Performativity:intervening the everyday, event-making in city space

Media Art: Theory & Practice I

Version Sem B, 2008

Linda C.H. LAI

Performative

• Speech act: a promise, bet, or contract

• 2 types: > clearly marked

> diffused

The “performative” as a concept:

performance suffusing an act or an activity

constructed social reality

A linguistic definition of the performative

(a term coined by J.L. Austin…)

– a semiotic gesture (play with language)– being as well as doing:

> a doing that constitutes a being…(the process of playing out one’s subjectivity in a specific moment and place)

> an activity that creates what it describes

Performative

Performatives are intelligible only within a matrix that is simultaneously social and semiotic.

> depends on a densely woven web of social relations that renders it intelligible, believable, and acceptable

> involves self-legitimating power

> Shift of context of the utterance shift or loss of cultural authority.

However, a “shift” can also be a parody of dominant conventions: to show that there are conventions… (Judith Butler) e.g. to pronounce a pair of women husband and wife…

Performative

Performativity therefore involves daily behavior based on everyday norms or habits.

Performativity works through the norm of reiteration.

For example,

“Gender” is NOT something one is, but something one does…

• There is no essential identity: gender is performance. It’s what you do at particular times, rather than a universal you.

• We perform different identities/selves in the world.

Performativity

• Judith Butler describes performativity as “…that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” (Butler quoted in Identity: A reader, 2000)

• Key: repetition

Performance VS Performativity

• Performance presupposes a pre-existing subject; performativity contests the very notion of the subject

• Performance: subject precedes the act• Performativity: the act constructs the (identity of) subject

• collapse of differences between “fiction” and the “real”

Case studies: Vito Hannibal Acconci

Individual moments of urban reality:

- collapse of differences between “fiction” and the “real” - create fiction or story in everyday living space- interaction with the public and play with the space

Vito Hannibal Acconci (b. 1940)

In the 1960s, his preoccupations were now orientated towards "real space” (for example, the physical space, the social space, the cultural space, the day-to-day, time) which he explored using various media.

In the early 1970s, he was known for his performance and video works.

Beginning in the 1980s, he concerned himself with private domestic spaces and public spaces for interaction. His many projects include parks, playgrounds, and "anti-monuments".

Vito Acconci: Following Pieces (1969)

Acconci’s Spy Project

• From midnight, April 16, to midnight, May 12, at all times, a “spy” was assigned to the outside of Peters Hall (which houses the offices of the dean of students, the dean of men, the registrar, etc.). The spy’s task was to watch the entrance or entrances facing the Memorial Arch.

• Every hour, on the hour, the spy took a color photograph of what he is watching.

• The photographs were sent to the artist; the results of the piece formed his collection of information.

(Untitled) Project for Pier 17 (1971)

• “From March 27 to April 24, 1971, I will be at Pier 17 (an abandoned pier at West Street and Park Place, New York). At I am each night; I will be alone, and will wait at the far end of the pier for one hour.”

• “To anyone coming to meet me, I will attempt to reveal something I would normally keep concealed: censurable occurrences and habits, fears, jealousies – something that has not been exposed before and that would be disturbing for me to make public.”

• Asking the viewer to keep this secret, Acconci then invited them to demand something from him, even blackmail him.

Acconci was often the protagonist in his early works and regularly invited viewer participation. (Untitled) Project for Pier 17, for example, was conducted as tools for self-analysis as well as explorations into human relationships.

(Untitled) Project for Pier 17 (1971)

Vito Acconci: Blinks

• Nov 23,1969; afternoon.

• Photo-Piece, Greenwich Street, NYC; Kodak Instamatic 124, b/w fil

m 

Holding a camera, aimed away from me and ready to shoot, while walking a continuous line down a city street.   Try not to blink.   Each time I blink: snap a photo. 

Vito Acconci: Blinks

Acconci: Virtual Intelligence Mask (1993)

Virtual Intelligence Mask (1993)

A conventional fencing mask is used as a support-structure-for electronics; the electronics are used as contact with the world outside. On the front of the mask are three televisions: one larger television facing out, and two miniature televisions facing in….

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/virtual-intelligence-mask/

Case studies: Sophie Calle• French, born 1953

• French conceptual artist influenced by Oulipo

• personal investigation the terms and parameters of subject/object, the public versus the private, and role playing.

• Interest in the fluid levels of reality -- reality (the archive) transformed into fiction (narration), and vice versa. conceal the borders between art and life, fiction and reality, and private and public.

• Art-making: accumulation of experiences and memories

Case studies: Sophie Calle

Double Game - a book project that is a documentation of Calle’s performative projec

ts and well as the performative itself

Paul Auster’s novel: Leviathan – Uses Calle as a blueprint for the character design– pg.60-67 Uses a number of episodes from Calle’s life to create

a fictive character named Maria– Mingling fact with fiction.

