What gets me is how performance becomes the only honest medium for dealing with governmental dishonesty. You’re creating something live, ephemeral, something that by its very nature can’t be perfectly preserved or controlled, the exact opposite of Nixon’s paranoid recording compulsion. There’s something genuinely radical about taking the most documented presidency in history up to that point and making art about what wasn’t documented, what got “accidentally” destroyed.
And Nixon’s quote, “I don’t give a shit what happens”, that’s the aesthetic principle of every failed empire right there. The desperate flailing of control freaks losing control. Performance art that deals with this material isn’t just commentary; it’s inoculation. You’re forcing people to sit with the discomfort of knowing that power operates in these gaps, these erasures, these convenient malfunctions.
The beauty is in the duration: 18 ½ minutes. That’s long enough to be genuinely uncomfortable, to make an audience feel the weight of absence. Not the safe distance of documentary, but something more visceral and present. You’re asking people to experience the gap rather than analyze it from a comfortable remove. That’s where the real work happens, in the squirming, the wondering, the inability to look away from nothing.
I don’t give a shit what happens.
I want you all to stonewall—plead the Fifth Amendment,
cover-up, or anything else.
If that will save it, save the plan.
President Richard Nixon to his subordinates in the White House during Watergate