The Transformative Power of Performance

A New Aesthetics

Erika Fischer-Lichte, Saskya Jain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134047499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In this book, Erika Fischer-Lichte traces the emergence of performance as 'an art event' in its own right. In setting performance art on an equal footing with the traditional art object, she heralds a new aesthetics.

The peculiar mode of experience that a performance provokes – blurring distinctions between artist and audience, body and mind, art and life – is here framed as the breeding ground for a new way of understanding performing arts, and through them even wider social and cultural processes.

With an introduction by Marvin Carlson, this translation of the original Ästhetik des Performativen addresses key issues in performance art, experimental theatre and cultural performances to lay the ground for a new appreciation of the artistic event.

Chapter 1
The transformative power of performance

On October 24, 1975, a curious and memorable event took place at the Krinzinger Gallery in Innsbruck. The Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramović presented her performance Lips of Thomas. The artist began her performance by shedding all her clothes. She then went to the back wall of the gallery, pinned up a photograph of a man with long hair who resembled the artist, and framed it by drawing a five-pointed star around it. She turned to a table with a white table-cloth close to the wall, on which there was a bottle of red wine, a jar containing two pounds of honey, a crystal glass, a silver spoon, and a whip. She settled into the chair and reached for the jar of honey and the silver spoon. Slowly, she ate the honey until she had emptied the jar. She poured red wine into the crystal glass and drank it in long draughts. She continued until bottle and glass were empty. Then she broke the glass with her right hand, which began to bleed. Abramović got up and walked over to the wall where the photograph was fastened. Standing at the wall and facing the audience, she cut a five-pointed star into the skin of her abdomen with a razor blade. Blood welled out of the cuts. Then she took the whip, kneeled down beneath the photograph with her back to the audience, and began to flagellate her back severely, raising bloody welts. Afterwards, she lay down on a cross made of blocks of ice, her arms spread out to her sides. An electric radiator hung from the ceiling, facing her stomach. Its heat triggered further bleeding from the starshaped cuts. Abramović lay motionless on the ice – she obviously intended to endure her self-torture until the radiator had melted all the ice. After she had held out for 30 minutes without any sign of abandoning the torture, some members of the audience could no longer bear her ordeal. They hastened to the blocks of ice, took hold of the artist, and covered her with coats. Then they removed her from the cross and carried her away. Thus, they put an end to the performance.

The performance had taken two hours. In the course of these two hours, the artist and the spectators created an event that was neither envisioned nor legitimized by the traditions and standards of the visual or performing arts. The artist was not producing an artifact through her actions; she was not creating a fixed and transferable work of art that could exist independently of her. Yet her actions were also not representational. She was not performing as an actress, playing the part of a dramatic character that eats too much honey, drinks wine excessively, and inflicts a variety of injuries on her own body. Rather, Abramović was actually harming herself, abusing her body with a determined disregard for its limits. She fed it substances which, though certainly nutritious in small doses, would doubtlessly cause nausea and discomfort in such excess. Moreover, the audience had to infer a strong physical pain from the heavy external injuries that she inflicted on herself. Yet, the artist betrayed no sign of distress – she did not moan, scream, or grimace. She generally avoided any physical sign that would express discomfort or pain. The artist restricted herself to performing actions that changed her body perceptibly – feeding it honey and wine and inflicting visible damage on it – without producing external signs for the inner states induced by these actions.

This put the audience in a deeply disturbing and agonizing position that invalidated both the established conventions of theatrical performance and generally of human responsiveness to a given situation. Traditionally, the role of a gallery visitor or theatregoer is defined as that of either an observer or spectator. Gallery visitors observe the exhibited works from varying distances without usually touching them. Theatregoers watch the plot unfold on stage, possibly with strong feelings of empathy, but refrain from interfering. Even if a character on stage (e.g. Othello) sets out to kill another (in this case, Desdemona), the audience knows full well that the murder is but a pretense and that the actress playing Desdemona will join the Othello actor for the final curtain call. In contrast, the rules of everyday life call for immediate intervention if someone threatens to hurt themselves or another person – unless, perhaps, this means risking one’s own life. Which rule should the audience apply in Abramović’s performance? She very obviously inflicted real injuries on herself and was determined to continue her self-torture. Had she done this in any other public place, the spectators would probably not have hesitated long before intervening. What about this case? A variety of considerations come into play. Abramović’s artistic intent demanded a certain respect, ensuring that she could complete her performance. One risked destroying her “work of art.” Then again, calmly watching her inflict injuries on herself seemed incompatible with the laws of human sympathy. It is also possible that Abramović wanted to force the spectators to take on the role of voyeurs¹ or test how far she could go before someone would put an end to her ordeal. What rules should apply here?

