Aura, Commodity Objecthood, and Public Space in Recent Work The reason I now place a bar between performance and art is that, when grounded in audience reception, all art is performance. No object ever embodies an experience, experience is reified in the object as an abstract similarity or continuity between two experiences, singular sensuous receptive events, structured by difference. This means that we place all art within a single field and formal questions become strategically important relative to specific audiences and their needs. If cinema seems too much an optical phenomenon to respond to tactile demands, apparatus theory and studies of movie house architecture reveal its nature as performance. Domestic architecture was transformed by the introduction of the television, and even when it is not on, it still thus structures domestic life. Painting, sculpture and photography may all seem most at home in the museum, but they each have their public counterparts which have at least the potential to engage audiences and to produce a public. If all experience is "aesthetic" experience all art is performance art. While recent performance work may not have directly engaged in a critique of commodity, there seems to be a trend toward work located institutionally somewhere between installation and performance which attempts to generate temporary disruptive alternative economies. These works attempt to stage a sort of potlatch, a gift economy in which gifts are given without the traditional notion of debt, or where excess, devalued through ubiquity, is given over to liberated consumption or over consumption. Food of course, being the most primal image of consumption, the one behind all others, is exploited by Rirkrit Trivanija. He has done several installations, which locate the consumption of food as a supremely social act, held out as possible site for the creation of a public space. Likewise, Fˇlix Gonzalez-Torres produces sculptures so beautiful one wants to eat them, and, as they consist of candies spilled against the wall, the audience is not discouraged from so doing. In reference to Serra's notorious lead corner, perhaps the first work to make direct reference to the institutional architecture of the art world, one surreptitiously consumes the material foundation of the museum in this act as well. In a similar vein, Daniel Martinez's installation 23 Blows of the Dagger at Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago provided the audience a room of Salvation Army clothes for the taking. The audience was also encouraged to make the space a sort of club or living room, to lounge in the piles of clothing and were provided brown paper shopping bags each silk screened with guns in which to carry the loot away. This last element comments on the second economy already operating below the surface of Capital, where guns and drugs and turf shift roles with money as primary markers of status, wealth, and power. Within the institution of perfomance art itself, a more dominant, but largely failed, tactic has been to shift the role of the artist to something akin to the social worker, often taking a pedagogical relation to a community. Inspired by third world theorists like Augusto Boal, they place the remnants of community against the hegemony of Capital, a strategy not always successful in the American diasporic urban neighborhood. There are successes when such a community can be found, for instance, Red Moon Theatre, in the Chicago West Side neighborhood, Logan Square. The group performs seasonal pageants which involve community members, mostly children, in producing works which incorporate the iconography of their everyday life. Despite its grounding in the everyday, the work is dominated by artifice and play which draws the audience into the creative process and at the same time allows the children of the community to produce images which are truly fantastic. The work thematizes and even facilitates hope and transformation, the means by which people resist totalizing power in their everyday lives. From within the "institution" of performance art, I only know of one major American performance artists, John Jesurun, who has critically thematized the relation of performance to cinema. His early and ongoing work, Chang in a Void Moon [1982-] is a 'living film serial,' and begins his use of "staging techniques adapted from movies: camera pans, flashbacks or jumpcuts." [Goldberg, Performance Art 194] and live reproductions of distinctly cinematic images, reproducing overhead camera shots by placing actors on a wall. Ironically, his reproduction of cinematic and video aesthetics in live art creates what Goldberg calls, "a new theatricality of performance." [195] In his most recent work Slight Return, a solo actress performs live a "Ballard"-ish Surreal science fiction text in a minimalist cube set ominously at the back of a stage. The audience never sees her except through "live" video images projected onto a translucent scrim strechted in front of the cube. The image of multiple video cameras set at different angles, as well as objects, lights and sounds which occasionally carry over the top of the wall guarantee the veracity and simultaneity, the "auratic presence" of the images. While the level of practice-politics evident in the previously mentioned work is missing, Jesurun provides a critical analysis of the nature of performance missing in the others. If, as I have said, all art is performance, it should not be too odd that in order to continue to illustrate my theory, I turn to two Chicago artists, a painter and a sculptress, who both "perform their role as artist" from