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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822375128 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Performance
By Diana Taylor, Abigail Levine
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7512-8
CHAPTER 1
Framing [Performance]
Since the 1960s, artists have used their bodies to challenge regimes of power and social norms, placing the body FRONT AND CENTER in artistic practice — no longer the object depicted in paintings, or sculpture, or film, or photography but the living flesh and breath of the act itself. For some, performance refers to PERFORMANCE ART or BODY ART or LIVE ART or ACTION ART, terms that accentuate both the centrality of the living artist in the act of doing and the aesthetic dimension, "art."
Carmelita Tropicana (Cuba/U.S.) recognizes the transformative potential of performance: "Performance is kunst (art) that is fluid, messy, a hybrid; an art that liberates the performer and spectator with the cri de coeur of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, homosexualité!"
Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexico/U.S.) inhabits performance: "For me performance art is a conceptual 'territory' with fluctuating weather and borders; a place where contradiction, ambiguity, and paradox are not only tolerated, but also encouraged. The borders of our 'performance country' are open to nomads, migrants, hybrids, and outcasts."
Performance, for him, is not simply an act, or an action, but an existential condition. An ONTOLOGY. He says that the only difference between a performance artist and a madman is that a performance artist has an audience.
"The word performance," says the woman in Diana Raznovich's cartoon, "is itself a performance!"
PERFORMANCE is not always about art. It's a wide-ranging and difficult practice to define and holds many, at times conflicting, meanings and possibilities.
This book analyzes performance: what it is , but also, more important, what it does , what it allows us to see, to experience, and to theorize, and its complex relation to systems of power. The term is used in the theatre, in anthropology and the visual arts, in business, sports, politics, and science. Across these fields, it signals a wide range of social behaviors. Sometimes "art," sometimes political "actions," sometimes business management, sometimes military prowess, performance aims to create effects and affects. Performance moves between the AS IF and the IS, between pretend and new constructions of the "real."
Many of the ideas, photographs, and images in this book come from the fifteen years of collaboration that have taken place through the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (hemisphericinstitute.org). Artists, activists, and scholars from throughout the Americas meet regularly to share their practices and discuss how performance intervenes in society. Many have worked or continue to work in difficult circumstances — under military dictatorships or savage neoliberalism, in sexist, racist, and homophobic societies, some under conditions of poverty and social marginalization. One of the (many) challenges of working together across linguistic, political, economic, disciplinary, and aesthetic borders, however, has been that the word "performance" does not exist in Spanish, Portuguese, or French. Negotiating the terms has been in itself an act of political and artistic translation. As the word "performance" is increasingly accepted in Spanish, with its gendered pronouns, new issues arise about its "sex." Is it el performance or la performance? Bi? Trans? Some would say "Both," some would say "It depends" (in some cases the masculine is reserved for business and the feminine for artistic projects; sometimes it depends on the country). It's a fascinating debate, and some artists play with it. Jesusa Rodríguez (Mexico) says life should be as fluid as performance and "leave behind its gender prejudices — what's important is that spectators confront their own capacity for transformation, male, female, bird, witch, shoe, or whatever." While I do not take up the specific language-based issues in this book, many of the examples and insights I offer come from this Americas-wide network. The concepts and practices, however, far exceed these geographical contours.
The word "performance" in this broader transnational, transdisciplinary, multilingual context has a wide range of meanings. Elin Diamond defines performance in the broadest sense: a doing, something done.
This DOING/DONE lens allows us to understand performance across temporalities — present and past.
DOING captures the now of performance, always and only a living practice in the moment of its activation.
In this sense, performance can be understood as process — as enactment, exertion, intervention, and expenditure.
William Pope.L, a New York–based artist, slowly crawls through city streets. "I am a fisherman of social absurdity, if you will. ... I am more provocateur than activist. My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement, to make it neut, to reinvent what's beneath us, to remind us where we all come from."
It is ALSO a thing DONE, an object or product or accomplishment. In this sense, performance might be experienced or evaluated at some different time. It might be collected by museums, or preserved in archives. Artists, too, may chose to perform in front of an archival image or video of their work to emphasize changes and continuity between then and now.
The tension between the DOING and DONE — present and past — is very productive. Performance has often been considered ephemeral, meaning "lasting only one day." Theorists such as Peggy Phelan have posited that performance "disappears" even as it comes into being, that it resists the "laws of the reproductive economy." It cannot be saved, she argues, or recorded or documented. When that happens, she maintains, it ceases to be performance and becomes something else.
