|
Performance art is commonly represented as resolving, through "de-objectification," the troubled relation of the modernist avant-garde to the art object. If it is the case however, at least for the politically progressive elements of that avant-garde, that what lies behind or in the object is the commodity, then how little deserved is the attribution of radicality to performance art as a medium, attempting to overcome without resolving the conflicts the commodity status of the art object embodies. Performance art's relation to the art object is predicated on its incorporation into the institution of "fine art." The claim of "de-objectification" is an institutional claim, it can only be understood in its immediate institutional context: Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptualism (rather than the more historically distant genealogy of performance in Dada, Futurism or Folk Carnival ). While the art object may tie culture to economics, it is in the end a dialectic of representation and presence which ties culture to politics. This relationship works both ways, it is on this tie cultural practices can be radicalized, and just as the form of performance does not grant it radicality, neither can it so deny it.
1. Modernism: the Art Object as Commodity
I will suggest, with Benjamin, that Modernism can be seen as the confrontation of the art maker with the commodity status of "his" object, the commodification of "his" labour. All Modernism reflects the contradictions of alienated production in its attempt to overcome it. The relation between objecthood and commodityhood is simple enough to establish— this is evident from the first pages of Capital and throughout his earlier writings. "The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object and turned into a physical thing; this product is an objectification of labour. The performance of work is at the same time its objectification." [Marx, EW 122] At the same time, Marx understands the commodity object as merely an illustration of Capital, a materialization of its abstract relations which Capital itself offers up for analysis. A careful reader of Marx cannot mistake that what at all points lies behind the object is acts and relations; the reality of exchange is labour.
Nor can a careful reader mistake the theatricality and dissimulation which are central to commodity and exchange. The analysis of Capital is the analysis of the commodity exactly because the commodity is the appearance of Capital, it is in every sense a "theatrical appearance." Even if we are to suppose that performance has no object, this does not free it from the condition of Modernism, alienation, and Capital. Indeed, the relation of production to the commodity and exchange is a sort of theatre, dissimulation behind which we find the undeniable reality of coerced labour. If Capital must at the same time increase wages to stabilize its labour force and lower them to maximize profit, a sort of theatre, to which Marx gives the name ideology, mediates this relation. Ideology varnishes the contradiction embodied in the false equivalencies of commodity exchange. One cannot escape the commodity through either theatricality or presence, theatricality and presence are already the two poles of Capital: exchange and production, money and commodity.
2. Presence and Objecthood
When used in reference to Modern art, the terms theatricality, presence and objecthood, draw to mind Michael Fried's essay, "Art and Objecthood." His handling of these terms, rooted as it is in the cult of beauty, is so devious and confused as to be almost incomprehensible. We can, however, bring these contradictions into sharp focus through an essay that remarkably parallels Fried's themes some fifty years prior, Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Initially, one has to question Fried's definition of theatre when he states, "The literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art." The confusion is heightened when he notes that even theatre has begun to reject theatricality and, "the relevant texts are, of course, Brecht and Artaud," which themselves embody very contradictory strategies of presence, extreme "theatricality" and "anti-theatricality." It is clear, however, this theatricality has something to do with a relation of distance, and in particular the distance of the subject from the object. It is important to note that the distance between subject and object is a metaphor of the commodity as well, for what is alienation if not distance. It is here that Benjamin becomes useful as both essays use the metaphor of distance to understand the condition of the art object. In fact, the central term in Benjamin's theory, "aura" is defined as "the unique phenomenon of a distance" [Benjamin 222].
But for Fried, in the minimalist object this relation of distance threatens the foundations of art. Fried argues that scale relates to the viewer's feeling of proximity to the object. "The awareness of scale is a function of the comparison made between that constant, one's body size, and the object. Space between the subject and the object is implied in such a comparison." [126]. The large object seems near and overwhelms the audience with its presence, while the small object seems distant and becomes an object of contemplation and rationality. One would think Minimalism brings the work too near if, as Fried writes, "Morris wants to achieve presence through objecthood" [126]. But, it appears that for Fried the object is too much in the middle ground, as is evident when he quotes an interview with Tony Smith, "Q: Why didn't you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer/ A: I was not making a monument/Q: Why didn't you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?/ A: I was not making an object." [128]
While Fried seems to suggest Minimalists, or "literalists" as he prefers to call them, are too concerned with the literal presence of the object, a presence forgrounded by a lack of internal formal qualities (i.e.: the relation between the red wedge and the white square), he also seems to suggest they focus too little on objecthood as presence. By emptying out the art object of any internal formal qualities one is forced to look not so much at the work as object, but at its relation to its context, or in Fried's terms, to "the entire situation," where ""the entire situation" means exactly that: all of it —including it seems the beholder's body."[127] It is especially the fact that it engages the audience, plays to an audience as embodied subjects, which constitutes "theatricality" and the decadence that Fried disparages.
