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Eiko & Komas performing Naked, Walker Art Center, 2010.
Commissioned by the Walker, this livingenvironmental installation
was open during museumhours throughout the month of November. Total
duration: 144 hours.
Performativity and Its AddresseeShannon Jackson
The difficult time is when there is nobody when we are waiting
to beseen but no one is there. Eiko 1
In November 2010 visitors to the Walker Art Center per-ambulated
as usual through its gallery spaces. They lingered be-fore
paintings and circled around sculptures, eventually happen-ing on a
gallery that housed an enclosed room. Upon entering,visitors found
leaves, rocks, water, and minerals. They mighthave discerned a
tremor in a small pile of leaves, looked twice atthe pallor of what
appeared to be a stone before realizing that thestructure also
contained live bodies, two of them. With barelyperceptible
movements, Eiko & Koma lay prone in what mighthave been defined
as an ecological art piece, never fully still butnot exactly moving
either, poised precisely to prompt awarenessof the precarious
nature of aliveness itself. When asked to dis-cuss what it was like
to perform this signature work, Naked, theysaid that the hardest
part was not the length of time or the dis-comfort of being gazed
on by strangers but the peculiar hollow-ness of moments when they
were alone. As Eiko notes in the epi-graph to this essay, the
absence of a spectator brought not reliefbut a strange tenuousness:
it was as if the work, waiting to beseen, did not quite exist
without anyone there to witness it.
Eiko & Koma are artists whose workalong with that
ofthousands of othershas been characterized as performativein some
way. Now we might ask what that characterizationmeans. Are their
works performative because they are perfor-mance artists? Can art
be performative without being perfor-mance? Can performance not be
performative? Are some types ofart performative and some not? While
I do not want to ignorethis tangle of questions, I do want to take
another philosophicaltack to chart our way through them. Most
generally, I would liketo consider the philosophical history of the
term performative, fo-cusing especially on what the concept implies
about the positionof the receiver. As it turns out, the receivers
rolethe role of thefigure we might variously call the audience, the
beholder, the visi-tor, the interlocutor, the participant, or the
spectatoris funda-mental to understanding the uses of the term
performativity. In-deed, the reception by the audience is key to
constituting any art-work, action, speech, or event as performative
in its power.This factor creates new philosophical tangles when we
consider
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Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1965, DVD (black and white,sound); edition
6/10, 9 minutes. Collection WalkerArt Center, T. B. Walker
Acquisition Fund, 2002,2002.210. Yoko Ono.
what it means to collect an artwork; an institution or
collectordoes not simply acquire a performative object but also
acquires astructure for renewing its relations of reception.
Given the wide range ofexpanded, cross-mediapractices that we
find
ourselves encounteringin museums, on stages,
and in the streets, itseems important to
develop a more preciseand varied vocabularyfor what they might
be
doing.
Let us first consider the term performativity in contempo-rary
art discoursealong with its varied, fuzzy, and
sometimescontradictory uses. The hazy understanding of the term
arguablycontributes to its ubiquity, as performative becomes a
catch-allin an art and performance scene that has undergone
incredibleexpansion. First of all, performativity is often used to
describework that seems to partake of performance but does not
quiteconform to the conventions of the performing arts.
Cross-mediapieces might incorporate a body, exist in time, or
perhaps asktheir visitors to do something. But what is their
medium? Theirgenre? They might be choreographed but are not quite
dance.They are theater-like but not theater. Some might call such
worksperformance art, and yet others would be unsure about the use
ofsuch a term, especially if the piece lacks the chocolate (of
KarenFinley), the scissors (of Yoko Ono), the loaded gun (of
MarinaAbramovi), or the oozing blood (of Ron Athey) that would
con-firm its place in the increasingly canonical history of that
genre.In the face of critical confusion, the term performative
comes into save the day. It seems to provide an umbrella to cluster
recentcross-disciplinary work in time, in space, with bodies, in
relation-al encounterseven if the term does this work without
sayinganything particularly precise. Let me call this phenomenon
theintermedial use of the performative vocabulary. As we will
see,the audiencethe receiverin fact plays a central role in
navi-gating this intermedial interplay. Depending on what art
formthey understand the work to be challenging, their reception
willtake different forms and make different judgments. Their
re-sponses gauge a works closeness and distance to sculpture,
todance, to theater, to film, to painting, or to other mediums.
In-deed, such calibrations will in turn affect whether the
receivercalls herself a beholder, an audience member, a spectator,
a view-er, a visitor, or a participant. The imprecision of
performativework in terms of medium thus gets tested most urgently
in theencounter with someone who is deciding what kind of
receivershe wants to be.
There is a second cluster of hazy and contradictory uses,
however, al-though they are uses that acknowledge the more
philosophical understanding ofthe term as linguistic action in the
world. In this cluster, performative art seeksmost specifically to
do something, to bring a world into being with its action. Theterm
performative comes from a longer tradition of speech act theory
that explores
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ACTING WITH WORDS/ACTING WITHPAINTING
the world-making power of language. In this school, language is
understood notsimply to describe the world but to constitute it.
Speech shapes our perceptionand also alters the conditions in which
we live, structuring how we think aboutourselves, about our
relationships, and about our environment. As a term thatarose
within a strain of Western philosophy, it coincided with a Western
history ofpostWorld War II art practice, one that was itself
preoccupied with philosophicaland political questions of
subjectivity, action, and autonomy. This is whereDorothea von
Hantelmann, in her essay for this volume, steps in to argue that,
bysuch a definition, all artwork is performative. It makes little
sense to speak of aperformative artwork, she says, because every
artwork has a reality-producingdimension. 2 Indeed, in the long
history of aesthetics, scholars have debatedthe question but have
largely concluded that representational acts of art are al-ways
reality-producing actions, contingent upon their conditions of
production.Interestingly, it is precisely at this point that the
position of the receiver comes inonce again to advance and
consolidate this process. As we will learn from examin-ing the work
of one of the most formative speech-act theorists, J. L. Austin,
the re-ality-making capacity of the performative happens in the
moment of a receiversuptake. A world is made in that exchange. This
is something that Eiko & Komaseem to understand with some
degree of urgency. The reality made by their art-work is all too
fragile, dependent upon someone to be there.
In what follows, I explore the frames and stakes of both the
intermedial andreality-making contexts of performative practice,
clustering my reflections aroundselected artworks and selected
philosophers that span the mid-twentieth centuryto the present day.
In reflecting on these uses, I find it important to understandand
value the impulses behind them. Given the wide range of expanded,
cross-me-dia practices that we find ourselves encountering in
museums, on stages, and inthe streets, it seems important to
develop a more precise and varied vocabularyfor what they might be
doing. While this essay focuses on correspondences
acrosstwentieth-century Western philosophy and Euro-American art
practice, we willalso see that these correspondences are revised
and critiqued by practices that en-gage a wider global history.
