performativity

A word I hesitate to use is performativity. Like so many half-words, devised through the
inarticulate spiel-konstruction inherent in theoretical writing, it bears the hallmark of
falsity, as do so many awkward non-words, made for the sake of illumination! Like the
bookmark I found stuck in a corner of the dictionary, the word lacks the necessary roar
required to express itself. Yet since the term has now become a catchall to corral the
many promises made in speech, acts, and theory itself, it seems I fall to usage, although
strictly speaking it’s no word at all! I promise to get it out of the way swiftly.

It’s in fact a mutation of performative:

per·for·ma·tive (pr-fôrm-tv)
adj.
Relating to or being an utterance that performs an act or creates a state of affairs by the fact of its
being uttered under appropriate or conventional circumstances, as a justice of the peace uttering
“I now pronounce you husband and wife” at a wedding ceremony, thus creating a legal union, or
as one uttering, “I promise”, thus performing the act of promising.
 n.
A performative utterance. Also called speech act.

Performative verbs mark the illocutionary force of an utterance, explicitly; locutionary

acts are the act of saying, and perlocutionary acts define the effects they have on the
hearer. This, of course, is all within the realm of linguistics and speech, but for me the
term in question embraces much wider, more varied and often non-verbal movements.

In the meantime, my promise is already broken.

I draw your attention to performativity in order to consider a way of working that

expands the ongoing practice of creating an artwork, whereby the artist and audience are
made and unmade through engagement in sayings, actions and situations. And central to
this concept is the idea of the reflexive or self-reflexive work – a mask that points at its
self – and in so doing, reveals its inner workings, its entire apparatus and circumstance of
being, but still continues to generate meaning within meaning. These works actively
strive to be self-referential, self-regarding, self-recording, self-replicating, self-realizing
and self-questioning: a highly acute and idealized state that very few works can attain.
Returning to the task at hand, I’d like to mention, unchronologically, a few memorable
incidents when this phenomenon felt incredibly tangible and close by, as pr-fôrm-tv- ité
began to roar not like a lion, but as a sea.

“Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.”
*Sarah Bernhardt

I992 – performance artist Annie Griffin prowls the stage as Sarah Bernhardt, the great
19th century French actress - The Divine Sarah. The event is billed as a one night only
audience with the notorious and celebrated thespian. The stage lays bare except for a
divan and the backdrop of a blank screen. Prior to her entrance Griffin is heard, cursing in
character, from her dressing room. She then bursts onto the stage, La Grande Dame,
speaking in husky Gallic tones, and begins divulging tales of her memorable life and
times. Gesticulating wildly and speaking with an extravagant passion, she describes the
boulevards crowded with her admires, the gentlemen, laden with bouquets, champagne,
jewels, outside her dressing room, the triumphs, the roles, the lovers! The excessiveness
of the performance is disarming yet seductive, the gestures large and exaggerated.

“For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short.
An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.” *

Over the course of her monologue the actress makes us aware of the physical effort of
acting, of the tricks of her trade, the sleight of hand, the illusions, the stagecraft,
particularly the larger than life, melodramatic style attributed to the late 19thcentury
theatre. We become privy to these secrets not only through the words spoken, but also in
witnessing them in action. For a moment, Griffin slips out of character. In briefly
breaking the illusion she points to her mask. We are drawn to feel what we know: we are
already experiencing an actress pointing at her mask in the form of an actress playing an
actress pointing at her mask. This queer doubling creates the beginning of a droste effect
in performative terms; also it reveals the many psychological loops enacted and
experienced by the performer, while prising open the spectator’s own investments in the
spectacle.

