After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance

After Criticism

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New Interventions in Art History Series editor: Dana Arnold, University of Southampton New Interventions in Art History is a series of textbook mini-companions – published in connection with the Association of Art Historians – that aims to provide innovative approaches to, and new perspectives on, the study of art history. Each volume focuses on a specific area of the discipline of art history – here used in the broadest sense to include painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic arts, and film – and aims to identify the key factors that have shaped the artistic phenomenon under scrutiny. Particular attention is paid to the social and political context and the historiography of the artistic cultures or movements under review. In this way, the essays that comprise each volume cohere around the central theme while providing insights into the broader problematics of a given historical moment. Art and Thought edited by Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen (published) Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium edited by Andrew McClellan (published) Architectures: Modernism and After edited by Andrew Ballantyne (published) After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance edited by Gavin Butt (published) Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image edited by Sam Smiles and Stephanie Moser (forthcoming)

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After Criticism New Responses to Art and Performance

Edited by Gavin Butt

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© 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd blackwell publishing 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Gavin Butt to be identified as the Author of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data After criticism : new responses to art and performance / edited by Gavin Butt. p. cm. — (New interventions in art history ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-631-23283-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-631-23284-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Performance art. 2. Art criticism—United States—History—20th century. I. Butt, Gavin. II. Series. NX456.5.P38A47 2005 701′.18′09049—dc22 2003023466 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10.5/13pt Minion by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com

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Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Series Editor’s Preface

vii viii xi

Introduction: The Paradoxes of Criticism Gavin Butt

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Part I Performing Art’s Histories

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1 Solo Solo Solo Rebecca Schneider

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2 Binding to Another’s Wound: Of Weddings and Witness Jane Blocker

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3 This is I Niru Ratnam

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Part II Distracted and Bored: The Critic Looks Elsewhere

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4 The Trouble with Men, or, Sex, Boredom, and the Work of Vaginal Davis Jennifer Doyle

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5 Utopia’s Seating Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johnston, and Queer Intermedia as System José Esteban Muñoz

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6 Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture Irit Rogoff

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Part III Critical Response/Performative Process

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7 Itinerant Improvisations: From “My Favorite Things” to an “agency of night” John Seth

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8 The Experience of Art as a Living Through of Language Kate Love

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A Transparent Lecture Matthew Goulish

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Selected Bibliography compiled by Andrew Walby

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Index

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List of Illustrations

1 Peter Moore, Becky Arnold Learning Trio A from Yvonne Rainer, photograph from lecture at Lincoln Center library. © Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, NY, NY 2 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Perfect Lovers), each clock 14 inches in diameter, paint on wall, 1991. Photo by Peter Muscato; reproduced courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, in representation of The Estate of Felix Gonzalez-Torres 3 Shez Dawood (as Shez 360), Tower Hamlets Billboard Project, London, 2000. Reproduced with permission 4 Vaginal Davis, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care, photo collage of performance, Los Angeles, April 2000. Reproduced with permission 5 Ray Johnson, Mailing, 1968. © Estate of Ray Johnson, reproduced courtesy of Richard L. Feigen & Co. 6 Thomas Struth, Pergamon Museum I, Berlin, 2001; C-print, face mounted on plexiglas. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York 7 Anne Tallentire, Instances, video still, 1999. Reproduced with permission 8 Kate Love, Untitled, 2002. Photo by Julian C. Lowe. Reproduced with permission 9 Morton Feldman, Projection 1, 1962. ©1962 by C. F. Peters Corporation. Used by permission. All rights reserved

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48 65

82 102

117 138 156 176

Notes on Contributors

Jane Blocker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on performance and its historiography, feminism, and art since 1970. She has published articles in Camera Obscura, Cultural Studies, and Performing Arts Journal. Her book on Cuban-American performance artist Ana Mendieta, called Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile, was published in 1999 by Duke University Press. She is also author of What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Gavin Butt teaches in the Unit of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He writes about performance and performativity in the visual arts, and queer theory, queer cultures and their histories. His book Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the American Art World 1948–1963 is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Jennifer Doyle is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She is co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol, and is working on the manuscript for her first book Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. She is a scholar of American literature and visual culture, and teaches in the English department. Matthew Goulish, performer and writer, has collaborated on the creation of eight performance works and several writing projects with the group Goat Island. Routledge published his 39 Microlectures – in Proximity of Performance in 2000. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Notes on Contributors

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Kate Love is an artist/writer and Senior Lecturer in Historical and Theoretical Studies in Fine Art at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London. In 1999 she organized an international conference at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London entitled Understanding Experience and has published widely on the theme of experience in the contexts of art and literature. José Esteban Muñoz is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota University Press, 1999). He currently teaches Performance Studies at Tisch School of Art, New York University. He is also currently completing two books, tentatively titled “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance” and “Cruising Utopia: Performing Queer Futurity.” He is series editor of Sexual Cultures: New Directions in Gay and Lesbian Studies for NYU Press. Niru Ratnam is gallery director of STORE and has written for a number of publications including The Face, Arena Homme Plus, Art Monthly, frieze, and Third Text. Irit Rogoff holds a University Chair in Art History/Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Rogoff writes extensively on the conjunctions of contemporary art with critical theory with particular reference to issues of colonialism, cultural difference, and performativity. She is author of Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (2000), editor of The Divided Heritage: Themes and Problems in German Modernism (1991), and co-editor, with Daniel Sherman, of Museum Culture: Histories, Theories, Spectacles (1994). Rogoff is director of an international AHRB research project “Cross Cultural Contemporary Arts,” housed at Goldsmiths College. Rebecca Schneider teaches performance studies at Brown University where she is Associate Professor and Head of the MA and Ph.D. programs in Theatre and Performance Studies. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (Routledge, 1997), co-editor of Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide (Routledge, 2001), and author of numerous essays. John Seth is an artist/writer and Curriculum Leader for Fine Art at Middlesex University, London. Since 1993 Seth has worked with the artist Anne Tallentire in the collaborative project work-seth/tallentire. Their collaboration also provides a space from which they pursue individual projects

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x Notes on Contributors and interests. Seth’s practice includes installation, performance, photography, video, and writing. Recent exhibitions by work-seth/tallentire include: Yes, Let’s Go (2002) for the live art series The Sum of the Parts at the South London Gallery, Manifesto (2001) in the group exhibition Preditor at KX-Kampnagel, Hamburg, and Dispersal (2000), a commission for the Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland.

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Series Editor’s Preface

New Interventions in Art History was established to provide a forum for innovative approaches to, and perspectives on, the study of art history in all its complexities. Here attention is focused on key developments that have taken place in the past decade in the work of selected art historians, performance studies scholars, writers on visual culture, artists, and art critics. After Criticism explores the blurring of the boundaries between theoretical interpretation and artistic practice in a bid to take seriously the consequences for a critical writing implicated within the space of the artwork itself. Many of the essays experiment with poetic, autobiographical, performative, and other writerly modes in the belief that the embodied conditions of interpretation are best explored through the production of novel narratives of viewer response rather than subsumed within already extant theoretical structures of interpretation. This innovative and challenging approach offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between the bodily experience of art, whether understood in physical, social and/or psychic terms, and the production of critical narratives. Debate focuses on the consequences of immersion of the spectator within the space of the work and whether this prompts a dissolution of critical judgment or in fact encourages a productive opening out of critical subjectivity to its sensual, psychic, and embodied conditions. These issues are addressed in relation to a range of examples, including the creative activities of gallery visitors; of audience members at a performance event; and of the critic as he/she writes. The chapters combine to form an original and provocative interrogation of how we think about and experience art. This book is, then, genuinely, a

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xii Series Editor’s Preface prompt for future research and debate that will take contemporary art studies in new directions. As such the concerns of After Criticism are germane to New Interventions and this volume is a very pleasing addition to this series. Dana Arnold London, 2004

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The Paradoxes of Criticism 1

Introduction: The Paradoxes of Criticism Gavin Butt Recently it has become apparent that criticism is in trouble. Certain timehonored ideas about the role and form of criticism within culture – ones which have habitually and variously underwritten the practices of artists and critics for centuries – have been shaken by the shifting cultural priorities of a changing world. The unease around such ideas has been made manifest not by any sustained analysis or treatise on the state of criticism today, but rather through varying instances and registers which, taken together, might indicate more deep-seated changes in contemporary attitudes toward criticism – and to its place and importance within art and culture. The voicing of such transformations in the critical field has come in part from well-established and respected art critics themselves. In a roundtable discussion published in 2002 in October – a magazine named in honor of revolutionary critique – criticism is taken to be both on the wane, and increasingly difficult to define.1 Artists appear less and less interested, say a number of the contributors, in the kind of critical discourse developed in the pages of October magazine over the last quarter of a century or so, whilst other contributors suggest that the “crisis” of contemporary criticism would perhaps be better understood as residing in the competing claims made for it by differing generations of artists and writers. One of the most established figures involved in the discussion, however – Benjamin Buchloh – sees the problem as less bound up with the presumed failure of any consensus about what criticism is (if indeed there ever was one) but rather that the space for criticality of any kind has withered away in late twentiethcentury capitalist culture. This he takes to be a direct consequence of the

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encroachment of corporate power into the realm of avant-garde aesthetic production and display.2 In the context of the co-option of radical art practice to the commodified logic of capitalism, witnessed by the burgeoning power of the corporate sponsor in international exhibitions and the synergistic relations between artists and businessmen – e.g. Matthew Barney meets Hugo Boss – Buchloh points to a scenario in which the very idea of criticism looks precariously drawn. For what of critical culture if it comes increasingly and narrowly to serve the interests of the market? What happens to the traditional image of the critic as arbiter of judgment as he or she is reduced to a mere consumer advocate – advising us only where, or even whether, to spend our money? Such worries about the capitalist co-option of criticism and critical culture are echoed by the growing unease in the academy about the ossification of critical theory, particularly within the arts and humanities. Though we may scoff whilst reading the above at a generation of experienced authors bemoaning the unpopularity of their theoretical writings amongst younger artists and writers, we would do well, I think, to reflect upon the issue of “theory” in criticism on a much broader contemporary stage than that afforded us by the perspectives of a handful of art critics. Questions have recently begun to be asked beyond the pages of October – from literary studies to the emergent academic field of visual culture – about whether or not the theoretical register remains a fertile ground for opening up critical perspectives on art and culture or whether it, in itself, has become part of criticism’s dilemma, serving to delimit what can be said and how it is that one might say it.3 That the answers to such questions don’t appear to be so readily forthcoming only goes to underscore the degree to which we currently find ourselves in the midst of such a predicament: has art indeed passed through the moment of its encounter with theory, and should we be looking for novel, less overtly theoretical, ways of writing about it and producing it? Or are we simply struggling with the leaden baggage of one particular body of theoretical ideas as we await the liberatory emergence of something new? Such questions have necessarily had an impact upon the ways in which artists and academics have begun to think of themselves, and their role as critics within society. For some cultural commentators the very Enlightenment idea of the critic as a discriminating authority on matters of art and culture is what has come to look increasingly problematic: a number of writers, including ones collected here in this volume, have come to question their role as specialized analysts of culture in favor of repositioning

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The Paradoxes of Criticism 3 academic inquiry as a kind of cultural participation in its own right. That is to say that the theorist, rather than being remote from that which he or she surveys, is – in the production of books, articles, conference papers, etc. – enmeshed in the very, perhaps even “creative,” production of the cultural fabric itself. Similarly some recent artists, like the much-hyped “Young British Artists” of the 1990s, have all but abandoned any idea of the artist as critical commentator in embracing a practice of making that celebrates the unassimilated vagaries and affects of individual subjective existence: all of this without feeling the need to somehow comment upon it from any avowedly “critical” vantage point.4 Taken together these examples signal the degree to which one of the key features of critical culture – critical distance – has come to look increasingly prone to collapse in recent years, as critics in their various professional guises have abandoned their claims to speak from any form of privileged or “authoritative” viewpoint. Of course this, in many ways, is nothing new. The transcendental figure of the Enlightenment critic – one placed at a special remove from society, from the object of criticism – has had its obituary read before at the height of postmodernism in the 1980s. The traditional authority of the critic, and his special dispensation to discriminate in the name of universal human values, was gladly bidden goodbye by postmodernists concerned to pay heed to cultural difference: Marxists and feminists critiqued it as an ideological form of class and gender privilege whilst post-structuralists deconstructed it as logocentric fiction. In the wake of such critiques of criticism then, postmodernists – particularly of the post-structuralist persuasion – quickly set about abandoning any absolutist statements of judgment in favor of reading artistic and literary texts deconstructively: to reveal the ways in which power might be seen as working both within and against them. Thus the deconstructive critic – if indeed he or she could be understood as a critic at all5 – did not take up a position outside of the text (after all, “there is no outside to the text” as Jacques Derrida once famously remarked), but they read it from within, against the grain of any intended or apparent meaning. There was thus no critical “position” as such to occupy, no anterior vantage point set apart from criticism’s object from which the task of critique could be launched: the postmodernist critic found herself always already imbricated in the warp and weft of the cultural text. But even though the collapse of critical distance has been entertained before in the postmodernism of the 1980s, I think the mode of unease with

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criticism today is of a different order. It is, I feel, less rooted in a resistance to traditional forms of criticism – less a re-run of the 1980s – and more a skeptical approach to the heritage of criticism left to us by postmodernism itself. This is particularly evident if we consider further the problematic relationships between theory and criticism in the contemporary academy. When referring to “theory” in this shorthand manner we usually invoke a mélange of theoretical paradigms and perspectives which have now come to be dominant in the Western humanities: semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism. But the problem seems to arise when such hermeneutic tools – originally deployed to critique various forms of power and authority within cultural and artistic representations – have come to be credited with a kind of authority of their own. The final paradoxical twist comes about when a body of work renowned for its deconstruction of authorial value comes to be accredited with precisely such forms of authority. What does the undergraduate student do in order to substantiate his argument about, for example, the representation of masculinity in contemporary art? Answer: he cites the proper name Derrida (or similar), and the authority of his body (of work), in order to underwrite his analysis of masculinity’s rhetoric of “presence.” It is precisely in this way that post-structural theory (perhaps above all) has come to operate both as criticism’s chief discursive enabler whilst simultaneously marking its limit point: operating as an authorizing metadiscourse for contemporary critical maneuvers, whilst simultaneously working to constrain the production of new concepts and/or methods of critical procedure. This, then, is the condition of theory as it becomes institutionalized within the postmodern academy. The routinization of certain theoretical maneuvers in critical work can, as the editors of the book Post-Theory (1999) put it rather bleakly, lead to a “sclerosis of theoretical writing, the hardening of [its] lexical and syntactic arteries. The words and phrases which are combined in over-familiar ways and thereby banalised, degraded, wielded like a fetish . . . in order to semaphore that ‘Theory’ is taking place are the surest sign that anything worthwhile is not.”6 That the “body” of theory invoked here is “diseased” suggests it is seen as being in danger of withering away, of no longer being capable of doing what was once presumed to be its life purpose. “We are perhaps at a stage,” the editors of Post-Theory go on, “where [theory’s] very pre-eminence has opened up real concerns about how it wants to proceed. . . . Theory has itself become doxa, the very state it set out to subvert.”7 This I find very

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The Paradoxes of Criticism 5 interesting and very germane to the problem of criticism as I want to characterize it here. For criticism, understood in at least two of its guises, was always paradoxical in its mode of operation. Firstly, in the sense that it depended for its definition on departing from commonly understood beliefs and values. Even the unreconstructed figure of the modern disinterested critic – much derided by postmodernists – distinguished himself by seeking to pronounce on the (aesthetic) value of that which had hitherto not been recognized as such, either by other members of the intelligentsia or by society at large. That the modern critic’s judgment of quality may have subsequently both transformed, and then passed into, a received set of values of a particular class or group within society – thereby becoming doxa – should not detract us from criticism’s important role in initially striking out from it. Similarly, in thinking of social and political critique, it is clear that criticism’s mode of operation can be viewed as paradoxical in the sense that it has sometimes proffered what, by the standards of received opinion, might count as absurd or even ridiculous propositions. One can imagine, for instance, how Marx and Engels’ analysis of ideological consciousness may have struck some readers of The German Ideology as highly bizarre, particularly bearing in mind their assertion that the world as we know it in its everyday sense is not the “real” world at all, but a representation of it turned upside down “as in a camera-obscura”.8 This book considers criticism, then, in a defining relation to the paradoxical. Not paradox as in the strict sense of being logically contradictory (though, as we shall see, in some cases it does indeed proceed by such conflictual maneuvers). Rather that criticism, in order that it remain criticism, of necessity has to situate itself para – against and/or beside – the doxa of received wisdom. Moreover, since it is postmodernist criticism itself, replete with its theoretical orthodoxies, which I take to be in danger of hardening into doxa, this book explores how criticism today may find itself turning away from some of the established procedures of critical practice precisely in order that it remain critical. That is, in order to continue to operate critically, criticism has to find a mode of working which frees it from the protocols of institutionalized forms of thought; a way which – returning to the disease metaphor momentarily – might prevent any further seizure, or even the eventual loss of its very life force. This brings us to the vexed question of critical agency which resides at the heart of this project: from whence, then, does contemporary criticism derive its power and authority to speak? If we have dismissed the superior

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sensitivity of the critic as an elitist fiction, and if criticism’s theoretical resources risk turning into doxa, from where else might the critic draw his or her “right” to speak? Of course, one might imagine in this context the confident reassertion of the guiding agency of a pseudo-Kantian critical intuition in the face of the deadening hand of “sclerotic” theory. But I, for one, am not interested in such a reanimation here. Rather, what this book pursues are the ways in which we may rediscover criticism and its agency within the very mode of critical address itself. It is by focusing attention on the performativity of critical response, then, and the ways in which such responses might deviate from established modes of critical procedure, that this book seeks to consider a critical practice situated, paradoxically, after criticism (after, that is, a criticism deadened by the hand of capital and the academy). In thinking about the importance of the critical encounter with the object, and the agency which we might (re)discover there, I want to borrow from the writing of Jacques Derrida in referring to the “paradoxical structure of [criticism’s] condition of possibility.” Paradoxical because it is constituted by the critic’s desire to communicate and be understood within a consensus alongside a coterminous desire to frustrate conventional understandings and received wisdom. That is, it articulates the potential failure of communication as a necessary condition of the critical endeavor itself. Derrida writes in his Politics of Friendship (1997) of the paradoxical implication of a statement often attributed to Aristotle – “O my friends, there is no friend.” For how can one address another as friend, if, indeed, there are none? It is here, in this address, that Derrida glimpses the necessity of remaining open to the irreconcilable confusions of communication, to the errors and misrecognitions that it opens up. In taking the amative relation as a model of the political relation here, Derrida writes of the desirable condition of remaining open to the possibilities of communicative failure in producing “a politics to come”: But we cannot, and we must not, exclude the fact that when someone teaches, publishes, preaches, orders, promises, prophesies, informs or communicates, some force in him or her is also striving not to be understood, approved, accepted in consensus – not immediately, not fully, and therefore not in the immediacy and plenitude of tomorrow, etc. . . . It is enough that the paradoxical structure of the condition of possibility be taken into account . . . for me to hope to be understood beyond all dialectics of misunderstanding, etc., the possibility of failure must, in addition, not be simply an accidental edge of the condition, but its haunting.9

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The Paradoxes of Criticism 7 Derrida goes on to write of the nature of the decision which is made in the context of such an undecidable, unpredictable mode of address. This decision, he writes, is one which cannot be taken as being authorized by an a priori theoretical schema, for that would be to rob it of that which makes it a “sovereign and free decision – in a word, of what makes it a decision, if there is one.” Thus the decision “must remain heterogenous to all knowledge as such, to all theoretical or reportive determination, even if it may and must be preceded by all possible science and conscience. The latter are unable to determine the leap of decision without transforming it into the irresponsible application of a programme.” And this is where the performativity, the indeterminacies and unpredictabilities of the singular act of address, comes to be important in the constitution of the social and (by extension) political relation: At this point, practical performativity is irreducible to any theorem; this is why we have stressed the performative force . . . of a sentence which in any case, in addressing another, could not count on any assurance, any purely theoretical criterion of intelligibility or accord; it could not count on such assurance, but above all it had to and desired not to want to count on such an assurance, which would destroy in advance the possibility of addressing the other as such.10

Thus Derrida usefully alerts us to the ways in which the outcome of the performativity of the address to the other as a friend (“O my friend”) – speaking to a friend rather than simply, and reportively, speaking of one – is particular to the event of the address, the “each time one single time” of the address to the other.11 In the context of this book’s concerns it should be clear that I am taking Derrida’s reflections upon intimate modes of address as instructive in thinking about the performativity of the critic’s address to his or her objects, and, in particular, in thinking about the event-ness of the critical encounter. It is to the critical event, then, rather than to other extant bodies of theory, that this book turns in order to revivify the practices of contemporary criticism.12 The book therefore follows Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s calls for the recognition of an “immanent,” rather than a transcendent, mode of contemporary criticality: one that is to be apprehended within – and instanced as – the performative act of critical engagement itself.13 Whereas Hardt and Negri look to the world stage for such a model of critique – and find it in the agency of “the multitude,” a form of social and

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political organization born of the global power relations in the contemporary world of “Empire” – this book offers a much more modest and localized focus for its deliberations. It is to the writings of contemporary artists and theorists to which this book looks; to their attempts to produce a kind of criticism responsive to the pressures and limits of the writerly acts which attend the field of contemporary art, ones which foreground the performative, and paradoxical, conditions of critical address.

Performance and the Performative: Criticism after the Theatrical Turn The focus on the event of the critical encounter as outlined above is mirrored in what follows by the attention paid to the “theatricalization” of art practice since the 1950s and 1960s. Thus the book considers not only the performativity of the critical “speech act” per se, but also how this becomes increasingly legible in the context of the turn toward performance in the field of artistic practice of the past half-century or so. I will now briefly review the importance of ideas of both “performativity” and “performance” with a view to making this link between the two all the more apparent. The emphasis on performance is adopted because the meanings of contemporary art have been transformed since the fifties and sixties by the rise of performance- and installation-oriented practices. From action painting to happenings and environments; from dance and performance art to pop events like Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable; these two decades were responsible for ushering in what I want to call a “theatrical turn” in post-war art production, one which drew the object-based practices of modernist painting and sculpture into the spatio-temporal co-ordinates of the event. Various “intermedia” practices (to use Dick Higgins’ rather apt term) emerged as a result of the cross-pollination of ideas and practices between the traditional fine arts and the performing arts (alongside poetry and film to boot). Such art forms – including Yves Klein’s actions, Yvonne Rainer’s dance, and Ray Johnson’s correspondences – form the subject of essays within this book – as do the latter-day “intermedia” practices (if I can use this term somewhat anachronistically and inappropriately) of Gabriel Orozco, Shez 360, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Anne Tallentire, and Vaginal Davis, all of which testify to the book’s interest in the disciplinary hybridity of the contemporary field of art/performance.

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The Paradoxes of Criticism 9 But what interests me particularly in the context of this present study are the challenges that such artistic developments may be taken as posing to conventional modes of critical practice as we attend to them now in the early part of the twenty-first century. In his famous attack on the theatrical qualities of late sixties art, Michael Fried allows us to glimpse the root of this challenge by describing theatrical art as one which “virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”14 Fried castigated the ways in which minimalist art, specifically, had turned its back on the sanctity of the modernist art object in favor of an installation of “literal” objects in the space of the gallery. This had the effect, Fried argued, of making the spectator fully aware of him or herself as a “live” participant in the actual site of the work, activating the spectator’s consciousness of the whole “scene” of exhibition and display. Thus the body of minimal art’s beholder was – supposedly unlike that of the spectator of modernist painting or sculpture – already on stage, implicated within the theatrical space of the work. Such work was “theatrical” precisely because it depended upon the presence of the spectator in order to be complete. “For theatre has an audience,” Fried writes, “it exists for one – in a way that other arts do not; in fact this more than anything else is what modernist sensibility finds intolerable in theatre generally.”15 It will doubtless be clear that I am not interested in following Fried in denouncing this theatrical turn. On the contrary, this book fully embraces such a turn and explores its ramifications for a criticism written from the perspective of a spectator immersed in the constructed environments of artistic spectacle. Whereas painting and sculpture have often been taken by modernist critics like Fried and Clement Greenberg as underwriting a view of aesthetic experience as integral to the art object – and therefore requiring a form of disinterested and disembodied critical appraisal – the theatrical turn taken by Western art since the 1960s has highlighted the experience of art as a profoundly embodied experience. For those who maintain that critical agency requires some kind of transcendental remove or distance from its object, such an immersion of the spectator within the space of the work has been seen as heralding a dissolution of the very conditions of critique. Another October elder, Rosalind Krauss, has written recently of an “international fashion of installation and intermedia work” which, she goes on, “essentially finds itself complicit with a globalisation of the image in the service of capital.”16 But rather than go with this line of thinking I want instead to concentrate on how such a model of spectatorship might encourage a long overdue, and productive, opening

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out of critical subjectivity to its embodied – and performative – conditions of production.17 I want to do this by taking heed of the important work which has been done within performance studies over the past decade. Whereas the object-based approach of Fried et al. has continued to underwrite much scholarly work done within art history, it is in the field of contemporary performance studies that this theatrical challenge to criticism has been most seriously taken up. Perhaps foremost amongst performance scholarship in this regard is the work of Peggy Phelan which has experimented with how the conventional tasks of critical inquiry – whether it be making a judgment of quality or exposing the workings of power and ideology – might be refigured or superseded by the productive attentions of the embodied critic.18 Principally in addressing performance – the unique spatio-temporal event – as opposed to the art-historical object, Phelan’s work has variously explored how critical writing might respond creatively to an art form that is “given to disappear”: one which happens, and when once it has happened, is gone.19 Writing in the absence of the event of performance then, rather than the “full presence” of the art object, performance studies has sought to use the scene of writing “to re-mark again the performative possibilities of writing itself.”20 This has led Phelan and other writers – including Amelia Jones and contributors to this volume Rebecca Schneider and Jane Blocker – to question the dominance of the documentary impulse to “save” performance through the production of historical narratives.21 Drawing on the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, such writers have worked to eschew a critical project which sees itself as writing only within a “constative” discursive register – in which the work of performance is described, in which matters of art-historical “fact” are recounted – in favor of engaging in a “performative” modality of criticism: one which does not reproduce the object or event it addresses but instead enacts it through the very practice of writing. Thus writers on performance have variously approached their subject through acts of description and analysis in the language of academic prose, as well as resorting to an evocation of the lost object through poetic or more “creative” styles of writing. For Austin, writing in How to Do Things with Words (1962), a performative utterance is quite literally one which does what it says.22 To say “I promise . . .”, for example, is to make a promise, it is a promise, not a mere statement about one. Insofar as the performative is an act then, such scholars – in trying to forge a performative mode of critical writing – have underscored Roland Barthes’ view

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The Paradoxes of Criticism 11 that criticism is, in some very crucial ways, an act undertaken by the critic: “Criticism is not at all a table of results or a body of judgements, it is essentially an activity, i.e., a series of intellectual acts profoundly committed to the historical and subjective existence . . . of the man who performs them.”23 This problematic of a performative historical/critical writing is explored with a different emphasis in each of the three parts of the book. In part I, “Performing Art’s Histories,” the essays consider/instance the ways in which the conventional authority of art-historical narrative might be troubled by a consideration of the performative conditions of its own writing, above all, perhaps, by upsetting the distanced perspective of the historical observer. In part II, “Distracted and Bored: The Critic Looks Elsewhere,” contributors consider a critical practice concerned less with the making of disinterested judgments, and more one which explores the possibilities suggested by modes of uninterested or distracted viewing. Finally, part III of the book, “Critical Response/Performative Process,” emphasizes the importance of an experimental writerly process in performing the tasks of criticism, a theme which is germane to most of the essays in this book but which is taken up with an explicit focus in the book’s closing pages. In part I, then, Rebecca Schneider, Jane Blocker, and Niru Ratnam explore the paradoxical logic of a performative historical writing. Blocker has written elsewhere that it is in writing a history which performs that we come to ask “history writing to do something that by definition it cannot do. That is . . . to let go of the past.”24 That is, the historian whose history performs does not work solely with representations of the past in an attempt to save it, but he/she also works with their own interpretive acts as something done in the present. Thus the essays collected together here find the space of their engagement split by working both the constative, reportive dimensions of historical inquiry against/beside what Austin might have called the more “explicitly” performative aspects of historical writing. All three contributions instance the ways in which history’s mode of address, in responding to past events, can be experimented with in ways which critique the orthodoxies of “authoritative” historical scholarship, its epistemological protocols and procedures. Schneider, Blocker, and Ratnam do this by playing out, without resolve, a succession of conceptual paradoxes, or near paradoxes, in their respective contributions. Schneider, in her essay “Solo Solo Solo,” engages the multiplicity encapsulated within solo performance, and explores how we might see it as rarely, if ever, singular. Instead, she foregrounds how, in

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viewing it as response to another’s act, and a call for yet another’s response to it in turn, the solo work is already undone, rendered collective and social. She also builds this insight into the very mode of her scholarly approach, drawing upon the device of “cutting” between different beginnings, not only in order to acknowledge differing genealogies of the solo artistic act, but also to stage the multiplicity of call and response which go to make up the “theater” of historical discourse, to see her (solo) speech act as historian as shot through with the echoes of the voices of others – of both those past and those still to come. Blocker takes up the issue of the historian as official witness of the past in “Binding to Another’s Wound: Of Weddings and Witness” by exploring the act of witnessing – as necessary as it is – as one fraught by its very impossibility. She returns us, once more, to the work of Austin, and takes the authorized witness at a marriage ceremony as a metaphor for the historian’s role in testifying to the historical past (many of the performative utterances discussed by Austin are the ones authorizing heterosexual union, “I thee wed,” “I do take this man,” etc.). Drawing also upon queer theory and trauma studies, Blocker analyzes the impulse to document the past in the art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the films of Ross McElwee. This emerges out of their work as one burdened by a necessary doubleness, in which the witness finds him or herself split between the event and its retelling, the (traumatic) event itself forever missed by the attempts to take hold of it. Niru Ratnam follows up both Schneider’s and Blocker’s contributions in his essay “This is I” by addressing the performative practice of making a claim to a place in history, particularly in relation to historical narratives whose very raison d’être may be to exclude the very making of such a claim. Ratnam sees this process as operative within the work of Indian painter Francis Newton Souza in a self-portrait from the late 1940s, seeing it as an attempt by the artist to instate the colonial subject within the Western mainstream. But, in addressing this work, Ratnam finds himself unframed from his more narrowly focused art-historical project on postwar black British art, and instead finds himself shuttling between the diasporic artistic strategies of Souza, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the contemporary billboard interventions of Shez 360 in London’s multi-ethnic East End – all of which variously attest to the performative power of the act of naming. Ratnam argues that such an act, traced variously over these different registers, does not refer to any pre-existent or concrete identity “outside” itself, but is nevertheless culturally significant in enacting an

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The Paradoxes of Criticism 13 identification, momentarily and provisionally elaborated through the very form of an enunciation itself. The essay also does that which it reports on by enacting Ratnam’s own identifications: as budding art historian, trendy Hoxton black hipster, and contemporary cultural commentator – in the process refusing the idealized, singular position of the distanced, neutral observer. The second part, “Distracted and Bored: The Critic Looks Elsewhere,” variously considers the critical function of forms of cultural attention which, by most standards of attentiveness, would hardly count as attention at all. Jennifer Doyle, for instance, recounts her experience of boredom at a performance by Los Angeles drag queen Vaginal Davis and takes this as the departure point for a discussion of criticality in the differing social/cultural spaces of the queer club and the art institution. In “The Trouble with Men or, Sex, Boredom, and the Work of Vaginal Davis,” Doyle addresses Davis’ citing of the high art of Vanessa Beecroft, but considers the value of a Davis performance to reside less in a critical reflection on sexual objectification à la Beecroft, and rather more in the facilitation of social contact amongst audience members. This, she argues, is one brought about by moments of failure in Davis’ performance: whether it be the failure to deliver the expected pornographic spectacle seemingly promised by Davis’ troupe of performers, or the failure of his spectators to read or recognize certain references and associations built into the act. Such moments testify to the breakdown of any “critical” reception of Davis’ work and – in following the affect of her own boredom – Doyle points to how we might just as well look elsewhere (for sex) instead of remaining hide-bound within conventional, de-sexualized, modes of critical consumption. Thus Doyle writes of Davis’ drag as a site of queer social productivity which the performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz also addresses in his essay “Utopia’s Seating Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johnston, and Queer Intermedia as System.” Muñoz writes a self-consciously personal account of “stumbling” upon the work of Ray Johnson’s correspondence art in a bid to pay writerly regard to the ways in which Johnson’s art comes to be known through – and as – the very informal queer networks and associations which it draws one into. In this way Muñoz instances the power of a queer utopianism which dares to imagine the world otherwise, making connections – social, critical – which might be deemed insignificant or inappropriate by more conventional, archivally sanctioned forms of art-historical inquiry.

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In drawing attention to questions of queerness, the essays by Doyle and Muñoz signal the importance of queer theory in thinking seriously about supposedly non-serious ways of accessing, or participating in, culture; ones that deviate from the straight and narrow paths of conventional critical attentiveness. Such deviations from normative modes of conduct, and the imbrication of queer sexuality within such deviations, has been explored before by queer theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker in relation to Austin’s writing on performative speech acts.25 What queer theory has allowed us to conceptualize are the ways in which such non-normative modes of cultural conduct – often dismissed as abnormal, un-serious, lazy, ineffectual, or even (to use the Austinian term) “unhappy” – might actually harbor within them ways of accessing culture which might critique the normativizing procedures and protocols of critical consumption. Writing in the face of such procedures, Doyle and Muñoz couple the writing of queer sexuality with their concern for a queer relation to culture, not in order to write from the perspective of a “gay” or “lesbian” subject, but rather to pay heed to their queering effects upon social action and cultural consumption. This concern with the social productivity at the scene of art’s reception also preoccupies the third contributor to this part of the book, Irit Rogoff, in her essay “Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture.” Rogoff answers her question “What comes after the critical analysis of culture?” by considering forms of audience participation in exhibition displays which comprise “looking away” from the sanctioned curatorial “script,” forms of distraction which she takes as offering ephemeral modes of cultural becoming which take us out of our habitually located sense of self as social subjects and cultural consumers. In this regard, like Doyle and Muñoz, she is concerned with the production of new forms of cultural affiliation which attend the scene of an engagement with art; ones which eschew the established and formalized structures of identity and belonging. These affiliations can be understood as performative precisely because they come into being only in and as the acts of looking away themselves. The final part of the book, “Critical Response/Performative Process,” showcases the work of three artist-writers whose work demonstrates an experimental approach to critical writing. The importance of exploring writing as process is paramount to the critical ambitions of these contributors. For instance in his essay “Itinerant Improvisations: From ‘My Favorite Things’ to an ‘agency of night’,” John Seth takes as his subject the relations between improvisation as a mode of working and itinerant,

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The Paradoxes of Criticism 15 diasporic subjectivity. Writing of the contingent productions of actions which only come to signify “in the moment of performance” Seth considers improvisation as a mode of critical agency undertaken by an itinerant subject – one which “riffs” on extant cultural forms and identities. Echoing Rebecca Schneider’s interest in jazz in her essay on solo performance, Seth looks to improvisational cultural acts – including those of saxophonist John Coltrane and artists Gabriel Orozco and Anne Tallentire – as well as to the everyday “improvised” actions of political refugees attempting to cross the policed borderlines of nation-states. Crucially, however, Seth not only writes about improvisation but also presents his writing as a form of improvisation itself; responding to the experiences of art and politics that he undergoes at the time of writing by critically riffing on them, turning to them in his writing in order to form, and de-form, his own authorial itinerancy. In this respect Seth raises the question of how contemporary writers on art – and perhaps artist-writers, being foremost among them – have come to increasingly rethink the relations between art and writing, and how the conventional task of critically writing about one’s subject (as if one were rotating around it from the outside) might be superseded by a writing which enfolds its subject into the very mode of writerly address itself. This kind of writing is what Kate Love offers us in her essay “The Experience of Art as a Living Through of Language.” Love takes as her point of focus the “experience” of the work of art and attempts to put experience to work in her text in order to open up the closures around art production and interpretation effected in the wake of identity politics and identitarian forms of analysis. Love attempts to write with the experience of art in order to capture in her writing what it might mean to experience a work of art: to open up the meanings of experience to the processes of writing, and, by the same token, to open up the processes of writing to the vagaries of experience. Love draws upon her experiences of working in an art school and thus makes performative use of the lecture format, partpresenting her inquiry by self-consciously reiterating the very forms of institutional utterance which come to produce “knowledge” of aesthetic experience as such. The final essay in the book is by Matthew Goulish, a member of the US performance group Goat Island. His essay, “A Transparent Lecture,” also takes the lecture as its template mode of address. Goulish writes of the transparency of the processes of sense-making and interpretation – of a performance, of a city, of a piece of music – and how these processes may

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be simultaneously understood as those of creative production. In approaching, for instance, the “decontrolled” music of Morton Feldman, Goulish writes of how Feldman devised a new form of musical notation in order to “transparentize” its novel compositional structure and the ways in which we might interpret it. Feldman’s graphic notation instances Goulish’s interest in those phenomena which resist sense-making within conventional structures of understanding – things which may, at first, appear incomprehensible, or that do not “make sense in the way that things make sense.” In writing of such things Goulish puts his faith in “inhabiting” the processes of invention in arriving at new ways of thinking and doing. This is evident in the writing of his essay; in the ways in which both Goulish, as author, and we as his readers, are drawn to inhabit his writing in ways which are anathema to conventional forms of critical textuality. Goulish’s writing, then, like Seth’s and Love’s before it, is experimental in form, enacting a novel way of framing, or apprehending, its subject – the better, to paraphrase Derrida, to address the subject as such. Like most experimental work, in departing from received convention, it risks not being understood, appearing unclear as to what it might be “about.” Goulish certainly does not write “about” performance in any conventional way, even though he addresses musical performance and the work of Goat Island. Indeed, elsewhere Goulish has suggested that his writing might more properly be understood as being located “in proximity of performance”: “I did not think the writing was really about performance. It wasn’t about anything . . . it . . . circled around topics, and never discussed them directly, while always staying in the neighborhood of performance.”26 And if Goulish stays in performance’s “neighborhood,” he does so by dint of a writing which blurs the boundary between “critical” and “creative” practice, being at once oblique commentary on performance and part of such a practice as performance text (the piece is devised, at least in part, in order to be read aloud). Interestingly Goulish, like Schneider, Muñoz, and Seth, has cause to return us to the art and music of the 1950s and 1960s, once more underwriting the importance of this era to the writings contained within this book. In particular it is to ideas of “process” and the “improvisational,” so characteristic of fifties and sixties art, that the contributors to the present volume see a link between the art taking place then and the necessarily performative engagement with the art of the present. Ideas which we thought we had dismissed in the wake of post-structuralism as modernist myths, such as “experience” (another important term in the discourses

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The Paradoxes of Criticism 17 of fifties and sixties art), now appear to be returning, albeit in significantly transformed ways, to early twenty-first-century creative and critical work in order to forge a way beyond the “impasse” of theory mentioned earlier. And it is this concern with the processes of aesthetic creation and interpretation which perhaps, above all, brings the essays in this volume together, one which highlights that the task of criticism – if it is indeed to go on – is to be (re)discovered in and through the act of criticizing itself, of doing it. Gone are the days of the manifesto, of the confident assertion of a model or blueprint for critical activity. On the contrary, if this volume signals any pathways that might lead to a place and a time “after” criticism, then it does so mainly by example rather than through polemic or by offering some new theory of the critical enterprise. And in this respect we might alight upon the ethics of the essays collected in this volume: for they do not impose a model of criticism from without, but discover or produce one out of an engagement with – and a response to – the contingencies encountered whilst undertaking the act of criticism itself. Just as we might understand the performative speech act as a unique and unpredictable affair – one which “produces or transforms a situation,” one which “operates” – then we might similarly understand these essays as producing or transforming the very situation of criticism as one constituted in, and as, the very operational procedures of its various undertakings.27 Only in this sense, then, does the book offer a going beyond of traditional forms of criticism. In no sense is it engaged in any simple abandonment of criticism as more commonly understood in favor of something new, something other, something better. If the contributors to this book are concerned with abandonment at all, then it is only with an abandonment to the act of criticism itself – this with a view to opening up the possible futures of criticism by actualizing them in the present-ness of the critical operation itself. Similarly, the contributors to this book should not be understood as rejecting theory in favor of a straightforwardly pragmatic approach to the tasks of critique. This is because the various essays collected here clearly utilize theory – especially theories of performance and the performative. But it is how this theory is used which hopefully distinguishes the contents of this book: how theory is marshaled less as authoritative source and how, instead, it is put to some paradoxical use – activated – in ways which make it “live” within the multifarious operations of critical culture today.

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Notes 1 (2002), Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism, October, 100 (Spring): 200–28. 2 See also Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Critical Reflections,” Artforum (January 1997): 68–9, 102. 3 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the introduction to her edited volume, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 1–37, and Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (eds), What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 2000). For a visual cultural perspective on this argument see Rogoff in this volume. 4 For more on this see John Roberts, “Mad for It! Philistinism, the Everyday and the New British Art,” Third Text, 35 (1996): 29–42. 5 Gregory Ulmer argued in 1983 that, in some crucial respects, deconstructionists were writing a form of “post-criticism.” See “The Object of PostCriticism,” in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto, 1983), pp. 83–110. 6 Martin McQuillan, Graeme MacDonald, Robin Purves and Stephen Thomson (eds), Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. xii. 7 Ibid., p. xiv. 8 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part One (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), p. 47. 9 Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 218–19. 10 Ibid., p. 219. 11 The phrase is Derrida’s, ibid., p. 215. 12 I am, of course, aware of the ironies of this statement, especially in the light of my reading of Derrida above. 13 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (London: Harvard University Press, 2000). See especially pp. 183–204 for a useful discussion of the changing ways in which critique/resistance might be mounted in the contemporary “imperial” world order. 14 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968), p. 125. 15 Ibid., p. 140. 16 Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Postmedium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), p. 56. In dismissing such work in this manner, and celebrating the value of work which critically explores its medium specificity, Krauss exhibits a neo-Friedian contempt for theatrically oriented work.

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The Paradoxes of Criticism 19 17 I can trace back the beginnings of this book – or at least one of them – to my own thinking on the historiography of happenings which I explored in my 2001 article “Happenings in History, or The Epistemology of the Memoir,” Oxford Art Journal, 24 (2): 113–26. 18 See her two key books, the polemical text Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993) and Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London, Routledge, 1997). 19 The phrase “given to disappear” is Rebecca Schneider’s in “Performance Remains,” Performance Research, 6 (2) (2001): 102. 20 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 148. 21 See Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (eds), Performing the Body/ Performing the Text (London: Routledge, 1999); Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997); and Jane Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999). 22 J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 23 Cited in Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American AvantGarde Since 1970 (London: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 24 Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta?, p. 133. 25 See Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds), Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 3–5. 26 Matthew Goulish, 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 17. 27 Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 321.

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Part I

Solo Solo Solo

Performing Art’s Histories

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Solo Solo Solo Rebecca Schneider

Figure 1 Peter Moore, Becky Arnold Learning Trio A from Yvonne Rainer, photograph from lecture at Lincoln Center library. © Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, NY, NY

Cut By the word “cut” I mean to reference a prominent tactic in what James Snead has called a black cultural insistence on repetition. In a passage on musical form Snead writes: “The ‘cut’ overtly insists on the repetitive

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nature of the music, by abruptly skipping it back to another beginning which we have already heard.”1 In “cut,” then, I reiterate the repetition in difference that is both “again,” or the same, and “an other” – “another beginning we have already heard.” In an essay published in 1981, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Snead warns readers not to prop up the false divide that articulates white cultural forms as devoid of repetition and black cultural forms as redolent with the repetitive. Rather, Snead asks that we interrogate what is at stake in different cultural stances toward repetition and their relations to the issue of origin – that is, that we examine attitudes toward repetition and “originality” as those attitudes take diverse cultural forms. Is it possible that panic about the ideality of origin and the fear of potential debauchery in the mimetic has more valence in white cultural approaches to repetition than in other cultural modes?2 If so, looking to black cultural heritage in the widespread embrace of repetition as a key quality of postmodern performance may raise further questions about the drive to “legitimacy” that results in the isolation of white “fathers” of performance art.3

Cut The twentieth century was uniquely hospitable to, and enamored of, solo performance, with an increasing fascination as the century wore on. This was the premise of a conference at the Centre National de la Danse in October 2001 in Paris to which I was invited. I typed out a polite note declining the invitation thinking that “solo” was against the grain of my thought. What more could I offer on the topic? Hadn’t we already critiqued the category of the singular and its link to “origin” and “originality”? Would doing it again be repetitive, redundant? Shouldn’t I rather attempt to make an original contribution to the field, not riff on the contributions of others – Griselda Pollock, Rosalind Krauss, Pollock Krauss Pollock Krauss? Should I not try and pronounce my singular voice? Resist repetition? I’d just brought out “Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and its Theater.” That essay took up the topic of cloning, fear of mimesis, and operations of surrogacy in performance art. I’d also been at work for a long time on a project concerning the “playing” of Abraham Lincoln in Linda Mussmann’s theatre piece Cross Way Cross (in which a woman, traveling south in a Lincoln Continental, has an accident with history and becomes Lincoln himself ). I thought of the actress as double in her solo:

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“she” and “Lincoln.” I was also thinking about Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play which features the re-enactment of Lincoln by a black man whom Parks calls the “Foundling Father” and a “Faux Father” (in spoken Black English “faux father” sounds exactly like “forefather” and “foe father,” etc.). These playings, it was obvious, concern double play and triple play – and if these doublings were concerned with singular figures, such as Lincoln, they were concerned on the level of multiplicity, reproduction, the inane hyper-appearance of the singular father. Of course, the hyper-copy and the thrall to the double was late twentiethcentury Warholian common sense. The Lincoln study had tripped me into a discovery of legions of “real-life” Abraham Lincoln impersonators who re-enact their “solo performances” of the Founder en masse.4 To think of these solo acts as “solo” seemed absurd. But I had to think twice.