within the institution of high art to carry on both a critique and a practice-politics which responds to the commodity status of art. These works engage both the questions of commodity and theatricality, the contradictions of presence I have attempted to examine. Laurie Hogin operates through commodity status of the object of the contemporary gallery system, but also, manages to escape the rarefied economy art world to address the economy in general, successfully negotiating a double signification of the gallery and/in the market. Most exemplary is an installation of paintings, hung salon style, installed on one wall of Peter Miller Gallery in Chicago. Each work was named and sold individually. These paintings as a group however, constitute a performance of Capital, a going through the motions of the economic system as a profound and stinging critique. Not merely the installation, but the sale of the work and its diaspora to corporate and private collections becomes a "metonym of illness" for the operation of Capital which the work indexes, recursively, on the denotative level. Each of these decadently framed pictures represents a single rabbit seated in a landscape poised in a defensive or aggressive position, large glossy eyes uncannily staring down the spectator. They are painted in a trompe-l'oiel Flemish style only ruptured by goonish scowls, bared fangs and tiger stripes, shifting uncomfortably between high art and low art, between masterpiece and cartoon (the cunning and irony of which is witnessed in the fact that it was almost immediately ripped off by a Chicago ad agency for which of course she received no credit or reimbursement). These paintings make reference not only to their own commodity status, but to the larger system of Capital several times over. The virtuosity and the life size scale of the paintings make them perfect commodities which demand to be held and to be taken home. The noted reproductive function of rabbits becomes metaphor for Capital's singular modus operandi, only to reproduce itself, and as rabid mutants they suggest nature gone bad, transformed into a violent destructive force. These animals represent the pack, but each one is individuated, alienated by the formal device of the ornate and precious frame in which is etched the title of the work, and presumably the name of the animal depicted, each literally, "a commodity on the exchange": timber, sugar, or gold. Jane E. McLoone has worked unrelentingly for several years in a strict style which synthesizes and works through the contradictions of Pop and Minimalism which unlike other feminist appropriations of Minimalism and Pop more than glosses the surface. Her work addresses the issues of utopia, longing, subjectivity, commodity, real and imagined public space. The most representative of her works, a series entitled "Shifters" resemble Alan McCollum's "surrogates," but take McCollum's object as representation/representation as object one step further. Where McCollum's dull enamels firmly state the objecthood of painting, these works both consume and repel, seem to represent the absolute depth of stars in infinite space and at the same time call only to the objecthood and surface of a counter in a 1950's diner. By using what she call "pop" materials, thick coats of resin with embedded glitter she undermines the heroic minimalist use of industrial materials and instead calls to the domestic space, not the pop image of advertisement, but the uncanny presence of the pop commodity at its site of consumption, domestic space. The title "shifters" is a reference to Roman Jackobsen's linguistic category for those words which take on different meaning in relation to their context and address. These sculptures, like the words "I", "you", or "me" incorporate the position of the spectator within their meaning. In this way she indexes the co-productive nature of the work, she does not erase her position as author (which is always at stake in feminist art) but nor does she master or dominate the viewer. Rather through the work, she creates a model for what I have called an enfleshed public, bringing artist and spectator into a dialogue where both comfortably exchange position as subject and object of address. Her one large scale public work, "Beauty," is a life size fiberglass horse which she has covered with her signature glitter and resin. The work is "in the collection" of a western wear store, and literally functioning as an street advertisement, is rolled onto the sidewalk each morning. Its black-blue sheen is continuously transformed by headlights, street-lights and sunlight as well as the position of the spectator. In it, she makes ironic reference to monumental equestrian sculptures, the phallic associations of the horse and the lack of its obligatory male rider. Unlike the oppressive presence of Tony Smith's Die which Anna Chave noted little girls kicking, the children of Chicago Avenue, in largely working class Hispanic neighborhood on the East Side of Chicago, pet the work and pretend to feed it sugar cubes and carrots as if it were alive when they pass it on their way to and from school. While I believe that live art has a unique role, each of these artists whatever their "medium," suggests new ways of looking at art, performance and the commodity. Both inside and outside the institution of art these artists have found a position of agency, a means to produce and engage public, to carry on a meaningful critique, to facilitate dialogue and develop a practice-politics. It is not the role of the artist to redeem history, but they can participate in the production of a public which can.