Sophie Calle’s game: Double Game• Autobiography• Turning the novel into a game and make her own particular mixture

of reality and fiction – she lived the life of Maria

Performativity and Sophie Calle: “Double Game”: To be Like Maria

• The life of Maria and how it influenced life of Sophie

– Chromatic regimen

– Alphabetic theme of a day

• Calle followed the author’s instructions

• The life of Sophie and how it influenced life of Maria– The wardrobe– The striptease– To follow…– Suite venitienne– The detective– The hotel– The address book– The birthday ceremony

The birthday ceremony

Performativity and Sophie Calle: “Double Game”: Chromatic Diet

• To be Like Maria…

• The Chromatic Diet – In the novel, Maria restricted herself to foods of a single color on

any given day– Calle followed the book and added in her own things:

• e.g. adding orange juice into the menu, setting out the full chromatic menu for six guests on Sunday

The Chromatic Diet

The Chromatic Diet

The Chromatic Diet

The Chromatic Diet

Research-based projects: intervening everyday life: The Hotel / To Follow

The Hotel

– Worked in a hotel as a temporary chambermaid for 3 weeks (February – March, 1981)

– She was assigned 12 rooms in her care– Examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and

observed through details lives which remained unknown to her

To Follow…

– Followed strangers on the street, took photos and took note of

their movements

Intervening the everyday: The Address Book (1983)

1983

• Found a address book

• Asked the people in the book to tell her about the owner

• Discovered a man whom she produced a portrait of without meeting him

The Birthday Ceremony (1981-1993)

• Worried people will forget her

• 1980, release herself of this anxiety, decided every year, on October 9, invite to dinner the exact number of people corresponding to her age, including a stranger chosen by one of my guests

• Don’t use the presents

• put an end at Age 40

Performativity, Sophie Calle, and more…

• The act of imposture has been widely used by artists: Sophie Calle, Cindy Sherman

The function of imposture for most artists is to effectuate a critique of the identitarian categories that inform debates about gender, race and sexuality.

Unititled Film Still #14, 1978 Cindy Sherman

More on Sophie Calle

• Double Blind (1992) with Gregory Shephard

• quasi-documentary

• produced and documented a real-life narrative of their journey — and their relationship

MORE CASES OF PERFORMATIVITY (DISCUSSED IN CLASS)

Door Game (Linda Lai / 2005)

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

The Gleaners and I ( Agnes Varda, 2000) +

The Gleaners and I Two Years Later (Agnes Varda, 2002)

MORE CASES OF PERFORMATIVITY (DISCUSSED IN CLASS)

Door Game (Linda Lai / 2005)

Simultaneously social and semiotic:Conventions of melodrama / gender role stereotypes (semiotic)

Ideal personhood / paradigms of social relation (social)

Opening up: challenging stable narratives, narrative coherence, and narrative closure

The work evolves from some sort of a comprehensive story (formulaic mannerism) to a series of image and text (openness of a photographic image) to the sheer act of

tearing apart whereby speech and words took over images and finally end as pure “noise”… The work can actually continue on and on with more and more sections.

Reiteration + repetition: The serial structure is endless, each of the 3 parts demonstrate how the same pool of raw

material can result in very different works of very different looks and very different speech acts.

Speech Act: The work and its entirety is the process of contemplating narrative mannerism than the

arrival in settled conclusion.

MORE CASES OF PERFORMATIVITY (DISCUSSED IN CLASS)

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

The work’s basic cinematic grammar – sustained long still shot, no camera movement, tableau set-up with a heightened sense of composition and organization of screen space – places the viewer in the mode of attentive contemplation, heightened sense of seeing…

Viewing habit is challenged: what do we see? What should we see? What else is there (other than for plot comprehension, eventfulness…)?

The impact of intense seeing opens up the possible meanings of an observable surface. A woman is more than a woman: she may be, she may be…she is, she is…

Acting for a pre-assigned dramatic role now becomes a performance that destabilize a fixed role. The viewing process keeps (re-)constructing who the person is via on-going performance.

Simultaneously social and semiotic… Repetition and details work together to open up…

MORE CASES OF PERFORMATIVITY (DISCUSSED IN CLASS)

The Gleaners and I ( Agnes Varda, 2000) +The Gleaners and I Two Years Later (Agnes Varda, 2002)

The film itself can be understood as simply a documentary.

The film in fact is an audio-visual record of a performative project / journey of Varda’s…

It is a journey of discovery, opening up the multiple implications and connective power of a gleaner and gleaning, by keeping open the questions: who is a gleaner? What does it mean to glean….? In the end, the work touch upon issues of poverty, homelessness, social marginality, conservation of the earth resources, artistic creation, and activist impulses to break into the core of modern/urban life.

The film therefore demonstrates the productivity and richness of the act of “opening up” and refusal to settle on a particular type of conclusive findings.

The performative force of the project lies also in the revisit 2 years after filming. It seems like this work is always in progress, and can carry on its life continuously (at least theoretically speaking…)