Cut The conference was in Paris. I accepted the invitation.

Cut How to approach the topic of solo work without revalorizing the solo as singular, but also without re-erecting a too often binarized opposition: the middle-aged critique that singularity, like originality, is mythic? Feminist art historians, as well as post-structuralist writers in general, have deconstructed the myth of greatness and its relation to genius for both male and female artists. We are by now familiar with Griselda Pollock’s 1980 argument that modernist criticism’s production of artistic authorship takes “the fundamental form of the bourgeois subject; ‘creative, autonomous, proprietorial’.”5 Works such as Rosalind Krauss’s 1986 The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths pressed the point, and Amelia Jones’s important 1998 Body Art: Performing the Subject pushed it farther. Pollock’s recent work continues in the same vein, reminding us that the proprietal bourgeois subject is substantially resilient – we are not beyond the point of reiteration. In Differencing the Canon (1999) Pollock notes

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that an individual work’s “authority” is still justified by its relationship to other “great” singular works as well as by an artist’s supposed originality in transcending “his” inheritance. Canons continue, she writes, to “actively create a patrilineal genealogy of father-son succession and replicate patriarchal mythologies of exclusively masculine creativity.”6 If originality is indeed a modernist masculinist myth, does the pressure on criticism to be original support that myth? Does our anxiety of influence engage in the same founding father patrionics that erects white painters like Jackson Pollock as father of postmodern performance art? If I make Griselda Pollock’s or Rosalind Krauss’s claim my own (because we have to hear it again) would my claim to origin (by my signature) be in error? Or, would challenging origin through error, engaging the familiar postmodern scam of, and thrall to, the copy, get something right in writing about postmodern art? Enunciating the Barthesian assertion (to give the claim authority) that authorship is in the process of being displaced as the central paradigm of Western artistic creation, Antoinette LaFarge has recently founded a museum of forgery. In a paper titled “The Mimetic Museum” presented at the College of Art Association Meetings in 1999, LaFarge argued that forgery both illuminates and deeply informs current art practice, contrary to traditional formulations of forgery as a degenerate activity.7 A timeline for her virtual museum, available as a link at the museum’s site, humorously cites Adam (as in Adam and Eve), then Marcel Duchamp, then Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Hans Haacke, and J. S. G. Boggs before arriving at the institution of LaFarge’s founding.8 It is unclear whether this is a lineage, or a spoof on lineage, which is probably exactly the point. And yet, the notion of forgery is haunted by its association with crime, and in that association anxieties are as much courted as displaced. LaFarge declares that, thanks to Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Gilles Deleuze, and others, the copy has fully arrived and that repetition is no longer a barrier – though note that it is still sameness she lauds (identicality being a hallmark of ideality): “In short, we have reached the point where the problem of reproduction set against the enduring primacy of authorship and the Signature have made art virtually identical with its dark twin, forgery.” My question is this: why is the twin marked as dark? Why is it color that draws a line between one twin and its criminalized other? How far “beyond” color lines is this? What link to anxieties about femininity, Freud’s “dark continent,” and anxieties of other (racialized) cultural influences still riddle LaFarge’s assertion? Or, is

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my very question going back over ground we have supposedly already traversed? How much is too much “again”? Perhaps repetition is precisely a mode of scholarly approach worth engaging explicitly. I’ll say “Griselda” Pollock and I’ll say Krauss saying “Pollock” again – remembering that “again” bears a persistent politics haunted by white cultural orientations to repetition still invested in property (and its idealized twin, propriety). Indeed, “again” seemed newly important to me in the conservative-again climate of the 2000s when a senior colleague recently nonchalantly remarked that my reiteration of the critique of origin is unoriginal “feminist old hat in a post-identity age.” To him, critiquing our cultural thrall to originality and the general project of fauxing founding fathers is, and I quote, “been there, done that.” And yet this scholar could merrily dismiss my work as what he called “illegitimate history” as if his choice of the language of legitimacy did not expose his investment in the very patrilineages we had supposedly “already” and “overly” troubled. Been there. Done that.

Cut First I had to think. What is “solo” performance? It is true that it is a uniquely twentieth-century term. It is also true that there was a sharp rise both in “solo” and non-script-based “performance” in elite venues for both theater and visual art. This increase occurred most pointedly mid-century when the center of the avant-garde shifted, after the Second World War, to New York City where, by the 1960s, we find an almost frenzied intersection between visual arts, film, dance, poetry, and theater (Dick Higgins’ phrase “intermedia” catches the sense of the intersection if not the feel of the frenzy). In thinking it over, I became intrigued that “solo,” as well as performance, should be a signature of the shift toward American-centered modernism and I wanted to think more about whether (and why) “solo” and “performance” might bear a particularly American valence.9

Cut Having accepted an appearance at the Paris conference, set for October 2001, I set about procrastinating. In August 2001, for reasons that are still

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unclear to me, I began to think repeatedly about Yves Klein’s Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void). This annoyed me because I had already settled on asking what “solo” and “performance” had to do with America as new art center. I had decided to reinterrogate the mythic delegation of Jackson Pollock as Originator, as Founding Father of Solo Performance, Founder of Performance Art – the latest to re-herald this patrilineage being Paul Schimmel in Out of Actions (1998).10 But, despite that decision, I kept returning to Klein’s Parisian Leap. Why? Was it because Klein made a failed bid for founder? Was it perhaps because he went over like a lead balloon when he exhibited his monochromes in his first “solo” show in New York in 1961? To rehearse the well known: Klein was a judo master and an artist in Paris. An artist with a plan for “world conquest” by color, Klein had appropriated a color to himself – his particular aquamarine blue. He wanted to interrogate color and line (making an unintentional riff on W. E. B. DuBois’ prediction of 1903 that the central problem of the twentieth century would be the color line). Klein was an artist painting (though he refused to call it painting) in Paris just after the art metropolis had crossed the Atlantic. Making his bid from Paris for “art world domination,” he sought formal global recognition for International Kleinian Blue. Savvy about the life/art line as well as the fact that “domination” was the game, he wrote letters to presidents and heads of state as part of his bid, but it was too late. Americans already had control of origin stories and foundation narratives – the macho drip flicks of 1947 had become the International Pollockian Act. And despite the fact that Klein dated his “leap” retrocessively as occurring in 1946,11 Klein is not repeatedly cited (recited) as Founding Father of the performative turn. Pollock, tragic hero, is.

Cut Looking forward. Looking back. Because it was still August and then early September, I let myself continue to dwell on Klein’s leap. Everything changed after the 11th, again.

Cut The photograph appeared in a newspaper Klein created on November 27, 1960, in Paris – a day he appropriated as a Theater of the Void. A body is

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leaping from a building. I have trouble thinking between the then and the now of falling bodies and media deployments. Is this confusion an error of origin?12

Cut Klein’s art/news declares itself both “theater” and “actual.” Such a double definition is the paradoxical property of “an act” – a paradox that continues to concern us today as we struggle to parse performance from performativity, but also as we think about theatricalities of war and the complicities of media, the role of the image in productions of “terror.” Like almost all of the event-arts of the early 1960s, Klein’s “actual” event (involving a “real” leap) required the construction and circulation of a document to substantiate, retroactively, that the act had taken place.13 The document produced appears to stand as witness, articulating an event as having already occurred, even as the photograph itself is the event’s very ongoing spectator, still sitting at attention in its theater of action: the archive, the art book, the art museum, the web page. Like the document-dependency of most event-arts in visual culture, Leap into the Void is a retrocession (the photograph cites backward, witnessing an event as having taken place) and a calling ahead, or leaping forward (Klein’s flight is a fall that will never hit bottom even as it cites that fall in advance of its impossibility). In the undecidable direction that the act romances (is he flying up or falling down? is he citing backwards or forwards?), the “art” is illustrative of the general “Leap into Performance” of mid-century artwork where the artist’s body – in dance, in movement, in “live” uncertainty – is both implicated, “actual,” and imprecise. If the piece looks backward to the “solo” dance of Pollock in Hans Namuth’s photographs of 1950, and back further to art in action of the European avant-garde, it also calls forward to the “performative turn” as the center of the avant-garde both shifted to New York and died14 in increasingly “literalist” or “theatrical” art-making (to use Michael Fried’s still apt phrasing).

Cut But solo performance? What is the status of the singular in this appellation, and how can we apply it here? The photograph appears to represent

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a singular event. It appears to document a performance by a singular artist and to stand as a trace of that original solo action.15 Let us rehearse the story. What occurred here? In staging the action, Klein performed his judo-inspired leap from a provincial two-story building, wearing a three-piece suit. He had performed the piece first on January 12, 1960, and invited two witnesses, but one – Pierre Restany – did not show up, and the other witness, Bernadette Allain, was not (it seems) witness enough. So, Klein wanted a photograph to capture the leap and to stand in for Allain having stood watch. But because he had hurt himself when he had “really” leapt, he wanted only to re-enact the real leap for the camera, not make the real leap again. Thus, for this October 1960 capturing of the January 1960 event, he had a tarpaulin held by 12 judokas from a judo club across the street to catch him. In this way the staging was projected both toward a future (an audience to witness the photograph as evidence) and in reference to a past (an event that had already taken place and had even already been witnessed as having taken place). This leap was, that is, not for a present audience but for a photograph that would record an event that had taken place at a prior time for a future audience that would see the leap on Theater of the Void Day, November 27, 1960, in the pages of the tabloid Dimanche. For the re-enactment of the real, the photographer Harry Shunk took not one, but two photos. One was taken with a net situated beneath Klein. The other was taken a few moments later from the same angle, but with the street empty. Shunk made a seamless montage of the two photos resulting in the “performance” of an act that will never have taken singular place, and resulting as well in generations of witnesses to a body caught in that act. This was, then, a live act pitched toward a future misrecognition: a call to misread, or . . . a response in advance of a future that cannot occur, cannot have occurred – the body that will not hit ground again and again and again. Perhaps, as Barthes responded after Vernant: “perpetual misunderstanding is exactly ‘the tragic’.”16

Cut My reading is redolent with intimations of trauma and the missed event: that is, I appear to be posing an invitation to read Klein’s leap as a choreography for a fall never adequately witnessed, repeating into a future that cannot arrive.17 It looks as though the leaping artist is headed for the sky

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(he is not). It looks as though he’ll hit the ground (he will not). The leap also appears to be an act, and the photograph appears to stand as a record of a “real” art-event (the status of photography as capturing the real, and as “documenting” art-making, adds to this reality effect). But, as the historical record makes clear, the event and the image is a re-enactment of an event, not the event itself. And, it is a re-enactment that never took place “as real” – there were judokas, there was a mattress. It is, thus, a record of a re-enactment that never arrives at the “real” it sought to cite via repetition, even as it strives to make that act present for witness. Thus the art marks a present as unachievable, “void”: both composed of disavowals, and, like the medium of photography, compelled to cite, to repeat, to render witnessing as constant (leap) deferral. But, how “void” the present?18

Cut Klein’s 1960 leap took place in advance of an earlier work, The Void. In the spring of 1958, at the Galérie Iris Clert, Klein hung a large blue velvet drapery around the doorway leading into a space that was entirely white – walls, doors, everything, nothing but white – a white Klein called “true blue.”19 In a serious flare-up before, during, and after the opening night of Klein’s exhibit of The Void, the city of Paris was home to a stream of massive street protests as the Algerian war of independence escalated. Racist rhetoric was virulent, translating physically to street violence. It was still three years before the October 1961 massacre that would leave the Seine choked with the bodies of Algerian Moslems killed by police. Parisians crammed into the whiteness of The Void, filling it beyond capacity.

Cut “Illegitimate history,” said the senior colleague. He had not raised his hand. His face was red. Color and line is not color line. Klein is more properly read relative to French existential philosophy, meaning, he said (dismissing other existentialists as not proper father figures?) to Sartre. You can’t read Leap into the Void and The Void relative to hitting the street. Miss – you play with words. I want to make a cut and move to the side to pass.

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I will read for an “illegitimate” history – if illegitimate history means listening for a syncopation of intention not “properly” resolvable in direct lineage, and, more radically perhaps, joining that syncopation as a critic with one reading among many. Can we listen for other voices in seeming “solo” work, like the multiple directions of reference figured in the way Klein’s Leap is both citational (referencing backward) and invocational (calling forward), readable as part of an antiphonal conversation beyond the frame or whitewash of the walls; a response to a call and a call for a response (including mine) beyond the confines of singular intention or policed legitimacies? Let’s remember: the Field of Founding Fathers is a minefield marked by gravestones erected for legitimacy of lineage, legitimacies marked for white race and male gender. Antiphony is a formal property of the “black cultural insistence on repetition” with which we began this essay. “Begin again,” then, wrote The Mother of Us All, Gertrude Stein, sitting in Paris, listening to jazz.

Leap . . . to America. November 27, 1960. Theater of the Void Day. The reaction to Action Art was in full swing. Happenings were in early bloom in white America – and Fluxus, Judson Dance, Pop Art, Minimalism, feminist Fluxus, feminist performance all around the corner – all with their emphasis on performance, all pushing the “dance” of action art to further blur the boundary between art and life, or street and gallery, store and museum. All of these could come to be considered solo performance, and yet, most of them were deeply critical of the cult of the singular artist they saw privileged in the history of painting as well as in contemporary Action Art. From a theater and dance perspective, we can understand solo performance to be, simply, a single body performing on a stage (or in any space). We might add to this that in solo performance as it developed in the latter half of the twentieth century, the single body increasingly performed in a piece authored and/or choreographed and/or staged and/or designed by that single body. Such solo performance is often (though sometimes erroneously) labeled performance art. As the category “solo” extended beyond the stage space to the entire creative project, we might include the general rise of auteurism in theater directing. In many ways,

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an auteur theater director can be considered a solo artist, working with mediums of other people’s bodies, light, space, sound, text, etc., but generating a work that is primarily regarded as his. We have become accustomed to posit the rise of (solo) performance art as a direct result of late capitalism and the object’s famous loss of aura. When the aura of the discrete art object dissipated under the habits and pressures of indiscriminate reproduction, the aura was displaced onto the artist himself – a figure supposedly not given to duplication – i.e., there was only one Jackson Pollock, the biological man, and he was not subject to reproduction. Thus, such a theory spins, in reaction to the commodification of art and the loss of the auratic object, emphasis shifted to the (singular) artist making that object. With the object in crisis, artists abandoned the object as site and collected under the awning of performance. Under this awning the site of the work shifted to the space between the object and the maker, the object and the viewer, the object and any given context (often with a resulting “theatricality,” in Michael Fried’s derisive sense).20 This space between viewer and viewed was closely aligned with dance and theater, where any product is more profoundly in the process, in the action, in the exchange, than in any formally discrete object. The Solo Artist making art became, then, the auratic object itself. The artist stepped (or danced) into the place of the object and rescued origin, originality, and authenticity in the very unrepeatable and unapproachable nature of his precise and human gesture – his solo act. At mid-century in America the artist’s gesture indicated the seeming non-exchangeable entity of the artist’s “self ” and the supposed uniqueness of the artist’s persona. To this day, the language of “liberation” – both of the canvas and of the self – so often accompanies the story of Pollock’s “revolutionary” act. The artist performing was a solo artist – but more to the point, a solo perceived as the self. It was art critic Harold Rosenberg who wrote in 1952: “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist . . . The act – painting – is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”21 The action artist was performing, but not delivering a script capable of reproduction by anyone other than that self as solo: could anyone other than Pollock have painted a Pollock by re-enacting the Pollock “dance”? Would the work produced by such a re-enacting dancer have been a Pollock in the way that a Graham dance danced by another dancer remains a Graham dance?

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No. Strangely, in the mid-century Euro-American art world, performance abruptly (and momentarily) appeared unitary, not available to reenactment or exchange. An act could be an origin of non-repeatable purity, a portal, indeed, of pure selfhood, of “existence.” To theater historians, of course, this has always seemed odd since performance had so long been the very means of re-enactment, the very means of repetition. But perhaps here we can begin to find a distinction between performance and theatricality taking shape that would separate the virile men (action performers) from the effeminate boys (acting performers) in line with a longstanding feminization of, and heterosocial gender panic toward, theatricality as debased mimesis, debauched and hollow hysteria, wombastic copy machine.22 In fact it seems remarkable that, for a while, a virile artist might even get away with performing woman and still not be considered an actor. Could anyone other than Duchamp have been Rrose Selavy? Not in the visual art world where the singular artist reigns on the basis of his signature versus his gesture – a strange Rrose indeed for theater artists whose history is studded with men playing Juliet, the rose by any other name.23 And yet, perhaps we should think again. The slippery slope of the theatricalities of identity very quickly dirtied the neat auratic screen through which Rosenberg had spied Pollock’s “artist’s existence.” For it wasn’t long after Pollock’s artist-as-self appeared to rescue the auratic object, that the theatricality and performative bases of identity began again to trouble the promise that the Authentic Living Artist might be anything other than Debauched Copy, Tawdry Stand-in, Theater Artist, Whore. This is to say that if originality was seemingly salvaged via “the act” of the macho action artist (an act of inner passion left as a trace in the painting), the authenticity of any “act” was very soon rendered unstable via “the act” of theatrical performance that would become Happenings, Minimalism, Judson, and Pop. Jim Dine’s brief 1960 “act” – The Smiling Workman – is a case in point. Dine’s piece (sometimes discussed as a Happening) consisted of a canvas, tacked up rather like a large bedsheet hung lazily on a wall, and a bucket of paint. After scrawling “I Love What I’m Doing” on the canvas, Dine, made up as a deranged clown in a paint-splattered smock, drank paint from his bucket, paint dripping on his body. When he finished, he dumped the rest of the paint on his head and leapt directly into the canvas as if diving into the void, making the canvas into theater curtains and rendering literal the Pollockian aim to “put HIMSELF into his paintings.”24 Here

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Dine was puncturing the screen, literally, with an antic that spoofed the Platonic bravado of claims such as Pollock’s Ideal “I am nature” with a counter-ideational bravado. But Dine’s translation of Pollock need not be read as entirely parodic. The effort to put one’s “self ” into one’s work was rendered literal in Dine’s puncture of the screen, as it had been in various Gutai works such as Saburo Murakami’s “Breaking Through Many Paper Screens.” In 1956, in Tokyo, Murakami hurled himself through a series of paper screens so that his body “burst through the traditional flat surface of painted art.”25 In the afterlife of the document, Murakami appears to “burst” toward the viewer, as if entering the scene. The exuberant rupturing of the screen(s), however, not only enabled the entering of the painter as “self,” but, in making the canvas a theater curtain, enabled the opposite move more sardonically exhibited by Dine: the exit of the artist. Interestingly, Dine’s exit of the solo action artist did not necessarily undo the notion of solo. That is, whether working for authentic expression of self or parodying the “authentic self ” as always theatrical (necessarily multiple), the single artist was singled out as unitary. Even Warhol’s labeling his studio a Factory, and his mass production not only of “art” but of art “stars,” did not dismantle the notion of singular Artist-Genius he so obviously both parodied and played for all it was worth. Like Griselda Pollock, though in some distinction to her early work, Amelia Jones has recently underscored the point that our art-critical and art-historical practices are not very far beyond traditional modernist conceptions of the artist as genius. We still repeatedly deploy the category of “artist” to delimit challenges set forward by the works themselves. Jones writes, “As with Duchamp, whose ‘nonsense and nihilism’ are marshaled to support celebration of him as ‘pioneer,’ Warhol’s ‘wigged-outness,’ his continual challenges to any attempt to fix him as definitive artistic origin, are commandeered as examples of his ‘genius’.”26 Thus, despite his obvious slam on the singular as singular, Warhol has been repeatedly produced as “one of a kind.” The drive to “single out” a unitary artist as against a consideration of the broader contexts of cross-national, cross-ethnic, cross-temporal pollination, dialogic collaboration, and broadly diasporic influence is also apparent in art-historical attempts to pinpoint a father for the twentieth-century rise of performative arts of solo actions. We continued to need, it seems, a seminal figure, a progenitor for the wellspring of solo works in the latter half of the century that cross between art, theater, dance, and painting to

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create that performative mash of intermedia most often called performance art. Time and again we are told (in a reverberating echo from Alan Kaprow) that the American Action Artist Jackson Pollock was responsible for the supremely masculine act of liberating art from the canvas and setting the entire performance-based art of the latter half of the twentieth century into motion. All other possibilities become as if relegated to a footnote.27

Cut Despite our citing of singulars, so much late-century “solo” performance work appears as a critique of singularity – as if to show up the cracks in the face paint we call unitary subjectivity. Often a “solo” artist performs as if alone or singled out, only to perform a kind of echo palette of others, a map of citations and a subjectivity so multiply connected as to be collective. One of the most obvious instances of “solo” working against its own singular status was Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 Trio A. Indeed, Rainer said of her dance work with the Judson School that one of the frustrating things about her fame in the 1960s was the knowledge that she was not so much being singled out because of something she did, but because she “existed in a world that felt the need to single one person out of a group of peers as a ‘star’ or ‘genius’.”28 In Trio A Rainer composed a solo dance, performed at various times as a trio, as a solo, or by and for multitudes “skilled, unskilled, professional, fat, old, sick, amateur.”29 The title of Trio A underscores a certain absurdity in denomination (because the trio is a solo, but also, the solo is a trio). As a trio, when the piece is performed by one person it unbecomes its name. To my mind, in this way Rainer’s solo “trio” is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein. For example, Stein’s 1927 Four Saints in Three Acts is an “opera to be sung” that has four acts and at least twelve saints. Again, a viewer or reader or performer is caught undoing the formal indication of what is contained on the level of the (performative) name. In Stein’s words, as in Rainer’s sequence, a title, like a signature, comes undone at the point of performance – an undoing, or unbecoming, which can also critically point to our ongoing investments in the titular, our investments in the signature as discrete. Such an undoing can, perhaps, make the literal word no more than material substance, make the gesture nothing more than a “task” given to repetition, and the name no more than indiscrete sound given to play and replay in infinite combination – a

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solo played and replayed in infinite and collective variation.30 Of course, Rainer did admit that when she encountered Trio A performed by a soloist at a fifth-generation remove she didn’t recognize the dance at all (and she didn’t like it). In that instance, Trio A was no longer “hers.” But this “decomposition” or “recomposition” is part of the possibility, the “countersigning” of riff contained in the indiscriminate, the illegitimate solo.

Riff Approach solo work rather more like call and response. Take up antiphony as a model for reading. If we think against the grain of the solo as discrete, we can begin to hear solo in collectivity – and not just by tracing influence in uni-directional lines of influence, but lines of influence or reverberation that, rather like Klein’s leap, shoot the call backward as well as forward, anticipate misrecognition, court it, and, simultaneously, redirect the past as having become itself through re-enactment. We can approach solo rather in the way that “solo” is indicated in jazz or blues – as an artist makes a call and another responds and another responds to that response as a call and a response is made which, again, becomes a call citing, or reciting, a response as call. Solos, in jazz, cite each other, bleed into each other, react to each other, re-enact each other, and perform an entire cross-hatch of work in which the “solo” quality of any one action becomes profoundly riddled with the echoes of precedence and the fore-cast echoes of future response (as one waits for the response after a call, mishearing that response in the call, before a response is even uttered). We might make a cross-hatch of works to produce a kind of visual or performance jam where we read sets of solo performance works as “riffing” across media, and across time, undoing any clear access to “origin” (mythic or otherwise). In such a jam, one could, indeed, play Pollock – rather like Lynda Benglis played Pollock in 1970 or Keith Boadwee in 1995.31 After all, this kind of play – this sense of playing, even play-acting – is the primary principle of postmodern production. But what kind of historical “lineage machine” can fully adopt this as scholarly practice? Since such a history could not offer a lineage that allows for singularity or discrete or unitary origins, “lineage” seems like a profoundly inadequate word. Perhaps an illegitimate history, a history of illegitimacy – that which we leave out, put back – is more (im)precisely the point.

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Cut In “black expressive traditions” the solo is pointedly not inflected by singularity but exists relative to collaboration. Theorists and practitioners of jazz and blues make the point repeatedly: “Sometimes,” Albert Murray tells us, “musicians refer to solos as choruses.” Sometimes, he goes on, “the riff chorus is used as background for the lead melody as choral response to a solo call line.”32 Similarly, in referring to the antiphonal nature of what he calls “black communication,” Robert Ferris Thompson writes that the call and response is like “solo and circle.” Here it becomes clear that a solo is hardly a solo if solo means unitary – the biggest insult in this tradition is for a solo performer to find that he performs without co-signers, co-performers. The successful solo, then, is no solo at all. But why turn to black expressive culture when thinking about solo performance in the twentieth century? And why do that when every artist I’m writing about here is seemingly white? Traditionally, African art forms are largely performance-based, with extremely porous or interactive distinctions between genres such as, for example, music and dance. African diasporic influence is absolutely key to white European avant-garde development (think of the mimetic pseudoAfrican masks of the Dada soirées, think of the “negrophilia” of Paris in the 1920s, think of the early Brecht and his Baal, his Jungle of Cities, his Drums in the Night). Such cross-culture imagining is also basic in aesthetic production in general in America. In fact, when the center of the avantgarde shifted to New York after the Second World War – a shift accredited to Jackson Pollock as if he single-handedly maneuvered it33 – it should not be surprising that the primary signature of a new American art scene should be performance. Before the world wars the primary contribution America had made to the landscape of aesthetic practice, that is, the unique American export – that which could be understood as American – was largely African American in derivation and was, significantly, performancebased: jazz, blues, black-face minstrelsy, and various dance styles. The fact that performance, citation, and repetition became the signature elements of multiple styles when the “center” shifted to New York from Paris should cause us to pause and revisit the “influence” of African American expressive culture. In such a pause we might recall the heritage of “love and theft,” as Eric Lott has written of white appropriation of black “source” material without name and without acknowledgment of source.34 Thus the erection of white Founding Fathers stands as a monument of “discovery”

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that erases or renders “illegitimate” the legacies of long-standing nonwhite (or non-male) practices. Writing on what he calls the “blues aesthetic,” Richard Powell has argued that the blues provides much contemporary literature, theatre, dance, and visual arts with the necessary elements for defining these various art forms as intrinsically “Afro-American.” Jackson Pollock, for example, often listened to blues when painting – in order to “overcome the blockage”35 – and those whom Pollock claimed as predecessors, the Surrealists, claimed “jazz” for their subconscious. Powell backsteps, however, and says that he would not call such aesthetics as Pollock’s African American – but he would call them “blues aesthetics” (which are nevertheless informed by African American experience). This question of influence returns us to the Founding Father of performance art. The aesthetic of much contemporary American work in theater, dance, etc., is directly heir to a black cultural aesthetic (at least in part because a distinguishing factor between American performance work and European performance work, especially in nineteenth-century theater practice, was the inflection of African and Native America), and yet we rarely cite African American or Native heritage in any more substantial way than influential “informant.” In one sense this is to ask about color and line(age) in the “founding” of the turn toward performance at a newly American center.

Cut As suggested by artists like Gertrude Stein and Yvonne Rainer, can we pick up the formal emphasis by which solo is not read as discrete but as imbricated in and punctuated by the movements of participants in what John Chernoff, writing on African aesthetics, called “a swinging back and forth from solo to chorus or from solo to an emphatic instrumental reply”?36 Can we read solo as collective? If Jackson Pollock would listen to blues while painting and if he was responding, as he claimed, to Southwestern Indian work, why is Southwest Indian sand painting – clearly performancebased work – not given foundational status? Why are the blues musicians Pollock was responding to not erected to the art apex, “fathering” performance form? Is it because their solos were understood, already, as non-discrete? As illegitimate? It cannot be that music is too discrete from painting if we remember that Pollock’s painting became itself as Pollock’s dance (and Namuth’s film). Perhaps the blues cannot be named as origin

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as they always already riff on origin, given to play and replay, existing in reiteration – origin as in performance and as essentially oral cultural transmission? Why then was Pollock’s response not also read as riff ? Was Klein right? Was the bid for world art domination about color after all?

Cut If we read on the riff, we find Pollock jamming blues and native work. Dine’s entry into Pollock’s citational jam make another riff on Pollock’s riff, signifying on Pollock signifying on Charlie Parker, and simultaneously making a call to re-read Pollock re-reading Parker as well as to incite future re-reading, re-actions, in “art.” The works cite each other, bleed into each other, react to each other, re-enact each other, and perform a cross-hatch of work in which the “solo” quality of any one action becomes profoundly riddled with the echoes of precedence and the fore-cast echoes of future response. Of course, the question becomes, can I write a history this way? If an original is composed always already of citation, sometimes citing laterally or peripherally or multiply, how can I draw any discrete line, how can I legitimate any discrete family tree? As Paul Gilroy, theorizing diaspora in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, has written, the original, or the thrall to the original, takes on a different valence under the influence of African expressive culture as the original is always subject to, and the subject of, repetition. The original is recited and re-sited in a “kinetic orality” – a recitation that situates any solo site, like any act, relative to the past it cites and the future it incites in the form of a call. Any work, then, exists in its own future – in the response that a call will elicit, as well as in that work’s own material properties – properties which, composed of citation, are never discrete. Authenticity, in such a scenario, emerges as “anachronistic” and often a matter of hotly contested debate.37 What I am getting at, here, is in keeping with the logic of citation generally, but it is also an extremely theatrical logic. Read as involved in call and response, or read as imbricated in collective or choral actions, “solo” in some senses casts itself into the future as becoming ensemble even as it re-cites itself backward, answering a thousand calls. This becoming ensemble in the solo work as I see it across the century is made apparent in the citational quality of performance – citing other work, co-opting other work, creating an action by acting or reacting, enacting or re-enacting,

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making of the single body a stage across which whole histories (the multitudes) are brought to bear. Any action, here, is already a palimpsest of other actions, a motion set in motion by precedent motion or anticipating future motion or lateral motion. Here, image, text, and gesture occur through, as Gertrude Stein instructed (informed by the crucible of Paris and jazz), beginning again and again. But this beginning, by virtue of its “again-ness,” is never for the first time and never for the only time – beginning again and again in an entirely haunted domain of repetition: image, text, and gesture.

Retell I became very curious about the fact that in the theater, the “auteur” director is usually understood as a “solo artist” precisely because he or she has abandoned the primacy, or at least the authority, of script or playtext. Conversely, in dance, we often find the category of auteur is born when a choreographer incorporates text. One begins to suspect that a director or choreographer becomes a “solo artist” or auteur when working in a medium of bodies in ways that run counter to, or unbecome, sedimented practices of genre or media distinctions. As part of the rise of the solo we find a painter becoming a dancer (Pollock); a painter becoming an actor painting or marking her body as stage (Carolee Schneemann); an architect building a structure becoming an auteur dancing a structure (Robert Wilson); a dancer becoming an opera maker (Meredith Monk); a conceptual artist becoming a musician (Yoko Ono); a musician becoming a painter (LeMonte Young). Each of these becoming solos underscores an unbecoming – a kind of double move: we find a bleeding or collapsing of genres simultaneously with a congealing of an artist into a seeming “active agent.” We find a slippage in genre boundaries together with a shifting of the site of art onto performance understood as an artist’s act. Thus, these artists become agents or actors (the emphasis on the active) by deploying gestures that seem to resist (or undo or unbecome) the very media through which they emerge and, often, by or through which they are recorded. In this way, act-based art makes itself available to become in different form, to be retold. This becoming different as retelling is key. There are many examples. We can think of composer Nam Jun Paik’s head painting, Zen for Head. This performance, which occurred on the stage of the auditorium of the

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Staditsches Museum in Wiesbaden, consisted of Paik dipping his hands, his head, and his necktie into a bowl of ink and tomato juice and then dragging his head along a paper on the floor. As Elizabeth Armstrong has written, this was Paik’s 1962 “interpretation of a composition by fellow composer La Monte Young, whose 1960 score simply directed the performer to ‘Draw a straight line and follow it’.”38 As part of a festival of “Very New Music” this “act” becomes music, but it is also, in interpreting music, performance. Interpreting music with the body, it is dance. It is the music itself. It is dance. It is a drawn line, a painting on paper, and ultimately a preserved object in the museum in Wiesbaden. It is, then, more than any one of the things it might be said to be. As an act, work such as Zen for Head seems to resist delimitation to frame and canvas, even though it produces a document in a frame that then gestures toward its own excess (ironically, it is the framed object that stands to testify that the act was “more” than the object). Such work also seems to require audience (it was seen that “that” is what the artist did). And yet, even as it necessitates an audience, the work results in a denial of audience by producing a document that will be exhibited as an indication that “you” (the viewer) were not present at the event – you missed the action contained by the frame but more than the frame. The paper, frame, and photo of the action all represent to the viewer that which the viewer missed – that which, standing before the document, you witness yourself missing again. And yet, in missing you are somehow more available to this “excess” of the object than you would be in a situation of “presence.” Missing it, you are available to hear it otherwise, through the retelling, the recitation of the document, and thus are “present” to it otherwise, in a mode of transmission – a re-enactment. Looking across examples, much intermedia “solo” work depends on the fact that “solo” acts produce choruses of witnesses – that is, various audiences of persons, objects, documents, photos or testimonies that stand as witnesses, each, in different ways, rendering accounts in diverse but collective reiteration. Such objects, like the framed image of Paik’s headdragging print, stand as witness to the event as seen and make the museum viewer witness to the event as missed. In such a scene, a viewer becomes, like the object, a witness. Thus the piece, producing witnesses ad infinitum, might be called a veritable witness machine. The site of the event is in the witnessing, the re-telling/re-seeing, not in the “event” itself; and yet the “event itself ” becomes what is told in retelling. The mechanism of retelling is thus pitched toward eliciting a response which can stand as another

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generation of retelling, and function, in retelling, as yet another call. Thus the media undoes the media, resists the very mode of its manifestation, and pitches itself toward re-enactment in a variety of forms always alternative to the event itself.

Miss This essay has missed one mark in hitting others. It never precisely arrived in Paris in October 2001 – fear of flying perhaps. The closest we came was August or early September. We made it, instead, to November 1960, and witnessed somewhere a body leaping from a building, or two, backwards or forwards, still undecided, not yet having hit but still coming down. Like lineage, coming down. Begin again.

Notes 1 James Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Black American Literature Forum, 15 (4) (1981): 150. 2 Much has been written on the long-standing Euro-cultural distrust of imitation most often associated with Platonism and referred to as “antitheatricality.” In a recent essay developing his 1981 thoughts on white and black cultural figures of repetition, Snead reminds his readers that “black culture” is a concept, traceable though Hegel, largely inflected by white European concerns about “race” and (re)production. He cites a difference in approaches to repetition on the level of material culture, worth reproducing here: “The discourse of capital in European economic parlance reveals a more general insight about how this culture differs from black culture in its handling of repetition. In black culture, repetition means that the thing circulates (exactly in the manner of any flow, including capital flows) there in an equilibrium. In European culture, repetition must be seen to be not just circulation and flow but accumulation and growth. In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it.’ If there is a goal (Zweck) in such a culture, it is always deferred; it continually ‘cuts’ back to the start, in the musical meaning of ‘cut’ as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series”: “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Robert G. O’Meally (ed.), The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 69.

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3 For an attempt to chart circum-Atlantic diasporic influences on performance while marking repetition as the key modality in performance see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 4 See the website <www.lincolnpresenters.org>. 5 Griselda Pollock, “Artist’s Mythologies and Media Genius, Madness and Art History,” Screen, 21 (3) (1980): 57–96. 6 Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 5. 7 LaFarge’s paper is available at . 8 See the website . 9 Of course, performance (if not “solo”) had been a staple of the European historical avant-garde. Figures like Alfred Jarry’s and his alter-ego “Ubu” made scatological waves in 1896 that greatly influenced the art world toward linking performance with anti-art. The pseudo-Africanisms of Dada relied on the “immediacy” of live enactment, coupled with the thrall to “negro rhythms” and an interest in the repetitions of ritual, underscoring the performative nature of the artworks generated in these contexts. The shift of emphasis to New York as art metropolis after the Second World War arguably increased the performance energies, however, as if there might be something American in the “immediacy” of performance. 10 Paul Schimmel, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949– 1979 (Los Angeles, CA: The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998). 11 See Klein’s retrocessing history in his “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto.” This was written precisely as his New York solo show was floundering in 1961. The manifesto is on the web at <www.artep.net/kam/manifesto.html>. 12 Yves Klein, “Leap Into the Void” can be viewed at the website . 13 This reliance on the document that comes after is one major way in which event-arts diverge from theater. Western theater, and we could say theater drawing on white cultural heritage, commonly relies on a document that precedes, such as a play script. 14 The common and often repeated position that the “avant-garde” died with modernism mid-century is also fascinating relative to the geographic shift (did it die mid-passage?). That the avant-garde should so often have been perceived to die (again and again like a Swan who overacts her solo), deserves analysis relative to the increase in performance as the mode of either avant-garde transgression or its supposed rebirth as neo-avant-garde resistance. The relationship between performance and death, like theory and death, is hardly an under-discussed topic. Theater theorists have been fascinated with the ephemerality of performance as a death that never dies, as after the

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curtain falls actors (unlike painters) almost always give the ruse away with a bow that (imprecisely) distinguishes them from their acts. See Herb Blau, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987); Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Spencer Golub, Infinity (Stage) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). See also Kristine Stiles, “Never Enough is Something Else: Feminist Performance Art, Avant-Gardes, and Probity,” in James M. Harding (ed.), Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Klein himself adored the trace to the point of impossibility, considering himself to be searching for “the trace itself ” and “the trace of the immediate.” See his “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto.” Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1978), p. 148. A great deal has been written in the last ten years on trauma, the compulsion to repeat, and the return of the real as a condition of late modernity informing art practices. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1991). See also Hal Foster, Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). A related question might be “How present the void?” This question dovetails interestingly with contemporary attempts to represent (and remember) the Jewish Holocaust without naturalizing a history that might render such an event comprehensible through the (masterful) logics of straight-line lineage. On postmodern (“postnational national”) architectures of the void, see Peter Chametzky, “Rebuilding the Nation: Norman Foster’s Reichstag Renovation and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, Berlin,” Centropa, 1 (3) (2001): 245–64. In Sidra Stich, Yves Klein (London: Hayward Gallery 1994), p. 136. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967). Reprinted in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1998), pp. 116–47. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News, 51 (1952): 22–3. J. L. Austin’s fascinating and abrupt dismissal of theater in his 1955 articulation of “performative acts” is illustrative of this bias. On this issue see Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds), Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 3–5. If we remember the long-standing derision of theatricality as feminized, debauched, downfall of ideality and origin (see Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) ), it is no surprise that the performing action artists, or the art critics writing about them, who wanted “the act” to rescue aura, would

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Rebecca Schneider underscore that act as macho. The rescue of “origin” could only be a masculine act. A feminine act would be just an act. Thus, masculinity was a constant byword for action art, as if this iteration would counter the feminizing debaucheries contained on the theatrical flipside of the notion “to act.” One suspects that if someone else could play Rrose Selavy, the act of Rrose would be theatrical, not “properly” artistic. It is Duchamp’s signature – or better, the aura of his singularity – that assures the “act” as art versus theater (origin versus feminized mimeticism) for the biases of the visual art world. The issue of the author’s or artist’s signature bearing the authenticating weight of singularity is a deeply vexed one. As Derrida made clear in “Signature, Event, Context” (in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)), “iterability,” or repetition, is a constitutive feature not only of all forms of language, but also of the convention of signatures. Even as signatures are the paramount mark of singularity, they are composed through repetition. Despite the fact that it is a mark of supposed origination or consent or authorship, a signature cannot be singular as it is a matter of convention beyond itself (it is a ritual act, as is its recognition). A signature is also a matter of repetition in that there needs to be more than one so that each can hold up, despite minor differences, as “same” and as index of the author’s hand. The performance bases of a signature then, and indeed the necessary “theatricality” or even “riffing” of any signature on itself, begins to undo the ontological status such a mark confers on that which it marks. Derrida did not go so far as to call signatures theatrical, as he was reserving the radical bases of citationality for writing (and theater is that scandalously murky place between writing and speech). But Derrida does provocatively remind us that the signature is necessarily “impure” (wanton? illegitimate?) even as it veils the necessity of its own condition (“the condition of its possibility is the condition of its impossibility” writes Jonathan Culler on Derrida’s notion of the signature, Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1982), p. 26). It bears remembering that impurity in this essay is a condition Derrida takes from Austin, where it is linked, most explicitly, to the parasitical and “etoliated” theatrical. On another note regarding “Signature, Event, Context,” it is interesting to note that Derrida uses the figure of the “cut” or break to underscore the condition of possibility contained within the citational (p. 320). The artist George Segal in 1967, quoted in Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 17. Tracey Warr (ed.), The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), p. 52. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 270. Kaprow is credited with being the first to claim Pollock as father in “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News 57 (6) (October 1958). He is not the

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last. A recent instance of this patrilineal homage can be found in Paul Schimmel’s Out of Actions from 1998. On this phenomenon also see Amelia Jones’ important chapter “The ‘Pollockian Performative’ and the Revision of the Modernist Subject,” in Body Art/Performing the Subject. Though Jones is reticent to give Pollock the position of progenitor, smartly following Foucault to read Pollock’s positioning-as-progenitor as a function of discourse, she is also reticent to take it away. She replaces “father” language with “signifier” language, saying that the Pollockian performative (the performative enunciation of Pollock as Progenitor) “signaled” and “indicated” rather than “caused” a shift in artistic subjectivity (p. 55). Of course the difference between a prime signifier and father figuration is not very large – it was arguably a performative matter of pointing and following backward that relegated Pollock to “father” as sign in the first place. The repetitive “point” seems to be, in arthistorical analysis, to find and found singular figures, to “father” signposts like markers of property rather than to enable multiplicity. On “pointing” and feminist reading see Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 43–4. This quote appears in danceonline.com and in a criticaldance.com 2001 review of Quatuor Albrecht Knust. It is unattributed, but a sense of this sentiment comes through in an interview with Rainer by Lyn Blumenthal published in Profile, 4 (6) (1984). Yvonne Rainer, Work: 1961–1973 (Halifax, NS: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), p. 77. Another way in which Rainer’s dance is reminiscent of Stein’s aesthetic is in the way in which Trio A resists punctuation, becoming “itself a sort of runon sentence.” As Carrie Lambert writes in 1999, “Trio A disarticulates phrases and their internal hierarchies with the result that, as Rainer put it, in this dance ‘no one thing is any more important than any other’”: “Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A,” October, 89: 97. See Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, pp. 96–101. Albert Murray, “Playing the Blues” (1976), reprinted in Gena Dagel Caponi (ed.), Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’, & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 98. See Landau, Jackson Pollock, p. 244. Eric Lott, Love and Theft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Landau, Jackson Pollock, p. 31. Cited in Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” p. 55. Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 85, 96, 97, 101. Elizabeth Armstrong, “Fluxus and the Museum,” in Janet Jenkins (ed.), In the Spirit of Fluxus, Minneapolis: Walker Arts Center, 1993), p. 14.

