ARTIFICIAL HELLS

delegated performance
problematise the binaries of live and mediated, spontaneous and staged,
authentic and contrived; to examine the construction of collective identity
and the extent to which people always exceed these categories. In the most
compelling examples of this work, a series of paradoxical operations is put
into play that impedes any simplistic accusation that the subjects of delegated
performance are reified (decontextualised, and laden with other
attributes). To judge these performances on a scale with supposed ‘exploitation’
at the bottom and full ‘agency’ at the top is to miss the point entirely.
The difference, rather, is between ‘art fair art’ and the better examples of
this work that reify precisely in order to discuss reification, or which exploit
precisely to thematise exploitation itself. In this light, the risk of superficiality
that occasionally accompanies the reductive branding or packaging of
social identities in a work of art (‘the unemployed’, ‘the blind’, ‘children’,
‘brass band players’, etc.) should always be set against the dominant modes
of mediatic representation against which these works so frequently intend
to do battle. 44 This, for me, is the dividing line between the facile gestures
of so much gala and art fair art and those more troubling works that do not
simply take advantage of contemporary labour conditions but foreground
our relationship to them through the presentation of conventionally underexposed
constituencies. It is true that at its worst, delegated performance
produces quirkily staged reality designed for the media, rather than paradoxically
mediated presence. But at its best, delegated performance
produces disruptive events that testify to a shared reality between viewers
and performers, and which defy not only agreed ways of thinking about
pleasure, labour and ethics, but also the intellectual frameworks we have
inherited to understand these ideas today.
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