“Once the curtain is raised, the actor is

ceases to belong to himself. He belongs
to his character, to his author, to his
public. He must do the impossible to
identify himself with the first, not to
betray the second, and not to disappoint
the third.” *

Increasingly Griffin slips in and out of character, telling the audience about her
encounters on the streets running outside the theatre, the hassles earlier in the day.
She seems to have broken the illusion most finally and goes on to introduce her
cameraman as he walks onto the stage. She then stretches out on the divan and describes
Bernhardt’s notable death scenes, the marvellous expressions of anguish, pain, loss.
At this point her face appears on the screen. The camera has been turned on and the
cameraman is leaning over the actress to get a good close-up.
Griffin prepares herself and does a run through of a death scene from a Bette Davis film,
perhaps Dark Victory, a woman dying from a deadly illness and saying farewell to life.
The first rendition is done in the raging style of Bernhardt – and suddenly the difference
between the emotional range that can be expressed from the space of the stage and that of
the screen is made strikingly and comically apparent. In close up, projected at a huge
scale, the actress’s grimaces are totally over-blown and grotesque.

In the second rendition, Griffin changes her range and softens a little.
“I think we need some tears for this,” she says, handing the cameraman a glycerine
dropper. He supports the camera apparatus on his right shoulder and takes the bottle in
his left hand. In much softer voice the actress intones. “The light is fading fast …”
She goes on speaking, a dying woman courageously meeting her fate, her eyesight
dimming as the cameraman leans over her, filming her face while dripping the glycerine
drops onto her cheeks.

This strange sight upon the stage induces great hilarity amongst the audience but as their
eyes travel between the physical set up before them and the close-up image upon the
screen, a hush occurs. The performance taking place on the screen is deeply moving and
utterly convincing. Griffin simultaneously appears to have broken several spells over the
course of her performance, only to create others and we, the audience, are plunged into a
mise en abyme, in which the mask declares its falsity only to reveal yet another, which is
utterly compelling.
2007, during the run of a Hogarth Exhibition at Tate Britain, Jefford Horrigan is about to
begin a performance. A crowd assembles in gallery 9: sitting and standing, they form at
wide circle. If it were not for the indoor setting and the 18th century masterpieces hanging
on every wall, you might imagine you are about to see a cockfight or an exhibition of
bare-knuckle boxing. Instead, within the circle emerges a solitary man, wearing a dark
suit, amidst a selection of disparate objects that stand at its perimeter: a green metal
cabinet, two dollies, a wooden CD player, a telephone, two chairs, two green lampshades,
a long thin table, a stick, a black hat. The man walks around, examining each of the
objects and items of furniture. He returns to a green metal cabinet and turns it upside
down, kneels, and draws on the back a gibbet with a man hanging from it, under which he
writes TOM NERO. Then elegantly pointing his toes, he uses a foot to pull one of the dollies
into the centre. Gently and effortlessly, he picks up the cabinet, places it onto the dolly
then steps away and, pressing a remote, causes the strains of Fly Me to the Moon sung by
Doris Day to flood the gallery. He then approaches the cabinet, its door swinging open,
and begins to dance gracefully with it, only to end the dance abruptly and abandon his
partner.

Thus begin The Four Stages of Cruelty. The piece takes its title from a series of Hogarth
engravings, their sequence a narrative, telling the story of Tom Nero, who after torturing
animals, goes on to kill a woman and is eventually rewarded by going to the scaffold and
ending up on the dissecting table of an anatomist. In his deft handling of the material
around him, Horrigan plays out subtle rituals of approach and courtship that shift slowly
into acts of abuse and violence. The disparate objects are as the contents of a prop box,
their combination recalling “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing
machine and an umbrella”, described by Lautréamont. They also imply the dismembered
body parts of Tom Nero on the mortuary slab while the man Horrigan, takes on the aspect
of a necrophiliac, lovingly bringing them back to life and to re-enact the crimes.
Using his foot once more, he pulls a dolly into the centre. A telephone is then placed
upon the one edge, with the cord running along the length. The assemblage becomes a
dog. The man throws a ball in front of the telephone and the dolly, playing with the dog.
It sits up and begs, comes to heel, playfully gripping his hand – man and dog play a game
of tug. The telephone receiver, acting as ears, droop as the man cuffs the dog. Its
changing moods are expressed by play with the receiver, deft adjustments making it prick
up its ears or flatten them despondently. Eventually the dog is prodded and kicked. The
ball is thrown at the dog. A bone like object is then tied to the dog’s tail then the man
spins it around and around and it is eventually pushed to one side.
Creating another animal Horrigan sets it to fight with the dog, the audience looking on as
if on a London back street. Afterwards, leaving two members of the audience still holding
the now tethered animals, he picks up the long table and sets it down vertically on one
end. He returns to the animals and, by their tethers, picks them up and drapes them over
one of the table legs. Pulling them apart he lets them clash and crash against each other
again and again. Then he takes the green cabinet off the wooden dolly. In one movement
he returns the long table to its normal position, tipping off the animals into a heap, and
placing two of the legs of the table onto the wooden dolly. He removes the telephone
from the green dolly and places it under the other two legs. He lifts the cabinet on to, and
towards the back of the table, then unbuckles the animals and places the one without
castors onto the forward end of the table. A horse and carriage ready to go!