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Binding to Another’s Wound: Of Weddings and Witness Jane Blocker

Figure 2 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Perfect Lovers), each clock 14 inches in diameter, paint on wall, 1991. Photo by Peter Muscato; reproduced courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, in representation of The Estate of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

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History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it – and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of History, I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of my own history (impossible for me to believe in “witnesses”; impossible, at least, to be one; Michelet was able to write virtually nothing about his own time). Roland Barthes1

My parents were married in 1954. Their friends made a home movie of the wedding that shows a funny scene outside the church where my greataunt Josephine clowns for the camera. The film, in those juicy Super 8 colors, stutteringly pans the guests milling about in front of the church steps, and then focuses in on Jo, who first waves exuberantly, then impishly presents her camera to take a picture of the amateur movie-makers. These dueling lenses trained upon each other always get a laugh, not only because we remember Jo was funny and childlike, but because we recognize the irony of the film camera being documented by the photograph, the dizzying mise en abyme of looking at someone looking at someone looking, of witnessing witness. The wedding, as the site of such surplus witness, is the concern of this essay. My interest in the wedding has to do with the fact that it is an excessively historicized event, one that demands, but seems nonetheless to escape, documentation. I take it for granted that, in its most basic terms, the wedding is a performative; it is a unique, unrepeatable event comprised by an authoritative act of naming, a speech act of considerable ideological force. It is what Judith Butler calls the “heterosexual ceremonial” and is therefore an occasion of power, of seeing (the elaborate display of normative sexuality) and blindness (that sexuality which the ceremony obscures but upon which it nevertheless depends). More specifically, I see the wedding as an inauguration of witness and an induction into history. There is a politics at work in granting witness to the wedding, a privilege granted to which not all attendees have equal access. In addition to its very real and material effects, I am also concerned with the wedding as a metaphor for coupling and binding, for the union of the one who experiences and the one who remembers. It stands as an elaborate ceremony of memory, but is at the same time an event whose dispersal is rehearsed in photographs and films from which the witness is by definition excluded. Like the movie of my parents’ wedding, my own seeing here is doubled and split. This essay looks at the way the wedding

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authorizes witnesses, whereby the witness is politically necessary. But it also looks at history as a hysterical and traumatic practice of looking at another’s looking, wherein witness is impossible. As a meditation on history, my work here is ultimately a consideration of what it means to be a historian, an official witness. That task consists, I will claim, in stereoscopic seeing and double telling. It consists, to use Cathy Caruth’s phrase, in binding to another’s wound. And so we begin by tying the knot. The first knot we must tie pulls tight on the wedding and the performative. Just one year after my parents were married, in 1955, J. L. Austin set about defining the performative. Both products of the post-war culture, my parents’ wedding and Austin’s book, in their own ways present the wedding as an unremarkable event. While their own wedding was no doubt a uniquely important event in their lives for my parents, weddings as a practice were simply what people did after the war, a sign that things were, as Warren G. Harding put it some years earlier, “returning to normalcy.” For Austin, it is such a common, “normal” ritual that it goes unremarked as a basic example used to illustrate his linguistic philosophy. Austin said that the performative was a type of utterance “in which to say something is to do something.”2 His famous examples include such utterances as “I do” or “I pronounce you . . .” at a marriage ceremony. In each case the saying of the thing and the doing of the thing are the same; in each case words do not simply describe or report: they act. He explains: “When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c., ‘I do’, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it. What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, ‘a performative’.”3 For Austin, however, the ability of such utterances to act is contingent on both their content and the qualifications and intentions of their speakers. Austin writes: “The uttering of the words is, indeed, usually a or even the, leading incident in the performance of the act . . . but it is far from being usually, even if it is ever, the sole thing necessary if the act is to be deemed to have been performed. . . . For (Christian) marrying, it is essential that I should not be already married with a wife living, sane and undivorced, and so on.”4 One cannot performatively produce marriage, then, if one is not authorized to do so or if the bride and groom are ineligible, or indeed, one presumes, if the participants are of the same gender. Such hitches Austin describes as “unhappy” or refers to as “infelicities,” and it is these that occupy the vast majority of his book on the subject. So while his intention seems at first to define a particular class of utterances,

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he soon becomes embroiled in the more profound task of defining the limits of authority. It is as an arbiter of authority rather than simply of the categories of speech that Austin (or more accurately the cultural presumptions he invokes) is made vulnerable to critique. His “infelicities” and the power involved in defining them and enforcing their exclusions has prompted Judith Butler to write that “the centrality of the marriage ceremony in J. L. Austin’s examples of performativity suggests that the heterosexualization of the social bond is the paradigmatic form for those speech acts which bring about what they name.”5 Butler thus awakens us (if we are not awake already) to the heterosexual presumption that authorizes the performative, and to the solemn weight of what is at stake in questions of performativity: the power to name or to participate in self-naming; the power to authorize publicly a private bond; the power to legalize particular forms of sexuality; the power to define what constitutes a family; the power to cite and draw from the legitimizing force of conventional authority; and the power to summon witnesses. The wedding, in short, occasions power. But how can we understand better how private performatives such as the wedding tie the knot with legal, political, and social privilege? To the extent that these forms of power accrue to heterosexuality, how can we, to paraphrase Butler, use the performative “to undo the presumptive force of the heterosexual ceremonial?”6 Neither Butler nor Austin really considers the wedding ceremony in detail; Austin focuses only on the locutionary force of “I do” and Butler the citational power of “I now pronounce you . . .”. But the wedding offers a variety of performatives that complicate these more flashy climactic utterances and that have implications other than those that are commonly registered. I will therefore highlight a different part of that “heterosexual ceremonial,” the part that authorizes witnesses. That the wedding is defined by witness seems clear enough, but witness has two aspects of its own that I’m interested in – one is seeing and the other is history – two passages through which the queer finds entry. “Marriage,” write Eve Sedgwick and Andrew Parker, “exists in and for the eyes of others.”7 But, as Carol Mavor has pointed out, the eyes are not the reliable devices they once were conceived to be. She writes in her recent book on photography: Our eyes and the stereoscope do not operate under the rules of Renaissance perspective: despite our attempts to understand vision otherwise, they

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Jane Blocker disregard the classical observer in favor of binocular disparity. As [Jonathan] Crary observes, to the extent that looking through the stereoscope is extremely “planar” . . . it is also strange rather than, as convention would suggest, realistic. “Strange” is the first definition that The Oxford English Dictionary gives the word “queer.” The stereoscope emphasizes the body’s own doubleness, the queerness of seeing.8

The act of seeing, Mavor tells us, is characterized by disparity, strangeness, and doubling. Seeing, witnessing, does not approach the real, rather it estranges reality, opens the space of difference. Certainly the sensations one experiences in the stereoscope have only grown more acute in the context of contemporary mechanisms of witness. Our eyes are doubled not only by the photograph, but by the video camera and the digital image in virtual space. Perspective can no longer be thought of as drawn together at a single point or even at two points, but expands outward infinitely in both time and space. Our claims on the real grow more awkward, less sure. Even the time of seeing is disorientingly compressed, attenuated, and repeated. Like two eyes that are the same and yet different, history (a licensed form of witness) is itself a kind of double vision (for Barthes, a form of hysteria). It strangely keeps one eye on the present and another on the past. Like seeing, history is estranged from the real; as Cathy Caruth says, the real event “can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence.”9 It is this fact that causes Barthes to remark that it is impossible for him to believe in witnesses. Caruth argues differently (more usefully) that the inaccessibility of events is the very nature of witness. She claims that events as they occur are unknowable and can only be approached by a departure in time and a latent return, a forgetting in order to remember. This necessarily results in repetition, so that “an impossible and necessary double telling . . . constitutes . . . historical witness.”10 By and by we will see that history’s impossible and necessary telling, its inherent repetitions of the same, its enactments in the present of events from the past, represent precisely that queering of the social bond for which Butler calls. The second knot we must tie binds together wedding and witness. For Austin the role of the witness is an important part of safeguarding the purely performative because he sees the witness not as hysteric but as authority. “It is worthy of note,” he writes, that in the American law of evidence, a report of what someone else said is admitted as evidence if what he said is an utterance of our performative

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kind: because this is regarded as a report not so much of something he said, as which it would be hear-say and not admissible as evidence, but rather as something he did, an action of his. This coincides very well with our initial feelings about performatives.11

The one who witnesses a performative utterance – seeing the priest saying “I now pronounce you,” the judge saying “I hereby sentence you” – is witness to an act with legal ramifications. What is more, he or she is allowed to speak or write about such an act as a matter of evidence. This indicates to me that, in addition to the performative force of marrying or sentencing, which these utterances contain, they also have the power to inaugurate, to authorize witnesses. That is, such performative statements instantaneously alter not only the status of the bride and groom or criminal but also the status of those watching the proceedings. By operating in this way, performatives work in the realm of history; they initiate the witness as historian. The wedding functions as a performative induction into history. Sedgwick and Parker simultaneously ratify and interrogate the role of witness in the wedding ceremony when they write: It is the constitution of a community of witness that makes the marriage; the silence of witness (we don’t speak now, we forever hold our peace) that permits it; the bare, negative, potent but undiscretionary speech act of our physical presence – maybe even especially the presence of those people whom the institution of marriage defines itself by excluding – that ratifies and recruits the legitimacy of its privilege.12

What they describe is that process whereby certain types of attendees of the ceremony will be initiated into history (those who are willing to testify to the sole legitimacy of the heterosexual bond), and other types (those whose identities are erased by this particular performative) are asked to keep silent. Indeed, in one stroke these silent witnesses are necessary for and excluded from history. Thus, in addition to its exclusion of particular forms of sexuality, of particular participants, and particular names, there is something else that is lost in the heterosexualization of the performative, that is, the right to serve as witness to another. Parker and Sedgwick abjure the wedding’s demand for witness when they write that “any queer who’s struggled to articulate to friends or family why we love them, but just don’t want to be at their wedding, knows it from the inside, the dynamic of compulsory witness that the marriage ceremony invokes.”13 But here, as

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before, they are referring only to the audience’s limited role as witness to the spectacular heterosexuality of the wedding event. While I would agree that the marriage ceremony is defined by a paradigm of witness, I want to locate it a little differently. The audience that witnesses a wedding authorizes the marrying couple to be witnesses for each other – to witness each other’s traumas, to tell each other’s past, to speak for the other’s desires in both personal and legal matters. It is to this latter form of witness that the legalization of civil unions in Vermont addresses itself. The law authorizes same-sex couples to assume the rights of the legal next of kin, including guardianship and medical decision-making, hospital visitation, and control of the partner’s body upon death. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ 1991 work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) offers us a way of seeing this particular form of witness and its implications. The piece consists of two white, institutional clocks, hung side by side, set to the same time. The performative that weds these lovers is “unhappy” in Austin’s terms. The two cannot be “wedded” officially because their love defies the heterosexual ceremonial; it does not involve gender difference but gender sameness – the clocks are identical. Yet they silently trouble the prohibition against same-sex marriage; they are wedded in the sense that they are bound to each other’s mortality, to telling each other’s story. Each is a repetition of the other’s time, each one measures the winding down of the other. Such is, according to Nancy Spector, Gonzalez-Torres’ definition of marriage. In his ideal world, she writes, people do not endure alone; they survive in pairs, as part of loving couples who age together, no longer in danger of premature separation caused by incurable and inexplicable disease. Here, bodily fulfillment refers to being in love, to existing in a state of togetherness, to constituting a community of two.14

I see the “lovers” in Gonzalez-Torres’ work as more than single individuals – I see them as the very potential to establish the community of two through which history, both necessary and impossible, gets told. This is addressed in other works such as the Bloodwork series in which Gonzalez-Torres attempts to bear witness to the trauma of his lover Ross’ illness and death from AIDS, and, at the same time, to witness the witnessing that medicine is granted. In these twenty-one carefully drawn and painted panels, the artist attempts to show what AIDS means to those whose real lives are obscured behind either cold medical data or sensational

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photographs of emaciated faces; those whose bodies behave incomprehensibly, treacherously because of their illness; those about whom science speaks with authority but whose desires it is incapable of representing; those whose histories will be used against them. Each panel consists of a grid on which is drawn a red line that descends from the upper left corner to lower right, as though tracking a dramatic statistical and thus physical decline. These blood tests are a bitter parody of the ones the bride and groom take in order to obtain a marriage license. In both cases the tests bespeak public anxiety over, and consequent attempts to police, the private mingling of blood. But each, in distinctly different ways, helps authorize and invalidate witness, legitimize and bastardize certain versions of the past. As Simon Watney writes: We may thus detect a significant slippage at work between the field of “scientific” medical photography, which identifies symptoms, and a wider form of what might be described as moralised seeing, according to which AIDS is a signifier of powerful non-medical meanings. AIDS thus becomes also a crisis of memory. For when the deaths of our loved ones are casually dismissed as “self-inflicted,” it is the most fundamental level of our most intense experience of life and of love that is effectively denied.15

Gonzalez-Torres disillusions our belief in the necessity of medical witness, showing it to be false, in the end incapable of seeing what it supposes it knows. Instead he insists on the value of witnessing’s impossibility, the authoritative truth that lies precisely in his inability to show the trauma by which he is engulfed and silenced. These facts embolden Gonzalez-Torres to claim the rights of witness, albeit of a different sort, not only to Ross’ traumas, but to history itself. In an untitled billboard he made in 1989, the artist provides an unconventional time-line that reads: “People With AIDS Coalition 1985 Police Harassment 1969 Oscar Wilde 1895 Supreme Court 1986 Harvey Milk 1977 March on Washington 1987 Stonewall Rebellion 1969.” This is history through the eyes of a witness who, it is normally presumed, “will not speak now, will forever hold his peace.” Moreover, by daring to be a queer witness, he shows how history itself is queer, how it is made, not of single comprehensible events and their representations, but of different versions of the same, of repetitions and doublings. The police harassment of gays in New York in 1969 repeats the harassment of Oscar Wilde in 1895.16 The criminalization of homosexuality in 1895 is repeated in the Supreme Court’s

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“Bowers v. Hardwick” decision of 1986. In reading this time-line, we experience 1969 twice – once through harassment, a second time through rioting. With this abbreviated history, Gonzalez-Torres reminds us of the queerness of seeing, the traumatic failure to understand events in the first instance and of the historical repetitions that result from that failure. The third knot we must tie is braided out of questions posed by acts of witness. This knot is called trauma. If both history and seeing are estranged from the real, if they are strangely blurred and doubled, how can one speak effectively of real experience? How can one bind events to their telling? How can one couple the one who experiences history and the one who witnesses it? First of all, we must reconcile ourselves to the traumatic quality of witness. To be a witness means by definition to stand outside of events, even those events we experience directly. That splitting of ourselves is traumatic (hysterical), because it means that, according to Cathy Caruth, what happens is “unavailable.” Trauma is a kind of psychic wound that takes place suddenly, incomprehensibly. It is never understood as it is being experienced but only through a leaving from the event and a latent return, a compulsive repetition. For example, Gonzalez-Torres experiences the brutality of being a gay man in a heterosexist society and so must split himself into the one who screams back at the Christian Coalition in a gay rights parade, and the one who sees his own experience distantly, sees it within what Carl George describes as “a long history of struggle against misunderstandings and aggression.”17 “Trauma,” Caruth writes, “seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.”18 History begins with the moment of listening to that cry, the moment in which, as Caruth says, “we are bound to each other’s traumas.”19 So the second thing we must keep in mind is that history, as Caruth warns, cannot be thought of as “straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and reference).” History is therefore the thing we do in place of “immediate understanding.”20 In the absence of reference, Caruth’s definition of history involves what she calls a “double telling,” which is “the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival.”21 This may involve, as it did for Gonzalez-Torres, the literal crisis of another’s death compounded by one’s own survival, or, as is more often the case, the kind

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of crisis that Barthes describes: “as a living soul, I am the very contrary of History . . .”.22 Let us tie one last knot, a knot that weds history and dispersal. I want to use one of Ross McElwee’s documentaries, one he made in 1993 called Time Indefinite, to think about the implications of wedding as history, to consider the special occasion that history is. This is a film that not only documents weddings but also self-reflexively considers questions specific to historical practice – the nature of documentation, the accumulation of archives, and the trauma of death. It thinks obsessively about what we do in place of immediate understanding. The first and last shot of the film is one taken from a pier off the coast of North Carolina, which captures McElwee’s own shadow and that of the camera perched on his shoulder, as they are cast on the sand below.23 In this brief footage McElwee makes the viewer keenly aware that she is watching a film about filming. Like the photograph that my Aunt Jo took of the movie camera, the shadow on the beach records the act of witness. Time Indefinite starts with a wedding. The film begins at the annual family reunion where McElwee gathers his relatives on the deck of their seaside cottage to announce that he and his filmmaking partner, Marilyn Levine, are going to get married. He sets off to make a film about the specific process of marriage, but more generally about family. He films himself and his fiancée getting their marriage license and their blood tests, Marilyn’s gynecological examination, the pre-marriage drinks with his friends, the caterers and florists setting up for the wedding, and Marilyn getting dressed. A few months later, he records Marilyn announcing to her parents that she is pregnant. All the while he muses about life and death, and the family as a device for measuring time. At a certain point McElwee loses control of this “documentary”; his attempts to direct the events in the narrative about his family are thwarted by his wife’s miscarriage, his grandmother’s death, and the sudden death of his father, all of which take place within a two-week period. He says of that time: “that winter seemed interminable and I found myself profoundly missing my father, my grandmother, and the child that Marilyn and I would have had. It was as if the two generations before me and the one that was to come after me had without warning suddenly vanished.” Most of the rest of the film is taken up with McElwee searching for answers about his father’s death. He travels back to North Carolina and Florida to talk to his sister DeDe and his brother Tom, to stay in his father’s empty house, to talk to his father’s housekeeper Lucille and to his old friend Charleen.

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McElwee sets up a homology between history and wedding early in the film in a scene at a bachelor party where his friends share their experiences of marriage and weddings. They warn him about his own wedding set to take place the next day, that it will resist his attempts both to experience the event and to remember it. One friend tells him, “You won’t get a chance to eat a single piece of food. You will see everyone you know and love in your life but you won’t remember having seen them, even though they’re there because you invited them. You won’t have a chance to talk to anyone you know. It will cost you a fortune and you’ll always have the pictures to look back on.” When McElwee asks if his friend ever looks at his own wedding pictures, he replies, “Many times. There are moments I don’t even remember experiencing, but I have the pictures to prove it.” The wedding not only satisfies the definition of the performative, but because of its inherent latency, it also satisfies a significant part of trauma. While Caruth concerns herself with more cataclysmic forms of trauma (the death of a child, the bombing of Hiroshima), her definition includes the idea that it “is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on.”24 Because I am interested in using trauma to understand more fully the nature of witness, it is precisely that “unassimilated nature” that concerns me here. The wedding, while not usually violent, is almost always seen as an “original” event. It thus can stand for all those special occasions that haunt us because we have forgotten them, significant events about whose fleeting nature we worry, and for which we bring out our cameras. Photographs or home movies become, in this sense, proof that such events actually took place. They are the vehicle by which we return to and re-experience the trauma of our own obliviousness to events we did not understand, the impossibility of our witness. And yet, as McElwee’s film demonstrates, such historical documentation is itself subject to dissolution and loss. It might at first appear that McElwee’s method is the opposite of Gonzalez-Torres’ dispersal. McElwee attempts, through a highly subjective form of cinéma vérité, to collect filmic evidence for as much of his life as possible. So ubiquitous is the camera perched on his shoulder that his father calls him “the big eye.” McElwee explains that the need for documentation runs in his family. In a voice-over, synchronized with clips from a home movie of his own baptism, McElwee says:

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Maybe I picked up the filming habit from my uncles. During the years I was growing up it seemed like either Uncle Fred or Uncle Nate filmed nearly everything we did. . . . Maybe this exposure to cameras has had some subliminal effect on me, made me want to do it when I got older.

There are problems, however, with McElwee’s compulsion to record. “It was becoming more and more difficult,” he complains, “for me to film my own life and live my own life at the same time.” And about the tragic deaths he has endured McElwee confesses: I’ve ended up with a lot of anger. Anger at the fact that my mother and brother and father are gone, but it’s completely useless; there’s absolutely nothing to vent it on. And I think this is connected in some way to why I keep filming away just like Uncle Nate and Uncle Fred, adding more footage to the family archives.

McElwee has learned the harsh and unrelenting and arbitrary nature of death. It is this lesson, combined with his fear of losing still other loved ones, that compels him to record. However, it is not enough for him to film conventionally significant events like weddings or birthdays; his appetite for evidence is insatiable. He films blind dates, his brother shaving, his wife brushing her teeth, his father performing surgery, clouds out of airplane windows, his father’s housekeeper ironing clothes, friends and relatives cooking, himself talking on the telephone, and on and on. But of his attempts to document death he asks, “What good does the proof do me?” Indeed Time Indefinite ends up affirming memory as loss. In this film, McElwee’s own wedding (and his filmed documentation of it) becomes the starting point for a narrative return to the trauma of death. It is as though, in the wedding ceremony, both bride and groom are initiated as witnesses to each other’s sudden and inexplicable experiences of loss and mourning, to each other’s fragile mortality. They are paired one to another “through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound.”25 In the film, McElwee’s own marriage is mirrored by that of his friend Charleen, whose role as witness to her partner is even more dramatic. Charleen’s estranged husband Jim committed suicide by immolating himself inside the house they had shared. She is charged with the care of a fragile archive, her husband Jim’s ashes. They are tied up in a plastic storage bag, which she fondles mournfully to feel the feather-soft dust of incinerated flesh along with the fragments of sharpened bones. Charleen is a historian of Jim’s life, a latent witness to his trauma. Even as

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she touches this delicate souvenir and narrates the story of his suicide, the irreducible bones poke through the bag and turn it into a sieve through which his remains are slowly lost. The paradoxical nature of the archive, its simultaneous obliteration and preservation of the past, mirrors the work of history, the way it forgets in order to remember. Just as Charleen is Jim’s historian, so Gonzalez-Torres becomes the archivist of his dead partner. Like Jim, Gonzalez-Torres’ lover was cremated, his ashes preserved in 100 plastic bags, which the artist left wherever he traveled.26 But unlike Charleen and Jim, Felix and Ross cannot assume the rights of mourning, cannot assume to speak on each other’s behalf. As Simon Watney writes, In these circumstances we often feel that we owe one another “a terrible loyalty,” to borrow from Tennyson. Without marriage and its attendant rituals and institutions, gay men’s most intimate and important relationships are frequently misunderstood and undervalued by heterosexuals, who simply cannot understand what one is actually saying when one tells them that a “friend” is sick or a “friend” has died.27

In October of 1992 ACT-UP staged a protest at the White House (then occupied by George Bush I) in which 11 people, followed by some 8,000 supporters, marched from the Capitol carrying plastic bags containing the ashes of their loved ones who had died of AIDS. Reaching the White House, these 11 witnesses tossed the ashes onto the lawn. This action involved a strategy of dispersal, the letting go of cherished remains, in order to claim the rights of memory and witness. A similar strategy is at work in another of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ installations. His Untitled (Loverboys) (1991) is a pile of white and blue swirled candies, the size and weight of which is meant to match the combined weights of the artist and his lover. The pile serves as a double portrait of sorts, one which yields itself to the interventions of the audience, who are invited to take a piece of the candy for their own. Nancy Spector writes that “in its excessive generosity – its willingness to give itself away to any admiring beholder – the sculpture risks the danger of total dissipation.”28 Of this work, the artist explains: “I was losing the most important thing in my life – Ross, with whom I had the first real home, ever. So why not punish myself even more so that, in a way, the pain would be less? This is how I started letting the work go. Letting it just disappear.”29 It is in this engagement with disappearance and dispersal that I see myself seeing, that I become aware of being an art-historical witness. I remember

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the morning of January 12, 1996, on which I entered my office to find a piece of paper someone had shoved under the door. It was a photocopy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ obituary which had appeared the day before in the New York Times. It struck me that the photocopied newspaper page that I had picked up off the floor was rather like Gonzalez-Torres’ own endlessly reproduced images, piled on various gallery and museum floors and free for the taking. The dispersal of the obituary is, like the dispersal of GonzalezTorres’ other stacks, a dissemination of witness. Of these works he said in an interview: The first stacks I made were some of the date pieces. Around 1989 everyone was fighting for wall space. So the floor space was free, the floor space was marginal . . . and also, to be really honest, it was about being generous to a certain extent. I wanted people to have my work. . . . In a way this “letting go” of the work – this refusal to make a static form, a monolithic sculpture, in favor of a disappearing, changing, unstable, and fragile form – was an attempt on my part to rehearse my fears of having Ross disappear day by day right in front of my eyes.30

Allowing viewers to take the sheets from the stacks, the candy from the piles, let Gonzalez-Torres witness to his own witnessing of Ross’ death, which took place traumatically “right in front of his eyes.” Susan Tallman, writing about the stacks, remarks that “with each removal it moves out from the concise block into the broad, dilute space of the edition, spread over a hundred walls, drawers, refrigerators (what do people do with these things when they get them home?), and there assumes a life both linked to the original sculpture and independent of it.”31 In my office I keep both the photocopy of the Times obituary and one of those offset prints, Untitled (1991), which I got from the Walker Art Center. The black and white print shows the gently rippling surface of water as though the paper had been cut out of the middle of a pond. The dark image, with no horizon line, no objects depicted, no human presence, seems mournful to me. This work of art which is not really an artwork, displayed in a museum but taken out of the museum, is a reminder to me of history’s necessary and impossible work. These artifacts, which are both gifts and burdens, are “linked to and independent of” the history they materialize. They rehearse for me my fears of what disappears from history – what drains out like water, what sifts out like ashes – right in front of my eyes. It is difficult neatly to straighten out the threads and knots I have tangled and pulled at here. So let’s entangle them a bit more by looking at one last

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wedding photo. McElwee’s documentaries are known for his unique style of cinéma vérité and for his intercutting of home movie clips, traditional documentary footage, and bits of videotape. In Time Indefinite he does this repeatedly, in one instance incorporating home movie footage of his parents’ wedding. As we watch the grainy Super 8 images flicker by, and listen to the sound of the home movie passing crudely over the sprockets of the projector, McElwee says: So this reel of film has been lying around for forty years. I bet that my parents never even had time to look at it. Life was probably too hectic. Right after the wedding, my father went back to medical school and my mother was working as a secretary, and then four kids were born in quick succession so we moved from an apartment to a house, and my father was gone every day and most nights working at the hospital, and he saw patient after patient year after year, and year after year my mother cooked and cared for the kids, and there were birthday parties and boy scouts and basketball games and graduations, and it was a forty year blur of events and images, and then suddenly it’s all over. And there was never time for anyone to look at the wedding footage until now.

It is in this way that Time Indefinite engages in stereoscopic seeing and double-telling. It uses McElwee’s own wedding as a repetition of his parents’ wedding. It uses filming as a repetition of his family’s filming of home movies. It attempts to witness the process of witness – the lens that watches history rattle by. And if it repeats the doubling that history does, it also repeats the strangeness of seeing, of not seeing fast enough. In the end, the film is witness to the “forty year blur of events and images.” It consists, to quote Caruth one last time, “not in seeing but in handing over the seeing it does not and cannot contain to another (and another future).”32 And so now too shall I.

Notes 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 65. 2 J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 12. 3 Ibid., p. 6. 4 Ibid., p. 8.

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5 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 224–5. 6 Ibid., p. 225. 7 Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Introduction to Parker and Sedgwick (eds), Performativity and Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 11. 8 Carol Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 109. 9 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 18. 10 Ibid., p. 8. 11 Austin, How To Do Things with Words, p. 13. 12 Parker and Sedgwick, Introduction, pp. 10–11. 13 Ibid., p. 10. 14 Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York: The Guggenheim Museum, 1995), p. 143. 15 Simon Watney, “In Purgatory: The Work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” Parkett, 39 (March 1994): 39. Emphasis mine. 16 The heterological nature of this history is further complicated by the fact that Gonzalez-Torres, when he made a limited edition screen-print of the billboard, changed the date from 1895 to 1891, thus referring to the year of a famous photograph of Wilde. About this change, Susan Tallman writes, “The change of date marks a shift of emphasis from public exposure to private pleasure, reflecting the intimate satisfactions of the print rather than the distant public power of the billboard.” Susan Tallman, “Felix GonzalezTorres: Social Works,” Parkett, 39 (March 1994): 66. 17 Carl M. George, “You Can Take It With You: The Public Life of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” POZ Magazine (December 1998): 70. 18 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 4. 19 Ibid., p. 24. 20 Ibid., p. 11. 21 Ibid., p. 7. 22 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 65. 23 This image is reminiscent of another work by Gonzalez-Torres, his Untitled (Paris) from 1989, a black and white photograph that depicts the shadows of two people standing on a footbridge and cast on the grass below. 24 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 4. 25 Ibid., p. 8. 26 George, “You Can Take It With You,” p. 70. 27 Watney, “In Purgatory,” p. 44. 28 Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, p. 154. 29 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, quoted ibid., pp. 154–6.

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30 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Interview with Tim Rollins, 1993,” in Lucinda Barnes et al. (eds), Between Artists: Twelve Contemporary American Artists Interview Twelve Contemporary American Artists (Los Angeles: ART Press, 1996), p. 88. Emphasis mine. 31 Susan Tallman, “The Ethos of the Edition,” Arts Magazine, 66 (1) (September 1991): 14. 32 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 111.

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This Is I Niru Ratnam

Figure 3 Shez Dawood (as Shez 360), Tower Hamlets Billboard Project, London, 2000. Reproduced with permission

Francis Newton Souza’s Self Portrait (1949) was painted just before Souza left for England, ostensibly because police raided his flat having heard he was responsible for obscene paintings. Souza was a young, rising artist in what was then called Bombay. He had been expelled from the Sir J. J.

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School for Arts in 1945 for supposedly anti-British behavior. At that time he was making images of Goan peasants and Bombay workers in a social realist fashion which drew upon the Mexican muralists. He also founded the Progressive Artists Group in reaction to what he and colleagues perceived as the local Bombay art scene which has been described thus: “The best among native artists, trained in ‘Western style’ painting, succeeded in having their work exhibited at exhibitions of the Bombay Art Society, if they were not crowded out, that is, by the watercolours of the English memsahibs who, in the true tradition of the English gentry, loved to dabble in paints.”1 Although the group may have been rebelling against what they saw as the Victorian hangover that was the Bombay art scene, it is worth noting that the manner of their rebellion clearly echoes Western modernist manifestos. They wrote: “Today we paint with absolute freedom for contents and techniques, almost anarchic; save that we are governed by one or two sound elemental and eternal laws, of aesthetic order, plastic coordination, and colour composition.”2 The Progressive Artists Group dissolved in 1949 – the year of Souza’s departure for London. By that time Souza’s style had evolved, and he had also held a few one-person exhibitions which had gained moderate attention. The self-portrait from that year is a defiant work, sparse, as bare almost as the artist who faces us, his brush cocked at a jaunty angle. The young-looking artist stares back at the viewer with the hint of an interior behind him, and we can make out the word SOUZA somewhat defiantly painted on what looks like the spine of a book roughly half-way up the canvas. The Indian art historian Geeta Kapur has argued that this selfportrait is less a statement of presence but rather a covert turning-away. For Kapur, Souza is part of a generation of artists who forsook India at its moment of independence for the West, with a mistaken belief in the freedoms the West could offer.3 She suggests that the raid on his flat gave Souza the excuse he was looking for to leave and try to stake a place in the West and thus in canonical art history. I would offer an alternative thesis: Souza was born in the Portuguese colony of Goa, and was heavily influenced by the imagery of the Catholic Church – as many later critics would attest. In India, he went to an art school whose syllabus was modeled on that of the Royal Academy, where “Indian-style painting” was only an option to be taken after the Western skills of anatomy, perspective, portrait-painting, drawing from antiques, still-life painting, and painting from the nude. In the earliest account of Souza’s work written for an Indian art magazine in 1949, the author,

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Dr Herman Goetz, noted that Souza’s influences were Matisse, Gauguin, Cézanne, Rouault, Rivera, Orozco, and finally Indian art: the Khajuraho temples, Borobudar reliefs, and the art of Mohenja-Daro. Souza was immersed in the visual culture and history of the West well before he left for India: perhaps then, the self-portrait was less a goodbye, and more of a questioning hello. I would argue that we can read the portrait as aspiring to occupy a subject-position which I think Souza was ultimately never allowed to take up: just another artist in the Western tradition painting subjects which had been painted in the West for years. Whilst Souza enjoyed a high level of critical recognition in Britain in the late 1950s and 1960s, he slipped from the net of canonical art history after his move to the USA in 1967, where, at the time of writing, he still lives in comparative obscurity. Perhaps, then, Souza’s self-portrait is a declaration. It is an attempt to stake a place in a narrative which he was prepared for, but which was not necessarily prepared for him: the narrative now known as canonical art history, which has arguably been founded on the exclusion of those artists from outside the West. This is really what this chapter is about: the attempt to stake a place in an ongoing narrative. Of course, it is now a commonplace observation that these singular narratives, such as history or art history, are made up of a number of internal narratives. However, this correct observation misses one point: those excluded from imaginary singular narratives often have a desire to be part of that narrative, rather than to demolish it. This desire is made manifest in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks (1952) which veers between admitting that desire and expressing a repulsion from it with the key refrain: “You come too late, much too late. There will always be a world – a white world between you and us.”4 Souza, too, was often positioned by critics as somehow too late; an uncanny echo of something they had seen before. For instance, critics were quick to point out comparisons with Bernard Buffet. David Sylvester thought Souza’s paintings were powerful but curiously empty: “But as I stand in front of the paintings I sense only the vehement force and passion behind them, find little of it in them; it is like watching someone singing grand opera on the television with the sound switched off.”5 Meanwhile John Berger was struck by what he saw as ambiguity in the works: “The bearded man in front of the landscape is both arch priest and gimcrack tramp. The nude is a greedy undeniable goddess and yet common as any fruit in a market. The couple are Abraham, or Sarah or Bombay shopkeepers.”6 In the research I have done on Souza I have analyzed

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contemporary readings of Souza’s work such as these to argue that we might understand the critical reception of Souza through Homi Bhabha’s idea of colonial mimicry. In short, Souza, in England, is never quite enough. He is always too much or too little for the critics – a “passionate expressionist” who is also curiously mute to Sylvester.7 This is a scenario that Bhabha articulates in his essay “Of Mimicry and Man” with his two refrains “Almost the same but not quite” and “Almost the same but not white.”8 Bhabha’s account of mimicry is instructive: he argues that it arises from the colonial desire to transform the other – who is a site of radical difference – into something recognizable but still different, in other words “almost the same but not quite.” The twin poles of this mechanism are, unsurprisingly, the twin poles of the Lacanian scene of identification: narcissism and terror. This then is the desire for a reformed other that is changed to be almost the same as the colonial self, but is still a subject of difference. Mimicry is constructed around ambivalence: the need to be “almost the same” means that the colonial other never quite offers an exact equivalence. Instead a slippage arises through the excess or lack arising from being only “almost the same.” As Bhabha puts it in a different context, “to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English.”9 It is a slippage which we can hear in this radio roundtable on Souza’s work which took place in 1957 on the BBC Home Service between the Guardian’s art critic Stephen Bone and the film critic Elizabeth Coxhead: coxhead. I did very much like his pictures of houses; he’s rather good at that, isn’t he, the mood of houses he gets – little bright-red houses of his in native Goa. And oddly enough houses in places like Oxford and corners of London which are very like Oxford and London. bone. Were they Goa? Some of them I thought were on the Great West Road. coxhead. Possibly, possibly bone. Well, I must look at the catalogue again – I’m so sorry.10

Mimicry, then, is constitutive of difference in an active way: as Griselda Pollock has put it, a “differencing” of the canon.11 Yet I want to go back to a moment before this differencing: to the self-portrait of 1949 with its signature placed high up towards the middle of the piece. The work is one of the last male figures that Souza would make in a relatively straightforward fashion: for as soon as he left for Europe, his male figures

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began to change, becoming more religious-looking or more distorted and monstrous. The self-portrait is, then, one of the final times Souza does not attack, exaggerate, or contort the male figure. The male figure is not othered through either monstrosity or sacredness, instead it is depicted in a way consistent with the tradition of self-portraiture in canonical art history. It is thus possible to read the image and the foregrounded signature as reflecting a desire not to be perpetually other, but to be regarded in the same way as his Western peers. We read the portrait more as indicative of a desire – not to difference the canon – but to be part of the canon. This is to read the work as embodying the desire for a subject position – that of a canonical artist – which Souza would never be allowed to occupy. Recalling his time in India Souza mockingly asked: “Who had ever heard of a professional painter in India?”12 In England, Souza would be lost half-way between Goa and the Great Western Road, his imagery alternately screaming and silent with imagery that really ought not to be familiar, but oddly was very much so. In this chapter I want to explore this idea: the staking of claim to a subject position in a history which you can never be present in, and moreover what can be done in light of the failure to stake that claim. *** “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once”: Act V, scene i of Hamlet.13 The famous Yorick scene. The one where Hamlet holds up the skull of the former court jester and muses upon mortality, much as he has been doing for the rest of the play. It’s an odd scene. Nothing really happens at the start. Hamlet and Horatio come across a gravedigger at work, who throws out a skull. Hamlet witters on about who it might be. There’s a clunky interlude where the gravedigger talks about Hamlet in the third person to Hamlet before chucking out another skull. That skull turns out to be Yorick’s – the court jester who had entertained Hamlet as a child. Cue more thinking about mortality. It’s typical Hamlet – entertaining, burbling, and indecisive. His meandering speeches are finally interrupted by a funeral procession, which turns out to be the funeral procession of Ophelia. Laertes – Ophelia’s brother – leaps into the grave in a very public show of emotion and grief. Something finally snaps in Hamlet. After five acts of dithering he actually does something. He leaps into the grave, and he shouts what I would argue are the most significant words of the play: “This is I, Hamlet the Dane.”

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What’s in a name? When Hamlet stakes his claim to be the “the Dane,” he’s not simply stating that he is Danish. The term “the Dane” is an accepted way of describing the king of Denmark, so what Hamlet is effectively saying is “This is I, Hamlet the king of Denmark.” What he is doing is what he has been thinking about throughout the play: he has finally claimed the throne that has been wrongly seized by his uncle who, we learn in the first act, poisoned his brother, Hamlet’s father. “This is I, Hamlet the Dane,” then, can be understood as a claim on a subject position – that of being the king. When Hamlet does make this claim, he is momentarily in an impossible position – for that subject position is already occupied, by his uncle. By its nature, it’s a subject position that cannot be occupied by two people. Only one person can be king. Thus Hamlet is making an unstable claim, a destabilizing bid for a subject position which is already taken. He’s staking a claim to be part of a narrative which cannot accept his claim. Shez 360’s Tower Hamlets Billboard Project was installed for six months in 2000. The project consisted of four billboards located around the Whitechapel and Bethnal Green areas of London. Each billboard presented two images of a young, good-looking Indian man, dressed as Hamlet staring at Yorick’s skull. Our Indian Hamlet is pictured at a slightly different angle in each pose, as if he might be on a slowly revolving pedestal. In each billboard, he passes through approximately one quarter of a turn, so that one might surmise that if the four billboards were placed side by side we could watch him spin a graceful circle in eight positions. But the boards were not placed next to each other. One billboard was located at the end of Bethnal Green Road, one on the Cambridge Heath Road, one opposite Whitechapel underground station, and one on Commercial Street. The area in between them is a rough rectangle of land which roughly corresponds to the patch of London made infamous by Jack the Ripper: an area which was meticulously recreated in Prague for the shooting of From Hell, a film released in 2001 about the Ripper’s murders. One of the reasons why they couldn’t shoot in Whitechapel is that a large part of the area has now morphed into what is called “Banglatown” and has been largely settled by British Bangladeshis. A number of the Bangladeshis run the so-called “Indian” restaurants which line Brick Lane. It is an area rich in history. Waves of immigrants have transformed it; the Huguenots, the Jews, and the Bangladeshis have all changed the fabric of the area – through their houses, their religious practices, and their culinary practices. More recently, artists, musicians – and, briefly, internet

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entrepreneurs – have also become more prominent in the area. The bad girls of young British art – Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas – had their infamous shop on the Bethnal Green Road which runs east–west along the top of the area. Rachel Whiteread has recently bought a synagogue to the north of Brick Lane – her casting of the space underneath the main stairwell was the centerpiece in her exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 2001. The contemporary art duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster have just bought a studio which was once a furniture factory belonging to the English rugby player Jeff Probyn. The area demarcated by Shez 360’s billboards is one that has been of much interest over the past ten years or so. The idea of working-class ghettos morphing into ethnic ghettos which are, in turn, colonized by artists and creatives before finally giving in to gentrification and loft apartments is now a familiar one. It has happened elsewhere in other cities – most notably, in recent times, Paris’s Left Bank, New York’s SoHo, and Berlin’s Mitte. Designer boutiques have moved into all three, along with white cube galleries and pricey loft apartments. You could apply the model to London’s Notting Hill, a once artsy area with a history of anti-racism airbrushed into a foppish middle-class playground for the eponymous Hollywood blockbuster. Yet the model is simplistic. It rests on the assumption that colorful, edgy pasts can be safely bottled away, leaving nothing more than the scent of interest for the colonizers. It is an assumption that hinges on the ability of the present to make a clear and final break with the past. Consequently it is an argument that developers would dearly like people to believe. A colorful past is an excellent bonus if – and only if – it is absolutely in the past. After all, you do not want to buy a luxurious pad in Mitte, only to find a bunch of squatters holding an impromptu nosebleed techno evening there when you return from your weekend in the country. The past is there to be held at arm’s length, mourned and celebrated, firmly differentiated from the present, to be recalled at will. Not unlike holding a skull at arm’s length and harmlessly mulling over mortality. Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well. It is a celebrated schoolchild misquote; for the text actually reads: “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest . . .” How did this misquote – now so enmeshed in some sort of schoolkid collective consciousness – arise? I would argue that it might be for this reason: it is a misquote that brings closure, where in fact there is none in the original. In the original text, as I’ve noted, the phrase leads into a meandering set of thoughts around mortality. The

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misquote cunningly disallows this openness, closing the phrase neatly, closing the past neatly, keeping it safely at arm’s length. But what if the past cannot be closed away this neatly? What if it refuses to come back when you will it? What if it appears when you do not want it to? What if it insists on bleeding into the present, seeping into the loft apartments, mugging gentrification, like the Carnival that continues to charge around Notting Hill upsetting the residents with its middle finger happily raised to the surroundings? Here’s an observation. Walk around the area that was demarcated by Shez 360’s billboards and you’ll see two scooter tribes. The first tribe is the Shoreditch trendies. They’ll be driving Vespas and wearing those dinky helmets which offer no protection when you inevitably vault nose-first into a dual carriageway. In an obvious postmodern gesture, they’ve appropriated a bit of history and made it theirs. Theirs is a conscious choice to mine the past for re-use in the present. The second tribe is the groups of teens who terrorize the same streets on chunky scooters which look uncannily like trainers. They tear up and down, often on the pavements and often with no apparent sense of the highway code. Show one of these garage kids a Vespa and they’ll think (with reason) that it’s a crappy, outdated bike, not even worth stealing. Yet the two groups occupy the same streets, in happy ignorance of each other, and it is this layering that I would argue is crucial: one group reveling in the past to create a retroinflected present, another group who don’t seem to care too much about the past and the cultural history of scootering. History is not the grand, unified narrative we might have once thought it was, but neither has it ended as the postmodern fantasy would have us believe that in a posthistorical age we can somehow stand outside of history, picking and choosing parts of it to refashion at will. History is neither a juggernaut bearing down upon us nor a conveyor belt spread out in front of us; instead history returns in dribs and drabs, and sometimes not at all; and it would be overstating the case to say that it permanently haunts the present, for this is to suppress the repression of history itself, skipping over omissions and plain forgetfulness. I want to read Shez’s billboard project as a claim on a subject position insecurely located within a series of narratives and histories. First, the image is a cliché. Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull is one of the best-known parts of the play and images interpreting it abound, cropping up in a range of discourses from advertisements to comedy. Secondly, the act of playing this role is repeatedly reinscribed. In the images we see a young

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Asian man dressed as one of English literature’s most famous characters. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is itself most probably based on a lost earlier English play which in turn draws upon Danish folklore. Finally the context of the billboard places the images in another visual history – that of billboard ads. The images look a bit like just another ad, with their young, goodlooking protagonist shot against a white background. There’s a strong chance that a number of passers-by, inured to the presence of ads, didn’t even notice them. And so we might say that the sites where the posters appeared, in fact, were already occupied. They were occupied by the memories of previous ads, by the anticipation of more ads. Thus, both the context and the images on the posters were already occupied: by the role of Hamlet, by the particular image of Hamlet holding the skull and by the medium of the advertising billboard. The staking of the claim, then, lies in working from the inside of a number of narratives to produce something momentarily new; it is a process that echoes Bhabha’s account of colonial mimicry that produces difference. It is a challenge to all those narratives which predate the staking of the claim. It is an admission that everything is already occupied and nothing is fresh, but it also attests to the idea that, within this, difference and differencing can still create the new, even if that newness only lasts momentarily. Every position might be already occupied but that does not stop anyone staking a claim, even if all that claim does is momentarily disrupt the smugness of those who lay sole claim to lands, histories, or subject positions, thinking that they’re the owners. It’s deliberately treading on people’s toes. It is a momentary, virtual mugging. I don’t want your money, I just want your space, your time, and your identity, your subject position, your claim on history: this is I. *** Oliver Payne and Nick Relph’s film House and Garage (2001) presents a number of overlapping and sometimes conflicting narratives – snippets of stories of lives led in the London suburb of Kingston: from the recent craze for square dancing to the unsolved racist killing of Ricky Reel. It ends with a series of lists of the things and narratives which surround us and attempt to position us, but I think in the reading out of those lists by multiple narrators there are moments where the narrators are narrating the lists rather than being narrated by them. It’s a momentary hijacking of those discourses which seek to position us, asserting a temporary but

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crucial agency. One of our story-tellers observes as he gets up: “It’s not the greatest story,” and, to be fair, it isn’t – instead it is the act of telling the stories which is crucial. If history is neither grand narrative nor conveyor belt, then how do you make a claim within it – how do you latch on to something which slips and slides out of your reach? Payne and Relph make time momentarily stand still at the end of House and Garage, backspinning a millennial firework display with the barely audible soundtrack of the Sex Pistols’ No Future. All superstar DJs know that a backspin inevitably leads into a perfectly cued-up track, but Payne and Relph subvert this – there’s no big track or tune, and instead the film ends. No Future is backspun to a provisional, silent ending that must somehow correspond with that ticking over of the millennial clock – a moment which slipped from the grasp of all those party-goers around the world. The present always eludes and we can only gesture towards it by thinking about the past and the future, by placing ourselves within their narratives. To stake a claim in the present is to be shadowed by bits of the past and to imagine the futures we are becoming. These are overlapping, sometimes conflicting, narratives, sometimes present, sometimes absent. This is the scenario of sudden appearances that momentarily make sense and then disappear. It’s the scenario of a scooter shaped like a trainer rocketing around a back street alarming the Vespa-driving, Becks-drinking Shoreditch glitterati. Or, of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, making an appearance at the bottom of Bethnal Green Road; a dark prince in amongst the uneasy mix of East Enders, Bangladeshis, BNP youth, and entry-level city workers. One of Shez 360’s billboards was on Commercial Street, an urban throughway punctuated by Hawksmoor’s ominously grand church and Spitalfields market, each redolent with histories, both polluted by the present, fearing and desiring the future. The homeless used to congregate outside the Hawksmoor church to be fed soup by public schoolkids in their gap year, whilst sex workers lured lorry drivers off the nearby A10, A12, and A13 (trade is always best at a crossroads). Today, the developers are taking over half of Spitalfields market to turn it into offices to howls of protest from some of the locals, who want to preserve what they see as history. As the developers moved in, the hookers were hoovered up and the homeless disappeared. In their place stands a bar which used to be a men’s public toilet; cocks in the darkness replaced by vodka tonics. Five years ago, the area around there was on no tourist map. If you go now early on a Sunday you can catch the pathetic rag market that trails

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around Bishopsgate goods yard – the remains of the busy shopping street that Shoreditch High Street once was. Now, all that’s left are old men, drinking cheap lager, selling bits of tat on a dirty sheet that is a glimpse of the past. Most visitors, however, leave the rag market and head for Spitalfields where they find New Age remedies, organic vegetables, and bits of modern design. It will be heaving with new residents (like myself ), tourists, and those drawn by media tales of groovy Shoreditch. Outside there is a petition that you can sign to fight the developer’s sinister plans for the historic site of Spitalfields market. Save our market – save our history. I signed it the summer before writing this while clutching a Coffee Republic Oreo cookie coffee monstrosity in my other hand. Save our history: this skull once had a tongue in it. Go on! Grab your frappucino, dress up, and stick yourself on a billboard. Stake your claim before you are plastered over. Traffic will roar past you and people will ignore you. Kids will graffiti you, kids will fly-post you. Your uncle will poison you before you take the crown that really ought to be yours. Sign a petition, get an ethnic snack, drink a vodka and tonic. Tell people who you are; even if that’s only going to be you for a minute: this is I. *** To reiterate: there’s an impossibility in staking such a direct claim on the present; once you’ve managed to backspin your record to the right moment, it’s gone. As Lacan suggests, the past definite is never available since it is no more, and nor is present perfect (“of what has been in what I am”); rather, only the future anterior is available.14 I met Souza once, in New York in the mid-1990s. He seemed to have shrunk from the mental image I had of him. I had been doing my postgraduate research for around two years at the Courtauld Institute and had obtained Souza’s number and address from one of the few sources in England who knew of his existence in New York. I phoned from my hotel on Broadway, and got a female voice which turned out to be his young, new wife. She seemed hostile, and brushed me off. I phoned again – the same thing happened. On about the third day I was there, I set off for the address I had for him, somewhere along 67th Street. I finally located the apartment, despite the misinformation from a laundrette owner that it had been demolished, and rang the buzzer. Same hostile voice, same information: he’s out. Walking back down 67th I saw him approach me along the pavement. He was much older than the photographs I had seen of him, most of which originated in

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the late 1950s and early 1960s. I stopped him, and asked him if he was indeed Francis Newton Souza. He looked surprised and asked me who I was. I blurted something out about being a research student. He said, yes, he was Francis Souza. And so we went up to his flat, filled with all these paintings which I was sure I recognized. I don’t know how long I was in Souza’s flat. It must have been around an hour I guess. His wife sat like a hawk between us, answering some of my questions, deflecting others. I sensed she had her own plans for research on her husband, and didn’t want me stealing anything. However, about ten minutes into this dysfunctional three-way interview, I realized that I was not really interested in doing the usual art-historical bit – in getting bits of information that you could proudly footnote “in conversation with the author, July 1995” or whatever. Instead I realized that I was more interested in – in fact I was mesmerized by – the fact that I was sitting in front of somebody who was repeating stories to me which I fully believed that, up until that point, had only been known by me. In short, we started reminiscing. Of course, I hadn’t been born in the sixties when Souza hit fame, but I was reminiscing from the letters I had seen, the exhibition pamphlets I had found, unearthed articles, Souza’s writings. I was reminiscing from the idea I had of him and his life built from the British Library, the archives and library at the Tate and the Courtauld. A life scattered around dusty, unopened boxes and files, which were invariably green. Cuttings in Hendon, at the edge of London, an appropriate place to unearth a forgotten career. I think Souza liked the reminiscing once he’d got past the weird bit that I wasn’t actually around at the time that the things I was reminiscing about took place or couldn’t hope to know the people I was talking about. One of them was Victor Musgrave, a brilliant gallerist from the 1950s and 1960s who had died young. I had read Musgrave’s stuff in the Tate archives once, and the material seemed ignored and dormant, waiting for a historian to come and construct a life around him; waiting to become what Musgrave shall have been. Souza recounted the same stories that I had sensed in those archives about Musgrave: for instance the one about how Musgrave had placed an advert in the Times as a twentysomething in order to fund his gallery. He got replies from all over the country, including one from a man who still had his demob money and wanted to do something good with it. The letter came from Cornwall, or Devon, or somewhere which in the 1950s was so far from London that there was no way the donor was ever going to be able to come and check that Musgrave

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spent the money on that something good rather than squandering it. In the end the money, and other donations, were put to good use: Musgrave was the first to show Yves Klein, and he showed Souza every year around the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s. And as Souza repeated these stories, which I already had fragments of, his history and Musgrave’s history were not simply being recounted, they were in the process of becoming what they shall have been. *** Hamlet’s claim is an impossible one. In the next and final scene he is killed, effectively by his uncle although Laertes administers the fatal blow. Ultimately, then, Hamlet could not occupy the subject position which he claimed because it was already occupied. Yet it is arguable that Hamlet knows this when he stakes his claim to that particular subject position. The rest of his words suggest that Hamlet might realize that, by staking his claim and leaping into Ophelia’s grave, he has leapt to his death: “Why, I will fight with him upon this theme / Until my eyelids will no longer wag,” and “Be buried quick with her, and so will I.”15 Thus perhaps we should understand “This is I,” as “This is what I shall have been – Hamlet the Dane.” Conversely, by making the claim Hamlet looks forward to what he is in the process of becoming – the rightful Dane, if only until he meets his death in the next scene. He can never be fully present as Hamlet the Dane, he can only gesture towards what he shall have been for the subject he is in the process of becoming. “This is I” is an impossible claim, for it attempts to nail down the processes of history, to staple a moment in the present down, in the way that Souza’s self-portrait is somehow an impossible self-portrait. And that impossibility attests to a desire: a desire for an authenticating narrative, a narrative which does not exist any more. In our desire to deconstruct such narratives, it is easy to forget about the desire for them which placed them there in the first place, and the mourning for their loss when they have gone, even if this mourning comes from the most unlikely of sources. Souza’s self-portrait stands on the cusp: the past of India is behind it, but that narrative is to change profoundly in post-independence days. The future in the West is in front of it, but that’s only to be a limited future which will end in obscurity in New York. It is on the cusp of the present, and in its impossibility it is neither of the past, the present, or the future. It is an impossible present which is pregnant with all that shall have been.

