Performance Studies international #19… Over a hundred performances, a hundred, and I’m supposed to what, exactly? Freeze them? Like trying to can lightning, bottle smoke, take a knife to the ocean and carve out a piece to take home… That one-second piece is already gone before my shutter even clicks. And the nineteen-hour endurance thing? Am I expected to be there for the whole degradation, the whole beautiful, excruciating arc of someone breaking themselves down for… what? Understanding? Transcendence? A line on their CV?
Here’s what kills me about this whole enterprise: Performance art is the most honest con job there is. It’s designed to disappear. That’s the whole fucking point. The moment happens, it burns, and then it’s just memory and argument and somebody’s half-assed description at a bar three years later. And I’m the guy trying to prove it existed.
Ron Athey carving himself up in “Incorruptible Flesh.” Julie Tolentino with honey dripping into her open mouth for hours, the “O” of ecstasy, the “O” of death, same shape, different movie. Some guy re-choreographing Roger Federer’s tennis match using Bergson and Proust because… why not. A woman breaking forty Cambodian clay pots and putting them back together, one by one, like some kind of archaeological Sisyphus.
And I’m supposed to capture this?
The camera’s a liar. It’ll give evidence, sure. Proof of attendance. But it won’t give you the smell of the space, the weird electricity when everyone realizes someone’s about to do something genuinely dangerous or stupid or sublime. It won’t give you that tightness in your chest when the performer’s been at it for six hours and you can see them starting to crack, their face doing things faces aren’t supposed to do.
But what I learned watching people do insane things for reasons they couldn’t articulate even when you bought them drinks afterward, the documentation isn’t really about capturing it. It’s about witnessing. I’m the guy who was there. My photographs are postcards from the edge of someone else’s breakthrough or breakdown, and sometimes you can’t tell which until years later.
So I shoot it all. The pretentious garbage and the genuine article. The thirty-hour monologue and the complaint desk and whatever the hell “2: Untitled” was trying to be. I shoot until my back hurt and my camera bag felt like it’s full of rocks and I’d forgotten what daylight looks like.
Because in ten years, twenty, these images will be all that’s left of people pouring themselves out. And even though the photographs lie, even though they can’t capture the thing itself, they’re still love letters. Evidence of passion. Proof that somebody cared enough to destroy themselves a little bit in the name of… something.
That’s my gig. Document the undocumentable. Photograph the ephemeral. Stand there with my camera while people turn themselves inside out.
It’s an awesome job..
So some guy restaged the choreography of a Roger Federer tennis match from November 6, 2012, not the game itself, just the bodies moving through space, and mixed it with Proust’s involuntary memory theories and whatever scraps people remembered about Antonin Artaud from his sister, his friends, his psychiatrist. The whole thing’s wrestling with Bergson’s philosophy of memory while asking whether I can even document performance without killing it, playing with what actually happened versus what might have happened versus what only exists in our heads. Theatre as subtraction instead of addition, starting long before anyone shows up and refusing to actually end. It’s pretentious as hell, sure, but it’s asking real questions about what remains when the moment’s gone, whether we’re all just restaging things we barely understand. Probably too smart for its own good. Definitely too smart for a Tuesday afternoon.
Gretchen Schiller built a fifteen-minute séance for place-memory, where a soft-spoken librarian, because of course it’s a librarian, guides you into a dim room full of custom-made furniture that doubles as audiovisual interfaces. You’re supposed to touch things, catch things, hold onto “traces of place” through different sensory setups, each one hiding secrets you’re meant to uncover like some kind of intimate scavenger hunt for feelings. It’s the art-installation equivalent of ASMR, quiet, tactile, designed to make you slow down and pay attention to textures and sounds you’d normally ignore. Precious, maybe. But also probably exactly what people need after sitting through five panels about post-structuralist theory and the body politic. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is whisper and let people touch stuff.