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment

of animals. Hogarth depicts this in his
engravings. He shows how cruelty grows and
develops. He shows the child’s cruelty to
animals, pinching the tail of a dog or a cat; he
then depicts the grown man in his cart running
over a child; and lastly, the culmination of
cruelty in murder. He thus brings home to us in
a terrible fashion the rewards of cruelty, and this
should be an impressive lesson to children. The
more we come in contact with animals and
observe their behaviour, the more we love them,
for we see how great their care is for their
young.

Immanuel Kant (Lectures on Ethics)

Writing No. 24 on two sides of the cabinet, Horrigan takes off his tie and knots it around
the front inside leg of the table and with the aid a stick begins to run the horse and
carriage around and around in circles until it eventually tips over and collapses in a heap.
The man drags the cabinet, still on its side and the other objects to the perimeter, leaving
the table prone where it fell. He returns to the table, picks it up and gently sets it
vertically down upon the green dolly. He undoes the two green lampshades from the
chairs and reties them loosely together, forming a cone and resting them between the
upper two legs of the table. His dance partner stands waiting. He turns, and with the
remote, plays Softly, As I Leave You Now - again by Doris Day. They dance a romantic
waltz. The man pushes the table away; they both extend their arms to towards each other
and rejoin.

She turns her back on him and he cuts her throat with the stick. The table falls backwards
with a crash, its legs pointing up into the air. He backs away from the table and turns off
the CD player. The man writes TOM NERO on each of the legs of the still upside down table.
He drags the cabinet, still on its side, with the gibbet drawing visible into the centre of the
space, pulls the table, still upside down onto the cabinet and replaces the telephone on the
green dolly. He then unties the object tied to the dogs tail (the saw), puts on the black hat
and saws off a leg of the table and gives it to the dog, which carries it like a stick to a
point on the circular space. The man repeats this until all the legs are removed and carried
by the dog to the four points of the compass, each with TOM NERO facing upward. He takes
of the hat and places it on what is left of the table, picks up the dog up under his arm,
strokes it and leaves.

In his elegance of gesture, grace of movement and manipulation of the objects around
him, Horrigan draws on manifold concerns. There is something of the play and invention
of childhood in his constructions but more particularly the building of these corps exquis
references the making of sculpture and the readymade. The meeting and combination of
these forms is a reminder too of a deep-seated animism applied to man-made objects, the
secret life with which our imagination endows inanimate things.

