The Common Turn in Performance

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Notes

This is Performance Art: Performed Sculpture and Dance (Part 1) took place at Camden Arts Centre, London, 8 April–8 June 2010.

‘What is Live Art?’, from the Live Art Development Agency's website, <http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about_us/what_is_live_art.html> [accessed 24 November 2011].

I generally follow this definition of ‘Live Art’ in this essay. I invoke it as a generally capacious moniker designating performance art and body art, as well as other kinds of live work that set themselves apart from traditional forms in the visual and performing arts. However, as will become clear, what Iam calling ‘the common turn’ takes us somewhat beyond the boundaries of even the most extended definitions of Live Art, to the culturally broader, and generalized, field of performance.

RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001), pp. 177–78.

A Short History of Performance – Part I, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 15–21 April 2002.

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Brimfield's work might be understood in Marc Siegel's terms as a practice of queer ‘fabulation’ in playing fast and loose with the requirements of historical veracity. For a related account of the historical fabulations of Berlin-based performance artist Vaginal Davis, see Marc Siegel, ‘Vaginal Davis's Gospel Truths’, Camera Obscura, 23.1 67 (2008), 151–57. On the queerness of gossip as a form of historical testimony see Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948–1963 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005).

Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening (London: Methuen, 1954), p. 125. Emphasis added.

Questions of taste have arguably fallen off the critical agenda somewhat in the humanities in recent years, perhaps consequent upon the waning of Cultural Studies within British and US universities, and the relative disappearance of social and economic class as a category of analysis in other fields of study. An interpretative discourse of taste has, therefore, largely retreated into the social sciences, particularly sociology.

‘It is no accident’, Bourdieu writes, ‘that, when [tastes] have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation’. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 56.

Goldberg, Performance Art, pp. 177–81.

This is something that, for reasons of space, cannot be undertaken in this article. An initial list, though by no means representative, of some of the items which might be consulted in such a study include: RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art Since the 60s (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998); RoseLee Goldberg, Performa: New Visual Art Performance (New York: Performa, 2007); Live: Art and Performance, ed. by Adrian Heathfield (London: Tate Publishing, 2004); Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979, ed. by Paul Schimmel (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998); Lea Vergine, Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language (Milan: Skira, 2000, orig. 1974); The Artist's Body, ed. by Tracey Warr (London and New York: Phaidon, 2000).

Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), p. 5.

Gans defines taste cultures by dint of the particular aesthetic values and standards that pertain within any one, and in which certain kinds of judgement prevail. As a Leftist sociologist he predominantly conceives of these cultures as they correspond to social class. He lists them as: high, upper-middle, lower-middle, low, and quasi-folk low. Additional taste cultures he identifies as youth, black and ethnic which exhibit particular relationships to his basic typology of class-based cultures. See Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 100–60.

Thornton, Club Cultures, p. 5.

These programme notes were shown as part of ‘Waiter Waiter, There's a Sculpture In My Soup – Part II’, Pumphouse Gallery, London, 25 March –17 May 2009. A revised version was circulated along with This Is Performance Art at Camden Arts Centre in 2010.

Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-Modernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986).

The name of the performance artist ‘Alex Owens’ is borrowed from the name of the lead character in Flashdance played by Jennifer Beals.

I use ‘queer’ and ‘feminist’ here only as rough markers of identity. These are not necessarily the best descriptive terms to describe the performances that I go on to characterize here, nor are they words necessarily embraced or preferred by the artists themselves. Indeed, as will become clear, some of this work might be understood as being actively involved in a struggle to reformulate the terms of contemporary politics and performance.

Duckie are self-styled ‘purveyors of progressive working-class entertainment’ based in London who have been organizing club nights and special performance events in the UK and internationally since 1995. They run a regular weekly club and cabaret performance night at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in South London, see <http://www.duckie.co.uk>. Club Wotever started in London in 2003 in order to provide an open, ‘wotever’ platform for a range of performance approaches by, and for, variously gendered and sexualized individuals, see <http://woteverworld.com/>. Eat Your Heart Out is a collective of performers based in London and founded by Scottee in 2008. They are driven by a provocative needling of the Live Art establishment and a desire to bring performance to new audiences. See <http://eyho.org.uk> for more details. Information on Bird Club can be found at <http://www.birdclub.org.uk/ and in the remainder of this essay. All links active as of 14 November 2011. Vikki Chalklin is undertaking PhD research work on the above groups in the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. I am indebted to her work, as well as to discussion with other students in the graduate seminar ‘Trashing Performance’, in developing the ideas in this essay.

Bird La Bird claims an experience of David Hoyle's work, then performing in the 1990s as The Divine David, as formative in her own development as performance artist; interview with author, 14 May 2010. For inter-generational relations between femme performers, see the FeMUSEum project led by Lois Weaver along with Bird La Bird, Amy Lamé and Carmelita Tropicana  <http://www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk/words-and-images.post92.html>  [accessed 14 November 2011].

Gay Icons was held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 2 July–18 October 2009.

Comedians involved included Simon Munnery, Kevin Eldon, Tony Law, Josie Long, Helen Lederer, Isy Suttie and Rachel Pantechnicon.

Gay Shame Goes Girly, O2 Academy Brixton, London, 4 July 2009.

Yvonne Rainer, ‘Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called Parts of Some Sextets, Performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, in March, 1965’, The Tulane Drama Review, 10 (Winter 1965), 168–78.

This exploration of ‘terrorist’ feminism is even more marked in Bird's performance as Birdie Solanas, the bastard offspring of Valerie Solanas, in her Up Your Art (2009).

Ben Walters, ‘Scottee Interview’, Time Out London, 18 January 2010, <http://www.timeout.com/london/cabaret/article/732/scottee-interview> [accessed 14 November 2011]. I'd like to thank Jay Stewart for drawing my attention to this article.

See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

There are many voices in this debate. Perhaps some of the most prominent are those of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); and Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2010).

Michael Hardt, ‘The Common in Communism’, in The Idea of Communism ed. by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Verso, 2010), pp. 131–44 (p. 136). Thanks to João Florêncio for directing me to this source.

Ibid.

Hyde, Common as Air, pp. 32–44.

Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), p. 67.

It is possible, following Gans and other sociologists of culture, to think about Brimfield, Bird and their appreciative audience members (among whom I count myself) as cultural omnivores. This allows us to see them and their work in the context of broader convergences taking place between differing taste publics in recent western culture. This is a rich, and complex, direction of thought but not one that I have the space to take up in this essay. See Gans, Popular Culture, pp. 8–13.

John Waters is aware of this paradox when he writes that ‘a filth movement for the next century […] will claw its way down the ladder of respectability to the final Armageddon of the elimination of the tyranny of good taste’ (p. 296). The paradox lies in Waters' recognition that his semi-ironic call for such a movement will only be answered by a small band of freaks; that the movement itself will become its own select culture with Waters himself as its ‘cult leader’. See John Waters, ‘Cult Leader’, in Role Models (London: Beautiful Books, 2010), pp. 293–317.

The Cunt Cheerleaders were a performance group comprising Cay Lang, Vanalyne Green, Dori Atlantis and Sue Boud associated with Womanhouse at Fresno State College.