matters more complex, the countervailing claims stem from the same material circumstance. The museum must perform. It is important to note the synchronies between this incipient injunction for institutions to perform, the professional changes it precipitated, and the facts of artistic practice at the same moment. For, these same years mark the first appearances of performance, in its live manifestations, in major museums. To name just a few examples: in 1971, Yayoi Kusama made a disruptive and impromptu Happening at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead sought most of all to irk the living through the eruptive appearance of unruly flesh in the museum’s sculpture garden, but Kusama was only walking through a door already prised open earlier that year by the museum’s Summergarden program, for which Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and John Cage all did pieces. And just two years later, in 1973, the Happening had been incorporated into official MoMA

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

227

programming in the form of Marta Minujín’s Kidnappening.9 So titled because it was a Happening in the form of a kidnapping; Minujín and other performers literally absconded with fifteen willing museumgoers, transporting them blindfolded from the museum to various locations around the city. An advertisement for the event that ran in the New York Times featured an image of the artist in a blindfold and promised that “volunteers [would] be spirited away.”10 At the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1970, Yvonne Rainer staged Continuous Project Altered Daily, a work that expanded even the usual durational emphasis of dance by including learning and rehearsing as part of the work on display. Trisha Brown showed Walking on the Wall, which blended choreographic experimentation with reflection on the white cube gallery space. Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, and Steve Paxton all showed works at the Whitney around the same time.11 Meanwhile, in 1968, Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) held its first performance, an “action-happening” conceived by Nouveau Réaliste artist César. For this piece, César created one of his expanding poured-plastic sculptures for an audience of formally attired Tate patrons and invited the crowd to break off parts of the object to keep as souvenirs once it had dried and hardened.12 The year 1971 saw the infamous Robert Morris retrospective at Tate, for which the artist constructed a sort of phenomenological playground to be explored and activated by visitors. The show is notorious for the fact that it closed early because so many people injured themselves and the works in what Tate acidly described as museumgoers’ “overzealous participation.”13 And in 1972, the show Seven Exhibitions featured artists using materials as unorthodox as “human participation” and “social assumptions,” and crucially, the “institution” and its own forms.14 This short list of examples does more than demonstrate that performance entered the museum quite some time ago. It also shows that performance entered the museum at the same time museums began to interrogate and work toward new understandings of themselves and their mission. This historical fact, in turn, must be understood in its full profundity. This earlier appearance of performance in the museum was a true convergence—institutions and artists alike focused on reconceiving roles assigned to viewers. As a result, some complaints levied by critics at that time insisted that performance did not belong in the museum because it was too experimental, too disruptive, that it might not be art at all.15

THE “SPECTRALITY” OF THE NOT-SO-LIVE ARTS Performance has been in the museum for a long time, but there is now—in the last fifteen years or so—a concerted effort to historicize and to make it an official part of the museum apparatus. New curatorial departments and positions have been established, objects (such as scores, photographs, notes, and letters) once deemed archival documentation of live works have increasingly migrated into vitrines, onto walls, and even into collections as works of art, and a number of retrospective exhibitions have restaged live works first conceived and performed decades ago.16 Consequently, it is increasingly rare to encounter anyone insisting that performance is not art, that it should be excluded from art history, museum exhibitions and collections, and so on—now it seems plain that these works belong in the canon.

228

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Performance’s relatively new historical respectability, however, generates an anxiety that this mode of institutionalization itself threatens that art status by endangering performance’s very ontology. Ironically, it is mostly those same artworks from the “heroic” period of performance in the 1960s and 1970s that are once again imagined as potential nonart, but for very different reasons. Here, we encounter the discourse of spectrality and its notion that historical works of performance—once considered fearsome, now fragile—exist in the museum like souls in the bardo. As Hal Foster puts it, “Not quite live, not quite dead, these reenactments have introduced a zombie time into these institutions” (2015: 127). According to Foster, what these experiments—say, Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces (2005) at the Guggenheim or Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Roof Piece Re-Layered (2011) at MoMA—exhibit “is less a historical performance than an image of that performance. The performance appears as a simulation” (129). The work is not really there because whatever it was is past, and what remains can only point backward inadequately. With this appraisal of performance’s zombification, Foster echoes deeply entrenched notions about performance’s identity residing in its authentic one-off-ness, its ephemerality. This notion of performance’s mediumspecificity (ironic as such a thing might be) stems from the language that surrounded experimental works during the 1960s and 1970s and its powerful restatement and codification in Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Foster 2015: 18).17 This suspicion that a historical performance cannot materialize a second time is a consistent trope. Foster writes that a historical performance work, transported across time and space into the museum, “does not actualize . . . so much as it virtualizes. It seems to offer the presence we desire, but it is a spectral presence, one that famishes, with the result that as viewers we come to feel a little spectral as well” (2015: 130). Lütticken’s museum is a factory; Foster’s is a haunted house. As zombies or hungry ghosts, the artworks that haunt here are not only empty, but they also endanger the audience that encounters them, threatening to eat their brains or consume their souls. This incomplete art has the power to hollow.18 We should note, however, that Foster’s critique inverts the way performance or theater studies scholars engage with this problematic. Rebecca Schneider, for example, writes, “The instability of the divide between life and death is . . . something of a theatrical thing. Onstage, the lack of resolute demarcation between the live and the dead is the very stuff of the art form” (2011: 20). According to her, that actors appear as living masks for scripted characters (and previous actors who have inhabited their role) makes performance a perfect site for contemplating the capitalist commodity form and its fetishized mystification of social relations. She writes, “for Marx, capital, once produced by living labor, can also be called congealed or dead labor”; in theater, “[l]iving labor brings dead capital (back) to life” (2012: 156). For Foster, a repeated performance fails to live; for Schneider, it frustrates death. This difference in appraisals of performance’s spectrality is a function of disciplinary parallax. As Amelia Jones—working in the seam between art history and performance studies—puts it, the former discipline has a tendency to insist “art be frozen in time”; the latter to “claim that performance acts are special because they are temporal and seemingly immediate” (Jones 2011a: 35). A portrait

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

229

in broad strokes, it might nonetheless illustrate why Foster sees (mostly) dead people where Schneider sees (mostly) live art. For her part, Jones argues that performance in the museum demonstrates the untenability of each of those positions. She writes, “The re-enactment both testifies to our desire to know the past in order to secure ourselves in the present and the paradox of that knowledge always taking place through repetition. It thus exposes the paradox of that knowledge, proving our own inexorable mortality: the fact that we are always reaching to secure time, and always failing” (Jones 2011b: 19). The living (eruptive, unpredictable) part of performance in the museum demonstrates the impossibility of retrieving history “as it really was” and the dead (congealed, repeatable) part points to the representational quality of all experience, demonstrating that even the present is never really present. Not only is the “original” work gone, but all subsequent versions pass from this world to the next instantly and just as completely. The important point for this discussion is that all these modes of figuring performance’s spectrality—whether stated negatively or positively—seek to describe the extent to which performance makes history available to successive audiences as a function of medium characteristics assigned to performance as an art form. That is, performance’s dis/appearance (its fleeting ephemerality) becomes a cipher for the in/accessibility of the past. The quality of that access and the audience’s role are essentially predetermined by the theory of performance in operation (that it is above all rooted in this dis/appearance) and the mode of spectrality it figures for previous works. Here, we aim to demonstrate that any theory of performance—if such a thing can or should exist at all—should follow from an analysis of how a given work mediates the past for audiences, rather than having a theory of performance’s supposedly immutable ontology lead those analyses. Where the discourses of speculation and spectrality fall short, then, is in swapping cart and horse in exactly this fashion. Each underestimates how the performance works under discussion take a shifting economic and social terrain as their explicit subject and how the works approach this question through an expanded kind of formal analysis. This formal analysis can remain invisible if one is already sure one knows that performance is comprised of dis/appearing ephemerality, that the “form” of performance is chiefly its temporality. The form under examination, rather, is precisely the shape of the interaction between the museum and the people who populate it (both as its administrators and its audiences). These works comprise relations between people (artists, publics, curators, and so on) and their historical situation, and they are informed by institutional spaces and their multiple investments. Indeed, the terms “speculation” and “spectrality” might equally be reclaimed as descriptions of deliberate attitudes taken by artists in order to explore and model the interface between the purportedly private world of the artwork within the contested public space of the twenty-first-century museum. In looking to move away from anxieties about fidelity to “originals” and the modernist notions in which it traffics—for example, the idea that performance is a medium (based in time’s incessant flight) or the belief that meaning resides in the work itself (and, therefore, can be present

230

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

in or absent from a later version)—we propose two new terms that turn the lens of analysis more explicitly onto the question of audience and how performance in the museum mediates notions of the public and its relations to history. First, we will discuss how performances summon audiences, how people are gathered and called into being as a public. Second, rather than asking whether works persist—or in what state of undeath they do—we will propose inheritance as a way of approaching the question of history, privileging how a public acquires access to it, as well as a sense of its value and purpose. In proposing these terms, we look to shift the analytical focus; we also look to effect a change in scale in how we approach the question of history. When we imagine “performance” as a medium with inherent characteristics and “the museum” as a monolithic entity with a single (antithetical) agenda, we end up asking about history as though it were also a unitary thing, as the past that either can or cannot be accessed. When we examine performances in terms of how they interact with specific museums (and make them perform their various functions), we can ask about the histories they can enact, make visible, or interrupt.

THE PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS Tino Sehgal’s practice—comprising live works made for museums and galleries beginning in the 2000s—is widely acknowledged as game-changing. But his work and its legible investigation into the relation between liveness, museology, and value should be seen as a crystalline formation of inchoate solutions bubbling in the laboratories of many other artists during the same period. As such, the clarity of his propositions offers a useful key for reading form across the field of performance in this art context. Combining his study of economics, contemporary dance, and the linguistic theory of performativity,19 Sehgal’s “situations” choreographed for enactment by live “interpreters” (his terms) represented a watershed in understanding how the museum functioned. Suddenly visible in and through his work were not only the laboring bodies that produced it—the literal place of people—but also new senses of how history is encountered in a given context, inhabited, and transmitted. With an insistence on the work’s enactment as its only mode (rather than documentation, or the display of a score), Sehgal’s rehearsed and repeated enactments effected a kind of “tensed” time, a temporal passage made heavy and brittle by crystallizing the weight and habits of the past in a present moment. Sehgal’s work made those who encountered it see behavior, and by extension, the human infrastructure of the museum as performative, and thus open to being played or elaborated through repetition and variation. In this sense, it should be understood in a tradition of institutional critique by the likes of Daniel Buren (previously mentioned), Michael Asher, and subsequently Andrea Fraser. Sehgal’s early situations such as This is Propaganda (2003) or This is So Contemporary (2005), for example, were choreographed for interpreters who pose as gallery attendants and are “activated” or triggered only when a visitor enters the gallery. What links questions of institutional performance to Sehgal’s own performance practice (and also to that lineage of institutional critique) is that his works appear during what Dorothea von Hantelmann20 has described as the “opening hours” duration of the

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

231

exhibition, in contrast to the “appointment time” of theater. His works are grown from the principles of dance choreography, and thus based in repeatability. With their carefully devised parameters, they have a presence akin to the stability and permanence of sculpture, in that they are rostered and organized without gaps, and for the full hours of a gallery or museum day. Crucially, his enacted and repeated mode of live art never points back to an original. In its insistence on live presence without documentary traces, it becomes impossible to situate his work in a time line (as might be the case with photographs in a chronological display). His work exists only as a (rehearsed) iterative present. Yet, his is not the pure present tense of that former notion of performance art championed by Phelan, which (even if it has been criticized by Rebecca Schneider et al.) persists in the imagination as an attribute of liveness (especially when considered against “the museum”). If Phelan’s originary myth stresses the time of performance as eruptive, as capable of exiting the ordinary flow of time and leaving the past behind, and relates clearly to a model of performance from the 1960s and 1970s, then the new attitude embodied in Sehgal’s practice and in other contemporary performance that relies on repeated scripts and rituals is one that feels the persistence of the past in the present and, therefore, finds the past a valuable and necessary object to identify and confront. Sehgal proposed a new notion of the install-ability of live performance, its potential permanence and capacity to be editioned and acquired. He drew attention to its fundamental relationship to the human choreography of the institution. This demonstration made for a significant contribution to the understanding of viewers and museum administration alike about the provisional and performative bases of art and culture underwriting a museum’s typical and historical functions. Most importantly, perhaps, his play with these conceptual aspects of the protocols of art in terms of both exhibition and market, as well as his anti-publicity stance in banning photography of the work, trod daringly close to an appearance of the kind of complicity Lütticken theorizes: collusion with the late-capitalist experience economy, the commodifying of subjectivity, and the use of stealth marketing. None of this, of course, is accidental. Recall how Foster’s “zombie time” argument and the discourse of spectrality it typifies hold that a performance work’s operations and effects become ineffective, are transformed into mere representation once inside the institution. Yet, Sehgal’s work, far from being “famished” by the institution, performed an operation on it and with it. In his ambition to insert this alternative proposal of value and presenttense experience into the existing format of the chronology-based museum, the artist effected what we could describe as a kind of drag-like “passing” in order to enter its collection. He made live work that, rather than emphasizing its liveliness, was proposed as akin to sculpture: solid, reliably “on” during opening hours. Such conceptual games ensured its entry. Once inside, however, it worked its way into the DNA of the institution: shifting values concerning object possession, modes of working, questions around conservation, and indeed expectations about the boundaries of the “work” and where it was located. The work’s choreography, its interactive protocols, its shift-work structure pressed upon and drew attention to existing staff working patterns and contracts for performers, which had not, until

232

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

this point, accommodated the kinds of durational shifts that this work required. Sehgal’s work might have mimicked the presence of sculpture on a surface level, but its production and acquisition for the collection required—variously—new administration and new database categories. It also needed new kinds of curatorial care: dressing rooms, water supplies, a new approach to “maintenance” through discussion and feedback sessions, engagement with the human resources department. While the enactor in his work This is Propaganda (2003)—a work acquired for Tate’s collection in 2004–5—might resemble a visitor experience attendant who stands in the gallery, the underlying structures determining their employment—the hiring process, skills, hours, pay, breaks—were determined differently, and had to be negotiated specifically in order to enable the continuation of the work. Seghal’s work, enacted by a group of individuals—people, usually not professional actors, who brought their own stories, thinking, and ideas as well as the ability to perform physically in the piece—introduced a new micro-community into the existing infrastructure of museum staffing and working culture, with an alternate set of bonds and values. As part of this process, Sehgal had to engage and test his artistic vision not only with and against a system set up for the conservation of physical matter, but also with Tate’s regulations for labor and human resources in the manner in which his interpreters were rostered, paid, contracted, and given breaks. Questions of institutional welfare and regulations for hiring and managing such roles were new facets of material engagement between the work and the institution: an institution that was not set up to produce performance, but to look after, display, and exhibit the art objects in its care. Far from their appearance being spectral, these appearances in Sehgal’s work, and others that we will discuss, were orchestrated by substantial shifts in the museum’s economic and administrative base, effecting foundational shifts and opening up new capacities: engagement with the actors union Equity for advice on pay; a deep engagement with Time Based Media conservation colleagues about how we might fix the parameters of such an acquisition, and eventually a new, specifically skilled production coordinator for producing performance work. The accommodation of such complex work, moreover, initiated a sense that permission had been taken, space had been created, for such a purpose. The imaginative power of such a proposition wrought real changes within the workings of the institution and its culture of value. Sehgal’s practice—both in its conception and aims and how it engaged with the museum landscape it negotiates—interlaces in exemplary fashion two threads many other artists (including, for example, Roman Ondak, Elmgreen and Dragset, Carlos Amorales, and Monster Chetwynd) had already been variously following, spinning, or tugging on during the early 2000s. Firstly, these artists begin to address, rally, invite, or summon an audience. Not merely to appear for an audience (as in theater) or be in place to be sought by one (how a painting sits on a wall, to be seen), but to summon by inviting attention, directly addressing, or eliciting engagement. And the roots of such engagement work their way into the human infrastructure of the museum more deeply than they might in a space already designed for the appearance of the live body as a focus (as in a theater). For these reasons, we find summoning to be a more accurate and powerful line of analysis than speculation.

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

233

Secondly, these artists also began to stage a relationship to historical time as a live situation of uncertain inheritance. Not resting content with the (essentially modernist) notion that the work of art is suspended outside of time, as an eruptive moment, but instead, seeing that history as always already related to where we are, even constitutive of it. These artists began to make visible, as a living concern, the inheritance of the past that precedes you, makes you. And for these reasons, we prefer the question of inheritance to the assertion of spectrality. In the first vein, approaches to liveness are not so much concerned with an authentic experience secured through ephemeral immediacy, but with conjuring new experiences of sharing in and confronting the encounter with art in newly summoned patterns of attention, assembly, or congregation.21 In the second, we see artists dealing with history by performing and inhabiting it, dramatizing the museum as a space of history.22 Moreover, because these two threads are not neatly separable, we find an entanglement of these concerns: artists probing the museum as an architecture of value production by putting together the question of audience formats with the question of histories. And running through these two categories is the persistence of an appetite for dialogical exchange: stories to be told or ideas conveyed, but enacted for somebody. The artists in this early 2000s period proposed situations that are inherently dialogical and invest viewers with a certain imaginative responsibility in their attendance and investment in the work. Taking examples from Tate, we will look specifically at that asymmetric confluence of interests: between the appetite for audience of the emerging “mass museum” (and its diminished state funding) and the summoning of audience by artists re-engaged with relational and performance-based approaches. Tate Modern (opened in 2000) was conceived in the climate of diminishing governmental support previously outlined, and its founding director, Nicholas Serota, established that the museum would function with a 60/40 split in public/private funding. Tate Modern needed to be both a publicly accountable and a commercially viable arts organization.23 In her thesis, “Establishing Tate Modern: Vision and Patronage” (2013), Caroline Donnellan notes that the museum also emerged at a moment in London in which a fundamental reconsideration of the nature of “public space” was taking place: marking a shift from a focus on parks and green spaces toward “urban” or “consumer spaces” and a new “pavement culture” (2013: 29–30). Art historian Briony Fer noted that Tate Modern’s very architecture, with its glass panels and large public space at its core, already suggested that gathering, observing movement, and perspectives on distance within and outside the building were as important as looking at the art in the galleries (Donnellan 2013: 224). The place of performance at Tate from the early 2000s (across both sites, but now initiated by Tate Modern) took root between the countervailing, but conjoined demands that constitute the injunction to perform, as described earlier in the chapter. In early 2002, one offer of private funding immediately showed up the composite nature of the new organization and the position of performance at its crux. The sponsorship came from the Internet bank, Egg, and the funds came in through the enterprises department, specifically catering. The sponsor left the brief open, but the question was: What could Tate do that was new? Both sponsor and

234

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

museum had large-scale live events in mind. What Tate Enterprises saw was not only the cash opportunity—to the tune of £1 million—but also necessary audience building and profile raising.24 For the curatorial department, it was a chance to open up new potential within the museum; to experiment with the new space and forms of collaborative practice that Tate had thus far not been able to produce within the economy of its paying exhibitions program. The asymmetric meeting point of interest here, in 2002, was evident in the push and pull of negotiation that went on in the setting up of “Tate & Egg Live,” as the one-year program of commissioned events was titled. A stark contrast emerged between one conception of partially sponsor-driven “audience building” (really, more like “audience testing,” that is, is this our audience?) that sought to mount largescale events with their own, more-or-less predetermined formats, such as concerts (by indie pop acts like PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, as well as classical musician Arvo Part, who performed a piece dedicated to Anish Kapoor’s Turbine Hall commission) and another version stemming from curatorial lobbying for a parallel program (with roughly one tenth of the budget) and conceived as performance created by visual artists. The latter reflected a curatorial desire to invite the visual artists who were already experimenting with how an as-yet-unknown audience might encounter art afresh. Many of the performance works featured at Tate Modern in 2003—by artists such as Lali (now Monster) Chetwynd, Mark Leckey, hobbypop, Kyupi Kyupi, and Carlos Amorales, and in subsequent series in the years that followed, Pablo Bronstein, Linder, Gerard Byrne, Olivia Plender, Liam Gillick, Daria Martin, and Celine Condorelli—concerned the creation of live rituals that staged both performers and the audience who would share in “the work.” These were unlike the historical image of “performance art” from an earlier period, in that this work was often more focused on plumbing the changing nature of art’s institutions than insisting on an anti-institutional, or even anti-market, stance. Crucially, there was an intersection between how artists were imagining the situation of the art encounter as a live, reciprocal, theatrical, playful, artistically determined one, and the institution’s own process of learning and self-formation. Further, this often included attention not only to the choreographing of the audience, but also to the nature of the interpretation materials, and publicity. Often, the work also grappled specifically with what it meant to be within a museum.25 On the evening of Friday May 9, 2003, Mexican artist Carlos Amorales staged a wrestling performance, Amorales vs Amorales, in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, as part of Tate & Egg Live (see Figure 3.13.1). The artist, whose practice had a base in drawing and painting, had designed masks and costumes for the lucha libre wrestlers, who—as a displaced kind of self-portrait—wore cartoon versions of his own face.26 Amorales was fascinated by the sport’s popularity in Mexico as a form of entertainment, in combination with its underlying ritualistic and moralistic themes. Typically, good battles evil, creating a narrative that further engages the audience in “the fight.” Amorales was, around this time, invited to stage this piece in the Centre Pompidou, the Walker Art Center, and a wrestling arena in Tijuana, and later SF MoMA.