During the course of the intricate performance, multiple references to cinema, dance,
theatre and painting arise, only to just as swiftly fall away. Within the circle there is
something of the wrestling ring; the harsh cruelty of bear baiting combined with the hard
perimeters and restrictive forms of Francis Bacon. Horrigan’s elegant cabinet waltz
immediately catches a moment of Fred and Ginger, before turning murderously to
Hitchcock. Enacted in silence, there is an air of dark slapstick reminiscent of Chaplin or
Keaton, but the sense of real danger and cruelty becomes more akin to the stage plays of
Harold Pinter, despite the absence of language. Like Pinter, Horrigan’s work reveals
extreme sexual ambivalence in relation to its objects: a connection or partnership is
formed only to be discarded or assassinated. This sadism not only reflects Hogarth’s
discourse on cruelty, but also becomes an exploration in object relations and the
phantasies and drives acted out upon surrogates and substitutes.

Metamorphosis and transformative acts are key in Horrigan’s work. The possibilities of a
situation and its props undergo a continuous process of conversion from one thing to
another until the interaction is completed. In making the ‘staging’ of props utterly
transparent, without deception, Horrigan lays his craft bare from the start. The clowning,
sculptural shape shifting, and formal embodiments resulting from his physical guile allow
the audience to exercise their imagination and interpretative capabilities through access to
their experience and collective knowledge, influenced and shaped by their own object
relations.
1984 Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers is screened at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle.
The film begins with a snowy Icelandic landscape shot in black and white. The figures of
gold prospectors appear, slowly walking across the rocks and impacted ice. Two
women’s voices enunciate riddles that they decide they must solve during the course of
the film.

I am born in a beam of light. I move continuously yet I’m still. I’m larger than life yet do not
breathe. Only in darkness am I visible. You can see me but never touch me. I can speak to you but
never hear you. You know me intimately and I know you not at all. We are strangers and yet you
take me inside of you. What am I?

Their soft voices are intimate, quizzical, playful yet determined. To listen is unnerving
for the riddle is a direct address to the viewer who watches the image projected onto the
screen via the mechanisms of cinema and the encounter immediately sets up the
dynamics of a highly self-reflexive work – once again drawing attention to itself and
pointing to its mask, asking again and again: What am I?

The stark opening shot directly references Charlie Chaplin’s 1929 silent, The Gold Rush.
Chaplin’s inspiration to make his film came through viewing stereoscope pictures of the
1896 Klondike gold rush, and seeing the image of a long line of prospectors extending up
the Chilkoot Pass to the goldfields’ gateway: in The Gold Diggers, Potter’s chief
concerns are Money and Cinema.

Throughout, the director makes allusion to film history, quoting D.W Griffith's Way
Down East, Mervyn LeRoy’s Gold Diggers of 1933 and David Lean's Doctor Zhivago,
which starred a young Julie Christie, hot on the heels of her appearance in John
Schlesinger’s Darling. In another self-reflexive stroke, Potter casts a mature Christie in
one of the main roles: an iconic star actress playing an iconic star actress. Her character is
called Ruby whose cohort and ally is the enigmatic Celeste, an employee in a bank.
Initially, Ruby appears at the top of a staircase dressed in a hooped crinoline, the epitome
of the feminine belle. She descends the stairs and proceeds to waltz with a series of grim
faced men in bow ties and tails. Celeste comes to the rescue upon a white horse. While
Celeste speaks of redressing the balance, Ruby remarks that she has been kept in the
dark. The two are like detectives on a quest to unearth the nature of gold and the golden
female star, both as objects of exchange. Together they explore the movement of gold
and the transactions, values and investments of financial and visual economies.

In exploring these issues directly by use of visual quotation and subversion of narrative
convention, the work exposes the underlying meaning hidden in cinema’s generic
iconography. The techniques employed to implicate the viewer give the work a strong
performative quality, articulating itself skilfully as the medium it critiques, and always
drawing its spectators back to an awareness of their presence in the dark cinema hall.