If one might initially be tempted to align Performance Art with what Fried calls theatricality, at root in performance lies an anti-theatrical impulse: a rejection of dissimulation, representation, theatricality. Performance actually has a tendency, especially when it relies on "de-objectification" to do exactly the opposite of what Minimalism does through objecthood. It relies on the "proposal inherent in Conceptual Art ... to replace the object of spatial and perceptual experience..." which Buchloh in his article on Conceptualism and the art institution contends, "constituted the most consequential assault on the status of that object: its visibility, its commodity status, and its form of distribution." [Buchloh, 107] One must ask how well this strategy works and how much it actually submits to the "theatricalizing" ideological pole of the commodity and excorporates the subjectivity of its audience.
3. Art-Life: Utopian and Cynical
As much as in a problematics of its relation to objecthood, Modernism can be defined through the demand for a merger of art and life. While we can trace the art-life paradigm from Courbet's or Goya's rejection of mythological themes in favor of the everyday, the definitive break pertinent here is Duchamp's ready-made, which does not represent the quotidian, but brings the everyday itself into the museum, rejecting the role of the museum as an institution of representation. If what mediated the art object and everyday life was the institution of the museum, the collection, or the gallery, Duchamp re-unified them by making the mediating institution part of the work itself. The ready-made without the institution is just another commodity: snow shovel, wine rack, coat hanger or commode.
Pop and Conceptualism both hold a sort of literal anti-aesthetic. Where Minimalism thematizes perception, they show it complete disregard. Pop relies on a sophisticated conceptual apparatus which overshadows its object nature. Following a Platonic logic, there is an equation between Pop's serial objecthood and Conceptualism's negation of the object; if the singular demands embodiment, the series implies an abstract model or ideal. Conceptual art then incorporated the commodity object, not as series but as model, thus attempting to negate "the validity of traditional studio aesthetic," and to "cancel the aesthetic production and consumption which had still governed Pop Art and Minimalism." [Buchloh 119] It may have done neither. If it is Conceptualism from which Performance seems to have taken its "de-objectification" paradigm, it fails on the same grounds.
While Pop and Minimalism mimicked the serial nature of the commodity, neither successfully dislodged itself from the institution of art in which interpretation took place, precisely because it was strategically dependent upon this institution as its object. Even when Minimalism places itself in public space, one must ask if it has made itself truly available to a public uninformed about its critical function or its institutional reaction to the history of sculpture. Pop does not bring uncoerced aesthetic production and un-alienated experience into everyday life, but rather brings the commodity object and mechanical reproduction fully into the institution of art. Pop reveals the already existing, but concealed, unification of alienated life and alienated art. The unfortunate truth is, as Benjamin writes in "The Author as Producer," "the Bourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate astonishing qualities of revolutionary themes, indeed, can propagate them without calling its own existence and the existence of the class that owns it seriously into question." [229]
4. Cinema, Mass Culture and Audience
Of course, while art has "mimicked" mass production from within conservative institutions, the cinema represents an art form which is founded in mechanical reproduction. If modernist painting opposed itself to the mass production of the photographic apparatus by emphasizing its singularity and non-referentiality, performance art could be seen as a similar reaction to cinema; "there is no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction" [Benjamin, 230]. In this relation however, we must begin to see the opposition of the singularity of the unique art object with the singularity of the aesthetic experience, the event of reception.