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

235

FIGURE 3.13.1:  Carlos Amorales, Amorales vs. Amorales, 2003. Performance at Tate Modern. Photo by Jeremy Hilder. Image courtesy of Kurimanzutto and Estudio Amorales.

Amorales’s performance could be described as being in the “pop” tradition, and his fascination with staging this work was not simply as a performance image, but in thinking about how such an event would insert itself into the museum; what it might do. Tate’s strategies for press and marketing were tied to the nature of the sport, in parallel with an overall marketing campaign for the live series. But rather than seeing marketing as a dirty necessity, Amorales embraced the notion that publicity and amplification for the event were an inherent part of the work. Tate’s press and marketing departments sought connections with wrestling clubs and fans. And, as quoted in the Guardian newspaper (the media partner for this series), “[Catherine Wood, the Curator] and Amorales intend to drive around the streets of south London with a loudspeaker drumming up a crowd.”27 (In the end, this didn’t happen, but it was a strategy the artist had used previously.) The publicity campaign worked; the event amassed a huge crowd, filling the Turbine Hall both physically and sonically; people cheering and booing in turn. The central atrium of the museum was transformed, temporarily, into a vast sports arena: an image of mass-ness in the museum that was—for Tate Modern—thus far unprecedented. (Recall the fact that the first use of the Turbine Hall for art proper was the presentation of the conventional, large, bronze Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture, Maman, in 1999.) The image of Amorales’s work is in subtle ways at odds with the notion that “the museum” itself “uses” liveness to draw an audience. As a young artist, unknown in a UK context, Amorales was not brought in to pull the crowds. But he was explicitly interested in the mechanics of a mass mob, as a necessary and charged part of the

236

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

experience of the wrestling performance. His event required such participation in order to appear authentic, as a total situation. Was it audience building? In a sense no, because there was a “cheat”: many of the people who came were drawn in for the real wrestlers, not the art. Yet, as an image, this work set a template for what the mass museum might look like. Could art, in its large new spaces, be popular, like this? Clearly not in a way that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (the government funders of Tate) might have anticipated. In the same series, Mark Leckey—whose work at this point had been presented in artist-run spaces, nightclubs, or his own studio flat—took the invitation to make a performance for the museum as an opportunity not simply to displace his audiencefollowing from one kind of space (subcultural) to another (official museum), but to investigate the meaning of that transition. Instead of straightforwardly critiquing the museum, the artist paradoxically embraced the magic he perceived in its fundamental qualities—its connotations of sacredness and high culture—while playing out an assault on this status. Leckey chose the most spectacularly church-like situation at Tate Britain, borrowed a significant work from the collection (Jacob Epstein’s Jacob and the Angel), and left the ordinary gallery lights on rather than creating a “theater” atmosphere to play a sound composition that was part serenade, part Dada attack. He conjured a hallucination within the ordinary museum lighting, after hours. But perhaps most important to note is that this work, Big Box Statue Action, was titled in circus poster spirit inspired by Leckey’s research into a historic showing of the then thought to be salubrious Epstein sculptures for a paying audience in a disused shop on Oxford Street in the 1920s. In a different way than Amorales, and with a certain class-conscious politics, Leckey, too, played the role of the showman or impresario, and brought museum culture into dialogue with contemporary music and club culture: a Brixton-built sound system that played his own collaged composition, mixing classical, avant-garde performance, and electronic music. The experience of this work was transformative in its audience’s understanding of, and investment in, the museum, and what it could be. Rather than allowing his subcultural perspective to be absorbed and used up by the authority and weight of the historic institution, Leckey found a way to unsettle the institution’s conventions and perform them on his terms. Most striking was that he did so while dramatizing a sense of awe for the museum’s standing, the objects in its care. As visitors stood in a circle and observed the face-off between the alternately serenading and affronting sound and the rock-solid, canonical sculpture, the experience of viewing this sculpture was set in time and was felt to be for somebody, for those assembled (and indeed prefiguring a later Leckey exhibition title: See, We Assemble, 2012), with palpable intensity. For the crowd of 400 or so people, there was a sense of trespassing, of occupying the institution as though illicitly, at night, and of a temporary ownership. The museum, and this artwork, for that passage of time were no longer external entities, but existed through bonds of consensus while attended to in the possession of those who were present. This sense summoned a vivid alternative to the presumed imposition of power upon us as visitor-subjects in ways that were already defined. Likewise, Monster (formerly Lali and, in 2006–13, Spartacus) Chetwynd also thought about negotiating her place, as a young artist, within its national

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

237

collection at Tate. How, when invited, to make space within the history that was already represented? How to inhabit it? And how to invite others into that space? Chetwynd’s approach to the negotiation of historical material (film, pop video, performance art) and her own live work complicates the notion of “zombie time,” directly anticipating Foster’s question. Indeed, one of her early quasi-reenactments was a live iteration of Michael Jackson’s literally zombie-filled Thriller video: her costumed performers (a band of loyal collaborators: artists, community members, and friends, some who participated as part of learning workshops devised by the artist) erupted in the midst of a nightclub event in the East End of London called Nerd in 2002, to present an impromptu, low-fi, and clearly hand-made version of the famous high-budget music video. Chetwynd’s translations of familiar or shared cultural material into live performance were not attempts at retrieving an original, restoring life to the dead. She was never mimicking their original liveness or production levels, or even their medium. In fact, for her performance at Tate in 2003, Chetwynd selected a painting to enact as tableau vivant: a Victorian fairy painting by the artist Richard Dadd titled The Faerie Feller’s Master Stroke (1855–64). Her performers, costumed in papier maché and painted iterations of a variety of characters that appear in the painting— including a carrot and a goblin—appeared in the event bursting through the lumpy gold-painted frame of a giant photocopy and papier maché enlargement of the original painting held up by two performers like a circus hoop. Here, Chetwynd’s manner of engaging performers bordered on the “community” or “learning” territory that some might have ascribed to a separate museum department. In future work, Chetwynd went further to blur these lines by making performances that were explicitly presented as participatory workshops of the kind that children might partake in, as with her Iron Age Pasta Workshop, for example (Studio Voltaire 2014). Chetwynd’s interest was in creating instances of meaning within a community of participants and spectators by articulating shared points of reference and themes. Whether biblical stories, Hollywood films, or feminist politics, Chetwynd found a way to propose the museum or gallery as a site for a kind of communal assembly in which memory is manifest as image. If these works by Amorales, Leckey, and Chetwynd found new ways to acknowledge the museum’s proximity to entertainment spaces as strategies for summoning audiences, inventing formats of assembly, and experimenting with new modes of relation to “sculpture” or “painting,” while challenging their positions as inheritors of the histories and values that the museum represented, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera proposed an alternative attitude: one founded upon the politics of power and authority, and questioning institutional hierarchy and complicity with the state. Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper 5 first appeared in the context of a group exhibition The Living Currency (2008), organized by guest curator Pierre Bal-Blanc (Figure 3.13.2). For this work, Metropolitan mounted police performed six crowd control exercises typically used in riot situations, to no apparent end, inside the museum. It created a striking image of the crowd as fundamental to the work, constitutive of its meaning, and yet subject to the powers that brought it into play in a way that is typically masked by the apparently politically neutral space of the

238

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURE 3.13.2:  Tania Bruguera, Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008, performed as part of UBS Openings: Live—The Living Currency, Tate Modern. Photo: © Tate. Photography by Sheila Burnett.

art museum. As an artist whose practice is founded in activism, Bruguera saw the “street-like” aesthetic of the Turbine Hall (conceived by the architects and planners as being part of this new-genre indoor/urban public space) in a critical new way: One that directly and pointedly connected the inside of the museum to the streets outside, by both the appearance of the trotting horses as they exited the building back toward Whitehall, and the political lines that joined the national institution to the police force who use such methods to subdue a crowd during a riot. We would do well to note how this work echoes the critical fears of mob energy described earlier, but makes this hostility overt (and thus visible for analysis). If Amorales summoned a crowd who understood themselves as constitutive of a fun sports event, Bruguera pointed to the notion that one’s subjectivity is constituted by an address from the police: it asserts the contingency of one’s status as a political subject. These early examples of performance in the 2000s at Tate represent a set of templates for imagining the encounter with an audience for art that radically shifted the museum’s expected terms. Summoning and acknowledging the presence of a mass, or group of participants, was fundamental to the way in which these works worked, and to how they interacted with the set-up artists were given. These acts of assembling were both necessary, and critically knowing. The very act of “showing” was a fundamental part of each work, in each case mentioned here, coming with an often-playful nod to the notion of showmanship, with a proximity to entertainment, or with an exertion of symbolic authority. These works by young artists created fluid images that effaced their own presence in favor of iterating new collective rituals

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

239

in which the boundaries of “the work” or image were flexible and contested, and into which we, the audience, could imaginatively project and participate.28 These works tested art’s proximity to its neighboring cultural forms, conjuring images of how a twenty-first-century museum might operate in ways that acknowledged rather than played blind as regards the presence of people as a fundamental part of its constitution. These works posed speculative images of the mass museum as a space for new kinds of encounters: not just between people and things, but between people and people. Behind the scenes, artists’ visions for ambitious works in the live medium necessitated new terms in the collection database, new requirements for fundraising, new kinds of interdepartmental collaboration (notably between curatorial and visitor experience), the development of staff roles and expertise (production), and the seeds of planning the future use for the Tank spaces in the expansion of Tate Modern as Phase II. For Tate Modern, the mass audience becomes a given. The homogeneity of that mass is the thing that artists demonstrate should not be assumed. The project by Boris Charmatz and Musée de la danse, If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse? (2015), offers perhaps the most thoroughgoing experiment in summoning an audience to probe the question of inheritance (Figures 3.13.3). Over a decade into Tate’s post-2000s initiation of performance programming, this project extended the groundbreaking questions posed by the staging and acquisition of live performance scores, and elaborated questions about the museum’s human and architectural frames, by proposing a temporary, but total transformation of Tate Modern into the “Dancing Museum.” Charmatz’s project effected a combination

FIGURE 3.13.3:  Boris Charmatz, Public Warm Up at Tate Modern, 2015, part of BMW Tate Live: If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse? Photo: © Tate. Photography by Louise Haywood Schiffer.

240

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

of summoning an audience to inhabit its theatrically visible frame—danced actions inserted into galleries and spaces usually reserved for object artworks—and “tensing” time as dancers enacted and shared live history. If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse? was a two-day event involving ninety performers and up to 50,000 audience members, which proposed that by shifting our perspective (“wearing different lenses in our glasses” as Charmatz put it) we might see Tate Modern as the “Dancing Museum”: both because of the dancers who were planted in the galleries, and the ongoing pedestrian activity to be found there on a daily basis. As the project unfolded, it catalyzed observable shifts in habits of behavior and attention among the audience. Charmatz worked with the gallery and visitor experience attendants and managers to initiate new interfaces that often involved “soft” elaborations of authority on the part of museum staff who engaged with and became knowledgeable about the work via talking with the performers directly. The question, what “If Tate Modern was musée de la danse?” was posed not just through the live dance and workshops planted throughout the building, not just the summoning of a mass audience, but also by taking on the idea of a permanent collection as something that might not be an externalized material object, but something embodied (in at least two different ways). First, on the level of individual participation, a collection “object” could consist of a learned piece of dance to take away; this is the kind of collection possessed by the performers. As those dancers related their own stories to museumgoers of how and why specific pieces of choreography became important to them, even as they danced these works next to elements of the permanent collection (works that have been deemed important to Tate or to the UK or to the historical canon more broadly), their intervention suggested a second way in which collections are embodied practices. The compounded effect was to set the entire collection and the entire notion of cultural patrimony “dancing,” to lift it from its usually secure moorings and demonstrate that the enterprise of deliberating inheritance—who gets and gives what to whom—is a human endeavor, one made of people, their priorities, and their relative positions within and levels of access to power. On a more prosaic level, Charmatz addressed the museum’s material reality by working with what was given, and deliberately mobilizing the many communicative facets of the museum’s branding. Changing the “title” of the museum temporarily, as the project proposed, involved a subtle and viral insertion of that title-question into multiple facets of Tate’s brand appearance: from the member’s guide, to signage, to T-shirts, coffee cups, and badges. This project, particularly, acknowledged the framework for imagining and participating posed by a combination of physical and conceptual and branded space, such as is represented by the contemporary museum in its dual function as recognized authority and ambient social enterprise. Such an approach to summoning an audience clearly worked in a subtle, suggestive way that deliberately included the apparently neoliberal commercial facets of communication, and an explicit invitation to take part. Charmatz understood the potential to summon a mass experience as being located not simply in the physical assembling of a large crowd—although this was part of it—but in the ideological rumor planted by the iteration of an idea, posed as a question, running through the prosaic facets of

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

241

the museum encounter: the titular question (If Tate Modern was musée de la danse?) appearing not in the galleries, but in the café, on the map, or on staff T-shirts. In inviting us to raise this fictional institution within our collective imaginations, and through our own bodies, Charmatz’s summoning of audience temporarily effected a speculative vision of a whole new hybrid organization, the possibility of a new set of values, new ways of doing things. The positioning of living bodies as sites of heritage and aesthetic form challenged the material basis of the museum’s foundational collection. New interfaces were initiated by Charmatz between gallery attendants (usually positioned to protect works) and performers, so that they became mediators engaged in conversation with visitors about what was taking place. In broader terms, the museum’s assumed prioritization of permanence, stability, and fixity that runs through all of its procedures for collecting and conserving and displaying works of art was disrupted by this “pop-up” canon: temporary, fugitive, alive, but equally excellent in terms of artistic worth. Such transformation, if temporary, effected a powerful sense of the actual possibility of performing that “what if ” in institutional memory. And it is institutional memory that sets out the building blocks for potential future acts: we did that; we can do it again. When Tate Modern Phase II opened a year and a half later in 2016, the museum was primed (practically and conceptually) to integrate live performances in the collection with activated sculpture, and to tell a fluid story of their fundamental interrelation since the 1960s. What have been maligned as the apparently speculative and/or spectral natures of these performances, then, should not be understood as famished, empty, or even accidental. Experiments with publicity, assembly, and historicity are facets of deliberate attempts to reckon with the changing shape of art’s public character, the decentralization of the privileged position of its traditional audience, and the fact that these require new ways to see, experience, and narrate the past. These shifting emphases have their roots in economic changes—large-scale political recalibrations of what constitutes public goods—begun in the 1970s. In reaction to governmental disinvestment in the public sphere, museums, in complex ways, have begun to understand, or at least position, themselves as beholden to all those disinvested somebodies. The machine of the museum comprises the hydraulic interactions— sometimes smoothly pneumatic, sometimes halting and disjointed—of its diverse departments and their divergent understandings of a “shared” mission to sustain a space for art. (Curators despair when communications strategies get muddled with artistic ones.) And yet, the cases of Amorales or Charmatz demonstrate that just as artists might co-opt physical features of a location to make site-specific sculpture, artists will co-opt facets of the museum’s operations that can serve their vision, and make us reflect upon how the machine is put together. Only sometimes does such reflection take the form of a cooperative investigation undertaken by an artist and an institution working in concert; sometimes works are designed to be more antagonistic from the outset or end up functioning that way no matter the intention— but it always makes a difference, generating organizational shifts and responses to works’ demands. This process of museological and artistic co-determination stems from the fact that museums and artists alike find themselves wondering exactly who constitutes their public and what their own public role is and should be; this

242

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

existential worry is intrinsically tied to their simultaneous, mutual negotiations of a precarious financial landscape in which performance is everything. The museum not only offers a space for a new kind of summoning, for calling an audience to assemble and reimagine the mechanics and import of inheritance, but it also must figure these questions front and center in order to be seen to perform.

NOTES 1. Sven Lütticken mounts the most formidable of these cases. See Lütticken (2015) and also Saltz (2014). 2. Hal Foster’s argument is our main example for this line of attack. See Foster (2015). Amelia Jones considers this anxiety as well (see Jones 2011) . The worry that the museum situation denatures works of performance, however, has been around at least as long as performance has happened in art museums (since the 1960s)—see, for example, Westerman (2016c). 3. By “new institutional forms,” we intend the mutations wrought by a slow, almost evolutionary process of interaction between art practice and museum modes of exhibition and collection. In this way, our argument and focus are different from Shannon Jackson’s with respect to these issues. Her approach (see especially 2014) concerns immediate encounters with individual performance works when in proximity to other forms (and their viewing protocols)—that is, how the perception of a performance’s intermediality might be informed by its relation to (or deviation from) nearby paintings or sculptures. 4. While providing a weak basis for analysis of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century institutions, this image of the monolithic “museum” is rooted in the reality of the form’s centuries-old history. See, for example, Bennet (1995). 5. For an example of rhetorical war waged against intermediality and “theatricality” in the name of artistic modernism, see Fried (1967). 6. Claire Bishop (2018) also discusses the push/pull generated by opposing, simultaneous injunctions to autonomy and heteronomy. As we do, Bishop situates these contradictory demands in relation to the neoliberal economic order, but she focuses her analysis on how this plays out on the field of an individual’s modes of attention paid to artworks and, crucially, how some performances of dance in museums anticipate, manipulate, and probe those modes and capacities. Our focus is less on the nature of the public’s attention and more on anxieties about who that public is. 7. This cognate usage of the word “performance” to describe modes of adapting to neoliberalism’s demands has not gone unnoticed by scholars interested in the forms of art under discussion here, especially within the field of performance studies. See especially McKenzie (2001). 8. First published as The Function of the Museum (Buren 1973). Full text available in Alberro and Stimson (2009). 9. See interview with Ana Janevski, MoMA curator of New Media and Performance, in Giannachi and Westerman (2018). 10. For a further description of Kidnappening and a facsimile of the New York Times ad, see Iglesias Lukin (2017).

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

243

11. See interview with Jay Sanders, former curator of performance at The Whitney in Giannachi and Westerman (2018). 12. For a more complete recounting of this event and its relation to contemporaneous tensions around performance’s institutionalization, see Westerman (2016a). 13. See Westerman (2016a). 14. Performance at Tate time line: http:​//www​.tate​.org.​uk/re​searc​h/pub​licat​ions/​perfo​ rmanc​e-at-​tate/​timel​ine. 15. Fried’s already-cited 1967 attack on “theatricality” as not only other than, but opposed to art might be the strongest statement to this effect. But we could also cite a more general hostility in the popular press: The New York Daily News’s reaction to Yayoi Kusama’s 1969 happening at MoMA, Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead, summed up by the headline “But is it Art?” (New York Daily News, August 25, 1969). An even more incredulous headline encapsulated the British press’s reaction to a retrospective of Robert Morris’s sculpture, which asked audience members to climb, balance, drag, roll, or otherwise physically use and activate objects: “Art?” (Daily Express, April 28, 1971). In contrast, Hilton Kramer (1977) left little to the reader’s imagination as to his appraisal of the 1977 Whitney Biennial. 16. Examples include Marina Abramović’s recreation of important historical works by various artists as Seven Easy Pieces (2005) at the Guggenheim in New York or her “solo” retrospective, The Artist Is Present (2010), at MoMA. In 2012, The Tanks, a dedicated performance space, opened at Tate Modern with the fifteen-week series, Art in Action. Also in 2012, the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited Sharon Hayes: There’s So Much I Want to Say to You. In 2015, the Stedelijk presented A Year at the Stedelijk: Tino Sehgal; and 2018 saw Joan Jonas at Tate Modern and Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 and Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done—both at MoMA. Far from comprehensive, this list offers only a suggestion of the field during this period. 17. Phelan argues that the ontology of performance consists entirely in its live enactment; once completed, the work vanishes. See Phelan (1993). For a full account of the historiography around “liveness,” see Westerman (2016a). 18. The resonances with Michael Fried’s condemnation of what he perceived to be the hollowness of minimalism (or “literalism,” as he called it) are striking. Fried thought minimal art an abomination insofar as it was completed in and by the viewer’s act of reception, itself always variable. This resonance is nothing if not eerie, given that Foster is perhaps the best explicator of Fried’s argument and its relation to the subsequent course of contemporary art. See Foster (1996). 19. See Austin (1962). 20. See Dorothea von Hantelmann’s publication for The Shed, New York, What is the New Ritual Space for the 21st Century? (2018) and also her book How to Do Things with Art (2017). 21. See Lepecki (2016). 22. In Spectres of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida details his conception of “hauntology” as recognition of the ghosts that return to haunt one’s world paired with an agentic claim made on a particular inheritance, an essentially performative enunciation of their relevance. His hauntology interlaces spectres and inheritance, couching this

244

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

process of becoming within an analysis of a literary drama: Hamlet’s decision to kill his uncle and avenge his father. 23.