In one scene Ruby enters a theatre pursued by two men. From the gallery she looks down
at the stage to see herself inside the little hut in the snowfield, costumed and heavily
made up like a silent film star. She runs out of the theatre into a derelict house. Once
inside she sees two little girls and a woman digging a garden. In following them she finds
herself in the wings of a large stage where a woman is tap-dancing. Then a man grabs
Ruby and pushes her on to the stage. She is once again the silent-movie ingénue, acting in
a little play involving guns and gold nuggets: she plays her role unwillingly and the
audience reacts with jeers, coughs and catcalls. She laughs; and then sees herself up in
the gallery watching before running from the theatre, once more followed by the men.
Now Ruby enters the empty house again, and this time finds herself as a little girl
standing in the snowfield from the opening shot. Ruby inhabits the mise en abyme as a
duplicating phantom observed by her own image.
To the bank with the beauty, to the bank with the gold; both make money and neither grows old!

Celeste on her own nocturnal quest is also followed by men. Her boss at the bank refuses
to tell her more about her job, but she persists in making enquiries about the movement of
gold. Walking through the nighttime streets of the City, she watches as two groups of
men foregather outside the Royal Exchange. One group bears a litter laden with gold
ingots; the other group carry a bier containing what appears to be a statue of the
Madonna, but on closer inspection is revealed to be Ruby. The men, singing as they
climb the steps, carry the gold and the woman into the bank. The two women escape.

Once again Ruby appears at the top of the staircase and descends to the ballroom.
The riddles have been solved, and her dancing partners fall down to the ground one by
one. There is the impression of completing a circle as the women waltz, and the film
comes to its end. Implicit throughout The Gold Diggers is the investment the viewer
makes in the spectacle and the transaction implied by identificatory processes, made
through recognition of already existing forms. The film exposes a system of
representations which limit, imprison and objectify women in particular as images for
consumption. The work’s self-awareness also highlights the financial investment required
in funding a film and its further obligation to make money once completed. The
hierarchical nature of finance even informed the project’s own waging system of
participants: all members of the all-woman production crew, actors and technicians alike,
were paid equally. In both plot and production, this highly experimental film equalises,
explores, and questions the exchange value of money and women. In its utterances, it
keeps its promises, while the promise to pay the bearer is enacted in the most challenging
way.
1996 - the opening of the Museum Van Hedendaagste Kunst in Gent: the Ukrainian artist
Oleg Kulik appears standing in a small cradle, hanging from the roof of the new building.
He is covered in tiny mirrors and swathed by dry ice. As the sound of Sylvester singing
the disco classic You Make Me Feel Mighty Real pumps out of multiple speakers, many
concentrated light beams are fired at Kulik’s revolving body. He becomes a human
mirror ball, casting thousands of tiny halos of reflected light on the assembled mass of
curators, artists, journalists, television crews and general art groupies who look on,
mouths agape. The effect of the performance Armadillo for your show is not to make its
audience dance, but to mesmerize, almost stupefy them like rabbits before a snake. There
is something of the retorting mirror in Kulik’s performance – illuminating and firing back
the greedy consuming gaze of the spectators and revealing the tawdry self-regarding
nature of the proceedings. The mirror fragments at once decorate and fetishize the artist’s
body as an exquisite, trashy entertainment while acting as a form of psychic armour
against the invasive and jaded eyes of a glutted art crowd. He rotates, sparkling and
dazzling like a sun god whilst the crowd remains mute and perturbed.

