If you want to understand what Raegan Truax is doing, you’ve got to throw out everything you think you know about performance art. Forget the pretentious gallery openings, the wine-sipping theorists nodding knowingly at shit they don’t understand. This is something else entirely.
Thirty-seven hours. Barefoot. No breaks. No food. No clock.
Most people can’t sit through a three-hour movie without checking their phones. Truax spent 37 consecutive hours inside Citation at CounterPulse, using her body like it was the only instrument that mattered, because it was. Sweat. Skin. Breath. Blood. The raw materials of being alive, transformed into something that makes you uncomfortable precisely because it’s so goddamn real.
This is durational performance as punk rock manifesto. It’s not about suffering for suffering’s sake, that’s the lazy read. It’s about presence, about excavating what it means to exist in a body across time when everything in our culture screams at us to speed up, gloss over, move on. Truax plants herself in duration like a flag in hostile territory and refuses to budge.
She’s not performing masochism. She’s interrogating it. There’s a fierce intelligence at work here, a queer feminist methodology that asks, what if endurance isn’t about domination but about possibility? What if vulnerability is the most radical act?
The body becomes archive. The body becomes argument. The body becomes the most honest thing in the room.
You can have your safe, digestible, three-minute attention-span art. This is for people who still believe that time is political, that the flesh matters, that showing up, really showing up, means something in a world that’s forgotten how.
Thirty-seven hours.
The 37 hour performance began
Friday, September 22 at 9am and ended
Saturday, September 23 at 10pm, 2017.