Throughout her performance, Abramović created a situation wherein the audience was suspended between the norms and rules of art and everyday life, between aesthetic and ethical imperatives. She plunged the audience into a crisis that could not be overcome by referring to conventional behavior patterns. Initially, the audience responded with the very physical signs that the performer refused to show: signs from which inner states could be deduced, such as incredulous amazement at her eating and drinking or horror at her breaking the crystal glass with her hand. When the artist began to cut into her flesh with the razor blade, one could hear the spectators drawing their breath in shock. Whatever the transformations the spectators underwent in those two hours – transformations that, to some extent, were manifest in perceptible physical expressions – they flowed into and prompted concrete reactions. Moreover, these transformations had clear consequences: the spectators put an end to the artist’s ordeal and thus concluded the performance itself. The performance transformed the involved spectators into actors.

In the past, when one spoke of art’s potential to transform – referring both to the artist and the recipient – one generally evoked an image of the artist seized by inspiration or the beholder of art roused by an inner experience, calling out like Rilke’s Apollo: “You must change your life.” Nonetheless, there have always been artists that treated their bodies abominably. Legendary accounts and autobiographies of individual artists consistently tell of sleep deprivation, drug consumption, excessive use of alcohol and other substances, as well as self-inflicted injuries. Still, the violent treatment that these artists inflicted upon their bodies was neither hailed as art by them nor considered art by others.² Relevant sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveal that such practices were tolerated at best. They were accepted as a possible source of inspiration for artistic endeavor, sanctioned as the price for the work of art that they induced – but never credited as art itself.

Nevertheless, there existed – and continue to exist – cultural domains that consider practices in which people injure themselves or expose their bodies to serious harm not only “normal” but even laudable and exemplary. This applies particularly to the domain of religious rituals. Many religions bestow a special saintliness on ascetics, hermits, fakirs, or yogis, not only because they suffer unimaginable privations and put their own bodies at great risk but also because they injure their bodies in the most tremendous ways. It is all the more astounding that even mass movements occasionally adopt these practices, as is the case with flagellation. Part of individual and collective practice for nuns and monks from the eleventh century onwards, self-flagellation was taken up in various forms: in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, processions of flagellants moved through Europe and conducted their ritual publicly in front of large crowds; orders of penitence, prevalent particularly in Latin countries, had their members flagellate themselves collectively on various occasions. Voluntary self-flagellation has sustained itself as a living practice up to the present in Good Friday processions in Spain and in certain places in southern Italy, as well as in Corpus Christi processions, and in the liturgy of Semana Santa.

The descriptions of the everyday lives of the Dominican nuns at the cloister Unterlinden near Colmar, composed by Katharina von Gebersweiler at the beginning of the fourteenth century, reveal that voluntary self-flagellation constituted a fundamental part, if not the culmination, of the liturgy:

At the end of the morning and evening prayers, the sisters remained standing in the choir and prayed until they were given a sign to begin with their devotional worship. Some tortured themselves with knee bends while praising the rule of God. Others, consumed by the fire of divine love, were unable to contain their tears, which they accompanied with devotional wailing. They did not move until they were suffused anew by grace and found ‘thou whom my soul loveth’ (Song of Solomon 1:7). Others finally tormented their flesh by severely maltreating it on a daily basis – some with birch rods, others with whips, containing three or four knotted straps, a third group with iron chains, a fourth one with flagella furnished with thorns. During Advent and the entire fasting period, the sisters went into the chapter house and other appropriate places after the morning prayers, where they mauled their bodies severely with the most diverse instruments of flagellation until blood flowed, so that the lashings of the whip sounded through the whole cloister and, sweeter than any other melody, ascended to the Lord’s ears.³

(Ancelet-Hustache 1930 cited in Largier 2001: 29)

The ritual of self-flagellation lifted the nuns above their monastic routine and offered the promise of transformation. The violence inflicted on their bodies together with the physical transformation evident after the torture brought about a process of spiritual transformation: “Those who approached God in these diverse ways were granted enlightenment of the heart, their thoughts were purified, their passion ignited, their conscience became clear, and their spirits ascended towards God” (Ancelet-Hustache 1930 cited in Largier 2001: 30). Voluntary selfflagellation – physical abuse that aims at spiritual transformation – is recognized by the Catholic Church as a penance practice even today.⁴

