How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Performance Art

Confession Time: For many years I thought performance art was kind of silly.

I know I wasn’t alone in thinking that. Of all the art forms out there, performance seems to be consistently taken the least seriously. Trying to account for why this is the case invites several explanations.

Maybe it’s because performance art is not contextualized or taught in school and many galleries. There’s very little frame of reference to grab onto; it’s not quite theatre, not quite dance, not quite visual art. Either way, performance often seems quite inaccessible and baffling to outsiders. Failing to fit into any categorical or contextual nook, it seems easy enough to laugh it off. This is one obstacle of many, to be sure, but the antidote to this particular problem is easily enough found in an appeal to time and greater exposure.

Another challenge might be the relational dynamics of performance. As a spectator, performance art forces you to be uncomfortably present. The distant contemplation we normally enjoy with art objects is denied and the performer has the startling agency to address and provoke their audience directly. Very little else prepares us for such conditions, and yet, I think this relational aspect is easy enough to overcome, particularly in the hands of a skilled performer attentive to the mood of their audience. Eventually this dynamic becomes something you crave as a spectator; surrendering your control and complacency reaps unexpected rewards.

A larger block in many people’s minds seems to be the very authority by which artists perform. Actors and painters have laboured at length to win this societal trust, and it seems to be predicated on the guarantee that an artist will assume the role of an expressive truth-teller. Something very interesting seems to shift in this pact when the artist takes on the role of performer. Several unanswered questions beg resolution. What contrivances legitimate the performer, and what kinds of guises do they have the legitimacy to assume? What is so aberrant about the idea of performing in our incredibly self-conscious culture?

Of course, I wasn’t quite phrasing it like that at the age of seventeen. I was a little more sceptical and a little less scholarly.

My first exposure to performance art was Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. It’s a simple enough idea: Ono sit passively on stage while her audience is directed to approach the performer and cut pieces of clothing off her body. It continues until she is vulnerably exposed.

Inviting the audience to slowly and collectively disrobe her, Ono seemed to be making a point about gendered and racialized power. I, however, immediately thought that it was ridiculous. I couldn’t reconcile this point with her methods. There seemed to be a disconnect between Ono’s performative identity and the identity I assumed she normally inhabited.

Performance, I figured, was anything but passive. It takes a huge amount of audacity to place oneself in the mercy of a crowd, and Ono didn’t seem to lack that bravado. Therefore it appeared that her performance as passive was entirely inauthentic to her character, robbing her performance of the legitimacy that comes from showcasing one’s experiences and self. Suggesting that women were disempowered was one thing, but contriving to theatrically adopt that posture in an experimental space seemed to me to be bad science. She looked to be performing something that she wasn’t, something falsified, as if speaking for another person. This was, of course, a dangerous and ignorant assumption on my part, but it presented a problem that haunted my attitude towards performance art for many years.

It’s a pretty common reaction that when faced with abnormal or inexplicable acts (particularly embodied ones) to try and dismiss these actions as contrived (not authentically reflecting the self) or deviant (reflecting a twisted self). So much of our outlook towards art relies upon this invocation of ‘the authentic self’ that it’s no surprise that performance can tangle these expectations into an uncomfortable knot. It’s difficult to unravel the performer’s off-stage presentation from the many valences of identity that they bring into their work; from the assumption of an atypical character, to the unusual and disruptive actions performed, to the confrontational presence of the body and its naked physicality. Performance disturbs the self as an essentialist object that is brought into visibility through art. Performance rather seems to suggest the self as hidden under layers of different guises, or perhaps most scandalously, alluding to the fact that there’s never been an authentic self after all.

It is at this interesting juncture that performance art seems to suggest the performativity of identities- a notion that can be traced back to the theories of Judith Butler. Written in the heyday of identity politics, when oppressed groups were looking to the proclamation of their own essential and shared identity, Butler’s theory of performativity threatened this quest for solidarity based on a common interior sense of being a woman, being black, or being a sexual minority.

Butler spins the idea of authenticity on its head by claiming that gender is not something that we are, but rather something that we do. Her big thesis is the idea of gender performativity, which suggests that there is no authentic interior experience of gender, but rather a series of affectations produced and regulated through how gender is performed. My identity and understanding of femininity, she would argue, stems from the gendered presentations and acts I have seen and enacted- internalized from the exterior rather that stemming from the interior. What is means to be a woman, therefore, is ultimately shaped by acts in a disciplinary matrix rather than some instinct buried in my second X chromosome. Gender also becomes a space for performative resistance, sexual agency, and creative experimentation in this understanding.

But I don’t think it necessarily ends with gender. Maybe all our gestures, relations and actions- in short ‘being’ itself- can best be described as performative, making the question of authenticity a moot point altogether. If all of our actions are performed, rather than authentically expressed, then performance artists are merely modifying the usual script rather than failing to actualize ‘true expression.’

Extrapolated back to Yoko Ono, it seems clear that I’ve done her a disservice in my initial reading of Cut Piece. Attempting to fix her identity as an artist and as a performer in categories of authenticity seems to be an action that I not only lack authority to do, but is also predicated on a model and demand for an expressive self that is increasingly called into question. If Ono performs her gender, race, or any other myriad of intersectional identities in a different way during performance than in other contexts it would still be immensely problematic to privilege the ontology of one performance over another. One may seem like a contrivance, but so are all the others when you get down to it. To reappropriate some Shakespeare, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

So that’s the sordid tale of my ongoing relationship with performance art. Loosing my belief in authenticity seemed to be the key to letting performance into my heart, and I have to say that I’m much better off for having done so. I look forward to Visualeyez’s launch tomorrow with great anticipation. I hope that you’ll join me in the all too rare experience of witnessing performance first hand, and maybe even rethinking the meaning of performance altogether.