The Literary Life of Performance

B ook s
Shonni Enel ow
The Lit erary Lif e of Per f or manc e
Emergency index’s Performance Documentation Project
Emergency index 2011
edited by Yelena Gluzman and Matvei Yankelevich
2012: Ugly Duckling Presse
“Amidst unsuspecting midday lunchers and farmers market shoppers preening in the
prosperous autumn sun of New York City’s Highline and Meatpacking Districts, the
two young and upright mommies coddled, kissed, licked, fondled, and ultimately
devoured swaddled, life-­sized babies cast in skin-­tinted fudge” (367).
So reads the delectable description of “Adoring Appetite” by Caitlin Berrigan
and Anya Liftig in their tart entry in Emergency index 2011, the ambitious new performance documentation project from Brooklyn publishing collective Ugly Duckling
Presse. Berrigan and Liftig’s text is accompanied by a hilariously campy photograph
of, indeed, two young women with swaddled babies, one in mid-­bloody-­g ulp. The
photograph and the description, which explains that the performance “explored the
obsessions, myths and terrors of motherhood through repeated acts of uncanny, comic
cannibalism,” are found on pages 366 – 67 in the 538-­page paperback, which documents
249 performances from around the world. In an open submission process, the editors
Yelena Gluzman and Matvei Yankelevich, collaborating with an international team
of artists, critics, and curators, invited performance artists to document their work in
a four-­hundred-­word essay “focus[ing] on the problem or issue the work was made to
address.”1 Artists were also asked to include an image, the date and location of the first
performance of the work, and the number of times it was performed in 2011, and to pick
one to ten keywords from their description for the index ’s index, where readers can
Theater 43:1 doi 10.1215/01610775-­1815575
© 2013 by Shonni Enelow
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easily find every documented performance relating to, for instance,
“modernity,” “monitor,” “monks,”
“monster,” or “Moore, Julianne.”
The book, organized by the date
of the performance rather than
by the artist’s name, is formatted
consistently: two facing pages are
devoted to each performance, the
left page with the image, title,
date, and location, and the artist name(s) and contact information, and the right page with the
text. With its rough paper cover
and constructivist design (a signature of Ugly Duckling Presse),
the book is part encyclopedia, part phone book, part newspaper, and part discrete art
project of its own. (For full disclosure: one of my performances is on pages 44 – 45 in the
index.)
It’s also the first-­ever comprehensive performance documentation project of its
kind, one that could significantly alter the way that performance scholars and performance artists think about their work. We read about performances in New Delhi,
Amsterdam, Osaka, Bogotá, Vancouver, Mexico City, Mount Rainer, Santiago, Belfast, Kansas City, Madrid, Melbourne, Yogyakarta, the Edinburgh Zoo, Divinity
Chapel at Harvard University, a train station in Berlin, the Brooklyn ikea, a laundromat in Grand Rapids, the steps of a church in Portugal, many (in galleries, in apartments, on street corners) in London and New York, and many other places besides. We
meet a pile of panties on Sunset Boulevard, Mexican wrestlers battling over a stolen
indigenous artifact, a field of raw eggs, naked boys digging through rotting clothes in
a junkyard. There were “virtual performances” (“Pixel Video” was “delivered live via
Skype,” “performance[s]-­for-­documentation,” and even an “Aerobic Workout tape.” A
friend told me she’d read about a guy who’d fondled his doctor during a checkup; she’d
followed Gluzman’s suggestion during the index ’s release party at New York’s The
Kitchen a few weeks earlier that the index “makes great bathroom reading.” I found
“Medical Dream 1” on page 151 by looking up “medicine” in the index: “By undertaking
these interventions, I not only asserted the presence of my entire body to the doctor but
also was able to maintain a heightened awareness of my own volition within a medical
context.” As my friend pointed out, the artist doesn’t mention the doctor’s reaction.
