Thinking towards a Queer Art Education through Collective Practices in Performance

Abstract

The article focuses on the affective politics of Prom by Swiss Philippe Wicht as a model for future radical education. Exploring the question/s of how—and what—performance art can teach us about our relations to others, I establish a reading that oscillates between affect and subject theories. I allege Prom as an aesthetic collective situation, de-constructing an affective we through a disidentificatory affect politics.

As affective dispositive, Prom thematizes how relationality, if not mutual dependence, is at the core of performance art situations. As Judith Butler has pointed out, the other inheres in that very precarious relationality that shapes us as human beings. Performance establishes aesthetic situations under heteronormative conditions that are structurally similar or even equal to those in society. As these (often invisible) respective norms are literally and symbolically enacted in subjects, they produce concrete, yet phantasmatic bodies, which constitute the material for and the materiality of performance.

Collective-defined performance always entails the horrors of gendered life and of heteronormative relationality. Performance draws on the social and psychic quality of gendered bodies that never belong fully to themselves but are always decentred or dispossessed by the gaze, touch and affect of the other.

Wicht creates a material and affective body of the group through sliding on the scale of affect, calling forth and deceiving its solidarity and subverting its engagement. My analysis reflects on this singular being together enacted as disidentificatory or queer affect politics, creating unsettling situations alongside atmospheres of complicity and belonging. It is on these premises that I see performance art as a model for radical or queer art education.

Notes

1 Own translation from French. The referred-to version of Prom was performed on 17 October 2015 at Museum of Art Lucerne. Philippe Wicht had developed and shown a first version of Prom in 2011. The length was fifty minutes.

2 Literally, the German term ‘Wicht’ means squirt – a ‘böser Wicht’ would be a bad squirt, while ‘Bösewicht’, written together in one word, could be translated as villain.