Perform, Repeat, Record

Live Art in History

Amelia Jones, Adrian Heathfield, Amelia Jones, Adrian Heathfield

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781841504896
• eBook ISBN: 9781783204373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Bringing together contributors from dance, theater, visual studies, and art history, Perform, Repeat, Record addresses the conundrum of how live art is positioned within history.  Set apart from other art forms in that it may never be performed in precisely the same way twice, ephemeral artwork exists both at the time of its staging and long after in the memories of its spectators and their testimonies, as well as in material objects, visual media, and text, all of which offer new critical possibilities. Among the artists, theorists, and historians who contributed to this volume are Marina Abramovic, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Rebecca Schneider, Boris Groys, Jane Blocker, Carolee Schneemann, Tehching Hsieh, Orlan, Tilda Swinton, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

III

Dialogues

Introduction

Adrian Heathfield

Through a series of exchanges between artists and between artists and theorists, this zone seeks to emphasize a vital dynamic in both the creation and historicization of performance and live art: dialogic discourse. As several contributors to this volume have already noted, the artist as an individual voice and identity still occupies a privileged place within the economies of production and reception of contemporary art practices.¹ Following Roland Barthes’ deconstruction of the powers of authorship in “The Death of the Author” (1967), the reductive rooting of an artwork’s meanings and affects within a single authorial figure – one who acts both as the primary source for and repository of interpretations of the work – has become a suspect critical gesture.² Contemporary art and cultural criticism would more readily assess the significance of an artwork in a complex network of interdependent productions of meaning, arising from, between, and through diverse agents and factors, including the artist, the reader or spectator, and the many material and discursive contexts of the forging and understanding of a work. The very notion of the singular artist as an originating, exceptional, elevated, and isolated figure has been criticized as a projection of modernist ideologies, and contextualized as culturally and historically specific.³ Nonetheless, the individual author–artist persists as the dominant figure in the systems of production of western contemporary art and in the critical and financial modes of art evaluation by the art institutions, press, and market. Recognition and reward route to a single name, even if that nomination is a stand-in for a complex set of collaborative relations. Live art and performance practices have sat somewhat uneasily in relation to identitarian economies, as public physical enactment in both its preparation and realization is often dependent on complex social creative relations. Whilst there are some striking examples of performances made in solitary conditions and “unwitnessed” by spectators, more often than not performance arises from situations involving collaboration, whether visible or invisible, explicit or implicit, stratified or non-hierarchical.⁴ Historically, across its somewhat distinct visual art and theatrical genealogies, performance has also been the chosen form of loose and tight collectives, the necessary modality of mutual and relational artistic expression.

A mode of discourse that emerges not simply from the individual but from the space of relation between agents would seem, then, highly appropriate for a discussion of performance and live art and its passages into historical record. The cultural status of the dialogic in relation to art production and discourse has been made more complex by the resurgence, in late twentieth-and early twenty-first centuries’ global visual art scenes, of practices that are socially engaged and whose content arises from processes of extensive relational production.⁵ Here art is refigured as a dialogic process, and the transient, intersubjective, and affective dynamics of these works necessitates complicated and highly politicized negotiations around its containment by and lasting presence within art institutions, evidentiary and archival registers. No account of the powers of the dialogic within the contemporary could be complete without consideration of the general information explosion arising from new technologies, and its accompanying cacophony of continuous interpersonal babble. What qualities of the dialogic might distinguish it from the incessant noise of the general economy of prodigious information exchange? Conversation (and its common textual manifestation in the form of the interview) is now an established form of art discourse production, rather than an intriguing minor biographical supplement. The ambiguous status of the interview form in terms of its enmeshment within identitarian and market forces is made evident, for instance, in the phenomenon of the high profile curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s prolific “collection” of interviews with key “names” in the contemporary art world. Cumulative collection and nomination here are in tension with Obrist’s commitment to the practice of exchange, its epistemological and pedagogic dimensions, his interest in a kind of “endless conversation.”⁶ But what might be the potentials of dialogic exchange in this context? What does dialogue disclose that is inaccessible or illegible in other forms of discourse or historicization? And how might dialogue be particularly enlightening as a critical force in relation to the practices of performance and live art?

While the interview can easily become a means of reinforcing notions of individual “genius,” dialogic discourse can open up more critical relations. One potential of such exchanges may well be, if the dialogues’ participants choose to utilize its inherent capacities, the further dismantling of the cultural and critical powers of both the figures of the artist and the art theorist-historian. Contributors to this volume have previously discussed the discursive mechanisms of mythologization that have sprung up around particular performance acts and artists, and the disclosures of artists in such exchanges may work in a counterfactual mode. Equally, particular figures within the fields of art criticism and history have acquired elevated status through their formalized interpretive powers, so much so that the authority of the figure overrides the truth-claim of what is said. The epistemological imperatives of both art and theory are obscured by these operations. In contrast, the openings occasioned by dialogue – to the informal, the unplanned, and the interpersonal – can be deployed to estrange the participants from their habitual perceptions of the relation between their selves and their work, to unpick cultural and critical projections and upturn sanctioned knowledges.

These exchanges can thus provide an opportunity for the power relations that define the cultural positions of artist and art theorist to be tested and loosened. This is the loosening not only of positions occupied by participants, but of the language and vocabulary deployed by speakers to mount a discourse on a subject. As a form of discourse that is within and partly about the present context of encounter, dialogue is an intensely social and provisional affair that is not readily subject to closure. Here language is gripped by differentiation: as the philosopher Maurice Blanchot stated, conversation “turn[s] language away from itself, maintaining it outside of all unity, outside even the unity of that which is. To converse is to divert language from itself by letting it differ and defer, answering with an always already to a never yet.”⁷ In particular, for the practicing artist to speak theoretically or for the art theoretician to discuss the practicalities of making or reception may involve each in a leaving of established formalities, languages, and logics, a departure that produces new ways of knowing and of speaking about the work. What might it mean for the practice of art criticism to attend less to interpretation, speculation, placement, and narration,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introductions
• Theories and Histories
• Documents
• Dialogues