A second cultural domain that allows for bodily injury or risk thereof can be found in fairground spectacles. On the one hand, tricks that would “normally” lead to serious injuries miraculously seem not to harm the artists themselves, such as fire eating, sword swallowing, or piercing the tongue with a needle, to name only a few. On the other hand, the artists perform extremely hazardous actions, exposing themselves to real dangers. The mastery of the performers lies precisely in their ability to defy this danger. The performer’s concentration need but slacken for a fraction of a second for the ever-lurking danger to erupt that is posed by a tightrope act without a net or by the taming of predatory animals and snakes: the tightrope dancer falls, the tamer is attacked by the tiger, and the snake-charmer is bitten by the snake. This is the moment the audience fears most and which it yet feverishly awaits. Its deepest fears, fascination, and sensationalist curiosity are unleashed in this moment. These spectacles are not so much about the transformation of the actors or, even less so, the spectators. They rather seek to demonstrate the unusual physical and mental powers of the performers, and are intended to elicit awe and wonder from the audience. We are talking here about precisely the emotions that also took hold of Abramović’s audience.

The second distinctive feature of Abramović’s performance is the transformation of the spectators into actors, for which there also exist examples from different cultural domains. Of particular interest for our context are the penal rituals of the early modern period. As Richard van Duelmen has shown, spectators would crowd around the corpse after an execution in order to touch the deceased’s body, blood, limbs, or even the lethal cord. They hoped that this physical contact would cure them of illness and generally provide a guarantee for their own bodily well-being and integrity (1988: 161). The transformation of spectators into actors occurred in the hope of achieving a lasting alteration of their own bodies. As such, this transformation had a completely different thrust from that experienced by the audience in Abramović’s performance. Her spectators were not concerned with their own physical well-being so much as that of the artist. The actions that transformed the spectators into actors, i.e. the physical contact with the artist, were aimed at protecting her bodily integrity. They were the result of an ethical decision directed at another, the artist.

In this respect, the audience’s actions also fundamentally differed from those of the Futurist serate, Dada-soirées, and Surrealist “guided tours” at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which spectators turned into actors. In this case, the spectators were provoked into action by deliberate shocks. The transformation of spectator into actor happened almost automatically as specified by the mise en scène; it was hardly the result of a conscious decision on the part of the concerned spectator. Accounts of such events as well as manifestos of the artists speak to these conditions. In his manifesto entitled The Variety Theatre (1913), for instance, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti makes the following suggestions for provoking the audience:

Introduce surprise and the need to move among the spectators of the orchestra, boxes, and balcony. Some random suggestions: spread a powerful glue on some of the seats, so that the male or female spectator will stay glued down and make everyone laugh … – Sell the same ticket to ten people: traffic jam, bickering, and wrangling. – Offer free tickets to gentlemen or ladies who are notoriously unbalanced, irritable, or eccentric and likely to provoke uproars with obscene gestures, pinching women, or other freakishness. Sprinkle the seats with dust to make people itch and sneeze, etc.

(1973: 130)

In this artistic spectacle, members of the audience became actors merely through the impact of shock and the power of provocation. Throughout, they were watched with anger, excitement, amusement, or malice by the other spectators and organizers. In Abramović’s performance, too, the transformation of some spectators into actors would have aroused contradictory emotions in the remaining spectators: shame for having lacked the courage to interfere oneself; outrage or even anger due to the premature conclusion of the performance, preventing one from seeing how far the performer would have still been willing to go in her self-torture; or relief and contentment about someone finally deciding to end the ordeal of the performer and most probably also that of the audience.⁵

Whatever the final assessment of the similarities and differences, Abramović’s performance notably exhibited elements of ritual as well as spectacle, that is to say, it hinted both at a religious and a fairground context. In fact, it constantly oscillated between the two. It was ritualistic⁶ by virtue of engendering a transformation of the performer and certain spectators but lacked the publicly recognized change in status or identity, as is often the case with rituals. It resembled a spectacle by virtue of eliciting awe and horror from the spectators, shocking and seducing them into becoming voyeurs.

Such a performance eludes the scope of traditional aesthetic theories. It vehemently resists the demands of hermeneutic aesthetics, which aims at understanding the work of art. In this case, understanding the artist’s actions was less important than the experiences that she had while carrying them out and that were generated in the audience. In short, the transformation of the performance’s participants was pivotal.