The performance artist does not escape the alienation of the film actor who, Benjamin notes, quoting Pirandello as an early witness, "feels as if in exile—exiled from himself" and yet, "for film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else" [229]. But this is self as commodity, "The cult of the movie star, not the unique aura of the person but the "spell of personality," the phony spell of commodity"[231] This commodification of the subject not only changes the conditions of work for the actor, but also reflects the conditions of the audience under Capital to the extent that the worker is emptied of self in labour and Capital attempts to fill him back up with the lost object, the commodity. It is this commodity of persona with which the mass audience identifies: "…the worker sinks to the level of the commodity and to a most miserable commodity…" [Marx EW]
Rather than conflate them, one can diametrically oppose alientated subjectivity under Capital, which makes one alone and separate, but in a relation of abstract equivalence with others, to a social subject that is unique and different, but nevertheless located within and dependent upon a set of social relations to which it is not only subjected, but within which it is an agent as well. In Capital the subject that is negated is the social subject— the alienation of the commodity results in alienation from others, alienation from the self, alienation from one's body [Marx, EW 129]. Absolutely opposed are the subject that only exists within social relations and the individual subject as commodity, and through this alienation the social audience is replaced by the mass audience, a community of unique beings is replaced by a mass of equivalent individuals.
5. The Alienated Commodity Subject as Performance Artist
While I have until now accepted performance art's claim to have no object, the claim is of course false. Performance fills the absent reference of all art Modern art work: the subject. The connection of Expressionism to the rest of the avant-garde is precisely this crisis of the commodity, expressed, however, differently. Expressionism was a reaction to the most clear manifestation of the "object" nature of man, finally literalized in World War I. Dada, which is often cited as a precursor to performance, is in many ways a reaction against Expressionism. Unlike Dada, however, contemporary performance has been largely a movement of expressionism, and, like its precursors, its object has been the presence of the artist as suffering alienated subject. Ironically, it was the Abstract Expressionists who appropriated and aestheticized the image of the heroic male industrial worker, but disingenuously, for the artisinal nature of these artist's work is exactly here the opposite of the boring, alienating, un-expressive labour of mass production.
All art, to the extent it is "Modern," is about the condition of alienation, and thus about the alienation of the subject from itself. Thus, the Abstract Expressionism that Fried would have defended against Minimalism, and into which he projected his cult of beauty, operates by some of the very same principles as Minimalism. No one can explain why a viewer should feel the same emotion as a painter did while painting— or even prove that such a thing is possible. However, Abstract Expressionism does seem, in its lack of referent and focus on painting-as-object, to become an immediate overwhelming experience which promises to overcome the distance between the artist and the audience. By equating expressionism with emotive expression or with the masterful style and gesture, the alienated subject gets equated with the master, and this of course is an equation of unequals: any question of the artist's relation to an audience becomes one of mere domination. The master dominates the slave out of existence, and only to lose his own in the process. Jackson Pollock understood his own paintings not so much as a beautiful expression of genuine emotion but as a trace of his labour, a moment of his life. However, the scale of his work, its critical reception, even his status as an artist, conspired against him.
In performance, the subject of enunciation is present and taken to act as an authentic "self." Autobiographical work which emphasizes the performer over the audience then naturalizes the individual subject, equates the "individual" with the "subject" rather than reground that subject in its social context. The biographical compulsion of performance, from Spalding Gray and his endless imitators to Karen Finley, is then a sort of expressionism, an expression of self, but just as in the case of the film star, an expression of self as commodity.
One of the primary ways in which performance has dealt with its "subject" is through the body. But the equation of subject to body cannot be taken for granted. Just as the "subject" becomes the alienated individual, subject as alienated "object," the condition of commodity production renders the body alien as well; "It alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life" [Marx EW, 129]. The body is taken as a "natural" metaphor for "subject" as "object," but in that equation it presumes the a priori existence of some more primary subject which is alienated, thus occluding the produced nature of subjectivity itself. This is the opposite again of Minimalism. We remember that it does not address the artist's singular body, but the audience's plural, collective body. As an in-corporated subject, the object of Minimalism is a surrogate for the artist, but also signals the artist's absence.
Rather than placing the audience in a passive position through singular and immediate presence, "it is this necessary, greater distance of the object in space from our bodies, in order that it be seen at all, that structures the non-personal or public mode. However, it is just this distance between object and subject that creates a more extended situation, because physical participation becomes necessary." [Fried 126] The work mediates in such a way as to place the emphasis on the condition of reception. The collective subject, the audience, is the proper subject of the radical work of art. The only possibility of overcoming alienation is not through becoming an independent individual, but through collective emancipation, a reinvestment in the social. Just as the individual is a product of one set of relations, so is the social subject, the subject of history, the product of another. Minimalism proves, even in its failure, that aesthetic experience can produce that subject.
