Performativity: intervening the everyday, eventmaking in city space

Performativity:
intervening the everyday, event­making in city space
Media Art: Theory & Practice I
Version Sem B, 2008
Linda C.H. LAI

Performative
• Speech act: a promise, bet, or contract
• 2 types:
> clearly marked
> diffused

The “performative” as a concept:
performance suffusing an act or an activity
constructed social reality

A linguistic definition of the performative
(a term coined by J.L. Austin…)
– a semiotic gesture (play with language)
– being as well as doing:
> a doing that constitutes a being…(the process of playing out
one’s subjectivity in a specific moment and place)
> an activity that creates what it describes

Performative
Performatives are intelligible only within a matrix that is
simultaneously social and semiotic.
> depends on a densely woven web of social relations that renders
it intelligible, believable, and acceptable
> involves self­legitimating power
> Shift of context of the utterance shift or loss of cultural
authority.
However, a “shift” can also be a parody of dominant conventions: to
show that there are conventions… (Judith Butler) e.g. to pronounce
a pair of women husband and wife…

Performative
Performativity therefore involves daily behavior based on everyday
norms or habits.
Performativity works through the norm of reiteration.
For example,
“Gender” is NOT something one is, but something one does…
• There is no essential identity: gender is performance. It’s what you
do at particular times, rather than a universal you.
• We perform different identities/selves in the world.

Performativity
• Judith Butler describes performativity as “…that
reiterative power of discourse to produce the
phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” (Butler quoted
in Identity: A reader, 2000)
• Key: repetition

Performance VS Performativity
• Performance presupposes a pre­existing subject;
performativity contests the very notion of the subject
• Performance: subject precedes the act
• Performativity: the act constructs the (identity of) subject
• collapse of differences between “fiction” and the
“real”

Case studies: Vito Hannibal Acconci
Individual moments of urban reality:
­ collapse of differences between “fiction” and the “real”
­ create fiction or story in everyday living space
­ interaction with the public and play with the space

Vito Hannibal Acconci (b. 1940)
In the 1960s, his preoccupations were now orientated towards "real
space” (for example, the physical space, the social space, the
cultural space, the day­to­day, time) which he explored using
various media.
In the early 1970s, he was known for his performance and video
works.
Beginning in the 1980s, he concerned himself with private domestic
spaces and public spaces for interaction. His many projects include
parks, playgrounds, and "anti­monuments".

Vito Acconci: Following Pieces (1969)

Acconci’s Spy Project
• From midnight, April 16, to midnight, May 12, at all times, a
“spy” was assigned to the outside of Peters Hall (which houses
the offices of the dean of students, the dean of men, the
registrar, etc.). The spy’s task was to watch the entrance or
entrances facing the Memorial Arch.
• Every hour, on the hour, the spy took a color photograph of
what he is watching.
• The photographs were sent to the artist; the results of the piece
formed his collection of information.

(Untitled) Project for Pier 17 (1971)
• “From March 27 to April 24, 1971, I will be at Pier 17 (an abandoned pier at
West Street and Park Place, New York). At I am each night; I will be alone,
and will wait at the far end of the pier for one hour.”
• “To anyone coming to meet me, I will attempt to reveal something I would
normally keep concealed: censurable occurrences and habits, fears,
jealousies – something that has not been exposed before and that would be
disturbing for me to make public.”
• Asking the viewer to keep this secret, Acconci then invited them to demand
something from him, even blackmail him.
Acconci was often the protagonist in his early works and regularly
invited viewer participation. (Untitled) Project for Pier 17, for
example, was conducted as tools for self­analysis as well as
explorations into human relationships.

(Untitled) Project for Pier 17 (1971)

• Nov 23,1969; afternoon.
Vito Acconci: Blinks
• Photo­Piece, Greenwich Street, NYC; Kodak Instamatic 124, b/w
film
Holding a camera, aimed away from me and ready to
shoot, while walking a continuous line down a city
street.
Try not to blink.
Each time I blink: snap a photo.

Vito Acconci: Blinks

Acconci: Virtual Intelligence Mask (1993)

Virtual Intelligence Mask (1993)
A conventional fencing mask is used as a support­structure­for
electronics; the electronics are used as contact with the world
outside.
On the front of the mask are three televisions: one larger television
facing out, and two miniature televisions facing in….
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/virtual­intelligence­mask/

• French, born 1953
Case studies: Sophie Calle
• French conceptual artist influenced by Oulipo
• personal investigation the terms and parameters of
subject/object, the public versus the private, and role playing.
• Interest in the fluid levels of reality ­­ reality (the archive)
transformed into fiction (narration), and vice versa. conceal
the borders between art and life, fiction and reality, and private
and public.
• Art­making: accumulation of experiences and memories

Case studies: Sophie Calle
Double Game
­ a book project that is a documentation of Calle’s performative
projects and well as the performative itself
Paul Auster’s novel: Leviathan
– Uses Calle as a blueprint for the character design
– pg.60­67 Uses a number of episodes from Calle’s life to create
a fictive character named Maria
– Mingling fact with fiction.
Sophie Calle’s game: Double Game
• Autobiography
• Turning the novel into a game and make her own particular mixture
of reality and fiction – she lived the life of Maria