Ann Carlson rounded up people from all over the Stanford University campus: janitors, professors, lab techs, whoever, and turned their actual work movements into an orchestra, except instead of violins you get the gesture of someone pipetting samples or shelving books or mopping floors. She choreographed each person’s workday motions into individual dances, then wove them all together into one big gestural symphony. So the librarian’s doing their thing, the groundskeeper’s doing theirs, and somehow it’s supposed to add up to this revelation about the artistry already hiding in ordinary labor. Which sounds like the kind of thing that could go horribly wrong, like watching your coworkers mime their jobs at the office holiday party, but there’s something genuinely beautiful about the idea. Taking people who spend their days invisible, doing the repetitive movements that keep a place running, and saying “look, this is choreography, this is art, you’ve been dancing this whole time.” It’s democratic in a way most performance art isn’t. Whether it actually works or just turns into an earnest exercise in mutual appreciation depends entirely on Carlson’s ability to find the poetry in someone’s third hour of data entry. But at least she’s trying.
Margaret Tedesco sits in a semi-dark room and watches entire feature-length films with the sound off and the projection blocked by her own body, then just tells you what she’s seeing, not the plot, not the names, just “she walks across the room, he touches the wall, they stand in blue light, it’s night.” Pronouns only, like she’s describing a dream she can barely remember. You don’t get to see the film, you only get her describing it in real-time, this weird oral translation that turns cinema into storytelling, passive watching into active imagining. It’s perverse, really, taking a visual medium and making it auditory, blocking the thing people came to see and replacing it with one woman’s account of gestures and mood and architecture. Could be maddening. Could be brilliant. Probably both. Depends on whether she’s got the voice for it, whether two hours of “she, he, they” becomes meditative or just makes you want to scream “WHO? WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” But there’s something genuine in the attempt, stripping away the apparatus of cinema to get at what remains when it’s just one person trying to describe what light and bodies do in space.
The Office for Make Believe calls itself a “dream tank”, which is San Francisco for “we’ll take your half-baked fantasies seriously”, and they use deliberately shitty technology to make impossible things happen. Not cutting-edge, not state-of-the-art, just whatever works to build scenarios out of people’s woolgathering, their idle daydreams, the stuff you think about on the bus but never tell anyone. For this piece, Ryan Tacata set up shop for three days and just staged whatever gallery visitors wished for, turned their private mental movies into actual performances, photographs, videos, whatever form fit the particular delusion. It’s part therapy, part carnival, part con job in the best possible way. Someone says “I always imagined I’d…” and Tacata says “okay, let’s do it right now with duct tape and a camcorder.”
There’s something deeply generous about that, taking people’s secret desires and giving them physical form, even if it’s cheap and jerry-rigged. Most of us spend our whole lives keeping our daydreams locked up. Ryan broke them out into the light for three days to see what happens.
Raegan Truax did something 232 times over ten hours and fourteen minutes. This was the second time she’s done this. The math is what matters here: 232 repetitions, which works out to roughly one exchange every two-and-a-half minutes for over ten hours straight. No breaks mentioned, no intermission, just this relentless rhythm of give-and-take until your body forgets what not-exchanging even feels like. Durational performance is always a test, of the performer, sure, but also of everyone watching, everyone participating. By exchange 47 you’re numb. By 127 you’re somewhere else entirely. By 200 you’re a machine that exchanges, and the action has burned through meaning into pure repetition, pure endurance. By the end I’m not sure it was about the exchange anymore. It was about lasting. About what happens when you do something so many times it stops being a choice and becomes a trance state.
Helen Paris and Caroline Wright took singers and swimmers to the bottom of windswept cliffs where the sand meets the sea and just pointed them at the horizon. The singers can’t breathe right, that’s the point, they’re out of breath, and the swimmers are in over their heads, literally, and they’re all staring out at the water like they’re searching for someone who’s never coming back. Is somebody lost at sea? Maybe. Probably. The whole thing’s drenched in that particular kind of seaside melancholy, that “staring at the ocean wondering what the hell we’re all doing here” feeling. UK soprano Laura Wright doing the vocals, Jocelyn Pook’s score underneath it all, and you’ve got this tableau of people at the edge of everything, land, breath, depth, hope, looking for something they can’t name. It’s almost too perfect, too picturesque, the kind of thing that could tip into Romantic capital-R nonsense real easy. But there’s something genuinely haunting about putting bodies where they don’t quite belong, singers without air, swimmers without solid ground, and watching them reach for the unreachable anyway. We’ve all stood at that edge. We’ve all searched that horizon.