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Notes 1 Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza: Devil in the Flesh,” Third Text, 8/9 (Autumn/Winter 1989): 28. 2 Exhibition catalog, Souza in the Forties (New Delhi: Dhoomi Mal Gallery, 1983), p. 11. 3 Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza,” pp. 63–4. 4 Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. 122. 5 David Sylvester, New Statesman and Nation, May 23, 1957, p. 23. 6 John Berger, “An Indian Painter,” New Statesman and Nation, February 26, 1955, p. 278. 7 Neville Wallis, The Observer, December 1, 1957, p. 10. 8 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 89. 9 Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” p. 87. 10 Extract from transcript of “The Critics” radio programme, broadcast on December 1, 1957, BBC Radio Home Service. 11 See Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999). 12 Francis Newton Souza, “A Fragment of Autobiography,” in Souza, Words and Lines (London: Villiers Publications, 1959). 13 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (London: Methuen & Co., 1982), p. 380. 14 “What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming,” Jacques Lacan, “Function and Field of Speech and Language,” in Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 86. 15 Shakespeare, Hamlet, pp. 391, 392.

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Part II

The Trouble with Men 79

Distracted and Bored: The Critic Looks Elsewhere

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4

The Trouble with Men 81

The Trouble with Men, or, Sex, Boredom, and the Work of Vaginal Davis Jennifer Doyle

And the best and the worst of this is That neither is most to blame If you have forgotten my kisses And I have forgotten your name. Swinburne1 “Well, it wasn’t meant to last forever!” Vaginal Davis

Introduction Once, in the midst of a morning phone conversation about art and Los Angeles audiences, Vaginal Davis asserted to me: “I am not interested in entertainment.” She wrapped herself in the sentence several times, turning up the volume with each repetition, and imperiously emphasizing a different word: I am not interested in ENTERTAINMENT. I am not INTERESTED in ENTERTAINMENT!” With each repetition, she became more operatic, hilarious, and entertaining. Davis is a black drag queen/performance artist from Los Angeles – a “blacktress,” as she puts it. Her presence, her voice, her charisma are all

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Figure 4 Vaginal Davis, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care, photo collage of performance, Los Angeles, April 2000. Reproduced with permission

larger than life, amplified by an Amazonian physique. Well over six feet tall, she towers above her entourage. She is incredible to watch, partly because she welds a hard and intricate version of femininity to a supersized black body: she could be Edith Piaf ’s mulatta sister (or brother?), magnified. As Davis lamented the limitations of her audience in Los Angeles (a city very interested in entertainment) I had to hold the phone away from my ears – I could have heard her campy assertion of avant-garde pretension through the phone, from across the room. In our phone conversation, Ms. Davis and I reviewed the successes, failures, and scandals of her performance art boutique “GIMP,” run out of a queer bar in Los Angeles, in partnership with her friend, the artist

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The Trouble with Men 83 Ron Athey. The previous night’s event had been thematically organized by the slogan “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care,” and Davis had worked it as Vanessa Beecroft, an art-world star and actual person, represented by the Gagosian Gallery. Beecroft had been invited to participate in that year’s Whitney Biennial, and was most known for her “installations” of scantily clad female fashion models and fully uniformed US navy SEALs. Dressed and coiffed just like Beecroft – who is a petite, curvaceous Italian woman – Davis boasted, again and again, about having been invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial. Working the room in the elegant haute couture and pumps of a well-bred bitch (think Anna Wintour in a Chanel suit), and in a near perfect imitation of Beecroft’s particular brand of feminine naivety, Davis-as-Beecroft crowed about her achievement as she introduced each new act. Vanessa Beecroft’s “installations” of models and US navy SEALs are deliberately provocative – clusters of naked and nearly naked skeletal women stare vacantly into space and mime the posture of haute couture, citing the conceptual runway antics of the season’s hottest designers; navy SEALs stand in formation as ready-made national monuments. Beecroft performances are gala publicity events: people crowd into the galleries to see the “live” version of the girls pictured in the photographs used in her publicity kits, and sold by her galleries. Her work finalizes the corporate marriage of art and fashion, and renders visible the libidinal dynamics of art consumption: gorgeous bodies served up to paying customers under the guise of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment. This essay takes up the complexity of Davis’s citation of Beecroft. In exploring the difference between the two artists, I will position Davis in a dialectical relation to the institutions of the art world as they are expressed in Beecroft’s work, primarily through a discussion of the place of sex and boredom in the work of both artists. My approach to Davis orbits around a series of failures (meaning moments of collapse, unexpected turns in the performance, misrecognitions on the part of the audience), and takes these failures as, in fact, both revealing and definitive not only of Davis’s performance practice, but as the route by which the practice of “art” becomes visible in her performance as an object of critique. I will, furthermore, implicitly argue that, to the extent that Davis’s work exists in dialectical tension with an institutionalized avant-garde, it suggests that the dialectical is always already a bit queer. I should admit that I have been thinking about Davis’s work recently because it responds particularly well to Adorno’s writing on aesthetics –

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Davis’s work is queer and dialectical. In coupling Davis’s aesthetic practices with Marxist criticism I am following the lead of José Muñoz who, in his book Disidentifications, reads Davis in relation to Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of the functions of the intellectual. I read Adorno’s writings on art for years with much aggression and very little confidence. His rapid acceleration from passing observation to heady theorization of everything more often than not leaves me in the dust, squinting. I have persisted out of spite: the sociology of Marxism in the academy is more macho than I can accommodate – men speaking with total confidence about concepts like dialectical criticism and aesthetic negativity, girlfriends sipping their drinks, talking to each other about something else (wondering, however, if these boys really know what they are talking about). It was only recently, reading Aesthetic Theory in bed one night when I was feeling particularly angry at the world, that I understood the value of his writing as a critical vise, as writing squeezed out of the grip of ethical imperative and an unrelenting sense of despair. This is expressed, for example, in Adorno’s comment on the critic’s bad-faith claim to detachment: “The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such. His own distance from business at large is a luxury which only that business confers.”2 The critic’s sense of independence from the systems he or she describes is a privilege underwritten by those systems – a benefit one must enjoy, Adorno writes, cautiously, modestly, self-consciously, not by the virtue of “good upbringing, but by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell.”3 Writing of the importance of these grim observations to the architecture of Adorno’s thought, and to Adorno’s understanding of the role of the intellectual, Fredric Jameson describes “the sheer guilt of art in a class society, art as luxury and class privilege” as “a ground bass that resonates throughout all of Adorno’s aesthetic reflections without a break. . . .”4 One could nominate this aspect of the mood of Adorno’s writing as a prime source for its difficulty. Jameson, in a separate essay, describes another: the critic’s sense of entanglement can make it impossible to describe any single detail without lugging the whole system into the equation, as if, when reading Adorno, you aren’t sure what the point of any given passage is until you’ve read the entire section – in part because he won’t let the reader occupy the position of “detached observer” long enough to take in the long view.5 My interest in this aspect of Adorno’s writing is part of a larger project on the applicability of Marxist writing on aesthetics (and on aesthetic

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The Trouble with Men 85 negativity in particular) to the sexual politics of art. Adorno’s insistence on the entanglement of the critic in the world she observes indicates an important point of commonality between (at least) feminist, queer, and Marxist writings. Feminist critics have long interrogated the reproduction of patriarchal authority in the rhetorical posture of the disinterested critic. Arguing in this vein, Amelia Jones writes that The psychic dimension of aesthetic judgment as a strategic mode of othering (of producing boundaries to define white, upper-middle class, masculine culture as superior in relation to a debased – non-white or “primitive,” lower-class, feminine – alternative) is relatively clear. It is crucial, then, for the art critic/art historian to claim “pure pleasure,” to avoid acknowledging his investments in the determination of meaning: “the loss of the subject in the object” threatens not only the interpreter’s claim to authority, but his very coherence as a subject (who is implicitly masculine, white, heterosexual, upper middle class, etc.)6

This critique of traditions of aesthetic judgment requires that feminism assert the contingency of value, and make visible the position of the critic. Feminist criticism must call into question the management of aesthetic value by art institutions and critical habit. The enunciation of impure pleasure, therefore, is integral to the work of the feminist intellectual. This essay experiments with this harmony between Marxist perspectives on aesthetic judgment (as inherently political, especially in its refusal to appear political), and critical models grounded more explicitly in the sex politics of art (a subject which almost never comes up in the circles of critics who use Adorno to talk about art). This is not, however, to move the affect of Marxist writing away from the subject of class warfare. When guilt and shame register in contemporary art it is frequently around spectacles of femininity, homosexuality, and blackness. Art, as understood by Davis in her citation of Beecroft, is a form of class warfare. My aim is to demonstrate how the institutional consequences of material difference become differently visible in Davis and Beecroft’s performances as sexual and racial difference.

The Trouble with Men Davis’s performance in “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care” (April 2000) cited Beecroft’s work with the US navy, in which neatly uniformed military

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men lined up in galleries, or on the deck of a navy ship to reiterate nationalism’s creepy glamour (“U.S. NAVY,” San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, June 1999; “V.B. 42,” Whitney Biennial 2000). Where Beecroft’s work with women has, over time, moved towards the presentation of an idealized high-fashion femininity, “U.S. NAVY,” writes Ron Athey, “used the military’s ultimate marine warriors, the SEALs, to stand in for the male.”7 Men hand-picked by navy representatives marched into the gallery space and stood in place for about 20 minutes, shifted their posture in unison, and then marched out, and marched in again, and repeated the performance. By all accounts the most interesting part of this event was the visibility of the difficulty the men had maintaining a straight face. Davis hosted “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care” as Beecroft, orchestrating an evening of queer burlesque – singers, strippers, and body artists shared their quirky projects with a mostly drunk, cruisey, and queer audience. The evening’s headline performance was Davis’s own. Reading from a dog-eared handbook of military conduct for marines, Davis/Beecroft called a small crowd of carefully chosen young men onto the performance area (the event was staged in the back of a bar). Unlike the state-approved pressed and manicured men of Beecroft’s “U.S. NAVY,” Davis’s boys were soft, skinny, rumpled, floppy-haired aspiring bohemians. Some seemed just barely on the legal side of 18, others, more weathered. While they filed into their place, Davis kept time in her lilting and booming voice, and elaborated on passages in the handbook which struck her as particularly erotic. Her boys paraded in uniform from the waist up only: dressed in Russian sailor shirts, jockey shorts, and socks. Once all were arranged in rows, a “real live Marine” in full military regalia marched ceremoniously to the foot of the performance area, stripped, and played with himself while gay art-pornographer Bruce La Bruce, in a crouch, camera in hand, circled, documenting. The porn-star/marine failed to work up a meaningful erection. One of Davis’s navy boys stepped forward and dropped to his knees (ever ready, Davis sang out, to serve his country). This was an unexpected turn of events. As he knelt at the feet of the naked marine, he appeared to be drunk, but very enthusiastic. The performance dissolved around this moment. As an audience we watched the “marine” massage his penis and then receive a rather vigorous blow job. We were suspended in a state of anticipation – and then an almost excruciating boredom. The chorus member’s fellatio made little impact on the problem. We found ourselves leaning forward, scrutinizing the performance. A question yawned before us. Whose failure

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The Trouble with Men 87 was this? The marine’s? Or was he the recipient of a bad blow job? Were we the problem? Did we make the marine nervous? I could say that a large cloud of anxieties gathered over the room: the spectacle of phallic failure produced the possibility that the shame circulating throughout the room might come to rest. But this is not exactly what the performance felt like. Even before the navy boy stepped up to go down, it was clear to all of us that the marine was never going to get a full erection, never mind ejaculate. I, at least, stopped waiting for this, and found myself growing bored with the spectacle. We had started out knowing what we were waiting for – and as long as we were waiting for this, we were held in a state of anticipation. Once, however, the performance’s trajectory veered off the script of phallic display and into the domain of phallic failure the most pressing issue became our presence – what were we waiting for, if it wasn’t sex? Some might say that boredom emerged at this moment as a protective bubble – an affect that allowed us not to be overwhelmed by anxiety while we kept looking. Boredom is often treated in this way – as a failure or as a pathological symptom. The bored spectator or reader poses the same problem for the critic that the bored child does for adults around her. The analyst and essayist Adam Phillips writes that boredom is heard by adults as a demand, sometimes as an accusation or failure or disappointment, [but] it is rarely agreed to, or simply acknowledged. How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him – as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting.8

The risk one takes in writing about boredom is the reproduction of the scene of this demand – that the spectacle be endlessly interesting, that the spectator be endlessly interested, that we critics, at the very least, produce the effect of interest. To cite Adam Phillips again: “Boredom . . . protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be.” “So the paradox of the waiting that goes on in boredom is that the individual does not know what he is waiting for until he finds it, and that often he does not know that he is waiting (at all).”9 Boredom flowered only in the absence of a sense of purpose, just at the moment we abandoned anticipation. The ephemeral character of boredom distinguishes it from other affects. It is not unlike “surprise,” which Sylvan Tomkins describes as a “resetting”

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affect. A resetting affect has no life outside the moment of resetting; it is, by definition, a moving affect, more a route than a destination – a route, furthermore, which takes you not from one point to another on the same grid (from “a” to “b”) but from one grid to another (from “a” to “2”).10 Phillips approaches the affect with an eye on its place in therapy. Extending his description of boredom’s space-clearing relation to desire to the work of the psychoanalyst, Phillips suggests that “[o]ne could, in this sense, speak of the ‘analytic attitude’ as an attentive boredom.” The good analyst will not perform interest for the sake of her client so much as she will allow herself to be bored by her (and what, really, is more pleasurable than a therapist who seems to relax under the blanket of your prattle?). With a little tinkering, we might use this understanding of boredom as a model for an embodied form of aesthetic enjoyment.11 It is hard to argue with someone’s boredom, in much the same way that it is hard to argue with someone’s arousal – both are stubborn and unpredictable. Along with the suspension of disbelief we might add another precondition: an openness to boredom that would allow us, in criticism, to replace the “detached observer” with a body that is both less committal (always ready to walk away) and more promiscuous (or go straight to bed). According to the original plan, the “real live marine” was supposed to ejaculate into the audience. Instead, he reminded us that the penis is rarely the Phallus we want it to be. His failure to perform exposed our investment in the discovery of military culture as pornographic fantasy. The truth of the piece was far more problematic, however, than that of the pornographic spectacle: military culture revealed as a compensation for the vicissitudes, the unpredictability of the masculine body. The official space cited by Beecroft and Davis was exposed by the latter as the last place where one might find an economy of pleasure that could assign value to the man who can’t get it up. Having failed to provide the spectacle which might punctuate his performance, Davis dismissed him and the troupe of sailors. The boys marched off stage and dispersed into the audience, leaving in their wake a lasting confusion over whether or not Davis had been invited to perform as part of the Whitney Biennial. After all, as Beecroft, she’d been boasting about the invitation all evening. The moment our attention shifted from the spectacle to our place in the room, and to Davis’s relationship to art institutions, the performance came closest to reproducing the basic structure of Beecroft’s signature work with women. The differences between Beecroft’s and Davis’s work are, to a certain extent, obvious. Beecroft is a white European woman

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The Trouble with Men 89 who works with exclusive galleries and with museums, and whose career is covered by Artforum and Vogue (for example) – magazines explicitly invested in the reproduction of the culture of luxury. Vaginal Davis is a black drag queen, a grande dame of the queer underground in Los Angeles, on the margins of both the Los Angeles art world (as non-commercial) and the gay scene (black, queer, punk rock drag queen that she is). In her self-presentation, Davis mobilizes a high-camp version of femininity and the rhetorical force of the Black Power movement (she took her name as a homage to Angela Davis), as well as an aggressively queer version of male homosexuality. As José Muñoz has detailed in his own writing on the artist, Davis’s drag is a carefully staged performance of disidentificatory practices. Unlike “commercial drag [which] presents sanitized and desexualized queer subjects for mass consumption,” Davis adopts a “guerrilla style . . . that functions as a ground-level cultural terrorism.” Often wearing toxic aspects of white culture as costuming, Davis “fiercely skewers both straight culture and reactionary components of gay culture,” Muñoz argues, “performing the nation’s internal terrors around race, gender, and sexuality.”12 Davis’s gravitation towards Beecroft’s work with the military was, given this understanding of her method, inevitable insofar as it allowed her to take on a range of these “internal terrors” simultaneously. In another iteration of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care” (July 2001, at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival), for instance, Davis pulled the palest of her boys from the ranks, and praised the pallor of his skin, singing out “America Looooves Your Whiteness” as she bent him over, pulled down his underwear and rubbed his ass cheeks for a cheering throng of gay men and women – an audience which loved his whiteness, for all the wrong reasons. As Muñoz explains, one of Davis’s most powerful contributions to contemporary queer art is its aggressive attack on white homo-normativity, declaring a boredom, as does the title “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care,” with the organization of gay politics around things like participation in military culture by asserting the queer presence in military culture as always already there – and, to a certain extent, as always already more gay than mainstream gay culture. Beecroft herself never appears in her performances – Davis’s adaptation of the artist as a persona is arguably her most aggressive revision of the former’s work. As Muñoz argues in detail (tracking Davis’s performative disidentification with white supremacist punk), the artist is absolutely fearless in her avowal of the lure of those aspects of white hegemony that are most explicitly organized against the survival of queers of color. What

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became almost desperately visible in “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care” was the awful work women perform within the profoundly homosocial space of art: although Davis/Beecroft kept time for the marching boys by chanting from her queer handbook of military conduct, she was a superfluous, excessive presence in the drama of sexual failure played out for us. The abjection let loose by the collapse of the phallic spectacle seemed to collect around Davis herself – until, that is, she’d had enough and sent the boys home. In the end, the marine’s failure to get it up perfectly supported Davis’s production of herself as “art-bitch,” as a monstrous expression of femininity that commands, but only from the margins. The coupling of her invocation of the Whitney’s name with the performance of phallic failure (staged, furthermore, as a camp appropriation of military posturing) opened up the potential failure of Davis’s work as art – as if in the “Whitney” version, the porn star’s dick would be fully operational or, even more disturbing, as if what was missing was the “real” Beecroft. The authorizing presence of the Whitney upset the balance of the evening – in which, in a queer bar, drunk, cruising, few were thinking about what might make any of the performances aesthetically important. For a moment at least, it became all we wanted to talk about. This is to say that Beecroft’s work is also an attractive target for Davis because it is an ethically ambiguous homage to the most regressive impulses in art. This is especially true of her work grounded on the explicit display and objectification of women’s bodies. Models lined up in rows at the Guggenheim in Gucci bikinis and high heels are subjected to awkward inspection by art connoisseurs. Her performances appeal to the particular arrangement of guilt, shame, and ambivalence that hovers over “Art” as a social institution. These mixed feelings are often allegorized in the display of the female body – in which a woman’s alienation from her own sexuality stands in for art’s final compromise with the logic of the marketplace. When the audience of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care” noticed its own boredom with the marine’s attempts to get it up for us, Davis accidentally reproduced (and rewrote) this aspect of Beecroft’s work. The relatively easy absorption of Beecroft’s work into the art market (in spite of its grounding in live performance) draws out one of the critical dilemmas facing feminist critics of contemporary art: on its face, it seems to forward a feminist critique of the art world by literalizing the place of women as objects of consumption/contemplation. Her performances (and the photographs which document them) are cathartic – they provide a space in which citizens of the art world can exorcise their guilt – they can

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The Trouble with Men 91 bump against their own limits, stew in their own complicity in the subjection of women. Take, for example, Dave Hickey’s channeling of the art market’s sense of Beecroft’s importance. Writing of Beecroft’s installation/performances as tableaux vivants, Hickey describes the imposition of self-consciousness upon Beecroft’s spectators: In the presence of these tableaux we are denied both the privacy of contemplating a representation and the intimacy of participating in a real encounter. As a consequence we find Beecroft’s women, at once more present to us and less accessible than we would wish, as unavailable to our understanding as they are available to our gaze. Our anxiety, then, does not arise from the fact that naked women are near us, but from the unbridgeable, yet illdefined distance between ourselves and them. It is not the anxiety of desire, but the anxiety of displacement. . . . In the mirror image of an anxiety dream, we find ourselves unkempt and slovenly in our clothing, confronted with the cool authority of art’s nakedness, and we have no role to play. Neither worldly enough to stare – to re-impose the distanced logic of the gaze – nor innocent enough to accept the world in its nakedness and opacity, we drift and loiter.13

It is nearly impossible to think about Beecroft’s work without noticing its complicity with the economies of interest and value that underpin the gallery system, but which are a continual source of shame to the art world. In Los Angeles, a trip to a Beecroft performance is a trip to Beverly Hills (where the Gagosian Gallery is located). Carefully dressed socialites, art patrons, and hangers-on move around thin and barely dressed “models.” Photographs of “V.B. 46” show attendees pushed up against the walls, not entirely sure where and how to look, as Hickey predicts. This is, however, more or less the case with every event at the Gagosian. Each person in attendance wears their own version of social privilege – a newly acquired sense of entitlement might have brought you through the door, but your probational status leaves you with an eye trained on the nearest exit. Beecroft’s performances make explicit art’s total complicity with business (with fashion, with the deep penetration of the self by consumer culture). There is nothing inherently radical, however, about the accusatory turn of such work – about making visible that uneasy feeling one gets moving about a gallery space, around a cluster of naked or nearly naked skinny women, feeling slightly ashamed, titillated, and, ultimately, aware of the libidinal energies that frame the experience of art consumption. One

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might construct a history of modern and contemporary art around such turns towards the audience to reveal art’s underbelly, replacing Clement Greenberg’s trajectory towards the blank canvas with a series of attempts to tell this other truth about art. We could begin, perhaps, with Olympia’s notorious stare, and her black companion’s sidelong glance at the body of the prostitute, the black woman’s stolen glance providing a substitution for a different, more authorized, gaze: that of the white, bourgeois, male art consumer. As has been thoroughly argued, Olympia is not only a portrait of a prostitute. It is, as Benjamin Buchloh once described it (in passing, alongside a discussion of Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe), a portrait of “our collective scopic prostitution.”14 The painting takes as its subject the spectator’s lust for the spectacle, the audience’s complicity in the production of Olympia (the artwork) as art commodity, allegorically linking, furthermore, the work of the artist with that of the prostitute.15 The painting unmasks our group participation in, to borrow from Rosalind Krauss, “the denial and self-deception under which the thrill of libidinal possession [is] carried on in the name of disinterested pleasure and ideal beauty.”16 It refuses to go along with what we all already know about the nude but which we bury in our enjoyment of her spectacle – that the nude has always already turned a woman into a thing by turning her into a commodity. In refusing to disavow this circulation of money and desire, and, as T. J. Clark has argued, in linking this refusal to an avowal of its status as a painting, Olympia claims prostitution not as the thing most alien to high art, but as the thing that has become most constitutive of it.17 Olympia claims as its subject not a prostitute, but the artwork’s solicitation of its audience. Throwing down the challenge that must lead to the aggressive contestation of the myth of the autonomy of art – Olympia asserts that there is no more art that does not engage in a form of prostitution. This is to say that artworks, within this provisional tradition, announce themselves in the unveiling of our erotico-economic investment in Art. In a quixotic essay on the subordination of sexuality to discourse, Adorno describes this kind of mobilization of sex as “the de-sexualization of sexuality,” a “fatal integration” of sexuality, in which “Libidinal energy is displaced onto the power that dominates it and thereby deceives it.” Adorno predicts the range of affects and poses modeled by Beecroft’s women when he writes that this reification of sex “is strengthened by the premium patriarchal society places on the female, her passive docility, weaned from all personal affect, if possible, from all aspiration to her own pleasure.”18 It would be easy to plug Adorno’s words on this point into an argument

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The Trouble with Men 93 against the deployment of sex in the space of art – into the critical dismissal of sexually explicit art as pornographic, as hollow, as “not-real.” This is not my intention, nor is it Adorno’s point. Sex, for all of its appearance in art as the “real,” the unruly, the free, is more often than not completely divorced from the politics of sexual practices, from the regulation of sexual subjects. Peter Bürger, in his review of the status and function of avant-gardism, explains the basic structure of the move I am attempting to describe: “The European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men.”19 The avant-garde exposes the myth of the autonomy of art, with the assertion that art is always already fully complicit with the very social systems against which it defines itself. Beecroft’s work reproduces this fundamentally negative (meaning critical) move, using the allegorical force of the compromised woman to make a single artwork about “Art” as a whole.20 This is the critical leap that Hickey makes in his appraisal of her importance: “The odd frisson of confronting something like casual, domestic nakedness in a public space is combined with the unnerving frisson of confronting the constituents of showgirl review in a naked modern space, robbed of its theatrical accouterments, its framing proscenium.”21 This expression of avant-gardism is explicitly offered up as a fashion statement – it adopts the pose of a critique of the objectification of women in art, but the power of that critique is all but completely dismantled by the institution which mounts it. As Bürger argues, the reproduction of this critique of the myth of art’s autonomy no longer works as a critique of art-as-institution. “Art as an institution,” he writes, “prevents the content of works that press for radical change in society [i.e., the abolition of alienation] from having any practical effect.”22 In other words, in the wake of what Bürger calls the “historical avant-garde” (a historical moment when avant-gardism had the capacity to spark fist-fights – a historical moment which art institutions produce nostalgically), art as an institution (which has fully assimilated the avant-garde’s critical move) constantly reproduces its own failure to rise above (as opposed to ‘about’?) the material. The distinction between aesthetic and sexual interest provides one of the most powerful vectors for the expression of this failure. Sex emerges as the secret about art that the artist (and the critic) can’t help but confess. This is, from my perspective, an explanation of the difference between the career trajectories of people like David Wojnarowicz and Annie Sprinkle

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(who, for most of their careers, have been read as art and sex activists) and artists like Vanessa Beecroft. The sexual possibilities embedded within and contained by Beecroft’s installations lend her work a gallery-sanctioned radicalism, just as sex, as a signifier, does the work of, for instance, Jeff Koons. In this space, in which the making-visible of the spectator’s desires institutionally signifies art’s failure to transcend the body, sex is removed from sexuality as a practice (and here I feel myself approximating, at least in tone, an especially grouchy version of Marxism’s suspicion of all processes of objectification).23 The value of Beecroft’s work to feminists depends upon our ability, as spectators, to keep up with a series of reversals, to use her work in order to track the “de-sexualization” of the sexual body when it is displayed at the Guggenheim. Show, without irony, exposes the containment of sex and the aggressive regulation of pleasure by art institutions. Davis’s appropriation of Beecroft forces the question, however: Is this enough? Davis uses Beecroft much as queer boys and girls use Barbie dolls – as an occasion for misuse. It is a hallmark of Davis’s work that the sources she appropriates are sometimes so deep inside art-world institutions, and so prophetic, that many of her audience members don’t recognize the citation (but soon enough see the cited figure everywhere they turn – but only if they care to read the right art magazines, and much of her audience doesn’t). That night Davis trumped her audience: a sizeable contingent left the club thinking that Vaginal Davis, a Los Angeles-based Amazonian black drag queen with solid welfare class roots, had been officially sanctioned by a major museum as a representative of contemporary American art. I admit that I was among those who confused Davis’s performance as an artist that night with the artist that Davis was performing. When I first realized the misrecognition and the nature of my confusion I experienced an uncomfortable mixture of embarrassment and relief – embarrassed by the naive optimism that is symptomatic of my own suburban youth, and a relief that I’d caught the mistake before, in conversation, I’d revealed my ignorance. I take that misrecognition to be an important effect of this piece, and a major part of Davis’s presence in the Los Angeles queer underground in general. Davis’s performances are not usually events around which you are likely to find yourself pretending to recognize names you don’t because you are worried what people will think if they find out you, perhaps, know all the wrong people. I would contrast this misreading (of Davis as Beecroft), furthermore, with another misreading: At “V.B. 46” (Beecroft’s performance for the

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The Trouble with Men 95 Gagosian gallery in Beverly Hills), perfectly attired black security guards dressed in black supervised Beecroft’s audience. They were as uniformly dressed and aloof as Beecroft’s girls – their affect so similar, in fact, and their color so curated, that several in attendance wondered if the guards were a part of the piece.24 This was a mistake – blackness in America invokes such a powerful coupling of threat and nobility of manner that, in Beverly Hills, security agencies rent black male models to galleries, bars, and expensive restaurants looking to lend their threshold-to-fabulousness something of “the dignity of the bouncer.”25 The black man’s body is so penetrated by economies of use that even standing around doing nothing, he works. The work performed by these men may be placed in a genealogical relation to the anchoring presence of the black woman who hovers behind and above Olympia. The blackness of the guards became momentarily visible as the shadow of Beecroft’s staging of white femininity: in “V.B. 46” Beecroft mounted femininity as a useless white spectacle – women bleached by white wigs, white walls, bright lights, and white powder; women who can’t speak to you or to each other; women good for nothing but standing around. This may be the most useful aspect of Beecroft’s work: the potential misreading unleashed by the fascism of her aesthetic, which is powerful enough to make the intense regulation of black participation in the arts conspicuous. Davis’s performance as Beecroft starts with the horizon of that artist’s work: arousal and the hard-on, the invisibility and deep irrelevance of female pleasure (to art, and to sex), a fascination with whiteness-asspectacle, the black body as the ground against which art defines itself. She gives us a black drag queen’s burlesque on the attraction of white masculinity as a spectacle and the limits of white masculinity as a performance. Ultimately, Davis’s performance offered us a camp deconstruction of the art world’s fascination with its own shame. Davis’s performance manipulated the conflicting investments of her audience (a fairly white expression of Los Angeles alterna-bourgeoisie: gay and straight men and women students, artists, academics, musicians). In general, one does not attend Davis’s performances in Los Angeles looking for an art experience – those who do are working with a different set of expectations than attendees of Show or Beecroft’s Gagosian events. Davis is more tightly knitted to a queer social underground than the city’s network of galleries, artists, and art critics. She supports herself through the promotion of events like GIMP (housed in bars here and in Europe), by writing occasional articles for fashion magazines, and by speaking and performing at universities. When

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she makes public appearances, people turn out to see who turns out as much as they do for Davis herself – partly because an appearance at a Davis event is more valuable as queer gossip, as an indicator of that person’s relationship to queer culture, than as an indicator of Davis’s worth to art institutions. And unlike art openings, no one attended “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care” in the hope of meeting someone who might advance their career. The chance of making such a connection was much smaller, and much less interesting, than the chance of taking one of Davis’s boys home for yourself (they became part of the audience after Davis’s performance). We can use Samuel Delany’s distinction between spaces which promote “contact” and “networking” to explain the difference between Davis’s performance in a gay bar and Beecroft’s performance at a gallery or a museum. He writes: [Contact] is the pleasantries exchanged with a neighbor who has brought her chair out to take some air on the stoop. . . . As well, it can be two men watching each other masturbating together in adjacent urinals of a public john – an encounter that, later, may or may not become a conversation. Very importantly, contact is also the intercourse, physical and conversational, that blooms in and as casual sex in public restrooms, sex movies, public parks, singles bars and sex clubs . . . from which nonsexual friendships and/or acquaintances lasting for decades or a lifetime may spring . . . a relation that, a decade later, has dissolved into a smile or a nod, even when (to quote Swinburne) “you have forgotten my kisses / and I have forgotten your name.”26

Contact, in Delany’s understanding, requires a space conducive to crossclass contact. It is not, he is careful to assert, necessarily conducive to the formation of a sense of community. It is a practice that grows out of the overlap between different communities which share the same physical space. It is specific to urban settings. “Networking situations are selfreplicating structures of knowledge and desire. Desire is what holds them stable and replicates them, and the absence on which that desire is based is the paucity of socio-material benefits everyone who attends them hopes to receive.”27 “Networking,” the social management of a scarcity of recognition, “tends to be professional and motive-driven,” Delany writes, and is inherently competitive. One might map the shape of the system of scarcity Delany describes onto the “premium placed onto the female” that Adorno describes – women’s removal from pleasure, their appearance of cool

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The Trouble with Men 97 unavailability, stands in for institutional indifference to the hoards of artworld wannabes in hopeful attendance (aspiring critics, struggling artists, anxious sophisticates, etc.). Beecroft’s women, in this sense, stand in for Art, exactly as they adopt the look of boredom. Davis’s citation of Beecroft and her invocation of the authority of the Whitney Museum of American Art disrupted the habits of her own audience because her aesthetic practice is cultivated within zones of contact, and has an entirely different relationship to terms like “recognition,” “career,” and “art” than does Beecroft’s. The event centered on the spectacle of Bruce La Bruce photographing a guy in a Russian navy get-up going down on a naked marine, producing pictures not for Artforum, but (according to Davis/Beecroft) for the gay porn rag, Honcho. (These photographs have yet to appear in the magazine, however, no doubt because the marine never produced a usable image for the photographer.) In injecting art’s institutional force into the spectacle of queer sex (samesex, as well as drunken, casual, and non-ejaculatory), the piece raised questions about the line between pornography and art – but from a different angle than that described by the exemplary figures in gay studies in art history (like Robert Mapplethorpe).28 Davis’s work does not disturb the boundary between art and sex by making art that is overtly sexual, or that formally anticipates its own censorship (as Richard Meyer theorizes the expression of homosexuality in twentieth-century art-making). More nearly, Davis troubles the art–sex distinction by invoking high-art traditions in the most inappropriate spaces (rather than inappropriate acts in high-art spaces). The performance leaned into art (by citing Beecroft) and out of it (by being too explicit, too dirty) at the same time. The apparent bestowal of a high-art status on Davis by the Whitney promised to anchor the value of the performance piece, which then became unhinged by the marine’s inability to get it up. In “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Care,” art was staged as the sexual spectacle that never managed to “happen,” as the failure to become sex. The movement from the optimistic, almost utopian vision of art which places Vaginal Davis at the Whitney to the “correct” understanding of the invocation of the Whitney’s name as part of Davis’s drag makes the institutional boundaries which place Davis on the margins palpable. If you know enough about art to know that Vaginal Davis (a black gay man) is not Vanessa Beecroft (a straight white woman), your experience of that night’s performance might have produced the following thought: “I am

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watching a performance by an artist who, in all likelihood, may never be invited to the Whitney.” Maybe “art” works in Davis’s performance like Beethoven’s drums, heard in the foyer of a concert hall – as a sign turned inside-out. “Heard in the corridors of the concert hall,” Adorno writes, “little remains of one of Beethoven’s orchestral works than the imperial kettle drum; even in the score the drums represent an authoritarian gesture, which the work borrowed from society in order to sublimate it in the elaboration of the composition.” Maybe “sex” in Beecroft becomes like “Music . . . piped into restaurants,” which, Adorno observes, can be transformed into something completely different, of which the hum of conversation and the rattle of dishes and whatever else becomes a part. To fulfill its function, this music presupposes distracted listeners no less than in its autonomous state it expects attentiveness. . . . Functions such as warming people up and drowning out silence recast music as . . . mood, the commodified negation of the boredom produced by the gray-on-gray commodity world. The sphere of entertainment, which has long been integrated into production, amounts to the domination of this element of art over all the rest of its phenomena . . .29

Davis asserts “I am not interested in entertainment,” but embedded in that declaration is a dialectical twist, a response to the mandate to be entertaining with a reanimation of art-production, not as a career, but as a praxis. This is not to say that one mode of production is more pure than the other – at the very least, however, Davis’s (which is full of lies) is more honest, and more hopeful. She gives us a diver’s suit, making the air in Los Angeles almost breathable: In her world, art is the prelude to a kiss.

Notes 1 “An Interlude” (1866), quoted by Samuel Delany in Times Square Red/Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 124. 2 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso 1974), p. 26. 3 Ibid., p. 28. 4 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 1990), p. 130.

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The Trouble with Men 99 5 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). See especially the concluding chapter, “On Dialectical Criticism.” 6 Amelia Jones, “Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning,” in Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (eds), Performing the Body/Performing the Text (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), p. 41. 7 Athey describes the SEALs as visibly uncomfortable with their role, “few of the 16 SEALs were able to remain poker-faced . . . Some became watery-eyed, and many appeared uncomfortable. The most visibly troubled soldier alternated between laughing and glaring psychotically.” Ron Athey, “Vanessa Beecroft, ‘U.S. NAVY’ (Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego),” a review essay published in Los Angeles Weekly (July 2–9, 2000). 8 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 69. 9 Ibid., pp. 77–8. 10 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds), Shame and Her Sisters: A Sylvan Tomkins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 11 I am working with a different model of boredom than, for instance, the one used by Patricia Meyer Spacks in Boredom: A Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). In the literature Spacks examines the reader’s boredom and interest as, most of the time, mutually exclusive perspectives on a text’s value as a literary work. I would suggest, however, that boredom and interest are not necessarily mutually exclusive. That the two share much is, in fact, implicit in Spacks’s study, insofar as both are, as Spacks argues in detail, expressions of taste. Spacks begins to describe the weird embodied-ness of boredom when she observes that “There is no arguing with the awful and absolute authority of boredom. If I declare [Wordsworth’s poem] ‘The Idiot Boy’ boring, no one can refute me. It may not bore you, but your arguments about its complexity, its importance, its depth of implication can no more change my emotional response than your explanation of how funny a cartoon is can make me laugh” (p. 128). For more on this point, see especially Spacks’s chapter “Interlude: The Problem of the Interesting” (pp. 113–28). 12 José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 99, 102, 108. 13 Dave Hickey, “Vanessa Beecroft’s Painted Ladies,” in VB 08–36: Vanessa Beecroft Performances (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000). 14 Benjamin Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art,” in Kynaston McShine (ed.), Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 51. 15 T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985) is the most comprehensive; Jennifer Devere

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Jennifer Doyle Brody reads the painting from a black feminist perspective in her essay “Shading Meaning,” in Jones and Stephenson (eds), Performing the Body/ Performing the Text, pp. 89–106, and “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s Olympia,” in Theater Journal, 53 (1) (March 2001): 95–118. See also Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); and Griselda Pollock’s Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). Rosalind Krauss, “Olympia,” in Yves Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 148. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. Theodor Adorno, “Sexual Taboos and Law Today,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 75. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 49. In other writings I refer to this as a rhetoric of prostitution. See “Tricks of the Trade: Pop Art/Pop Sex,” in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Muñoz (eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Hickey, “Vanessa Beecroft’s Painted Ladies.” Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 95. This is in the spirit of Adorno and Horkheimer’s jeremiad on the culture industry’s assimilation of the dehumanizing processes of capitalism to form, or Marcuse’s critique of the affirmative character of culture – the compensatory appreciation of inequity exorcised in the domain of aesthetic appreciation. In the case of the latter, suffering is acknowledged but never redressed. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” and Hebert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Marcuse, Negations (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 88–133. Conversations with Marie Jager and Amelia Jones, March 8 and 15, 2002, respectively. According to gallery staff, “We hire security guards for some openings, and, for this one, security was a must.” Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 118. Delany, Times Square Red/Times Square Blue, p. 123. Ibid., p. 139. For other applications of urban theory to art criticism, see also Rosalind Deutsche, “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City,” in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornell West (eds), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 107–32. For a compelling treatment of the topic of Mapplethorpe, pornography, and censorship see Richard Meyer’s Outlaw Representation: Homosexuality and Censorship in American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 253.

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Utopia’s Seating Chart 101

Utopia’s Seating Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johnston, and Queer Intermedia as System José Esteban Muñoz

for Luke The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost. Jill Johnston

The Stonewall riot was a manifestation of pent-up energies that erupted on the streets of Greenwich Village in 1969. Today I live and work in the village and it’s hard to find any residue of those energies. Yet, the task of finding traces of those transformative political potentialities is nonetheless important. In my research I find it important to return to that moment of counter-cultural fecundity. Stonewall is of course the birth of the modern gay and lesbian movement and that initial eruption led to a formalizing and formatting of gay and lesbian identities. While this turn to the identitarian was important and even historically necessary, it is equally important to reflect upon what was lost by this particular process of formalization. Before this bold rebellion there was another moment in which the counter-cultural map was perhaps a bit queerer, which is to say more expansive and including of various structures of feeling and habits of being that the relatively restrictive categories of gay and lesbian identities are incapable of catching.

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Figure 5 Ray Johnson, Mailing, 1968. © Estate of Ray Johnson, reproduced courtesy of Richard L. Feigen & Co.