I extrapolated those snapshot descriptions; many of the entries in the index are
a bit too scrupulous in obeying the editors’ instruction not to describe “the experience
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Caitlin Berrigan
and Anya Liftig’s
Adoring Appetite,
Art in Odd Places
Festival, New York,
2011. Photo:
Bami Adedoyin
enel ow
Emergency index
2011. Cover design
by Ugly Duckling
Presse, 2012
of watching the performance.”2 According to Gluzman, this was both a practical and
a philosophical choice: the editors wanted to render the work more “readable” by contextualizing the ideas behind the performance, for readers not familiar with the microcultures the artist may have been speaking to, and also to “steer clear of the [Peggy]
Phelan problem, wherein the description is a betrayal of the work . . . in our solution,
the description never claims to represent the performance. Instead it reports on the
theoretical and functional aspects of that work.”3 The result is a pointed focus on artistic
intention. Putting the onus on artists to identify the terms and stakes of their work,
indeed, to decide if it was performance in the first place (the editors did not specify, for
instance, that the work had to be live, and quite a few entries were not), Gluzman and
Yankelevich’s approach treats performance as a conceptual art. The understanding of
performance as a conceptual art is nothing new, but it continues to provoke and raises
important questions about the nature of performance as an art form and the status of its
frame. (Theoretically, a conceptual artwork needs only
the artist’s intention to become a work, but practically
it needs the frame of the gallery or museum — or even
just wall text — to be legible as such.) Is the frame of
performance the live presence of an audience? Or is it
the documentation?
That audience is what frames performance may
have seemed self-­evident at one time, but increased
interest in documentation, as well as dissatisfaction
with first-­wave performance art criticism that cast performance as the medium of the pure present has led
some performance scholars to swing the other way.
Body and performance art historian Amelia Jones, in
her influential 1997 article “‘Presence’ in Absentia:
Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” argues
that photographic documentation productively furthers
the aim of body art: “to expose the body itself as supplementary, as both the visible ‘proof ’ of the self and its
endless deferral.”4 Documentation should not be seen
as proof that an originary event took place she asserts,
but rather as another displacement of the myth of the
original. For Jones, someone who attends an event has a perspective on what happened
that is no more privileged than that of someone who sees a photograph of the event:
either way, the “body is not self-­sufficient in its meaningfulness but relies not only on
an authorial context of ‘signature’ but on a receptive context in which the interpreter or
viewer may interact with this body.”5 Philip Auslander, drawing from Jones in 2006,
goes further, arguing that documentation produces the performance as such. Troubling
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the distinction between works like Chris Burden’s
Shoot, performed in front of a live audience, and
Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void, a doctored photograph suggesting an event that never took place,
Auslander argues that even early performance
artists recognized that their work needed to be
documented perhaps even more than it needed
to be witnessed live.6 Thus, using J. L. Austin’s
terms — terms almost too familiar in performance
studies, though he is careful to read them in their
initial context — Auslander contends that rather
than illustrate a past event (for Austin, a “constantive” verbal statement), performance documentation is “performative”: it enacts something with its
“utterance.” Therefore, “it is not the initial presence of the audience that makes an event a work
of performance art: it is its framing as performance
through the performative act of documenting it
as such.”7 Documentation delineates the work of
performance, created not for the purpose of live
experience but toward its future, virtual audiences.
For both performances that actually happened and
performances, like Klein’s Leap, that did not, the
crucial audience is the audience for the documentation, for whom it is not clear, nor does it matter, whether there was any other, live audience
involved.
I asked Gluzman if she agreed with this assessment: did it matter to the editors whether the performances documented in Emergency index actually took place? It
seems impossible that they could verify all of them; still, in asking for the date and the
site, they made it clear that they were looking for an event bound in time and place. On
the one hand, Emergency index documents performances that the vast majority of readers are unlikely ever to have seen or ever to see, and the primacy of the documentation
is therefore, from one angle at least, a moot point: the documentation is all we have.
