This issue features articles by Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf and Mårten Snickare, originating from a research project on Performativity in Baroque Art. Both articles highlight the art of Bernini as a paradigmatic instance of »Baroqueness«. Bernini is here apprehended as exceeding ontological and representational limits, but also bridging the distance between our time and the historical Baroque.
»Baroque« was a projective concept from the start, emerging in dialectic interplay, as a system of oppositions, in critical discourse. Bernini's full-blown animation of the sculptural medium, and his use of intensive interplay between art forms, became the figuration of contrasts—in opposition to the unifying harmony of Renaissance art as well as to the purification and isolation of forms in Neo-classicism. Differing from the Platonic superstructure of Renaissance art and from ideal or spiritual essences, Bernini's idiom reflects doubts and the continuous anguish in human experience.
Performativity is the state of events and things, when objects are displayed and expressions issued; and when there are responses and effects in relation to what is seen or noticed to happen. While performativity has been highlighted in humanist research during the last decade, the paradigms and formative texts are not entirely compatible, calling for a compulsory clarification whenever a scholarly work claims to use a method or study a phenomenon designated as »performative«. The sources for a »performative« approach of interpretation are typically found in four very different areas of reflection: theatre studies and studies on artistic creation and production; speech-act philosophy; research on rituals and ritual behaviour, in anthropology as well as in historical studies; and analyses of identity issues, as philosophical, social, and representational problems. The obstacles for a unifying or coherent system of analysis lie, for instance, in the facts that the case of theatre is not acknowledged in the speech-act theory, as used by John Langshaw Austin and John Searle; and the research on identity issues adopting the concept does not generally subscribe to the psychology and language comprehension of the speech-act philosophy. So, the issues of conflict are not high up in the tree of knowledge in this case, but at the roots. The history and development of the systems of ideas in the conflicting traditions have been presented and discussed by many. A unifying lead, however, is the idea of repetitions (according to the notion of rites in a wider sense) and also a focus on how each repeated occurrence carries the risk or promise of failure and potential deviation in the very act of its becoming.
In their interpretations of Bernini, both Rossholm Lagerlöf and Snickare seek to capture a sense of event, in the construction of meaning itself, thematized not only as »happening« in the comprehension, as a movement in the conceptual signified, but also in the bodily signifier, as it appears (or can be thought to have appeared) in its space, on its site, through its lighting, material quality, and accessibility.
The Editors