Performance embodies an action which explores a liminal state. It questions, in equal measure, the form, conditions and order of discourse — the body and the logic in the making. It is a political and epistemic gesture of emptying, a gift and a rupture. What cannot be mastered or integrated into the structuring modes of a culture of commodification finds, in performance, a ground for starting over with new conditions for action, where unpronounceable images can anticipate a future way of sensing.
We're not talking about shamans, martyrs or self-proclaimed visionary minds. In his last poems, Artaud projected syllables that formed incomprehensible sounds; Abramović cleaned 1,500 fresh bones during four days; Beuys, with his face covered in gold, gave an art lesson to a dead hare. What do they have in common? Perhaps the use of a single action, an action that invokes regeneration through a specific presence, an action that contains within itself the various violences and deaths of the world.
If performance has been a field of study with its own department since the 1970s, its derivations and areas of activity range from the margins of the page to the streets, to even return to the sheet as a space for drawing action. Vito Acconci, for example, started his practice exploring the physical limits of writing on paper sheets. For his following pieces (1969), he went on to the streets and public spaces, chasing strangers while capturing his pursuits. He later ended up forming an architecture studio, along with installation and landscape projects.
The performance was equally structuring and marginal in the visual arts, theatre, dance, and in the open field of the social sciences and humanities. In philosophy and linguistics, the performative expressions of J. L. Austin (How To Do Things With Words, 1962) or Judith Butler's seminal reading on gender performativity (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990), are classic examples. Performance was then assimilated as an expanded concept in economy and management, in monitoring labour and its productivity/effectiveness. In war.
Interventions, readings and spit-pasting manifestos on walls, happenings, durational pieces, ephemeral or interactive actions, site-specific work, occupations of galleries and public spaces, live-art pieces — where the body and voice are at the centre — the formats, media, documentation and impacts of performance vary, but all express a continuing search for meaning, freedom and openness. In this issue, we identify how performance has operated and how it continues to be actualised in its ways of doing and thinking, both as a vehicle and a space for writing, dialogue, discontinuation, transition and transformation.
Bruno Humberto