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Utopia’s Seating Chart 103 When I turn to the ephemeral archive of queer New York I am interested in locating the anti-identitarian germ of this rebellion. Avantgarde cultural work from this period can be viewed from a certain vantage point in which the complexity of these then inchoate identities can be grasped. This approach looks at the cultural work of certain cultural producers as ephemeral archives of these previous understandings and cartographies of the world. I am most interested in identifying a certain utopian component in these archives. This archival turn is intended to do more than simply unpack the past, to move from then to now, but instead to calibrate a critical optic that can potentially perceive the residue of the utopian impulse that animated pre-identitarian queer politics, and move from then to here. This move from then to here is a move to think about the coterminous nature of the temporal and spatial in the queer utopian methodology I’m suggesting. The time of the past helps mount a critique of the space of the present. This is not revisionary history or meta-history, it’s a critical deployment of the past for the purpose of engaging the present and imagining the future. The purpose of calibrating such an optic is to then deploy the knowledge gleaned from queer ephemeral archives for the purposes of reanimating and reviving this utopian impulse. To this end, I turn to two figures from this period: cultural critic Jill Johnston and conceptual artist Ray Johnson. This pairing is not random and it is not based on the near match of their last names. It has to do, more nearly, with similar anti-disciplinary protocols in their artistic work, what I call the “intermedia” approach of their cultural production. This intermedia process leads to a perpetual unfinished system that is by its very nature anti-systemological, and thus analogical to the pre-identitarian moment I am so interested in. Intermedia is a radical understanding of interdisciplinary. The usage of intermedia that I am suggesting is interdisciplinary in relation to both art-making protocols and taxonomies of race, gender and sex.1 I transport Johnston and Johnson from their historical perch and attempt to understand them alongside each other, as well as the historical moment that enabled their projects. The project here is to understand how this work represents a much larger communal vibe and not to cast the two cultural producers as some kind of individualistic heroes. The hope behind this loose methodology is decidedly utopian and queer. The work of Ernst Bloch, especially his interest in discerning the utopian aura of art, is crucial to my endeavor. The plan is to turn to the past in an

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effort to imagine a future. But before I engage this project I will sketch a map of how I got from then to here. *** No one knows how many members belonged to the New York Correspondence School. I would like to think that the membership was vast and far-reaching, a virtual army of lovers who mailed obtuse yet beautiful objects to each other, objects that remade the world in significant and startling ways. The New York Correspondence School debuted in 1970 at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art with the show “Ray Johnson: New York Correspondence School” (September–October 6, 1970). This, of course, was the school’s public debut, and in that way a very limited aspect of the story. To understand the NYCS we should begin with a sketch of its founder, architect, and author – Ray Johnson. Johnson was not only a member of this club, but also its president.2 Johnson alternated between the spelling “correspondence” and “correspondance.” The later spelling connoted the strange choreography of his mail art. Considering Johnson’s close association with the Judson Memorial Dance Theater and his attendance at Robert Dunn’s famous dance classes, the visual artist’s indexing of dance as a process, as it was being conceived in the postmodern dance circles in which he traveled, is worth paying attention to.3 The dancers Johnson would send out onto the stage were his mailings. The stage was the world via the postal system. The art of the NYCS had much to do with Johnson’s sending of ephemera, information, collages, and all manner of unconventional mailings. These mailings were correspondences insofar as they sometimes called people to respond. His recipients, all of whom formed the membership of the NYCS, were invited to write back and present their own work or alter his previous mailing. He often sent his collages, which he called “Moticos,” through the mail. The recipients of these mailed collages found that he used everything from Lucky Strike packaging, movie star publicity photos, and fashion magazine layouts in these Moticos. Moticos were an art that moved, performing objects insofar as they danced along the runways and stages provided by the world postal system. They were performative art objects that flowed like queer mercury throughout the channels of majoritarian communication and information. I’ll continue this sketch of who Ray Johnson was and what he did by describing my first encounter with Ray Johnson. This next phase of my

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Utopia’s Seating Chart 105 description veers from anything resembling a traditional art-historical methodology. I want to show my associative belonging to this work. This turn to the associative is not random; instead it is meant to performatively echo the associative style of both Johnson and Johnston. At times my prose also echoes this work. I never met Johnson yet I know him through a friend. My dear friend Luke Dowd first told me about Johnson. Johnson’s friend and most famous collector, William Wilson, had bought a piece of Luke’s work in a gallery. When Wilson had purchased the work he did not know that the young artist whose work he had found compelling enough to add to his collection was the son of another artist, John Dowd, a queer artist who was a friend to Wilson and Johnson. Before John Dowd had died of an AIDS-related illness in San Francisco he was involved with General Idea – a group of Toronto-based conceptual artists who were, to some degree, inspired by the NYCS. Luke had told me about this chance meeting with Wilson and his familial connections. This is before the large retrospective of Johnson’s work had been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art (January 14, 1999–March 21, 2000). I was intrigued by Luke’s description of Johnson’s work, and this interest was further fed by a conversation I had with the artist Nayland Blake, who was, at the time, considering teaching a course on Johnson, Jack Smith, and Joseph Cornell – the latter two whose work I had (and continue to have) a great interest in. At this point I had become somewhat obsessed with Johnson. Through the machinations of New York City’s vast interlibrary loan system I acquired two slim catalogs of Johnson’s work from the early eighties. The work did not disappoint my hyped expectations. The art I encountered was ingenious and funny. The work abounded with verbal and visual puns. The collages included tributes to Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore, two of my sapphic modernist heroes. My only frustration was that there was hardly any mention of the NYCS in the two artist’s catalogs. I would need to wait until the 1999 Whitney retrospective on the artist’s work for the opportunity to immerse myself in the NYCS. I also learned about Johnson’s brilliant response to Allan Kaprow and the Happenings movement in contemporary art: his “Nothings.”4 One particularly interesting nothing is recorded in a recent documentary on the artist, How to Draw a Bunny,5 in which Johnson walks into a room where there is only a cardboard box. The artist removes his belt and proceeds to whip the box. As he does so he slowly attempts to articulate the word “Kafka” and is unable to say the artist’s proper name. There is a conceptual minimalism to the piece that called attention to the over-abundance

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which was associated with Happenings. This performative insistence on “the nothing” (the not there) over the present-ness of the happening (what is there) is both queer and utopian. Utopia is always about the not quite here, or the notion that something is missing. Queer cultural production is both an acknowledgment of the lack which is endemic to any heteronormative rendering of the world, and a building, a “world making,” in the face of that lack. A nothing is a utopian act insofar as it acknowledges a lack that is normalized as reality and attempts to work with and through nothingness and ephemerality: it is both a critique and an additive or reparative gesture.6 Queer utopian practice is about “building” and “doing” in response to that status of nothing assigned to us by the heteronormative world. Walking through the exhibit with another good friend, the playwright Jorge Cortiñas, I found myself awash in Ray Johnson’s conceptual madness. I learned about Johnson’s biography – his training at Black Mountain and the profound influence of his teachers, Joseph Albers and John Cage, on his work. I took pleasure in looking at Johnson’s punning bitchy swipes at macho abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock. He poked fun at his queer contemporaries, especially Andy Warhol. I found out about his charming and somewhat demented relationship with the artist May Wilson, collector and critic William Wilson’s mother. But it was the correspondences I was most impressed by. I marveled at their freakishness. The work was small and subtle and it was clear that critics whose imaginations were limited would simply dismiss it. When I looked at the collages I could see the clear-cut influence of artists like Yvonne Rainer and Merce Cunningham, artists committed to anti-formalism and spontaneity as well as the resonance with the conceptual work of Fluxus. I looked at the letters and thought about Samuel Delany’s autobiographical narrative about the bathhouses of New York, particularly his first visit to the St. Mark’s Baths.7 Delany, through the strange blue light of the public sex facility, saw a mass of perverts and drew great comfort from this. Not only did the vision make him understand that he was not the isolated pervert that the cultural logic of heteronormativity might render him to be, but, under this odd illumination, the science fiction writer and memoirist realized that gay culture had set up institutions that kept us from knowing ourselves, our status as a mass and a body politic, our potential for insurgency. For me these letters function something like the representation of those writhing pre-Stonewall bodies. Viewing Johnson’s postings, his mail art, was like entering a secret world I had somehow half known. It was edifying. The

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Utopia’s Seating Chart 107 letters represented a vast system of associations and correspondences that made a world that was not quite here yet nonetheless on the horizon. It was a queer world of potentiality. I have taken the time to narrate my encounter with Johnson in an effort to convey the sensation of stumbling upon the queer world of Johnson and the NYCS. How did I chance upon Johnson’s world? Mostly through coincidence: like the fact that Johnson’s collector, William Wilson, bought the work of a friend, which occasioned the discovery that this friend’s late father was a friend of Johnson’s. But also more common routes, like a Whitney retrospective. Yet through these decidedly different ports of entry I found myself in the midst of the world of the NYCS. I’m not just an archivist or a scholar. I’m also part of a queer relational orbit, a force-field of belonging. Through associations both common and unique I acquired information about Ray Johnson and his work. Johnson’s work allows one to see worlds that are both real and imagined, existing in a spatio-temporal coordinate between the real and the virtual. Johnson’s correspondence school works as a map, or schematic, of a world that can only potentially exist. This potential, born out of spatio-temporal conditions of (im)possibility, can be deciphered as utopian. These conditions of (im)possibility reflect Johnson’s rejection of “objective” reality. This rejection challenges objective reality’s tenets, which include conventional understandings of not only the temporal and the spatial but also the ontological itself. For example, one did not actually need to be present at a meeting of the NYCS to actually be there. At this point I would like to turn to a maverick critic who was a contemporary of Ray Johnson, the lesbian dance and art critic Jill Johnston, and her collection of writings culled from her Village Voice column, Marmalade Me.8 Johnston’s perspective on critical practice interests me and inspires my approach to this essay and the larger project it is associated with. Johnston was a student of literature who moved to New York from her native London (perhaps her Englishness, as well as her sexuality, contributed to her status as cultural outsider). The avant-garde art world of New York was the place where Johnston could join other outsiders and find a critical sense of belonging. Johnston was not only a commentator on the scene she covered, she was also often, to varying degrees, a participant. For instance, like Ray Johnson, she audited Dunn’s famous dance workshops, and other cultural happenings that led to the formation of the Judson Memorial Theater. Within the pages of her writing Johnston, through the performance of her wildly associative style, would narrate her

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experiences on and off the stage, including her use of drugs and her acting out at parties. Deborah Jowitt, in an introduction to a recent edition of Marmalade Me, wrote, regarding Johnston’s style, that: “I’m also tempted to see in the rambling meditations structural analogies to Yvonne Rainer’s epochal Trio A – a long chain of movements performed in such a way as to render no movement more important than any other one.”9 Rainer’s piece, one of the most important pieces of choreography in the history of postmodern dance, challenges codes of difference and value within dance practice. Rainer’s practice is a challenge to dance’s hierarchy of value insofar as her work brackets, yet does not abandon, technique in an effort to relativize the difference between movement that was not traditionally considered “dance-like” with moves that were established as such in dance’s canon. This is reflected in Johnston’s dance criticism, which began in the Voice as a column specifically addressing dance and progressed into a column about almost everything. Through this analogy one is reminded of Johnson’s punning of correspondence and correspondance. Johnson’s collage work and conceptual work, like Rainer’s dance practice and Johnston’s writing, make a radically democratic point: everything corresponds to everything. This move to denaturalize aesthetic value is one that thematically and affectively binds the emergent queer postmodernism of that period. Johnston, in an article titled “Untitled,” claimed “every genealogy is a fiction. There is no such thing. There’s only one genealogy. It takes place in our dreams. Every specific genealogy is a fiction.”10 Much in the same fashion as postmodern dance wished to disrupt the codes of value assigned to different movements and gestures, Johnston took swipes at objective reality. Naturalized origin stories were dismantled by Johnston’s intermedia, a concept that framed various and often contradictory stories about life and aesthetics as interchangeable. I think Ray would agree with Jill’s statement about genealogies. Furthermore, he would add that since every genealogy is a fiction one should get to the project of writing. Writing in words, movements, images, collages, gestures, fidgets, twitches, stumbles. I trace a line from my biographical coordinates to my critical project on Johnson. While the account I render is true, it is, of course, also a fiction. It is a queer imaging that traverses friendship and gossip, strolls through the archive on a Sunday afternoon, and so much more. The archive is a fiction. So let’s write it down. Nobody knows this better than queers – people who have had to cop the fiction of a socially prescribed straightness. Queers make up genealogies and worlds. Jill Johnston did and so did Ray Johnson. I am following their lead and always

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Utopia’s Seating Chart 109 have, even before I knew these figures. Now, through a return to these artists’ work – the ephemeral shards of their previous lives – I attempt to inhabit a queer practice, a mode of being in the world, that is also inventing the world. I want to assign a certain value to this move so that it resonates as something more than individual dementia. I call such a move necessarily utopian, because it is my belief that such a move is necessary in the face of the political nihilism that characterizes this present moment. I do not wish to render a picture of utopia that is prescriptive. I want to instead connote an ideality – a desire for a thing, or a way, that is not here but is nonetheless desirable, something worth striving for. This does not lead to practical politics or even a practical critical practice, because pragmatism has only ever failed us. It is political pragmatism that has led us to a historical moment when the right to serve in the military or to participate in the suspect institution of marriage have become the gay movement’s major issues. Thus I return to the Johnston of Marmalade Me and not the Johnston of Lesbian Nation. Not because Lesbian Nation is not an admirable text, not because it is not important. The moment that Jill Johnston named herself and her sexual identity was important for the history of queer politics and thinking. Yet if we read that move alongside Johnston’s refusal to name in Marmalade Me, we are faced with her salient question, “What does it mean to name something? Where do we get off giving everything a legal identity?”11 The reader is warned that to accept this naming is to agree to “a real or pseudo-etymological exercise”12 in which one can “uncover the hoax of a frozen legal identity which finds its way into that mausoleum called the dictionary.”13 Johnston claims that the dictionary is one of her favorite books. But how can a mausoleum be one of her favorite books? I would suggest that Johnston is a Hollywood voodoo queen in the mausoleum of the dictionary, where she routinely raises the dead, calling attention to its status as fixed and frozen and magically reanimating it. This again is a queer practice worth calling attention to. The fictional relationality of the genealogy which is a dream is performed beautifully in the work of Ray Johnson. In a typed mailing Johnson unfurls the narrative of one of the NYCS’s meetings. The text reads: The N.Y.C.S. attacked itself and strangled itself, mutilated itself, tried to kill itself, tried to kill itself off but returns! The fetish has to be fed. The nonprofit organization without a Girl Friday konked out under the weight of the fantastic network of previous structures. Very encouraging was the

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response from England who even came up with the London Correspondance School. David Bourdon was dropped whose valentine in part read “don’t send me your emotional blackmail”. Bici Henbricks told me stories about how Xenia Cage asked to be taken off her list. Years ago, Jeanne Raynal expressed distaste at the “mailings” saying it had all been done before. Michael Malce has not been heard from in quite a while. Is he dead?14

The above is the first paragraph of the document. The NYCS lives, or so it is announced (later Johnson would write and submit various obituaries announcing the death of the school). While the school, in this report, lives, it has also apparently “konked out” under the “fantastic weight of the network of previous structures.” One can therefore begin to arrive at a definition of the relational chain of the NYCS as a structure, or a network of structures. It is a structure that must resist the weight, gravity, or pull of previous structures. The NYCS is therefore a structure that is fatigued, challenged, and compromised by previous structures. If the NYCS is a social formation it is therefore one responding to previous social structures, or relational orderings, other ways of being in the world. Membership in the NYCS is like a queer kinship, an alternate chain of belonging, of knowing the other and being in the world. Some characters, like Xenia Cage, wish to be taken off the list, and therefore opt not to belong to these different relational networks. Perhaps she prefers traditional genealogies and systems of belonging. The NYCS is not held by the same truth claims that organized previous networks or social structures. One might wonder if Johnson’s reportage is based in objective reality. Did these meetings actually happen? While the above statement may, in fact, be an account of some reality – many of the people did receive letters and mail art from Johnson – it is not something that can be described as objective reality. Instead it represents a queerly subjective account of the world. The narrative spun by Johnson is part of an artwork that insists on a revisionary framing of friendship, kinship, and belonging. If we consider Michel Foucault’s charge that we must always be in the process of “becoming homosexual and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are” and that the homosexual must “invent from A to Z a relationship that is formless” we can begin to understand the rejection of “objective” reality proposed in the work of these queer utopian artists and writers.15 This is a mode of objectivity that Jill Johnston could respond to. Indeed she is included in the mailed seating assignment for a proposed 1968 meeting of the group. Johnston can be found in the first

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Utopia’s Seating Chart 111 column of the seventh row of a grid that included 78 boxes. In these bohemian squares some of the names are still recognizable as art world celebrities, whilst other square occupants, like Nancy Dowd (column 1, row 3), my friend Luke’s mother, was a friend of Johnson but not a known art world celebrity. One way of looking at this organizing of names is in contrast with Andy Warhol’s Factory and the Warholian elevation of freaks, weirdos, and social oddities to superstar status. Later, in the 1967 document, it is reported that “Andy Warhol has never been a superstar in the NYCS but Billy Linich recently received two personailty [sic] posters of Peter Fonda.”16 In this instance Johnson is pitting his NYCS map of the world against the Warhol Factory cosmology. Yet Warhol starlet Ultra Violet is included on the 1968 grid mailing alongside the young man favored with two Peter Fonda personality poster mailings, Billy Linich, also known as Billy Name. The first thing we can infer from this is that Johnson was no great fan of Warhol. The same kind of resentment or distaste towards Warhol is also articulated by Jack Smith at different moments in his oeuvre. Johnson was present at the play orgy that was the filming of Smith’s Flaming Creatures. This fact, the attendance of Johnson at Smith’s cinematic orgy, enables me to visualize a network of queer cross-associations and influences. Smith’s performances, like Ray Johnson’s mail art, contained a utopian impulse that I would associate with a larger circuit of queer intellectuals and artists in New York at this time. The list would include, but would certainly not be limited to, writers like Frank O’Hara and LeRoi Jones (now the not-soqueer Amari Baraka), O’Hara’s tradey object of desire the painter Larry Rivers, dance critic Edwin Denby, dancer Fred Herko (whose name appears in several of Johnson’s posters and mailings), poet and fag hag Diane di Prima, science fiction writer and theorist Samuel Delany, and a columnist like Jill Johnston. It would also include my friend Luke’s father, John Dowd, who did not acquire the fame of the above list but would nonetheless make it onto the grid I would draw of this moment, from my perspective as queer archivist and theorist. My cues for this critical endeavor, my approach to this material, come from my reading of Johnson and Johnston and what I understand as the cross-temporal performative reverberations of their work of the 1960s. In the parlance of the age, I am attempting to reflect a certain “vibe,” a structure of feeling that I understand as utopian. To this end the work of the Frankfurt School, especially Ernst Bloch, is useful. Bloch’s threevolume treatise on hope is incredibly instructive when one considers the

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rejection of the real that one encounters in Johnson’s NYCS or the wildly associative flights of fancy that characterize Johnston’s journalism. Bloch, in a published discussion with Theodor Adorno, remarks that the secret to utopia is an understanding that it must have multiple goals.17 For example, utopia is not about simply achieving happiness or freedom, utopia is in fact a casting of a picture of potentiality and possibility. This casting or imaging is also an act of negation. What is negated is the present in lieu of another time or place. Thus utopia has a positive valence, that of a projection forward, and a negative function, which is the work of critique. Both Johnston’s criticism and Johnson’s art perform the negation that Adorno and Bloch ruminate about insofar as they, through associative protocols, chip away at the fabric of reality. This chipping away in Johnston is a casting of a picture of the future that she calls intermedia. Her notion of intermedia is worth citing at length: Re-integration. The everything as everything. The organism as totally illegal. The legality of nothing but pleasure. In an orgy of self-reproduction (the paramecium). The end of importance. The end of politics. The end of hierarchies. The end of families. The end of groups. The end of the earth as a penal colony (Burroughs). No end to what there can be an end of in the great reintegration: the intermedia of the cosmic village; the intermedia of the genealogy of a vast prolific dream; the intermedia of language as the gurgling of happy infants; the intermedia of hordes of artists (all the people) making sand castles and other inanities inside and outside of their heads, or doing nothing at all. Intermedia is the world before and after we chop it up into bits of pieces and stash it away in a filing cabinet labeled MINE, YOURS, THEIRS.18

When I consider this far-out hippie utopianism-as-stream-of-consciousness it is difficult not to become pessimistic about contemporary queer politics, given that the regular lesbian columnist in today’s Village Voice is the far right’s lapdog dagger Norah Vincent, who regularly denounces progressive advances in academia in her “Higher Education” column. Vincent is not the villain of this essay; she, like Johnston and Johnson, is merely a representative of a moment. The point of digging up, and digging, Jill Johnston and Ray Johnson is not to simply conjure them as antidotes to Vincent and other gay neo-conservatives who plague the present. Rather, it is important to imagine other models of queer presence in the public sphere that preceded current models. The notion of the “everything as everything” that Johnston deploys is reminiscent of Johnson’s seating chart

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Utopia’s Seating Chart 113 and the leveling effect achieved in that work. Both of these queer culturemakers are interested in art-directing the real. They offer new systems of knowing and organization. The call to end groups, hierarchies, and families is a call to replace those previous systems of classification with new circuits of belonging. The NYCS is meant to replace and stand in for these previous systems. In a 1972 interview with Richard Bernstein in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, Johnson explained that “[t]he whole idea of the [New York] Correspondence School is to receive and dispense with all these bits of information, because they all refer to something else. It was just a way of having a conversation or exchange, a social intercourse.”19 Intermedia is exactly this other “social intercourse.” If everything refers to something else the relational order of conceived reality is utterly transformed. The negation that Bloch ascribes to the utopian function of art exists in dialectical tension to this new ordering of epistemology (what things mean) and relationality (how the other is perceived). A utopian transformation is performed through Johnson’s mail art process. A letter’s standard temporality is that of the sender’s present and the receiver’s future. The letter no longer has a “here to there” trajectory. It now takes on a “here to there to there and there too” trajectory since a piece of mail art will move between a circuit of friends and acquaintances, being altered at every point in its journey. We can call this new temporality one of queer futurity, where the future is a site of infinite and immutable potentiality. This notion of queer futurity might also be useful to an understanding of the futurity envisaged through Jill Johnston’s idea of intermedia. Taken together or separately, Johnson’s intermedia practices and Johnston’s idea of intermedia provide contemporary critics with models for approaching artistic practices and strategies that avoid the pitfalls of conventional disciplinarity. They help us reconsider what an archive is, what counts as evidence, and the ways in which we know the object. The queerness of both Ray Johnson and Jill Johnston during the period I’m referencing has very little to do with the indexing of sexual identity (which is not to say that it is not intimately related to sexual experimentation and discovery, since they fuel the utopian impulse at this historical moment. Queer sex and desire challenged standardized notions of relationality and intimacy.) The work under consideration performs a queering of, as I have shown, temporality, relationality, epistemology – which is what I would describe as a world making performativity. In this methodological performance the routinization of approach is thrown out the window in favor of vibrant collage. This open-ended collaboration also challenges the

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most aggressive disciplining of artworks in relation to when they are finished, incomplete, or overworked. Johnson’s collage includes the ephemeral and the utopian, the fact and the anecdote. It is time to return to the source, which is to say, the site where queer energies and potentialities exploded on the world as the contemporary gay and lesbian movement. By my clock we were queer before we were lesbian and gay. This understanding may lead to a critical looking back that may be a step forward. The past, especially the way in which it circulates in relation to Ray Johnson’s and Jill Johnston’s biography and cultural practices, can be instructive to queer critical and political practices that will neutralize the impasse which is the queer present, opening a portal to a queer future that would be, could be, should be. In closing I wish to return to the seating chart. One of my entrances into the NYCS was column 1, row 7: Jill Johnston’s box. Her notion of intermedia resonates in relation to Johnson’s project in a manner that I find instructive and useful as a queer scholar and thinker. But another entrance that is equally important is column 1, row 3: Nancy Dowd’s box. I find my entrance to, even my membership of, the utopian world imaged by the NYCS through a queer logic of kinship and becoming. It is through friendship and bond with Luke Dowd, who introduced me to Ray Johnson, that I situate myself and take my own seat at this gathering. I haven’t discussed Luke’s art, of which a few pieces hang on the walls of my New York apartment. But that work connects me to Johnson too. One thing that reminds me of Johnson is some of Dowd’s line art pieces. Instead of the perfectly symmetrical and graphed lines of Johnson’s chart, Dowd’s line art shows systems that are in collapse or disrepair. Both Dowd’s and Johnson’s work display the ways in which systems fail. Through Johnson’s work this effect is realized by punning and tongue-in-cheek exaggeration, whilst in the art of the younger artist it is signaled through the literal collapse of graphic images. My favorite piece on my apartment wall is a very large painting on wood of the Silver Surfer. The Silver Surfer is a famous character from the Marvel comics pantheon of super-heroes. This painting engages me on a few levels. It certainly indexes Pop Art’s interest in super-hero mythology and one can look at the majesty of the Surfer in flight and think of Andy Warhol’s Superman silk-screens. The difference is that Superman was a dominant comic during Warhol’s childhood. The sickly boy of east European origins lost himself in the fantasy of this Superman who was a perfect man. I too grew up reading comics like Marvel’s The Fantastic Four.

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Utopia’s Seating Chart 115 The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and Spiderman were breaks from the grand and glowing DC comic super-hero pantheon that included characters like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, characters who were Amazons, millionaires, and Super Aliens. The Marvel characters broke from the previous DC model insofar as they were real people with problems. Their powers were more curses than blessings. The Fantastic Four were a dysfunctional family, the X-Men had a certain genetic difference that made them social pariahs (like theories of the gay gene that I don’t buy) and Spiderman was a fucked-up teen. The Surfer was an alien exiled to Earth, always longing to return to his homeland. For me, a Cuban kid who grew up in Miami, where I was always told I was living in exile from my homeland, the Surfer’s mythology resonated. Dowd’s painting then spoke of a troubled world of super-heroes both in touch with reality and defying it, not the idealized sphere of Pop Art’s cartoons. The Surfer is sexy too but not in the obvious way that Superman is. His form is perfect but his skin is pure reflective silver. My childhood desire for him is not Warhol’s desire for this alien who looks like a hunk, it’s the desire for an alien who looks like an alien, is odd and freakish, and reflects my own freakishness back at me. I thus would like to hold up my friend’s beautiful shiny painting and call attention to it as my membership card in the NYCS. It signals a desire for another way of being in the world, another way of knowing the world, and this world is one gleaming with potentiality.

Notes I am grateful to Gavin Butt, Jennifer Doyle, and David Román for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. 1 See Dick Higgins, Horizons: Intermedia: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984) for a different take on this concept. 2 See the exhibition catalog, Donna De Salvo and Catherine Gudis (eds), Ray Johnson: Correspondences (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1999), for useful essays on the artist. 3 See Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre 1962–1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) for mention of both Ray Johnson’s and Jill Johnston’s involvement in this scene. 4 The classic text on happenings is Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: Dutton, 1965).

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5 While the documentary is certainly a resource insofar as it offers valuable footage of Johnson, his friends, and his work, it is also disappointing due to the filmmaker’s inability to deal with the queerness of Johnson’s art and life. If this film heralds a certain canonization of the artist then it is one which is content to keep his queerness as unknowable as possible. 6 For more on a reparative criticism see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 7 Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: East Village Sex and Science Fiction Writing: 1960–1965 (London: Paladin, 1990), pp. 265–9. 8 Jill Johnston, Marmalade Me (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 9 Deborah Jowitt, “Introduction to Jill Johnston,” ibid., p. 12. 10 Ibid., p. 4. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid, p. 6. 14 De Salvo and Gudis (eds), Ray Johnson: Correspondences, p. 132. 15 Michel Foucault, Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Johnson (New York: Semiotexte[e], 1989), p. 204. 16 De Salvo and Gudis (eds), Ray Johnson: Correspondences, p. 132. 17 Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 116–17. 18 Johnston, Marmalade Me, p. 6. 19 Richard Bernstein, “Ray Johnson’s World,” Andy Warhol’s Interview (1972), p. 40.

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Looking Away 117

Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture Irit Rogoff

Figure 6 Thomas Struth, Pergamon Museum I, Berlin, 2001; C-print, face mounted on plexiglas. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

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What comes after the critical analysis of culture? What goes beyond the endless cataloging of the hidden structures, the invisible powers, and the numerous offenses we have been preoccupied with for so long? Beyond the processes of marking and making visible those who have been included and those who have been excluded? Beyond being able to point our finger at the master narratives and at the dominant cartographies of the inherited cultural order? Beyond the celebration of emergent minority group identities as an achievement in and of itself ? Many of these issues and questions are being rehearsed in the arenas of displayed culture and in the shift of focus from the objects on display to the strategies of their staging and the responses of the viewing audiences. Over the past generation we have seen an extensive critique of the museum as everything from the staging ground of national histories to the performative sites of private obsessions. Artists such as Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Spoerri, the Guerrilla Girls, Fred Wilson, and Barbara Bloom have launched complex stagings of the disavowed dimensions, both public and private, of cultural display.1 We have even seen institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York put themselves on supposedly reflexive display by looking at their own practices through the artworks that unravel them as “The Museum as Muse.”2 Spurred on by the work of Michel Foucault, we have looked at issues of categorization and classification; by the work of Haacke, at “Museums as Managers of Consciousness” through the machinations of sponsorship; and by that of Daniel Buren at the way museums turn “History into Nature.”3 From James Clifford we have taken an understanding of the relation between collecting and colonizing, and from Hal Foster of the relation between establishing something called “Primitivism” and maintaining the hegemony of the West.4 From Carol Duncan we have understood how deeply notions of gender are embedded in the museum as a mode of display and a public notion of edifying space, while the Guerrilla Girls have documented the continuing absence of women artists from both permanent collections and temporary exhibitions within mainstream American Museum culture.5 The Canadian artist Vera Frenkel offers another mode of troubling the realms of museological display in her documentary project accompanied by videos and performance activity entitled “The Cornelia Lumsden Archive.”6 In it Frenkel traces, through her veritable absence, the shadowy presence of a fictive twentieth-century woman writer; she does this by scrupulously emulating the archival modes that would have represented her had she ever existed, which takes us back full circle to Foucault. From all of these theoretical

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Looking Away 119 and art practice sources we have mobilized an extensive critical arsenal which we can deploy for a critical analysis of the ways in which institutions have functioned, and of what they have hidden, elided, or simply disavowed. It seems to me that within the space of a relatively short period we have been able to move from criticism to critique to criticality – from finding fault, to examining the underlying assumptions that might allow something to appear as a convincing logic (as in the case of all the aforementioned work on and in museums), to operating from an uncertain ground which, while building on critique, wants nevertheless to inhabit culture in a relation other than one of critical analysis; other than one of illuminating flaws, locating elisions, allocating blames. In Visual Culture some partial responses to the question of what comes after critique can be teased out through a shift of the traditional relations between all that goes into making (practice) and all that goes into viewing (audience) the objects of visual cultural attention. This, of course, builds on that mighty critical apparatus which was evolved throughout the 1970s and 1980s and in which an unraveling of the relations between subjects and objects took place through radical critiques of authorial authorities, of epistemological conceits, and, perhaps more than anything else, through the ever-growing perception of knowledge as an extended wander through fields of intertextual subjectivities. That project is well underway and in its wake come the permissions to approach the study of culture from the most oblique of angles, to occupy ourselves with the constitution of new objects of study that may not have been previously articulated for us by existing fields. In fact, it may well be in the act of looking away from the objects of our supposed study, in the shifting modalities of the attention we pay them, that we have a potential for a rearticulation of the relations between makers, objects, and audiences. Can looking away be understood not necessarily as an act of resistance to, but rather as an alternative form of, taking part in culture? The diverting of attention from that which is meant to compel it, i.e. the actual work on display, can at times free up a recognition that other manifestations are taking place that are often difficult to read, and which may be as significant as the designated objects on display. Recently an exhibition opened at the Courtauld Institute in London, an exhibition of contemporary art selected and hung in the actual spaces of the Institute by some postgraduate students.7 The opening was jam-packed with the young men and women of the art world – pushing and shoving on the narrow stairs, sloshing beer over everyone, and grinding cigarettes

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on the hallowed eighteenth-century staircase. This invasion of a stiff and formal, traditional academic space by the floating population of art world openings was surprising enough to someone like myself, having studied at the Institute at an earlier phase. Instead of being hung in the more conventional spaces of the adjacent Courtauld Galleries, the works here were distributed among the offices and seminar rooms of the Institute itself and the viewers were asked to explore the spaces that are usually occupied by the business of teaching and of academic work, spaces cordoned off by the work being done in them and barred from the view of the general public. More surprising than this invited invasion, however, was the comment I overheard again and again as I trudged up and down the stairs “Well,” said various visitors that evening, “it’s not so posh, I expected it to be a lot more posh, didn’t you?” “What’s all the fuss about this place?” said another, “It’s just an old building, isn’t it?” ending his statement on a slightly puzzled questioning tone, as if wondering if there was some level of the experience that had been hidden to him. I, who, as a student, had for years been intimidated by this place and by its snobberies and exclusivities, was endlessly amused – it was as if the Queen had opened her bedrooms to the public and everyone had come around to share in the exposure of something that had so far been hidden. But beyond the voyeurism and beyond my own amusement, at a more interesting level, a form of participation was taking place in which some façade of privilege, of class and cultural exclusion, of supposedly rarefied learning, had been breached and the viewers were trying to figure out what exactly had kept them outside, had kept them at bay – since after all “it wasn’t all that posh, was it?” The exhibition project on display itself probably had in mind some notion of “democratization” and “accessibility” through undoing the boundaries of elevated separation and inserting itself in the realm of the “contemporary.” Its final effects, however, were almost the opposite: rather than making people feel comfortable within its spaces, it produced – in my reading of it at least – an embodied manifestation of the mythical and fantasmatic which kept them at a distance. It did so, not through curatorial intention, but through a proliferation of performative acts generated by the audience and, of course, by our ever-growing ability to read these performative acts. There is a popular assumption that the performance of exclusion is an actual form of remaining outside, of not daring to enter spaces perceived as exclusive or intimidating or barred. Perhaps, though, the performance of exclusion is the process of realization that exclusion

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Looking Away 121 has nothing to do with entrance or access and far more to do with perceptions of the possible. In the tortuous operations of trying to produce a fit between specific identities and their legible representations, the joyous possibilities of Giorgio Agamben’s “whatever,” which I shall return to in greater detail later, are lost to us.8 The “whatever” in question here, says Agamben, relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim) but only in its being such as it is.9 In the experience of the actual space, in being positioned as an actual audience, the crowd at the Courtauld exited the work of framed identities, in relation to which they are positioned, and judged themselves and moved into the performative workings of the “whatever.” Thus it is experiential, not in the sense of having an actual embodied and shared experience in the space, but rather in the sense that entering a space inscribed with so many caveats and qualifications, in a state of what I call “unbelonging,” leads to the active production of questions concerning the very rights of entry and belonging. It is in this sense that I would perceive it as an embodied manifestation of the mythical and fantasmatic that kept the audience entering the Courtauld that evening at a cultural distance in the first place. It is in this moment, in the preliminary production of these questions, that I wish to recognize the shift from entering to taking part, from following the roles allotted to us as viewers and listeners, to engaging in the performative and becoming the subject of the work itself. In expanding the parameters of what constitutes engagement with art, we might in fact be entertaining an expanded notion of the very nature of participation, of taking part in and of itself. We all believe in the principle of participation. From the institutions of parliamentary democracy we sustain to the practices of listening to, rather than silencing or ignoring, the voices of children, women, minorities, or the handicapped that we take part in, we all uphold and approve the rhetorics of expanded participation as they circulate in political culture. What we rarely question is what constitutes the listening, hearing, or seeing in and of itself – the good intentions of recognition become a substitute for the kind of detailed analysis which might serve to expand the notions of what constitutes a mode of speaking in public, of being heard by a public, of having a public manifestation. Of course one of the main issues within this structure is that the question posed in the name of expanded participation – whatever that question might be – is inevitably articulated at the centers of power, and it is

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only the response elicited by it, that is paid attention. What interests me is the possibility of reading a response as a form of rearticulating the question of what it might be to take part in public sphere culture. These thoughts chart the beginning of an inquiry into the possibilities that exhibition spaces might provide to accommodate the proliferation of performative acts by which audiences shift themselves from being viewers to being participants. Furthermore the participation I have in mind goes beyond an aesthetic identification within the confines of spaces reserved for artistic practices and towards a model in which these spaces re-engage with political culture in unexpected ways. The argument is predicated on a belief that art does not have to be overtly political in its subject matter in order to produce a political effect, thus constituting a politics rather than reflecting one. It is this differentiation between the subject matter of works or exhibition thematics and the subject of the exhibition that is the main issue I should like to get to, albeit via a slightly circuitous route. In trying to recount a series of scenes in which audiences produce themselves as the subject of whatever may have been put on view for their edification, I am arguing that exhibition spaces might indicate possibilities – rather than provide opportunities – for self-representation. Of late I have become interested in trying to understand participation differently than as dictated by the commonly agreed principles of democratic participation and representation through institutions; some of these thoughts have been spurred by the opportunity to hold public dialogs with curators on the theme of “the curatorial”;10 others were developed through a process of integrating some of my thoughts into a book of artist’s writings by Yve Lomax, and all have resulted from the struggle to reconfigure my relations to the spaces and activities of art beyond the position of critical viewer.11 By claiming an interest in participation I would like to put into question what it means to take part in culture beyond the audience functions of viewer or spectator allotted to us by most cultural arenas. Obviously the active/passive division of that old model of taking part in culture cannot be sustained in the wake of the immense rethinking of positionality that the last 25 years of theoretical analysis have launched on the world. We all come from somewhere, we all represent something, we are all burdened by histories, we all make and re-make ourselves daily through the acts of speech and appearance, but none of these are the stable identities which we can rely on to be constant through the barrage of encounters of difference we face. Being so active and volatile an entity we, as viewing audience, can

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Looking Away 123 no longer be positioned as the observers of work from the outside, and having understood how we remake work in relation to the subjectivity we project upon it, we cannot unlearn this when confronted with the work of “art.” The question that is raised therefore is what forms of response replace that old model of lost identification, and do these emergent modes of response afford some mutuality that links viewers and participants beyond their named location of identity? Consequently I have been reading various philosophers and social theorists who themselves have been thinking possibilities of the common and its articulation without resorting to the stability of “identity” whether essential or constructed.12 At some level it has been possible to locate in these readings potential opportunities for the disruption of that rapt gaze of culture which has kept us for so long in the position of edified viewers: finding alternative models of both looking away and coming together in Giorgio Agamben’s unhinging of “singularity” into the “whatever,” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s13 insistence on the disruption of myth – of myth designating the absence of what it names – as the grounds for political possibility, and in Hannah Arendt’s constant flow of made and remade “spaces of appearance.”14 In their thought there is a preoccupation with concepts of community that is not founded in the politics of identity, and there is equally a play with flows and ebbs of mutuality that has helped me link preoccupations with “the performative” to a theory of “the political.” For some time now I have been getting into trouble with my use of “we” and “us” in my texts. Frequently after the publication of some piece I would be asked, often with great hostility, “Who is we, who are us, in your writing?” – “We,” they would say, “who don’t share your identity; be it national, sexual, political, theoretical, class- or language-based, refuse our inclusion into your argument.” Well, the “we” I have in mind is not identity-based – it cannot be found in the named categories by which an identity is currently recognized in the world. Rather, it comes into being fleetingly as we negotiate a problem, a mood, a textual or cultural encounter, a moment of recognition – these momentary shared mutualities do not form a collective heritage, but they do provide the short-lived access to power described by Arendt, not to the power of the state but to the power of speech. In the context of this particular writing the “we” I have in mind is designated through recognition of shifts taking place in the project of “theory.” A shared transition, albeit expressed in different ways, that the project of theory has moved on from being a mode of analysis by which you understand what lies behind and beneath the workings of

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knowing and representing. Instead “theory” can become the space of making, or re-making, of culture, of envisaging further possibilities rather than of explicating existing circumstances. Those who agree to a suspension of the purely critical, to momentarily shared imaginaries, to a bit of groundlessness, lost and regained – that’s us, that’s who I mean.

Refusals What are the demands that are made on us by “art” but the demands for totality and singularity, for completeness and for satiety, that infuse “art” as they infuse any other grand cultural scheme in the traditional order? I want to take some elements of Yve Lomax’s dialog with these demands, with their claims and with the refutation of those claims, and situate them in what Hannah Arendt has called “The Space of Appearance.”15 As much of Yve Lomax’s reflection is put forward through a play with narrative voices, and as I am a fellow participant in her work’s overall charge of decentering cultural trajectories, it seems appropriate for me to inflect these with additional analyses that are both spatialized and founded in ethnographic observation of a fairly mundane nature. In so doing I am attempting an argument that would wish to both unframe the realm of art from all of those deeply isolating grand privileges, from all those impossible demands, while at the same time allowing it to be the space of collective engagements. Not collective engagements planned in the headquarters of ideological persuasions, but rather those that Arendt characterized as “speech and action,” loosely coming together for a momentary expression and then coming apart again. This “space of appearance” articulated by Arendt is neither concretely inhabited nor is it temporally constant; it comes into being “whenever men are together in the manner of speech and action and therefore precedes and predates all formal constitution of the public realm and its various forms of government.”16 Why have I gone back to old Hannah Arendt? Why to someone so often allied with “liberalism” and who seemingly predates the intricacies of “difference” in trying to think of some of the little steps that might follow in the wake of the slippery sliding “line in the middle” Yve Lomax speaks of ? Why then? Having abdicated the collective investment in totalizations and singularities which had long claimed the task of our collective cementing, can

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Looking Away 125 we begin to think alternative collectivities and can we do so without lapsing into some lamenting grief about the clear-cut guidelines and navigational principles we once shared in those long-gone days of certainties and the unequivocal actions that these legitimated? This state of having first fragmented those certainties and of currently trying to go beyond both these and the endlessly fragmented lines they have dissolved into is not an act of refutation – “No,” says Yve Lomax, “not a question of a lost or unlocatable reality, no, not a question of total mystification.” It is not a refutation of those old demands seemingly made on us by “art” but a refusal – a refusal of both them and the very terms by which they come into conceptualization and operation – which is my preoccupation. It is for this reason that I have dragged in old Hannah, because of the exceptionally fresh and arbitrary nature of the “space of appearance” that she proposes to us. In its fleeting and ephemeral constitution, the “space of appearance” shares much common ground with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “spatialization” as the constant social production of space.17 Not a space named by its concrete constituents – such as buildings or environments or tasks – but one which comes into being through a related reading of actions and of the fantasmatic subjectivities projected through these actions. The peculiarity of this space of appearance, says Arendt, “is that unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of men . . . but with the disappearance or the arrest of the activities themselves. Wherever people gather together, it is potentially there but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever.”18 The knowledgeable reader, immersed in structuralist and poststructuralist theory as such readers are, will inevitably ask: why invoke Arendt when we have available to us theories of spatialization by Lefebvre, theories of discourse by Foucault, and the strategies of performativity suggested by Judith Butler? In partial, only very partial, reply I might say that it is because Arendt’s thought links speech and action to the very constitution of power, but not power as a mode of representation, nor power as the concrete articulations of ideological belief and their consequent translation into various structures of speech and of government. “What keeps people together after the fleeting moment of actions has passed (what we today call ‘organisation’), and what at the same time they keep alive through remaining together, is power.” Neither force, strength, nor violence, nor the apparatuses of the state or the law, this power

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conceptualized by Arendt is the fleeting coming together in momentary gestures of speech and action by communities whose only mutuality lies in their ability both to stage these actions and to read them for what they are. The spaces of appearance in which these momentary actions take place are the staging grounds of protests, refusals, affirmations or celebrations, and like Lefebvre’s “space in the process of production” they do not bear the markings of traditional political spaces but rather galvanize the spaces of everyday life and temporarily transform them by throwing flitting mantles of power over them: “Action and speech create a space between the participants, which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as they appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.”19 The reason I would wish to think of “art” in relation to such a “space of appearance” is a recognition that, when something called “art” becomes an open interconnective field, then the potential to engage with it as a form of cultural participation – rather than as a form of either reification, representation, or contemplative edification – comes into being. The engagement with “art” can provide a similar space of appearance to that described by Arendt, not by following the required set of interpellated, pensive gestures but rather by seeking out, staging, and perceiving an alternative set of responses.