See http:​//eth​eses.​lse.a​c.uk/​712/1​/Donn​ellan​_Esta​blish​ing_T​ate_M​odern​_2013​.pdf.​

24. Enterprises were, of course, fundamental to the emerging public/private approach of New Labour years: set up to generate income for and fund the core costs of running the museum. 25. And beyond Tate, there existed at this same time an apparent appetite for palpable iterations of live histories that were otherwise forgotten and fragmented. Between the mid-1980s and 1995, Tania Bruguera made an important first attempt at reviving the work of her late Cuban predecessor, Ana Mendieta, in creating a series of live remakings of Mendieta’s performance and body works as a homage, after the artist’s sudden death. A number of artists (including Tino Sehgal) were invited to reenact performances from the 1960s and 1970s in the context of the project A Little Bit of History Repeated, curated by Jens Hoffmann at Kunst-Werke, Berlin, in 2001. Monster Chetwynd had staged her own remake of Yves Klein’s Anthropometries in 2003, in a context of making performance versions of The Wicker Man or Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Jeremy Deller, on the other hand, convened a group of almost 1,000 participants to reenact the 1984 UK miners’ strike protests, as documented in the video The Battle of Orgreave (2001). Using images or fragmentary documentation as a “score,” these artists rallied histories in ways that were able to be witnessed collectively, and it was the combined acts of enacting the image of this work and the staging of an audience that made for its significance in terms of acknowledging this work, and declaring an alternative historic foundation for contemporary making. These new iterations of historical performances, actions, and events might be likened to the reenactments that take place within communities who wish to reflect upon significant religious narratives or political events of the past that constitute their community: whether annual Christmas Nativity plays or the 1917 restaging of the Russian Revolution. 26. Working in collaboration with mask-maker and former lucha libre (free-style wrestling) wrestler Ray Rosas. 27. See Gibbons (2003). 28. It might be tempting, still, to assert the curious conflation of historical image and living saint-like stasis created by Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in 2005 as a counter-example. We would point out, however, that Abramović’s own presence was the point of focus for those works much more than a historical reclamation of any of the famous artists or works she purportedly reenacted. That work constituted a summoning and a mode of understanding inheritance: It’s just that the summoned audience was there to appreciate her person as a unique repository and possessor of that history rather than being given any role to play themselves in its deliberation. We should note, moreover, that the Seven Easy Pieces project would be unthinkable without the larger context described here, in which both history and its proper presentation in and by museums are up for grabs. As such, it bears on the same questions engaged by the other artists discussed here, albeit with starkly different (and impoverished) answers proffered.

INSTITUTION OF PERFORMANCE TO PERFORMANCE OF INSTITUTIONS

245

REFERENCES Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson (eds) (2009). Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things With Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bennett, T. (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge. Bishop, C. (2018). “Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention.” TDR 62, no. 2: 22–42. Buren, D. (1973). The Function of the Museum. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art. Foster, H. (1996). “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real, 35–70. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foster, H. (2015). Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency. New York: Verso. Fried, M. (1967). “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5, no. 10: 12–23. Giannachi, G. and J. Westerman (eds) (2018). Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices. London: Routledge. Gibbons, Fiachra (2003). “Tate Modern Celebrates ‘Violence and Ritual Movement.’” Guardian, April 26. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk /2003/apr/26/arts. artsnews1. Hantelmann, D. von (2017). How To Do Things With Art: The Meaning of Art’s Performativity. Zurich: Ringier & Les Presses du Reel. Hantelmann, D. von (2018). What Is the New Ritual Space for the 21st Century? A booklet for “Prelude to The Shed.” New York: Arts Center. Horkheimer, M. and T. W. Adorno ([1944] 2001). “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in J. Cumming (trans.), Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120–67. New York: Continuum. Iglesias Lukin, Aimé (2017). “A Hostage Situation at the Museum of Modern Art: Marta Minujín’s 1973 Kidnappening.” Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe, November 22. Available at: https​://po​st.at​.moma​.org/​conte​nt_it​ems/1​074-a​ -host​age-s​ituat​ion-a​t-the​-muse​um-of​-mode​rn-ar​t-mar​ta-mi​nujin​-s-19​73-ki​dnapp​ening​. Jackson, S. (2011). Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge. Jackson, S. (2014). “Performativity and Its Addressee,” in E. Carpenter (ed.), Living Collections Catalogue, Vol. 1 (On Performativity). Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. Available at: http:​//wal​kerar​t.org​/coll​ectio​ns/pu​blica​tions​/perf​ormat​ivity​/perf​ormat​ivity​ -and-​its-a​ddres​see. Jones, A. (2011a). “Introduction: Performance, Live or Dead.” Art Journal 70, no. 3: 32–38. Jones, A. (2011b). “‘The Artist Is Present’: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence.” TDR 55, no. 1: 16–45. Lepecki, A. (2016). Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. New York: Routledge. Lütticken, S. (2015). “Dance Factory.” Mousse 50 (October–November): 90–103. McKenzie, J. (2001). Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge.

246

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge. Saltz, Jerry (2014). “Last Stand on 53rd Street: This Renovation Plan Will Ruin MoMA, and the Only People Who Can Stop It Aren’t Trying.” New York Magazine 47, no. 6 (March 24): 127–9. Schneider, R. (2011). Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge. Schneider, R. (2012). “It Seems As If . . . I Am Dead: Zombie Capitalism and Theatrical Labor.” TDR 56, no. 4: 150–62. Weil, S. E. (1999). “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum.” Daedalus 128, no. 3: 229–58. Westerman, J. (2016a). “The Place of Performance: A Critical Historiography on the Topos of Time,” in M. Reason and A. Lindelof (eds), Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance. New York: Routledge. Westerman, J. (2016b). “Stuart Brisley with Peter Sedgley, Unscheduled Action 1968,” in Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art. Tate Research Publication. Available at: https​://ww​w.tat​e.org​.uk/r​esear​ch/pu​blica​tions​/perf​orman​ce-at​-tate​/pers​pecti​ves/s​tuart​ -bris​ley. Westerman, J. (2016c). “Robert Morris Exhibition, Tate Gallery, 1971; Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern, 2009,” in Performance At Tate: Into the Space of Art. Tate Research Publication. Available at: https​://ww​w.tat​e.org​.uk/r​esear​ch/ pu​blica​tions​/perf​orman​ce-at​-tate​/pers​pecti​ves/r​obert​-morr​is. Whitney Biennial (1977). “The Whitney Biennial is as Boring as Ever.” New York Times, February 2: 77.

CHAPTER 3.14

Performance in the Age of the Technosphere CHRIS SALTER

The smell is overwhelming, almost deafening—if one can use an auditory term to talk about olfactory phenomena. An unnameable mingling suggests a combination of acrid burning acid and rotting cheese. Perhaps due to the scent, the visual display before oneself also becomes a play of contradictions: attractive and noxious, colorful and repulsive, simultaneously. The back-lit glass vitrine is filled with a long slab of agar and what appears to be streaks and blobs of black and red paint, at least upon first glance. The longer we stare, the more the art historical references flash by: Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, the slashes of Jackson Pollock’s action painting, the Abstract Expressionist canvases of Clifford Still or Lee Krasner. Suddenly, we see that the marks of red paint actually spell out not only a word but in fact, a sentence: “You Can Call Me F.” Although it appears to be static, the display is teeming with life below the level of visibility. In actuality, it consists not only of the pungent aroma that assaults the viewer but also a display of “collective bacteria” specifically grown for this occasion—a 2015 performance installation at The Kitchen in New York by the Korean-born, American-based visual artist Anicka Yi (which also and not incidentally is titled with the same sentence found in the glowing vitrine). According to Yi, the content of this luminous glass case that seems to cross between alchemy and design is both metaphorical, operating as the artist says as “a kind of biological metaphor for the potential of female networks” (Wyma 2015) and simultaneously, material: the work constitutes a mega cluster of growing biome composed of the individually swabbed bacteria of 100 women’s bodies (predominantly friends and acquaintances of the artist) that is grown in a singular clump by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) synthetic biologist Tal Danino (Stamler 2015). The exhibition cum performance is filled with other lively stuff: volatile odors released in the air (one a synthetic recreation of the air in Larry Gagosian’s New York blue chip gallery), mysterious liquids, fragments of dried shrimps, and the remnants of lizard eggs. What is more remarkable is that while alive with the microbial life of women, with the exception of the spectators, there is nary a human body in sight. As theater historian Sally Jane Norman, riffing on the French biologist and artist Louis Bec, has reminded us, however, the context of performance is one designed

248

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

to model the skenobiotope, the scenography of life itself, in miniature. After all, as Norman claims, the theater and its somewhat new antecedents—performative installations and environments—isolate the live actions “of humans and other beings and imagined entities, etc.—to make them appreciable as shareable aesthetic experience” (Norman 2015: 348). Along with the performative projects of artists such as Tissue Culture and Art (Catts and Zurr), Paul Vanouse, Maja Smrekar, Guy Ben Ary, Marianne Cloutier and Francois Joseph Lapointe, Thomas Feuerstein, and myriad others who utilize biological life as a frame, entity, and staging ground, Yi’s work somehow resonates with our historical moment of biological, cultural, and socio-technical confusion. Yi’s and other artists’ projects increasingly subscribe to biologist and science studies scholar Donna Haraway’s almost otherworldly description of the Chthulucene—the tendrillike, knotty, moist, and entangled world of creatures on and below the earth in which “Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the Earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this Earth are the main story” (Haraway 2016: 55). Interestingly, although there is a pronounced absence of human bodies, Yi’s projects still have zoe at the center of them—ants, bees, pollen, bacteria. We cannot say the same for works billed as “performances” that dispense entirely with carbonbased life-forms. With ever-increasing alacrity, the human, all too human realm of performance is being invaded by electromechanical-chemical phantoms that no longer possess bodies but are instead distributed into nets, instruments, algorithms, immersive scenographic surrounds, and atmospheres and machines. Some of these new performers are visible, yet others, following the art historian Caroline A. Jones, are about displaying the problematic of visibility (without the aid of instruments) itself (Galison and Jones 2010: 49–51). While the much-debated concept of the “anthropocene” provides the historical and climatological backdrop for current forms of life on this planet, I purposely did not title this chapter “performance in the age of the anthropocene” for both political (as Haraway and others contend, the term has become a catch-all phrase to be rendered almost meaningless) and aesthetic reasons. In other words, not all experimental performances are focused on the exhibition (or framing) of the bacterial, the biological, or the ecological in order to deal with the endlessly complicated problem of the human and the conditions of the earth, despite current artworld/art historical trends that show no strong signs of abating any time soon.1 But there are also other agencies at work in contemporary performance practice: that is, the increasingly messy space of machine agencies. As historian Sigfried Gideon already claimed in the 1940s: “mechanization takes command” (Gideon 1948). Of course, theaters of objects and machines have existed since time immemorial: the first-century AD mathematician and physicist Heron of Alexandria and the second-century BC scientist Philon of Byzantion’s automata, the all-night spectacles of Wayang in Indonesia, Vaucanson’s eighteenth-century digesting mechanical duck, Japanese karakuri dolls, Kiesler’s (1923) electromechanical stage for Karel Čapek’s robot drama RUR, the Futurists’ “drama of objects” in the 1920s,

PERFORMANCE IN THE AGE OF THE TECHNOSPHERE

249

Tingueley’s “doomsday machine,” SRLs destructive pageants from the 1980s, or the recent machine actions of Kris Verdonk and gemenoid theater of Oriza Hirata and Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, among others. Despite the uncanny valley (at least in robotic performances), these machines may have been interlopers and foils, saviors and demons for their human counterparts, but they have always been framed in such a way that their utmost alienness could also be tamed by the force or at least presence, of human bodies. But now it appears something else is starting to happen. Science and technology are no longer simply the subject of performance, like the long-standing tradition, from Brecht, Frayn, Stoppard, and others who create theater about science. Instead, they have become substance and matter as an increasingly prominent focus on nonhuman forms, or what Félix Guattari called “a new material of expression” seems to take focus in galleries, theaters, and laboratories around the world (1995: 7). While a recent “definition” of performance studies from scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte claims that the discipline has “focused on live embodied performance [my emphasis] occurring in art and other social contexts” (2014: 15), the use of the term “performance” and even “performativity” by artists to describe everything from robots writing the Bible to the actions and behaviors of chemicals and vibrations in front of (or around) an audience, seems to ride a slippery linguistic and material slope. This slipperiness of labeling nonhuman bodies with the term “performance” suggests a kind of anthropocenic heresy: that is, the final letting go of the long held belief that performative acts are ultimately rooted in and reserved solely for human bodies. In other words, what is performance practice and theory to do in such a state of affairs—one in which soon, sensors will outnumber humans by a factor of 2,000:1? Are the sensorial and cognitive technologies of our time going to drag theories and practices that are distinctly driven and linked to bodies and their cultural, social, and political formation kicking and screaming into a world that is not only occupied by science and technology but also increasingly made by it? What are we supposed to make of these new forms of life in a world where technoscience—“scientific practices that are directly intertwined in a technological setting and that are technologically driven as both the ‘natural milieu’ of development as well as the prime mover” as philosopher of technology Gilbert Hottois defined it—shapes daily experience (Salter 2015: 6)?

LIFE IN THE TECHNOSPHERE In the age of the technosphere, the limits of what Andrew Pickering, Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Bruno Latour, and other observers of our current technoscientific condition have called “human exceptionalism” become blatantly apparent. The environmental scientist Peter Haff coined the term “technosphere” to describe one particular facet of our anthropocenic condition—the increasing networked constellation of large-scale informatic and biological technologies. In recent Earth history a new Earth paradigm has emerged—the collection of interlinked systems that comprise regional- to global-scale technology. The

250

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

technosphere constitutes the set of large-scale networked technologies that underlie and make possible rapid extraction from the Earth of large quantities of free energy and subsequent power generation, long distance, nearly instantaneous communication, rapid long-distance energy and mass transport, the existence and operation of modern governmental and other bureaucracies, high-intensity industrial and manufacturing operations including regional, continental and global distribution of food and other goods, and a myriad additional “artificial” or “non-natural” processes without which modern civilization and its present 7 × 109 human constituents could not exist. (Haff 2014: 302) What Haff suggests is a new global order of environmental, political, scientific, and economic strata operating in an interlocked series of parts that constitute a new state and scale of existence. The technosphere is Janus-faced—it never functions completely outside of human control but also never wholly within it either. More critically, the technosphere is autonomous. It is a conglomeration hungrily fed by fossil fuels, its operations ultimately inaccessible to the meddling of human agents (even though we are partially responsible for its existence) and it is exceedingly complex due to the dynamic intertwining of all of its constituent parts. Although humans who are “essential” for its operation and maintenance must influence the technosphere, we are, alas, only subordinate parts. “The technosphere’s operation . . . will tend to resist attempts to compromise its function” (2014b: 127).

MIXING UP BODIES What does Haff ’s concept of the technosphere propose about the development and future of performance theory and practice in the twenty-first century? First of all, it suggests a much different scale and scope of experience for understanding technology and its effects than performance theory has formerly grappled with. The long-term obsession with liveness and its mediatory effects on the body might finally subside in the face of technology that becomes, as Haff states, “the next biology” (2014: 302). Indeed, the intensive focus on mediation from performance scholars such as Philip Auslander, Jon McKenzie, Susan Broadhurst, Steve Dixon, and many others, has long equated technology’s impact on performing bodies and viewers as mainly a question of communications media and in the process, established an ideological position that the “digital” is thus screenal and hence, no longer material.2 In sharp contrast, Science Technology and Society (STS) scholars have repeatedly argued for more than thirty years now that science is both social and technical, exploring how in “such environments, actors and artifacts are continuously being (re-) arranged in changing hybrid formations by complex processes of translation, which stabilize and destabilize the socio-material order in a given space and time” (Salter, Burri, and Dumit 2016: 139). They have emphasized that at its very heart, technoscience is fundamentally a set of concretized material conditions. These conditions involve not only labor and capital but also, as the French philosopher of technics Gilbert Simondon already claimed in the 1950s, concretized ensembles

PERFORMANCE IN THE AGE OF THE TECHNOSPHERE

251

of technical components or “objects” that transition processually across temporal, spatial, and ontological scales. Simondon’s phenomenology of technology uniquely argued for a process that the philosopher termed “technical ontogenesis” (Simondon 1958). Technical ontogenesis describes the process by which a technical element, object, or ensemble evolves, or as Simondon describes it, concretizes over time. The process of concretization that a specific technical object undergoes is in relation to the environment that not only surrounds it but, in effect, helps bring it into being.3 Concretization describes a process by which the parts or components of devices become increasingly historically linked and connected with each other over time. Simondon articulates this process as a way of confronting the specific material processes that occur between technologies and their environments in order to establish continuity between technical, biological, and psychosocial processes of individuation. More importantly is the relationship between the object and the environment, or what Simondon calls the “associated milieu.” The associated milieu describes an environment of mutual or reciprocal dependence and interaction—“an environment which it influences and by which it is influenced” (Simondon 1958: 49). The associated milieu is not pre-given as in an a priori schema or representation, but arises in the operation or performance of an object and its environment through a dynamic relation with one another. The concretized, situated, technological “individuals” or “ensembles” that Simondon describes are far from the physical/virtual dichotomies that usually shape accounts of technology’s operation within performance contexts. Digital and biological technologies do not simply float unmoored in an electronic ether. On the contrary, the ways in which artists deploy and use technological objects and processes such as sensing and actuation systems, cameras, scent molecules, sterile hoods, incubators, electronic components, and algorithmic logics are wholly concrete and material, particularly as such material conditions begin to distinctly shape the affective impact of these artists’ work on themselves as well as their audiences and participants over time. These technologies create interlocking relationships between themselves and forms of perception that attempt to grasp their operations. Aligned with thinking in the sociology of scientific knowledge and practice, Simondon’s work should thus help dispel us of the argument that technology in these contexts denotes the visible, usually in the form of the digital image in its myriad interactive, responsive, or virtual configurations. Indeed, if, as Haff claims, the technosphere functions as a new global geological, technological, and biological set of material processes, then the concept should help rid us first of the endless belief that technology, particularly within the arts, is what mediates our (mainly) eyes—whether generated inside the head-mounted display (HMD) of the Oculus or Vive or unfolding on an 8K light-emitting diode (LED) surface in the latest Broadway spectacle.

IMMERSION AND THE TECHNICAL UMWELT Recent programming shifts in large-scale European museums and festivals that have been traditionally devoted to the “performing arts” help demonstrate this

252

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

shift of emphasis away from technology as representation and toward the concept of technology as material, spatiotemporal conditions that evolve to co-shape its creators, users, and experiencers. In fact, while it is evident that bodies still haunt new techno-scenographic performative environments and installations being put forward in the domain of established European culture, the form and emphasis of these bodies are increasingly “re-rendered,” that is, reconfigured through technospheric economic-technical-political-social conditions. A core example of this shift is the transformation of the Berliner Festspiele, the largest performing arts festival in Germany and one of the largest in Europe. Funded by a special grant from the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and the German Parliament, the three-year Immersion program at the Festspiele since 2016 has aimed to shift its traditional curatorial emphasis away from the body-centric performing arts of dance and theater to what artistic director Thomas Oberender has called “works [. . .] that often occupy territory on the borders between exhibition and performance [. . .] pioneering artistic positions [. . .] narrative forms and everyday practices that recalibrate our relationship between activity and passivity” (Oberender 2018). More telling is Oberender’s argument that the Immersion project is “facilitating a better understanding of many of the artistic and social developments of our times and necessitating a reassessment of classical institutions, their missions and their working practices” (2018). A quick glance at Immersion’s programming between 2017 and 2018 reveals these different forces at work. For example, the Festspiele’s press releases describe a 2018 exhibition by the French artist Philippe Parreno as “a living organism that can be set in motion by light, sounds and images. He [Parreno] controls his staged spaces with the help of algorithms that synchronise the behaviour of the objects contained in the room” (2018). It is worth quoting in detail one part of the exhibition’s description before it opened in order to depict the way that this somehow seamless and frictionless exchange between the bodies of human subjects and the bodies of matter or machines is imagined to operate: Disembodied free-floating sensations and intensities will directly affect the bodies of the works themselves and those visiting the show. In one room, three different wind vortexes designed by scientists will guide the circulation of balloon fish on an elaborate path. This course in turn will be altered in unexpected ways as the fish interact with the spectators. Live sounds, emanating from somewhere in or beyond the city, leak inside and spread from one room to the next. These sounds re-surface in the reflecting pool of the atrium as they are transduced into visual patterns of waterlilies. Light constantly changes in the galleries as automatic blinds go up and down following a rhythm governed by an unknown authority. Light reflected off the facing buildings slowly moves across the museum floor in what Parreno calls a “heliostat choreography.” Another area is bathed in an eerie orange glow that evokes the fictional future of our fading sun. In another room, the temperature changes drastically. Is it just our imagination? How can we feel these intensities if they have yet to be actualized?