On the other hand, in their desire to track “a state of the field” and to make Emergency
index a practical sourcebook for performance ideas, the editors resist privileging the
conceptual apparatus of their book. Gluzman responded that yes, it did matter whether
the performances took place, but the reason is “not so much historical veracity as . . .
interest; we believe that the description of a theoretical work is simply not as complicated as that of a work which has been actualized.” However, she added a major caveat:
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Mark McCloughan’s
Medical Dream I,
performed in various
doctors’ offices,
Philadelphia, 2011.
Photo:
Mark McCloughan
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This situation is different (at least
in scale, but I think also in kind)
for contributions which used the
material conditions of Emergency
index
in order to create a perfor-
mance which occurred via reading the description of the performance. There are a few such works
in the current volume of
index ,
including a piece by Vicente
Lloco, and one by Alex Ness. In
these works, which satisfy all the
conditions we set out for contributions, the performance was
located in the moment of reading,
making any reader of
in dex
an
audience who is completing (and
complicit in) that work.8
Michael Bramwell’s
Man Who Levitated
Out of the Ghetto,
Harlem, 2011. Photo:
Carolyn Bramwell
Lloco’s and Ness’s performances, in
fact, appear right next to each other in the index: both artists seem to have recorded
the date of their performance on the date of their entry writing, close to the submission deadline. Lloco’s entry is full of Futurist posturing and uncomfortably ambiguous irony: documenting his “radical and ephemeral” act “so that later generations can
reenact my oeuvres and thus the belief in this world,” he describes randomly shooting
someone in Danville, Illinois. On the facing page, the image looks like a screenshot of
a small-town online news article corroborating that there was a murder in Danville on
that night, just as the artist describes: a Midwestern Marinetti (Lloco locates himself
in “Italy/USA”) becomes a statistic of urban blight. Ness’s “RPerfect Recall” is slighter,
and funnier, written in the imperative: “type the description of a process as you type
without using the delete key. Uipmprovise the process as you tyrpe.”
But is there really a difference between these performances and the others?
I found myself returning to Auslander: there may be a difference in how the artists
conceived and executed the performances, but there isn’t a difference in how I, their
virtual audience, receive them, at least not more of a difference than there is between
how I receive each of the other entries. Lindsey Drury’s “Starched Spiral” is, like
“RPerfect Recall,” written in the imperative, and Lloco’s is no more conceptually
crafted and ambiguously truth based than many of the others. For instance, one of my
very favorite entries, “Man Who Levitated Out of the Ghetto,” by Michael Bramwell
(318 – 19), which narrates the story of a Harlem janitor trying to levitate out of the ghetto
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“like the ancient Greek Sisyphus,” is punctuated by this startling line: “In the Fall of
2011, cold air coming in through a window mixed with warm air rising from the radiator created an atypical set of thermal conditions that caused the janitor to experience
a slight levitation.” Each entry in Emergency index, upon examination, seems to have a
different relationship to the actuality of the live event, and the subtlety by which this
relationship can be delineated is the virtue of the medium of documentation the editors
of Emergency index have chosen: writing. Even in a highly detailed, “realistic” description, no one expects words to exactly correspond to reality. And the editors did not ask
for highly detailed, realistic description; they asked for abstractions (thoughts, ideas,
problems). They got poetics.
This is the distinctive contribution of Emergency index to the much-­contested
practice of performance documentation: the prioritization of writing as its medium.
Performance scholars, including Jones and Auslander, tend to assume that performance
documentation is primarily photographic, and this both reflects and reifies the position
of performance as a subsidiary of visual art, not theater. In making this distinction, I
don’t mean to imply that theater is inherently reliant on text, but simply that writing is
a more accepted interlocutor for theatrical performance (and theater studies), be it via
the dramatic script, the performance-­generated text of devised theater, or the textual
record of choreography, than it is for “performance art” as delineated (if not defined)
by scholars like Jones. But writing would seem to be a strikingly apt medium for performance documentation, if, following Jones and Auslander, we take documentation
not as a record of an original event but as that which makes performance what it is: a
subversion and estrangement of
presence.9 In fact, for Jones’s recurrent philosophical reference,
Jacques Derrida, writing is the
medium of this estrangement.