Looking Away What is it that we do when we look away from art? When we avert our gaze in the very spaces and contexts in which we are meant to focus our attention? When we exploit the cultural attention and the spatial focus provided by, and insisted on, by museums, galleries, exhibition sites, and studios to cajole some other presence, some other dynamic in the space, into being? Are we producing the “affirmation through negation” which Yve Lomax speaks of in her discussion of the Alpha (its very refutation serving to actually ground its importance), or are we opening up a space of participation whose terms we are to invent? Is this averted gaze a refusal of the work on display, of the contexts which frame it, of the claims made for it, of the gravitas required in its contemplation, of the gratitude it demands for our supposed edification? Perhaps it is a refusal of the

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Looking Away 127 singularity of attention that the work traditionally demands (a friend tells of never being able to get into a museum’s exhibits because he always seems to get waylaid by the bookstore; another friend spends longer talking about the different coffees in the museum’s cafeteria than about the exhibit that generated the visit in the first instance). Beyond Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” with its combined understanding of how uniqueness and value mutually constitute one another through the production of a third entity – the work of art imbued with a halo of splendidness – we have to think of what actively separates the work from everything else that takes place around it. In this context I would have to briefly and tediously insist on the difference between the project of contextualizing art, of embedding it in social and other histories as appropriate frameworks for the production of meaning (a largely academic and scholarly project which galvanizes both archival materials and methodological analyses to provide frames for reading works) and that of attending to the performative gestures which I have in mind and which work to undo those very frames. I am referring to those moments in which people come together to unconsciously perform an alternative relation to culture, through their dress, or speech, or conduct. These performative gestures offer both a disruption and the possibility of an alternative and less obvious set of links with its surroundings, links which may be quite arbitrary or coincidental to the trajectories of immanent meanings. Of these, the most insistent separations between bodies of work and their surroundings come about through two sets of beliefs. Firstly, an overriding belief in the singularity of the work of art and, secondly, a belief in the cultural habits of affording it, that singular work, our unfragmented attention. Therefore we have to unravel both concepts of “singularity” and those of “undivided attention” in order to rework the relations between art and its audiences through strategies of concentration. To unpack “singularity” I am using Giorgio Agamben’s argument in The Coming Community, a series of linked essays that asks how we can conceive of a human community that lays no claims to identity, and that can be formed of singularities that refuse any criteria of belonging. How can we think a community whose collective basis is neither the shared ideological principles nor the empathies of affinity and similarity? The coming community, Agamben writes, is whatever being . . . The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property (to a concept, for

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example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but only in it’s being such as it is. Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal. The intelligible, according to a beautiful expression of Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides), is neither a universal nor an individual included in a series but rather “singularity insofar as it is whatever singularity.” In this conception, such-and-such being is reclaimed from having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims) – and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself. Thus being-such, which remains constantly hidden in the condition of belonging . . . and which is in no way a real predicate, comes to light itself: The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is, lovable.20

Yve Lomax, in unshackling photography from being either the representation of a single reality or the manifestation of a singular practice, says, Photography is mixed up with all sorts of things – law and order, the family, the medical professions, the art market. Photography is involved in a diversity of practices, stories and theories. There is painting in photography. There are words in photography. There is sexuality in photography. There is money in photography. There are a host of different “photographies.” When we start with photography we are already in the middle of quite a few things. Indeed, we may argue that there is no such thing (in itself ) as Photography, only photographies.21

Between Yve Lomax’s pluralities and Agamben’s notion of the “whatever” (which, for the sake of clarity, is not the “whatever” of California teenagers in which anything can be substituted by anything else, more a distrust of speech) we have a joint project of decentering – not the repeated movement of return to a narrowing enclosure, but the introduction of a logic of movement at whose core is a non-epistemic, or, perhaps better, a counter-epistemic, arbitrariness. By this I mean an epistemological equivalent of Agamben’s “whatever” in which both the what we know and the how we know it are fluid entities that settle in different areas according to the dictates of the moment but receive equal amounts of attention and concentration regardless of their recognition or status in the world of knowledge. Agamben continues:

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Looking Away 129 Whatever is the figure of pure singularity. Whatever singularity has no identity, it is not determinate with respect to a concept, but neither is it simply indeterminate; rather it is determined only through its relation to an idea, that is, to the totality of its possibilities. Through this relation, as Kant said, singularity borders all possibility and thus receives its omnimoda determinatio not from its participation in a determinate concept or some actual property (being red, Italian, Communist) but only by means of this bordering.22

Thus the singularity of “art” is disrupted by a decentring dynamic, broken up by the plurality of its possibilities and by the arbitrariness of the principle of “whatever.”

Disrupted Theoretical analyses are also lived realities. Thus the disruption of art’s singularity, of its hold on our attention and focus, is everywhere in the speech and action we produce in the seemingly unimportant registers we engage in relation to it. G.B. and I have gone to see the Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London. I am wary of the hyperbolic claims made for the grand master of abstract expressionism, wary of the investment in the muscular and visceral hero of modernism, wary of the equation of action, physicality, and scale with some notion of liberation and of a strike for cultural autonomy. In short I am critically on guard and approach the whole visit with weariness and a sense of cultural obligation. I have dragged G.B. along in the hope that his superior knowledge of the period and of the work, the fact that he has already visited the exhibition on several occasions, will provide me with insight and animate the encounter, chip away at my weariness. Shortly after entering the exhibition and beginning to look, through the compulsions of chronology, at the early work, we spot the actress who plays the beautiful nurse Carol Hathaway on the fabled TV series ER. We are mesmerized, we follow her around the exhibition, she is even more beautiful in real life than on the screen and we speculate on the color of her hair and on her relationship to her companion at the exhibition. Our attention has been well and truly diverted and one mythic structure – the heroic modernist figure of Pollock and the art history that instates him and claims that singularity of our attention for him and for his art – has

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been interrupted by another mythic structure, that of Hollywood celebrity and the odd slippages between distance and proximity, reality and filmic fiction, that occur when it is delivered directly into our living rooms with weekly regularity. It is entirely true that both G.B. and I are fans of the series; at the same time it is also true that we occupy ourselves with the critical interrogation of the meanings and status of art within broad visual culture. Were we simply swept along, interpellated by fandom and struck by glamor? Or had we staged a disruption that was entirely necessary for our own viewing processes, allowing us to exit the application demanded from us and to unframe the exhibition from the isolating claims made for it, from its mythic structures? Mythic structures clearly play a substantial role in the interpellation of our attention. Much thought has been given to the mythic in terms of heroic artists and of valiant, groundbreaking avant-garde movements, of figures and actions which oppose some set of perceived conventions of the day. But they are equally the primal scene of Arendt’s “space of appearance” and evolved out of the joint operations of narrative and conversation. Certainly in the case of the disrupted viewing of the Jackson Pollock exhibition, G.B. and I regaled one another with tales of our watching experiences and reactions to ER: our perceptions of the characters portrayed, of the actors portraying them, of the evolving story line, of the mesmerizing effects of the fast cutting technique which is the series’ cinematic hallmark. Not only was one mythic structure mobilized in relation to another one, that of the exhibition, but a viewing position, an alternate of imbricated fan as opposed to reverential spectator, was put into play in this disruption. Myth, states Jean-Luc Nancy, begins when a group is gathered listening to a story, and the telling of that story is the entire point of their assembly – the scene of the myth is their space of appearance. “We know this scene well. More than one storyteller has told it to us, having gathered us together in learned fraternities intent on knowing what our origins were. Our societies, they have told us, derive from these assemblies themselves, and our beliefs, our knowledge, our discourses and our poems derive from these narratives.”23 The relation of the narrative and of its structuring properties within the mythic is to do with the fact that what it communicates is itself, its process of communicating: It does not communicate a knowledge that can be verified from elsewhere: it is self-communicating . . . In other words, along with knowledge, about

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Looking Away 131 whatever knowledge about whatever object it might be, it communicates also the communication of this knowledge . . . Myth communicates the common, the being-common of what it reveals or what it recites. Consequently, at the same time as each one of its revelations, it also reveals the community to itself and founds it.24

One of the most interesting of Nancy’s insights is the degree to which critical or analytical initiatives (his examples are romanticism, communism, structuralism) are secret communities and constitute the very last possibility of myth to both invent itself and transmit itself. Another is his insistence on its fictional nature: “Mythic thought – operating in a certain way through the dialectical sublation of the two meanings of myth – is in effect nothing other than the thought of a founding fiction or a foundation by fiction.”25 Both of these insights I believe to be the source of much comfort, yet another acknowledgment of Derrida’s faith in there being no “outside of the text,” an endorsement of the fact that as we converse and exchange critical perspectives we do not situate ourselves beyond their contexts and interpellations but rather shift the ground of these and recognize the degree to which we ourselves are its mythic objects. We are the arena and the site of both of these combined activities. As Nancy says, myth operates simultaneously as both “foundation” and “fiction,” and its truest form of thinking is philosophy which wants to both tell the truth (1) of myth, and (2) in relation to myth (as its opposite).26 But having agreed on the space of appearance and on the inherently split nature of the mythic, now we also have to face not simply the fictional but also the fragmented nature of the critical models around which a gathering could take place. Beyond romanticism, communism, structuralism, we locate ourselves within atomized trajectories in which direction or subject, one direction or one subject, are not at all inevitable. On the contrary, says Yve Lomax, Think of making the art gallery a most untimely place. Think of making the lines break through and not settling for well-established points. Think of all the lines, which are involved. Rigid lines – sexual lines – institutional lines – supple lines – saddening lines – electric lines. Lines of prejudice but also vibrant lines. The lines involved within the formation of the gallery space can never be contained in just one local place.

Everything that we had previously counted on in order to focus our attention – the fixed and designated identity of named spaces, the perceived

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clarity of division between subject and object, the gripping and compelling nature of myth – have come undone within the dialectics of subjectivity. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms: Myth realizes itself dialectically: it exceeds all its mythic figures to announce the pure mythology of an absolute, foundational, symbolizing or distributive speech. It is here that things are interrupted. The tradition is suspended at the very moment it fulfils itself. It is interrupted at that precise and familiar point where we know that it is all a myth . . . and the word “myth” itself designates the absence of what it names.27

The disruption I recounted is partly an intervention in a mythic structure and the compulsion to point to the absence that it names through the deployment of a high/low dichotomy. But it is also performative and makes a claim for what Hannah Arendt calls “the space of appearance.” For Arendt, this space of appearance is what makes possible “action” and the inevitable reversal it has wrought in the hierarchical order between, in Arendt’s terms, contemplation and action. Having become aware of the very mythic nature of our own critical interventions, it is the minute gatherings of refusal and disruption that are left to us to somehow live out the combined entities of participation and criticism. To make such a statement is to somehow be seemingly gripped by a situationist ethos, by the echoes of stealthy street actions, remade topographies and inscriptions left behind on walls. How do we occupy the space of commanding attention in ways that are not the take-over of street marches nor the romantic covert operations of the agents of détournement? Perhaps we could say that we simply do not, that we refuse that very notion of a spatial occupation in which our identity is subjugated to a named commonality. To my mind the great difference between subversive action and what I am calling “disruption” is precisely Agamben’s “whatever” in all its arbitrariness and ephemerality. No form of subversive action can be that without some attempt to create a fit between itself as a manifestation and a set of values and ideals it is operating in the name of. In other words, subversivity is always ideological and always consciously mobilized, even if it takes the form of an unplotted nocturnal roaming and even if its outcomes are not foreseen, as in the workings of détournement. Equally critical practice works to unveil the hidden and to enter the battlefield of signification, in order to intervene and subvert those meanings. Instead I am hankering after the unconscious processes of actually becoming the subject, which I identify as “the performative.” Claiming that we live out Agamben’s “whatever” in

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Looking Away 133 the vagaries of trivial conversations that ebb and flow, making and remaking the “space of appearance” as we speak of different things. Inside, distracted, acknowledging that our utterances come back to us in inverted form, conceding the common while refusing its identity – that’s us. “Us” in the process of becoming the subjects of culture. The ethnographies of visits to the Tate Gallery and to the Courtauld Institute, and to all the other exhibitions and institutions that I am attempting to describe in the course of this work on participation, are encounters with mythic spaces in Nancy’s terms. They allow me to make concrete and manifest, to stage as it were, the unauthorized consequences of what I have called “looking away,” of diverting attention from all that culture demands we pay attention to. It is precisely because we are knowledgeable about the “auratic” value invested in art through teleology and filiation (to use the Marxist and the semiotic terms of analysis), precisely because we have been through such a long and protracted phase of institutional critique of the spaces and strategies of display, that we can affect such a bold step of “looking away” from inside those discourses and those spaces. In the process we produce for ourselves an alternative mode of taking part in culture in which we affect a creative bricolage of art works and spaces, and modalities of attention and subjectivities, that break down the dichotomies of objects and viewers and allow for a dynamic manifestation of the lived cultural moment.

Notes 1 See Hans Haacke, Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Marcel Broodthaers, Marcel Broodthaers (New York: Walker Arts Center, 1989); Daniel Spoerri, An Anecdotal Topography of Chance (London: Atlas Press, 1995); The Guerrilla Girls, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (London: Pandora Press, 1995); Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum (Baltimore: Baltimore Society of Contemporary Art, 1989); and Barbara Bloom, The Reign of Narcissism (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1990). 2 Kynaston McShine, The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999). 3 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1972); Daniel Buren, “The Function of the Museum,” Artforum, 12 (1) (1973). 4 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Washington: Bay Press, 1985).

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5 Carol Duncan, Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995); and Steven Dubin, Of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 6 Vera Frenkel, “The Cornelia Lumsden Archive,” in Museums by Artists (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983). 7 Exhibition titled Shadows and Silhouettes, November 2001, Courtauld Institute, London. 8 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 9 Ibid., pp. 1–2. 10 Part of this text has been published as “How to Dress for an Exhibition,” in M. Jaukuuri and M. Hannula (eds), Stopping the Process (Helsinki: NIFCA, 1998). This is the proceedings of an international meeting of curators and theorists which attempted to broaden the understanding of the curatorial. 11 Part of this text appears in Yve Lomax, Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). My thanks to Yve Lomax both for involving me in her project and for permitting me to reprint part of that writing in the present context. The mutuality of that writing project between the critical/analytical, the theoretical, and the creative made it possible to locate corollaries between these ideas and some of the main concepts. 12 Much of my thinking on this subject has been developed in conversations with the philosopher Eva Meyer whose own texts also embody the contiguity of the analytical and the creative mentioned in the previous footnote. 13 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 14 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 198. 15 Lomax, Writing the Image, p. 78. 16 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198. 17 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 18 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 199. 19 Ibid., p. 198. 20 Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 1–2. 21 Lomax, Writing the Image, p. 78. 22 Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 67. 23 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 44. 24 Ibid., p. 50. 25 Ibid., p. 53. 26 Ibid., pp. 53 n. 23, 161. 27 Ibid., p. 52.

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Part III

Itinerant Improvisations 135

Critical Response/ Performative Process

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Itinerant Improvisations: From “My Favorite Things” to an “agency of night” John Seth For Lanis When the dog bites When the bee stings When I’m feeling sad I simply remember my favorite things And then [things don’t seem so bad].1

— It is early December and for reasons that remain unclear to me the song “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music comes to mind. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that this is the month of December and we are approaching Christmas time when, in years past at least, it has seemingly been the “traditional” time on British television to screen The Sound of Music. So the reason may be as simple as that. Moreover, the Sound of Music website states that the film is not only viewed as an annual family event, but is also “one of the most watched and rewatched films of all time.”2 Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian (Friday, November 30, 2001), describes the film as “a much-loved Christmas favourite for young and old, straight and gay.”3 Whatever the case, the film is judged to be appropriate, good, family viewing for the Christmas holiday season. Of course it may be that the melody and the words of this

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Figure 7 Anne Tallentire, Instances, video still, 1999. Reproduced with permission

song have been skipping over in my mind after having recently come across the 1960 studio recording of “My Favorite Things” by the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.4 And then I remember seeing the film The Sound of Music for the first time: Calcutta, India, 1970, 1971, 1972 or 1973 – I cannot recall which year exactly. Nevertheless, none of this provides a wholly adequate reason for why my memory seems to be dwelling on the sound of “My Favorite Things.” But let me start from here . . . In the film, the scene setting for “My Favorite Things” is Maria’s bedroom during her first night in the von Trapp household. There is a thunderstorm and the von Trapp children, in turn, rush into her bedroom looking for comfort and assurance. Maria tells the children that when something bothers her and makes her feel unhappy she thinks of nice things like “daffodils, green meadows, skies full of stars.” To comfort them she then goes on to make up a song – seemingly on the spot, improvised even.

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Itinerant Improvisations 139 Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens Brown paper packages tied up with string These are a few of my favorite things.

At one point in the scene, Maria scratches her head (a slight tussling of her hair), seemingly at a loss for words. And then: Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudel Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings These are a few of my favorite things.

The scene is interrupted by the entrance of Captain von Trapp, who immediately stops the apparent hilarity by reminding Maria that discipline is an important feature of his family. He reminds her that “the first rule in [his] house is discipline.” And of course, it is well past the children’s bedtime. — Wednesday, December 27, 2001. On my way to the Marian Goodman Gallery, I was already anticipating that this exhibition, titled Fear Not, of the artist Gabriel Orozco’s recent work was going to raise some of the issues that I have been thinking about. In fact, as I was already familiar with Orozco’s work, I knew beforehand that his work had some relationship to my own interests and concerns. And then I found myself wandering on 57th Street in Manhattan as I realized that I hadn’t made a note of the specific address for the gallery. Past Tiffany’s on the corner of 5th Avenue and 57th Street, as I am reminded of the distinctive Tiffany Blue, past the London policeman-doorman in a somewhat dated uniform standing outside Burberry’s, I thought for a moment about Orozco’s videorecording journeys: his wandering through a city for a day recording things, events, as he happened upon them.5 And somewhere in the swarm of post-Christmas sales shoppers: “None of these people are New Yorkers.” Of course, we were all tourists. And then there I was at the entrance to the ground floor lobby for 24 West 57th Street. A certain kind of text and a certain set of identifications function to mark out a relation between Orozco, his work, and the terrain of his operations. Peter Schjeldahl’s review of Fear Not provides a biographical text that identifies Orozco as having “[a]mong peripatetic conceptualists . . . one of

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the most visa-crazed passports.”6 Schjeldahl produces a particular reading of the artist’s work through a notion of the peripatetic, combined with the facts of Orozco’s life (the life of an international artist, moving and working from place to place). He states: “Typically, [Orozco] will live somewhere for a spell, incorporate elements of the local landscape into his work, and move on.”7 Schjeldahl informs us that it was in Paris that Orozco cut the body of a Citroën DS lengthwise, removing the middle and re-welding it together, simultaneously producing an exaggeration of the car’s design and removing its function as a car. Berlin, continues Schjeldahl, provided Orozco with the opportunity to search around the city for an East Germanmade yellow motor scooter, now no longer in production, that resembled his own. On finding a similar scooter, Orozco would park his own scooter beside the found scooter and take a photograph as a kind of commemoration of the find. Out of this process a series of photographs was made: Until You Find Another Yellow Schwabe (1995). The peripatetic, the seeming itinerancy, in relation to Orozco’s work is not simply a part of what it is to be caught in the market maneuvers of international art. Rather, it also becomes part of the working procedure and thematic of his practice. A further example of this peripatetic aspect of Orozco’s practice was his Penske project. Exhibited in 1998 at Marian Goodman as part of his The Free Market is Anti-Democratic, the Penske project comprised (sometimes barely) assembled or worked on materials which had been cast out by their owners and collected by the artist in the vicinity of lower Manhattan. “Scavenged,” as Nancy Princenthal put it.8 “The result of a fishing expedition . . . [of ] work [that] had to be finished there on the spot,” as Molly Nesbit puts it.9 Indeed, this way of his practice is evident, though differently, in earlier work, notably Island within an Island (1994) and Yielding Stone (1992). And somewhere in all of this I find an opening onto another reading of Orozco’s work. An opening that I see in his words, as cited in the Princenthal review: “I don’t know what I am going to do next.” And in Nesbit’s observation of an action being “finished on the spot.” And, again, in Orozco’s words: “I trace certain intentions with the camera, and then suddenly the tension between my intentions and reality becomes too great and the whole thing breaks down.”10 What seems to be suggested here in this not knowing, or this doing on the spot, or the breakdown caused by a tension between intention and reality, is something to do with a certain contingency. Perhaps, even, something to do with an action that signifies (only) in the moment of performance. And then, how does Orozco proceed,

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Itinerant Improvisations 141 or go on, from this not knowing what to do next? Of course, it isn’t exactly a “not knowing.” Instead we should see in this statement an identification of a process of working that is actually a kind of knowing what to do next (a kind of activity or process), but a knowing that is not determinate. It is a knowing that one might call improvisational. — In 1961 the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane released a version of the song “My Favorite Things” on an album of the same title, an album that included covers of a number of popular songs of the period (Porter’s “Everytime We Say Goodbye” and Heyward and Gershwin’s “Summertime”). But it is “My Favorite Things” that came to be known as Coltrane’s signature tune. The introductory liner notes for the 1998 CD re-release describes this first recording of the song as “pretty much straightforward and kind.”11 At the 1963 jazz festival in Newport, Rhode Island, the performance of the tune is less wholly “My Favorite Things,” and seemingly more a starting point for improvisational variations; nevertheless, the melody is still clearly discernible. At this moment in the 1960s, cited as the beginning of Coltrane’s own deployment of modal jazz – an aspect of which is a use of scales and a simplified chord structure that allows a greater freedom for improvisation – the performance of the tune works between improvisation and theme, where the theme is returned to as a kind of center. By the time of the performance in 1966 at the Village Vanguard, New York, the version of “My Favorite Things” is described as a “head-on” meeting of “the aggression and fury of his style” and the melody “while he mowed mercilessly through kittens with whiskers and snowflakes on eyelashes.”12 In fact the version on Live at the Village Vanguard Again! runs about three minutes into the performance before anything resembling the original tune is even heard.13 And this is only if the six minutes of the double bass solo introduction are not included. Moreover, when the tune does emerge it is as something found in the “sheet noise” of the music.14 Once found it seems almost immediately lost, deliberately dispensed with, or fragmented. One might say that Coltrane breaks the melodic line of “My Favorite Things” out of its sequential order – the order that gives it a form that we recognize and to which we can hum or whistle along – and runs it along something like a chain of difference with the musical phrases of the original composition only occasionally emerging through the “glisses” of his playing.15 Of course, the “improvisational,” in jazz of the 1960s, and in free jazz in particular, is seen as a mode of “freedom of self-expression.”16 In free jazz,

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this “freedom of self-expression” is repeatedly described as the performer’s freedom to create in the moment of the performance without concern for any predetermined set of rules or structures. Martin Williams describes the improvisation in Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz as “almost total.” Moreover, he continues, “it is frequently collective [the subtitle of the album is ‘A Collective Improvisation’], involving all eight men inventing at once. And there are no preconceptions as to theme, chord patterns or chorus lengths.”17 Williams goes on to cite Coleman saying: “We were expressing our minds and emotions as much as could be captured by electronics. [And to try and] play the music and not the background. [In other words, the music should be] direct and immediate . . . expressing our minds and our emotions rather than being a background for emotions.” This “total improvisation,” then, is an expression that is simultaneously a collective and an individual identity. Moving through something like an interior “conversation” to collective dialog, the improvisational mode in free jazz, as indicated in Coleman’s definition of harmolodics, allows for a spontaneous expression of “more than one direction at one time” and using “a multiplicity of elements.”18 One of the differences between the Coltrane and Coleman works that I have cited here is obvious: the Coltrane a reworking of an already existing song and the Coleman a spontaneously performed composition. This difference could be described as part of the movement in the history of jazz music “from the firm ground of composed music towards the terra incognita of complete improvisation.”19 However, whilst the complete improvisation of the Coleman collective is not a reworking of previously composed material, it nevertheless partakes of, or engages with, previously existing forms – a terra incognita, then, of a paradoxical kind. — There is a scene in James Baldwin’s novel Another Country, published in 1962, that is set in a jazz club. Here is the passage that describes the scene: He had a lot to say. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And, again, Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question [that was] heard, the same phrase, unbearably, endlessly and variously repeated, with all the force the boy had. The silence became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on

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Itinerant Improvisations 143 the table; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and the most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe.20

Something of the viscerality of the improvisatory act is conveyed in this passage. Whilst there is a suggestion of the heroic in this passage – the “pagan pride with which he humped the air” – it conveys an act of selfexpression that is simultaneously wretched, “terrible and real.” But perhaps more importantly this passage offers a basis from which to form an understanding of a notion of agency within the act of improvisation, an agency that is formed through the process of deformation. In an attempt to explain his relationship to “Western” culture and history or, in his words, “these white centuries,” Baldwin, in an earlier text, provides a particular idea of appropriation through the image of the “interloper.”21 Unable to see “any reflection” of himself in this culture and history, and not having any recourse to any other “heritage,” Baldwin concludes that he would have to “appropriate these white centuries” in such a way as to make them his own: “I would have to make them mine – I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme – otherwise I would have no place in any scheme.” I take the action of the interloper, then, as one that deforms the traditional materials of any kind. However, as indicated in Baldwin, the interloper has a “special attitude,” which suggests more than simply a de-formation of culture. Whilst there is, here, a deformation of the material worked on, there is also a formation of the subject, a “special attitude,” through the acting, or working, upon material. The deformation of the material is, obviously, the transformation of the material into an as yet unrecognized form, or perhaps simply another form. Arlene Keizer reads the improvisational agency as offering a way of thinking “human agency-in-resistance” – an agency that does not passively accept its place in a hegemonic order – that not only entails a deformation, but, and importantly for Keizer, also a reformation:

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The improviser understands what is expected of her/him and may begin by performing it according to traditional rules (mastery of form). The improviser then deliberately disrupts the traditional form by introducing other elements into it, elements drawn from other contexts, or by using the instrument in a significantly different manner from the way it has been used in the past (deformation of mastery). Finally, the piece composed from both traditional elements and non-traditional, improvised elements is a new whole, with internal integrity (reformation of form).22

Keizer goes on, through Ralph Ellison, to argue that this reformation is a fashioning of an identity that is in the process of continual improvisation.23 For Ellison, however, this fashioning and refashioning of identity comes at a cost. In this site of performance, the improviser (the “jazzman”), even as s/he finds a voice, a “definition of identity” both as an individual and as part of a tradition/community, risks losing it in that very moment to “imitators,” to the next gambit for the status of originality, and back, perhaps, into tradition itself. Stuart Hall, on the other hand, offers a way of thinking about identity in relation to “black diasporic experience,” that is always in the process of continual improvisation and that does not return us to stasis or totality. An experience that is rooted in the traditions of migrant cultures, but an experience that is nevertheless worked through in a different place – different geographically, socially and also psychically. It is a thinking of identity as identification. Identification, suggestive of a more discursive process, opens out identity as contingent, perhaps even provisional. Moreover, this contingent identity, as Hall argues, in “using the resources of history, language, and culture,” is a continual process of “becoming rather than being.” It is a combining of parts, “a process of unsettling, recombination, hybridization, and cut-and-mix,” that does not necessarily make up a totality.24 — From Coltrane’s appropriation of “My Favorite Things,” particularly in the late versions, back into the Sound of Music, one could hear the deforming glisses running through and into the original. Couldn’t one? In the deformation of the melodic line the song is turned into a process of versioning where the original becomes merely one amongst a number of possible maneuvers.25 Moreover, through this process, the last version is always put off, deferred, until the next performance. Could we see this as something like a process of composition that takes shape in relation to “a particular place at a particular moment . . . right there, on the spot – and

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Itinerant Improvisations 145 then throw[n] . . . away”26 until the next time? Of course, jazz reworkings of popular songs were then, and continue to be, something of a tradition (hence Lester Bowie’s recent reworkings of the Spice Girls’ “Two Become One,” and Michael Jackson’s “Black or White”). Certainly the choosing of a popular song like “My Favorite Things” was as much about reaching out to the market: to do “something for the people,” as Coltrane put it.27 However, we could also understand this reworking as a turning of the composed and the finished into a process, or, in LeRoi Jones’ words, into “the verb process, the doing, the coming into being, the at-the-time-of.”28 But as the two – the original song and Coltrane’s versioning – run up against and through one another, something else also emerges. Passing into the seriousness of Coltrane’s reworking is a certain frivolity, a lightness. After all, the purpose of the song is as a reminder of the pleasant and delightful when times are bad. Moreover, Maria performs in The Sound of Music, from her first clownish, even “childish,” appearance in the von Trapp household, as a sign of levity and disruption: “Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes / Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes / Silver white winters that melt into springs / These are a few of my favorite things.” — Let me get back to Orozco: Orozco, the nomadic, the “peripatetic conceptualist.” At the exhibition Fear Not, in what appears to be a storeroom with boxed works of art (the south gallery viewing room at Marian Goodman’s), I watch Orozco’s Jaipur Kites (video, 29 minutes), a videorecording shot during a visit to India in 1998. One might be forgiven for thinking, like James Meyer, that this nomadic artist makes work on the move “from one commission to the next.”29 Meyer draws a distinction between “lyrical nomadism” and “critical nomadism,” placing Orozco’s work clearly in relation to the former. For Meyer, whilst “lyrical nomadism” conceals the structures and formation of the gallery institution, “critical nomadism” explicitly attempts to reveal these structures as part of the practice. In the latter, then, the work sets out to explore the very structures of nomadism as historically located and site (institution) specific.30 However, Orozco has distanced himself from the term nomadism as something “seductive” and, instead, identified himself as an immigrant, even if a “privileged one.”31 In the meantime I am following the kites that decorate the evening sky in dots of color. The camera, zooming in for a pixilating detail, attempts to catch the rise and fall of a kite in dance as the children on rooftops pull at

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its strings. A kind of soundless dialog is in play between the kites as they pull towards and away from one another. A tree is tinseled in abandoned kites – having drifted off from their owners, disengaged, lost. Of course, this scene in Jaipur is mirrored across different cities, towns, and villages in India. Like the improvising of the Sandal Wicket (1998) for a game of cricket, kite-flying – whilst being a favorite activity during particular festivals – is also an everyday leisure sport. Moreover, the flying of kites in India also involves the demonstration of a deftness, a skill, as one engages the difficult task of avoiding, or deliberately entangling (as in the case of kite-fighting), nearby kites. It is in the attention to the particularity of the “life-world,” as Jean Fisher puts it, that we might grasp a “critical” improvisation in Orozco’s work. The reworking of debris and other kinds of discarded material is an improvisational process that also signifies a particular set of cultural conditions. Fisher has argued that the particularity here is related to, or “springs from a sensibility and a life-world” that are the “conditions of lived experience in Latin-America.”32 In this context we might think of the reworkings of Orozco as, in Fisher’s words, an “act of re-animation.” If the reworking of materials is a re-animation, then Orozco’s video works offer a representation, a documentation, of a process of mobility. Moreover, as with Jaipur Kites, the procedure is a working within the contingency of a given time and place: Jaipur, India, the annual kite festival, January 1998. Orozco describes his video works as being produced through a process that is “extremely controlled,”33 but this control is nevertheless subject to the sudden encounter, the chanced-upon event. There is something tactical, to use a term from Michel de Certeau, about this process that produces “unforeseeable sentences.”34 De Certeau opposes the notion of “strategy” with “tactic.” Whilst, for de Certeau, strategy indicates procedures for administering the processes of accumulation and control from a position of power, tactics are actions performed by those without power operating in situations not of their own making. From this position, a “tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect of circumstances.”35 The tactic, then, takes the shape of decisions made or “opportunities . . . seized ‘on the wing.’ ”36 Moreover, for de Certeau, the tactic introduces movement and agitation into a system of control. For sure, the kite-flying in India, as recorded in Jaipur Kites, is not necessarily an example of a

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Itinerant Improvisations 147 tactical procedure. Although kite-flying as a popular leisure pastime does provide opportunities for inventiveness that deviate from the accepted norms of the activity: a particular example here might be the use of special glass resin on the line for the purposes of kite-fighting. It is rather in the procedure of Orozco’s recording that one might read a tactical process: the happened-upon event that is recorded, an entering into a temporary relation with it in that moment. One might also consider this as an appropriation, even if a tactic could not deploy the process of appropriation as an owning. But these appropriations suggest both a re-presentation of, and a partaking with, the event. Orozco’s video recording is continuous with the event, an improvising in the moment: “When I begin recording something, I don’t know how long it’s going to last . . . so I improvise, watching and walking at the same time.”37 However, if we were to consider Orozco’s improvisation as a kind of tactical production, what is it that constitutes the subject engaged in such a production? As Fisher points out, it is a subject that works with what is available, with what is to hand. In this action, a doing with whatever is to hand, we might glimpse a subject in motion. — And in this motion I hear something else. Something like the repeated phrase Do you love me? spurting forth without any actual concern for an answer. A question that spins off into the air of the metropolis and bangs around like some repeating echo not settling for any easy coexistence and returning as a screeching and wailing. A subject de-formed, dispersed, and then formed? Perhaps not. The motion of the subject is, instead, a subject-forming that is constituted by the very weave of the moment, place, and circumstances of enunciation. For Baldwin, it is in the seeing of his no-reflection that is the becoming moment of the interloper. The improvisational process of appropriation, which might be described as the tactical procedure of the interloper, is both what constitutes the identity of the interloper and the actions and processes that become the form of the interloper’s enunciation. The discourse of improvisation, as found in the texts of jazz, situates an anterior subject, as Keizer describes it, in the history of a tradition and/or community that is then deformed and re-formed through the engagement with the institutional structures of cultural hegemony. However, the thinking of improvisation as performative, rather than performance, situates the subject differently in the relation between tradition/community and the cultural hegemony of “these white centuries.” A difference that crucially posits the production of the subject

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in the performative moment of enunciation that provides the very possibility of agency and the possibilities of improvising through the very structures of power.38 *** — Daffodils, Skies Full of Stars, and an agency of night. — (“In the darkness I lose a sense of space, and in this nowhere I feel myself more solidly. . . .”39) — (“Abus Hassan emerged from the dark. . . .”40) — The artist Anne Tallentire shows me some bits of works, a few images on videotape. As yet unfinished and without any particular form, these bits of work could, I guess, be more accurately described as rough cuts. One of the images – or rather video sequences – had already been described to me over the telephone before our planned meeting: she was in the City of London before sunrise. The sky was still dark, but the streets were lit up, not only by street lighting but also by the light from the office buildings. I need no reminding that all the buildings in the vicinity of the City of London are offices. In the midst of all this was a patch of daffodils along a sidewalk bathed in the artificial light of the buildings and street lamps. There is a strangeness to these blooming flowers in the night: there they are, these daffodils, their flowers open, swaying gently in the city breeze, in the night-light. The description by Tallentire of this image acted as a kind of prologue to our meeting and my viewing of the tapes. And the sequence on the tape continues: the camera pans up from the daffodils and catches a glimpse, in the distance, of two figures seemingly walking together along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the road. They are walking away from the position of the camera. The camera follows them as they cross the road up ahead and the image cuts as they finish crossing. Other than the fact that they are women, it is not possible to make out anything about them. Actually, it is not at all evident that these figures are women. Whilst the street is bright, it is not daylight and the figures remain in a kind of hazy distance. These mere passersby are perhaps part of a workforce that is not normally seen during daylight. Of course, they may not be. But this is the significance that I am left with: that they are workers whose work takes them to office

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Itinerant Improvisations 149 buildings during the early hours of the day and before the “working day” begins. The other images that I am shown similarly document the comings and goings of people along the streets in the early morning. However, whilst the time of day that is recorded on these tapes is the early morning, there is a quality about them, the hazy light and color, that is of the night. These workers, caught in the early morning, on their way home (or perhaps to continue the day with other work), passing along on the sidewalk, waiting for a bus, crossing the road, are (merely) passersby, on the move from one place to another. A similar time of day is inscribed in Tallentire’s video installation Instances (1999): from the video-projected image of dawn slowly breaking over a city skyline achingly pictured in real time, to the semi-light of the performance scenes screened on a video monitor.41 Moreover, Tallentire has stated that “Instances began with not being able to sleep, lying awake in the night, often through till dawn.”42 But how do we arrive at an understanding of this kind of being in the night? Maurice Blanchot suggests that being in the night could be understood as the task of sleep, put to use by the day, to “blot out the night.”43 In our “surrender to sleep,” night escapes us as we “withdraw from everyday bustle.” This is the sureness of sleep at night: a time and place that we withdraw to, and from which we return renewed. Consequently, Blanchot suggests, to not sleep (as a resting in place) is a cause for concern: “Nocturnal wandering, the tendency to stray when the world is attenuated and grows distant, and even the honest professions which are necessarily practiced at night attract suspicions. To sleep with eyes open is an anomaly symbolically indicating something which the general consciousness does not approve of. People who sleep badly always appear more or less guilty. What do they do? They make night present.” The bad sleeper is also one who is unable to find a position: to not find an attachment, to be unable to localize. For Blanchot, “insomnia” signals “the impossibility of making sleep a free zone, a clear and true resolution.”44 The video projection of the image of dawn in Instances is charged with this instability. Not only is the viewer unsure of the point of view or place from which the image is shot, but even as the different aspects of the scene – tree, rooftops, tower block – reveal themselves in the coming daylight, the seemingly industrial fence dominant in the foreground of the image offers no certainty of location. It provides no ground. And what happens in this time between darkness and light? In the tower block we see light in one window. Then a second window lights up and then goes out. It is

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dawn and the lit window in the building signals an unseen activity; people either at work or rising for work in the city. As the image brightens the sounds of birds and traffic intensify, bleeding into one another. A sleepless dawn cannot be thought of as the break of day, but of the night continuing into the day – and, perhaps also, neither night nor day. In an adjacent space to the video projection, on the monitor about two inches or so off the ground, a series of performances is screened. The performances, taking place in a semi-light, occur at floor level. However, it is perhaps too much to refer to these “actions” as “performances.” Better to say, a series of actions is performed: a small folding table is unfolded and folded; a too small pair of women’s leather gloves is tried on, struggled with, neatly folded and put aside; a series of nails is hammered into the floorboards, seemingly following some line or grain in the wood; a room-dividing canvas screen is laid out unfolded on the floor and methodically ripped apart to reveal its support; a piece of floorboard is pulled up using a claw hammer; discarded elements, items that have slipped in between the gaps of the floorboards, are retrieved and then brushed back under the boards; a drawing is attempted with bits of burnt wood; blue-black ink-like liquid is poured into a metal trough that then leaks out onto the floor . . . and so on. The camera closely follows these actions, sometimes as though in the space of the actions, sometimes pulling back, but always near. In one moment I am following the blue-black ink-like liquid, a night being poured, uncontainable as it runs out of the metal trough spreading along the floorboards. And then I am caught, transfixed, by the glimmering light of stars in the sky: Tallentire empties out troughs filled with shattered glass onto the floor. The pieces fall in a cascade that gradually fills the screen, almost. Her feet in worker’s ankle boots, she moves across the now crushed-glass-covered floor in a slow, shuffling motion of a dance. And then, with bare hands, the bits of glass are further spread across the floor. Jaki Irvine describes this scene as an “inverse shadow, bright fragments fallen onto a dark ground . . . freshly fallen urban snow,” and of course, “fragments glisten[ing] . . . like stars of another kind.”45 — But what “stars of another kind”? Not actual stars (merely) look-alikes: like the light in a window in deepest night, like a glittering city at night seen from an approaching airplane. Perhaps, the look-alike star whose starlight transforms, a sign slipping along its axis, a liquefaction of sorts, into the surveying beam of the helicopter searchlight; a beam that when

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Itinerant Improvisations 151 followed to its source is a pinhead of light. But the star-light-beam can only catch a glimpse of a subject as it improvises its maneuvers in the dark. And then the specks of starlight slip across to its opposite: dark flecks that run across the surveillance monitor screen of the night vision cameras. — Sangatte, near Calais, northern France: Looking like the “night-shift, which has just finished at the factory,” emerging from the Sangatte refugee warehouse-camp, out under a sky full of stars, on a “long and twisting moonlit road, they move as silently as possible, shying away from car headlights.”46 As Blanchot proposes, the very fact of activities taking place at night suggests an illicitness. In this instance, of course, to make a move at night is a necessity. The refugees (and, of course, other migrants) move, in Kim Sengupta’s words, “ghost-like” across the terrain in the vicinity of Sangatte heading for the “strangely cinematic . . . Eurotunnel terminal.”47 Already having negotiated a journey crossing national boundary markers, their actions, like glisses, make fluid – despite and against the regulatory laws on the movement of people – the border limits of a nation. The sounding of glisses, the running of multitudinous notes on a harp, resembles a liquidity, a running across a surface searching out fissures and crevices. Actions such as this, however, are not necessarily performed at speed. Journeys, like that of Sadiq Hanafi, can take up to seven months: Afghanistan – Pakistan – Iran – the Ararat mountain range across western Iran and eastern Turkey – on to Istanbul – across the Aegean sea to Italy, but ending up on a Greek island – on to Rome, and then across Europe to Britain.48 On the way, temporary residencies of a kind are taken up and labor markets entered into; exchanges that provide for the possibility of moving on again. None of these decisions can be pre-planned. Moreover, the taking up of work, the laboring in a sweatshop for instance, is barely a decision that is made. Instead such decisions are a response to a necessity demanded by the moment or the people-traffickers. And whilst the journey has a determinate end, the way is full of chance, risk, negotiations and, yes, improvisational maneuvers: fake documents are procured in exchange for money, false identities taken up, moving between different smugglers depending on the changes in local geopolitical terrain, dodging border guards or soldiers. These maneuvers must be fluid and “tactical” rather than “strategic”; no land or space is appropriated, only a temporary negotiation of the terrain through the meeting of feet and land. And the

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idea of the well-made plan must give way to the chancing of circumstances. The slightest shift in the local situation changes everything: a particular mountain or sea crossing on one day might be unusable the following day. The improvisational here is not with an aim towards “expression,” but rather the matter-of-fact maneuvers (whose etymology is suggestive of work done by hand) across uncertain terrain. And then, as Sadiq recollects, crossing the Ararat mountains to get to Turkey: “We had been walking all night and were crossing when the soldiers started firing at us. . . . The two smugglers who were with us ran away. We were freezing and had no food so we tried to make our way down [the mountain]. Two shepherds found us and sold us on to another smuggler who put us in a truck . . . to Istanbul.”49 Time and again, the night provides some kind of shelter, even if inadequate. And at Sangatte, in the shelter of the night, despite the risks, they act. In the night’s dubious security of concealment, the terrain is unmade as a terra incognita. Dodging past posters for the French National Front, past hostile looks, and then dodging between freight trains, and security lights, moving in turns fast and slow. And in the rush towards the freight tunnel, spotlights following, tracking movements, hovering on the edge of visibility, sometimes caught in the gaze of a star. And then a thwack as the night vision camera catches a blur of a stone as it hits a searchlight. — And with the moon on my wing / And with snow on my eyelashes / Things could be . . . otherwise.

Notes Thanks to Gavin Butt, Lanis Levy, Adrian Rifkin, Anne Tallentire, and Jon Thompson for their comments and encouragement during the research and writing process of the text. The author acknowledges the funding assistance provided by the Research Committee of the Kent Institute of Art and Design for the writing of this chapter. 1 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, “My Favorite Things” (1959) The Sound of Music, directed by Robert Wise (Twentieth Century Fox, 1965). I have altered the last line in my quote from “And then I don’t feel so sad.” 2 See <www.foxhome.com/soundofmusic>. 3 Peter Bradshaw, “Christmas Film, Video and Movie Guide Review,” The Guardian, Friday, November 30, 2001. <www.guardian.co.uk>, accessed December 6, 2001.

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Itinerant Improvisations 153 4 John Coltrane, My Favorite Things (Atlantic Recording Corporation, 1998 [1961]). 5 See Gabriel Orozco, “A Thousand Words: Gabriel Orozco Talks About his Recent Films,” Artforum International, 36 (10) (Summer 1998): 115. 6 Peter Schjeldahl, “Exquisite Debris: The Transforming Eye of Gabriel Orozco,” New Yorker, December 3, 2001. 7 Ibid. 8 Nancy Princenthal, “New York: Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman,” Art in America, 87 (7) (July 1999): 88–9. 9 Molly Nesbit, “The Tempest,” in Gabriel Orozco (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000), p. 163. 10 Orozco, “A Thousand Words.” 11 Bob Carlton, liner notes, John Coltrane, My Favorite Things (1998). 12 Ibid. 13 John Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (Impulse, MCA Records and GRP Records, 1997 [1966]). 14 The jazz critic Ira Gitler referred to Coltrane’s playing as “sheets of sound.” Quoted in Bill Cross’s liner notes, Coltrane, My Favorite Things (1961). 15 John Coltrane quoted by Bill Cross, ibid. The full quote is: “At the time the tendency was to play the entire scale of each chord. Therefore, they were usually played fast and sometimes sounded like glisses.” The term “glisses” refers also to the particular sound of the harp. 16 The idea of “freedom” in free jazz of the 1960s also carried associations with the politics of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States. For a discussion of this relationship see Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 337–64. 17 Martin Williams, liner notes, Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (Atlantic Recording Corporation, 1961). 18 On the idea of “inner dialog” see Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 192–5. Ornette Coleman’s definition of harmolodics is cited in Ajay Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), p. 54. 19 Ted Gioia, The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 59. 20 James Baldwin, Another Country (London: Michael Joseph, 1963), p. 16. Originally published by Dial Press (New York, 1962). 21 James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes” (1952), in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: The Library of America, 1998). 22 Arlene R. Keizer, “Beloved: Ideologies in Conflict, Improvised Subjects,” African American Review, 33 (1) (Spring 1999): 118–19. 23 Ralph Ellison, “The Charlie Christian Story” (1958), in Robert G. O’Meally (ed.), Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings (New York: Modern

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John Seth Library Edition, 2000). The passage from Ellison cited by Keizer can be found on p. 36. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities” (1988), in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). The term “versioning” is discussed by Dick Hebdige in his Cut ’n’ Mix (London: Methuen, 1987). Cited in Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” in Krin Gabbard (ed.), Jazz Among the Discourses (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 77–8. John Coltrane, July 27, 1965, quoted in Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album (London: Granta Books, 2002), p. 172. John Coltrane, Newport ’63 (GRP Records, 1993). LeRoi Jones, “Hunting is not Those Heads on the Wall” (1964), in Home: Social Essays (New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1998), p. 174. Cited in Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” p. 86. James Meyer, “Nomads,” Parkett, 49 (1997): 205–9. Meyer discusses, as examples of this “critical nomadism,” the work of Christian Philipp Müller and Renée Green. Karim Ghaddab, “Gabriel Orozco: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris” (review), Art Press, 238 (September 1998): 66. Jean Fisher, “The Sleep of Wakefulness,” in M. Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Gabriel Orozco (Kortrijk: The Kanaal Art Foundation; Mexico City: La Vaca Independiente – Promoción de arte y cultura, 1993), pp. 14–23. Orozco, “A Thousand Words.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. xviii. Ibid., p. xix. Ibid. Orozco, “A Thousand Words.” I am drawing upon the idea of the performative from Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990); see in particular “Conclusion: From Parody to Politics.” See also Butler’s Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 121–4. Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 1. Part of the opening sentence from Terri Judd, “The Asylum-Seekers, the Channel Tunnel and an Industry Being Brought to its Knees,” The Independent, Friday, March 15, 2002, p. 9. Anne Tallentire’s Instances was commissioned to represent Ireland at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. This work was subsequently exhibited at the Lux Gallery, London, September–October 1999. The catalog, Instances: Anne

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Tallentire, including texts by Jaki Irvine and Brian Hand, was published by the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs of Ireland, 1999. Libby Anson, “Wakefulness in Still Places: An Interview with Anne Tallentire,” Make: The Magazine of Women’s Art, 85 (September–November 1999). Maurice Blanchot, “Sleep, Night,” in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982 [1955]), pp. 264–8. This text is mentioned by Tallentire in Anson, “Wakefulness.” It is also cited by Irvine and Hand. Ibid., p. 265. Irvine, “Anne Tallentire’s Instances,” p. 9. Kim Sengupta, “For the World’s Dispossessed, Sangatte is a Staging Post on a Traumatic Journey in Search of Freedom,” The Independent, Thursday, August 23, 2001, p. 8. The Red Cross Sangatte camp, a corrugated iron warehouse, was formerly used by Eurotunnel to store materials for the construction of the Channel Tunnel linking Britain to mainland Europe. The warehouse was requisitioned in September 1999 by the French authorities for the purpose of housing asylum seekers. Ibid. Maggie O’Kane, “Sadiq’s Story,” Guardian, Monday, May 21, 2001, <www. guardian.co.uk/Refugees in Britain/Story/0,2763,493800,00.html>, accessed June 4, 2002. However, the article does not indicate whether or not this journey included passing through Sangatte. Ibid.