This audience is not the Stalinist mass any more than it is the mass audience at Nüremberg, but a collectivity that allows for difference in a public sphere capable of negotiating the conflicting demands that difference brings with it. This reveals the importance of understanding the audience as incorporated or 'enfleshed,' not as ideal subjects of consciousness, but as subjects conscious through preception, through sensuous-aesthetic experience which is only available through embodiment. Grounding art in its reception, collective and corporeal, also means the realization of the critique of authorship, of understanding art as co-production,
"a production of and by subjects already in social practices which always involve heterogeneous and often contradictory positions in ideologies. . . . Real readers are subjects in history rather than readers of a single text." [Claire Johnson quoted in Delauretis 44]
Where Minimalism seems to fail is where Benjamin seems to believe painting does as well; unlike cinema it does not produce or organize the social to respond to it. [235] Likewise, cinema fails (where Minimalism does not), as Benjamin writes, "for the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation alone." [240] In order for art to become radical, it must not only create a collective audience, but one capable of responding to the demands placed upon it by its position in history.
6. Realization of Contradiciton: The Production of Community
Artists begin to be radicalized, and their work begins to create and interact with audiences that generate historical change, not by denying but by acknowledging their own position in Capital. Any question of the de-objectification of art is simply a smoke screen for the continued participation of cultural production in the larger project of Capital. In order to escape the commodity status of art, what art must address is not so much the "object," but its production, and this is a matter of social relations and their reproduction. Where art meets these social relations is in the receptive act of its audience. The religious aura must be replaced with another, which Capital, through the abstraction of exchange, erases. Each aesthetic experience, each act of recepetion, is a once occurrant historical event.
To note the failure of Performance Art as an institution is not to say that live art, performance/art (replacing the mute space with a bar of difference), is not useful in the struggle against the commodity. I think, in fact the consequence of my argument is just the opposite. While the presence of painting invoked in Benjamin does not seem redeemable except as a merely critical exercise, performance remains important because its demand for an audience implies a relation to a social body (althought it is never said I believe Benjamin would concur, as his defense of Brecht would indicate. ["Work of Art" 235; see also Understanding Brecht]) Live art, whether you call it theatre or performance, has the ability to react and transform over time and even use its "presence," its materiality and singular eventhood as a tool, allowing it to not only to create its audience, but also to prepare an audience for the tasks before it.
Capital steals away the once occurant moment from the worker and embodies it in the object which is then removed. The redemption of labour is in the re-appropriation of this object, not as object but as aesthetic experience. Marx understands this as the redemption of use value over exchange value. Only through collective re-appropriation, which is predicated on a collective subject, a public, can this redemption be detached from its religious roots and succeed in being transformed into a literal re-appropriation of labour through experience.
Seamus Malone is an interdisciplinary artist and theorist living in Brooklyn. He is a recent
fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He is the New York regional
editor and a regular contributor to P-Form.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, Hill and Wang,
New York, 1975.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, New York, 1968.
————. "The Author as Producer," Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, Schocken Books,
New York, 1978.
————. Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, New Left Books, London, 1973.
Buchloh, Benjamin. "Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration
to the Critique of Institutions," October #55, Winter 1990.
Buck-Morss, Susan. "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay
Reconsidered," New Formations #20 Summer 1993, The Actuality of Walter Benjamin
ed. Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead, Lawrence and Wishart, London.
Chave, Anna. "Minimalism: Masculinity and the Rhetoric of Power," Arts Magazine, 1992.
De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1984.
Fried, Michael. "Art and Objecthood," Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed.
Gregory Battcock, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1968.
Goldberg, Rosemary. Performance Art: from Futurism to the Present, revised
and enlarged ed.,Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1988
-————. "Performance: A Hidden History," "Performance: The Golden Years,"
The Art of Performance, ed. Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas, E.P. Dutton & Co.,
New York, 1984.
Marx, Karl. Early Writings, trans. & ed. Tom Bottomore, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1963.
————. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, The Modern Library, New York, 1906.
Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993.
Roberts, Julian. "The Aesthetics of Conflict," The Actuality of Walter Benjamin (op cit.).
|
|
|