PERFORMANCE IN THE AGE OF THE TECHNOSPHERE

253

Having been present at the exhibition in the summer months of 2018, these fanciful descriptions are indeed speculative. While the exhibition featured some of the aforementioned elements (the floating fish balloons, the blinds going up and down in the galleries, the eerie orange glow achieved by gelling the windows in one gallery), the exhibition’s central concept—an algorithmic choreography of objects and atmospheres driven by a central bioreactor—sounds better in print than in material reality. The perceptual disconnect between action and reaction, hidden algorithmic logic and material events, however, is perhaps Parreno’s ultimate aim: to create a performance that one knows is being conducted by hidden mechanisms and in which human bodies have been replaced by spectral forces such as two pianos playing themselves, lights flashing on and off in opposite rooms, or sudden bursts of sound that reverberate throughout the vast nineteenth-century Gropius Bau spaces. More interesting, however, is another exhibition running in the same Immersion series, curated by Oberender and artist Tino Seghal, entitled Welt ohne Außen (World without Outside): Immersive Spaces since the 1960s. Featuring roomfilling installation works that directly play with the spectators’ spatial and temporal engagement, Oberender and Seghal’s exhibition seeks a mediation between space, objects, and invisible nonhuman forces (a continually changing cloud of odors in one room, Carsten Höller’s blinding light wall, phenomenologically based light-space works from the 1960s from Lucio Fontana and Doug Wheeler that disintegrate the boundaries between object and room) and human performers who inhabit a series of spaces and act out strange events that range from an hourly tea ceremony to participative works that directly blur the boundaries between performer and spectator. As the press release for the exhibition announces, Welt ohne Außen “develops a unique dramaturgy that allows visitors to enter into these immersive spaces, with each work unfolding within its own temporality” (Berliner Festspiele 2018). In a recent article entitled “From Communicable Matter to Incommunicable ‘Stuff ’: Extreme Combinatorics and the Return of Ineffability,” art historian Barbara Stafford has attempted to grapple with this sudden interest in what she terms the “foggy undecidability” of such hybrid technological “stuff ”: “Today, I argue, the viewer is deliberately presented with experiences, ‘entities,’ that are not only without a concept but without the possibility of a concept, thus producing a failure of intuition—that is, not a soaring ascent into comprehension, but a bewildering descent, into ineffability” (Stafford 2017: 9–10). Stafford takes issue with what she calls our “imagistic, linguistic, and ontological inability” to configure and grasp the “rising tide of confounding objects,” leading to a severing of action from “reflection and judgment” (2017: 9–10). This tension between action and reflection in the face of the affective power of such “ineffable combinatorics” was also present in another project for Immersion’s 2017 program “The Limits of Knowing”: mine and the Italian artist/composer TeZ’s 2017 performative sensory environment Haptic Field (Figure 3.14.1). Haptic Field toys with the supposedly established borders between fleshy bodies and the technologically enabled and enacted milieu in a slightly different manner than the other projects previously described. It tries to create an experience where the senses start to merge and mix together and where the distinction between immediate, bodily

254

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURE 3.14.1:  Chris Salter and TeZ, Haptic Field, 2017. Installation photo by Chris Salter.

experience and technological “umwelten” (the term that the German biologist Jacob von Uexküll used to describe the environment that immediately surrounds animal beings) is increasingly reimagined (von Uexküll 2010). Visitors arrive to the installation and don garments embedded with wireless haptic actuators that produce varying levels of mechanically produced vibration on the skin of the wearer. These actuators, which we call “vibropixels,” also emit light by way of a series of powerful LEDs. When one is in the suit, one emits light and also feels vibration in a kind of cross-modal mingling. Perhaps the key theatrical device of the installation is a pair of frosted goggles, which, when worn, produce strange visual effects, in effect blurring the total field of vision and reducing depth of field so much that the visitors have really no sense of how far or how close something is in the space that lies in front of them. The visitors then enter the installation and move through a series of acoustic and luminous spaces that vary in size and shape as well as in the density of sensory input—for example, one room is barely visible while another space features four channels of binaural audio and a floating color field above the visitors’ heads that plunges the space into a vibrating zone of color and sound. These spaces do not really have a sense of depth and therefore the visitors only see other visitors as essentially strange, ghost-like shadows that emit light—almost like voids in the space. Therefore, a kind of strange, otherworldly communication starts to happen between bodies—a communication that is more akin to animal or technical forms

PERFORMANCE IN THE AGE OF THE TECHNOSPHERE

255

of sensing that involves “seeing” without the eyes (as in the case of snakes who can only “see” infrared frequencies) and “sensing” without a specifically dedicated sense modality—what is termed “amodal sensing” in psychology. As one visitor remarked during an interview session, it was as if “my own heartbeat was being broadcast onto others and as if I felt these others.” In yet another performance work, the Austrian artist Kurt Hentschlaeger’s Feed (2004) also acts as a harbinger of artistic forms that entangle bodies and scenotechnical surrounds in complex and potentially unsettling ways (Figures 3.14.2 and 3.14.3). Feed was originally realized for the Venice Biennale Theater Festival and recently revised as Feed.X for the Wiener Festwochen, another major European performing arts festival that attempted a curatorial makeover from 2017 to 2018 to focus on new forms of performance until its director resigned in 2018 due to audience protests against his vision of performing arts without actors. In the original Feed, the performance consisted of a twenty-minute, large-scale, projected, computergenerated animation of twisting, contorting, 3D animated bodies followed by the complete and total engulfment of the audience in a dense and blinding fog blasted by colored stroboscopic light at different frequencies. With the work described as a “consciousness expanding, spiritual experience,” the performance establishes a continuity between the total loss of human reference points within a technologically instrumented apparatus and an internal form of perception that continually shifts depending on the apparatus’ behavior (Hentschlaeger 2018). All of the projects previously described involve the creation of artificial environments through technological means that inundate the existing and established practices and habits of human perception. In these new performative works, technology has two specific meanings. One is the more common understanding as that consisting of processes and tools derived from scientific development that can be deployed in artistic performance contexts to deliberately blur the distinct borders between externalized environments and internalized perception. In the case of Parreno’s installations or environmental works such as Haptic Field and Feed, these tools and techniques include a battery of sensors, actuators, and computer hardware and software to control the actions of light, sound, vibration, images, fog, heat, motors, and other elements. But it is in the second sense of the term “technology” where the process of destabilizing the separation between body and environment really takes place. The term “technology” as used here is more in line with philosopher Michel Foucault’s argument that technology is less an object than a strategy—a “practical rationality governed by a conscious goal”—that functions as a means to govern and shape bodies and behavior, both externally (what Foucault called technology as a “discipline”) and internally (so-called “technologies of the self ”) (Foucault 1988: 17). Within the kinds of immersive performative environments described here, the senses are continually being governed and shaped by different apparatuses and machines such that the borders between human versus technological sensoria disintegrate. At the same time, the notion of autonomy is once again challenged by these exhibitions in several ways. First, as a visitor, one feels only part of a larger governing system. While the presence of the spectator/observer is necessary for such environments

256

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

FIGURES 3.14.2 and 3.14.3:  Kurt Hentschlager, Feed.X, 2018. Installation photo by Bruno Klomfar.

not only to function but also to come into being, the larger organizing operations driven by mathematical, biological, chemical, or physical scripts, behaviors, or actions suggest that humans are only one force among others. Second, there is a sense that the operation in time of these performances is subjected to techniques that, while programmed by humans, evolve in time based on their own internal mechanisms. For

PERFORMANCE IN THE AGE OF THE TECHNOSPHERE

257

example, Parreno’s exhibition claims that the central control (which might have been called the director or the choreographer in previous iterations) is executed by the behavior of organisms in a bioreactor (a sterile environment used in the culturing and maintenance of cells). Yet, this control is invisible, both at the level of perception (the visitors cannot see these organisms with the naked eye) and in terms of causality (the relations between the organisms, the electronics, the algorithms, and the resulting actions that take place within the larger museum environment).

THE NEW BEINGS ARE RELEASED OR HOW MACHINES EXPERIENCE The technosphere not only depicts a profound shift in how we view human experience in relationship to technical beings through the sensoria, but it also articulates a transformation in the ontological structure of what we understand as autonomy. Scholars from Marshall McLuhan to Bernard Stiegler or artists such as Stelarc, Orlan, Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca, and numerous others have continued to see technology as prosthetic, as either something that extends the body or the senses, or as the externalization of human memory, which it quickly subsumes. But the rapid instantiation of mathematical and computational models such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural nets, sensor networks, and Internet of Things (IoT)-based objects implies that technical systems themselves should be understood not as mere extensions but as beings in their own right. If moving bodies so omnipresent in the performing arts of dance and theater are not necessarily disappearing without a fight, they increasingly have to share the spotlight with more autonomous technical beings other than the screens, cameras, harnesses, or human-steered, remote-controlled objects of the past. For example, in a spate of contemporary dance performances, dancers square off with computerdriven lighting systems, wear “prosthetic costumes” or dance with flickering, real-time captured, point cloud-like images of themselves stretched and scanned beyond anthropomorphic recognition. Forms of statistical reasoning—what is now labeled machine learning in computer science circles—drive many of these systems. Machine learning is usually defined as a subfield of artificial intelligence that “employs mathematical and statistical models that can classify and make predictions based on statistical inference over observed data rather than on logical rules” (Audry 2016). More revealing is one explicit technical definition expressed by the computer scientist Tom Mitchell: “A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, IMPROVES with experience E” (Mitchell 1997: 3). The key to machine learning, or ML as it is known to aficionados, is the notion of the machine’s “experience.” Experience here is not the well-understood phenomenological meaning but rather the concept that a machine will improve its ability to “perform” (i.e., accomplish some specific task) over time, based on analyzing new data and making decisions based on such data. While machine learning is beginning to take off as a technique in mainly screen-based “creative coding” (not least due to Google’s promotion of its Deep Dream and Artists and Machine Intelligence

258

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Programs) contexts, it is interesting that contemporary dance increasingly appears to be one core site for artists to explore how statistics and bodies can interact. In Pattern Recognition, a work by the British choreographer Alexander Whitley, Turkish artist and programmer Memo Akten deployed machine learning systems to create a battle between flesh, metal, and photons, in which rows of moving lights are “trained” (that is, the ideal target patterns are previously learned) via software agents responding to live video capture that attempt to follow the movement of the dancers by predicting where their arms or torsos might go next. The resulting work gives the audience the sense of a system that almost but not quite hits its targets—an environment in which multiple moving, rotating, and crossing beams of light demonstrate a kind of metastable, shifting form of agency that at times dominates the human bodies and, at others, appears like a two-year-old child fumbling in the dark to complete a simple task. In another vein, artist Marco Donnarumma’s (2018) Eingeweide (“Guts”) is a dance performance that uses what the artist calls a “robotic prosthesis driven by adaptive neural networks (computer models based on simplified models of how neurons fire) and machine learning algorithms” (Donnarumma 2018). Donnarumma’s interface “Amygdala,” perhaps appropriately named after the reptilian “limbic system” in the brain, does not move in predetermined ways but rather through trial and error— its actions “emerge from learning.” The fact that the work’s publicity asks the questions “what does it mean to create a machine that is truly and fully autonomous, independent from human control? And what happens when such a machine becomes part of a human body?” already depicts what many artists (and technologists) see as the inevitable teleology of machine agency—a literal fight between a human performer and “a prosthesis that behaves independently from its wearer” (2018). At the same time, this fight between corporeal and mechanical-computational agency does not succeed bloodlessly for Donnarumma, who also portends to return to a phenomenological resuscitation of bodies by “submerging the spectators and focusing their senses” (2018).

ALGORITHMS TAKE COMMAND While it may seem strange that dance is the central live art form that has embraced machine learning as part of its scenographic and even choreographic mechanisms, this is not surprising if we take a longer historical point of view. In Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (2010), I argued that in the 1960s and 1970s, dancers and groups such as Judson Church and Grand Union, Merce Cunningham, Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, and Lucinda Childs’s works for 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering and later, William Forsythe, Wayne McGregor, and dancers associated with the so-called “dance + tech” movement of the 1990s, were drawn to the use of mathematical procedures, algorithms, rules, computer-driven interactions, and other forms of “objective” technologies in order to explore the very tension between the autonomy of the moving body and systems that appeared to be external to it. In justifying his interest and use of aleatoric procedures in order to remove the human being as the sole instigator of movement, choreographer Merce Cunningham described these practices as “not the product of my will but an energy and a law which I obey” (Copeland 2004: 94). While this relationship was certainly not

PERFORMANCE IN THE AGE OF THE TECHNOSPHERE

259

frictionless (one might recall choreographer Deborah Hay’s statement that her eighteen-month collaboration with Bell Labs’ engineers during 9 Evenings in 1968 was “so traumatic that she was unable to work afterwards”) (Dyson 2006: 12), the interest in the choreographic possibilities of deploying autonomous technical apparatuses to influence and shape human bodies in movement already portended that dance as the sole performing art form where the moving body had always been front and center, would soon be an arena for battle. Yet, in the contemporary technospheric landscape, the co-presence of algorithmic forms of agency is by way of radically different technological processes of “intelligence” that begin to assume traits that not only originally characterized humans (like self-autonomy) but also influence, partner with, and radically transform the relationship between performers, environments, and audiences. That these algorithmic agencies are indeed “alien” is a given because increasingly even their authors no longer know exactly what effects these processes will yield as they are unleashed and interlope with their human others. It is helpful to bear in mind how the word “intelligence” is recast by computing and cognitive science. As artist and author Simon Penny has recently argued, artificial intelligence in its initial heyday in the 1950s originally denoted human reason as the logical operation on symbols. Boolean-based models of thinking could easily replace the flesh and blood world and human intelligence would be seen as the “automation of mathematical logic” (2017: 3). This model is in marked contrast to the worldview that Penny advocates, which contrasts the symbolic view with that of the embodied, situated, “post cognitive” conditions that artistic practice usually captures (even those arts in which computing is their basis). Penny articulates the radical shift in creation and perception that such cultural computing practices suggest, through what he calls “aesthetics of behavior.” Such aesthetics mark the difference between contemporary artworks that can respond dynamically to their environment (through sensing, effectors, and software) versus traditional static forms that remain fixed in time. At the same time, this aesthetics directly emerges from the “possibility of cultural interaction with machine systems” (Penny 2000). An aesthetics of behavior is one in which an action that is taken may not necessarily be intentional (a core sticking point in discussions about agency in human beings versus agency in nonhuman things) but certainly has consequences. Indeed, performance theories have long been based on the assumption that actions taken by human actors (or actants, according to Bruno Latour) are conscious, driven by certain forms of motivation and meaning making. But more recent theories emerging from post cognitive neuroscience and cognitive biology (Lyon and Opie 2007) suggest that even when humans, let alone things, take actions, these may not be as readily available to conscious understanding as we might have originally imagined.

UNTHOUGHT: THE BIRTH OF MICROPERFORMATIVITY In Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious, cultural theorist N. Katherine Hayles argues for “the existence of nonconscious cognitive processes inaccessible to conscious introspection but nevertheless essential for consciousness to function”

260

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

(Hayles 2017). Hayles’s reconceptualization of the relationship between bodies and technologies as “systems, with well-defined interfaces and communication circuits between sensors, actuators, processors, storage media, and distribution networks, and which include human, biological, technical, and material components” gives us room to pause. No longer can we see humans as superior to the technospheric condition of vast technical systems in “which cognition and decision making powers are distributed throughout the system” (2017: 35). At the same time, Hayles deals a (perhaps well-deserved) blow to new materialist or pan-psychist theories by arguing that many of the celebrated concepts of contemporary thinkers of things and objects (e.g., Timothy Morton’s notion of “hyperobjects” or Jane Bennet’s “vital materiality”) are not particularly useful. Forms of projected material agency in rocks and trees are radically different from technical systems due to such systems’ inherent incorporation of nonhuman, cognitive abilities, such as sensing and higher-level algorithmic logics and processes or biological systems, with their own ability to sense and react to their surrounding environments. Moreover, these new forms of unconscious cognition are not only characteristic of the “extended mind” (Andy Clark) or “distributed cognition” (Edwin Hutchins) in which cognition is solely contained in humans or technical assemblages, but are also distributed throughout the entire biological spectrum such as animals and plants, even if species such as plants have no discernable nervous system or brain. Indeed, within the burgeoning field of plant neurobiology, these debates have reached a pitch, with plant scientists arguing both for (plants are aware) and against (plants are not intelligent in the form that we understand human or animal intelligence to be). At the same time, whether there is scientific evidence or not, an increasing number of artists are demonstrating a marked interest in creating performances that take such kinds of nonhuman, yet organic cognition, seriously. For instance, there are performances involving “biocommunication” (a type of communication within intraspecific or between interspecific species of plants, animals, fungi, protozoa, and microorganisms) and more extreme, transplantation. Such works are not just the result of current technospheric conditions, but, in fact, have firm historical precedents. Already, in 1976, the video artist Richard Lowenburg and composer John Lifton’s performance work The Secret Life of Plants (named after the successful pop science book of the same name from the same period) sought to interface plant physiology and human brain waves to audio and video synthesizers in order to create a joint “green” composition between humans and plants. This interest in plant performances has been taken up more recently by a range of musicians and artists including groups such as Data Garden Quartet, the French media art collective Scenocosme (the plant installation Aksumaflore), and composers/performers Miya Masaoka (“Piece for Plants”) and Mileece Petre. In her performance Pulsu(m) Plantae (2012), the Mexican composer and performer Leslie Garcia used biofeedback techniques to “analyze the intangible communication processes in networks composed of biotic elements, amplifying electrical signals that serve as transmission channels between the different types of specimens that make up the plant kingdom” (Petrao 2018).4 The performances of these artists and others, however, can only be realized through the deployment of instruments that can bring these hidden signals previously

PERFORMANCE IN THE AGE OF THE TECHNOSPHERE

261

unavailable to human perception to the surface through what curator and scholar Jens Hauser has termed “microperformativity.” Microperformativity suggests that performativity is not only describing performance as an experimental object but also “performance as an experimental method” in which performance itself acquires a new epistemological nature—that is, one comes to know that which was once thought to be unknowable (Hauser 2014: 188). In this sense, the “cognitive assemblages” of these plant performances (as well as other new formations of ineffable stuff) long forgo the human at the center of the stage and instead, promote an intertwinement among multiple forms of life: human, biological, technical. In other words, our understanding of performance may, in the end, be a matter of passing through thresholds—between living and nonliving, machinic and organic, human and technical. If, indeed, things increasingly move to the unconscious configuration of new bio-technical worlds, then perhaps performance in the age of technosphere might just construct another realm—one that stages the very threshold of the (in)visibility and perceivability of these new hybrids of living and technical matter(s) as new experiences available to all forms of life.

NOTES 1. See, for example, Oliver-Smith (2018), Heartney (2014), Davis and Turpin (2015), and Tsing et al. (2017). 2. See Auslander (2008), McKenzie (2002), Broadhurst and Price (2017), and Dixon (2007). 3. For Simondon, technical ontogenesis focuses on the manner in which a specific technology comes into being (becoming) rather than a focus on its essence or being (ontology). See Simondon (1958) and LaMarre (2012). 4. In relation to microperformativity, a similar interest in “how certain plants, animals and fungi move among worlds, navigate shifting circumstances and find emergent opportunities” has arisen focused on “emergent ecologies” (Kirksey 2015).

REFERENCES Audry, Sofian (2016). “Machines That Learn: Aesthetics of Adaptive Behaviors in Agentbased Art.” PhD diss., Concordia University. Auslander, Philip (2008). Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge. Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Broadhurst, Susan and Sara Price (eds) (2017). Digital Bodies: Creativity and Technology in the Arts and Humanities. Vienna: Springer. Clark, Andy (2011). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Copeland, Roger (2004). Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance. New York: Routledge. Davis, Heather and Etienne Turpin (2015). Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press.

262

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Dixon, Steve (2007). Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Donnarumma, Marco (2018). “Eigenweide and Amygdala.” Available at: http:​//mar​codon​ narum​ma.co​m/wor​ks/#p​erfor​mance​(accessed June 3, 2018). Dyson, Francis (2006). “And Then It Was Now.” Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology. Available at: http:​//www​.fond​ation​-lang​lois.​org/h​tml/e​/page​ .php?​NumPa​ge=21​56 (accessed June 3, 2018). Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2014). The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, edited and translated by Minou Arjoumand. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1988). “Technologies of the Self,” in L. H. Martin, P. H. Hutton, and H. Gutman (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, 16–49. London: Tavistock. Galison, Peter and Caroline A. Jones (2010). “Unknown Quantities.” Artforum International 49, no. 3: 49–51. Giedion, Sigfried (1948). Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: Oxford University Press. Guattari, Felix (1995). Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haff, Peter K. (2014a). “Technology as a Geological Phenomenon: Implications for Human Well-Being.” Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395, no. 1: 301–9. Haff, Peter K. (2014b). “Humans and Technology in the Anthropocene: Six Rules.” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 2: 126–36. Haraway, Donna J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hauser, Jens (2014). “Molekulartheater, Mikroperformativität und Plantamorphisierungen,” in Susanne Stemmler (ed.), Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung, Experiment: Wissen. Objektivität und Subjektivität in den Künsten und den Wissenschaften, 173–89. Zürich: Diaphanes. Hayles, N. Katherine (2017). Unthought: The Power of the Collective Unconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heartney, Eleanor (2014). “Art for the Anthropocene Era.” Art in America, January 30. Available at: https​://ww​w.art​iname​ricam​agazi​ne.co​m/new​s-fea​tures​/maga​zines​/art-​for-t​ he-an​throp​ocene​-era (accessed August 7, 2018). Hentschlaeger, Kurt (2018). “Feed.X.” Available at: http:​//www​.kurt​hents​chlag​er.co​m/por​ tfoli​o/fee​d/fee​d.htm​l (accessed June 3, 2018). Hutchins, Edwin (1996). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kirksey, Eben (2015). Emergent Ecologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. LaMarre, Thomas (2012). “Humans and Machines,” in Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, 79–108, translated by Thomas LaMarre. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lyon, P. and J. Opie (2007). “Prolegomena for a Cognitive Biology,” in Proceedings of the 2007 Meeting of International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, 270–76. University of Exeter. Abstract available at: https​://di​gital​.libr​ary.a​ delai​de.ed​u.au/​dspac​e/han​dle/2​440/4​6578 (accessed June 3, 2018).

