On Rupture

In Artificial Hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship Claire Bishop notes that the neo-liberal tendency to value art only as a manifestation of history and as a narrative of social and economic productivity is a foreclosure of art: ‘art is not only a social activity but also a symbolic one both embedded in the world and at one remove from it’ (2012: 7). Drawing on Bishop's argument for art as a multidirectional presence, given to producing ruptures and therefore able to confront the flattening out of the political in a post-political landscape, this issue seeks to extend debates about the role of performance within and in response to the current neo-liberal context.

Moreover, given the appeal of right-wing popularism and the performative tactics often employed to vilify important issues such as ecological crisis and rising inequality, we are at a crucial juncture – one in which it is necessary to pause and reconsider the relationship between performance and a broadly defined progressive leftist politics. We want to explore what this relationship may mean in the twenty-first century. How may it function, and in what ways is politics, and the idea of the political more broadly, being negotiated in contemporary art practice?

Now is a time when performance is both more political and less political than in the past. In global terms it forms a small part of the ‘culture industry’ wherein it faces commercial pressure to avoid controversy in favour of the box office. In recent times arts organizations in many jurisdictions have been unwilling to defend the arts in the face of contrived spectacles of outrage, in actuality often playing into the hands of conservative politics and the urge to censor and curtail critical intellectual and cultural forms of expression. Simultaneously, we have seen a proliferation of arts practices sustaining alternatives and giving voice to communities and marginalized groups. But there are questions about how claims to dissident and/or oppositional arts are reintegrated into a normative ideological narrative that alternately celebrates and denigrates art depending on the circumstances at hand. Art is deemed useful by power elites when it serves their interests but this act of support is an expedient one. In fact, the use value of art runs two ways: towards supporting arts markets, offering community experiences and being educative, entertaining and empowering; and, at the same time, art is also seen by some as a useful field of activity in the construction of the normative centre-right politics of moral panic and philistinism.

In this situation, performances’ engagement with aesthetics, politics and society has radically shifted and the question of how to be an artist, audience/participant and/or scholar of performance in the neo-liberal sphere is undergoing transformation. Does performance still have a role to play in societies often ruled by the theatre of popularism and infantile spectacle?

We use this issue to test the assumption that the value of performance continues to lie in its capacity to embody human experiences, posit ideas and generate polemical, affective, immersive and/or dialectical modes of engagement with audiences. We want to reflect on the idea and/or act of rupture and to consider how it may operate as an artistic means of thinking about and participating in a radical critical counter-politics and resisting the foreclosure of the left.

Rupture is a dramatic assertion, appealing to its avant-garde precedence for art to breach the known and contemplate alternatives. As a revolutionary concept, this idea has been criticized for its destructive momentum, singularity and even posturing. In this issue, we are not so much interested in these historical debates, but on rupture and arts practice in the contemporary world. While we make no claim to this being a universal cultural system the essays in this volume point to a wide dispersal of themes, ideas and encounters with the problematic of rupture in multiple sites and encounters.

We consider rupture in a world focused intensely on security, compliance and economic hierarchy. Can artistic practice hope to interrupt something as pervasive as corporate sponsorship of the arts and bite the hand that feeds?

What of unsanctioned ruptures that actually break something and in many places would be subjected to surveillance and punishment, justified by so-called ‘anti-terror’ legislation? Do intellectual and artistic communities actually want the potentially violent or destructive rupture that this legislation anticipates? Or are we hopeful for something more in the way of symbolic, representational and critical gestures? Perhaps what we may even imagine as a rupture needs rethinking?

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An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire – a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of music, whose focal points, though diverse in time and place, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density. (The Invisible Committee 2009: 12–13)

When Bob Brown, the former leader of the political party the Australian Greens, wanted to change people's viewpoints on conservation he sometimes took them to the Tasmanian forest to experience the awe and vibrations of ancient trees. Brown stood up to corporate interests and violent right-wing thugs unflinchingly, yet to change people he hoped for the sublime power of nature to shift set-in-stone ideological views of his opponents. He enacted the kind of rupture outlined by The Invisible Committee, one that occurred through the ‘imposition’ of new or different vibrations rather than through direct force or oppression.