Intentionally or not, Emergency
index shifts performance documentation — and thus, performance itself — away from its
long-­standing alliance with visual art and into the realm of literature.
Back to “Adoring Appetite”: Berrigan and Liftig’s concept is, to my mind, brilliant,
but what compels me most about
their index entry is the sumptuousness of its language, its arch,
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Yelena Gluzman’s
The Bacchae,
Collapsable Hole,
New York, 2011.
Photo: Jsun Burns
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Alex Ness’s “RPerfect
Recall,” performed
in a private residence,
San Francisco, 2011.
Photo:
Alex Ness
melodic surrealism. I can
imagine the performance
live, and I’m sure I would
like it, but I don’t see
how I could enjoy the
intricacies of the artists’
self-­positioning without
the subtle parody in the
phrase “the young and
upright mommies,” the
precision of their mise-­
en-­
scène without “the
prosperous autumn sun.”
As for photographic documentation, I’ve seen the
photos, on Anya Liftig’s
website and even in person (last spring they were
exhibited in Brooklyn),
and they didn’t thrill me.
It’s the writing that exalts their delightfully subversive gender performance. More: just
as “Adoring Appetite” is a critique of the contemporary myths of bourgeois motherhood, their index entry complicates what has become the de facto genre of performance’s afterlife, the more modest, yet omnipresent collaborator with the photograph:
the myth of the performance.
In many cases throughout performance art’s history, the photograph of the performance has operated as the guarantor of the myth. (For example, Jones describes the
myth of valie export’s “Action Pants” performance, which apparently never happened as the artist reported, though her story has been repeated now for decades and
was reperformed in Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces exhibit at the Guggenheim
largely by reproducing a photograph.)10 Photographs are really good at mythmaking,
as Roland Barthes registered in his famous explication of contemporary myth in the
magazine photo of a young African in a French military uniform — hence the pervasiveness of photography in advertising. An image can quickly communicate a message
that appears to be natural, obvious, and given (in this case, the message that colonialism is clearly not oppressive because the black soldier obviously loves France), disguising its ideological construction.11 Barthes defines myth as that which turns history into
nature: the myth of the performance, we might say, typically turns a complicated historical and cultural event into a pure one, an “experience” or “encounter.”12 As Jones
points out, the mythic life of performance can be used to critique the myth of presence,
of the natural, of the original, or it can simply promulgate that myth (and, I would add,
in attempting to do the first, it might in fact do the second).
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Emergency index destabilizes the mythification of performance in several ways.
First, in its democratic construction, it refuses the hierarchy of the name that secures
the performance’s aura: in the index, there is no separation between the famous artist
and the unknown, just as there is no distinction between performances in fashionable
or respected sites and those performed in obscurity. Second, in asking artists to speak
for themselves and frankly share their ideas, it ousts the (still pervasive) myth of artistic
inspiration. Last, and most crucially, the index undercuts myth by rendering performance documentation literary, with literature’s slippages, citations, traces, and framed
absences. Required, in many cases, to construct an image of the performance entirely in
his or her mind, the virtual audience is given a fragmentary, suggestive, and, for all the
emphasis on artistic intention, disjunctive reading experience. In even the most careful
and detailed entries, I often found that the relationship between the cited ideas behind
the performance and the scattered descriptions of the act itself was not easily discerned.
To be clear: I think this is a good thing. The editors note, in the project description on
the Emergency index website, that “of course, describing a performance in language is
problematic,” because “language . . . has a complicated relationship to the performance
it describes,”13 but for me this misses the point: that inherently complicated relationship is what makes the project so interesting. By their own account, the index of the
index is how the editors “acknowledg[e] the semi-­autonomous materiality of language
and attemp[t] to reap its benefits,”14 but I think those benefits are reaped by the reader
throughout.
