Sta(i)r Falling

Abstract

This article provides an illustrated description and analysis of Kira O'Reilly's Stair Falling performance.1 It engages the notion of trauma through a number of interrelated writerly and theoretical gestures: through performative writing as the mode of writing that suspends theoretical judgment in order to approach the creative logic of art-making and art-practice; through activating trauma as a complex temporal dynamic in light of which O'Reilly's performance may be compared to Marcel Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, and through a sustained theoretical analysis of some of the aesthetic and ethical stakes involved in engaging with trauma in making and theorizing performance.

¹ Performed 3–19 July 2009 at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, as part of ‘Marina Abramović Presents …’ at the Manchester International Festival.

Notes

¹ Performed 3–19 July 2009 at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, as part of ‘Marina Abramović Presents …’ at the Manchester International Festival.

* with images from the artist Kira O'Reilly's Stair Falling performance

² The notion of wit(h) nessing is proposed by Bracha Ettinger to address an important shift in contemporary art and performance: ‘In art today we are moving from phantasm to trauma. Contemporary aesthetics is moving from phallic structure to matrixial sphere. We are carrying in this second half of the twentieth century enormous traumatic weight, and aesthetic wit(h)nessing in art brings its awareness to culture's surface’ (Ettinger 2004: 87).

³ The interview was occasioned by O'Reilly's performance Untitled (Syncope), which took place in April 2007 at the Shunt Vaults below London Bridge Station, as part of the SPILL Festival of Performance.