A more complicated problem of politics and rupture is neatly explored in Thomas Ostermeier's current production of An Enemy of the People, a work that uses an extended quotation from the ‘Coming Insurrection’ text. In this version, adapted from Henrik Ibsen's play by Florian Borchmeyer, Dr Thomas Stockmann, newly appointed medical officer of the municipal baths (and appointed by his brother, the town mayor) intends to reveal that the city's spa water is contaminated. After being rebuffed by the local media, he calls a public meeting. At the meeting the actor diverts from the Ibsen script, quoting instead from the insurrection text and telling of the conspiracy of forces working to keep his findings from public view. What follows is an extended participatory discussion between audience and performers debating the politics of this conspiracy. Crucially, however, Stockmann is defeated and violently attacked at the end of the scene. The play ends with the defeated Stockmann no longer a whistle-blower but instead considering his stock portfolio that will decline if the truth of the matter becomes known. He must measure the value of truth against his own self-interest. Given that the audience are enthusiastic participants, clearing the political air in the staged town hall meeting (different each night but confirmed by several viewings and reports from others), the play asks broader questions about our commitment to ideas of political opposition and rupture. We have a political intransience where people are prepared to approach questions of rupture theatrically but not in reality. In fact, this scene states the matter at hand perfectly: we are prepared to engage in politics as long as the material conditions of our individual existence are not threatened or disturbed.

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The contributions for this issue are diverse and take the form of essays, provocations, documents and performative and visual texts.

‘Fissure(s) – walking/dancing along, across and in-between lines of difference’ by Holger Hartung repositions the notion of rupture. He considers his embodied experience of a 2011 work Fissure by Louise Ann Wilson, a work that took place over three days on the Yorkshire Dales as a memorial to the artist's deceased sister. Hartung's essay explores mapping and knowledge production through the body, deploying Martin Heidegger's concept of the rift to ask critically how corporeality and memory are experienced.

Helena Grehan's essay ‘An Unresolvable Dramaturgy: Dennis Del Favero's Todtnauberg and what it means to respond’ also considers the question of responding to an artwork and positions Heidegger in a different context. Grehan's response to Del Favero's video work on a meeting between the Jewish poet Paul Celan and Heidegger highlights a dramaturgy of rupture in the encounter between these two figures. Grehan shows how this reflects on the value or significance of responding to the other.

Rupture in the form of the 2010 Canterbury earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand is discussed in Thea Brejzek and Peter Falkenberg's essay, ‘After the Rupture: Restoration or revolution?’ Their work reflects on the urban, procession Canterbury Tales from 2013, and asks whether the carnivalesque aspects of this can both uncover and heal the social, cultural and political ruptures of living in an earthquake zone.

Jessica Santone's essay is an examination of ‘The Economics of the Performative Audience’. Drawing on her analysis of work by Claire Bishop and Alan Badiou, among others, Santone explores questions of agency and collectivity in audience responses to contemporary performance.

Mick Douglas documents and extrapolates from the public artwork ‘The Performance Arcade’ directed by Sam Trubridge in Wellington, New Zealand in 2014. Douglas's combination of writing and photo essay in

CARRIAGE amplifies the temporary interruption to dominant circulation patterns of commodity exchange. It relocates and ruptures the experience of the source work and brings this into a new set of artistic relations.

Bryoni Trezise examines the work of artist Jane Korman, who travels to sites of conflict and makes performances that invite dialogue and sometimes provoke censure. Her essay, entitled ‘Images that Sense Us: Performing visual culture in Jane Korman's Miss World Peace’ considers the affective ruptures of Korman's work and its entangled relationship with the neo-liberal dramaturgies of contemporary visual culture.