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The Experience of Art as a Living Through of Language Kate Love

Figure 8 Kate Love, Untitled, 2002. Photo by Julian C. Lowe. Reproduced with permission

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The Experience of Art 157 “I think sculpture happens in that space, between the object and the person who is looking at it. It’s obvious but it’s still mysterious how much you can do with that space.”1 But everything seemed to be moving at dead slow speed, even the rain, and it was best just to try to endure it, best just to try to meld into every second (surviving) without noticing where they began or where they ended, but to just keep on going through each moment as it peaked and troughed, peaked and troughed, moment-moment-moment-moment, for years.

Any request to write tends to galvanize meshes of thought, which have been circulating for some time but haven’t necessarily surfaced in any particular formation. The following text, in retrospect, is actually about the process of encouraging such constellations to contingently cohere within a particular context. The context in question is the space of art school life. For the last 10 to 15 years art education in England has played around with the relationship of autobiographical and political accounts of personal experience and its representation in art. Identity politics in the early 1980s seemed to make this an imperative in art schools more than in many other disciplines. This text pieces together aspects of this instruction and its effect on art criticism. In an attempt to undermine the theory/ practice binary, still tenaciously holding on in art school parlance, an auxiliary intention was to posit the idea that we don’t have to bring words to art but rather that we can use the experience of art as a form of criticism itself. In so doing, I discovered that experiences with art can function very well as forms of analysis in their own right – providing interpretations of experience that are far more politically useful than conventional accounts. Moreover, on a personal level such a strategy enabled me to move from that flat, dark place of “nothing’s worth doing” to activity and light.

Part 1: The Destruction of Experience? If this present text is an attempt to scrutinize experience and its relationship to art and the politics of subjectivity – both now and in the recent past – then a reasonable place to start might be with the suggestion that experience is “so over.” For example, in Giorgio Agamben’s book Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience he discusses the poverty of experience as being a characteristic of modernity originating, as Walter Benjamin had diagnosed, with the horrors of World War One.2

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Approaching the destruction of experience from a more recent perspective, Agamben suggests that we do not need a catastrophe such as war to wreak such a dissolution of experience as “[h]umdrum daily life in any city will suffice.”3 He goes on, “[f]or modern man’s average day contains virtually nothing that can still be translated into experience.” Exhausted, “he makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience. . . . Indeed, his incapacity to have and communicate experiences is perhaps one of the few self-certainties to which he can lay claim.”4 Infancy and History was originally published in Italy in 1978 just as the first articles were appearing in the British press warily citing the possibility of the beginning of something called postmodernity. By the time Agamben’s text was translated into English in 1993 it could easily have been interpreted in terms of its allegiance to the then plethora of voices bewailing the crisis of full-blown hyper-reality. Certainly on first glance, Agamben’s claim that contemporary men and women have lost the ability to have or to speak about their experience does appear to substantiate the clichéd image of a subjectivity that is emptied out by the exigencies of a postmodernist/poststructuralist mediation. However, on a second, more thorough reading, perhaps this interpretation – which sees Agamben blaming the machinations of intertextuality for the dissolution of contemporary experience – doesn’t quite add up. For instance, in a passage bemoaning our inability to translate everyday existence into something that we might be able to call “experience,” Agamben begins by citing a range of situations such as visiting the supermarket, reading a newspaper, or sitting in a traffic jam – events which he claims have limited power to become memorable as experience – and are indeed particularly susceptible to a kind of “second-degree imagerepertoire.”5 The reader is then led staccato-like through a succession of examples of the so-called impoverishment of daily life in order to make the point that no matter how commonplace or unusual everyday life might be it still does not warrant the appellation “experience.” Lulled to some extent by the format of a list, it took this reader several re-readings, at least, to realize that quietly buried amongst this roll-call of everyday events, from tedious subway journeys to queuing in banks – situations which would undoubtedly confirm the ennui of modern life – was inserted a sequence of other, much more dramatic and affecting, encounters, such as the impact of tear gas clouds or rapid blasts of gunfire, occurrences which

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The Experience of Art 159 would certainly qualify for the title of “experience.” But this juxtaposition is telling, because in an almost surreptitious attempt to equate the numbness of one event with the horror of the other, Agamben’s intention, I think, is to deliberately void any significant distinction. Because what slowly becomes apparent from reading his opening pages is that, according to Agamben, this non-translatability or poverty of contemporary experience is not caused by any diminution of “meaningful” events in an ordinary person’s life – clearly, being shot at would be exceptionally “meaningful” in any conventional sense. “On the contrary,” he writes, “perhaps compared with the past, everyday existence has never been so replete with meaningful events.”6 Neither is he arguing, as might be thought on first glance, that the affect of something like tear gas could be reduced entirely, even at the height of postmodernism, to a form of discursive interpretation. Both of these explanations for the supposed destruction of experience would be far too easy to assimilate. In fact, I think Agamben is trying to make a point which is much more nuanced. That is, as he sees it, the reason why experience is so inaccessible to us now is because neither the events of modern life, nor the individuals who perceive them, have sufficient authority to translate their experience into something we might be able to call “experience.” As he writes, “[f]or experience has its necessary correlation not in knowledge but in authority – that is to say, the power of words and narration; and no one now seems to wield sufficient authority to guarantee the truth of an experience, and if they do, it does not in the least occur to them that their own authority has its roots in an experience.”7 In other words, in the world as Agamben knows it, neither boredom nor wounding would seem enough to warrant the authority of “experience.”

Part 2: The Authority of Experience? “Now”, he said, “this sort of painting is all very well – in fact to my mind it’s all very well executed – but how much has it got to do with your experience?” The air hung. Everyone looked to the floor. “I mean” . . . slightly desperate . . . “Don’t you think it’s important that you make work about your own experience now?” “What do you mean? I have to make work about my own experience now?” “Well” . . . with some authority, he knew he was right . . . “I would have thought you would have wanted to make work about your experience, I mean, you’ve had the experience, right? If someone hasn’t had

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If we begin to address Agamben’s thoughts in the context of art, and in particular the context of art education, how seriously can we take the proposition that this supposed lack of authority is responsible for the destruction of contemporary experience? For example, would the claim that we can no longer have or communicate experience still stand up, and how might this affect our understanding of the experiences of art in general? [Lecture room. Tiered, hot and stuffy] lecturer. Right then everyone. I want us to look at the first part of the argument that “no one now seems to wield sufficient authority to guarantee the truth of an experience” and to ask – if this is actually correct – then why are so many of you in today’s art schools still encouraged to make work about your “own” experience/subjectivity/visibility etc.?8 I do agree that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this is very much a question of degree, in that a lot of you may well have gone through and out of the other side of the simple injunction “to make work about your own identity.” But ask yourselves: do you think that there is still an implicit understanding in the studio that it would be odd to make a work about an experience which bore no relation, seemingly, to the experiences that you have undergone? Let’s try another angle. If Agamben is correct to say that “no one has sufficient authority to guarantee the truth of an experience” will this mean that college administrators will cease to show such palpable bemusement and/or disbelief when a white student starts talking about their photographic project as black-identified? Or, would there be a whiff of embarrassment rather than an intensification of interest the next time someone pipes up in a seminar about the autobiographical detail that underpins their work? Possibly, possibly not. For even though Agamben might wish to assert that no one can claim the truth of an experience, I would propose, on the contrary, that there is still a lingeringly consensual view that to have been through a particular experience of something does guarantee some sort of authority or authentic knowledge of that something.

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The Experience of Art 161 And furthermore, by extension, that it just doesn’t feel right or appropriate to make work about an experience of something (or make critical estimations of it) if you haven’t actually been through that something – however attenuated from that something the resulting work might be. This is very important in the context of so-called “marginal subjects” (whoever is so designated at any one time) in that this reading of experience as authenticity implies that ipso facto the marginal subject’s experience of otherness is so authentically unknowable – so elsewhere – that it couldn’t possibly make sense to the rest of “us.” And therefore you should be encouraged – compelled even – to make work about your experience so as to let everyone else know what it’s really like. By the same token, of course, it was thought that it would make no sense whatsoever for someone, particularly from a so-called dominant or powerful subject position, to make work about marginality or difference. That would be just too grisly! You only have to remember, for instance, the incredulity that greeted Jacques Derrida’s desire to write “as (a) woman” in 1973. This statement elicited considerable indignation from both women and men who seemed surprised, and angered, even, by the suggestion that a man could or would even want to write (or read) as a women if “he” hadn’t experienced “biological womanhood.”9 Given the debates at the time, which were beginning to encourage the idea of the social construction of subjectivity, it would have been slightly unusual if this furore was entirely caused by the thought of inhabiting the position of “woman” as it might be conceived of in a socially and historically constituted sense. But underneath all this, the actual row (though strangely, this was not acknowledged at the time) was really about experience. Because of the tendency to collapse experience to self-presence, it was almost impossible to believe that anyone would dare to suggest that they could write about another’s experience – particularly if they were intending to write with any acuity – because “your” experience was the one thing that you, and you alone, could have access to and own as your “own.” Even in the late 1990s, when it was more or less established, theoretically at least, that the recognition of experience as experience is always already subject to discursive interpretation, in the last instance, you might well hear someone say “Oh but I’m not talking about actual experience,” as if, by some miracle, experience as an everyday relation to the world might transcend any linguistic/structural/historical determination.10 It may well be 28 years since Derrida’s nascent attempt to deconstruct essentialized identity, but there is still a tendency in art schools, even now,

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to see departments scrambling to find an artist of color to fill the lecture slot on difference and identity.11 And equally, it is quite common for art magazines to think “Let’s review the dinky pink-eared Martian show”, and then think “Oh well then, yes, we must send our dinky pink-eared Martian staffer. Are they in town?” There are, of course, many concomitants to this conflation of experience with truth, not least of which is the well-meaning but, I would argue, misguided directive to insist that students “find their own voice.” Obviously it’s one thing to encourage someone to find their “own voice” and make work about their “own experience,” but what if such an appeal to this so-called unerring veracity only serves to keep that person in their “own place”; to fix or reify that voice or experience as essentially and irrevocably marginal and different? As Terry Eagleton has written in Illusions of Postmodernism: “In this sense, one of the commonest forms of postmodernist dogma is an intuitive appeal to ‘experience’, which is absolute because it cannot be gainsaid (Not all appeals to experience need be of this kind).”12 Which is right, but you could say that this understanding of “experiencing” still endures because there is still a fairly common-sense idea that for most people, for most of the time, the apprehension of lived experience passes in an unmediated form into consciousness from the world which surrounds it. Therefore to “have experienced” something appears to inevitably guarantee an authentic and inviolate interpretation of that experience. Which, to summarize, means that: (1) there is an enduring belief in the transparency of lived experience; (2) there is no interface or “transmission noise” between experience as the “buzzing confusion of things” and its interpretation (seen as immediate contiguity between consciousness and understanding rather than experience as mediated in and through language); (3) as a consequence of (1) and (2) it is presumed that only people who have had a certain experience – say, for example, the experience of “living as a woman” or “living as a gay man” – can truthfully speak to, and on behalf of, those particular experiences. So to be able to say that we have sufficient authority to guarantee the truth of an experience means that we must believe that there is no interface between experience and language. Now, if I were to start to recap this lecture, I would say that that even though Agamben is trying to argue that experience has lost its authority in modern life, in contrast it does seem that . . . confident voice from back of hall. Hang on, I’m slightly lost here. Because, from what you are saying, despite Agamben’s claim that we can

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The Experience of Art 163 no longer have or communicate experience, as long as we picture experience as having an immediate relation to truth then there will always be attempts to valorize the representation and communication of experience as guaranteeing some sort of authentic knowledge? lecturer. [Slightly impatiently, it’s nearly time to get out of the room] Yes. confident voice. [Strident] Which means that contrary to Agamben’s protestations experience still does retain some degree of authority in the guise of authenticity, realness, immediacy, intuition, etc. lecturer. Yes. confident voice. Well then, why is he so adamant that experience has no authority in contemporary life? I mean he’s so withering. Look these are his words: “it is the character of the present time . . . that nobody would be inclined to accept the validity of an authority whose sole claim to legitimation was experience.”13 lecturer. [Weary] Well, if I could finish my sentence! This is what I was just about to say: that even though Agamben is trying to argue that experience has lost its authority in modern life, maybe it hasn’t but rather it’s just that it’s not the kind of authority that Agamben envisaged! That is, that all along, Agamben is anticipating an authority which would constitute your experience as neutral, disinterested, impartial – a relation to the world which could make your trajectory through life feel more real, elevated, enduring, strong, certain . . . this is what he feels has been lost. confident voice. [Hesitant] Right? lecturer. But because the concept of experience has traditionally been recognized as a sensate, experimental, essentially emotive undergoing of the world, then experience in this interpretation is the antithesis of what you might want or expect from authority . . . which actually means that experience and authority enjoy somewhat contradictory relations to the world, especially if that authority continues to be conceptualized as mastery, certainty, truth etc. [Getting to some end] And that all along, the inability of Agamben to acknowledge this realization has obscured an important and challenging paradox: namely, “no one could wield sufficient authority to guarantee the truth of an experience” if it is “experience” itself which doubles back and undoes the concept of “authority.” confident voice. Well, depending on how you interpret the concept of experience and authority – yes. So why do you think – as you’ve been suggesting – that given this realization there is still a conflation of experience and authority in the case of the “others”? lecturer: Well, let’s look at this story.14

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Cold, windy day at the “Request” bus stop reading an Adrian Searle article in the Guardian to pass the time. “ ‘Me, Me, Me, Me’ – If as an artist, Tracey Emin courts failure and revels in it, as a storyteller she’s superb. She lets us rummage through her life and aspirations, and into corners most of us keep well away from the public gaze. Is Emin an artist or an autobiographer? Either way, her only invention, and only subject, is herself.”15

Quick find a pen. I must write this down, will I remember it, oh the tyranny of these little pieces of paper. Why is it that it’s not enough just to live through these thoughts, keep them open? Why is it not enough just to have gone through them and been in their care – even for a moment – and not try to run them towards understanding? Why do I have to hold them, kill them really? Am I frightened that it’s a strand of me which “I” will never see again? Must remember what Peggy Phelan said about “mourning without killing.”16 Remember relation of writing and experience. As is so typical, many hours later, usually after sleep, I realized that this sentiment echoed the relation of language and experience, that is, that you don’t have an experience then put it in to language but experience is always already in language. Right, here’s a pen, so, I am writing it down after all. Well, what did I want to remember? Well, on the one hand it’s interesting that Searle seems to be praising Emin (woman, Turkish father, born in Margate) for having the guts to represent her sometimes painful experiences in her work. But then, on the other hand, there’s a small problem – it might not be art. Artist or autobiographer? That says it all. Presumably he thinks that autobiographical work isn’t really art? And I think that’s because the thorny issue of experience has got in the way again. Because, it’s clear from Searle’s tone that (a) he’s greatly relieved that “someone else” is getting on with recording the messiness of personal experience; (b) precisely because it is “someone else” who is retelling their story, it’s only experience with a small “e” and therefore far too “subjective” or “empirical” to inhere within the authoritative confines of high art – or art as it is defined by the constituency that Searle, almost unconsciously, believes he represents. He does say further on that “her only invention is herself ” so he must realize on some level that autobiographical work is just as constructed and formal as avowedly fictional work. But because of the misreading of the concept of experience there is still a tendency to see autobiographical or confessional work functioning as little more than the sensitive pen of the Geiger counter caught in the act of registering the seismographic trace of emotion writ

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The Experience of Art 165 large in canvas or print. On this model it is thought that the artist is relieved of all the usual struggle, thought, and fabrication that typically go in to a piece of work but merely hiccups the work to fruition. This of course leads to all manner of hierarchical/hysterical judgments about the relative merits of work which is deemed too personal, and thus too empirical (often associated with women’s work and therefore vilified even more), versus work which steers clear of anything to do with the artist’s “self ” (which shows up in this binary as “intellectual” or “conceptual” – lending itself nicely to the stereotypically “masculine” posture which is synonymous with the attempt to disavow all self-interestedness or anything too personal). What’s even worse is that if you include a reference to something explicitly experiential in your art it often causes more consternation than if you were to try to speak on behalf of another’s experience – whereupon ironically you actually accrue a greater degree of gravity and poise.17 So . . . even though there might be more of a preponderance to “allow” the so-called others to wield the “authority of experience” in their art – because it’s not the kind of experience which is valued a great deal within dominant, particularly patriarchal, economies of thinking – it means that it’s not the sort of authority that many people actually want. This is presumably why others are permitted so much of it. In fact, even when they do not necessarily intend it, their work is often interpreted as personal.18 And furthermore, it seems that the more you use your “own” experience in your work the more likely it is that you will lose any vestiges of the social and cultural authority that you were trying to hang on to. The bus arrives. Only room for one. Push. In. Thank God, I’m so cold now I can hardly think. Must remember to come back to this, it’s obviously got something to do with experience being interpreted as self-presence where there is evidently no interface between experience and language, which makes it a dirty word in some contexts. It makes people turn away from experience, without much thought, to other relations to art and I wonder how useful that is and whether in fact this interpretation of experience as presence really works for us anymore. What does it do to art, etc.? confident voice. So what you’re saying is that Agamben’s reading of the so-called “poverty of experience” only really applies to certain subjectivities? lecturer. Yes – possibly heterosexual, maybe masculine, but almost certainly white. [Person from the next class opens the door, thereby bringing proceedings to a halt. Shuffling and Finish.]

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Part 3: Experience has fallen in value (but only if you understand it in a certain way)19 David Wood has written, “For a long time, ‘experience’ has been a dirty word in some philosophical circles. Not because it appealed to a properly discredited empiricism, that asked too little of experience. But because it implied a subjective legitimation that promised too much.”20 This has been the problem. For thinkers such as Agamben the “destruction of experience” is actually the dissolution of a very particular interpretation of experience, which, though illusionary, does appear to sanction a great deal. It all becomes so fascinatingly attenuated: what started out as a wrong turn, the mistaken identity of experience as self-evidently self-present, makes thinkers understandably suspicious of a relation to the world which appears as unconscionably brute, sensate, real. Dissatisfaction with this reading of experience as immediacy then encourages a binary opposite in the idea of experience as a moment of disinterestedness which, though clearly both untenable and unsustainable, is subsequently and misleadingly conceptualized as “lost.” This necessarily engenders the pursuit and the promise – once again – of an experience which might be revealed to be neutral, impartial, universal, and true. And it was precisely this promise which drove Agamben, and others like him, to mourn, and then try to resurrect, what I would argue can only ever be a chimera, a mirage even, of how and what experience might be. In the context of visual culture we are all too familiar with how this fantasy-play of the disinterested experience impacted on the production and reception of art, and how it made many writers and critics, and artists to some extent, turn resolutely against the merest hint of anything slightly experiential in an artwork. One only has to remember, for instance, the artistic lives and works needlessly impeded by the stricture of Clive Bell’s “significant form” – “To appreciate a work of art we need to bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of threedimensional space,”21 or Clement Greenberg’s “right relation” – “That visual art should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience, and make no reference to anything given in other orders of experience.”22 To understand the obsequious oppression of such a discourse, one only has to try to estimate how difficult it would have been for anyone not similarly constituted as Greenberg or Bell to be able to make art in relation to any hint of lived experience. It’s very doubtful, of course, that

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The Experience of Art 167 we would today pay much heed to these sorts of sentiments, but I would certainly argue that such a make-believe, characterized so appositely by Jane Tompkins as “the authority effect” (stress on effect), still inheres within much normative discourse: I cannot describe the pretence except to talk about what it ignores: the human frailty of the speaker, his body, his emotions, his history; the moment of intercourse with the reader – acknowledgement of the other person’s presence, feelings, needs. This “authoritative language” speaks as though the other person weren’t there. Or perhaps more accurately, it doesn’t bother to imagine who, as Hawthorne said, is listening to our talk.23

It may be ten years, or more, since Tompkins gave the name to such a disposition, but you are particularly lucky if you do not encounter this authority effect at least once a day – even now – within the context of art and/or art school parlance. This is what gives the misnomer, slightly, to the title of the present book, because if we didn’t continue to exact a critical relation to art and its institutions we all might all find ourselves, back there, constituted and fixed as “known,” “discrete,” “individuals” by the last vestiges of this particular conversational style: one which posits experience as universal – “we” are all the same underneath our gender, ethnicity, class, etc. So the issue becomes one of how we can (in all of our specificity) begin to re-work a critical interpretation of experience in the context of art which might not lead straight back to the promise of self-presence but might be truly responsive to the openness and contingency of experience itself. That is, how to negotiate an undergoing of the experience of experience in such a way that it might prevent relations with the world through art getting “caught” or congealed, might allow a negotiation of a time with art which wouldn’t hang, drag or solidify. . . . Everything seemed to be moving at dead slow speed . . .

Part 4: Experience: Before and After Criticism In this next section therefore I want to try to look at the experience of art in the name of criticism but criticism as it might be transformed by the experience of art.

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My starting point would be that if a more productive interpretation of experience with art might be usefully understood “After Criticism,” then it’s possibly a case of articulating the “after,” in the title, in its adverbial sense, that is, “in honor of,” or “in recognition of ” criticism (proper criticism), because to have an experience with art after criticism in terms of “beyond” or “finished with” might only seek to court the crazy promise of “neutral experience” and its disinterested subject once again. I was recently reminded of these sorts of dangers – of flirting with the idea of positing oneself after criticism – when I came across a book by David Levin.24 In The Opening of Vision (1988) he makes the distinction between two predominant postmodern visual modes – the Assertoric and the Aletheic – the former defined as a gaze which is abstracted, monocular, inflexible, unmoving, rigid, ego-logical, and exclusionary and the latter as multiple, aware of its context, inclusionary, horizontal, and caring. The memory of the tyranny of the Assertoric gaze – particularly in the late 1970s in English art schools – sent shudders down my spine, remembering as I did that it was the intractability of such a view which was, of course, one of the primary reasons for the development and efficacy of critical theory in art schools in the first place. I want to argue, though, that, important and liberating as that first wave of criticism was – particularly the influence of deconstruction on the understanding of subjectivity, responsibility, and agency in art practice – structurally, critical discourse had a very contradictory response to the interpretation of experience, both in terms of the experience of art and the representation of personal experience in art. A tension still exists today on a common-sense, if not more rigorously philosophical level – witness the recent publication of Sir Nicholas Serota’s introductory book to the new Tate Modern Gallery, Experience or Interpretation (my emphasis).25 It seems as if, in the first instance, the pressures to develop a more critically contingent analysis drove the conventional understanding of experience (which had somehow now become synonymous with universalism) in two conflicting ways. Either experience was conflated with authentic knowledge26 which, as I have already noted, tended to position the relation as outside of and “other” to language, or, in response to the improbability of such a model, the argument was made that experience must therefore be always already in language, for it to be understood as experience at all. The problem with both of these models, and in particular the latter, was that the import of how it is to actually experience the world, and the art that is in it, was all too easily reduced in critical analysis to entirely an issue of linguistic and textual interpretation.

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The Experience of Art 169 Obviously, neither of these models seems quite adequate to the job, which is why calls are now being made for a much more performative inquiry into the experiential affects of art and why this text is a response to that request. However, in answering that call I should say here that I do not believe that a truly performative relation to art can ever be properly felt, or enacted, if we persist with either of the above models of experience – that is, where the sensual, affecting, bodily and cognitive moment that is experience is seen as either outside of or as entirely collapsed to language. Both of these models fix and hold down experiences of art – this is that – the very opposite of what performative work should be attempting to do with what William James has called “the buzzing confusion of things” that can be the apprehension of the visual arts. My argument would be that interpretations of the concept of experience will only be able to move forward (or go back, pace Agamben) if they can manage to retain some sort of estimation of what actually experiencing something feels like, in contrast, say, to the feeling of understanding or knowing something. And one way of moving on might be to think about the work that the word experience does – as in, for example, “I’ve just had this fantastic/dreadful experience,” etc., etc. Because if I think back to when I’ve said “I’ve had an experience” (such as the one outlined below) I realize that I have probably used the word because I want to register the precise feeling that that which I have just lived through was something like an approach to the world which I both recognized, and yet didn’t quite recognize, a space which was both in language but yet not quite in language, at the limit of language but unequivocally not beyond. I wouldn’t have used the word understanding to describe such a moment because, unlike experience, which is mobile and fluid, understanding is synonymous with the feeling of being within the fold of language – positioned or placed by what you know. In actual fact it is as if the word experience has chosen me, because it is the palpability of the experience itself – in taking me to the margins or limits of what I know in any precise or exactingly demarcated sense – which has made me realize that this was a moment or an encounter that I would have to call an experience rather than an interpretation or another way of knowing. My suggestion would be therefore that maybe when you say you have had an experience it simply means that such an encounter with the world has obliged you to recognize that what you have just lived through (as an experience) was in some way an experience of a negotiation with language – or that there is language27 – a feeling which corresponds to the openness of experience that is made possible by experience itself. And whilst it is

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definitely this feeling of meeting the edges or limits of language which makes certain experiences feel so rich, so fluid, so energizing – the loss of which you can understand Agamben so rightly bemoaning – on a downside it is precisely the muzziness associated with this “feeling” which can “oh so easily” be posited as beyond language or as other to language. This interpretation merely recreates the naive and oppressively authenticating and marginalizing model of experience which I have discussed above. In order therefore to prevent this happening, but yet retain this richness or authenticity, the trick then might be to recreate a model which captures the “feeling tone” – the openness and fluidity of experience as a living through of language – without reducing it to full presence. Interestingly, in the context of the present book, it is my experiences with art which have taught me that the production and reception of art has the power and agency to substantiate the recognition of such a model: one that is not entirely inside or outside language, a relation which may in fact give certain experiences of art their “buzz.” However, to say this here, now, feels as if I am insisting rather than showing the power of art as critical reflection, a line of persuasion which seems altogether wrong in a performative politics of apprehension. So what I want to do next, by way of a conclusion, is take you through a story of one such encounter, an event which I still don’t fully understand, and a story I can only really “tell” as much as analyze. But here it is: a story of an experience with art which might be my beginning to understand how art can do critical work after criticism and in this particular case can show, just by example, that what it really means “to say you’ve had an experience is to have lived through something that does something to that saying.”

Part 5: Experience as “Activated Space” . . . It was a very hot summer afternoon in 1996 and without much purpose I was drifting in the heat around a number of galleries, trying to catch up on who was showing that season. In order to get some shade I wandered in to the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and started to look at an exhibition of work by Gabriel Orozco, work which I didn’t really know very well at that point, and turning into the upstairs gallery I was suddenly and absolutely unexpectedly thrown back on to an experience of an experience of the photograph “Breath on a Piano” (1993). As I stared transfixed I had a sudden and inexplicable sensation of seeming to

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The Experience of Art 171 experience (what I could only estimate as something like) Orozco’s experience of setting up that specific photographic image. It was a very powerful affect, one which transfixed me entirely to the spot, unable to either go back or move forward into a space – which now felt infinite. How had this happened? This supposed anticipation of another’s experience, and this was the rub, felt as if it was entirely interwoven with that of mine – appearing to break and double back upon my “own” experience – rupturing any notional autonomy or self-same identity that I previously supposed. In retrospect, Peggy Phelan’s definition of the modality “unmarked,” which she articulates as “the broken symmetry between the self and the other,” seemed to strike a chord here.28 Because this encounter with, what I supposed to be, the artist’s consciousness, as it was intended towards its object, left me with a vivid and very living impression of something which I had previously understood only as a theoretical concept – that is, that the constitution of subjectivity as entirely dependent on the “other” for any estimation of the “self.” Inhabiting this movement as “unmarked” produced an almost epiphanic sensation whereupon the boundaries between my “self ” and what was “other” felt endlessly negotiable – leaving me with a very pronounced sense that anything and everything was possible, an openness and fluidity that temporarily undid “who I was.” This felt like experiencing the world in the best way one can – a sort of “activated space” – that precise moment when consciousness meets language meets world – when you are mixed up, in real time, in the business of making sense of the world as it makes sense of you, which, as I said earlier, makes you feel like you might be able to mobilize meanings which hold you rather than remain fixed. What’s more, this experience of the living through of language would easily be able to counter any postmodern claim that all experience is fictional. This is because, in that activated moment, I became vividly aware of living through the way language produced my relation to the world at the same time as that world spoke back interrogatively to any such representations of it. Such an experiencing, therefore, did count for something even in what otherwise might be thought of as a heavily mediated world. Contrary to the idea of the so-called authenticity of experience which merely reproduces a given ideological structure – placing and reinforcing any incipient marginalization – this interpretation of experience contests any such system, displaying and reinforcing the constructed and productive nature of an experience which is I think why it offered such a perception of openness and fluidity.29

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What has subsequently become interesting to me is that the overwhelming palpability of this momentary shock or dissembling of what I would now have to call “my” subjectivity could have lent itself very effectively to the conventional characterization of experience as a sensate or bodily, rather than cognitive, relation to the world; an event which we would normally recognize as taking place entirely outside of language and signification.30 However, what prevented me from just walking away with this thought was the equally powerful recognition that such a split or division could not have occurred if I had stepped outside of language and signification into an area exclusively inhabited as sensation and affect (in the old disinterested sense) because I would not have been able to recognize the import of the affect. Rather, the palpability of such a feeling was probably instituted as a consequence of reaching what could only be described as the limits of an “easy” or “normative” relation within signification: the penumbra of subjectivity that actually might be called experience. This limit announces itself as a difficulty or as a disruption – a definite sense of being in negotiation with the rustle of language or with the relations of sense which bind you – where what one might be attempting to make sense of is not easily assimilable or placed.31 As I said at the beginning of this section, maybe this story encapsulates a touch of what “after criticism” might actually be like in terms of a new kind of work. That is, no longer having to think in terms of ideas that are somehow buried underneath or behind art – which an old-fashioned criticism heroically unearthed. But rather, that art can now do “the reading.” By which I mean that – like my moment with Orozco’s photograph – it might be possible to begin to analyze the world through and against the concepts of experience that the work of art, itself, tends to produce. That is, to redefine the notion of art as a mode of analysis whereby knowledges and ideas could be extracted from the process of making art, thereby enabling both the maker and the viewer to tune in to the sorts of thinking or approaches to the world that the apprehension of art itself makes you do. And to this end, it seemed as if this encounter with the photograph “Breath on Piano,” unlike other forms of more conventional analysis, had the power to act as an understanding of experience as it might wish to be interpreted, but is in fact very rarely conceptualized: as open and fluid, rather than fixed and self-present – where the limit rather than the subject is posited as the source or “origin” of any such experience. And maybe this is the nearest I can come to understanding the promise of the authority of experience, which Agamben lamented. For maybe it is only when

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The Experience of Art 173 you are enabled to experience the world as a living through of language (which art enables so well) that we can begin to articulate both an adequate conceptual model of what it feels like to experience but also, probably more properly, to live those experiences as unbounded and vibrant . . . as moving rather than dead slow . . . “But I’m afraid that it’s a word that involves time and the perception of something . . . especially when language is happening through space and time; not only a word on a wall, or in a closed book. ‘Space’ happens when the sign is moving in life, or when the language is in action and when the spectator, the activator of the sign enacts these relations in which knowledge, passion, sign, language, perception, sexuality, intervene. That is when space starts to be perceived in a more comprehensive, more total way. When you are in front of something that just covers all your attention, you generate that space and you are experiencing the world in a total way; that’s perhaps the space that contemporary sculpture, and maybe in art in general, tries to generate.”32 But I wasn’t there to hear: because I was in quite another space altogether. Like all amazing experiences with the openness of art – it had given me the confidence to feel (and make) in my own way . . .

Notes 1 Gabriel Orozco in conversation with Benjamin Buchloh, in Clinton is Innocent, catalog to Orozco’s exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris, September 1998), p. 43. 2 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1993), p. 14. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 360. 6 Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 14. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 15. 9 For an overview of responses to Derrida’s pronouncement see Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (eds), Men in Feminism (London and New York: Methuen, 1987). 10 At the end of Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne’s book, Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London: Clinamen Press, 2000),

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Kate Love Osborne, comparing a cross-section of interpretations of Benjamin, singles out Howard Cagill’s Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). He asserts that “[t]he advantage of [Caygill’s] approach is that it situates Benjamin’s oeuvre in the mainstream of nineteenthand twentieth-century European philosophy as an invasion and ruin of philosophy by experience. (As Caygill comments nicely on Benjamin’s essay on Naples: ‘the Neapolitan staircase walks all over the Critique of Pure Reason, disobeying all the rules which would qualify it to be an object of a possible experience’)” (p. 297). As I understand it, the logic of Osborne’s statement presupposes that the category of experience can be thought of as other to philosophy, and therefore that experience can also be interpreted as standing apart from philosophy, and in a sense must do if it is to be able to bring about philosophy’s ruin. It also appears to follow from this assertion that Osborne takes as a given the interpretation of experience as a selfpresenting state – whereas philosophy, in this binary, is subsequently posited in contrast to experience as inevitably caught up in the categories of conceptual and linguistic determination. By trying to suggest that he could “write as (a) woman” Derrida was attempting to undermine the fixity of biologically determined gender identity by implying that if gender was historically and culturally constructed then both “men” and “women” could inhabit and appropriate the structural relations typically associated with these gendered subject positions. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 67. Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 14. “What enchants me: my experiences in buses. I think that writing serves also to do this: to collect what Joyce called epiphanies. Moments where reality, in its most modest form, joins in a single stroke a possibility and a promise of eternity – an instant that resists death”: Hélène Cixous and Mireille CalleGruber (eds), Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 98. Adrian Searle, “Me, Me, Me, Me,” The Guardian (London) Tuesday, April 22, 1997, p. 13. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds), The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 11. I am thinking here of the difference in the way Tracey Emin’s and Richard Billingham’s work is received. I am thinking here, for example, of the early 1990s feminist re-visioning of the concept of the “personal” in which writers such as Nancy K. Miller deliberately eschewed definitions of the personal as overtly confessional in favor of what she termed “life-writing,” which strategically acknowledged its positionality in terms of its relation to the other. However, such work was frequently subjected to a postmodern version of “aspect-blindness” in the

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sense that, despite its intentions, it was typically misinterpreted as “embarrassingly personal” in the traditional sense, even when nothing explicitly personal was included or else its positional status was simply occluded. See Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). “More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest amongst our possessions, were taken away from us: the ability to exchange experiences. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value”: Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana, 1973), p. 83. David Wood, speaking at the “Understanding Experience” conference, ICA, London, November 1999. Clive Bell, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” in Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1914), p. 10. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1965), in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds), Modern Art & Modernism: A Critical Anthology (London: Open University, 1982), p. 8. Jane Tompkins, “Me & My Shadow,” in Gender & Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 129. David Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 68. Nicholas Serota, Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996). This is the model of experience as self-presence, which, as I have shown above, was already firmly in place but only articulated (and consequently strengthened) as such by the advent of critical theory. Christopher Fynsk, Language & Relation . . . That There Is Language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 13. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 6–7. Joan W. Scott has written, “Experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straight-forward; it is always contested and always therefore political”: “The Evidence of Experience,” in Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1993): 412. I have used the word shock because my reaction was sudden. However, the feeling was more akin to an attenuated sense of muzziness – when the boundaries between self and other appear to be endlessly negotiable. “. . . a language which doesn’t allow itself to curdle like milk”: Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p. 76. Gabriel Orozco in conversation with Benjamin Buchloh: Clinton is Innocent, p. 45.

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A Transparent Lecture Matthew Goulish

Figure 9 Morton Feldman, Projection 1, 1962. ©1962 by C. F. Peters Corporation. Used by permission. All rights reserved

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A Transparent Lecture

Arrival

Part 1.1: Music like a city – 1950 identity – structure – congruence friends – decontrol – transparency – legibility – notation – identity – catastrophe 1, 2, and 3: We recognize the city 1 and 2: We work not knowing 4 and 5: We call it a basket 3, 4, and 5: We inhabit the music twice

Part 2: Catastrophe 1: Bubbleness (a brief digression on catastrophe theory) 2: Lecture in the Shape of a Bridge Collapsing 1. We begin 2. collapse 3. visibility 4. uncreativity 5. floodlands 6. delirium 7. transparency 8. machines 9. to believe

Part 1.2: Music like a city – 2000

Departure

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Arrival We have more time than we had. Let us begin. Let us understand one another. This is the end of the day. Tomorrow we may leave early. Tomorrow we may stay. We may sit in a ruined window and imagine that we belong to these times. This sensation, in no small degree, owes to my own anonymity, to the incongruity of a lone figure on the steps of the station: an easy target for oblivion. It was a winter night. The sky was full of winter stars. This is how I arrived in the city. Presently a bus emerged, and a handful of people pushed past me to the stairs of the terminal. I saw the only person I knew in the city. In her recognition of me, I recognized this. The city was now a city with me in it.

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Part 1.1: Music like a city – 1950 We begin by considering music as something that we inhabit. We begin with it encircling us. We devise paths, directions, landmarks, modes of recognition. We ride a bicycle through it. We say to ourselves: some small figures in blue, the sand is pink, a little patch of yellow wall with a sloping roof. This is how we ought to live. In pronouncing this we undertake an enormous journey, to which we become so accustomed that we travel in our sleep. Such sleep devotes itself to the production of memory, and memory has a great desire to be understood. We pause, rest, and begin again Between 1950 and 1951 four composers became friends, saw each other constantly – and something happened. Each of us in his own way contributed to a concept of music in which various elements were decontrolled. Because this music was not “fixed,” it could not be notated in the old way. Each new thought, each new idea within this thought, suggested its own notation. As controls are given up, these elements lose their initial identity. But it is just because of this identity that these elements can be unified. Behind it is sound – which unifies everything. Only by “unfixing” the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves – not as symbols, or memories of other music. It follows, then, that an indeterminate music can lead only to catastrophe. This catastrophe we allowed to take place. We are talking about the music of Morton Feldman. Join the form to the processes of the mind and body. Call this join Sense. How then do we inhabit music? This is a first part of a lecture. This part is in the shape of a rug. This part is a failed attempt at symmetry. These are fragments of theory and language, of music and architecture, in some form woven. This part is a lecture in ten parts, two parts of five that interleave: 3 + 2 + 2 + 3.

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identity – structure – congruence friends – decontrol – transparency – legibility – notation – identity – catastrophe Having bicycled ourselves to a beginning, we pause, rest, and begin again.

1, 2, and 3: We recognize the city Sense has three levels: formal, connective, and significant. On the formal level, we find: identity and structure. Identity is the extent to which a person can recognize or recall a place as being distinct – as having a vivid, or unique, or at least a particular, character. Structure on a small scale is the sense of how the parts fit together, and on a large scale is the sense of orientation: knowing where (or when) one is, which implies knowing how other places (or times) are connected to this one. Identity and structure include those aspects of form which allow us to recognize and pattern space and time in themselves. Next comes the connective level, or those qualities which help us connect the city with other features of our lives. On this level, we find: congruence, transparency, and legibility. Congruence matches spatial structure to nonspatial structure; does the abstract form of a place match the abstract form of its functions?

1 and 2: We work not knowing Friends “Between 1950 and 1951 four composers became friends, saw each other constantly – and something happened.” We have not said enough about friendship. What could be more common? The commonplace is the totality of our commonality; it is meaningful as that, as the place where we know each other and know we are together. In ancient Greek thought, this common place, political in character,

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constitutes the polis. The political in this sense is the coming into appearance: the place for the sharing of words and deeds, the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together. Its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be . . . To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. “For ten years of my life I worked in an environment committed to neither the past nor the future,” wrote Morton Feldman. “We worked, that is to say, not knowing where what we did belonged, or whether it belonged anywhere at all. What we did was not in protest against the past. To rebel against history is still to be a part of it. We were simply not concerned with historical processes. We were concerned with sound.” If one sees history as a set of active correlations (co-relations) – then that seems a workable characterization of the context of something. It not only allows one to situate that something within history, but it also gives something a history with a future. Context is a past with a future. That is the sense of the phrase this is happening. He waits for history to notice him and alter its direction. He has in mind: to allow a space for sound and friendship to appear.

Decontrol “Each of us in his own way contributed to a concept of music in which various elements were decontrolled.” Of an orchestral composition titled Coptic Light inspired by textiles in the Louvre, Feldman said, “These fragments of colored cloth conveyed an essential atmosphere of their civilization. I asked myself what aspects of Monteverdi might determine its atmosphere if heard two thousand years from now.” The composition process became one of isolating those signature aspects (instrumentation, pitch, dynamic) and arranging and rearranging them, stating them and repeating them in tiny variation. Decontrol destabilizes a unity, deconnects inter-related elements. Pitch, volume, duration, rhythm, and dynamics, the five elements of music, when decontrolled, transport the listener into a nondilineated sound world, a world of the substance of music. Decontrol replaces subjective with objective, predicated by the ability to accept change that is not of one’s making – an “outer life”, a decontrolled exteriorness engendered by a point of view supplanted by a process, a combination of mathematical/chaotic systems,

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affirming process against structure, experimentation against interpretation – a transparent self. In contrast to a transcendent plane, which organizes and develops forms (themes and motifs) and assigns and develops subjects (feelings, personages, interiority), this music proposes an altogether different plane, one that liberates the particles of an anonymous matter, allowing them to communicate through the “envelope” of forms and subjects, retaining between them only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness, floating affects, so that the plane itself is perceived at the same time as it allows us to perceive the imperceptible (the microplane, the molecular plane). This music deploys not a pulsed time or tempo, but a floating time, in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute state of movement. One may enter and exit this plane at any point, and repeatedly. It resembles less a house and more a garden.

4 and 5: We call it a basket Transparency defines the degree to which we directly perceive the operation of the various functions, activities, and natural processes that occur within the city. Clarity In the sense of transparence, I don’t mean that much can be explained. Clarity in the sense of silence. Having bicycled ourselves past a midpoint, we pause. When we have a basket of apples, we can distinguish the apples from the basket. If the basket were empty, we would not call it a basket of apples. We would simply call it a basket. We rest, and begin again. Flags, lawns, crosses, signboards, picture windows, orange roofs, spires, columns, gates, fences – the city, like a medium of communication, displays both explicit and implicit symbols. These signs inform us about ownership, status, group affiliation, hidden functions, proper behavior.

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We call this legibility: the degree to which the inhabitants communicate accurately to one another via symbolic and semiotic physical features. Human opinions adapt to human senses. They let what passes for reality rise to assimilate the day and complete the transmutation of what would otherwise forever cling to its objects, into an approximation, a promise, an imperfect proximity.

3, 4, and 5: We inhabit the music twice Notation “Because this music was not ‘fixed,’ it could not be notated in the old way. Each new thought, each new idea within this thought, suggested its own notation.” In 1950 Morton Feldman notated Projection 1 for solo cello on graph paper. His hand-drawn scores from this period resemble Mondrian-like vines. His performance instructions read as follows. Timbre is indicated . . . Relative pitch (high, middle, low) is indicated. Any tone within the ranges indicated may be sounded. The limits of these ranges may be freely chosen by the player. Duration is indicated by the amount of space taken up by the square or rectangle, each box being potentially 4 icti. The single ictus or pulse is at the tempo 72 or thereabouts.

We may think of graphic notation as a double transparentizing gesture. First, any graphically notated score transparentizes the processes of interpretation. Graphic scores, a nonspecialized code, appeal to people who may have avoided a musical education while acquiring a visual one. One finds oneself already inside the music, navigating within its instantly legibile landscape. One finds it much harder, or at least much different, to make a mistake. What does the performer play? The score indicates the range of a given passage and its temporal area and division, but the actual notes heard must come from the performer’s response to the musical situation. The musician must reach the metaphysical place, allying necessity with unpredictability, musical creativity with interpretive understanding.

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Second, Feldman’s particular approach transparentizes the music produced. It destabilizes the relations of the sounds to symbolism (loudpassion, soft-tenderness), by creating a work which attempts no references outside itself. His sounds “exist in themselves – not as symbols, or memories of other music.” By setting a range of possibility for pitch selection (high, middle, low) Feldman emphasizes tonal relations over individual notes. One listens as if “not listening, but looking at something in nature.” New ideas suggest new language. New language suggests new ideas. Graphic notation becomes a musical container. As the composer Toru Takemitsu observed, visuality itself partially supplanted musical symbolism, connecting Feldman’s scores to their sound. “He was extremely nearsighted and wrote his music as if touching the notes with his eyes.” Piece for Four Pianos (1957) begins simultaneously for all four pianos, after which notes may be played to the end by each of the pianists at time intervals of their mutual or individual choice. Feldman has said, “The beginning of the piece, by virtue of the repetitions, conditions one to listen. The repeated notes are where the mind rests on an image.” As we proceed to the individual time-responses of the four pianists we move inexorably toward the final image where the mind can rest, at the end of the piece. It is as if we traverse an enormous plain at the opposite ends of which are two huge monoliths, guarding its winds and grasses. This music requires the performers to listen while performing – in a sense to become audience. Maybe it also requires the audience to become performers. Two environmental qualities converge: the performer occupies (in concentrated stillness) a creative metaphysical location, while the music occupies (in navigational movement) a precise physical plane. We experience a double inhabitation, the existence of the player and the journey of the listener. As if in two bodies at once, one still and one traveling, we inhabit the music twice. We play it and we hear it. We produce it and we traverse it.

Identity “As controls are given up, these elements lose their initial identity. But it is just because of this identity that these elements can be unified.”