After introducing some key concepts and conundrums,I focus on three
different historical moments that are framed by different
perfor-mative vocabularies. For the purposes of this essay, I will
somewhat reductivelycall them the action turn, the Minimalist turn,
and the relational turn, al-though we will soon see that such
namings are themselves performative speechacts with their own blind
spots. I hope that a general consideration of these threeturns can
help us get back inside what are indeed true artistic puzzles about
howwe encounter and evaluate contemporary art, contemporary
performance, andtheir many antecedents. Following the position of
the receiver in these varied con-texts provides a way to navigate
their forms and their effects.
In 1955 Austin delivered the prestigious William James
Lecturesat Harvard University. In advance of his appearance, he had
beenoffering earlier versions of these thoughts in a course at
Oxfordthat he called Words and Deeds. It was the Harvard version,
how-ever, that would be remembered, transcribed, and ultimately
dis-tributed. The propositions, explorations, and qualifications
that
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Robert Motherwell, Lyric Suite, 1965, ink on rice paper, 11 1/16
x 9 1/16 in. (28.1 x 23 cm). CollectionWalker Art Center, Gift of
Margaret and AngusWurtele and the Dedalus Foundation, 1995,
1995.47.Dedalus Foundation/VAGA, New York, NY.
Franz Kline, The Chair, 1950, oil on canvas, 20 x16 in. (52.1 x
42.2 cm) framed. Collection WalkerArt Center, Donated by Mr. and
Mrs. Edmond R.Ruben, 1995, 1995.74. The Franz Kline Estate/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.
appeared in those lectures ultimately became a book, How to
DoThings with Words, that received a good deal of attention in
itsown time and would become required reading for many studentsof
critical theory as the twentieth century wore on. 3 I willexplore
later why interest in speech act theory resurged in ourcontemporary
moment, but first perhaps it is worth remember-ing a network of
related developments at midcentury. This wasalso a moment in the
art world when Abstract Expressionism hadestablished itself as a
distinctively American postWorld War IIart movement that invoked
but reworked the nonfigurative ab-stractions of the European and
Russian schools. As many criticstried to come to terms with the
large allover canvases of AbstractExpressionist painters, some
found themselves just as preoccu-pied with the movements and
processes by which painters madesuch works. Harold Rosenberg would
give a name to this ap-proach, defining action painting in the
United States in 1952 atthe same time that Austin was rethinking
the nature of wordsand deeds across the Atlantic. 4 For Rosenberg,
the distinc-tiveness of American Abstract Expressionist canvases
camefrom a change in attitude toward painting itself. The
conventionsof two-dimensional representation were undone by
painters whono longer viewed painting as a domain to reproduce,
re-design,analyze, or express, instead regarding it as an arena in
whichto act. As Rosenberg described it, What was to go on the
canvaswas not a picture but an event. 5 He attempted to call
suchactions American, somewhat speciously mixing metaphors
ofpolitics, spontaneity, and individual liberation; meanwhile, a
vari-ety of (usually male) artists were placed under this umbrella,
in-cluding Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, andCy
Twombly. Jackson Pollock would of course become the mostemblematic
American action painter of his time. That notorietywas solidified
when Hans Namuth documented his painting inaction, following the
cigarette-smoking, hypermasculine Ameri-can artist as he moved
deftly and determinedly with his dripbrush across a canvas that was
propped horizontally in the greatoutdoors.
I cannot do justice here to the histories and debates
thatsurround both speech act theory and action painting. But for
theconfined purposes of this essay, it is worth noting that their
pur-suits share a number of implications and consequences.
Withoutoverdrawing equivalences, we can spot a parallel
betweenAustins attempt to overcome a purely descriptive
understandingof languages function and Rosenbergs attempt to
describe thestakes of action paintings refusal to represent. Said
Rosenberg,The painter no longer approached his easel with an image
in hismind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do
somethingto that other piece of material in front of him. The image
wouldbe the result of this encounter. 6 The canvas was thus a
doc-umentary trace of an action, an encounter that was a doing
tothe canvas rather than a brushstroke aimed to represent a
priorimage in his mind.
A similar if not equivalent desire to dissolve the referen-tial
relationthat is, the prior-ness of the referent, the image,or the
signified before a signifierpreoccupied Austin. It wasfor too long
the assumption of philosophers that the business ofa statement can
only be to describe some state of affairs, or tostate some fact, he
wrote. Rather than statements whose in-
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tegrity was determined by the veracity of their
descriptionthatis, their representational or descriptive accuracyhe
focused onstatements that approached the world with the intent to
dosomething to it. Considering linguistic phrases like, I bet or
Ipromise or, most famously, I do, he found them most interest-ing
for their implosion of the referential relation. Indeed, it wasby
virtue of that implosion that such phrases transformed reality.He
called such phrases performative utterances, choosing theroot
perform, he said, because it indicates that the issuing of
theutterance is a performing of an action. 7 Both these
1950sWestern intellectuals were thus interested in reorienting our
un-derstanding of their respective mediums, a reorientation
thatforegrounded the capacity of language and the capacity of
paint-ing not simply to represent an already-given world but to
installtransformative encounters that brought the world into
being.
This decade followed and preceded a number of transfor-mative
and self-consciously active art experiments in Europe,Latin
America, Asia, the Soviet Union, and the United States:Dada,
Surrealism, the Bauhaus, Neoconcretism, Gutai, Construc-tivism,
Minimalism, institutional critique, and more. BeforeAustin, after
Austin, and whether or not they had read Austin,artists in various
contexts were questioning the parameters oftraditional aesthetic
forms in painting, sculpture, theater, anddance. Importantly, the
action in self-consciously active art in-corporated and deflected
the sociopolitical contexts in whichartists found themselves,
responding to the emergence of psy-choanalysis (Surrealism), to
collectivist aspirations (Construc-tivism), or to the rising
corporate capitalism and the new wars(including cold ones) that
defined the second half of the twenti-eth century. To notice that
art movements invoke a term like ac-tion is thus not to assume that
there is any equivalence amongthe realities that such performative
acts seek to make.
With that caveat in mind, it is worth lingering just a bitlonger
on Rosenbergs text and context to notice how this em-phasis on
action affected the reception of the painting. For one, itredefined
the relation between the artist and his work. A paint-ing that is
an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist,said
Rosenberg. The act-painting is of the same metaphysicalsubstance as
the artists existence. The new painting has brokendown every
distinction between art and life. 8 This lack ofseparation expanded
the notion of the artists signature at apresumably existential
level. Viewers were encouraged to see apainting as part and parcel
of an artists existence, not simplyreading biographical content
into its imagery but, more radical-ly, encountering the work as
life itself. With this stance on thework, the artists actions were
celebrated as much as the canvas-es themselves; when the canvases
alone were displayed, behold-ers were encouraged to discern the
choreographic actions thatproduced them.
Intriguingly, Rosenberg began to use the language of
thetheatrical medium to describe a new kind of viewing.