PERFORMANCE IN THE AGE OF THE TECHNOSPHERE

263

McKenzie, Jon (2002). Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, Tom (1997). Machine Learning. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Morton, Timothy (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Norman, Sally Jane (2015). “Theater and ALife Art: Modeling Open and Closed Systems.” Artificial Life 21, no. 3 (Summer): 344–53. Oberender, Thomas (2018). “Immersion.” Available at: https​://ww​w.ber​liner​fests​piele​.de/ e​n/akt​uell/​festi​vals/​immer​sion/​ueber​_prog​ramm_​immer​sion/​immer​sion_​allge​mein/​allge​ mein_​immer​sion_​1.php​(accessed June 3, 2018). Oliver-Smith, Kerry (2018). The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene. Gainsville, FL: Harn Museum of Art Publications. Penny, Simon (2000). “Agents as Artworks and Agent Design as Artistic Practice,” in K. Dautenhahn (ed.), Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology, 395–414. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Penny, Simon (2017). Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Petrao, Carlo (2018). “Botanical Rhythms: A Field Guide to Plant Music.” February 26. Available at: https​://so​undst​udies​blog.​com/2​018/0​2/26/​botan​ical-​rhyth​ms-a-​field​-guid​ e-to-​plant​-musi​c (accessed June 3, 2018). Salter, Chris (2010). Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Salter, Chris (2015). Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Salter, Chris, Regula Valérie Burri, and Joseph Dumit (2016). “Art, Design, and Performance,” in Ulrike Felt, Rayvon Fouché, Clark A. Miller, and Laurel Smith-Doerr (eds), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 139–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Simondon, Gilbert (1958). The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Trans. Ninian Mellamphy. Paris: Aubier. Stafford, Barbara Maria (2017). “From Communicable Matter to Incommunicable ‘Stuff ’: Extreme Combinatorics and the Return of Ineffability,” in T. D. Knepper and L. E. Kalmanson (eds), Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, 9–27. Cham: Springer International. Stamler, Hannah (2015). “The Sights and Smells of Anicka Yi’s Bacteria Art Show.” Creators Project, March 17. Available at: https​://cr​eator​s.vic​e.com​/en_u​s/art​icle/​ 9anqy​e/the​-sigh​ts-an​d-sme​lls-o​f-ani​cka-y​is-ba​cteri​a-art​-show​ (accessed June 3, 2018). Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Von Uexküll, Jacob (2010). A Foray into the World of Animals and Humans, translated  by Joseph D. O’Neil. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wyma, Chloe (2015). “Girls Gone Viral: Anicka Yi’s Pathological Feminism.” Momus, March 24. Available at: http:​//mom​us.ca​/girl​s-gon​e-vir​al-an​icka-​yis-p​athol​ogica​l-fem​ inism​(accessed January 11, 2019).

264

PART IV

Annotated Bibliography and Resources

266

Annotated Bibliography EYLÜL FIDAN AKINCI

This bibliography on performance art reveals the historicity of the indexing and theorizing efforts to capture the somewhat elusive nature of the form. I initially set out to create a reference list to accompany this companion, but soon discovered that the task instead required mapping the epistemological configurations and detournements of the more expanded term “performance,” with its self-referential ellipses, anxieties of influence between artistic disciplines and academic fields, its social and political stakes, and the economic and institutional valorizations that are woven around it. While this bibliography revolves around the studies of performance in the visual art context, the selection of books reflects their aesthetic and conceptual exchanges across experimental theater and choreography as well as the framing devices and methodologies they share with performance studies. I divided this reference bibliography into eight lists, based on varying historiographies and geographies of performance, its aesthetic-politic vectors, and recent developments in its reception and circulation, although many of the books overlap and could be included in several of the categories I used. While the year 2000 seems like an arbitrary cut-off point, the scholarly literature and other critical writing on performance do proliferate in the first two decades of the new millennium. That said, several key books from the late 1990s are included in this bibliography as they established the conversation and the terms by which we continue to conceptualize and discuss performance in art contexts today. Major limitations of this bibliography are its exclusion of the monograph studies on individual artists and their legacies, and the heavy reliance on anglophone literature. The first list begins with a brief section of the first few books that defined the form and its artistic scope in order to give the reader a sense of historicity, and continues with the generalist texts, historical surveys, and critical companions on what performance art is and who the prominent figures are. I then pinpoint more specialist histories of performance art from Western Europe and North America, which include artistic movements and groups that led to the emergence of performance art in the 1960s as an autonomous form. The next list expands the geography of performance outside the margins of the “West.” It was an intriguing discovery that almost all of the books in this list pertain to countries or regions that are physically or politically at the border of the West (e.g., Central and South America, East European and ex-communist countries, Japan with its fractured history of Westernization and postwar occupation), inadvertently implying a dialectic. They offer varying methodologies for historicizing performance art globally, and call for a transformation in our understanding and contextualization of the form as such.

268

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

The wealth of scholarship on historical and contemporary performance as a critique of power led me to divide it into two lists based on the primary methodology or the privileged object for ease of navigation, although most of the studies here have overlapping focus. Thus, the third list demonstrates the centrality of feminism, civil rights movements, identity politics, and the intersectional concerns of racial, sexual, and gender identification for performance art. These attest to the intrinsic way performance intervenes in subjecthood and community at the context of systemic injustice, and to the artists’ personal implication in their works as subject matter. The fourth list groups related concerns of corporeality and agency as they center on the pervasive processes of subjectivation, the materiality of the body, its endurance and vulnerability, and disability and expanding the normative limitations of ableism. What the reader could glean from these two lists is how biopolitics and necropolitics, as the concurrent structures of state power and global capital, coincide with the development of performance art, perhaps the latter emerging as an aesthetic response to the former. The fifth list deals with the philosophical discussions and theories of performance in relation to postmodernism, presence, temporality, liveness, mimesis, dramaturgy, pedagogy, intimacy, selfhood, and neoliberalism. Following up with these concepts and questions, the sixth list zooms in on the sociality and participation that performance art generates (as opposed to other forms of visual art or in distinction from theater). I added monumental art, public art, site-specificity, and documentary performance to this group since it also visits questions on the distinction between public/private, on transforming social habits, on critical community making, as well as on interventions into the everyday life and official memory. The subsequent list collects research on how performance makes use of and transforms with the impact of intermediality and new media—phenomena that have also shown an exponential development in the past two decades by way of networks, digital platforms, and the capitalization of data. The final list aims to capture the parallel resurgence of institutional concerns regarding performance. It brings together the recently growing literature on the acquisition and curation of performance, archiving and reperforming, and dance and choreography in the gallery and museum context. The reader will find the special issues and key journal articles, from the same period as the book lists, as a separate section for ease of navigation. Likewise, I made sections for several exhibition catalogs as well as the recently digitized historical zines and web archives, the latter of which also demonstrates the importance of online platforms for the “currency” of performance art in both senses of the word.

1  HISTORIES OF PERFORMANCE ART FROM WESTERN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA Section I: Early Conceptualizations of Performance Art Battcock, Gregory, and Robert Nickas. The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

269

Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979. Henri, Adrian. Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance. New York: Praeger, 1974. Kostelanetz, Richard. The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Performances. New York: Dial Press, 1968. Nuttall, Jeff. Performance Art, Vol I: Memoirs. London: Calder, 1979. Nuttall, Jeff. Performance Art, Vol II: Scripts. London: Calder, 1979.

Section II: Performance Theory Readers, Surveys, and Critical Companions Allain, Paul, and Jen Harvie, eds. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. New York: Routledge, 2006. Barber, Bruce. Performance, [Performance] and Performers I: Conversations. Edited by Marc James Lger. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2007. Barber, Bruce. Performance, [Performance] and Performers II: Essays. Edited by Marc James Lger. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2007. Bial, Henry, and Sara Brady, eds. The Performance Studies Reader. Third edition. New York: Routledge, 2016. Brimfield, Mel, and Will Fenton. This is Performance Art. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011. Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. Third edition. New York: Routledge, 2018. Case, Sue-Ellen, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster, eds. Decomposition: PostDisciplinary Performance. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. Cheng, Meiling, and Gabrielle Cody, eds. Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres. New York: Routledge, 2016. Childs, Nicky, and Jeni Walwin, eds. A Split Second of Paradise: Live Art, Installation and Performance. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1998. Davis, Tracy C., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Fischer-Lichte, Erika The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies. Edited by Minou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse. Translated by Minou Arjomand. New York: Routledge, 2014. Freeman, John. New Performance/New Writing. Second edition. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016 [2007]. Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century. Third edition. London: Thames and Hudson, 2018. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. Conversations Across Borders: A Performance Artist Converses with Theorists, Curators, Activists, and Fellow Artists. Edited by Laura Levin. New York: Seagull, 2011. Groom, Amelia, ed. Time. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013. Heathfield, Adrian, ed. Live: Art and Performance. New York: Routledge, 2004. Heddon, Deirdre, and Jennie Klein, eds. Histories and Practices of Live Art. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

270

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Hoffmann, Jens, and Joan Jonas, eds. Artworks: Perform. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. Howell, Anthony. The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Harwood Academic, 1999. Johnson, Dominic. The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Kaye, Nick. Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Harwood Academic, 1996. Kelleher, Joe, and Nicholas Ridout, eds. Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion. New York: Routledge, 2006. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge, 2006 [1999]. Lushetich, Natasha. Interdisciplinary Performance: Reformatting Reality. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pontbriand, Chantal, ed. Parachute: The Anthology (1975–2000). Vol. II: Performance & Performativity. Zurich: JRP/Ringier & Dijon: Les Presses du Rel, 2014. Reinelt, Janelle G., and Joseph Roach, eds. Critical Theory and Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Sandford, Mariellen R., ed. Happenings and Other Acts. London: Routledge, 1995. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Revised edition. London; New York: Routledge, 2003 [1988]. Schechner, Richard. Performed Imaginaries. New York: Routledge, 2015. Shepherd, Simon. The Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Taylor, Diana. Performance. Translated by Abigail Levine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016 [2012]. Wood, Catherine. Performance in Contemporary Art. London: Tate Publishing, 2018.

Section III: Specialized Histories and Legacies Badura-Triska, Eva, and Hubert Klocker, eds. Vienna Actionism: Art and Upheaval in 1960s′ Vienna. Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2012. Bennahum, Ninotchka, Wendy Perron, and Bruce Robertson, eds. Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016. Bonin-Rodriguez, Paul. Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programs Redefined U.S. Artists for the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Burt, Ramsay. Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces. New York: Routledge, 2006. Burton, Scott. Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975. Edited by David Getsy. Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2012. Chatzichristodoulou, Maria, ed. Live Art in the UK: Contemporary Performances of Precarity. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2020. Cheng, Meiling. In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

271

Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, ed. Arte Povera. Abridged and updated edition. London: Phaidon Press, 2014 [1999]. Harding, James M. The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Harding, James M., and Cindy Rosenthal, eds. The Sixties, Center Stage: Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Higgins, Hannah. Fluxus Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Johnson, Dominic, ed. Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK. New York: Routledge, 2013. Jones, Amelia. Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Lippard, Lucy R. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Miller, Hillary. Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Montano, Linda M. Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties. California: University of California Press, 2000. Phelan, Peggy. Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983. New York: Routledge, 2012. Phillips, Áine, ed. Performance Art in Ireland: A History. London, UK: Live Art Development Agency & Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2015. Rodenbeck, Judith F. Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011. Roms, Heike. What’s Welsh for Performance? Vol 1. Beth yw “performance” yn Gymraeg? Cyf 1. An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales 1968–2008. Cardiff: Samizdat Press, 2008. Sell, Mike. Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Trimingham, Melissa. The Theatre of the Bauhaus: The Modern and Postmodern Stage of Oskar Schlemmer. New York: Routledge, 2011.

2  GLOBAL PERFORMANCE: HISTORIES AND THEORIES AT THE EDGE OF THE “WEST” Alvarado, Leticia. Abject Performances. Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Bago, Ivana, Antonia Majac̆a, and Vesna Vuković. Removed from the Crowd: Unexpected Encounters I. Zagreb: BLOK, 2012. Berghuis, Thomas J. Performance Art in China. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2006. Bryzgel, Amy. Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960. Mancheste: Manchester University Press, 2017. Bryzgel, Amy. Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland Since 1980. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013.

272

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Cheng, Meiling. Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary Chinese Time-Based Art. London: Seagull Books, 2013. Citron, Atay, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, and David Zerbib, eds. Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Cseh-Varga, Katalin, and Adam Czirak, eds. Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere. Event-Based Art in Late Socialist Europe. London: Routledge, 2018. Eckersall, Peter. Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Fuentes, Marcela. Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Fusco, Coco. Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. London: Tate Publishing, 2015. Fusco, Coco, ed. Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas. New York: Routledge, 2000. Geczy, Adam, and Mimi Kelly, eds. What Is Performance Art?: Australian Perspectives. Sydney: Power Publications, 2018. Harding, James M., and John Rouse, eds. Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Jakovljević, Branislav. Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. McKenzie, Jon, Heike Roms, and C. J. W.-L. Wee, eds. Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Morganová, Pavlína. Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain. Translated by Daniel Morgan. Prague: Karolinum, 2014. Noszlopy, Laura, and Matthew Isaac Cohen, eds. Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance: Transnational Perspectives. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Pather, Jay, and Catherine Boulle, eds. Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019. Sheren, Ila Nicole. Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera Since 1984. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Taylor, Diana, and Sarah J. Townsend, eds. Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Tiampo, Ming. Gutai: Decentering Modernism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Weisenfeld, Gennifer S. Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

273

3  PERFORMANCE AT THE INTERSECTION OF FEMINISM, QUEERNESS, AND CRITICAL RACE STUDIES Battista, Kathy. Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013. Benston, Kimberly W. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2000. Blomberg, Nancy J., ed. Action and Agency: Advancing the Dialogue on Native Performance Art. Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 2010. Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Cervenak, Sarah Jane. Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Chambers-Letson, Joshua. After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life. New York: NYU Press, 2018. DeFrantz, Thomas F., and Anita Gonzalez, eds. Black Performance Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. English, Darby. To Describe a Life: Essays at the Intersection of Art and Race Terror. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Gaines, Malik. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Greer, Stephen. Queer Exceptions: Solo Performance in Neoliberal Times. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Harding, James M. Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Harris, Geraldine. Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999. Johnson, E. Patrick, and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, eds. Blacktino Queer Performance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. McMillan, Uri. Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nyong’o, Tavia. Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Román, David. Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Rosenberg, Tiina. Don’t Be Quiet, Start a Riot! Essays on Feminism and Performance. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2016. Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997. Smith, Cherise. Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

274

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Taylor, Diana, and Roselyn Costantino, eds. Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Wark, Jayne. Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Wilson, Siona. Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance. Minneapolis, NC: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Yoshimoto, Midori. Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Young, Harvey. Embodying the Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010.

4 BIOPOLITICS—CORPOREALITIES—BODY ART—ENDURANCE ART Anderson, Patrick. So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Archias, Elise. The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Blocker, Jane. What The Body Cost: Desire, History, And Performance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Brady, Sara. Performance, Politics, and the War on Terror: “Whatever It Takes.” Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Gonzalez Rice, Karen. Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Jones, Amelia. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Jones, Amelia, and Andrew Stephenson, eds. Performing the Body: Performing the Text. London: Routledge, 1999. Keidan, Lois, and C. J. Mitchell, eds. Access All Areas: Live Art and Disability. London: Live Art Development Agency, 2012. Kuppers, Petra. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge. New York: Routledge, 2003. Kuppers, Petra. The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Morrison, Elise. Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. O’Dell, Kathy. Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. O’Reilly, Sally. The Body in Contemporary Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009. Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London: Routledge, 1997. Sandahl, Carrie, and Philip Auslander, eds. Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

275

Stiles, Kristine. Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Thomas, Nicholas. Body Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2014. Vergine, Lea. Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language. Second edition. Milan: Skira, 2000 [1974]. Warr, Tracey, and Amelia Jones, eds. The Artist’s Body. London: Phaidon Press, 2000.

5  PHILOSOPHIES OF PERFORMANCE Auslander, Philip. From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1997. Bailes, Sara Jane. Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service. London: Routledge, 2011. Banes, Sally, and André Lepecki, eds. The Senses in Performance. New York: Routledge, 2007. Bleeker, Maaike, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, and Heike Roms, eds. Thinking Through Theatre and Performance. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019. Bleeker, Maaike, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou, eds. Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations. New York: Routledge, 2015. Butt, Gavin, ed. After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Davies, David. Art as Performance. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Davis, Tracy C., and Thomas Postlewait, eds. Theatricality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dertnig, Carola, Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, eds. Performing the Sentence: Research and Teaching in Performative Fine Arts. Berlin: Sternberg Press, and Vienna: Academy of Fine Arts, 2014. Doyle, Jennifer. Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008. Georgelou, Konstantina, Efrosini Protopapa, and Danae Theodoridou, eds. The Practice of Dramaturgy: Working on Actions in Performance. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017. Giannachi, Gabriella, Nick Kaye, and Michael Shanks, eds. Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being. New York: Routledge, 2012. Goulish, Matthew. 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance. New York: Routledge, 2000. Grant, Stuart, Jodie McNeilly, and Maeva Veerapen, eds. Performance and Temporalisation: Time Happens. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Harvie, Jen. Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Hill, Leslie, and Helen Paris. Performing Proximity: Curious Intimacies. Cambridge: Red Globe Press, 2014.

276

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Hill, Leslie, and Helen Paris, eds. Performance and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Jannarone, Kimberly, ed. Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Krasner, David, and David Z. Saltz. Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance and Philosophy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Kunst, Bojana. Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism. Winchester: Zero Books, 2015. Laermans, Rudi. Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2015. Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge, 2006. Lepecki, André. Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. New York: Routledge, 2016. Lunberry, Clark. Sites of Performance: Of Time and Memory. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2014. Malzacher, Florian, ed. Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today. Berlin: Alexander Verlag Berlin, 2015. McEvilley, Thomas. The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism. Kingston, NY: McPherson, 2005. McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge, 2001. Mock, Roberta, ed. Performing Processes: Creating Live Performance. Bristol: Intellect, 2000. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Read, Alan. Theatre in the Expanded Field: Seven Approaches to Performance. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Reason, Matthew, and Anja Mølle Lindelof, eds. Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2016. Ridout, Nicholas. Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Sack, Daniel. After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Torrens, Valentin, ed. How We Teach Performance Art: University Courses and Workshop Syllabus. Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2014. Wickstrom, Maurya. Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018.

6  PERFORMANCE AND THE PARTICIPATORY, SOCIAL, PUBLIC, AND DOCUMENTARY Bala, Sruti. The Gestures of Participatory Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Bianchini, Samuel, Erik Verhagen, Nathalie Delbard, and Larisa Dryansky, eds. Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

277

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New York: Verso, 2012. Bishop, Claire, ed. Participation. London: Whitechapel, 2006. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods, and Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002 [1998]. Brown, Kathryn, ed. Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Burton, Johanna, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Willsdon, eds. Public Servants. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Cvejić, Bojana, and Ana Vujanović. Public Sphere by Performance. Second edition. Berlin: b_books, and Aubervilliers: Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, 2015 [2012]. Dezeuze, Anna, ed. The “Do-It-Yourself ” Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Doherty, Claire. Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place. London: Art Books Publishing Ltd & Sweden: Situations, 2015. Ferdman, Bertie. Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. Harpin, Anna, and Helen Nicholson, eds. Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge, 2011. Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. New York: Routledge, 2000. Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Lacy, Suzanne, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New genre Public Art. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995. Martin, Carol. Theatre of the Real. Basingstoke, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Martin, Carol, ed. Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. O’Grady, Alice R., ed. Risk, Participation, and Performance Practice: Critical Vulnerabilities in a Precarious World. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pais, Ana, ed. Performance in the Public Sphere. Digital edition translated by Rui Parada Cascais. Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de Teatro / FLUL and Performativa, 2018 [2017]. Patrick, Martin. Across the Art/Life Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social Practice in Contemporary Art. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2017. Rounthwaite, Adair. Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Shaughnessy, Nicola. Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Tomlin, Liz. Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990–2010. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Ward, Frazer. No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2012.

278

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Widrich, Mechtild. Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.

