The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art

Bertie Ferdman, Jovana Stokic, Bertie Ferdman, Jovana Stokic

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350336162
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350057586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands performance art as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance, the book's chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art, and explore how this development is reflective of capitalist approaches to art and event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art-where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable-the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction.

This Companion adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to present performance art's legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a comprehensive and multifocal overview of the emerging research trends and methodologies devoted to performance art.

PART I

Introduction

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

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 art-world 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) h osted 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 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 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 no t 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 experimentation an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Issues and Problems: Future Directions in Performance Art Research
• PART III Essays
• PART IV Annotated Bibliography and Resources
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright