The first thing you need to understand about Raegan Truax is that she’s not interested in your comfort. Not yours, not hers, not anyone’s. She’s after something else entirely, something most people stopped looking for around the time they figured out how to order their entire lives from an app.
Thirty-seven hours. That’s how long she held Citation at CounterPulse. No breaks. No food. No clock. Just flesh and time doing what they do, which is revealing every goddamn lie we tell ourselves about what it means to be present. You think you understand duration? You check your phone every four minutes. You can’t even watch a two-hour movie without getting up to piss just to feel like you’re doing something.
Raegan plants herself barefoot in the crucible and says, watch this. Watch what happens when you stop treating your body like a vehicle for getting to the next thing. Watch what happens when you let time run through you instead of racing against it. The body becomes archive, becomes argument, becomes the last honest voice in a culture built on sophisticated forms of not showing up.
This isn’t performance art in the wine-and-cheese sense, the gallery-opening sense, the look-at-me-I’m-transgressive sense. This is more like what Chris Burden was doing when he was rolling around in broken glass, only Raegan has a Ph.D. and she knows exactly what theoretical framework she’s dismantling. She’s got the academic chops to explain why your comfortable assumptions about endurance and suffering and presence are full of shit, but instead of writing another book that twelve people will read, she just does it. Body as both weapon and testimony.
The queer feminist methodology here isn’t window dressing. It’s the whole point. Because what she’s asking is: What if vulnerability isn’t weakness? What if endurance doesn’t have to mean domination? What if the most radical thing you can do in late capitalism (which wants you efficient, productive, measurable, useful) is to just be for thirty-seven consecutive hours without producing anything except the undeniable fact of your existence?
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.
Alan Watts
Alan Watts says we’re hypnotized by time, that we have no present, only this hairline crack between a past we can’t change and a future we’re terrified of. Raegan heard that and said, fine, I’ll make you feel time. I’ll make you so uncomfortable with duration that you can’t look away. I’ll turn my body into a clock that doesn’t tell time, just is time, moving through space while everyone else is frantically checking their watches and wondering when something’s going to happen.
What’s happening is already happening. That’s what you’re missing.
The pictures show it. Sweat, exhaustion, this raw physicality that makes you feel like you’re intruding just by looking. Which you are. That’s the whole point. You’re supposed to feel complicit in watching this, in demanding that someone perform their mortality for your edification. She’s not suffering for art; she’s revealing what we ask of bodies, what we expect from them, how we measure them.
Durational performance as punk manifesto. Punk wasn’t about the mohawks or the safety pins, that was just the costume. Punk was about refusing to pretend everything was fine, about making art that made people uncomfortable because discomfort was the only honest response to how fucked everything was. Raegan does that. She makes you watch someone exist in real time, and it’s excruciating precisely because we’ve forgotten how to do that ourselves.
She’s not interested in your applause. She’s interested in what happens when you strip away every escape route and just remain. That’s harder than anything most of us will ever do. We’re all running, all the time, from the one thing that’s guaranteed: that we’re here, in these bodies, until we’re not.
So yeah, throw out everything you think you know. This isn’t about shock value or attention or any of that easy shit. This is about someone who looked at what culture demands (speed, efficiency, constant forward motion) and said no. Not with words, but with hours. With flesh. With the stubborn refusal to be anywhere but exactly where she is.
And if that makes you uncomfortable, good. That means it’s working.