Variazioni su un oggetto di scena (Variations on a Prop, 2002/05/07), for piano and stuffed toys. Var. XXII (Valsugana) Var. XI (Maridemi mi) Var. I (Reposare) Louganis (2007), for piano and TV/VCR combo (video by Terry Berlier)
Katharine Fry put two women, and yeah, they’re beautiful, you noticed, everyone noticed, that’s part of the deal, in front of a projected clock and had them become the sound of time passing. As the second hand goes around, they trade “tick” and “tock” back and forth like it’s a conversation they’re trapped in, this endless call-and-response with the machinery of measured time. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. For a full minute, then presumably it loops or ends or drives everyone quietly insane. It’s a meditation on live versus recorded time, on whether bodies can ever really sync up with clocks or if we’re all just faking it, pretending we understand what a second actually means. The sexy-beautiful thing isn’t incidental here, it’s asking you to watch these women very carefully, to pay attention to their rhythm, their breath, their synchronization, while time literally ticks away behind them. Are they keeping time or is time keeping them? After about thirty seconds it stops mattering and you’re just watching two people locked in mechanical dialogue with the universe’s metronome. It’s hypnotic in the way only truly simple ideas can be. Also probably maddening. Tick. Tock. We’re all just counting down to something.
Kimberly Jannarone threw a one-hour cabaret where people actually performed fascist art, not critiqued it, not deconstructed it, but performed it, to spark debate about reactionary aesthetics. Which is either the bravest or stupidest thing you can do in an academic setting, hard to tell which. The idea is you can’t really understand the seductive power of right-wing art unless you experience it working on you, unless you feel how it pulls and persuades and makes ugly ideas sound beautiful or righteous or necessary. So for one night, in one hour, they re-enacted the stuff we’re supposed to keep in the locked cabinet of history. The problem, of course, is that performing fascist art gives it a stage, gives it bodies, gives it life again, even ironically, even critically, even with the best intentions. You’re betting the room is smart enough to see the critique, sophisticated enough not to be seduced. That’s a hell of a bet. Probably made some people deeply uncomfortable, which might’ve been the whole point. You can’t fight what you won’t look at. But you also can’t un-ring a bell once it’s rung.
Michael Hunter and Derek Phillips decided to resurrect Cage’s 1949 Lecture on Nothing, which was already about nothing when Cage did it, but instead of just reading it straight, they built a live soundtrack from digitally mangled recordings of the actual space around the performance venue. So you’re hearing Cage’s words about silence and emptiness and the futility of meaning, but underneath it there’s the manipulated sound of that specific room, that courtyard, those buildings, turned into music or noise or whatever exists between the two. It’s Cage on Cage, basically, using his own strategies against his original work, making it site-specific seventy-something years later. The question is whether this adds something or just multiplies the nothing. Cage would probably approve, or laugh, or say it doesn’t matter either way. The whole point of Lecture on Nothing was that it wasn’t about anything, it was just structure and time and the sound of a guy talking. So reconstructing it with local ambience and digital processing is either perfect, making it new, making it now, or completely missing the point by trying too hard. Probably both. Cage has that effect. You can never tell if you’re doing it right or if doing it right was never the goal.