This is not to say that there was nothing for the audience to interpret; the objects used and the actions carried out on and with them could indeed be construed as signs. The five-pointed star, for example, would have given rise to the most diverse mythical, religious, cultural, and political associations – not least as the established symbol for socialist Yugoslavia. When the artist framed the photograph with a five-pointed star and then cut a corresponding star into her abdomen, the audience might have interpreted these actions as a symbol for the ubiquity of the state. This ubiquity manifests itself to the individual through its laws, provisions, and injustices; the audience might have read Abramović’s actions as a symbol of the violence that the individual suffers at the hands of the state and that inscribes itself onto the body. When the performer used a silver spoon and a crystal glass at a table set with a white tablecloth, the audience might have been reminded of daily activities in a middle-class setting, while the excessive consumption of honey and wine may also have implied criticism of consumerist, capitalist society. Alternatively, the audience might have read these actions as a reference to the Last Supper. In this context they would have then interpreted the flagellation – which in another context might have alluded to sadomasochistic sex practices – as a reference to the flagellation of Christ and his followers. When the artist lay down on the cross of ice with her arms spread out, the audience would probably have made a connection to the crucifixion of Christ. They might even have read their own act of removing her from the cross as the prevention of a historical reenactment of the self-sacrifice or as a repetition of the removal from the cross. Overall, the audience could have interpreted the performance as an exploration of violence that ranged from self-harm to the sort of violence that individuals encounter at the hands and in the name of the state or religious communities. The audience could have seen it as a criticism of social conditions, which allow the individual to be sacrificed by the state and which require such self-sacrifice.

However plausible such interpretations might seem in retrospect, they remain incommensurable with the event of the performance. The audience would have attempted such interpretations only to a limited degree during the performance itself. The actions that the artist carried out did not simply mean “drinking and eating excessively,” “cutting a five-pointed star into the abdomen,” or “flagellating oneself;” instead, they accomplished precisely what they signified. They constituted a new, singular reality for the artist and the audience, that is to say, for all participants of the performance. This reality was not merely interpreted by the audience but first and foremost experienced. It provoked a wide array of sensations in the spectators, ranging from awe, shock, horror, disgust, nausea, or vertigo, to fascination, curiosity, sympathy, or agony, which stirred them to actions that equally constituted reality. It can be assumed that the affects that were triggered – obviously strong enough to move individual spectators to intervention – by far transcended the possibility and the effort to reflect, to constitute meaning, and to interpret the events. The central concern of the performance was not to understand but to experience it and to cope with these experiences, which could not be supplanted there and then by reflection.

In this way, the performance redefined two relationships of fundamental importance to hermeneutic as well as semiotic aesthetics: first, the relationship between subject and object, observer and observed, spectator and actor; second, the relationship between the materiality and the semioticity of the performance’s elements, between signifier and signified.

For hermeneutic and for semiotic aesthetics, a clear distinction between subject and object is fundamental. The artist, subject 1, creates a distinct, fixed, and transferable artifact that exists independently of its creator. This condition allows the beholder, subject 2, to make it the object of their perception and interpretation. The fixed and transferable artifact, i.e. the nature of the work of art as an object, ensures that the beholder can examine it repeatedly, continuously discover new structural elements, and attribute different meanings to it.

This possibility was not offered in Abramović’s performance. The artist did not produce an artifact but worked on and changed her own body before the eyes of the audience. Instead of a work of art that existed independently of her and the recipients, she created an event that involved everyone present. The spectators, too, were not presented with a distinct object to perceive and interpret; rather, they were all involved in a common situation of here and now, transforming everyone present into co-subjects. Their actions triggered physiological, affective, volitional, energetic, and motor reactions that motivated further actions. Through this process, the relationship between subject and object was established not as dichotomous but as oscillatory. The positions of subject and object could no longer be clearly defined or distinguished from one another. Did the spectators establish a relationship amongst themselves and Abramović as co-subjects by removing the artist from the cross of ice, or did this act, carried out without her requesting or explicitly approving it, turn her instead into an object? Conversely, were the spectators acting as puppets, as objects of the artist? There are no definite answers to these questions.

The transformation of the subject–object relationship is closely connected to the change in the relationship between materiality and semioticity, signifier and signified. For hermeneutic as well as semiotic aesthetics, every aspect of a work of...