Criticismmust begin by recognizing in the painting the assumptions
inher-ent in its mode of creation. Since the painter has become an
ac-tor, the spectator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its
incep-tion, duration, directionpsychic state, concentration and
relax-ation of the will, passivity, alert waiting. He must become a
con-noisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the
sponta-
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Yves Klein, Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo CaneShroud), 1961,
pigment, synthetic resin on gauze,108 x 118 in. (274.3 x 301 cm).
Collection WalkerArt Center, Gift of Alexander Bing, T. B.
WalkerFoundation, Art Center Acquisition Fund, Professional Art
Group I and II, Mrs. Helen Haseltine Plowden, Dr. Alfred Pasternak,
Dr. Maclyn C. Wade, byexchange, with additional funds from the T.
B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2004, 2004.63.1-.3. YvesKlein and
Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork/ADAGP, Paris.
neous, the evoked. 9 Intriguingly, the art critic tried to
dis-cern the duration of the works creation, imagining the
gallerydisplay as a kind of performance piece; with this kind of
en-counter, the paintings beholder took on the qualities of a
the-aters audience member. The performative gesture of
actionpainting thus required an intermedial calibration, one that
im-plied duration, one that reflected on the difference between
ges-tures that were spontaneous and those that were evoked.
Toencounter action painting meant learning from other art forms
inorder to become a different type of receiver.
Let us compare such work with another early examplethat exposes
the intermedial and reality-making performativityof painting: Yves
Kleins famous two-hundred-piece series of An-thropometry paintings.
During what would be an unfortunatelyshort career, Klein began to
produce monochrome block paint-ings in his beloved blues, a pursuit
that was for him about access-ing a life force, albeit one
inflected by an unorthodox combina-tion of Rosicrucian spiritual
and existential reflection. Kleinssearch for absolute freedom in
painting meant pushing theboundaries of painting itself; his
language called for a spatial ex-pansion beyond the
two-dimensional: Today anyone who paintsmust actually go into space
to paint. 10 Klein famously wentinto space with his Leap into the
Void, a moment of apparentflight and apparent danger captured in a
photograph and circulat-ed in a self-published journal under the
intermedia title Thtredu Vide. The Anthropometrie paintings were
another mecha-nism for the spatialization of painting, one whose
theatrical ele-ments were also quite pronounced. Beginning in 1958
and hiringwomen to serve as living paintbrushes, Klein organized
numer-ous salons in which spectators were invited to watch as
femaleensemble members immersed themselves in human-size trays
ofhis trademark ultramarine blue paint, prostrating themselves
inturn across a huge horizontal canvas on the floor. In looking
atthe canvases now, we find ourselves speculating about the
chore-ography behind the images. We can see how the intensity of
theblue varies with the intensity of the press of the
three-dimen-sional body parts as they made contact with the canvas.
Thewomens own acts of self-paintingthe smears over the ab-domen and
circular swirls over their breastsnow remain on thecanvas as the
signature brushstrokes of the artist. Meanwhile,the white space of
the canvas marks absent spaces where the restof their limbs should
be; their hands are isolated in negativewhite space, detached from
their limbs and seemingly splayed inpanic. The effect of the
Anthropometries is thus one that recallsRosenbergs formula; the
performed painting was one in which apainters material is doing
something to another material, inwhich the image would be the
result of that encounter. Knowl-edge of those historical actions
affects how we encounter themnow. The paint presses and
brushstrokes are indexes of actionswhose gradations we try to
discern, speculating upon the exis-tential biographies of their
makers as we do.
While the concept of action painting seems to resonatewith
Kleins practice, it is also important to note that he resistedthis
alignment. In fact, the terms in which he rejected it bringforward
other intermedial and philosophical questions:
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Many art critics claimed that via this method of
painting I was in fact merely reenacting the technique
of what has been called action painting. I would like
to make it clear that this endeavor is opposed to action
painting in that I am actually completely detached
from the physical work during its creation. I would
not even think of dirtying my hands with paint.
Detached and distant, the work of art must complete
itself before my eyes and under my command. Thus, as
soon as the work is realized, I can stand there, present
at the ceremony, spotless, calm, relaxed, worthy of it,
and ready to receive it as it is born into the tangible
world. 11
Initially it is perhaps a little hard to reconcile Kleins
de-sire to enter into space with the assertion that, in the
Anthro-pometries, he preferred to be detached, distant, and
spot-less. Interestingly, the apparent contradiction uncovers
anotheralignment with the conventions of theater as a practice.
Unlikethe action painter, who positions himself as the instrument
ofaction, Klein essentially delegated and ordered the actions
ofothers, a position very much akin to the directors role in the
the-ater. Moreover, he was more able to remain calm and to
receivethe work as it unfolded by practicing the piece with his
ensemblefirst: like any theater director, he rehearsed. Hence, the
dele-gated and rehearsed quality of this performed painting did
notconform to the lone and spontaneous conventions of
Americanaction painting as Rosenberg had celebrated it, a fact that
makesa painting like Suaire de Mondo Cane all the more intriguing.
As apiece that was made in rehearsal in 1961, it is an index of a
cen-tral aspect of Kleins practice. One can thus look at the
canvasand wonder what was automatic, spontaneous, or evoked, butone
looks simultaneously with an eye toward speculating as towhat
spontaneous acts Klein might have kept in the script.What
evocations did he decide to eliminate? And what ele-ments could
have been rehearsed until they were automatic?More pointedly,
different kinds of contemporary receivers mightfind themselves
reading different kinds of content into the can-vas. Certainly for
a spectator asking feminist questions about thepaintings
production, the imprint of the female body parts has aparticular
urgency. By what logic could this male artist imaginethat his own
freedom would be expressed from such a spotlessposition? And what
were the stakes of that freedom for the mute,unnamed female nudes
who became his living paintbrushes?
The intermedial expansion of painting has taken manyshapes.
Allan Kaprow shared Harold Rosenbergs stance on Pol-lock and wrote
his own account of what he felt was most impor-tant in The Legacy
of Jackson Pollock. 12 Kaprow devel-oped an array of Happenings to
extend the action of action paint-ing, positioning them as
experiments that further blurred theboundaries of art and life and
that carried Pollocks action legacyeven further into the sphere of
the everyday. It is also importantto recognize, however, that other
artists innovated in the experi-mental expansion of paintingand not
necessarily in the samelegitimating spheres in which Rosenberg and
Pollock circulated.
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Kazuo Shiraga, Untitled, 1959, oil on canvas, 70 x110 in. (180 x
279.4 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition
Fund, 1998, 1998.109.
Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 19581966, oil with wood andmica on canvas,
128 92 11 in. (327.3 234.3 27.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American
Art, NewYork, Gift of thhe Estate of Jay DeFeo and purchasewith
funds from the Contemporary Painting andSculpture Committee and the
Judith RothschildFoundation 95.170. 2009 The Jay DeFeoTrust/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.
MINIMALISM AND ITS MISFIRES
In 1954, in another part of the world, Japanese artistsformed
the Gutai Art Association to craft alternative techniquesand an
alternative place for the artist in postwar Japan. Invokinggutai,
or embodiment, as a first principle, they explored theperformance
of painting, developing new gestures and methodsof working with
paint, throwing it, applying it with their feet,spreading it with
their own bodies. As actions, these artworkspreceded Kaprows
Happenings and developed independentlyfrom the work of either
Pollock or Klein. Staged in a Japan thathad recently surrendered in
World War II, the actions of artistssuch as Jir Yoshihara, Sabur
Murakami, and Kazuo Shiragawere deliberate attempts to create an
alternative embodimentto the one they found in the political
atmosphere of their home-land. As Ming Tiampo has argued, the
regional specificity ofthese actions decenters narratives of
innovation and experi-ment recounted from an exclusively Western
modernist perspec-tive. 13
The frame of action painting can become more heteroge-neous when
we consider not only global and gender diversityoutside of
Euro-American exchange but also diversity within it. Agreat deal of
visual art made by women can be helpfully under-stood as an
extensionand often a parodyof the actions ofmale painters. In San
Francisco in 1958, Jay DeFeo took the ideaof action, art, and the
everyday to different extremes when shebegan working on a huge
canvas in her Fillmore studio. Layeringwhite and gray paint into
forms that became sculptural in theirthree-dimensionality, she
undertook a process of scraping andrelayering, turning her own
actions as a painter into a daily ritualthat lasted for nearly
eight years. In her hands, the action ofpainting was not simply
spontaneous but also continuous, trans-forming the creation of what
she would eventually call The Roseinto a durational and social
relation in her studio. If a feministrereading of the everyday in
action painting is made possiblethrough the example of DeFeo,
feminist critique becomes morepointed and direct when considering
something like ShigekoKubotas Vagina Painting (1965) or Carolee
Schneemanns InteriorScroll (1975). Whether squatting to paint a
horizontal canvas witha brush secured beneath her dress (Kubota) or
displaying hernaked body as a locus and container of textual
authority (Schnee-mann), these artists addressed the gendered
undercurrent ofprevious action experiments. For historians of
feminist art of the1970s such as Amelia Jones and Rebecca
Schneider, the interme-dial challenge was clear. 14 If access to
life was going to bepossible for the female paintbrush, it could
happen only underher signature and when she controlled her own
relationship tothe canvas.
The performative role of the addressee would become newly heated
and newly de-bated with new sculptural movements in the 1960s and
1970s. The term Minimal-
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ism became a catchall for this turn in art and
performancevariously defined asliteralist art, primary structures,
or specific objectsone that reduced theparameters, materials, and
gestures of art in order to provoke an expanded reflec-tion on what
it meant to be encountering it. Before considering these art
move-ments and their critical reception, however, it is important
to elaborate uponsome other dimensions of performativitys
propositions. Indeed, having concludedthe previous section with
examples of feminist reinterpretation, it seems impor-tant to
return first to historic discussions of performative utterances. As
much asconnections between art and Austin can be found in the
emphasis on action, adeeper investigation shows just how much the
felicity of those acts dependsupon their reception. Indeed, How to
Do Things with Words is most interesting forAustins meditations on
what he called the uptake of an utterance. He concededquite early
that performative utterances could not have world-making power
un-less theysomewhat paradoxicallyalso had the cooperation of the
world aroundthem. Speaking generally, it is always necessary that
the circumstances in whichthe words are uttered should be in some
way, or ways, appropriate. 15 Suchcontingent circumstances
empowered speech to be performative. Austin thus be-came fully
engaged with all the inappropriate or precarious conditions that
short-circuited performative efficacy, creating a vocabulary for
what he called unhappyperformatives, or the doctrine of the things
that can be and go wrong. 16 Elabo-rating on different types of
infelicity, he thought at length about the concept ofthe misfire,
speech that missed its mark. He explored a variety of examples
inwhich the intended meaning of speech differed enormously from a
receivers up-take. He further distinguished the misfire from what
he called an outright abuseof language. Abuses were not simply
mistakes but utterances in which the sinceri-ty of the speaker was
in fact dubious. The difference between the sincere misfireand the
insincere abuse prompted a great deal of anxious reflectionnot
unlikeour most fraught debates around the effects of contemporary
art.
One of Austins most famously fraught reflections involved the
theater: aperformative utterance will, for example, be in a
peculiar way hollow or void if saidby an actor on the stage, or if
introduced in a poem, or spoken in a soliloquy. Thisapplies in a
similar manner to any and every utterancea sea change in
specialcircumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special
waysintelligiblyused not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its
normal useways that fall underthe doctrine of the etiolations of
language. 17 The idea that theatrical represen-tation was hollow,
void, and parasitic thus had intermedial implications. Certainlyit
resuscitated a historic Western antitheatrical prejudice that has
led commenta-tors since Plato to worry about the effects of letting
actors and poets into the are-na of serious civic debate. Austins
argument on the nonserious nature of the-atrical language would be
quoted and critiqued by subsequent thinkersincludingJacques
Derrida, Judith Butler, Shoshana Felman, and Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwickwho worried about its implications for a variety of
aesthetic sites at risk of beingdubbed nonserious or insincere. 18
After all, the history of Western art hasseen artists, poets, and
actors constantly renewing their bid to gain legitimate en-try into
the public sphere. Meanwhile, much of the recent history of late
twenti-eth-century experimental art has given itself a more urgent
charge, seeking toundo the art-life binary that would define
theateror any artas parasitic inthe first place. If parasitism
assumes a reality that precedes it, much contemporaryart and
performance exposed the dependence of that reality on a language
that de-fined it. Perhaps reality is actually the parasite.
While much of the art criticism that invokes Austin focuses on
his reflec-tions on parasitism, there are other dimensions of his
theory worth emphasizinghere. In fact, in the same period that
Rosenberg was writing and painters wereacting, a variety of critics
were decidedly unhappy about this nascent performa-tive discourse.
Clement Greenberg is the powerful art critic most famous
forlaunching analyses of Abstract Expressionist painting that
critiqued Rosenbergsvocabulary in the strongest of terms. Keen to
develop a specifically modernist
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art criticism, Greenberg found it necessary to reassert the
autonomy and essen-tially self-critical qualities of modernist
painting. Joining AbEx painters withother artists he admired, he
posited that the modernist strength of their paintingslay in the
degree to which they did not reference conditions outside
themselves;properly modernist paintings focused on their own
essential medium-specificity,their two-dimensional uniqueness as a
work on canvas. It was the stressing ofthe ineluctable flatness of
the support that remained most fundamental in the pro-cesses by
which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism.
Flat-ness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting
shared with no otherart, and so Modernist painting oriented itself
to flatness as it did to nothing else.
19
For Greenberg, Jackson Pollocks paintings were groundbreaking
not be-cause of the actions that coincided with them, not because
of the existence or lifeforce of the painter, but because the
paintings foregrounded the specificity ofpainting qua painting,
meditating upon their own essential flatness. For Greenbergand
other critics, such as Michael Fried and Hilton Kramer, there was
nothing in-termedial about such painting. What does he mean by the
canvas as an arena inwhich to act? Kramer asked of Rosenberg in
frustration. 20 To recall suchclaims and such frustrations is to
remember that many disagree with the notionthat all art is
performative. Moreover, as Greenberg had elaborated, a paintingwas
a good painting when it did not depend upon the uptake of the
receiver. Afterall, properly modernist painting criticized and
defined itself.
Certainly the most notorious and hence most often circulated
argumentagainst the intermedial and performative turns in
contemporary art came from aformer student of Greenbergs, Michael
Fried. His Art and Objecthood is a textthat is returned to again
and againsome might say too often. I return to it brieflyhere only
to remind ourselves of how the receiver figures in the text. Fried
trainedhis attention largely on Minimalist sculpture and the
influence of what he per-ceived to be its theatricality. His
scandalized concern focused on many aspects ofthe work: its
supposed literality, its durationality, its in-between-ness as an
in-termedial form. But one of his prime anxieties about Minimalist
sculpture had todo with its effect on the beholderindeed, its
dependence on the beholder. Fortheatre has an audienceit exists for
onein a way the other arts do not; in fact,this more than anything
else is what Modernist sensibility finds intolerable abouttheatre
generally. 21
While Fried found the audience relation intolerable, many
Minimalistartists sought actively to cultivate it. They were
interested in creating artworksthat encouraged viewers to avow
their own relation to the work of art; receivershad to reckon with
themselves in shared space with an artwork whose constitutionas a
work depended upon them. Robert Morriss reflections on what he
called thebetter new work defined this pursuit: One is more aware
than before that hehimself is establishing relationships as he
apprehends the object from various po-sitions and under varying
conditions of light and spatial context. 22 And Mor-riss own work
incarnated the pursuit as well. In his historic solo exhibitions at
theGreen Gallery in 1964 and 1965, the gallery space was
reorganized and even over-whelmed by the arrangement and volume of
Morriss large geometric structures.Viewers had to adjust their
comportment in the space, noticing heretofore unac-knowledged
spatial elementsincluding the corner occupied by his Untitled
(Cor-ner Piece) (1964)and questioning the assumed boundary between
artwork andgallery space, which was blurred by his Mirrored Cubes
(1965). Mel Bochner wouldjoin his own interest in numerical systems
with the environmental expansivenessof Morris in works like
Measurement Room (1969). Lining walls, ceilings, and floor-boards
with a tabulation of the rooms dimension, Bochner called viewers
atten-tion to the gallery as a spatial container, indeed, positing
the work as coincidentwith the container in which it is viewed. If
Minimalist art encouraged viewers tocome to terms with themselves
as bodies in a space, Eva Hesse pushed that em-bodied awareness
further, transforming rigid geometries into serial
presentations
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Paul Thek, Hippopotamus from Technological Reliquaries, 1965,
beeswax, plexiglass, metal, rubber, 11 x 19 x 11 in. (28.9 x 50.2 x
29.2 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker
AcquisitionFund, 1994, 1994.196.
of soft, bulbous, spindly, and sometimes prickly materials that
seemed to invite atactile encounter.
Even if Morris, Bochner, Hesse, and other formative Minimalist
and Post-minimalist artists did not cite Austin explicitly, they
were well aware that art wasconstituted in the moment of uptake,
and they conceived art that exposed itsown interdependence upon
this primary encounter. For Fried and other allied artcritics,
however, such a gesture was not only formally compromising but
decidedlyunnerving as well. Fried famously analogized the encounter
with Minimalist sculp-ture as a kind of threatening rapprochement
with the silent presence of anotherperson. Furthermore, Minimalist
art called increased attention to what Austinwould have called
circumstances, an extended imagining that was, for Fried,hard to
bear: But the things that are literalist works of art must somehow
confrontthe beholderthey must, one might always say be placed not
just in his space butin his way. It is, I think, worth remarking
that the entire situation means exact-ly that: all of itincluding
it seems the beholders body. Everything countsnotas part of the
object, but as part of the situation in which its objecthood is
estab-lished and on which that objecthood at least partly depends.
23
Ultimately the performative role of the address would
becelebrated by some as vociferously as it was condemned by
crit-ics like Fried. In this reconsideration of the crux of
Minimal-ism, Hal Foster expressed the change in the viewers
relation-ship to the art object as follows: Rather than scan the
surface fortopological mapping of properties of its medium, he or
she isprompted to explore the perceptual consequences of a
particularintervention in a given site. 24 Although Foster was
dis-cussing a different kind of art than was Rosenberg, his
termschime with Rosenbergs account of how action painting
trans-formed the viewing relationship. In both action painting
andMinimalist work, the viewer focuses on the artists gesture as
it-self an intervention. Whether standing before a canvas or in
asite, she becomes a connoisseur of the gradations of that ac-tion,
taking account of its perceptual consequences.
Looking back at this kind of thinking from the vantagepoint of
the early twenty-first century, we know that Fried andGreenberg
would not have their way. Much contemporary experi-ment seems an
active attempt to reinforce the notion that all artis performative,
even if some artists and critics have had an in-terest in
disavowing the degree to which this is so. Meanwhile,many
developments in contemporary art are explicitly influencedby the
challenge launched by Minimalism and have extended it inways that
even Minimalisms founding fathers might not haveanticipated. For
Paul Thek, Minimalist sculpture hardly went farenough in engaging
the perceptual and political imaginary of itsbeholders. In the
mid-1960s, frustrated by a cool geometry thatdid not come close to
responding to the entire situation of theVietnam War, Thek
installed fabricated meat pieces inside cu-bic vitrines, pushing
beholders to reflect on what it meant to en-counter material that
looked like it could have once been alive.Decades later, Glenn
Ligon took the geometry of the Minimalistblock in another
direction. In To Disembark (1994), he further lit-eralized Frieds
silent presence by imagining such blocks ascontainers of cargo of
another sort, recalling the story of HenryBox Brown, a slave who
gained freedom when he allowed him-self to be shipped in such a box
from Richmond, Virginia, to Phil-adelphia. The geometry of To
Disembark thus reminded receivers
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Eiko & Koma, Naked, installation view, Walker Art Center,
2010.
UPTAKING PERFORMANCE AND OTHERRELATIONAL TURNS
that the legacies of slavery are part of the entire
situation.
Let us now return to the work of Eiko & Koma. We left them
prone amidminerals, plants, and water, waiting for someone to enter
the gallery space inwhich Naked was on view. It is easier to see
the significance of their realization ofhow difficult it was to
sustain Naked without a receiver in the room; the felicitous-ness
of their works performative gesture depends on the presence of an
ad-dressee. It also seems fairly clear that the installation
violates a variety of mod-ernist art principles and embodies much
of what modernist art critics feared. IfFried was menaced by a
Minimalist sculpture that came upon visitors like thesilent
presence of another person, then Naked also literalized that
supposed liter-alism by using silent people to create a kind of
sentient structure. Like other Mini-malist challenges that expanded
attention to an entire situation and includedthe beholder, Eiko
& Komas piece had an environmental reach. The floor of
thegallery strategically functioned as a sound trigger when a
visitor entered the room.With each step, one announced ones
presence, and the artwork seemed to re-spond. The resulting
self-consciousness in the visitor might have felt welcoming to
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some and distressingly in the way to others.Moreover, Eiko &
Koma are very aware that uptaking takes many forms.
They know that some visitors pass relatively quickly through the
gallery while oth-ers linger for multiple hours. The artists sense
of their own relation to the behold-erone that might include the
beholders bodyexpands as well. Their eyesnot only see the entire
frame. They travel to some other area and back to my bodypart.
Sometimes they see one part of us, sometimes Eikos knee. We are
invitingpeoples gaze to travel. Intriguingly, the structural
pursuit of Naked lies in part inits ability to accommodate
different types of uptaking. Rather than hoping for oneparticular
kind of encounter, Eiko & Koma want receivers to notice how
they areco-constructing the exchange. They have to put themselves
in the mind, changetheir conditions sometimes people say, Thats
enough I want to stay more butI have more important things to do.
25 The invitation to beholders to cali-brate the conditions of
beholding means that Eiko & Koma also have to respondand accept
the results of those choices. The performers thus have to maintain
aflexible notion of what qualifies as felicity in this performative
encounter.
With the work of Eiko & Koma, we also get the opportunity to
think aboutother intermedial puzzles and tensions. As Japanese
expatriates influenced byGutais aesthetics of embodiment, they
bring to their work a cultural specificitythat is registered to
varying degrees by receivers on the global art and
performancecircuit. Moreover, while Naked was created for a museum
gallery, and perhaps ap-propriately understood as an expansion of
the display conventions of visual art,Eiko & Koma have also
conceived work for other types of venues. Their pieces areoften
sited in theaters, for instance, a different kind of aesthetic
location that en-gages different horizons of expectation for its
receivers. When they work on-stage, say Eiko & Koma, viewers
tend to think about one evening as a wholething, whereas in a
gallery the durational parameters of the whole are much
lessfixed.
Those temporal and spatial horizons widen and retract in more
ways whenwe think of other sites in which Eiko & Koma have
located their work, includingschools, streets, and even a large
lake outdoors. Indeed, dance critics are just aslikely as art
critics, if not more so, to review their work. And just as visual
art crit-ics have had to adjust the parameters of evaluating their
sentient sculpture, so toohave dance specialists. Deborah Jowitt
once argued that the pair seeks to de-con-dition you for dancing, a
statement that both unsettles the category of dance andreinstalls
dance (rather than sculpture) as a compass from which their works
in-novation is measured. 26 For their own part, Eiko & Koma are
quite clear thatdifferent kinds of venues have medium-specific ways
of uptaking, however inter-medial any artwork or performance piece
happens to be. The decision to placeNaked not in the theater but in
a gallery space was thus deliberate, a key dimensionof the kind of
experience that they were trying to create for receivers. Rather
thantaking a seat in a row within a theater setting, waiting for
the curtain call beforedeparture, gallery visitors participate in
the creation of the whole thing. As Eiko& Koma elaborate, They
have to choose which bench, where to sit they make adecision to
leave us. 27
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Installation view of the exhibition Dance Works I: Merce
Cunningham/Robert Rauschenberg, Walker Art Center, 2011.
The intermedial stakes of performance-based work thus shift
depending onthe conventions of the venue in which they are
received. This contingency is anintriguing one for many of the
artists gathered in the Walkers collections, espe-cially if one
considers the Walkers relationship to a history of experimental
per-formance. Eiko & Koma are part of the collection, says
Philip Bither, the muse-ums William and Nadine McGuire Senior
Curator of Performing Arts, because ofthe institutions long history
with them as a commissioning partner. 28 Thiskind of tacking
between the professional spheres of different mediums has oc-curred
with other performative artists. William Kentridges drawing videos
havebeen displayed in the Walkers galleries, but his work with
Handspring PuppetCompany appeared on its stages in 2011. Merce
Cunninghams company has ap-peared on the Walkers stages for
decadesand made its own contribution to thedeconditioning of dance.
Now, however, the Cunningham companys materialswill be part of its
collection (a status, it should be said, that is much differentfrom
being part of a performance librarys archive). This means that
RobertRauschenberg is represented in the Walkers collection not
only by a discretepainting like Trophy II (1960) but also by his
intermedial redefinition of the the-atrical set in his work with
Cunningham. Meanwhile, Trisha Browns dance Lat-eral Pass (1985)
premiered at the Walker, and her canonical choreographic workMan
Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) was remounted in
Minneapolis in2008. Moreover, pieces such as Its a DrawFor Robert
Rauschenberg (2008) giveBrown a place in the Walkers visual art
collection as well.
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Trisha Brown, Its a DrawFor RobertRauschenberg, 2008, charcoal,
pastel on paper, 81x 108 in. (205.7 x 274.3 cm). Collection Walker
ArtCenter, Julie and Babe Davis Acquisition Fund andthe Miriam and
Erwin Kelen Acquisition Fund forDrawings, 2008, 2008.54.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1991, offset printon paper,
endless copies, 7 x 38 x 45 in. (17.8 x97.8 x 114.9 cm) ideal stack
dimension. CollectionWalker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition
Fund,
Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Walker
Art Center, 2008.
The protocols and paradoxes of acquiring performance-based works
create their own new puzzles that exceed the para-meters of this
essay. To the extent that such acquisitions are alsopromises on the
part of art organizations to sustain a future ofcontinued
reception, however, it is worth lingering on somemore recent turns
within the artistic history of performative en-counter. Indeed,
much recent conversation about the performa-tive in contemporary
art came about not so much to recall ac-tion painting or to embrace
Minimalisms theatricality or tonotice a history of performance
curating that has been going onwithin visual art contexts for many
decades, but to come toterms with more recent relational art
practices. Dorothea vonHantelmann captures much of this discussion
in her account ofthe experiential turn in her essay in this volume.
Many con-temporary artists have been creating extended events of
socialencounter under a variety of newer labels, and each of the
termssocial practice, community engagement, participatory art,
rela-tional aestheticshas a different resonance and different
stakes.A number of artists tend to serve as indexes of more recent
ex-perimentationincluding Felix Gonzalez-Torres with hisstacks and
spills, Rirkrit Tiravanija with his cooking installa-tions,
Santiago Sierra with his disturbing installations of unem-ployed
humans in the gallery, and many more. The phrase rela-tional
aesthetics is often credited to the French curator
NicolasBourriaud, who used the term to describe a variety of work
inwhich intersubjectivity functioned as the material substrateof
the art event. 29 That is, rather than paint, clay, wire, met-al,
or canvas, the material of the art object becomes the rela-tional
exchange that it provokes. As I have argued at length else-where,
the new turns of these participatory forms can certainlybe found in
earlier work and in a variety of mediums, includingthe performative
encounters of performance. 30 As we havealso seen thus far, the
relational exchange among participantswill certainly have different
stakes depending upon how receiversunderstand the regional politics
and perceptual parameters of
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1991, 1991.130.1-.4. The Felix Gonzalez-TorresFoundation.
the situation in which an encounter occurs.The task of
contextualizing, mounting, and collecting re-
lational work comes to the fore in yet new ways when we
consid-er the work of Tino Sehgal. A piece like This objective of
that object(2004) differently refracts the puzzle of the
performative in con-temporary art. Sehgals objectless pieces have
recently receivedworldwide attention, in part because they actively
resist thestructures of both visual and performing art. Trained in
eco-nomics and dance, he seeks to make work that uses no
naturalresources and leaves no material imprint. Previous pieces
havedrawn on experimental choreography, distinctive in part
becausehe forbids documentation or any reproduction that could
substi-tute for the live event.
This objective of that object shares company with a numberof
recent pieces that make use of a game-like structure, includingThis
Situation, recently acquired by New Yorks Museum of Mod-ern Art,
and This Progress, originally sited at the Institute of
Con-temporary Arts in London and remounted at the GuggenheimMuseum
in New York to bemused renown. This objective of thatobject is
composed of five interpreters who form a loose circlearound gallery
visitors with their backs turned. The interpretersbreathe softly,
and then each successively begins to whisper,The objective of this
work is to become the object of discus-sion. They repeat the
phrase, as noted in the Walkers acquisi-tion write-up, in
expectation of the visitors response. If thereis none, the
interpreters will gradually lower their voices and, af-ter pauses
and moments of silence, sink to the floor, apparentlyundone by the
fact that their performative utterance has not pro-duced a
felicitous uptake. If, however, a visitor does offer a re-sponse,
the interpreters actively celebrate the apparent happi-ness of the
performative encounter. There may be an exchangebetween a visitor
and an interpreter. The interpreters may thendecide at any moment
to initiate a circular dance and a series ofphrases and exit the
room, often leaving one remaining inter-preter behind to sustain
conversation with the visitor. As in otherworks by Sehgal, the
interpreter may finish by reminding the visi-tor of the name of the
artist, the name of the work, and the yearit was made, both
parodying and reinforcing visual art conven-tions of attributing
artistic authorship.
If much late twentieth-century art has called upon the re-ceiver
to avow her role in the constitution of the art object, thenthis
piece isolates that directive in its skeletal structure. Thepiece
is an encounter about encounter, thereby making explicitthe primary
condition that Eiko & Koma endured. Because it usestext and
language more than the other artworks described so farin this
essay, the Sehgal piece also more explicitly returns ourdiscussion
of the performative to the exchange of speech. How,after Austin, is
this piece doing things with words? The objec-tive is the intention
of an utterance as well as the intent of thework. Reciprocally
self-constituting, the work is itself the dis-cussion that it seeks
to produce; if felicitous, that exchange willbe both the form and
the content of the work. The utterance ofthe work is happy when the
object of the discussion becomesthe discussion itself. Meanwhile,
the work has less than satisfyingmechanisms for contending with a
lack of uptake; interpreterssink to the floor until the process can
start again. But the aspira-tion is also to induce awareness in
receivers of their own role in
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producing the outcome. Importantly, that sense of embedded-ness
comes within a structure that is simultaneously the workstheme. It
is an exchange about exchange whose misfires areabout
misfiring.
There is a kind of recursive quality to Seghals workone that in
turn pro-duces recursive sentences from critics like me who are
trying to come to termswith it. However, it might be exactly that
sense of recursion that explains the in-terest of so many critical
theorists in Sehgal. Earlier I noted that interest in
themid-century reflections of speech act theorists resurged as the
twentieth centurywore on. The recent revision of performativity
theory was part of a broader effortto understand the complexities
of subject formation, a project that questioned theassumption that
self-making was essentially a voluntary operation, regulated onlyby
the exercise of internal will. More recent thinkers as varied as
Michel Foucault,Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and many others
began to excavate a history of crit-ical philosophy to mount
alternative conceptions, frames that took seriously thedegree to
which social circumstances in fact produce our internal perception
ofa voluntary will, often with particular ideological effects. 31
It was in such acontext that the notion of the performative was
revived, this time to tease outthe implications of the constitutive
power of language that J. L. Austin himselfmight not have pursued.
Indeed, for many recent theorists, it is most important toconsider
the degree to which the primary doing of the performative is the
ideo-logical constitution of the doer herself.
To ground such a complex notion, let us look at one famous
philosophicalexample that dramatized this kind of recursionand,
incidentally, served as a re-source for Bourriauds relational
aesthetics. Louis Althussers Ideology and Ideo-logical State
Apparatuses is a key text in this conversation, particularly for
the vo-cabulary of hailing and interpellation that he introduced
and for the examplehe used to describe how we participate in our
own ideological formation:
That very precise operation which I have called interpellation
or hailing
can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace
everyday
police (or other) hailing: Hey, you there! Assuming that the
theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the
hailed
individual will turn round. By this mere one hundred and eighty
degree
physical conversion, he comes a subject. Why? Because he has
recognized
that the hail was really addressed to him, and that it was
really him
who was hailed (and not someone else). Experience shows that
the
practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly
ever
miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always
recognizes
that it is really him who is being hailed. 32
Althussers teachable example proved fruitful for many subsequent
conver-sations in critical theory. It temporarily anthropomorphized
ideology as a copwhose performative utterance sought an addressee;
moreover, it was by physicallyand psychically allowing ourselves to
be addressed that ideology did its work. Thatfamous turn was a form
of uptake that ensured the felicitousness of ideologysperformative
reach. Moreover, Althusser was keen to note that the process of
ad-dress and uptake had a temporal coincidence: Naturally for the
convenience andclarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had
to present things in the form of asequence, with a before and an
after, and thus in the form of a temporal succes-sion. But in
reality these things happen without any succession. The existence
ofideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as
subjects are one and thesame thing. 33 Althusser thus posited
interpellation of subjects by ideology asitself a recursive
process, as one and the same thing. Joining an Austinian lan-guage
with an Althusserian one, Judith Butler would attempt to tease out
a degree
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of variability in the process of hailing: As Althusser himself
insists, this performa-tive effort of naming can only attempt to
bring its addressee into being; there isalways the risk of a
certain misrecognition. If one misrecognizes that effort to
pro-duce the subject, the production itself falters. The one who is
hailed may fail tohear, misread the call, turn the other way,
answer to another name, insist on notbeing addressed that way. 34
At the same time, if misfire or misrecognition ispossible, it still
occurs within a recursive structure that both constrains and
en-ables the subjects it made.
It is no coincidence that some bloggers and other commentators
have usedthe language of Althussers hailings to describe the
exchanges at work in Sehgalspieces. 35 Since Sehgal is concerned
with exposing the ideological nature ofsubject formation within
museum institutions, we could say that This objective ofthat object
is an interpellation about interpellation. Indeed, the choreography
ofthe piece seems to invoke but revise the choreography of
Althussers theoreticaltheatre. In Seghals piece, in fact, the
addressers back is turned while the ad-dressee reckons with being
hailed by the piece. Any comment is registered as afelicitous
recruitment, prompting the addresser to instantiate its success
bymaking her own 180-degree turn.
Moreover, the piece seems to hail participants whether or not
they fully in-tend to be recruited. In Von Hantelmanns accounts of
the enactment of thispiece, its structure accommodates a wide range
of responses, even turning ringingcell phones or discreet comments
in a foreign language into a felicitous uptak-ing. Visitors thus
find themselves hailed despite themselves, reckoning with
theprocess of recruitment. It is thus perhaps no wonder that
accounts of Sehgalspieces include so many critics chronicles of
their own process of reception. Wefind critics using the first
person more often in their accounts, as the evaluation ofthe work
coincides with a highly personal process of exchange. (I have my
ownstory, one that involves the effects of bringing my children to
This Situation inParis and watching how their presence unsettled
the commentary of the playersuntil one found a way to interpellate
my son into the piece.) We also find criticstrying to push the
structure of the work to test its hailing capacities. When he
par-ticipated in This Progress at the Guggenheim Museum in 2010, a
theoretical the-ater that included structured conversations with
child players, the critic JerrySaltz was not sufficiently attentive
to its discursive conventions. The result wasthat his child
interlocutor burst into tears, prompting Saltz to write an account
ti-tled How I Made an Artwork Cry. 36
The intermedial puzzles of contemporary art create
newperformative realities (and new performative problems) for
receivers trying to make sense of them.
Like all the work chronicled in this essay, Sehgals oeuvre also
brings for-ward intense reflection about the intermedial nature of
so-called performative
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ENDNOTES
1. Eiko, in interview with Justin Jones, November 30,
2010,http://channel.walkerart.org/play/eiko-koma-on-naked/.
2. See Dorothea von Hantelmann, The Experiential Turn, in
OnPerformativity, edited by Elizabeth Carpenter, Vol. 1 of Living
CollectionsCatalogue. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2014, para
2.http://walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/experiential-turn
work. He quite actively refuses the language of theater and
performance to de-scribe his structures, using terms like
interpreter or player to refer to the inter-locutors he hires. At
the same time, he is perceived as challenging the conventionsof a
visual art world motored by the creation and purchase of material
objects. AsRebecca Schneider has argued, these pieces seem to
accrue a good deal of medialpanic as artists, critics, and curators
debate different frames of legitimation anddelegitimation. 37
Finally, the intermedial puzzles of contemporary art create new
performa-tive realities (and new performative problems) for
receivers trying to make senseof them. If a residual antitheatrical
discourse still influences the evaluation ofself-consciously
performative art, then artists like Sehgal have an interest
inmaking sure that no one calls their work theater. And if
performing artists such asTrisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, and Eiko
& Koma are to receive the legitima-tion of a visual art-world
context, it certainly helps that they have created work forgallery
spaces and produced objects that are collectible. But it also seems
impor-tant to explore the possibility of recursion and reciprocity
happening in more thanone direction. A museum context does
something to these intermedial works, butthese works also do
something back to the museum. They require new
presentingapparatuses; they ask the institution to make new kinds
of promises. It will be ex-citing and intriguing to see whether and
how intermedial panic can be turned intointermedial transformation.
The performativity of art will, in the end, perpetuallytransform
the institution that houses it.
Shannon Jackson is director of the Arts Research Center at the
University of California,Berkeley, where she is also Goldman
Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and
Performance Studies. Along with numerous contributions to museum
catalogues, jour-
nals, edited collections, and art media outlets, her
publications include the books Lines ofActivity: Performance,
Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (University ofMichigan
Press, 2000); Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy
fromPhilology to Performativity (Cambridge University Press, 2004);
and Social Works:Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge,
2011). Forthcoming projects include abook about intermedia
performance for MIT Press and an edited collection on keywords
in the curating of time-based art and performance, created in
collaboration with the Pew
Center for Art and Heritage.
http://channel.walkerart.org/play/eiko-koma-on-naked/http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/performativity-and-its-addressee#linksect14fn155http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/experiential-turnhttp://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/performativity-and-its-addressee#linksect2fn176http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/performativity-and-its-addressee#fn340
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3. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard
UniversityPress, 1962).
4. Harold Rosenberg, The American Action Painters, Art News
51(December 1952), reprinted in Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of
the New(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 2339.
5. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 25.
6. Ibid., 25.
7. Austin, How to Do Things, 6.
8. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 2728.
9. Ibid., 29.
10. Label text for Yves Klein, Dimanche (1960), from the
exhibition Art in OurTime: 1950 to the Present, Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis, September 5,1999September 2,
2001,http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/dimanche.
11. Yves Klein, The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto, Yves Klein,
19281962 (Houston:Rice University Institute for the Arts, 1982),
124.
12. Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, Art News 57
(October1958): 2426, 5557.
13. See Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago:
University ofChicago Press, 2011).
14. See Amelia Jones, Body Art / Performing the Subject
(Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
15. Austin, How to Do Things, 8.
16. Ibid., 14.
17. Ibid., 22.
18. Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context, trans. Samuel
Weber andJeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern UniversityPress, 1977), 123; Judith Butler, Bodies
That Matter (New York: Routledge,1993) and The Psychic Life of
Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA:Stanford University
Press, 1997); Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act(Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1983); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
QueerPerformativity: Henry Jamess The Art of the Novel, GLQ: A
Journal ofLesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 116.
19. Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, in The New Art: A
CriticalAnthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1966), 6869.The first version of the essay, using the term support,
appeared in ForumLectures (Washington, DC: Voice of America,
1960).
20. Hilton Kramer, The New American Painting, Partisan Review 20
(JulyAugust 1953): 427.
21. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago, IL: University
of ChicagoPress, 1998), 163.
22. Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture, Part II, Artforum 5
(October 1966):21.
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23. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, 15455.
24. Hal Foster, The Crux of Minimalism, in The Return of the
Real(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
25. Eiko & Koma, interview with Justin Jones.
26.
27. Eiko & Koma, interview with Justin Jones.
28. Ibid.
29. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses
du Rel,1998).
30. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting
Publics (NewYork: Routledge, 2011).
31. Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context, trans. Samuel
Weber andJeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern UniversityPress, 1977), 123; Judith Butler, Bodies
That Matter (New York: Routledge,1993) and The Psychic Life of
Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA:Stanford University
Press, 1997); Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act(Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1983); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
QueerPerformativity: Henry Jamess The Art of the Novel, GLQ: A
Journal ofLesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 116.
32. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,
in Lenin andPhilosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971),
16263.
33. Ibid.
34. Judith Butler, Subjection, Resistance, Resignification:
Between Freud andFoucault, in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories
in Subjection (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 1997),
95.
35. See, for instance, Katie Kitamura, Tino Sehgal, Frieze, no.
131 (May
2010),http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/tino_sehgal2/.
36. Jerry Saltz, How I Made an Artwork Cry, New York, February
7, 2010,http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/63638/.
37. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times
ofTheatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 129.
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