On Performativity

I

Walker Living Collections Catalogue

Contents

Elizabeth Carpenter

1. Introduction

Curator Elizabeth Carpenter surveys the notion of performativity in the context of the Walker Art Center’s own history of interdisciplinary programs and collecting landmarks. “How do institutions reconcile the challenges facing the art world today,” Carpenter asks, “regarding the historicization, canonization, institutionalization, documentation, preservation, and presentation of performance and, by extension, of the objects that it often leaves behind?”
Dorothea von Hantelmann

2. The Experiential Turn

How are experiences shaped in and by specific artworks? How do they produce meaning for viewers? And how might experience be understood as an artistic medium? Linking the notion of experience to recent cultural and economic transformations in Western society, art historian and curator Dorothea von Hantelmann advances a new critical position to frame contemporary art’s evolving and experiential nature.
Philip Auslander

3. Surrogate Performances

Performance Documentation and the New York Avant-garde, ca. 1964–74

Drawing on speech act theory, performance theorist Philip Auslander argues that documentation can do more than describe; rather it has the capacity to produce its own event. Focusing on the New York avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, he analyzes the documentary work of Michael Kirby, who advocated for straight documentation over interpretive criticism, as well as that of Peter Moore and Babette Mangolte, both of whom shared Kirby’s call.
How does the strong focus on presence that comes with art’s turn to the experiential relate to the idea of a historical memory that is constituted by and through art? —Dorothea von Hantelmann
Shannon Jackson

4. Performativity and Its Addressee

Through a philosophical history of the term “performative,” performance studies scholar Shannon Jackson provides a necessary grounding in the subject through the position and role of the receiver or audience. Reflecting on various artists and philosophers that span the mid-twentieth century to the present, she argues for a precise and varied vocabulary for the wide range of expanded, cross-media practices that we now encounter regularly in museums, on stages, and in the streets.
Bartholomew Ryan

5. Kinetic Observation

Viewing Eiko & Koma’s Naked

In 2008, renowned Japanese movement artists Eiko & Koma presented Naked, a month-long “living” installation commissioned by the Walker Art Center and created specifically for its galleries. Offering an inside look at the work’s complicated process of realization as well as its reception, curator Bartholomew Ryan expounds on its universal themes of nakedness, desire, and death. “Eiko & Koma,” he writes “locate the body as concrete—lingering, perhaps, and contingent—but essential in its presence and absence.”
The intermedial puzzles of contemporary art create new performative realities for receivers trying to make sense of them. —Shannon Jackson
Eric Crosby

6. Painting on, or as, Film

Yves Klein’s Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo Cane Shroud)

Yves Klein, the self-proclaimed “painter of space,” sought to achieve immaterial spirituality through pure color, an ambition that took this most mercurial artist from painting and sculpture to performance, film, photography, and music. For his most performative works, his so-called Anthropometries, Klein employed naked bodies as “living brushes” in his increasingly theatrical painting practice. Here, curator Eric Crosby situates Klein’s iconic late work Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo Cane Shroud) between the surface of painting and the projected image of cinema.
Color permeates everything just as indefinable sensibility permeates without form and without limit. It is spatial matter that is at once abstract and real. —Yves Klein
Elizabeth Carpenter

7. Be the Work

Intersubjectivity in Tino Sehgal’s This objective of that object

For more than a decade, Tino Sehgal has placed direct experience at the center of his practice through a series of open-ended, undocumented, performative works called “constructed situations.” Curator Elizabeth Carpenter elaborates on his piece This objective of that object (2004), as well as the broader implications of social interaction as an artistic medium under capitalism. “While a sculptor may transform stone into a human figure,” she writes, “Sehgal transforms an individual’s energy, intellect, and actions into something altogether different, a new paradigm in art-making.”
Yves Klein, Anthropométrie de l'époque bleue (Anthropometries of the Blue Period)
Irene V. Small

8. Toward a Deliterate Cinema

Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Block-Experiences in Cosmococa—Program in Progress

In 1973 in his New York City loft, Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and his collaborator Neville D’Almeida pioneered an immersive form of participatory installation they dubbed Block-Experiments in Cosmococa—Program in Progress, or Cosmococas, for short. These multi-sensory “quasi-cinemas,” with their heady mix of projected images, soundtracks, and props, effectively recast the passive film viewer as active participant. In this essay, art historian Irene Small locates CC5 Hendrixwar amidst various historical threads of avant-garde film, semiotic theory, loft performance, and radical pedagogy.
Avant-garde, experimental performance must be documented in order to be known beyond its negligible initial audience. In effect, it must be documented to exist. —Philip Auslander
Peter Eleey

9. If You Couldn’t See Me

The Drawings of Trisha Brown

While Trisha Brown is best known for her innovative choreographies, drawing has long featured prominently in her maverick practice, at once a tool for schematic composition and a component of her ongoing investigation into the limits of her own body. Written to accompany the artist’s 2008 Walker survey exhibition, this essay by curator Peter Eleey presents necessary historical and critical context for the artist’s signature work It’s a Draw – For Robert Rauschenberg (2008) and other works on paper in the Walker’s collection.
Eiko & Koma, Naked
Colophon