Ruthie Abeliovich also considers performance in sites of asymmetrical power relations in her study of the deformative rupture of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict. Her essay, entitled ‘The Occupying Spectator: Audio-visual ruptures in performative representations of Israeli – Palestinian encounters’, examines the notion of rupture both as a performative configuration of the audio-visual structure, and as a metaphor manifesting the complex link between identity and place. Like Grehan's work, she argues for the need to reincorporate the spectator into an understanding of the other's narrative.

The discussion of site is further considered in the next essay, ‘On Resonance in Contemporary Site-specific Projection Art’ by Shana MacDonald. Here the author develops the idea of resonance rather than rupture, thus enabling a variety of performative gestures that promote connectivity and community. The example of contemporary site-specific installation art is discussed as a means to dissolve the fixed boundaries of medium specificity, space and spectatorship in art.

Asher Warren's essay ‘Responding to Rupture: Kids Killing Kids’ reflects on an Australian performance that recounts the making of their earlier collaboration with the Philippine group Sipat Lawin and is based on the Japanese film, novel and game Battalia Royale. The experiences of the Australian artists and the fallout from the collaboration became the subject of this confessional documentary performance. Warren considers if Kids Killing Kids was a genuine process of reflection about responsibility or a cynical courting of the very controversy that the collaboration work created.

‘THE ART OF LAWLESSNESS’ by the Institute for Live Arts Research, a coalition of scholars, artists and activists, takes the discussion of rupture to Greece in the era of the financial crisis. In the face of austerity measures that insist on the closure of public institutions and redirect resources to private interests, people have organized creative collectives as inclusive spaces of resistance. This contribution, including photo documentation and writing, frames these events as dramaturgies of rupture.

Katerina Paramana's analysis of Tino Sehgal's These Associations in her essay ‘On

Resistance through Ruptures and the Rupture of Resistances’ is attuned to the invisible rupture or the potential of an artwork to generate a shift in our understanding of the social. With a focus on participation, the author explored how this created ruptures in the flow of time and movement established by the museum exhibiting Sehgal's work. The essay argues that the ruptures created by and due to the work were a form of resistance to the material economy of the museum, but also to neo-liberalism's production of the social.

‘How to Do Things with Performance Art’ by Edward Scheer discusses the highly relevant politics of Mike Parr's performance artwork Daydream Island in relation to questions of rupture in a discussion of art and performativity by Dorothea Von Hantelmann. Reintroducing his work on redressive actions, such as art's life crisis rituals, Scheer draws our attention of the tactics of art to work as mode of reconfiguration and as a statement of ethical opposition.

Urban transformation and the influence of corporate interests is the focus of Abigail De Kosnik's essay ‘Disrupting Technological Privilege: The 2013–14 San Francisco Google bus protests’. She examines a variety of anti-tech-company actions that sought to disrupt the upward slope of hi-tech's financial, social and cultural significance in the Bay Area. Dispelling the ‘green image’ of the technology industry, De Kosnik considers how these actions are ruptures that do harm to the urban population.

The final essay in the issue, written by Boyd Branch and Erika Hughes, explores The Veterans Project, an ongoing work of embodied historiography in which American military veterans appear onstage and are invited to share their stories of military service and civilian life. Their essay ‘Embodied Historiography: Rupture as the performance of history’ explores how these performances can disrupt the monolithic discourse surrounding the veteran experience in the post-9/11 United States and calls attention to the contradictions inherent in a society that claims to value life and liberty but has to maintain a military to ‘defend’ those values.

Ultimately, we do not see these contributions as creating a whole – or singular response to the theme. Instead, we are pleased that they at times overlap, veer away from one another and offer sometimes contradictory or conflicting ideas about rupture. We see these works, in their negotiation of ideas and practices of rupture, repair, resonance, divergence and response, as important reminders of the need to continually consider and reconsider the role and power of art both as an entity within and a force outside of the increasingly (and again) fearful neo-liberal political sphere.

Each contribution included here offers us a mode of thinking about and responding to rupture that reminds us that in the face of increased surveillance, control and commodification, one of the most important things we can do is to remember the ways in which art has the potential to rupture the status quo and to yet again remind us – sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully – of the important things.