7  PERFORMANCE AND INTERMEDIALITY, NEW MEDIA, AND DIGITAL CULTURE Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Second edition. New York: Routledge, 2008 [1999]. Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson, eds. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Jennier Parker-Starbuck, and David Z. Saltz. Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Benford, Steve, and Gabriella Giannachi. Performing Mixed Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Berghaus, Günter. Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Causey, Matthew. Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness. New York: Routledge, 2006. Eckersall, Peter, Helena Grehan, and Edward Scheer. New Media Dramaturgy: Performance, Media and New-Materialism. London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2017. Giannachi, Gabriella. The Politics of New Media Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2007. Giannachi, Gabriella, and Nick Kaye. Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Harbison, Isobel. Performing Image. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019. Kaye, Nick. Multi-Media: Video—Installation—Performance. New York: Routledge, 2007. Klich, Rosemary, and Edward Scheer. Multimedia Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer. Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Salter, Chris. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Stern, Nathaniel. Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance. Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2013. Zurbrugg, Nicholas, ed. Art, Performance, Media: 31 Interviews. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

8  REPERFORMANCE AND ARCHIVE; PERFORMANCE/DANCE IN THE GALLERY; CURATING LIVE ARTS Auslander, Philip. Reactivations Essays on Performance and Its Documentation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Bangma, Anke, Steve Rushton, and Florian Wüst, eds. Experience, Memory, ReEnactment. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, 2005.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

279

Borggreen, Gunhild and Rune Gade, eds. Performing Archives/Archives of Performance. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2013. Büscher, Barbara, and Franz Anton Cramer, eds. Fluid Access: Archiving PerformanceBased Arts. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2017. Butte, Maren, Kirsten Maar, Fiona McGovern, Marie-France Rafael, Jorn Schafaff, eds. Assign & Arrange: Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014. Calonje, Teresa, ed. Live Forever: Collecting Live Art. London: Koenig Books, 2014. Costinaș, Cosmin, and Ana Janevski, eds. Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The New Performance Turn, Its Histories and Its Institutions. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018. Davida, Dena, Jane Gabriels, Véronique Hudon, and Marc Pronovost. Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. Dziewańska, Marta, and André Lepecki, eds. Points of Convergence: Alternative Views on Performance. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2017. Giannachi, Gabriella, and Jonah Westerman. Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices. New York: Routledge, 2018. Gronau, Barbara, and Matthias von Hartz, eds. How to Frame: On the Threshold of Visual and Performing Arts. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. Groys, Boris. In the Flow. New York: Verso, 2016. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Guy, Georgina. Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation: Displayed & Performed. New York: Routledge, 2016. Hantelmann, Dorothea. How to Do Things With Art: The Meaning of Art’s Performativity. Edited by Karen Marta. Zurich: JRP/Ringier & Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2010. Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield, eds. Perform, Repeat, Record. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2012. Malzacher, Florian, and Joanna Warsza, eds. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy. Berlin: Alexander Verlag Berlin, 2017. Osborne, Peter. The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays. New York: Verso, 2018. Pontbriand, Chantal, ed. Per/form: How to do Things With(out) Words. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014. Remes, Outi, Laura MacCulloch, and Marika Leino, eds. Performativity in the Gallery: Staging Interactive Encounters. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. Rugg, Judith, and Michèle Sedgwick, eds. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007. Sant, Toni. Documenting Performance: The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011. van Mechelen, Marga. Art at large: Through Performance and Installation Art. Arnhem: Artez, 2013.

280

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

9  EXHIBITION CATALOGS Baker, Simon, and Fiontán Moran, eds. Performing for the Camera. London: Tate Publishing, 2016. Behar, Katherine, and Emmy Mikelson, eds. And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art. New York: Punctum Books, 2016. Bishop, Claire, ed. Double Agent. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2009. Charmatz, Boris, Gilles Amalvi, and Martina Hochmuth, eds. expo zéro. Rennes: Édition du Musée de la danse, Rennes, 2011. http:​//exp​ozero​.muse​edela​danse​.org/​leca​talog​ue.ph​p. Clausen, Barbara, ed. After the Act: The (Re)presentation of Performance Art. Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2005. Cullen, Deborah, ed. Arte ≠ vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000. New York: El Museo Del Barrio, 2008. Droschl, Sandro, ed. The Only Performances that make It All the Way . . . Yes, but Is it Performable? Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018. Elms, Anthony, ed. Endless Shout. Los Angeles, CA: Inventory Press, 2019. Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia, Andrea Giunta, and Rodrigo Alonso. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, University of California; Munich; New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2017. George, Adrian, ed. Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance. London: Tate, 2003. Goldberg, RoseLee, ed. Performa 15: The Renaissance, Poetry, Pavilion Without Walls. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Company, 2019. Hendricks, Geoffrey. Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958–1972. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2003. Hoffmann, Jens, ed. A Little Bit of History Repeated. Paris: Edition Valerio & Berlin: Kunst-Werke, 2001. Hoptman, Laura, and Tomáš Pospiszyl, eds. Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002. Householder, Johanna, and Tanya Mars, eds. Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2004. Janevski, Ana, and Thomas J. Lax, eds. Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018. Katz, Vincent, ed. Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Kim, Yu Yeon, ed. Translated Acts: Performance and Body Art from East Asia, 1990–2001. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt & New York: Queens Museum of Art, 2001. Larmon, Oraison H., ed. Franklin Furnace: Performance & Politics. New York: HemiPress, 2018. Lütticken, Sven, ed. Life, Once More: Forms Of Reenactment In Contemporary Art. Rotterdam: Witte de With, 2005. Maude-Roxby, Alice, ed. Live Art on Camera: Performance and Photography. Southampton: John Hansard Gallery, 2007.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

281

Oliver, Valerie Cassel, ed. Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Houston, TX: Houston Contemporary Art Museum, 2013. Pagnes, Andrea, and Verena Stenke, eds. Venice International Performance Art Week I: Hybrid Body—Poetic Body. Venice: VestAndPage Press, 2012. Rosenthal, Stephanie, ed. Move: Choreographing You: Art and Dance since the 1960s. London: Hayward Publishing, 2011. Sanders, Jay, and J. Hoberman. Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and The New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970–1980. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art & New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Shimmel, Paul and Kristin Stiles, eds. Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998. Tancons, Claire, and Krista Thompson, eds. En mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean. New York: Independent Curators International & New Orleans: Contemporary Arts Center, 2015. Tarsia, Andrea, ed. A Short History of Performance, Part IV. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2006. Tonkin, Steven. Political Acts: Pioneers of Performance Art in Southeast Asia. Melbourne: Victorian Arts Centre Trust, 2017. Yadong Hao, Sophia, and Matthew Hearn, eds. NOTES on a Return. Sunderland: Art Editions North, 2011.

10 ONLINE RESOURCES AND ARCHIVES This is Live Art. Specialized research projects, online films, and catalogued documents on performance art, produced by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA). http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/resources. The Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL). The first major digital video library of performance practices in the Americas. https​://he​misph​erici​nstit​ute.o​rg/en​/ hidv​l-col​lecti​ons.h​tml. Re.Act.Feminism: A Performing Archive. An archive and exhibition project on feminism and performance art. Curated by Beatrice E. Stammer and Bettina Knaup. Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2014. http://www.reactfeminism.org/. Performa Magazine. In liaison with Performa Institute and Biennial, online reviews dedicated to contemporary performance across disciplines. Founded by RoseLee Goldberg. http://performa-arts.org/magazine. In Terms of Performance. A keywords anthology designed to provoke discovery across artistic disciplines. Edited by Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola. The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia and Arts Research Center, University of California, Berkeley. http://intermsofperformance.site/. Living Collections Catalogue 1: On Performativity. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. https​://wa​lkera​rt.or​g/col​lecti​ons/p​ublic​ation​s/per​forma​tivit​y. Performance and Performativity: Tate’s interdisciplinary research initiative examining the entwined concepts of performance and performativity, and their application in the field of contemporary art and culture. https​://ww​w.tat​e.org​.uk/a​bout-​us/pr​oject​s/ per​forma​nce-a​nd-pe​rform​ativi​ty.

282

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

Performance at Tate: Collecting the Performative. Tate’s research network examining emerging practice for collecting and conserving performance-based art. https​://ww​w.tat​e.org​.uk/a​bout-​us/pr​oject​s/col​lecti​ng-pe​rform​ative​. Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art. Tate’s research project that explores the history of performance art at Tate from the 1960s to 2016. https​://ww​w.tat​e.org​.uk/ r​esear​ch/pu​blica​tions​/perf​orman​ce-at​-tate​. The Performative Turn: Open Museum 2011. Organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, meetings and conversations dedicated to the relationship between theater, dance and visual arts. https​://ar​tmuse​um.pl​/en/d​oc/cy​kle/z​wrot-​perfo​rmaty​wnym​uzeum​-otwa​rte-2​011. Venice International Performance Art Week Resources. Collection of free downloads and links to performance art related research material, provided by the ART WEEK artist and collaborators. https​://ve​nicep​erfor​mance​art.o​rg/re​searc​h. Electronic Arts Intermix selection on Fluxus and Happenings. Includes documentaries on the Fluxus movement, documents of Fluxus events, and works by and about Fluxus artists. https​://ww​w.eai​.org/​serie​s/flu​xus-a​nd-ha​ppeni​ngs. Arte Útil. Draws on artistic thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that change how we act in society. Formulated by Tania Bruguera and curators at the Queens Museum, New York, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Grizedale Arts, Coniston. http://www.arte-util.org/. PerformanceProcess. Online archive of documentations and research from two exhibitions on Swiss performance from 1960 to today. https​://de​v.ppr​ocess​.ch/e​n/pre​face/​1/ pre​face.​html. Action Art Beyond the Iron Curtain. Operated by Adam Czirak. http://www. aktionskunst-jenseits.de/en/. Performance Art in Eastern Europe (1950–90). Coordinated by Sylvia Sasse. http://www.performanceart.info/. Performing Arts in the Second Public Sphere. A comparative and coherent analysis of the neo-avant-garde´s event-based art in different regions of Central, East and Southeast Europe. http://www.2ndpublic.org/. Performing the East: Performance Art in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Operated by Amy Bryzgel. http://performingtheeast.com/. Performance Perspectives: An Archive of Video Interviews Exploring Performance Art in Australia. http://www.performanceperspectives.org/. Ibraaz Platform 009: “Performance.” Essays focusing on genealogies of performance art in North Africa and the Middle East. Edited by Anthony Downey. https://www.ibraaz. org/essays/140. A Performance Affair (APA). A platform for performance art that brings together artists, galleries, collectors and institutions to research and discuss current tendencies in performance art and the economic structures around it. https://aperformanceaffair.com/. Monoskop-Performance Art Bibliography. https://monoskop.org/Performance_art. Ubuweb. An online database for avant-garde art, Ubuweb’s Film and Dance sections have a rich selection of performance documentations. http://ubu.com/. High Performance Mag 1978–97. Digital archive of all issues. https​://ap​ionli​ne.or​g/ hig​h-per​forma​nce-m​agazi​ne/hp​issue​s/.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

283

Performance Magazine UK 1979–92. Digital archive of all issues and a documentary on the magazine. http://www.performancemagazine.co.uk/. Performance Art Magazine. PAJ Publications was founded in 1976. In 1979, the publishing company began to publish books as well as another little magazine called Performance Art (retitled LIVE with the third issue). https://www.mitpressjournals.org/ loi/pam.

11 JOURNALS AND MAGAZINES: SPECIAL ISSUES Journal of Curatorial Studies 7.2 (2018). Special Issue: “Living Display.” Edited by Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick. https​://ww​w.ing​entac​onnec​t.com​/cont​ent/i​ntell​ect/j​ cs/20​18/00​00000​7/000​00002​. Texte zur Kunst 110 (2018). “Performance Evaluation.” https://www.textezurkunst.de/110/. Theatre Journal 69.3 (2017). Special Issue: “Theatre and the Museum / Cultures of Display.” http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/36988. Performance Paradigm 13 (2017). “Performance, Choreography, and the Gallery.” Edited by Erin Brannigan, Hannah Mathews, and Caroline Wake. https​://ww​w.per​forma​ ncepa​radig​m.net​/inde​x.php​/jour​nal/i​ssue/​view/​22. Theater 47.1 (2017). Special Issue: “Curating Crisis.” https​://ww​w.duk​eupre​ss.ed​u/cur​ ating​-cris​is-1. Representations 136.1 (2016). Special Issue: “Time Zones: Durational Art and Its Contexts.” Edited by Shannon Jackson and Julia Bryan-Wilson. https://rep.ucpress. edu/content/136/1. Theater 44.2 (2014). Special Issue: “Performance Curators.” Edited by Tom Sellar and Bertie Ferdman. https​://ww​w.duk​eupre​ss.ed​u/per​forma​nce-c​urato​rs. Dance Research Journal 46.3 (2014). Special Issue: “Dance in the Museum.” Edited by Mark Franko and André Lepecki. https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/31274. Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts 8.1 (2014). Special Issue: “Performance Legacies.” Edited by Will Shüler, Diana Damian-Martin, and Sara Reimers. https​://ww​ w.roy​alhol​loway​.ac.u​k/med​ia/53​74/00​_full​.pdf. Contemporary Theatre Review 22.1 (2012). Special Issue: “Live Art in the UK.” Edited by Dominic Johnson. https​://ww​w.tan​dfonl​ine.c​om/to​c/gct​r20/2​2/1?n​av=to​cList​. MASKA Performing Arts Journal XXVII, No. 147–148 (2012). Special Issue: “The Event as a Privileged Medium in the Contemporary Art World.” Edited by Beti Žerovc. http:​ //www​.mask​a.si/​index​.php?​id=16​3&L=1​&tx_t​tnews​[tt_n​ews]=​1109&​cHash​=c663​ 5894f​a057e​789da​bbe1f​a34c3​ebb. Art Journal 70.3 (2011). Forum: “Performance, Live or Dead.” Introduction by Amelia Jones. http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=2796. Artforum International 48.9 (2010). Focus: “The Next Act: Issues in Contemporary Performance.” https://www.artforum.com/print/201005. Frakija 55 (2010). Special Issue: “Curating Performing Arts.” Edited by Florian Malzacher, Tea Tupajiç, and Petra Zanki. http:​//www​.cdu.​hr/fr​akcij​a/sho​p/des​cript​ion.p​hp?br​=55. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19.3 (2009). Special Issue: “Women & Fluxus: Toward a Feminist Archive of Fluxus.” Edited by Midori Yoshimoto. https​://ww​w.tan​dfonl​ine.c​om/to​c/rwa​p20/1​9/3.

284

THE METHUEN DRAMA COMPANION TO PERFORMANCE ART

TDR: The Drama Review 49.1 (2005). Focus on Franklin Furnace and Martha Wilson. https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/9664. Performance Research 7.4 (2002). Special Issue: “On Archives & Archiving.” Edited by Heike Roms and Richard Gough. http:​//www​.perf​orman​ce-re​searc​h.org​/past​-issu​edet​ail.p​hp?is​sue_i​d=22. Performance Research 7.3 (2002). Special Issue: “On Fluxus.” Edited by Ric Allsopp, Ken Friedman, and Owen Smith. https​://ww​w.per​forma​nce-r​esear​ch.or​g/pas​t-iss​ue-de​tail.​ php?i​ssue_​id=21​. Contemporary Theatre Review 10.3 (2000). Focused issue on body and performance. Edited by Patrick Campbell. https​://ww​w.tan​dfonl​ine.c​om/to​c/gct​r20/1​0/3?n​av=to​cList​ Texte zur Kunst 37 (2000). “Performance.” Edited by Sabeth Buchmann, Isabelle Graw, Clemens Krommel, and Susanne Leeb. https://www.textezurkunst.de/37/. Art Journal 56.4 (1997). Special Issue: “Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century.” Edited by Martha Wilson. https​://ww​w.tan​dfonl​ine.c​om/to​c/rca​j20/5​6/4?n​av=to​cList​.

CONTRIBUTORS

Eylül Fidan Akıncı is a PhD Candidate in the Theater and Performance program at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a visiting fellow at the Studies in Performing Arts & Media (S:PAM) research center of Ghent University. Her writing has appeared in TDR, PAJ, and Performance in a Militarized Culture (eds. Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan, 2017). Danielle Bainbridge is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Northwestern. Her book project “Refinements of Cruelty: Enslavement, Enfreakment, and the Performance Archive” examines the lives of African American sideshow and freak show performers who were also enslaved. Danielle is also a creative writer, playwright, and web series host. She is researcher, writer, and host of the PBS Digital Studios web series “The Origin of Everything,” which focuses on highlighting unusual and under told history and streams on YouTube and Facebook Watch. Her creative nonfiction and fiction appears in Moko Magazine, Killens Review of Arts & Letters, and The Mechanics’ Institute Review Online. T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Her first book, Learning How to Fall: Art and Culture after September 11 (2015), investigates the changing relationship between world events and their subsequent documentation in mainstream and social media, positing contemporary art and performance as not only a stylized re-envisioning of daily life but, inversely, as a viable means by which one might experience and process real-world political and social events. Her current project engages feminist theories of care, mothering studies, and ecological feminisms to explore the potential of performance to enact radical care. Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor of Dance at Duke University. He directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a group that explores emerging technology in live performance. He received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association. Professor DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better, and engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. He has contributed the concept and voiceover for a permanent installation on Black social dance at the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life. His books include Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004), Black Performance Theory

286

CONTRIBUTORS

with Anita Gonzalez (2014), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion with Philipa Rothfield (2016), and The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft (2018). Peter Eckersall teaches in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York and is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Recent publications include The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics (co-edited with Helena Grehan, 2019), New Media Dramaturgy: Performance Media and New Materialism (with Edward Scheer and Helena Grehan, 2017), and The Dumb Type Reader (co-edited with Edward Scheer and Fujii Shintaro, 2017). Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is a British/Venezuelan art historian and curator in modern and contemporary art, specializing in Latin American art. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Essex, England, and a master’s in 20th-Century Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England. She was chief curator at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach; director and chief curator of the Cisneros Fontanals Arts Foundation (CIFO) and the Ella Fontanals Cisneros Collection, Miami, USA; and director of Sala Mendoza, Caracas, Venezuela. FajardoHill has published and curated extensively on contemporary Latin American and international artists. Bertie Ferdman is Associate Professor of Theatre at Borough Manhattan Community College at the City University of New York. She is the author of Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific (2018). Her essays have appeared in Theater, TDR, PAJ, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and Performance Research. She was co-editor (along with Tom Sellar) of a Special Issue of Yale’s Theater Magazine titled “Performance Curators,” as well as guest editor of a special section of PAJ titled “Urban Dramaturgies.” Her essay “From Context to Concept: The Emergence of the Performance Curator” was published as part of the collection Curating Live Arts. Malik Gaines is a writer and artist, a member of the performance group My Barbarian, and Associate Professor of Performance Studies at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts. He is the author of Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (2017). His published articles include “The QuadrupleConsciousness of Nina Simone” in Women & Performance, “City After 50 Years’ Living: LA’s Differences in Relation” in Art Journal, and many short essays and interviews about art and performance for journals, magazines, museum publications, and artists’ monographs. Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Research at Roski School of Art & Design, USC, and is a curator and scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist/sexuality studies. Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A

CONTRIBUTORS

287

History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012); co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016); and the edited special issue “On Trans/Performance” of Performance Research (2016). Jones is currently working on a retrospective of the work of Ron Athey and a book entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. Lois Keidan is the cofounder and director of the Live Art Development Agency (LADA). Marking its twentieth anniversary in 2019, LADA is a center for Live Art—a knowledge and research center, a production center for programs and publications, and an online center for digital experimentation and representation. Through its projects, opportunities, resources, and publishing, LADA works to create the conditions in which diversity, innovation, and risk in contemporary culture can thrive, to develop new artistic frameworks, to legitimize unclassifiable art forms, to support the agency of underrepresented artists, and to set new artists and ideas in motion. Bojana Kunst is Professor and Director of the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies/ ATW—Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft at Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany, where she leads the International MA in Choreography and Performance. Prior to Giessen, Bojana worked as a researcher at the University of Ljubljana and the University of Antwerp (until 2009), and later as a guest professor at the University of Hamburg (2009–2012), where she lectured and organized seminars and workshops in different academic institutions, theaters, and artistic organizations across Europe. Bojana is a member of the editorial board of Maska Magazine, Amfiteater, and Performance Research. She is the author of Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism (2015). Sven Lütticken studied art history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Freie Universität Berlin. He teaches art history at Vrije Universiteit and publishes regularly in journals and magazines such as New Left Review, Texte zur Kunst, e-flux journal, and Grey Room and contributes to catalogs and exhibitions as writer or guest curator. He is the author of Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art (2006), Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle (2009), History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image (2013), and Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (2017). Heike Roms is Professor in Theater and Performance at the University of Exeter. Her research into the history and historiography of early performance art was supported by a large grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and won the UK’s David Bradby TaPRA Award for Outstanding Research in 2011. She is currently working on a book with the working title When Yoko Ono Did Not Come to Wales: Locating the Early History of Performance Art. www.performance-wales.org Rebecca Schneider is Professor of Performance Studies at Brown University. Her books include The Explicit Body in Performance (l997), Performing Remains: Art

288

CONTRIBUTORS

and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011), Theatre and History (2014), and Remain with Jussi Parikka (forthcoming). She has authored over fifty essays in the field, including “That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up” in Theatre Journal, “What Happened, or Finishing Live” in Representations, “Remembering Feminist Remimesis” in TDR, and “Solo Solo Solo” in After Criticism. Jovana Stokic is a Belgrade-born, New York-based art historian and curator. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her dissertation, “The Body Beautiful: Feminine Self-Representations 1970–2007,” analyzes the works of several artists—Marina Abramović, Martha Rosler, and Joan Jonas— since the 1970s, particularly focusing on the notions of self-representation and beauty. Stokic was a fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; a researcher at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the curator of the Kimmel Center Galleries, New York University; and the performance curator at Location One, New York. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA Art Practice, SVA and NYU Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions. Chris Salter is an artist, University Research chair in New Media, Technology, and the Senses at Concordia University, and codirector of the Hexagram network for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technology in Montreal. He completed his PhD in directing/dramatic criticism at Stanford University where he also researched and studied at CCMRA. He collaborated with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe/ Frankfurt Ballet. His work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Chronus Art Center Shanghai, Wiener Festwochen, Barbican Centre, Berliner Festspiele, Muffathalle, Vitra Design Museum, HAUBerlin, BIAN 2014 (Montreal), LABoral, Lille 3000, CTM Berlin, National Art Museum of China, Ars Electronica, Villette Numerique, Todays Art, EXIT Festival, among many others. He is the author of Entangled (2010) and Alien Agency (2015). Jonah Westerman is Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York. In 2016–17, he was Chester Dale Senior Fellow in Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. From 2014 to 2016, he was Postdoctoral Research Associate at Tate in London, where he collaborated with curatorial, research, collection care, and archive departments on “Performance at Tate,” a project that produced an institutional history, as well as new strategies for collecting, displaying, and commissioning performance. He is coeditor of Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices (2018). Catherine Wood is Senior Curator of International Art (performance) at Tate Modern. She was instrumental in founding the performance program at Tate in 2003 and has since curated more than 200 live works, both at the museum and within the online space Performance Room, which she initiated in 2011. Wood was curator of A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, 2012 and co-curator

CONTRIBUTORS

289

of Robert Rauschenberg in 2017. Alongside her works on performance projects, exhibitions, and displays, she has been critical in the acquisition of works by Joan Jonas, Tino Sehgal, and Suzanne Lacy among many others, and displays at Tate Modern, as well as being actively engaged in research. She is the author of Performance in Contemporary Art (2019).