This, of course is true if we think about performance as only a discrete, singular act. But, we shall see, performance also works across time in intriguing and powerful ways. Instead of the once, the act that bursts on the scene only to vanish, we can also think of performance as an ongoing repertoire of gestures and behaviors that get reenacted or reactivated again and again, often without us being aware of them. If we learn and communicate through performed, embodied practice, it's because the acts repeat themselves. We recognize a dance as a dance, even when the moves and rhythms change. In this sense, then, performance is about past, present, and future.
On the first day the 2013 Hemispheric Institute Encuentro in São Paulo, Abigail Levine (U.S.) and two other dancers performed Slow Falls at entrance to the main theatre, leaving a record of their movements in tape on the building's exterior. The performance lasted two hours, but for anyone walking by the following days, the lines that remained invoked the presence of the dancers' bodies. Performances may take place, but do they entirely disappear, or do their effects endure? Large or small, visible or invisible, performances create change.
Doing, done, redoing
Doing is fundamental for human beings who learn through imitation, repetition, and internalizing the actions of others. This central theory — that people absorb behaviors by doing, rehearsing, and performing them — is older than the Aristotelian theory of mimesis (imitation, acting) and as contemporary as theories of mirror neurons that suggest that mirroring, empathy, and intersubjectivity are fundamental for human survival.
Anna Deavere Smith (U.S.) often quotes her grandfather as remarking: "If you say a word often enough, it becomes you." The reenacted becomes "real."
Although repetition and rehearsal is essential for human functioning, Maris Bustamante (one of Mexico's foremost performance artists) alerts us to the conservative potential of mimesis:
"We human beings are born clinging to each other and fundamentally programmed to reproduce what we are taught. Submitted to this programming, in this sense, we are victims of what others have made of us. Or to put it another way, we are not ourselves, we are ... them."
Performance, however, is not limited to mimetic repetition. It also includes the possibility of change, critique, and creativity within frameworks of repetition. Diverse forms such as performance art, dance, and theatre, as well as sociopolitical and cultural practices such as sports, ritual, political protest, military parades, and funerals, all have reiterative elements that are reactualized in every new instantiation.
These practices usually have their own structures, conventions, and styles that clearly bracket and separate them from other social practices of daily life.
[performance]
Each performance takes place in a designated space and time. A soccer game is a demarcated act (with a start and end time, a defined space, with rules, and a referee to enforce them). A political protest, too, has a beginning and end, and distinguishes itself from other cultural practices. In other words, performance implies a set of meanings and conventions. A protest is not just any walk down a public street.
Placing an event/image outside of its familiar context or frame can be, in itself, an act of intervention.
A performance implies an audience or participants, even if that audience is a camera. Ana Mendieta's (Cuba/U.S.) work, for example, was not always staged directly for spectators. People can experience it only through film or photographs.
Other kinds of performances such as ritual might restrict participation to those initiated in certain practices. Participating in the ritual might help cement membership in the group, or further reinforce social subcategorizations, exclusions, and stereotypes — women belong over here, men there, some groups nowhere, and so on. DOING becomes a form of BELONGING in a very specific way.
A public act, on the other hand, can be seen by all those who happen to be present.
In all these scenarios, the (social) actors, initiates, and spectators follow the implicit rules of the event, governed as it is by conventions and norms. We all know how to behave at a play, a concert, a funeral, or a political protest. We've learned by doing. Social behaviors are rehearsed, repeated, and incorporated — everything from secret handshakes to putting on one's scarf in a holy place to taking off one's hat in the theatre. Participation in itself constitutes a social practice, the learning and sharing of codes, whether we're aware of it or not. Sometimes we do not even know we're watching a performance, as in the "invisible" theatre that Brazilian practitioner Augusto Boal writes about, which "consists of the presentation of a scene in an environment other than a theatre, before people who are not spectators." A couple begins to argue in a subway car, and all of a sudden everyone in the car joins in.
Some performances pass by in a flash, leaving nothing (apparently) but a memory.
Bel Borba (Brazil) dashes around the Praça Roosevelt in São Paulo (2013) with water bottles, quickly drawing a massive water painting. Astronauts float in space, attached by an umbilical cord. Heads, faces, arms, bodies, all sorts of figures magically come into focus. The entire painting can be seen in its entirety for about half an hour before it evaporates.
What is the work of performance?
The vanishing image? Or Borba's rapid movements (labor)? Or does the work constitute the interruption into the quotidian? An invitation to interact with the environment? Take a look, his work shouts. This is possible! Or all at the same time? Borba's interventions in the urban are not about changing it as much as showing that change is possible.
In 2013 María José Contreras (Chile) sent out a call via Facebook asking 1,210 ordinary citizens to lie down, head to foot, along Santiago's main avenue on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of the coup d'état on September 11, 1973 — one person for each disappeared person killed during the dictatorship. The performance, #quererNOver (#wantNOTtosee), lasted exactly eleven minutes. While fleeting, it served as a powerful, collective testimonial that made visible the line or scar that historical events in Chile have left on the social body.