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Decontrolled, the five elements of music redifferentiate, and fall into a balance wherein symmetries arise. “In Anatolian village and nomadic rugs there appears to be considerably less concern with the exact accuracy of the mirror image than in most other rug-producing areas. The detail of an Anatolian symmetrical image was never mechanical, but idiomatically drawn. Even if it be asymmetrical in its placement, the proportion of one component to another is hardly ever substantially out of scale in the context of the whole. Most traditional rug patterns retain the same size when taken from a larger rug and then adapted to a smaller one. This question of scale precludes any concept of symmetry or asymmetry. The sum of the parts does not equal the whole. The scale, whether it be of the whole or of the part, is a phenomenon unto itself. Forms are essentially only methods of arranging material. They serve no other function than to aid one’s memory. “In Triadic Memories, a piano work, there is a section of different types of chords where each chord is slowly repeated. One chord might be repeated three times, another, seven or eight. Quite soon into a new chord I would forget the reiterated chord before it. I then reconstructed the entire section: rearranging its earlier progression and changing the number of repetitions. I attempt to ‘formalize’ a disorientation of memory. When does a pattern become a pattern? They suggest function and direction, but this is an illusion; like walking the streets of Berlin – where all the buildings look alike, even if they’re not.”

Catastrophe “It follows then, that an indeterminate music can lead only to catastrophe. This catastrophe we allowed to take place.” We pause and rest, and having reached an ending, the first of three, we begin again again.

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Part 2: Catastrophe 1: Bubbleness (a brief digression on catastrophe theory) Consider the soap bubble. A child produces it using a bubble-blowing toy. A globe-like wall of liquified soap encircles air. Since it weighs the same as the air, it floats. The child touches it with the tip of a pine needle. It bursts. Droplets of liquified soap fall and disperse. Let us ask ourselves not why it burst, but how. It burst suddenly. It did not undergo a gradual burst. It was a floating bubble one moment, and a bursted bubble the next. It was a catastrophe. To understand this phenomenon, let us examine what mathematicians and topologists call the first five flags of catastrophe. modality – inaccessibility – sudden jumps – divergence – hysteresis

Catastrophe Flag 1: Modality The physical system has two or more distinct physical states in which it may occur. The potential describing the system has more than one local minimum for some range of external control parameters. Example: the cusp catastrophe becomes bimodal when the control parameters lie within the cusp-shaped region of the cusp catastrophe manifold. Consider the soap bubble bimodal: one mode, floatingness; the other mode, burstness. One sees a floating bubble and says, there is a bubble. Actually it is only half a bubble; a bubble in its mode of floatingness. One sees a rain of soap liquid droplets. The observant person says, it is the other half of a bubble, a bubble in its other mode of burstness. The floating mode bubble and the burst mode bubble together form a complete state of bubbleness.

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Catastrophe Flag 2: Inaccessibility The system has an unstable equilibrium state. Infinitesimal perturbations exist which decrease the value of the potential, rendering such equilibria unstable. Example: the two sheets over the cusp-shaped region representing the locally stable minima are separated by the middle inaccessible sheet representing an unstable local maximum. Tiny disordering pressures exist in bubbleness, both floating and burst. Yet these two modes are more stable than the third mode, which exists between them: an impossible bubble in a partially floating and partially burst state.

Catastrophe Flag 3: Sudden jumps A small change in the value of the control parameter may result in a large change in the value of the state variable as the system jumps, on a fairly rapid time scale, from one local minimum to another. Example: A sudden jump in the value of the state variable occurs as the system state jumps from one sheet of the cusp catastrophe manifold to the other. A bubble is a system. If we consider the size of the system large, we may consider the size of the stimulus that causes the system to change small. Because of a small stimulus (the touch of a pine needle), the large system transitions from one relatively unstable mode (floating) to the other relatively unstable mode (burst) by passing through the inaccessible transitional mode. Since the transitional mode remains inaccessible, we witness a transitionless, discontinuous change, a sudden jump.

Catastrophe Flag 4: Divergence A finite change in the value of the control parameters leads to a finite change in the equilibrium value of the state variables. Usually a small perturbation in the initial values of the control parameters will lead to only a small change in the initial and final values of the state variables.

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However, small changes in the control parameter initial values may lead to large changes in the state variable final values. Example: Assume that some physical process changes the control parameters from positive to negative. Then a perturbation of the initial values of the control parameters which changes the sign has little effect on the initial value of the state variable, but a profound effect on its final value. The bubble may burst all by itself, without the help of the pine needle.

Catastrophe Flag 5: Hysteresis Hysteresis occurs whenever a physical process is not strictly reversible. That is, the jump from local minimum 1 to local minimum 2 does not occur over the same point in control parameter space as the reciprocal jump from local minimum 2 to local minimum 1. Example: A property that has been changed by an external agent fails to return to its original value when the cause of the change is removed. The word hysteresis derives from the Greek: a late arrival. We could call it Humpty-Dumptiness. The bubble transitions more easily from floating to burst than it transitions from burst to floating. The child may attempt to catch the burst bubble droplets, reverse the process, and out of them reconstruct a fresh, although probably diminished floating bubble. The child will find it easier, however, simply to take up the bubbleblowing toy, and start again. Catastrophe theory attempts to study how the quality of the solutions of equations depends on the parameters that appear in the equations themselves. Change the parameters, and the solutions change. What is an equation? bubble, bridge, music, mind. The misalignment of motivation and threat: A subdigression on the work of Goat Island We had finished performing It’s an Earthquake in My Heart. It was our last night in Hamburg, Germany. The young man, a festival volunteer,

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who drove us in a van to our hotel, suddenly began to address the entire company (six people) in a voice that announced itself, in struggling but precise English, as now entering a mode of significance. I must tell you what I thought of your show, he said. He rarely attended performance work of this kind, and often did not know what or how to think about it. He was, he said, a normal person. This kind of thing was outside of his experience. But since he had picked us up at the airport, he had felt the urge to see our work. He had come to the performance prepared and mentally alert. When the piece began, it seemed as if almost nothing was happening, although we the performers behaved with intense concentration. He had wrestled with the experience intellectually for the first 45 minutes of the performance, trying and failing to decode each moment, feeling increasingly frustrated and overwhelmed. When we began moving around, “dancing” as it were, that did not help matters. Why am I here?, he thought, and why are they here and why are they doing this and how long is this going to continue and who are they and what do I think and why? Everything seems to mean something but the meaning is opaque. Then, he said, pointing at me, (I sat next to him in the van) you appeared with trees on your feet. He was referring to a moment in which I attempt an imitation of a dance choreographed and performed by Pina Bausch in her 1978 piece Café Mueller. I dance my version wearing “shoes” made from the wooden bases of miniature artificial Chinese cedar trees. The trees drag along behind my feet during the dance, and then I exit. This episode lasts about 90 seconds. At that moment, he said, it occurred to me that this means absolutely nothing. It is incomprehensible. Or rather, I should say, it does not make sense in the way that things make sense. I felt as if my mind collapsed. I gave up on the performance. From that moment on, I have to say, I enjoyed it immensely. It had begun to rain, and he switched on the windshield wipers. It occurs to me now, as I try to recreate his testimony, that a catastrophe had taken place – a particular cusp-shaped catastrophe caused by a misalignment of motivation and threat. One prepares one’s motivation in anticipation of the scale of the expected threat. One arrives at the charged site, ready for battle. The threat appears, and the motivation locks into it. The threat is instantly defeated, since it was never a threat at all. The motivation, oblivious of its victory, floats in confusion, threatless, searching for a target. Finally, it releases itself and expires. The mind turns over, and for one indelible moment we see the world as from the other side.

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So, said the driver, I want to thank you very much for that experience. Of course the experience, while we had encouraged it, was entirely his and was also entirely him. The new world has always been here. It was only my mind in the way of my seeing it. The old world remains like a ghost. Excuse me. I have fallen off my bicycle. I must change the way I ride. Now that things are so simple, there is so much to do.

2: Lecture in the Shape of a Bridge Collapsing 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 1.

We begin collapse visibility uncreativity floodlands delirium transparency machines to believe

We begin

1.1. We begin as if to reshuffle the world, like a deck of cards whose original sequence has disappointed us. 1.2. We begin as if to form our thoughts in the shape of a bridge collapsing. 1.3. We begin with visibility. 1.4. We begin with uncreativity. 1.5. We begin caught in the floodlands of memory. 1.6. We rehearse our disasters in order to realize them, first to imagine the world, and then to make it. 1.7. We begin with transparency, to perceive the world in order to believe in it.

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1.8. If machines could talk, what would they say? 1.9. The problem has changed. 2.

collapse

2.1. On the morning of November 7, 1940, Kenneth Arkin, chairman of the Washington State Toll Bridge Authority, awoke to the noise of wind. 2.2. He drove to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge at 7:30 a.m. where he read a 38 m.p.h. wind velocity on an anemometer at the midspan, and observed that the bridge was bouncing noticeably, but not exceptionally, and that the tie-down stays on the west side of the span were loose and whipping in a circular arc. 2.3. Shortly after 10:00 a.m. Arkin again checked the wind velocity and saw that it had increased to 42 m.p.h. and that the movement of the bridge deck had heightened dramatically; by his count the deck rose and fell at the center of the bridge 38 times per minute with a 3 foot amplitude. 2.4. Greatly concerned, Arkin halted traffic. 2.5. The up and down motion of the center span consisted of at least nine vertical undulations while the bridge also deflected laterally by as much as 2 feet. all the words useless 2.6. Suddenly the bridge began twisting violently, and the nine-wave motion changed to a two-wave motion, while the deck near the Tacoma side appeared to twist to a 45° angle. 2.7. The amplitude of the twisting undulations from crest to valley reached 25 feet, and the bridge began to tear itself apart: suspenders flew, a section of the deck near the quarter point ripped away, the bridge rested a moment, then, with a deafening roar, a 600 foot stretch tore away from the suspenders and fell into the water, the tops of the towers tilted 12 feet toward each shore, the side spans sagged, and as each section fell shock waves rippled along the remaining sections until what was left of the structure at last came to rest. 2.8. Relatively modest aerodynamic wind oscillations destroyed the Tacoma because of its weakness in torsion, a weakness which stemmed from two causes: cause #1) the shallowness of its stiffening girders; and cause #2) the narrowness of its roadway in relation to the span length

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3. visibility 3.1. September: a million filing cabinets blew apart, and sheets of paper filled the streets, all the sheets covered with words, all the words useless. 3.2. We thought it was a movie, Independence Day, a sequel – the real as an appendage of the fantastic. a small mammal with big ears 3.3. Visibility, the fabric of something we understand as reality, emerges through insistence: we watch, and we watch again, and we watch again again. 3.4. Commerce had been the inevitable, the extrusion of the fantastic upward, but the future is gaining on fantasy, and this is the territory where the overtaking occurs, as demonstrated by the following four examples. 3.5. Example #1) Through America’s toughest times, the Kit-Kat Klock has brightened our days for 70 years, through the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, Desert Storm, and several recessions – this battery-operated timepiece in the shape of a black-and-white cat with its tail as a pendulum, has been the source of enjoyment for families around the world for almost 60 years, with its Rolling Eyes, Wagging Tail and Infectious Smile – we thought you might be interested in a historical profile of the Kit-Kat Klock in light of recent events. 3.6. Example #2) McDonald’s delivers 14 trucks, each 45 feet long, full of Quarter Pounders and Chicken McNuggets, to the ruins, free of charge, and issues a press release: “McDonald’s is doing what we always do – we are helping our neighbors.” 3.7. Example #3) Within one month the Pentagon spends millions of dollars purchasing publication rights to all the most accurate civilian satellite photographs of the effects of US bombing in Afghanistan, in order to render the suffering of the enemy invisible.

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3.8. Example #4) In the immediate aftermath, television networks cancel a number of programs deemed inappropriate – among these is one about an animated construction worker with talking machines: the BBC’s Bob the Builder, a cheerful children’s show with songs. 4. uncreativity 4.1. “I am spending the 39th year of my life practicing uncreativity,” writes Kenneth Goldsmith as he embarks on his latest project: “On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day’s New York Times, word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page.” 4.2. “Imagine a book that is written with the intention not to be read.” 4.3. “I’m interested in quantifying and concretizing the vast amount of ‘nutritionless’ language; I’m also interested in the process itself being equally nutritionless.” 4.4. “I’ve long been an advocate of extreme process in writing – recording every move my body has made in one day, recording every word I spoke over the course of a week, recording every sound I heard ending in ‘r’ for almost four years,” – this last project produced No. 111.2.7.93 – 10.20.96, a 606 page long sentence collecting and alphabetizing sounds, words, phrases, or sentences, ending in the linguistic schwah, into chapters organized by syllable count, of which the following is an excerpt from Chapter 7. 4.5. a small mammal with big ears, a sorry state of affairs, a stranger in yukatta, a way to spot a liar, accommodation collar, acquire other ideas, actress/model/whatever, adaptive gonkulator, add some sliced paranoia, Addicted to your partner?, addition to your chancre, ah Satan sees Natasha, Ahhh. So that’s what tears are for!, Ain’t that right my bald brothers?, Akira Kurosawa, all and all is all we are, all apes are sprayed with water, all inspected have no fear, all is fair in love and war, all my bras have underwires, all previously acquired, All right! I’ll cook you dinner!, Alois Schicklgruber, Am I my brother’s keeper?, ambush fickle-ass finger, amor vincit omnia, amusement parks are a bore, an awed whisper reached my ears:, an endless sense of wonder, an eternal amoeba, an evening to remember. 4.6. Two summers ago, as we walked through lower Manhattan, I thought, Kenneth walks the way he writes; not waiting for a crosswalk or checking for oncoming traffic, but simply following his trajectory,

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4.7. Now for three weeks I wonder if Kenneth has survived, until I receive an email: “I had a crash and lost all my email addresses . . . Too big, too complicated, too much to talk about here . . .” 4.8. But in those days of doubt, I thought of him: his presence more ear than voice, his mode one of collection and assessment without judgment, his world a field of singularities, irreducible, his credo a simple question: what if all language is poetry? – and I wondered, with a creative life of such perfect transparency, what kind of ghost would he have made? 5.

floodlands

5.1. What does sorrow signify? a building without a roof 5.2. They have raised enormous structures, they have achieved precision in certain rational constructs, and I have loved this to some degree. 5.3. But if I begin precisely with this, the possibility, absolute, of my nonexistence, who then are they, my father and mother? what did they want? is this question absurd, or is it a channel for death to move in? 5.4. That is the way it is when everything is dangerous. 5.5. Caught in the floodlands of memory, in the delirium where desire originates, we believe in our own existence. 5.6. We observe birds engaged in flight, observe ants engaged in reconstruction. 5.7. From these observations emerges something we understand as reality, convincing us of the peacefulness of the dead. 5.8. Change again; we do not change again. 6.

delirium

6.1. In 1904 Coney Island’s Dreamland amusement park opens with 17 public exhibitions including #14: Fighting the Flames – a 250 foot

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long, 100 foot deep building without a roof within which a square of a city has been built, showing houses, streets, and a hotel, and where four thousand firemen inhabit, permanently, this metropolitan “set”, recruits from the fire departments of this and nearby cities who wait in the wings of the synthetic block with four engines and hose wagons, an extension ladder truck, a water tower, an ambulance and a battalion chief ’s wagon. An alarm rings; the men leap from their beds and slide down the brass poles; the hotel is on fire with people inside it, flames on the first floor cutting off their escape; more people throng the square, shouting and gesticulating; the engines arrive, then the water tower, hose wagons, extension ladder truck, the battalion chief, and the ambulance, which runs over a man. The fire and smoke drive the inmates up until they reach the top floor when an explosion is heard and the roof of the building falls in – yet the hysterical guests are saved, the fire put out, the audience satisfied, and the city block prepared for its next performance. The choreographed spectacle says the city is this: an astronomical increase in the potential for disaster, narrowly exceeded by an equally astronomical ability to avert it. In May, 1911, the lighting system that decorates the façade of Dreamland’s exhibition #8: End of the World, short circuits, and sparks start a real fire, fanned by a strong sea wind. Only weeks before, a superior fire-fighting apparatus has been installed, with new water mains added to the hydrants, but somehow the ducts have not been connected to the Atlantic, and as the real firefighters arrive, they find no more pressure in the system than in a garden hose. The firefighters of Fighting the Flames are the first to desert their dormitories and the confines of Dreamland, and only the midget firefighters of exhibition #4: Lilliputia – confronted with the real thing after 2,500 false alarms – put up a real fight, saving a small piece of their city – the fire station. hear the waves strike the shore

6.8. In three hours Dreamland burns to the ground. 7.

transparency

7.1. Can we see people at work? hear the waves strike the shore? observe the course of a family argument? see what a truck is carrying or how

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the sewage drains away? touch what is for sale or see when the parking lot is full? watch the transfers of money and messages? 7.2. Some of these processes are important, some interesting, some trivial, others abhorrent, but they all convey a “sense of life” in any city, and are the direct perceptual basis for deeper meanings, since functions presented immediately to our senses help us to understand the world. 7.3. A transparent approach, one that attempts “uncreativity,” openness, one that attempts to reveal as visible and perceptual, rather than to conceal and obscure, the steps of the process, inevitably absorbs the audience, the critic, the pedestrian – any who would make meaning – as an active participant, because transparency cannot function without an observer. A tree uprooted 7.4. The architect Tadao Ando tells the story of growing up in the underground level of a housing project in Japan. 7.5. One day a remodel demolished the middle portion of the upper floor, temporarily removing a central strip of the Ando family’s ceiling. 7.6. Into what had always been a shadowy dwelling, there flooded a brilliant shaft of daylight. 7.7. “What has happened to my home?” he thinks, as he sits mesmerized by this new material that shifts and intensifies with the passing hours of the day, “Is this beauty, and is it my friend, and is it possible without destruction?” 7.8. Like all transfixed children, he is staring at his future. 8.

machines

8.1. By morning the rain had stopped and the clouds had rolled away, but a lot of damage had been done in the night – and Bob was the first person to hear about it. 8.2. A tree uprooted, blocking the road, telegraph poles down, pipes burst and fences broken. 8.3. He hurried out to the yard. 8.4. “Hey, that was some storm last night,” rumbled Roley; “It was,” Bob agreed, “and it caused a lot of damage – we’re needed right away” the bridge rested a moment

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8.5. Everyone was tired when they got back to the yard: “Get a good night’s sleep,” Bob told his machines, “We’ve got more repairwork to do tomorrow.” 8.6. “What a day it’s been,” yawned Wendy, “You should go and put your feet up by the fire, Bob.” 8.7. “I will, Wendy, goodnight, goodnight all!” Bob called. 8.8. “Good night, Bob,” murmured the tired machines. 9.

to believe

9.1. We study failure for the precision of its revelation – the exact manner of the collapse of the bridge allows us to see its design, the mathematics of its construction and stress, renders the wind itself visible, and renders visible the aggregate of factors at Tacoma Narrows on November 7th, 1940. 9.2. Failure produces transparency. 9.3. Preserve these words for a day of fear: an external field exists, one of singularities, irreducible, wherein no two deaths are alike. 9.4. Left to itself, in a world of obscurity, the mind has the capacity to move from one idea to another, but it does so at random, in a delirium that runs throughout the universe, creating monstrous giants and dragons of fire. 9.5. For the concept of error we substitute a concept of delirium, according to which there are beliefs that are not false, but illegitimate – illegitimate exercises of faculties, illegitimate functioning of reasons. 9.6. We are not threatened by error, rather and much worse, we bathe in delirium. 9.7. The problem has changed. 9.8. It may be that our most difficult task has become to perceive this world, this life, and to believe in it.

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Part 1.2: Music like a city – 2000 What has become of the city in which we believed? It has sprawled, congested with slow automobiles, deteriorated with neglected public transportation, gridded with buckling sidewalks, overflown with webs of rapid aircraft, made porous with instantaneous electronic communication and shopping. It has become more complex, more emptied out of inhabitants, more diluted, collapsed, split and disseminated. We accept our city as a noun, a substance, but it no longer designates a merely physical territory, nor only an indefinite play of variabilities. Its center and periphery have become unstable. Its perimeters have become relative. To grasp the category of the urban we must confront its globality, to which its elements become potentially coextensive – metabolized into the shifting order of planetary exchanges and electronic flows. The market steps up, with a systematic rigor that is hardly masked by the glitter of branding, the dominant aesthetics of advertising. And the cosmetic identity keyed into the city, for the convenience of mass tourists and the media, will not be enough to restore a semblance of spirit. As the geometric resolution of all the computations and projections, the city finally comes to designate the phylum of globality in its physical amplitude and its electronic limitlessness. Which is to say that it manifests the most opaque event of our time. We look back to the planned cities of the Roman Empire, which imply the potential of the architecture to be a passive agent, acting merely as a vessel for movements and flows. We see the Roman city now as a “box of speeds.” We see ourselves returning to it. This part is the last part of this lecture, and it is unfolding. With her 1993 chamber composition Floating, Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth employed a singular, hybrid notation technique. A simple gridlike diagram of three linear indicators instructs the musicians as a group. The lowest line shows timings for instrument entrances, followed by sectional transitions and conclusion. The middle line designates the range of dynamic variation. The uppermost line indicates the music’s density: the thicker this line, the more concentrated the music.

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At a second level of particularity, the score multiplies into a series of pages, one for each instrument. These pages designate individual musical material. For each section, one finds an arrangement of boxes. Each box contains a kernel of music. The box arrangements limit each instrument’s possible music. Each musician remains free to select the order in which the boxes occur, as well as the repetition. The more the boxes, the greater the freedom of choice within that section. The composition expands to the greatest number of boxes in section AA, with its spacious series of arrivals, and section DD, with its maximum density. The composition contracts and reduces for sections BB and DD, with their crescendo and decrescendo, and limits itself most severely at EE, the unison conclusion. They enter the city one by one. The space becomes congested. Both the individuals and crowd expand. They reach an ecstatic pitch. They grow tired. In an orderly fashion, they exit. We have arrived at the quality of unfoldingness. Who would want to live in an infinitely vivid city? We do not seek an absolute one-to-one correspondence between form and society. We do not want a multiplicity of evocative signs to overwhelm us. We need limits. We find greater value in the processes of cognition than in the resulting mental structures. We find pleasure in mysteries. We want definable elements rather than defined ones, complex connections, regions to explore, freedom to camouflage. Privacy shields us from tyranny. Sunshine is perhaps the best disinfectant. Goya said the sleep of reason breeds monsters. But doesn’t the insomnia of reason breed other monsters? Abundance is poverty, and light has many forms: autumn moonlight, light reflected off snow in winter, light of fireflies on summer evenings.

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We reduce the ideal of Sense with a double qualification. We limit ourselves. We limit our world. We set limits for an environment to permit an unfolding creation of meaning, a simple first order structure, to allow a more extensive ordering as it is more fully experienced, and to encourage the construction of new meanings at consecutive levels of unfoldingness. Through limits we make the world.

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Departure I set out to follow any street to its end, so I chose the first street I found. As I leave the house, I am bound to get lost in these coiling lanes and passageways that beguile me to see them through. This owes to the local topography, to the streets – narrow, meandering like eels. This city has no north, south, east, or west; the only direction it has is sideways. By evening, that light seeps anywhere, a light for the times, in which the buildings stand on low ground, their pediments just above the harbor, absolutely immobile, hollow, available. You could enter any building. You could look from any window. One might wave to oneself. Speak if you can. Her name is Phyllis, coming home from her first job on the bus in the bare civic interior, among all those people, the small doors opening on the night at the curb. Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness – so small a picture. A spot of light on the curb, it cannot demean us. I stood in the square, the light fading. Have I mentioned tracing out California. I have. How big is it. As big as a boat. I remember Felicity, Center of the World. Inside a pyramid in Felicity, California a plaque indicates the exact center of the world. Though it could be said that the surface of a spherical planet has an infinite number of “centers” this is the only Center of the World officially recognized as such by the County Board of Supervisors. Felicity, located on the highway west of Yuma, was founded in 1985 by Jacques-Andre Istel, a French financier, who, in addition to being an authority on the philosophy of centers, is also known as one of the fathers of recreational parachuting. This is how I departed the city. Mother took me to the Gare de Lyon. She entrusted me to a Red Cross convoy leaving for Grenoble, in the free zone.

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She bought me a magazine, an issue of Charlie, with a cover showing Charlie Chaplin, with his walking stick, his hat, his shoes and his little mustache, doing a parachute jump. The parachute attaches to Charlie by his trouser suspenders. Sixteen years later, when, by chance, military service briefly made a parachutist of me, I suddenly saw, in the very instant of jumping, one way of deciphering this memory. The ground rushes up at me. The diameter of objects increases faster and faster and I suddenly have the feeling I am not seeing them getting closer but seeing them move apart. The picture stops there. I have left the city. I float above it as from a balloon. Three hypotheses about myself as inhabitant have now occurred to me. 1. I hate the city. 2. I respect the city so much that I will never return to it. 3. I love the city as it was before I existed, and with a telescope aimed downward I will examine it, street by street, house by house, leaf by leaf, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination my own absence.

Sources Arrival Gertrude Stein (1999) Mexico – A Play (Kobenhaven and Los Angeles: Green Integer 42), part I, Act III, Scene I, p. 13; part II, Act III, Scene II, p. 50. George Oppen (1975) Collected Poems (New York: New Directions), “Of Being Numerous,” part 1, p. 147. Joseph Brodsky (1992) Watermark (New York: The Noonday Press and Farrar, Straus and Giroux), pp. 8–9.

Part 1.1: Music like a city – 1950 Marcel Proust (1999) In Search of Lost Time; The Captive, trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, Enright (New York: Modern Library), pp. 244–5.

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Lyn Hejinian (2001) A Border Comedy (New York: Granary Books), p. 22. Morton Feldman (2000) “Predeterminate/Indeterminate,” in B. H. Friedman (ed.), Give My Regards to Eighth Street – Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change), p. 35. Kevin Lynch (1998) Good City Form (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press), ch. 8, “Sense,” p. 131.

1, 2, and 3: We recognize the city Lynch, Good City Form, ch. 8, “Sense,” pp. 131–8.

1 and 2: We work not knowing Friends Lyn Hejinian (2000) “Reason,” in Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press), pp. 347, 365 (including quotations from The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt). Morton Feldman (2000) “The Anxiety of Art,” in Friedman (ed.), Give My Regards to Eighth Street, p. 22. Decontrol Morton Feldman (2000) “Coptic Light” and “More Light,” in Friedman (ed.), Give My Regards to Eighth Street, pp. 201, 150–1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 267.

4 and 5: We call it a basket Lynch, Good City Form, ch. 8, “Sense,” pp. 138–9. Oppen, Collected Poems, “Of Being Numerous,” part 22, p. 162. Thich Nhat Hanh (2001) Transformation at the Base – Fifty Verses on the Nature of Consciousness (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press), pp. 19–20. Hejinian, A Border Comedy, p. 89.

3, 4, and 5: We inhabit the music twice Notation Morton Feldman (1962) Projection 1 – Solo Violincello (New York: C. F. Peters edn 6945), score pp. 1 and 2. John L. Walters (1997) “Sound, code, image,” Eye, 26 (including quotation from Cornelius Cardew). Frank O’Hara (2000) “New Directions in Music: Morton Feldman,” in Friedman (ed.), Give My Regards to Eighth Street, pp. 213–15.

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Toru Takemitsu (2000), in Friedman (ed.), Give My Regards to Eighth Street, back cover. Identity Morton Feldman (2000) “Crippled Symmetry,” in Friedman (ed.), Give My Regards to Eighth Street, pp. 134–9. “Now that things are so simple, there is so much to do.” Morton Feldman quoted by John Cage, in Friedman (ed.), Give My Regards to Eighth Street, back cover.

Part 2: Catastrophe 1: Bubbleness (a brief digression on catastrophe theory) Robert Gilmore (1981) Catastrophe Theory for Scientists and Engineers (New York: Dover Publications), pp. 157–61.

2: Lecture in the Shape of a Bridge Collapsing 2. collapse Matthys Levi and Mario Salvadori (1992) Why Buildings Fall Down – How Structures Fail (New York and London: W. W. Norton), pp. 112–13. 3. visibility 3.3. Rem Koolhaas (1994) Delirious New York (New York: The Monacelli Press), p. 87. 3.4. Koolhaas, Delirious New York, p. 59. 3.5, 3.6. Oliver Burkeman (2001) “Tragic Times, but . . . ,” The Guardian, October 1. 3.7. Duncan Campbell (2001) “US buys up all satellite war images,” The Guardian, October 17. 4. uncreativity 4.1–4.4. Kenneth Goldsmith (2001) “Uncreativity,” artist’s webpage. Courtesy of New York: Poetry Plastique, Marianne Boesky Gallery/Granary Books. 4.5. Kenneth Goldsmith (1997) No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures), ch. 7, p. 80. 4.7. Kenneth Goldsmith (2001) Correspondence with the author. 5. floodlands 5.1, 5.2. Arkadii Dragomoschenko (1994) Xenia, trans. L. Hejinian and E. Balashova (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press), p. 124. 5.3. Dragomoschenko, Xenia, p. 155. 5.4. Gertrude Stein (1945) Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House), p. 121.

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5.5. Dragomoschenko, Xenia, p. 124. 5.6. Dragomoschenko, Xenia, pp. 120–1. 5.7. Dragomoschenko, Xenia, pp. 150, 120–1. 5.8. Stein, Mexico – A Play, part II, Act I, Scene II, p. 36. 6. delirium Koolhaas, Delirious New York, pp. 56–9. 7. transparency 7.1–7.3. Lynch. Good City Form, ch. 8, “Sense,” p. 139. 7.4–7.8. Merrill Goozner (1995) “Having a Heart – Pritzger winner to use funds to help orphans,” Chicago Tribune, April 21. 8. machines Diane Redmond (1999) Bob the Builder – Scoop Saves the Day (London: BBC Worldwide), pp. 2–5, 31. 9. to believe 9.4–9.6. Gilles Deleuze (2001) Pure Immanence – Essays on a Life, trans. A. Boyman (New York: Zone Books), pp. 41–3. 9.7, 9.8. Deleuze, Pure Immanence, p. 18.

Part 1.2: Music like a city – 2000 Nadia Tazi (2001) “Fragments of Net-Theory,” in Koolhaas, Boeri, Kwintner, Tazi, and Obrist (eds), Mutations (Bordeaux: ACTAR), pp. 43–4. Harvard Project on the City (2001) “How to Build a City – Roman Operating System,” in Koolhaas et al. (eds), Mutations, p. 12. Olga Neuwirth (1993) Floating. Score courtesy of composer and guitarist Burkhard Stangl. Lynch, Good City Form, ch. 8, “Sense,” pp. 143–4. “Sunshine is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Supreme Court Chief Justice Louis Brandeis. Tadao Ando (1987) “Festival,” The Culture of Fragments, Precis 6: 151, 154–5. The Journal of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (New York: Rizzoli).

Departure Brodsky, Watermark, p. 45. Oppen, Collected Poems, “Of Being Numerous,” part 11, pp. 153–4.

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Stein, Mexico – A Play, part I, Act I, Scene I, p. 5. Hinterland – A Journey into Exurban Southern California (1997) (Los Angeles, CA: The Center for Land Use Interpretation), “89: Felicity, Center of the World.” Georges Perec (1988) W or The Memory of Childhood, trans. D. Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine), pp. 54–5. Paul Virilio (1997) Open Sky, trans. J. Rose (London and New York: Verso), p. 29. Italo Calvino (1974) Invisible Cities, trans. W. Weaver (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), “Cities & Eyes 3,” p. 77.

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Selected Bibliography 207

Selected Bibliography Compiled by Andrew Walby

Books Adorno, T. (1974) Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso). — (1998) Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Agamben, G. (1993) Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. L. Heron (London and New York: Verso). — (1993) The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Arendt, H. (1968) The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Austin, J. L. (1962) How To Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Banes, S. (1993) Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre 1962–1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Barish, J. (1981) The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press). Barthes, R. (1978) Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (New York: Noonday Press). — (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang). — (1989) The Rustle of Language, trans. R. Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Battcock, G. (ed.) (1968) Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.). Belgrad, D. (1998) The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Benjamin, A. and Osborne, P. (eds) (2000) Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London: Clinamen Press).

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Benjamin, W. (1973) Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana). Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture (London: Routledge). Blanchot, M. (1982) The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press). Blau, H. (1987) The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press). Blocker, J. (1999) Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press). Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge). Butler, J., Guillory, J. and Thomas, K. (eds) (2000) What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory (London: Routledge). Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Caygill, H. (1998) Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge). Cixous, H. and Calle-Gruber, M. (eds) (1997) Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing (London: Routledge). Culler, J. (1982) Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press). De Salvo, D. and Gudis, C. (eds) (1999) Ray Johnson: Correspondences (Columbus OH: Wexner Center for the Arts). Delany, S. (1990) The Motion of Light in Water: East Village Sex and Science Fiction Writing: 1960–1965 (London: Paladin). — (2000) Times Square Red/Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press). Deleuze, G. (2001) Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. A. Boyman (New York: Zone Books). — and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Derrida, J. (1982) Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). — (1997) Politics of Friendship (London and New York: Verso). Diamond, E. (1997) Unmaking Mimesis (New York: Routledge). Eagleton, T. (1996) The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell). Fanon, F. (1986) Black Skins, White Masks (London: Pluto Press). Felman, S. and Laub, D. (eds) (1991) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge). Foster, H. (ed.) (1993) Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto). — (1996) Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Friedman, B. H. (ed.) (2000) Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change).

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Selected Bibliography 209 Fuss, D. (ed.) (1991) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London: Routledge). Fynsk, C. (1996) Language and Relation . . . That There Is Language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Gilroy, P. (1993) Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Golub, S. (2001) Infinity (Stage) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Goulish, M. (2000) 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance (London: Routledge). Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire (London: Harvard University Press). Hejinian, Lyn (2000) The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Higgins, D. (1984) Horizons: Intermedia: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press). Jenkins, J. (ed.) (1993) In the Spirit of Fluxus (Minneapolis: Walker Arts Center). Johnston, J. (1998) Marmalade Me (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press). Jones, A. (1998) Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). — and Stephenson, A. (eds) (1999) Performing the Body/Performing the Text (New York and London: Routledge). Irvine, J. and Hand, B. (1999) Instances: Anne Tallentire. Exhibition Catalog. Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs of Ireland. Kear, A. and Campbell, P. (eds) (2001) Psychoanalysis and Performance (London and New York: Routledge). Kirby, M. (1965) Happenings (New York: Dutton). Krauss, R. (1986) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). — (2000) “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson). Lefebvre, H. (1993) The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell). Levin, D. (1988) The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (New York: Routledge). Lomax, Y. (2000) Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory (London: I. B. Tauris). Lynch, K. (1998) Good City Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). McQuillan, M., McDonald, G., Purves, R. and Thomson, S. (eds) (1999) PostTheory: New Directions in Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Morley, D. and Chen, K.-H. (eds) (1996) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge). Muñoz, J. (1999) Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Nancy, J.-L. (1991) The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

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Orozco, G. (1998) Clinton is Innocent. Exhibition Catalog (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris). Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge). — (1997) Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge). — and Lane, J. (eds) (1998) The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press). Phillips, A. (1993) On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Pollock, G. (1999) Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge). Rainer, Y. (1974) Work: 1961–1973 (Halifax, NS: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design). Sayre, H. M. (1989) The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (London: University of Chicago Press). Schimmel, P. (ed.) (1998) Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 (Los Angeles, CA: The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Thames and Hudson). Schneider, R. (1997) The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge). Sedgwick, E. K. (2003) Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press). — (ed.) (1997) Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press). — and Parker, A. (eds) (1995) Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge). Souza, F. N. (1959) Words and Lines (London: Villiers Publications). Spector, N. (1995) Felix Gonzales-Torres (New York: The Guggenheim Museum). Ugwu, C. (ed.) (1995) Lets Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance (Seattle, WA: Bay Press). Warr, T. (ed.) (2000) The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon Press).

Articles (2002) Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism. October, 100 (Spring): 200–28. Anson, L. (1999) “Wakefulness in Still Places: An Interview with Anne Tallentire,” Make: The Magazine of Women’s Art, 85 (September–November). Brown, L. B. (2000) “Feeling My Way: Jazz Improvisation and its Vicissitudes: A Plea for Imperfection,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 58 (2) (Spring): 113–23. Buchloh, B. H. D. (1997) “Critical Reflections,” Artforum (January): 68–9, 102.

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Selected Bibliography 211 Butt, G. (2001) “Happenings in History, or The Epistemology of the Memoir,” Oxford Art Journal, 24 (2): 113–26. Criqui, J. (1996) “Like A Rolling Stone: Gabriel Orozco,” Artforum, 34 (8) (April): 88–93. George, C. M. (1998) “You Can Take it With You: The Public Life of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” POZ Magazine (December). Hickey, D. (2000) “Vanessa Beecroft’s Painted Ladies,” VB 08-36: Vanessa Beecroft Performances (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz). Kaprow, A. (1958) “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News, 57 (6): 24–6, 55– 7. Kapur, G. (1989) “Francis Newton Souza: Devil in the Flesh,” Third Text, 8/9 (Autumn/Winter): 25–64. Lambert, C. (1999) “Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A,” October, 89: 87–112. Nochlin, L. (1971) “Why Are There No Great Women Artists?” Art News (January): 22–39. Orozco, G. (1998) “A Thousand Words: Gabriel Orozco Talks about his Recent Films,” Artforum International, 36 (10) (Summer): 115. Pollock, G. (1980) “Artist Mythologies and Media Genius, Madness and Art History,” Screen, 21 (3): 57–96. Roberts, J. (1996) “Mad for It! Philistinism, the Everyday and the New British Art,” Third Text, 35 (Summer): 29–42. Rogoff, I. (1998) “How to Dress for an Exhibition,” in M. Jaukuuri and M. Hannula (eds), Stopping the Process? Contemporary Views on Art and Exhibitions (Helsinki: NIFCA). Rosenberg, H. (1952) “The American Action Painters,” Art News, 51 (December), 22–3, 48–50. Scott, J. W. (1986) “The Evidence of Experience,” in Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 397–415. Schneider, R. (2001) “Performance Remains,” Performance Research, 6 (2): 100–7. Snead, J. (1981) “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Black American Literature Forum, 15 (4): 146–54. Tallman, S. (1994) “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Social Works,” Parkett, 39 (March): 64–6. Watney, S. (1994) “In Purgatory: The Work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” Parkett, 39 (March): 38–44.

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Index

Index

ACT-UP 60 Adorno 112 and aesthetic theory 83–5, 92–3, 96, 98 Agamben, Giorgio 157–9, 160, 162–3, 165–6, 169–70, 172 and whatever singularity 121, 123, 127–9, 132 agency 5–6, 9, 73–4, 143, 147–8 and criticism 6 and relation to intention 140 Arendt, Hannah: spaces of appearance 123–5, 130, 132 art education 157, 160 Austin, J. L. 10–11, 14, 50–2, 54 see also performativity authority: and authorship 26–7, 41 and the Enlightenment critic 2–4 and experience 159–65, 166–7, 172–3 and naming 51 and theory 4–8, 11 and witness 52–3 autobiography 106, 157, 160, 164

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Baldwin, James 142–3, 147 Barthes, Roland 10–11, 26, 30, 49, 52, 57 Beecroft, Vanessa 13, 83, 85–98 boredom 13, 83, 86–90, 97–8, 159 Bradshaw, Peter 137 Bruce La Bruce 86, 97 Bush, George 60 Butler, Judith 49, 51–2, 125 see also performativity Caruth, Cathy 50, 52, 56, 58, 62 catastrophe 177–80, 185–8, 204–5 Certeau, Michel de 146 citation 32, 36, 38–40, 51, 83, 85, 94–7 see also performativity the city 176–80, 198–206 Clifford, James 118 collaboration 35, 38, 113–14 Coltrane, John 138, 141–2, 144–5 commonality 85, 132, 180 community 96, 123, 127, 131, 144, 147 of witness 53–4 see also Agamben Courtauld Institute 75–6, 119–21, 133

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Index 213 the critical: address 6–8 distance 3–4, 85 response 6 see also performativity critical theory 2–4, 168 see also theory criticality 1, 13, 119 as immanent 7–8 criticism: and after 6, 17, 167–70, 172 event of 7–8 feminist 3, 25–7, 85, 90, 94 Marxist 3, 5, 84–5 as paradoxical 5–8, 11, 15 role and form of 1–5 state of 1–17 Davis, Vaginal 8, 13, 81–90, 94–8 Deconstruction 3–4, 168 as limit 4–5 Derrida, Jacques 3–4, 6 and the decision 7–8 desire 94, 96, 109, 111, 113, 115, 194 disappearance 60, 125 disciplinarity: and hybridity 8, 103, 113–14 documentation 146 as witness 29–31, 49, 57–60 drag 13, 81, 94–5, 97 as cultural terrorism 89 Duchamp, Marcel 26, 34–5 Eagleton, Terry 162 Emin, Tracey 71, 164 ethics 17, 84, 90 experience: and authority 159–63, 166–7 of experience 167–73 and knowledge 168–9 and relation to language 162, 169–72 and self-presence 165–7

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and value 166–72 and writing 157, 164–5 experimentation 16, 113, 181–2 failure 6, 13, 56, 69, 83, 86–90, 93–4, 197 of criticism 1–2 of phallic display 88–90 Fanon, Franz 67 Feldman, Morton 16, 179, 181, 183–4, 203–4, 208 femininity 26, 82, 85–6, 89–90, 95 feminism 85 Fisher, Jean 146–7 Foster, Hal 118 Foucault, Michel 118, 125 and becoming homosexual 110 Frankfurt School 111 genius 25–6, 35–6 Goat Island 16, 188 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix 54–6, 58, 60–1 gossip 96, 108 the Guardian 68, 137, 164 Gutai 35 Hall, Stuart 144 Hamlet 69–74, 77 happenings 8, 32, 34, 105–7 Higgins, Dick 8 historical avant-garde 27–9, 38, 83, 103, 107 and myth of autonomous artwork 93–4 history: canons of 25–6, 66–9, 108, 118 as co-relation 181 and genealogy 26, 108–9, 112 as hysterical 34, 49–50, 52, 56, 188 illegitimate 27, 31–2, 37 and narration 67–9, 72–4, 77, 109–10, 124

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Index

history (cont’d) as queer 51–2, 55–6, 101–3 and reference 32, 56–7 and relation to truth 52, 55–6, 110 role of historian 11–12, 50, 53, 60, 75–6, 85 as traumatic 50, 55–61

Nancy, Jean-Luc 123, 130–3 New York Correspondence School 104, 113 notation 176, 179–80, 183–4, 198, 203

improvisation 142, 146–7, 151–2 and agency 142–4 and knowledge 140–1 and viscerality 142–3 installation art 9–10, 60, 83, 91, 94 interloper 143–7 and tactical procedure 147–8 intermedia 8–9, 27, 36, 42, 108, 112–14 as anti-disciplinary 103, 113–14 and futurity 113–14 see also queer

participation 3, 120–2, 126, 132–3 looking away as 14, 119, 123, 126–9, 133 patriarchy 26, 85, 92–3, 165 performance 8–11 as signature 38, 46 n. 23 solo 24–43 studies 10 writing and 16 performance art 24, 26, 28, 32–3, 36, 39 performative turn 28–9 performativity 6–7, 8–11, 29, 36–8, 49–54, 58, 104, 106, 111, 118, 120–1, 123, 127, 132, 169–70 heterosexualization of 12, 49, 51, 53–4 and historical writing 11, 40–1, 57–62 and identity 34, 89 and improvisation 147–8 and speech-acts 8, 10, 12, 14, 17, 50–3 world-making 113 Phelan, Peggy 10, 164, 171 Phillips, Adam 87–8 pleasure 85, 88, 92–6, 106, 112, 199 Pollock, Griselda 24–7, 35, 68 Pollock, Jackson 26, 28–9, 33, 36–40, 106, 129–30 pornography 97 Progressive Artists Group 66–7 psychoanalysis 4, 88

Jameson, Fredric 84 jazz 37–41, 138, 141–5 Jones, Amelia 10, 25, 35, 85 Judson Dance Theatre 32, 34, 36, 104, 107 Koons, Jeff 94 Krauss, Rosalind 9, 24–7, 92 Lacan, Jacques 68, 75 and identification 68–9 Lefebvre, Henri 125–6 Lesbian Nation 109 Mapplethorpe, Robert 97 minimalism 9, 32, 34 and Nothings 105–6 mimesis 24, 34 and difference 68–9, 73 myth 120–1, 123, 129, 133

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Orozco, Gabriel 67, 139, 140, 145–7, 170–1, 172

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Index 215 queer: archives 103, 108–9 and normativity 89 politics 112–13 theory 13–14 utopia 103, 106–7, 110 and witnessing 51–6 and world-making 106, 113 see also history; performativity repetition 26–7, 36 and performance 24, 34 and relation to difference 23–4, 184 and relation to origin 24, 31–2, 40–1 response 11–12, 30–2, 37–42, 118, 122–3 Sangatte 151–2 sex 83, 85, 87, 92–4, 96–8, 106 Shez 360: 8, 12, 70–4 Shoreditch 72–5 Smith, Jack 105, 111 Souza, Francis Newton 65–9, 75–8 Sprinkle, Annie 93 Stonewall 55, 101, 106 Tallentire, Anne 15, 148–50 Tate Gallery 76, 129, 133, 168

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theatrical turn 28–9, 32–6 historical context of 8–10 theory: in criticism 2, 17 institutionalization of 4–5 as lived reality 129 as possibility 6–7, 123–4 see also critical theory Tomkins, Sylvan 87 Tompkins, Jane 167 trauma 12, 30, 50, 54–9, 61 see also Caruth visual culture 119 visuality 184 Warhol, Andy 8, 25, 35, 92, 106, 111, 113–15 Watney, Simon 55, 60 witness: authorization of 50–3 as deferral 31 impossibility of 49, 54–7 see also authority; history Wood, David 166 writing: and the critic 2, 4–5, 10–11, 15–16, 84–5, 87, 108–9, 122 and experience 157, 164–5 as process 14–15

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