INDEX

Abramović, Marina The Artist is Present  4–5, 27, 29, 108 Seven Easy Pieces  228, 244 n.28 action(s)  28, 179 1965 action  39 (see also Beuys, Joseph) “action-happening”  227 (see also César) action-painting  67, 247 Asco’s No Movies, artists’ collective  121 (see also Asco) canvas as a space for  45 (see also Pollack, Jackson) “ecology of acts”  178–9 (see also Moles, Abraham) situationist(s) and post-situationists  178–9, 180 n.11 activism, activist artists  205 Bruguera, Tania  237–8 (see also Taitlin’s Whisper #5 event [at Tate]) community  116 embodied  89 feminist  150, 156 in Fluxus  48 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo  72–3 Lepecki’s call to  117 Liberate Tate organization  214 Precaria a la Deriva initiative  163 n.10 in queer performance  69 Sander, Helke  150–60 Situationist(s) and post-Situationists  178–9, 180 n.11 Subversive Aktion group  178 Adorno, Theodor  222. See also Horkheimer, Max aesthetics of behavior  259. See also Penny, Simon affect, affective  135 affect-driven economy  5

“affective investments  134 (see also Grossberg, Lawrence) the affective turn  135, 138 as codification of gesture  166 concurrent with feminist ethics of care  135 and emotion  130–2 gesture as a codification of  166 in Journey to Italy (film)  86–7 and labor of care  130 magic of photographs  133 (see also Cvetkovich, Ann) performance as producer of  108 The Politics of Affect  131–2 (see also Massumi, Brian) queer theorists’ work  132 Schneider’s affective turn  131–2 (see also Schneider, Rebecca) Spinoza’s affectations of the body  131 (see also Spinoza, Baruch) theory and studies of  8, 12, 135 (see also Ahmed, Sara) agency appropriation as displaced agency  136 (see also Mortensen, Mette) artist and museum co-determination  241 artists’ self-publishing and selfdocumentation  39–41 of the culturally disempowered  216 in gender performance  72 new modes of artist agency  22–4 shared between artists and interpreters  67 Aguilar, Laura  81, 83, 86 Ahmed, Sara  135. See also affect; feminist scholars Ai Weiwei  131, 136–7, 142. See also refugee crisis

INDEX

Akilah, Shani  98. See also ethical artistry guides Alexander, Jacqui M.  187. See also Chong, Albert Amorales, Carlos  234–6 Antivilio, Julia  191 Anzaldúa, Gloria  83. See also feminism; queer theorists archive(s), archival practices  213 alternative, queer archive  133 archival research  133 (see also Schneider, Rebecca) “archives de gestes à venir”  176 (see also Prévieux, Julien) Becker and Vogel’s archival book on Happenings  43 (see also Becker, Jürgen; Happenings, survey publications; Vostell, Wolf) historicizing performance  227 Performance Matters Archive  212 (see also Heathfield, Adrian) performance’s resistance to preservation  4 performative activation of the cultural archive  173 (see also Pirici, Alexandra) staging and acquisition of performance scores  239 (see also Charmatz, Boris) structure behind a collection  43 (see also Foucault, Michel) Taylor’s model  73, 78 n.20 (see also Taylor, Diane) art(s) critics in the 1960s and 1970s  62, 68 art criticism, artists ignored in  107 Cheng, Meiling  26, 137 and curatorial practice  107 existentialist  67 (see also Rosenberg, Harold) Foster, Hal  54, 228, 243 n.18 Fried, Michael  63, 64 Greenberg, Clement  66 Groys, Boris  104–7 Lütticken, Sven  12–13, 222–3, 231 mainstream  63 modernist formalist  66–7 (see also Greenberg, Clement)

291

new materialist  91 n.11 of performance art  22, 26, 71 perpetuating whiteness, heteronormativity, colonialism  7 Rosenberg, Harold  67 art for children  209–10. See also Peters, Sibylle artist’s body as enunciating agent  66 modernist formalist erasure of  66 as performative agent  23–4 (see also Pirici, Alexandra) political body  190–2, 194, 197–200 artmaking, modes of  19, 42, 45, 67, 98, 120, 127, 149 art market  4, 5, 17, 21, 27, 28, 213, 225–6. See also commodification Asco, collective of artists  121–2. See also action(s); Chicano artists audience(s), visitors activated by the live  108 amodal sensing  254–5 (see also TeZ) artist-audience interchanges  23 “audience building” sponsorship  234 as a collective  108 as consumer  220 dialogical exchange  193, 233 ethics of spectatorship  134 the experience economy  220 exploitation of  222–3 gaze of the Western viewer  138 imaginative responsibility  233 inundating human perception through technology  255 linked to digital technology  22 (see also Biesenbach, Klaus) mass experience  236, 239–41 (see also Charmatz, Boris; Tate Modern) motion tracking of  178 multiple levels of spectatorship  22 (see also Bishop, Claire) museum turn to audience  224–5 new forms of engagement  205, 207–8 reconceiving viewer role  227

292

role and responsibility  22 (see also Bishop, Claire) sharing in live rituals  234 spectatorship as act of endurance  185 (see also Pope.L, William) surveillance techniques  177 (see also Larsen, Nina Støttrup) systems of care between artists and audiences  93 tracking visitors in Gallery Analytics piece  175 (see also Lund, Jonas) in Instant Narrative performance installation  176 (see also Garcia, Dora) viewing a film  86 Austin, J. L.  59–60, 65, 71, 76 n.3. See also embodiment authenticity  3, 27, 111, 114, 116, 228 authorship  51, 166, 216 Bailey, Brett  216 Bal-Blanc, Pierre  237. See also curators Bartlett, Neil  209. See also queer artists Bauman, Zygmunt  105, 114–15. See also refugee crisis Beacham, Donte  97. See also Black artists Becker, Jürgen  42. See also Happenings, survey publications Belmore, Rebecca  89–90. See also decolonist artists; refugee crisis Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside)  89–90 Fringe  83–5 Bennet, Tony  226. See also museum(s) Bergman, Ingrid  85–9, 91 n.10. See also Journey to Italy; Rossellini, Roberto Bergson, Henri  165–7, 178, 199, 203 n.7. See also duration; gesture Berlant, Lauren  152–3, 159–60 Berliner Festspiele, Immersion program of installations  252–3 Haptic Field performative environment  253–4 (see also TeZ) Feed  256 (see also Hentschlaeger, Kurt) Parreno’s installation  252–3, 257

INDEX

Welt ohne Aufsen (World without Outside) exhibition (see curators) Beuys, Joseph  39, 46, 178. See also action(s); Fluxus artists Bianchini, Samuel  22. See also bodies; communal sharing; Fluxus survey publications; Verhagen, Erik Biesenbach, Klaus  4, 22. See also audience(s); curators Bishop, Claire. See also audience(s); exhibition(s); museum(s) consumer capitalism  22 (see also capitalism) critique of relational aesthetics  22 “dance exhibitions”  108–9 modes of attention to artworks  242 n.6 multiple levels of spectatorship  22 museum’s “gray zone”  22 performance crossing into installation  108 performance unruliness  5 spectators’ selfie-image  110 theatrical authenticity and realism  27 Black artists Beacham, Donte  97 Chong, Albert  182–7 DeFranz, Thomas F.  11–12, 119 Faustine, Nona  131, 138–42 “i-image”  187–8 n.2 (see also Philip, M. Nourbese) Marshall, Monèt Noelle  95–7 Piper, Adrien  126–7 poe, jumatatu m.  97 Pope.L, William  182–5, 187 “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art” retrospective  184 Santa Cruz, Victoria  192–3 Walker, Kara  100–2 Black artists, care for “anagrammical” blackness  140–1 (see also Sharpe, Christine) Black bodies  133 (see also Brown, Kimberly Juanita; Philip, M. Nourbese) double bind/burden  94, 99

INDEX

monetary value of Black creativity  95 performing for white audiences  94–7 shifting terms of experimental dance performance  9 thoughtful engagement  96 Black audiences Black performance as a racialized encounter  95 understanding deep structures of citation and legacy  98 witnessing each other as social dancers  97 Black popular and social dance  97–8 body, bodies communal sharing of  22 (see also Bianchini, Samuel; Verhagen, Erik) as document  85 new relationships between bodies and technologies  259–60 (see also Hayles, N. Katherine) the political, radical body  181, 190–1, 200 production, productivity  12 (see also Kunst, Bojana; Lütticken, Sven) virtual body and data body  175–6 (see also Critical Art Ensemble) body art  66, 77 n.11, 125–6, 190–2, 196–9. See also Antivilio, Julia; Hsieh, Tehching; Jones, Kim Bottoms, Stephen  63 Bourdieu, Pierre  120 Brecht, Bertolt  117, 171–2. See also gesture Brecht, George  43, 46. See also Fluxus artists Brown, Kimberly Juanita  133. See also Black bodies Brown, Trisha Roof Piece Re-layered  228 Walking on the Wall  227 Bruguera, Tania  237–8. See also activist arts Buchmann, Sabeth  23. See also audience(s) Buren, Daniel  225–6. See also museum(s) Bustamante, Nao  73–4. See also queer artists

293

Butler, Judith  19, 59, 70, 72. See also queer feminist theorists Gender Trouble  59–61, 69, 70–2, 76–7 n.5 Butt, Gavin  212. See also Live Art Development Agency Cage, John. See also music “Event” at Black Mountain College  66 predecessor of Happenings  44 work for Summergarden progam at Museum of Modern Art  227 Camiruaga, Gloria  199. See also Latin American women artists capitalism, capitalist advanced  5–6 anti-capitalist aesthetics  122 (see also Smith, Jack) the capitalist commodity form  228 (see also Schneider, Rebecca) care in choreography  148–9, 160 (see also Tunemyr, Else) cognitive  155 colonial-capitalism  84, 88–9 consumer  22 (see also Bishop, Claire) domestic and sociopolitical  134 an ethics of  93–4, 130, 135 exploitation of gestures  167, 176 extractive  163 n.7 extreme capitalism  113 and gender relations  154 industrial  166 late capitalism  59, 150, 183, 222 methodologies of  131–5 need for consumption  22 networked  177 performance as radical care  129 and reproduction  153, 157 as a shared methodological approach  24 the social factory (“fabbrica diffusa”)  172 (see also Trotoni, Mario) techno-capitalism  111 Carnevale, Graciela  199. See also Latin American women artists César  227. See also action(s)

294

Chaplin, Charlie  168, 172–3. See also gesture Charmatz, Boris  222–3, 239–41. See also archives; curators; museum(s); Tate Modern Musée de la danse (“Dancing Museum”), director of  238–40 Cheng, Meiling. See also art(s) critics critique of Ai Weiwei  137 cross-disciplinary criticism  26 Chetwynd, Monster  236–7. See also performance(s) Chicano artists’ movement  121, 193. See also Asco Chong, Albert  182–7. See also Alexander, Jacqui M.; Black artists “I-traits” series  185–7 “Natural Mystic”  182–5 Clark, Lygia  25, 200, 201 The Cockettes  62, 67–8. See also queer artists Collingwood, R. G.  65 colonial, colonialism  7, 30, 73, 84–9, 90 n.4, 91 n.13, 124, 128, 183, 186–7, 197–9, 216 commodification, commercialization (of art, gesture, museums, and performance)  5, 99, 165, 176, 213–5, 220, 233. See also art market Critical Art Ensemble  175. See also body cultural capital  107, 210, 213, 216 Cunningham, Merce  258–9 curators Bal-Blanc, Pierre (Tate)  237 Biesenbach, Klaus (Museum of Modern Art)  4 Charmatz, Boris  222–3, 238–41 Doyle, Jennifer  130, 193, 197 Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia  11 Giunta, Andrea  190, 195 Hauser, Jens  261 Keidan, Lois (Live Art Development Agency)  11 Lepecki, André  6–7, 117 Oberender, Thomas (Berliner Festspiele)  253 Sanders, Jay (The Whitney)  242 n.11

INDEX

Seghal, Tino (Berliner Festspiele)  253 Sheddan, Susan (Tate families)  209 Szeemann, Harald  39 von Osten, Marion  155 Wood, Catherine (Tate Modern)  207 Cvetkovich, Ann  133–4, 149. See also queer theorists Dabashi, Habid  136–7 dance, dancers awkwardness in museums and galleries  94 Brown, Trisha, work in museum  227, 228 “Buy My Soul”  95–7 (see also Marshall, Noelle Monèt) codification  166 copyright  166–7 (see also Fuller, Loïe) “dance exhibitions”  108–9, 174 (see also Bishop, Claire) “Dance Factory”  222 (see also Lütticken, Sven) dance and tech movement in the 1990s  258–9 De Keerssmaeker, Anne Teresa, work in museum  109–11 Donnarumma’s Eingeweide (Guts)  258 (see also dance) enlivening galleries  94 featured in museums  108 Fuller, Loïe  166 Happenings choreographers  42 instrumentalized by museums  222 liveness and ephemerality  97 in “prosthetic costumes”  257 Santa Cruz, Victoria  192–3 Sehgal’s choreographic “situations”  230–2 (see also Sehgal, Tino) von Laban, Rudolf  169, 174–5, 179 Davis, Angela  157. See also labor Debord, Guy  6, 178 de Certeau, Michel  39 decolonialist artists Belmore, Rebecca  83–5, 89–90 Rojas, Emilio  81–6, 90 DeFrantz, Thomas F.  11–12, 99–101, 119. See also Black artists De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa  109–11

INDEX

Demir, Nilüfer  129–30, 132. See also refugee crisis Derrida, Jacques debate on performativity  69–70 (see also Searle, John) “globalatinized”  91 n.14 (see also Mignolo, Walter) “hauntology”  243 n.22 intentional locution  69 performativity as iteration  60, 69–70 Donnarumma, Marco  258. See also dance Doyle, Jennifer  130, 193, 197. See also curators dramaturgy in Complexity of Being  111–16 (see also Richter, Falk; van Dijk, Anouk) “dramaturgy of the real”  107 (see also Martin, Carol) handling the complexity  116 intermedial  107–8 (see also Stiles, Kristine) linking aesthetic relations to artistic intention  10, 104 (see also Ekersall, Peter) need for critical distance  117 “new dramaturgy”  28, 105, 107 (see also Van Kerkhoven, Marianne) political dynamics of mise-enscène  108 (see also Stiles, Kristine) radical austerity of  110 (see also Mauss, Nick) of staging performances in museums  111 in Work/Travail/Arbeid  109–11 (see also De Keersmaeker, Anna Teresa) Druker, Zackary  74–6. See also queer artists duration indefinite duration in literalist art  63 (see also Fried, Michael) series of year-long performances  125 (see also Hsieh, Techching) we exist in a continuum  199 (see also Bergon, Henri)

295

Eckersall, Peter  10. See also dramaturgy Eliasson, Olafur  108 embodiment Austin’s concept of the performative  59–60 (see also Austin, J.L.) Butler’s body materialities  70 (see also Butler, Judith) digital disembodiment  24 exhibitions as shared embodied experience  192–3 (see also exhibitions) gendered  68–70 enactment  59, 94, 131, 142, 230, 243 n.17 ethical artistry guides Akilah, Shani  98 Muhammad, Abdul-Aliy Abdullah  98 ethics of an action  123 animating performance art  12 of the art work  121 (see also Fraser, Andrea) of care  137, 93 (see also care; Doyle, Jennifer) of diversity and inclusion  216 ethical care as attending to others  130 ethical leadership of institutions  214 ethics of fundraising symposium  214 inclusivity in UK arts  216 of queer performance  123 (see also Smith, Jack) radical ethics in performance art  124 of spectatorship  134 Euba, Mikel,  179. See also gesture Eurocentric, Eurocentrism anti-colonial position towards  191 Austin’s historical model (narrative) of performance art  12, 29, 127–8 (see also Austin, J.L.) concept of art  11 culture, as imperialist  191 models of creative modernity  11, 94–5 (See also De Franz, Thomas F.) performance art as Eurocentric concept  9 exhibition(s) border with performance  252 (see also Oberender, Thomas)

296

dance as an  108–11, 174–5 (see also Bishop, Claire) immersive-like  10 interaction with art practice  242 n.3 liveness in  110 in nineteenth century  226 of performance art  38–7 role of performance in  222, 227 as shared embodied experience  193 survey  52 technically advanced  106, 174 “theatricalization of the museum”  106 (see also Groys, Boris) experience economy  21–2, 110, 208, 220, 231. See also von Hantelmann, Dorothea Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia  11. See also curators Farocki, Harun  175. See also bodies Faustine, Nona  131, 138–42. See also Black artists feminism, feminist Black feminist art  29 (see also McMillan, Uri) Chicana feminism  83 (see also Anzaldúa, Gloria) ethics of care, care studies  135 German feminism  162 n.2 Marxist feminists  153 queer feminist performance theory  65 feminist artists Antivilio, Julia  191 Piper, Adrien  126–7 Precarias a la Deriva (Precarious Women Adrift)  156 Sander, Helke  150–61 Smith, Barbara T.  126 Tunemyr, Else  148–9 Ukeles Laderman, Mierle  153 Yi, Anicka  247 feminist scholars Ahmed, Sara  135 Alexander, Jacqui M.  187 Antivilio, Julia  191 Kunst, Bojana  12–13 McMillan, Uri  29 Phelan, Peggy  38, 52, 132–3, 136, 228, 231, 243 n.17 Tronto, Joan  134

INDEX

Flusser, Vilm  174, 179. See also gesture Fluxus affiliates’ disputes  55 n.10 Fluxus artists Brecht, George  43, 46 Halprin, Anna  46 Higgins, Dick  49 Kaprow, Allan  46, 67 Maciunas, George  45–9 Paik, Naim June  49, 51 Shiomi, Mieko  51–2 (see also action[s]) Vostell, Wolf  46, 50 Young, La Monte  46 Fluxus auto-histories, mappings  37–9, 45–52. See also Happenings Fluxus-chart  46–9 (see also Maciuna, George) Intermedia Chart  49 (see also Higgins, Dick) Paik’s “island”  49–51 (see also Paik, Naim June) Spatial Poem score  51–3 (see also Shiomi, Mieko) Vostell’s drawings  49 (see also Vostell, Wolf) Fordism, Fordist  157, 166–8, 172, 174–9. See also post-Fordist Foster, Hal  54, 228, 243 n.18. See also art(s) critics Foucault, Michel  43, 61, 69, 255. See also archives Franco, James  4 Franko, B. I Miss You  130 not a number  12, 129, 131, 133, 138, 142 Fraser, Andrea  121, 230 Fried, Michael. See also art critics attack on “theatricality”  243 n.15 condemnation of minimalism  243 n.18 homophobia  63–4 on “literalist art” and purity  63 threat of art dependent on audience  77 n.8 Fuchs, Elinor  28. See also theater(s) Fuller, Loïe  166. See also dance

INDEX

Garcia, Dora  176. See also audiences, visitors Garcia, Leslie  260. See also Latin American women artists gesture automatism  167 Chaplin’s slapstick  168 (see also Chaplin, Charlie) choreography of patented gestures  176. (see also Prévieux, Julién) chronocyclegraphs and “fatigue study”  168–9 (see also Gilbreth, Frank and Lilian) definitions of  166–7, 178 gesturality of speech  179 (see also Euba, Mikel) in industrial production  167 kinetography and Labananalysis  169–71 (see also von Laban, Rudolf) moving across time through media  85 “operational”  176 (see also Pias, Claus) photographing non-standard movement  169 (see also Mili, Gjon) the social gest  171–2 (see also Brecht, Bertolt) as symbol and aesthetic artifice  174–5 (see also Flusser, Vilm) Gilbreth, Frank and Lilian  168. See also gesture Giunta, Andrea  190. See also curators Glissant, Édouard  58 globalatinization  88–9. See also Mignolo, Walter Goffman, Erving  60, 65, 67–8, 76–7 n.5. See also performance(s) Goldberg, RosaLee  37 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo  72–3. See also queer artists Greenberg, Clement  66. See also art critics Grossberg, Lawrence  134. See also affect Grotowski, Jerzy  26, 30 Groys, Boris  104. See also art critics; exhibition(s); museum(s) Gutai group  65