Performativity and Sophie Calle: “Double Game”: To be Like Maria
• The life of Maria and how it
influenced life of Sophie
– Chromatic regimen
– Alphabetic theme of a day
• Calle followed the author’s
instructions
The birthday ceremony
• The life of Sophie and
how it influenced life of
Maria
– The wardrobe
– The striptease
– To follow…
– Suite venitienne
– The detective
– The hotel
– The address book
– The birthday ceremony

Performativity and Sophie Calle: “Double Game”: Chromatic Diet
• To be Like Maria…
• The Chromatic Diet
– In the novel, Maria restricted herself to foods of a single color on
any given day
– Calle followed the book and added in her own things:
• e.g. adding orange juice into the menu, setting out the full
chromatic menu for six guests on Sunday

The Chromatic Diet

The Chromatic Diet

The Chromatic Diet

The Chromatic Diet

Research­based projects: intervening everyday life: The Hotel / To Follow
The Hotel
– Worked in a hotel as a temporary chambermaid for 3 weeks
(February – March, 1981)
– She was assigned 12 rooms in her care
– Examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and
observed through details lives which remained unknown to her
To Follow…
– Followed strangers on the street, took photos and took note of
their movements

1983
Intervening the everyday: The Address Book (1983)
• Found a address book
• Asked the people in the book to tell her about the owner
• Discovered a man whom she produced a portrait of without
meeting him

The Birthday Ceremony (1981­1993)
• Worried people will forget her
• 1980, release herself of this anxiety, decided every year, on
October 9, invite to dinner the exact number of people
corresponding to her age, including a stranger chosen by one
of my guests
• Don’t use the presents
• put an end at Age 40

Performativity, Sophie Calle, and more…
• The act of imposture has been widely used by artists: Sophie Calle, Cindy
Sherman
The function of
imposture for most
artists is to effectuate a
critique of the identitarian
categories that inform
debates about gender,
race and sexuality.
Unititled Film Still #14, 1978 Cindy Sherman

• Double Blind (1992) with
Gregory Shephard
• quasi­documentary
• produced and documented a reallife
narrative of their journey —
and their relationship
More on Sophie Calle

MORE CASES OF PERFORMATIVITY (DISCUSSED IN CLASS)
Door Game (Linda Lai / 2005)
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal
Akerman, 1975)
The Gleaners and I ( Agnes Varda, 2000) +
The Gleaners and I Two Years Later (Agnes Varda, 2002)

MORE CASES OF PERFORMATIVITY (DISCUSSED IN CLASS)
Door Game (Linda Lai / 2005)
Simultaneously social and semiotic:
Conventions of melodrama / gender role stereotypes (semiotic)
Ideal personhood / paradigms of social relation (social)
Opening up: challenging stable narratives, narrative coherence, and narrative
closure
The work evolves from some sort of a comprehensive story (formulaic mannerism) to a
series of image and text (openness of a photographic image) to the sheer act of
tearing apart whereby speech and words took over images and finally end as pure
“noise”… The work can actually continue on and on with more and more sections.
Reiteration + repetition:
The serial structure is endless, each of the 3 parts demonstrate how the same pool of raw
material can result in very different works of very different looks and very different
speech acts.
Speech Act:
The work and its entirety is the process of contemplating narrative mannerism than the
arrival in settled conclusion.

MORE CASES OF PERFORMATIVITY (DISCUSSED IN CLASS)
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman,
1975)
The work’s basic cinematic grammar – sustained long still shot, no camera movement,
tableau set­up with a heightened sense of composition and organization of screen
space – places the viewer in the mode of attentive contemplation, heightened sense
of seeing…
Viewing habit is challenged: what do we see? What should we see? What else is there
(other than for plot comprehension, eventfulness…)?
The impact of intense seeing opens up the possible meanings of an observable surface.
A woman is more than a woman: she may be, she may be…she is, she is…
Acting for a pre­assigned dramatic role now becomes a performance that destabilize a
fixed role. The viewing process keeps (re­)constructing who the person is via ongoing
performance.
Simultaneously social and semiotic… Repetition and details work together to open up…

MORE CASES OF PERFORMATIVITY (DISCUSSED IN CLASS)
The Gleaners and I ( Agnes Varda, 2000) +
The Gleaners and I Two Years Later (Agnes Varda, 2002)
The film itself can be understood as simply a documentary.
The film in fact is an audio­visual record of a performative project / journey of
Varda’s…
It is a journey of discovery, opening up the multiple implications and connective
power of a gleaner and gleaning, by keeping open the questions: who is a
gleaner? What does it mean to glean….? In the end, the work touch upon
issues of poverty, homelessness, social marginality, conservation of the
earth resources, artistic creation, and activist impulses to break into the core
of modern/urban life.
The film therefore demonstrates the productivity and richness of the act of
“opening up” and refusal to settle on a particular type of conclusive findings.
The performative force of the project lies also in the revisit 2 years after filming.
It seems like this work is always in progress, and can carry on its life
continuously (at least theoretically speaking…)