by Jonah Jeng
What struck me most
about Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars—and what is echoed in the concept
of Afro-alienation introduced in Daphne Brooks’ Bodies in Dissent—is the
notion that performance art is marked by a desire to be both subject and object
at the same time. This impulse flies in the face of Western traditions of art
spectatorship, which has historically treated the artwork as a passive object
to be looked at (and, historically, the privileged mode of spectatorship has
indeed been the visual) while the human subject holds the role of active
looker. This sense of a separation between art and viewer is visibly reinforced
by the fact that art is often physically marked off from the social world by
the presence of a stage, a cordoned off area within a museum, or the
impermeable surface of a film screen. So the implication goes, in these spaces
art ought to remain, whereas the viewer is free to come and go as they please,
to look however and for as long as they want and then move on to the next
exhibition with no strings attached.
Performance art, on the
other hand, troubles and often downright shatters this dynamic. Performance, at
least as described by McMillan and Diane Taylor, is enacted through and
embodied by the body of a performer whose very goal is to invite and at times
force a breaching of the conventional art/spectator divide. The artist Adrian
Piper, mentioned in Chapter 3 of the McMillan book, illustrates this concept
clearly. Whether drenched in grease or sporting blaxploitation-inspired drag,
Piper ventures directly into social spaces—public squares, subways,
etc.—entering the places where “art” is not supposed to be. Absent of external markers
of “art” (the stage, the gallery, etc.), her performance fades on some level
into the fabric of the everyday. As an embodied individual in the spaces
of the quotidian, she has as much agency as anyone else, can and does move
wherever and however she pleases. She is, in other words, as much a subject as
the traditional Western spectator.
On the other hand,
performance art exists to interrupt the everyday, to, in Brooks’ words,
defamiliarize the ordinary. It does so through estranging the artist’s body
from the flow of other like bodies, through turning subject into object. The
aforementioned body grease and drag are the performative elements for Piper,
and what they do is catch the attention of passersby, who end up noticing both
the spectacle of this out-of-the-ordinary body and the fact that it still
resides in the ordinary, intruding upon their space. The artist’s presence in
the quotidian comprises an ethical gesture, interpellating the spectator and
implicating them, identifying in them a sense of social responsibility. All art
affects their beholders, and, through the act of these spectators going out
into the world, influences society at large. What performance art does is
foreground this affective act and make it its central project, turning a spectatorship
model built on one-way content transmission into a fraught interaction between
art(ist) and beholder. As McMillan and Brooks both talk about, the dual nature
of performance art is appealing to many black American performance artists
because it enables an embodied articulation of the experience and reality of
double-consciousness, in which one feels like they are constantly both subject
and object, uniquely themselves and yet always, on account of the color of
their skin, something to be looked at by others.
The question that most interests me now is: given the particular subject/object dynamic that is present in performance art, what do other art forms do that performance art cannot, specifically in terms of their political possibility? It is indeed useful to think of how performance art differs from all other art forms, but to stop there would be to disregard the ample ways in which theater is different from dance, film, sculpture, etc. Specifically vis-à-vis my interests, what can cinema and the subject/object positions it constructs offer that a performance like Adrian Piper’s cannot? To what extent might cinema and performance art be more similar than different? What can we learn about performances through how they are filmed/represented via the moving image? To what degree can cinema itself be called performance art? I have a personal stake in such cinema-related questions, but, as a class, I believe that thinking through not only what performance art has but what it lacks will teach us more about performance in general.
Regarding your questions, I think that Piper's performance is interesting in how it points to differences between performance art and film, while also troubling those differences. Namely, in performance art, the person who is performing is right there, in front of you, as opposed to having performed in the past while being brought to the present through a medium. But, regardless of what people say to Piper, she/the Mythic Being repeats the same entry about fasting. In a sense, Piper is putting the immediacy of herself as a person forward in a way that cinema can't, while also denying spectators the kind of back-and-forth interaction they feel like they should have due to her being in public. I think that, at least in part, this does something cinema cannot by having her-as-Mythic Being be both present and inaccessible. In keeping with McMillan's point that the performance(s) as the Mythic Being began as "a bodily and psychological experiment in transcending the boundaries between subjecthood and objecthood to become an art object" (101), I think her presence mixed with distance to the spectator provides a really interesting example of where differences in these media might be found. I don't think (although I could certainly be wrong!) that this effect could be done in film, because film has a different relationship between the spectator and immediacy of the performer.
ReplyDeleteOne major difference that seems important to outline is the clarity of other art forms as “art” (e.g. art in a museum, film, etc.). Performance art, on the other hand, can walk the line between the everyday and the exceptional, at times not even making clear it’s “art-ness.” I’m thinking here of the danger that comes with too clearly recognizing performance art as art (as in the case of Piper’s performance at Max’s Kansas City) or not recognizing it as art or performance at all. One of the key differences of performance art and other types of art that Piper outlines in a journal is the closeness of artist, object, audience that performance art allows. McMillan writes:
ReplyDeletePiper praises performance art as an answer to interrelated quagmires that arise from the gap between audiences and art object. Specifically, the delineates the problems that arise from audiences and artists not communicating in the same idiom. The discrete art object is somehow supposed to bridge the gap between the two but is itself of a different ontological status than both. Performance art, she argues, solves many of these dilemmas, especially because artist and art object are collapsed into one human entity. Its immediacy allows artists to calibrate their effect on audiences immediately, while its flexibility enables artists to constantly refine it to suit the demands of each particular set of audiences. (113)
To follow from this, it seems like performance art allows for a closeness that enables the artist to react immediately to the audience.
With that in mind, I do think your question about the difference between specific mediums of performance is very useful. Film is interesting because it still has elements of performance that offer the “same idiom” of communication that Piper is interested in above, but it does not offer the responsive element that performance art does. It is (typically) clearly delineated as art and accepted as a performance medium. Film also has the advantage of editing, narrative, and film techniques (e.g. lighting and camera angle) that performance art, and perhaps even filmed performance art, does not have. This allows for an additional layer of meaning making at the same time that it further distances the viewer from the artist—the gap grows.
While film may not be able to accomplish closeness with an audience, it is able to get intent (perhaps politics) across in a multitude of ways that audiences are comfortable with decoding. For instance, films have editing techniques, lighting, camera work, and other layers that enhance and add to individual performances. The actors are also already presenting in a clearly performative manner that audience expect. At the same time, I am immediately aware that film relies on the visual and aural while performance art relies on a wider variety of meaning making (such as the smell of Piper’s body as she walked through the streets smeared with cod liver oil and vinegar). Film as a medium seems to register with traditional Western ideas of performance in ways that performance art does not, making it easier to decipher. Perhaps the political intent is understood by a wider audience in films that in Piper’s performance/not performance art.
I'm torn on this question about the particular capacities of performance art vs other kinds of art! On the one hand I remain skeptical of the idea that performance art is the only form that can do what McMillan (or Taylor) say it can do—bodies, after all, show up in film; writing must be produced by a writer's body, etc. And although some art does happen on the street and outside of museums, performance art also sometimes happens within those same gallery spaces at the remove of traditional art. (We can think of Taylor's discussion of the Abramovic retrospective here.) If it participation rather than viewing that separates performance art—or a fantasy of participation—than it seems we're simply diving further and further into specific subsections of art, which are accessible to fewer and fewer people. This suggests that performance art carries a notion of presence which isn't carried through film or writing (which have fantasies of sameness between copies of the film or book, etc). One of the things that might bring film and performance together, however, is a kind of idealized viewing situation maybe? In U.S. mainstream cinema, for example, the continued importance/prestige of the movie theater (maybe the film people have something else to say about the history of the movie theater, of which I know very little!) vs the importance of the scene for the performance, whether that's the museum (for The Artist is Present) or the particular public space Piper goes out into.
ReplyDeleteSo part of what is really fascinating about McMillan's approach is his claim that black women's performance re-frames not just where the art happens but what counts as performance art, such that Joice Heth becomes foundational, etc. But it also seems like McMillan wouldn't be too bother by an attention to video, inasmuch as he thinks about videos particularly preoccupied with the role of the body in some way—we didn't read the chapter on Howardena Pindell this week, or the conclusion on Janelle Monae and Nicki Minaj, but those readings are primarily worked out through films (art films and music videos, not feature film, but still). On the other hand, that kind of collapse across media prevents us from thinking about how particular media, forms, or genres can structure particular kinds of investigation.
For those of you who haven't been to the Carnegie International, there's a relevant piece to this conversation (at least about medium; it's very white): Tacita Dean's Event for a Stage, which they show every Monday at 11 at the CMOA. It's a film made from a performance, but the performance includes a thinking-forward to the film (visible camera on the stage, interaction of the actor with that camera, references to the primary actor's film vs performance work).
In asking what performance cannot do that other forms can, Jonah is perhaps also asking why we go to certain forms, either as creators or spectators, to enact/express/evoke political pressures. I think this is an interesting, though difficult, question, one I imagine inspiring more questions than answers!
ReplyDeleteAs McMillan writes, “performance art’s most potent, electrifying, and lasting challenge is its radical evaporation of the distinction between art object and subject” (3). This collapse incites intense amplification of the material. The body becomes the site of the aesthetic questions at hand. Though, as Adrian Piper’s work illuminated, there are limitations to embodied performance, that is, when the body deflects or obfuscates the artist’s intention, but moreover, when the spectator projects onto the performing body, especially a racialized/sexualized/minoritized body. The unwanted attention Piper experienced on the street wasn’t necessarily in regards to spectator creep factor (maybe some of that though) but rather a break-down in the relationship between performer and audience, even as she tries to collapse the two.
So how do other forms navigate similar issues? Do other forms do this better (for lack of a better word) than performance? Probably yes, sometimes. And other times not. This is not to avoid an important question but to instead pivot toward the question of limits. All aesthetic forms confront the limitations of their medium. By which I don’t just mean logistical limitations (how to not attract creeps on the street, for example), but how to think through making one’s body an arena, as Piper attempted to do. In the face of finite forms, ones that maybe even fail, I wonder about the kinds of vitalities certain forms evoke (therefore moving away from questions of utility). What kinds of imaginaries do certain forms invest in, and why. Which forms (be it cinema or poetry or theatre) shift what kind of epistemological attentions. I think Jonah is right, asking about the lacks and limits of performance will, by negation, point us toward its potentialities!
In considering the different possibilities between performance art vs. other mediums, I first was struck by the increasingly easy reproducibility of art in our current time & place. It is easy for someone to rip a movie and post it for free downloads online; it is easy to find a cheap re-print of an expensive piece of artwork; it is easy to stream a song or album for a fraction of a penny per song; it is far more difficult, however, to capture, reproduce, and then distribute a piece of performance art (or, more broadly, any type of performance).
ReplyDeleteThis reproducibility could be seen either/both as liberating and equalizing, or oppressive; art becomes easier for people of many classes, races, nations and with varying levels of technological literacy to participate in art that until recently has been made available to a select few. Performance art can often purposefully defy this rigid consumption-oriented media focus, in which a hyper-generalized audience can flatten nuanced art into a single crowd-sourced reception: "good" or "bad." Additionally, maybe the instances of performances' most frequent reproductions have also been its most violent, as they force a potentially unwilling body (like in the case of Joice Heth) to reproduce the same "show" over and over. A performance that, as McMillan says about Ellen Craft, moves fluidly "back and forth across class, gender, race, and disability through the simplest of materials— sartorial props and her own malleable body" was made possible as it incorporated improvisation and embodied performances of the quotidian, rather than the exceptional or mass-appealing (69). This performance was made possible explicitly because it was designed to evade, to be untraceable and to happen in secret, to be slippery; it feels like many other art forms seek to do exactly the opposite.
whoops don't know why it says "unknown"--this is Jane !
DeleteAfter your presentation in class, we talked about how digital technologies and the massive distribution possibilities that come with them are affecting the ways in which //artistic performances// are conceived–no longer to be experienced “live” but to convey a remediated and highly codified “liveness” to an audience that is experiencing them remotely. This discussion focused more on a specific type of access on the one hand and the capitalization of performance on the other.
ReplyDeleteI would like to extend that conversation here–and connect it to some of your questions on the advantages and exchanges between art forms–by considering how film supports the circulation of //performances// not for capital but for visibility or representation. In the end of the introduction to her book, Daphne Brooks highlights how the “gaps and elisions” in the (predominantly white and male) archive make the task of theorizing 19th century black performance particularly challenging (19). As people’s awareness of the importance and uses of documentations grows (e.g. the now common practice of documenting and posting acts of police brutality), how do certain filmic conventions support the different goals of video documentation of performance? How do these acts of documentation or the videos themselves are performative (in J.L. Austin’s sense of the word, they "do" something)? How are //performance artists// reflecting upon this documentation of //performance//? How is cinema portraying these performances (as parts of stories or absorbing new cinematic conventions)?
1. Prompted by this discussion of spectatorship -- as prompted by your post, Jonah, but also our reading in performance studies as well as theories of film spectatorship --, I am intrigued by the applicability and possible distinct usefulness of audience theory. In my limited understanding, audience theory -- as espoused for example by Stuart Hall [reception studies] -- posits audiences as active consumers rather than passive recipients [and/or as simultaneously consumers and producers, which sounds like “prosumers,” though this term was developed by American futurist Alvin Toffler in 1980 (according to Wikipedia; I first heard about it from Brittney’s work] and was/is generally used by technology writers (so...possibly STS?). I do not know the possibly differences/intersections in spectatorship and audience theory, but rather am positing it as a question or problematic to think through as a class if relevant.
ReplyDelete2. Jonah, you state : “Performance, at least as described by McMillan and Diane Taylor, is enacted through and embodied by the body of a performer whose very goal is to invite and at times force a breaching of the conventional art/spectator divide.” I’m also interested in thinking through performance in which the human body is not the central performer. In class, Imani said something akin to : we (spectators/audiences) are meant to see the puppet strings (as part of the conversation regarding (certain) film, in which the audience is meant to interpret the characters as characters mediated by specific actors rather than “pure” characters [“pure” mimesis/realism]. I want to think about puppetry, and whether we are meant to focus on the “behind the scenes” (to whatever varying degree) puppeteers. In the 2018 Broadway, two new plays opened which strongly featured puppetry: Frozen and King Kong. In terms of Frozen, I’m going to speak of Sven (the reindeer), rather than Olaf:(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/theater/frozen-sven-reindeer-broadway.html)
In production, they highly considered getting rid of Sven altogether, as he is a non-speaking part, large (potentially “in the way” on stage), etc. Rather, they constructed an ornate hybrid : he/it is manned by a human body inside (with large blind-spots on stage), who is in full plank position when on stage), but invisible as “man” to the audience (more info in article); furthermore, the puppet does not integrate the human body and visibility in the same fashion as the puppetry of Broadway’s The Lion King -- it would be easy enough for spectators not to know how/if humans are manipulating the puppet “directly”). Beyond puppetry, this adaptation of King Kong is interesting because in casting -- a “race neutral” process, which opens a whole other line of discussion -- they cast a Christiana Pitts, a black woman from the South, as Ann Darrow, and then wrote her blackness into the diegesis -- a widely-accepted to-be racist diegesis, with Darrow in her typical blonde, damsel in distress white (skin and dress) is victimized by the Blackness of the primal, Primate Ape (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/theater/king-kong-broadway-musical.html).
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/theater/king-kong-broadway-musical.html] [http://www.playbill.com/article/behind-the-unparalleled-puppetry-of-broadways-king-kong]
[The puppet] Kong is discussed as the main character of the play, and he/it constrains rehearsal times and thereby the temporalities and bodies [ie labor] of human actors [“actors” in its multiple meanings]; he/it weight so much and requires such structure (and integration into the theater space) that he cannot be moved, and as such scenes in which actors interact with him must be staged precisely on the stage in rehearsals.