That’s it. That’s all you get. No artist name, no description, no manifesto about the semiotics of grievance or the performativity of bureaucratic frustration. Just those two words sitting there like a dare. Was it an actual desk where people filed complaints? Was someone performing the act of complaining? Was it about the futility of complaining, the way we all shuffle up to various desks throughout our lives and spill our grievances to people who can’t or won’t help? Who knows. Maybe it was brilliant. Maybe it was someone literally sitting at a desk for six hours listening to academics whine about panel assignments and conference coffee. Maybe that was the whole piece, the performance of receiving complaints, the endurance required to hear people’s petty bullshit with a straight face. The fact that there’s no explanation is either lazy documentation on my part or the most honest thing on this whole page. Sometimes art is just a desk. Sometimes a desk is enough. Sometimes you never find out what the hell anyone was thinking, and that’s the piece.
Julie Tolentino kept her mouth open in the shape of an O, the last kiss, the final gasp, ecstasy and death wearing the same face, while Stosh Fila dripped honey into it for hours. Not metaphorical honey, actual honey, filling and spilling while Tolentino swallowed and drowned and kept swallowing, her mouth a receptor for everything Fila chose to give or withhold. Hand recorders playing Vargas singing “Soledad” on loop, that drawn-out O of loneliness echoing Tolentino’s open mouth, and she’s moving to it, recording it in her body, erasing it, doing it again. Fila’s the one with power here, controlling the droplet’s shape, the speed, the intensity, squeezing and advancing and withdrawing, making Tolentino’s body respond to each squeeze, each swallow. It’s dominance and submission, it’s feeding and drowning, it’s the ecstatic state that both creates and destroys you. This is the kind of performance that makes people leave the room or stay riveted, unable to look away from something that feels too intimate, too dangerous, too close to sex and death and all the places where the self dissolves into the other. Durational, they call it. Which means it went on long enough for everyone watching to get deeply, profoundly uncomfortable with how much they wanted to keep watching. That’s the exposure, not just between Tolentino and Fila, but between all of us and what we’re willing to witness.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña showed up and did what he’s been doing for decades, being the border personified, the living embodiment of that razor-wire fence where two countries pretend they’re not fucking each other over. He shifts between English and Spanish mid-sentence, becomes different people mid-thought, uses what the program notes call “techno-ideology” and “ethno-poetics” but what really amounts to throwing every weapon in his arsenal at the audience until something lands. Acid Chicano humor, activist theory, pop culture references, the whole border-savvy kitchen sink. He’s talking about post-9/11 America, the “border wars,” Obama’s impossible position, the Minute Men with their lawn chairs and binoculars playing soldier, the three-ply fences that cost millions and stop nothing, the whole demonized construction of a line in the dirt that ruins lives. It’s a performance that refuses to let you get comfortable in any one language or identity or political position, you’re in the psychological outpost of Chicanismo whether you want to be or not. Some of it probably goes over people’s heads. Some of it probably lands like a fist. That’s the point. Gómez-Peña’s not here to make you comfortable. He’s here to remind you that borders are violence, that they cut through bodies and families and identities, and that the whole apparatus is as absurd as it is deadly. Whether you need to hear it or not, whether you’re ready or not, he’s going to tell you. Loudly. In multiple languages. While wearing whatever the hell costume makes the point.
Marcia Farquhar once performed a thirty-hour monologue, thirty goddamn hours of talking, which is longer than most people can stay awake, longer than most marriages last, longer than anyone should have to listen to anyone else under any circumstances. She called it The Omnibus because apparently she wanted to get everything in there, the whole messy sprawl of whatever fills a human brain when you give it thirty hours to empty itself out. Now she’s offering Long Haul, which is the “abbreviated version,” and you have to love the nerve of calling anything abbreviated after you’ve already proven you can monologue for longer than a full day. What’s abbreviated here? Three hours? Five? Still too long, probably, but nothing compared to the original marathon. And here’s where it gets uncomfortable for me,Farquhar’s up there talking about her childhood, her lovers, what she had for breakfast in 1987, the pattern on a curtain she once saw, looping and digressing, but suddenly she’s looking at me, talking to me, talking about me, the guy with the camera who thought he was invisible, who thought he was documenting from outside the frame. And now I’m in it. I’m part of her monologue. I’m material. The person trying to capture the performance has become the performance, and there’s no getting out because she won’t stop, she’ll just keep talking, weaving me into whatever endless narrative she’s constructing, and my camera’s suddenly not a shield anymore, it’s a prop in her show.