Other performances last for hours or days or even years.
Helene Vosters (Canada) fell one hundred times a day for an entire year, starting on Canada Day (July 1) of 2010 — a meditation, she says, on the deaths in Afghanistan. The number of deaths kept creeping up, and she felt she couldn't feel, couldn't connect. The falling served as a sustained meditation. It made it impossible for her to go through a day without thinking about war. She had to organize her life around the falls: where she would be, safety, weather, clothing. A note to witnesses, written on a postcard of the Canadian flag, explains that her falls are her attempt to "reach beyond the numbness produced by abstract numbers, political debates, and media spectacularization." On July 1, 2011, she closed the performance with a group fall.
Durational performances, while reiterated or continuous, are not all of a piece. They evolve. They contain all sorts of interruptions, repetitions, episodes, and other short-lived acts within a broad, ongoing structure. But they show something over time that cannot be known or captured at a glance.
Tehching Hsieh (Taiwanese-American) punched a time clock every hour on the hour for a year.
He and Linda Montano lived, tied to each other with an eight foot rope, for a year.
He lived on the streets of New York for a year.
He lived in solitary confinement in a cell for a year.
He lived without art for a year.
Each movement was taken out of context and ruthlessly stripped down to its most essential gesture until all the rhythms of daily life were turned on their head.
"Life is a life sentence," he says. "Every minute, every minute is different. You cannot go back. Every time is different but we do the same thing."
The term "durational" can also help us understand certain forms of explicit ongoing political resistance. There are many examples. Hunger strikes are an excruciating example of "durational" performance of noncompliance by those who have lost control of everything except their bodies. Every Thursday afternoon since the late 1970s, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have marched counterclockwise around the obelisk of Argentina's central square, wearing white kerchiefs and holding the photographs of their disappeared children. They have long struggled to make visible the dictatorship's crimes against humanity. They have left an indelible mark, not just on the plaza, but also in the awareness of the Argentinean people. The word "performance" does not suggest that their actions are not "real" or have no long-term consequences. It means that the mothers have used their bodies and their march ritualistically as a way of making political "disappearances" visible, nameable.
Performances operate as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated actions.
As Richard Schechner suggests, "performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second to the nth time."
Performance is "twice-behaved behavior."
Performance — as reiterated corporeal behaviors — functions within a system of codes and conventions in which behaviors are reiterated, re-acted, reinvented, or relived. Performance is a constant state of again-ness.
What does this do to the notion of the "original" as foundational, the first ... as a cipher of creativity and as product ... say, an original Picasso?
Or "authenticity"?
Is any act "original" and "authentic"?
Do these terms have meaning for performance outside the logic of the art market?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Performance by Diana Taylor, Abigail Levine. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface1. Framing [Performance]
2. Performance Histories
3. Spect-Actors
4. The New Uses of Performance
5. Performative and Performativity
6. Knowing through Performance: Scenarios and Simulation
7. Artivists (Artist-Activists), or What's to Be Done?
8. The Future(s) of Performance
9. Performance Studies
Notes
What People are Saying About This
"At the beginning of this book Diana Taylor makes the claim that since the 1960s artists have been placing the body 'front and center' in artistic practice, and at the end she asks, 'How would our disciplines and methodologies change if we took seriously the idea that bodies (and not only books and documents) produce, store, and transfer knowledge?' In between, Taylor offers, not so much a set of answers to that question, but instead, an array of perspectives on performance from which we can commence an inquiry into its cultural, aesthetic, and political significance. As such this book provides a comprehensive and enticing introduction to what performance is, what it does, and why it matters. But the book does more: in the examples it discusses and the visual documentation it provides, it inspires us both to see how performance theorizes the world and also how we might imagine its possible futures."
"Diana Taylor is the best kind of scholar: engaged, partisan, concerned not merely with describing her subjects, but with bringing forth the political power of their work. And that’s what this book does: it leavens existing visions in order to nourish new ones."
"Diana Taylor concludes with a strong claim that 'Performance is a powerful weapon. We need to understand it.' In that light she is clearly a warrior and an exemplary scholar. But she is also, as evidenced in the pages of this book, a profoundly insightful, compassionate, hope-filled lover of performers and performance. I’ve rarely come across such a trustworthy witness to the potential of art and activism. For that last ounce of courage, I think I’ll just have to carry this inspiring chronicle of performance studies, performance art, and, from my read, artists of all sorts—and have it with me in every type of backstage dressing room I might occupy."