297

Haff, Peter  249–51. See also technosphere Halprin, Anna  46. See also Fluxus artists Hansen, Al  42. See also Happenings, survey publications Happenings, survey publications Assemblage, Environments & Happenings  40, 43–5 (see also Kaprow, Allan) The Drama Review’s special issue, edited by Kirby, Michael  40, 56 n.4 Happenings, historical periods  40, 66 Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology  41 (see also Kirby, Michael) Happening & Fluxus exhibition  39 (see also Szeeman, Harald) Happenings. Fluxus—Pop Art— Nouveau Réalism  40, 42–4 (see also Becker, Jürgen; Vostell, Wolf) A Primer of Happenings  40, 42 (see also Hansen, Al) A Primer of Happenings and Time/ Space Art  40 (see also Kirby, Michael) “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)”  99–102. See also Walker, Kara Hartman, Saidiya  85 Hauser, Jens  261. See also curator; performativity Hayles, N. Katherine  259–60. See also bodies Heathfield, Adrien  38, 212. See also archive(s); Live Art Development Agency Henri, Arian  37 Hentschlaeger, Kurt  256. See also Berliner Festspiele “Hibiscus” (George Edgerly Harris)  68. See also queer artists Higgins, Dick  49. See also Fluxus artists; Fluxus auto-histories; mappings Horkheimer, Max  222. See also Adorno, Theodor Hsieh, Tehching  124–5. See also body art human rights  89, 198, 202 n.6, 214

298

If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse?  172, 239–41 Insignares, Catalina  149, 160–2. See also labor institutional critique  120, 31 n.6, 225, 230. See also Fraser, Andrea; Ukeles, Mierle Laderman intermedia  49, 107–8 Jackson, Shannon intermediality  20–1, 242 n.3 medium specificity  26 online performance anthology  117 n.4 Jones, Amelia  228–9 encountering  13 history of performance as paradoxical  38 the live as commodity  6 re-enactment as repetition  229 relationality in determinations of “queer”  10, 59 Jones, Kim  126. See also body art Journey to Italy  85–9, 91 n.10. See also Rossellini, Roberto Kaprow, Allan  40, 67. See also Fluxus artists; Happenings, survey publications Keidan, Lois  11. See also curators; Live Art Development Agency Kirby, Michael  28, 42. See also Happenings, survey publications; new theater Kulik, Oleg  3 Kunst, Bojana  12–13. See also body, productivity; labor; Lütticken, Sven Kusama, Yayoi  226. See also Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead (Museum of Modern Art) labor affective labor (of care)  4, 130, 138, 166 algorithmic dead labor  175 art as a form of  110 of the artist and performer  12, 27, 148–62

INDEX

in The Artist is Present  4 (see also Abramović, Marina) in Catalina Insignare’s us as a useless duet  160–2 Chaplin and industrial labor  173 emotional labor  95, 138 feminist and political debates  150 in Helke Sander’s films  150–60 in Hollywood’s studio system  168 immaterial  166 Laban’s mapping of  171 and leisure  177 in Manifesto for Maintenance Art  120, 123–4 (see also Ukeles, Mierle Laderman) mental and physical  172 and poetics  12 (see also Kunst, Bojana) reproductive  163 n.6 practices in curating and performance art  6, 8 Schneider, Rebecca affective and performative the agency of artists  24 civil war reenactments  135 dematerialized art as critique  5 the live and the dead  228 turn  131 semiotic  166 semio-affective  174 socialization of reproduction  157 (see also Davis, Angela) as subject in performance  124–4 (see also Hsieh, Tehching) swarms of data bodies  175 (see also Farocki, Harun) testing the museums’ regulations for employees  230–2 (see also Sehgal, Tino) Work/Travail/Arbeid  109–11 (see also De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa) Larsen, Nina Støttrup  177. See also audiences Latin American women artists Antivilio, Julia  191 Camiruaga, Gloria  199 Carnevale, Graciela  199 Garcia, Leslie  260 López, Yolanda  192–3

INDEX

Maiolino  199 Marmolejo, Evelia  197–8 Mayer, Mónica  191–2 Mendieta, Ana  196 Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985  190 (see also Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia; Guinta, Andrea) Rivera, Sophie  196–7 Santa Cruz, Victoria  192–3 Soares, Teresinha  196 Valdex, Patssi  193–4 Vicuña, Cecilia  194 Leckey, Mark  236. See also museums Lehmann, Hans-Thies  28. See also postdramatic theater; theater, experimental theater Lepecki, André  6–7, 20, 117. See also curators Liberate Tate collective  214 “liquid modernity”  105. See also Bauman, Zygmunt Live Art Development Agency (LADA)  11, 206, 209–10, 212–8. See also Tate Modern the live, Live Art, liveness activating audiences  108 as commodity and spectacle  6 of dance in museums  97 in film  86, 91 n.10 exhibition of “collective bacteria”  247 (see also Yi, Anicka) an expansive practice in UK  204 framing live art  205–6 impact of technology on  206 institutionalism in UK  204–5 the live and not live in film  86–7 “the live” in visual arts programming  5 (see also Schneider, Rebecca) and non-living (mimesis)  90 n.2 Performa  217 positioning the discourse  28 potential of liveness  229 (see also Jones, Amelia) SPILL Festival of Performance  217 and the (un)dead  220, 228

299

as visible laboring  110 in visual arts programming  5 What is Live Art?  205 (see also Sofaer, Joshua) The Living Currency exhibition  237 Lopez, Yolanda  192–3. See also Latin American women artists Lund, Jonas  175. See also audiences, visitors Lütticken, Sven  12–3, 222–3, 231. See also body; critics; dance; Kunst, Bojana; museum(s) Maciunas, George  45–9. See also Fluxus artists; Fluxus auto-histories, mappings McMillan, Uri  29. See also feminist scholars Maiolino, Anna Maria  199. See also Latin American women artists Marmolejo, Evelia  197–8. See also Latin American women artists Marranca, Bonnie  28. See also theater Marshall, Monèt Noelle  95–97. See also Black artists, dance Martin, Carol  107. See also dramaturgy Marxism, Marxist, Marx analysis of labor  163 n.7 dead labor  228 (see also Schneider, Rebecca) and feminist theory  7 masculinity alienated  126 (see also Jones, Kim) non-normative (Smith)  68 white  73 Massumi, Brian  131–2, 141. See also affect materialism  24 of the body  76, 268 as compromised online  142 of gesture  179 new materiality  24, 260 of photography paper  134 of the unprimed canvas  129 Mathieu, Georges  65–6 Mauss, Nick  110, 114 Mayer, Mónica  191–2. See also performance(s)

300

Memo Akten  258. See also Whitely, Alexander Mendieta, Ana  196. See also Latin American women artists Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  70 Mignolo, Walter  88–9. See also globalatinization Minujín, Marta  227 modernity  11, 24 n.1, 46, 87, 93, 105, 114–5, 123, 165–6, 187, 191 Moles, Abraham  178–9. See also action(s); technology Morris, Robert “Notes on sculpture”  63 retrospective (at Tate)  227 sculpture  243 n.15 Mortensen, Mette  136–7, 143 n.10. See also agency Muhammad, Abdul-Aliy Abdullah  98. See also ethical artistry guides Musée de la danse (“Dancing Museum”)  238–40. See also Charmatz, Boris museum(s) awkwardness of dance in  94 Birth of the Museum  226 (see also Bennet, Tony) challenging the museums’ regulations and systems  230–2 (see also Sehgal, Tino) contemporary museology  221 corporate sponsorship  214, 233–4 determining best practices  225 digital media, use of  106, 174 drive to privatization  224–5 the emerging “mass museum”  233 entering the flow  104 (see also Groys, Boris) as factory  222 (see also Lütticken, Sven) “The Function of the Museum”  225–6 (see also Buren, Daniel) “grey zone”  22 (see also Bishop, Claire) institutional critique  120, 225, 230 International Council of Museums  225 naturalizing art’s radicality  202 n.14

INDEX

performance turn in  20, 107 pitfalls as service organization  226 professionalization of  224–5 (see also Weil, Stephen) proximity to entertainment  234–7 rise of professional organizations  225 as a space for histories  233 staging performances in  111 transformation of the Tate Modern  239–4 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), performances The Artist is Present  4–5, 27, 29, 108 (see also Abramović, Marina) Björk MoMA  106 Marta Minujín’s Kidnappening  226 Work/Travail/Arbeid  109–11, 116 (see also De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa) Yayoi Kusama’s performance  226, 243 n.15 Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania  106. See also Walsh, David music, musicians Cage, John  44, 67, 226 in De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/ Arbeid  110 in Leckey’s Big Box Statue Action  236 nationalism, rise of  7, 198–9 Nef, Hari  59. See also queer artists neoliberalism  223, 242 n.6. 242 n.7, 225 new theater  28. See also Kirby, Michael; theater Norman, Sally Jane  248–9 Oberender, Thomas  252. See also Berliner Festspiele; exhibition(s) Opie, Cathy  59. See also queer artists Pacitti Company cultural institution  217 Paik, Naim June  49, 51. See also Fluxus artists; Fluxus auto-histories, mappings Parreno, Philippe  252–3, 255, 257 Pelmus, Manuel  172–4. See also Pirici, Alexandra

INDEX

Penny, Simon  259. See also aesthetics of behavior Performa  217. See also the live, performance(s); performance art an art in the first person  191–2 (see also Mayer, Mónica) capacity for self-historization  38 curatorial understanding of  116 endurance in Black performance praxis  183–4 as Eurocentric concept  9 gesture in performance theory  165 in the Global South  9 how it mediates the past  229 involving “biocommunication”  260 Latin American terms for body art  190–1 new historical respectability for  227–8 as participatory workshop  236–7 (see also Chetwynd, Monster) performance, as a term and practice  23 performance studies  62–3 (see also Schechner, Richard) performance turn, the  20, 105 a political art done by the body  191 (see also Antivilio, Julia) queer feminist theory  65 as a revolutionary ethos  127 social interactions as performances  65 (see also Goffman, Erving) testing boundaries  124–5 a theory of  229 performance(s) in museums to attract audiences  5 commissioned and programmed  5 contradictory conditions  6 install-ability  231 (see also Sehgal, Tino) as live rituals, at Tate  234 relational approaches  233 performativity, performative of curating  199 a genealogy of the concept  10 (see also Jones, Amelia) intersectionality  8 “microperformativity”  261 (see also Hauser, Jens; technology) origin of term  77 n.10

301

of public’s participation  199 Peters, Sibylle  209–10. See also Live Art Development Agency; Tate Modern Phelan, Peggy  38, 52, 132–3, 136, 228, 231, 243 n.17. See also feminist scholars phenomenology of technology  250–1. See also Simondon, Gilbert Philip, Marlene Nourbese  187–8 n.2. See also Black artists Pias, Claus  176. See also gesture Piper, Adrien  126–7. See also Black artists; feminist artists Pirici, Alexandra  23–4, 172–4. See also archives; artist’s body; Pelmus, Manuel PLAYING UP  209–10. See also Peters, Sibylle poe, jumatatu m.  97. See also Black artists Pollack, Jackson  45, 66–7 Pope L., William  182–5. See also Black artists populism  7, 114 heightened  17 of neo-liberal divisions  115 new populism  24 postdramatic theater  28. See also Lehmann, Hans-Thies post-Fordist, Fordism, Fordist  157, 166–8, 172, 174–9 post-industrialization  151, 154 Post-Partum Document  153–4. See also Ukeles, Mierle Laderman Precarias a la Deriva (Precarious Women Adrift)  156. See also feminist artists precarity of artists’ labor  150, 158 depicting human responses to  111 embodied and affective  158 governance through  159 Precarias a la Deriva (Precarious Women Adrift)  156 of reproduction  155 of work  115 Prévieux, Julien, choreographer  176. See also archive(s); gesture

302

private philanthropy sponsorship of Tate by Egg Bank  233–4 “Take the Money and Run?” symposium (LADA)  214 public space, sphere algorithmic crowd control of  177 disappearance of  151–2, 155 government disinvestment  241 the museum as a  221 Tate’s reconsideration of  233 queer artists Barlett, Neil  209 (see also queer and gender performativity) Bustamante, Nao  69, 73–4 The Cockettes  62, 67–8 Drucker, Zackary  74–6 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo  72–3 “Hibiscus” (George Edgerly Harris)  68 Nef, Hari  59 Opie, Cathy  59 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence  69 Smith, Jack  62, 67–8, 122–3 Sylvester  68 queer and gender performativity camp, theatricality, and gay men  62 connection of sexuality to performativity  71 (see also Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky) and creative communities  68–9 Gender Trouble  70 (see also Butler, Judith) Genealogy of Queer Theory  59 (see also Turner, William) “On Camp”  62 (see also Sontag, Susan) performance ethic of Jack Smith  123 (see also Smith, Jack) Queer British Art 1861–1967 (Tate Britain)  209 A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep  209 (see also Bartlett, Neil; queer artists) queer theorists Anzaldúa, Gloria  83 (see also feminism) Butler, Judith  19, 59, 70, 72 (see also queer and gender performativity)

INDEX

Cvetkovich, Ann  133–4, 149 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  59–61, 70–2, 76 (see also queer and gender performativity) Sontag, Susan  62, 68 (see also queer and gender performativity) Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960–1985, exhibition  11, 190 Rainer, Yvonne Continuous Project Altered Daily (at Whitney)  227 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering   258 redefinition to redistribution  12. See also Gaines, Malik reenactment(s) access to live experience as  136 of Aylan Kurdi’s pose  131, 136–8 (see also Ai Weiwei; refugee) Beuys’ 1965 action  39 (see also Beuys, Joseph) discourse of spectrality  228 empathy, not fueled by  136 of forgotten live histories  244 n.25 historical  135–6 a methodological critique  137 Public Collection of Modern Art  172–3 (see also Pelmus, Manuel; Pirinci, Alexandra) portraiture as  137 “writing of history” as  65 refugee (crisis)  137 Belmore’s exhibition in Greece  89 (see also Belmore, Rebecca) camps, as laboratories  114–15 (see also Bauman, Zygmunt) Richter and van Dijk’s performance installation  115 (see also Falk, Richter; van Dijk, Anouk) Syrian, critique of Ai Weiwei’s reenacted pose  131, 136–7, 142 (see also Ai Weiwei) Syrian, Franko B’s stitched canvas  12 (see also Franko B.) Syrian, photo by Nilüfer Demir  129–30, 132

INDEX

relational, relationality aesthetics  22, 160 in care studies  134 in determinations of “queer”  10, 59 (see also Jones, Amelia) glorification of  22 in queer and gender performativity  67–9, 71–3, 76, 131 reproduction, Marxist feminist definition  162–3 n.5, 163 n.6 retrospectives The Artist is Present  4–5, 27, 29 (see also Abramović, Marina) Happening and Fluxus  39 (see also Szeemann, Harald) Immaterial Retrospective (Venice Biennale)  172 “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art”  184 Robert Morris retrospective at the Tate  227 Richter, Falk  105, 111–17. See also The Complexity of Being; van Dijk, Anouk Rivera, Sophie  196–7. See also Latin American women artists Rojas, Emilio. See also decolonialist artists Instructions for Becoming  81–3, 90 Open Wounds (to Gloria)  83–6 Rosenberg, Harold  67. See also art critics Rossellini, Roberto  85–9, 91 n.10. See also Journey to Italy Sander, Helke  150–60. See also activist artists, feminist artists The All-round Reduced Personality— Redupers  154 Excerpts from Reports of the Guard and Patrol Service  151–3 politics of emancipation  150 Redupters  155, 158 spheres of labor  153 Sanders, George  85–9. See also Journey to Italy; Rossellini, Roberto Sanders, Jay  242 n.11. See also curators Santa Cruz, Victoria  192. See also Black Artists; dance; Latin American women artists

303

Santone, Jessica  52 Schechner, Richard  40, 55 n.4, 62. See also performance studies Schilder, Paul  135 Schneider, Rebecca  5–7, 24 n.1, 131–2, 135–6, 139, 228. See also affect; archives; live Searle, John  69–70. See also Derrida, Jacques Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  59–61, 70–2, 76. See also queer and gender performativity Seghal, Tino  207, 230–2, 253. See also labor; museums and performance(s) Serota, Nick  233. See also The Tate Modern settler colonialism, narrative  84, 91, 131, 143 Sharpe, Christine  140–1. See also Black artists, care for Sheddan, Susan  209. See also curator; Tate Modern Shiomi, Mieko  51–2. See also Fluxus auto-histories, mappings Simondon, Gilbert  250–1. See also phenomenology of technology The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence  69. See also queer artists Situationist(s) and postSituationists  178–9, 180 n.11. See also actions; activism Smith, Barbara T.  126. See also feminist artists Smith, Jack  62, 67–8, 122–3. See also queer artists Soares, Teresinha  196. See also Latin American women artists social justice  98, 102, 205 Sofaer, Joshua  205. See also live Sontag, Susan  55 n.3, 62, 68, 132, 136. See also queer feminist theorists spectacle(s)  26, 94, 185 as all-consuming  6 (see also Debord, Guy) bias against  27 Broadway  251 critique against  30 the gaze in film  86–7

304

of labor  120–1, 222 the live as commodity  6 (see also Jones, Amelia) neoliberal context  20 selfie-taking  22 spectatorship  19, 22, 107, 109, 124, 134, 184–5. See also audiences SPILL Festival of Performance  217. See also live Spinoza, Baruch  131. See also affect Stafford, Barbara  253 Stiles, Kristine  107–8. See also dramaturgy Subversive Aktion Group  178. See also activism, activist artists Sylvester  68. See also queer artists Szeemann, Harald  39. See also curators, retrospectives Taylor, Diana  73, 77 n.10, 78 n.20. See also archive(s); technology audience inextricably linked to digital technology  22 (see also Biesenbach, Klaus) Berliner Festspiele’s Immersion program of installations  252–3 communal sharing of bodies  22 (see also Bianchini, Samuel; Verhagen, Erik) dance and tech movement in the 1990s  258–9 digital disembodiment  24 digital media in musuems  106, 174 impact on Live Art  206 inundating human perception through technology  255 machine learning (ML)  257–8 “microperformativity”  261 Moles, Abraham  178–9 (see also action[s]) new relationships between bodies and technologies  259–60 (see also Hayles, N. Katherine) new virtuality  24 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering  258–9 (see also Ranier, Yvonne) shaping affects  251 skenobiotope  248–9 (see also Norman, Sally Jane)

INDEX

technical systems as beings  257 technosphere, the age of the  249–51, 257 (see also Haff, Peter) TeZ’s Haptic Field performative environment  253–4 (see also Berliner Festspiele) virtual body and data body  175–6 (see also Critical Art Ensemble, body) Tate Modern If Tate Modern Was Musée de la danse?  172, 239–41 (see also Charmatz, Boris) Live Culture program  206 (see also Live Art Development Agency) proximity to entertainment  234–9 (see also Amorales, Carlos; Chetwynd, Monster; Leckey, Mark) questioning institutional authority  237–8 (see also Bruguera, Tania) Serota, Nicholas  207, 233 Tate Families  209–11 (see also art for children; Peters, Sibylle; Sheddan, Susan) theater(s), theatricality attack on “theatricality”  243 n.15 black box theaters  27, 109 critical concepts in  107 experimental practices entering mainstream venues in UK  208 experimental theater practices  28, 208 (see also Fuchs, Elinor Lehmann, Hans-Thies; Live Art Development Agency; Marranca, Bonnie) modeling the skenobiotope  248–9 (see also Norman, Sally Jane) new theater  28 (see also Kirby, Michael) of objects and machines  248–9 postdramatic theater  28–9 (see also Lehmann, Hans-Thies) presentational acting styles  28 theatricality opening art to time  64 “theatricalization of the museum”  106 (see also Groys, Boris)

INDEX

too bound in commercial concerns  107 (see also Groys, Boris) Tronti, Mario  172. See also capitalism, the social factory Tronto, Joan  134. See also feminist scholars Tunemyr, Else  148–9, 160. See also care Turner, William  59. See also queer performativity Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. See also feminist artists; institutional critique; labor Manifesto for Maintenance Art  120–1, 123, 153 Post-Partum Document  153–4 Touch Sanitation Performance  123–4 Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside  120 Valdez, Patssi  193–4. See also Latin American women artists van Dijk, Anouk  105, 111- 7. See also Richter, Falk Van Kerkhoven, Marianne  28, 105. See also dramaturgy Verhagen, Erik  22. See also Bianchini, Samuel; bodies Vicuña, Cecilia  194–6. See also Latin American women artists visitors, in museums. See audience(s)

305

von Hantelmann, Dorothea  20–1. See also the experience economy von Laban, Rudolf  169, 174–5, 179. See also dance; gesture von Osten, Marion  155 Vostell, Wolf  46, 50. See also Fluxus artists; Fluxus auto-histories, mappings; Happenings, survey publications Walker, Kara  100–2. See also Black artists; “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)” Walsh, David  106. See also Museum of Old and New Art Weil, Stephen  223–5. See also museum(s) white cube  109, 220, 227 white privilege  29, 73 Whitley, Alexander  258. See also Akten, Memo Wood, Catherine  207. See also curators; Tate Modern Woolf, D.R.  40 Yi, Anicka  247. See also feminist artists, live Young, La Monte  46. See also Fluxus artists Zygmunt, Bauman  105. See also “liquid modernity”

306