Amy Lee Sanford sat herself down inside a circle of forty Cambodian clay pots and broke them. One by one. Then put them back together. One by one. Forty times. It’s called “Full Circle,” which is maybe too on-the-nose but at least it’s honest about what you’re getting. This is destruction and reconstruction as meditation, as endurance test, as some kind of reckoning with impermanence and repair. The pots are Cambodian, that matters, that’s not just exotic set dressing, that’s history and craft and probably someone’s livelihood turned into raw material for a performance about breaking and mending. By pot number five your hands are probably bleeding. By pot fifteen the sound of clay shattering has lost all meaning. By pot thirty you’re somewhere else entirely, you’re a machine that breaks and fixes, breaks and fixes, and the circle around you is half-shards, half-repaired vessels, and you can’t remember which version of the pot is the real one anymore. It’s brutal, really. Beautiful and brutal. The kind of thing that sounds poetic in description but in practice is just hours of your body doing violence and then trying to take it back, knowing you can glue the pieces together but it’ll never be what it was. Forty times she learns that lesson. Forty times she does it anyway.
Two women, both named Rebecca “considered” how the sun serves as “specter and collaborator” in their work as scholars and performers, which is the kind of language that sounds profound until you realize it means absolutely nothing concrete. The sun’s both a ghost and a partner, apparently, haunting them and working with them simultaneously, which is actually kind of beautiful if you don’t think about it too hard. Every performer knows the sun’s a collaborator, really. It changes everything, the temperature, the visibility, the mood, how long you can last before you start sweating through your costume. And it’s a specter too, this thing you can’t control that dictates when you can work, when the light’s right, when the day ends whether you’re ready or not. Maybe the vagueness is the point, the sun doesn’t explain itself either.
Ron Athey’s been making work about his post-AIDS body since the mid-90s, not his body with AIDS, his body after AIDS, the one that survived when it wasn’t supposed to. “Messianic Remains” is the fourth time he’s returned to this particular wound, this exploration of what it means to still be here, still be flesh, when the virus took everyone around you. He started this series working with Lawrence Steger, who didn’t make it, died of AIDS in the late 90s when dying of AIDS was supposed to be over, when the cocktails were supposed to save everyone. Then Athey kept going with Dominic Johnson, kept performing this investigation of the incorruptible flesh, the body that refuses to die. And here’s the thing that’ll kill you: some of these performances happened at Leigh Bowery’s funerals, plural, New York and Amsterdam, because when you’re an artist who performs about death and survival, where else would you perform except at the actual funeral? It’s been running from 1996 to 2007, over a decade of Athey asking his body the same question over and over: why are you still here? What does it mean to be the messianic remains, the leftover, the one who lived? It’s not survivor’s guilt as performance art, it’s something harder than that, something that doesn’t have easy language. Just a body on stage, still breathing, still bleeding, still asking.
Aleta Hayes took the Goldilocks story, you know, breaking and entering, eating someone’s porridge, napping in their bed, and turned it into a solo dance-song cycle about trespassing as sacred practice. She’s got koken with her, those “invisible” stagehands from Japanese theater who are right there in plain sight but everyone agrees to pretend they’re not, and together they’re navigating rooms the way certain indigenous cultures navigate landscape: through repeated song, through singing the space into existence as you move through it. You’re not just watching this, you’re in it, you’re the curious stranger in someone else’s house, trying to figure out what belongs to you and what doesn’t, what you’re allowed to touch. It’s Goldilocks as spiritual practice, which sounds ridiculous until you realize that’s exactly what Goldilocks was doing, trying on different lives, different sized chairs, different beds, looking for the one that fits. Hayes is asking you to feel that curiosity, that transgression, that searching for what’s “just right” in a space that isn’t yours. The sacred and the fairy tale bleeding into each other. Some rooms you sing your way through. Some rooms you have to break into. Sometimes they’re the same room.
