Durational performance art is the kind of thing that makes most people want to check their phones after ninety seconds, and that’s precisely the fucking point.
We live in a world built on the three-minute song, the fifteen-second clip, the swipe-left mentality. Everything’s pre-chewed, pre-digested, designed to go down easy. But then some lunatic decides they’re going to sit in a chair for 736 hours, or live in a cage, or let people cut their clothes off with scissors, and suddenly you’re confronted with something that refuses to be consumed. It just sits there, existing, demanding that you reckon with it on its own terms or fuck off entirely.
And most people fuck off. That’s fine. That’s honest.
But the ones who stay, man, something happens. Time starts doing this weird thing where it stops being linear and becomes this thick, almost physical presence. You become aware of your own breathing. Your own body. The fact that you’re trapped in this meat-suit just like the performer, watching someone push against the same existential walls you’re pretending don’t exist.
The art establishment loves to make this stuff seem precious and theoretical, wrap it in academic language until it’s suffocated under ten pounds of discourse. But strip all that away and durational work is brutally simple: it’s about being present in a world that’s engineered for distraction. It’s a middle finger to efficiency, productivity, the notion that everything needs to justify its existence by being useful or entertaining or Instagram-ready.
Think about it: we’ve commodified every goddamn second of human experience. But what happens when someone just… refuses? When they say, “I’m going to do this one thing, this uncomfortable, pointless, excruciating thing, and I’m going to do it until time itself becomes strange”? That’s not passivity. That’s resistance.
Sure, some of it’s self-indulgent garbage. Some of these artists are just torturing themselves and calling it transcendence. But the real ones, the ones who understand that the medium isn’t their body but time itself, human attention, the unbearable weight of consciousness, they’re doing something that cuts through all our carefully constructed defenses. They’re saying: you can’t scroll past mortality. You can’t fast-forward through suffering. You can’t skip to the good part because there is no good part. There’s just the relentless, grinding now.
And yeah, it’s pretentious. Yeah, it’s often boring as hell. But it’s also the most honest art form we’ve got. No tricks, no editing, no hiding. Just a human being, enduring. Which is basically what we’re all doing anyway, except they’ve got the guts to make you watch.
The question isn’t whether durational performance art matters. The question is whether you’ve got the stomach to sit still long enough to find out.
Raegan Truax: Citation performed in Memorial Auditorium, Stanford University for the Department of Theater and Performance Studies