1997 - the opening of It's A Better World at the Weiner Secession, Vienna: a crowd
huddle at the bottom of the steps to the main entrance and look up at Kulik, who is naked
on all fours and collared like a dog, attached to a long metal chain. The artist lies at the
entry to the Secession like some terrible Cerberus guarding the gates of Hell. It is quite
simple – in order to enter this exhibition one must pass the dog. Some members of the
crowd brave the stairs but scatter in all directions as Kulik leaps snarling at them,
howling and gnashing his teeth. Two people leap over him whilst a woman tried to fend
him off. He snaps at her hand, and she and the others on the steps descend again. The
crowd become restless as the artist barks repeatedly at them before curling up by the
door. Groups of people make little charges towards the door and gain entry at the expense
of others who are pounced on or bitten. Two men fend of attack with their umbrellas. The
dog attempts to hump a woman who has fallen on the steps. More people use this as an
opportunity to make a run for the door. Then an old man arrives with a stick and with
difficulty mounts the steps. The dog rolls on its back playful, his tongue lolling out of his
mouth as he pants excitedly. The old man very carefully begins to step over the prone
Kulik, at which point the artist nips him in the ankle with his teeth. There is uproar at the
bottom of the stairs. This performance continues for some time, with the more cowardly
members of the crowd skirting the perimeter of the Secession looking for other entrances.
While scaring the shit out of people the artist forces them to consider how much they
want to get into the exhibition and why, challenging an unthinking approach. Once again
in a seemingly simple but bizarre action, Kulik interrogates lazy assumptions about
viewing work, the context of exhibitions, the reception of the artwork, its consumption
and commodification and most importantly, the too easily presumed given in the West, of
the freedom to access what we consider to be our culture. Kulik’s bite is far worse than
his barking.

1975 - Dan Graham performs and records Audience/ Mirror at Free America in San
Francisco. He stands in front of a mirrored wall facing a seated audience. Scrutinising the
people before him, he begins to describe the audience’s movements and what they might
signify: a woman drawing her hair away from her cheek with a forefinger; a man closing
his eyes; another coughing. The artist then turns towards the mirror and describes himself
and the audience as he sees them reflected there. Graham writing on the work says:

"Through the use of the mirror the audience is able to instantaneously perceive itself as a public
mass (as a unity), offsetting its definition by the performer ('s discourse). The audience sees itself
reflected by the mirror instantly while the performer's comments are slightly delayed. First, a
person in the audience sees himself 'objectively' ('subjectively') perceived by himself, next he
hears himself described 'objectively' ('subjectively') in terms of the performer's perception."
Twenty -one year later, in 1996, Dan Graham re-performed Audience/ Mirror in Vienna.
I sit as part of that audience experiencing its odd displacing effects and delays directly.
Graham speaks as the words come to him, describing the room, its acoustics and how
they affect his voice. He speaks of how it feels to be talking in this way before an
audience, and describes the movements of his body in the space. The work becomes
startlingly intimate as he continues to talk, creating a relationship with those observing
him, one founded on sharing the immediate, experiential actions occurring in present time
consciousness. The audience members become acutely self-conscious as he describes
their movements. I feel embarrassment and increasingly self-conscious, but this passes.
As part of that audience I shift from watching as a defensive bystander into the act of
seeing with acute awareness, highly sensitised to my own presence and every other in the
room. Graham draws his audience into a hyper-attentive state of perception. There is
something very potent too in experiencing the continuation of this performance across
time, the artist older but the work ever pertinent as it works with its material – the
present.

Exposure to such works has sharpened my awareness in myriad ways and informed my
own methods of working. Encounters with playful, self-reflexive art, reconfigure my
capacity for attentiveness when it is most endangered. Words fail to capture satisfactorily
what these practices can achieve. Their essence is in and of the moment, and critical to
any understanding is to experience them in their moment and yours. Many works are
ephemeral in the true sense of the Greek root ephemeros, 'lasting only one day' - or one
night, or one hour, and even when repeated, each performance is unique. It has been
observed that a live performance is an event, not a text, and an event where performers
and audience are intimately bound together in real time, time unfolding, time passing. It
is no accident that many performance-based works are ill documented or not documented
at all. This is not merely an oversight, it is often a conscientious choice. This way of
working aims to bring us into the realm of real, physical contact, to awaken us to spatial,
perceptual and bodily experience, and to remind us that we live, and breathe, and occupy
a now.

These works ask for and provoke an acute form of attention to the now emerging
moment. Despite their apparentness as visual documents, moving image works of serious
intention also require dedicated and close viewing to be experienced fully. In an era
where we are increasingly caught by the virtual, and easily dissociated from the live, it is
essential that performative practices continue to draw us back towards a concentration
and focus that allow us to explore the real subtleties of time as it passes before us.