In just a few pages, the literary style of the descriptions range from the surrealist
(“I take out a bottle of maple syrup. I open it and take big mouthfuls. I hold it in my
mouth and drop it on to the ground, slowly, like a fountain”) to the gleefully triumphalist (“‘Art-­R iot’ is a soft-­core terrorism! But instead of killing, it brings genuine and true
art into the streets, galleries, or big institutions such as Tate Modern” ([359]) and the
earnest didactic (“The action sought to posit art as the force that creates cultural oxygen
and social connective tissue”). I laughed when I got almost to the end of Diane Dwyer’s
description of “Happiness Breast Lift” and came upon the fact that “this piece was
developed within the context of a circus in my home, Diane’s Circus.” Erin Hood and
Marina Kelly used poetic line breaks to suggest the fragmented dialogue of boxing in
“Hey, Fighter.” And many entries documented the use of text in the performance itself:
“Legal Manifestations,” by Yesiree the Public Notary; “Letters to Vito”; “Free Paper/
Nomadesk”; “Poemobile @ Pregones, La Casita, The Bronx”; “love.abz,” described by
the artists as “a writing as opposed to a reading — an act of digitally mediated, collaborative live writing”; “Endurance Texts”; “When I Buried the Book of Sand” with the
pathos of its diaristic narration — to name just a few. This may be partially because Ugly
Ducking Presse, the publisher of Emergency index, is known for experimental writing,
and some artists who responded to the call for submissions were undoubtedly familiar
with the Presse’s activities. But it might also be a sign that contemporary performance
artists are attuned to the possibilities of writing as a supplement to the live act, a supplement perhaps less easily misread as a guarantor of presence than a photograph can be.
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This hypothesis was supported by the most stimulating performance at the Emergency index release party, by the performance collective Joyce Cho. The editors had
asked five artists from the index to create short performances for the event based on
another artist’s entry. Joyce Cho offered a manic celebration of diegesis: three performers, two facing front and one off to the side, emphatically narrated the performance of
another artist as if they were watching it unfold in front of them, complete with incredulous witness commentary and mock-­contemptuous disagreement with each other’s
descriptions. Rather than try to repeat, recapture, or represent the performance, they
reveled in the estrangement of its inevitably idiosyncratic narrations and turned the
telling of the event into an event of its own. Their piece highlighted what is brilliant and
provocative in Emergency index: its grasp of performance from a sideline view — maybe
the only view that doesn’t betray performance’s always slippery deferrals.
Not e s
1. “Document a Performance,” Emergency index, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse,
emergencyindex.com/performance.html (accessed May 1, 2011).
2. Ibid.
3. Yelena Gluzman, e-­mail correspondence with author, April 27, 2011.
4. Amelia Jones, “ ‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,”
Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 14.
5. Ibid.
6. Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” paj: A Journal
of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): 3.
7. Ibid., 7.
8. Gluzman, correspondence with author, April 27, 2011.
9. Phelan has recently expressed the hope that performance studies reconsider the
relationship between performance and literature, perhaps signaling a shift in the field.
Phelan, “‘Just Want to Say’: Performance and Literature, Jackson and Poirier,” pmla 125,
no. 4 (2010): 942 – 47.
10. Amelia Jones, “‘The Artist Is Present’: Artistic Re-­enactments and the Impossibility
of Presence,” tdr : The Drama Review 55, no. 1 (2011): 28 – 29.
11. See Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” trans. Jonathan Cape, in A Barthes Reader,
ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 101 – 2.
12. Ibid., 116.
13. “The Language Connection,” Emergency index, Ugly Duckling Presse, www
.emergencyindex.com/project.html (accessed August 24, 2012).
14. Gluzman, correspondence, April 27, 2011.
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