Editorial

During recent years of economic hardship, small acts of anonymous generosity have re-emerged. In Italy, especially Naples, customers at coffee bars can purchase a caffè sospeso (a ‘suspended coffee’) and the receipt is then taped to the door or window of the shop and can be redeemed by any passer-by towards their own order. On our campus (the University of Wisconsin at Madison) the student Slow Food organization has a similar practice at their weekly lunches and dinners; diners can ‘pay forward’ a meal by paying for two – the one that is consumed and another that is available to be used by a diner in need. In North America there is an intermittent practice of ‘paying it forward’ at drive-through restaurant windows; The New York Times reported that at a Tim Hortons drive-through a streak of 228 consecutive cars paid for the orders of the car behind them (Murphy 2013).

Are these quotidian gratuities what we mean by generosity? Or does the term connote an impulse somehow grander or at least more social and less retail? Is generosity synonymous with philanthropy, hospitality or kindness? Is it the umbrella that covers all these? Is it the antithesis of greed, cruelty or xenophobia? Considered in the frame of performance, do ‘acts’ of generosity hinge on motive and intention or on effect?

Aristotle defined ‘liberality’ as noble giving performed without expectation of return. Writing in the fourth century BC, he emphasized the importance of giving only ‘to the right people, and the right amount, and at the right time’ (Aristotle 1934: Book 4, Chapter 1, section 12). Contemporary discourses of generosity frequently echo this, from the notion that one should give only to members of one’s own group, to obsessive concern that government assistance be used ‘effectively’. For Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, generosity carried social and political utility because it ‘conquers hate and thereby aids social well-being through an increase of joy in others’; it is an ‘altruistic’ force that can ‘enhance political peace’ (van Ruler 2014: 224). This suggests that generosity can have utility while still being genuine.

It was fundamental to early Christianity that generosity not demand reciprocity; while this perspective persists today, more cynical understandings of generosity can seem like common-sense political realism. This stance is crystallized in the cold tones of chapter 16 ofNiccolòMachiavelli’sThePrincewhenhe essentially says that being liberal with other people’s money is fine, but generosity with your own wealth is a trap. Few today publicly advocate such bad faith, but generosity as a social value is so circumscribed with supposed ‘realism’ that it is easy to lose track of or dismiss the multiple traditions, especially religious ones, with faith in altruistic generosity, as in this formulation by Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama: ‘generosity is the most natural outward expression of an inner attitude of compassion and loving-kindness’ (Dalai Lama 2012).

Marcel Mauss’s 1925 work on gift exchange is invaluable in trying to imagine exchange outside capitalist ‘rationality’. Mauss builds on Bronislaw Malinowski’s descriptions of the Trobriand Islanders as travelling long distances at great risk in order to bestow gifts on other communities, and on the practice of potlatch among indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest in what is now the United States and Canada. A simplistic reading of Mauss might be appealing to artists who would like to understand creativity as altruistically generous, but Mauss articulates structures of reciprocity and self-interest (and sometimes domination) imbuing gift exchange. Mauss does not offer a naïve celebration of gift cultures, but rather invites us to analyse structures of gifting for their imbrication in human relationality.

Within contemporary philanthropy, generosity can be colonizing and manipulative, as in foreign aid used to influence ‘hearts and minds’ of poorer nations. In Peter Weiss’s 1965 play Marat/Sade, the character of the Marquis de Sade critiques the patronizing underpinnings of ‘compassion’ with this speech:

Compassion is property of the privileged classes When the pitier lowers himself

to give to a beggar

he throbs with contempt

To protect his riches he pretends to be moved

and his gift to the beggar amounts to no more than a kick. (Weiss 1966: 26)

If Machiavelli and Weiss’ de Sade teach us to be suspicious of the supposed generosity of the wealthy and powerful, it is also common for everyday acts of generosity to be greeted with suspicion or dismissed as motivated by psychological selfishness. And if buying a stranger’s coffee might be interpreted as arising from mixed motives (to feel good about doing good) ‘artistic’ generosity is open to a similar critique – that giving is also a kind of taking, a sort of purchase of artistic aura.

Yet vestiges of the idea of acting out of loving-kindness remain in certain romantic conceptions of culture; altruism is often associated with art-making as a ‘labour of love’. Generosity likewise permeates theatrical language, where actors are ‘generous’ in their performances and audiences in their responses. Performers are ‘gifted’, celebrities speak of ‘giving back’. There is even a martyrdom of performance, of giving oneself or ‘giving it all’. There is also the generosity of spectators and audiences: we ‘give’ our applause, while we pay for the tickets, and we speak of ‘supporting’ our friends’ projects by attending them.

In his book The Gift, Lewis Hyde (who is among artists’ favourite writers on generosity) does not see art as necessarily altruistic, but does find it inherently generous:

Art that matters to us – which moves the heart or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience – that work is received as a gift by us. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. (Hyde 2007: xvii)

We want to think about this conception of art-as-gift in conjunction with another text frequently cited in the proposals we received, Australian philosopher Rosalyn Diprose’s Corporeal Generosity. For Diprose, a politics of generosity means ‘attending to the source of any potential transformation of social imaginaries’ (172) that ‘structure the civil body to be open to different ways of being’ (172). Diprose asserts that our society will be ‘transformed by exposure to irreducible alterity’ (172), in other words by sharing social space of the very immigrants that current xenophobia seeks to exclude. Drawing on Merleau Ponty, Diprose formulates the notion of ‘intercorporeal generosity’ as a force that is at the heart of ‘sociability and community formation’ and that can be ‘harnessed’ (177) for social change. If there is an irreducible gift in the making of art, and generosity is indispensable in the formation of community, then we can understand artistic engagement with generosity in frameworks that are less cynical and more interesting and nuanced.

Criticism, too, can be generative rather than simplistically agonistic. Building on the work of David Roman, feminist critic Jill Dolan argues for ‘critical generosity’ as ‘an ethical rubric through which to think and write about performance’ – a practice of criticism akin to dramaturgy in that it presumes a community intent on making work stronger rather than merely judging it. We have ongoing social relations with one another that precede and exceed any single critical encounter and, therefore,

critical engagement becomes a strategy for dialogue, not just between the critic and the artist but also hopefully among a community of spectators and writers and arts makers who see themselves as part of a larger project of world making. (Dolan 2013)

Daniel Coffeen (2012) uses the art school term ‘critique’ or the term ‘critical practice’ in contrast to the displays of cruelty or dismissiveness that abound in popular press and media criticism:

Critique is generous: it engages the other on its own terms – or on terms of the event. It lets the other do its thing and then wonders how the other can extend it and it, in turn, can extend the other. It is a glorious repartee.

It is in this spirit of ‘glorious repartee’ that we set out to assemble this volume. We hope that the essays herein extend both their subjects and one another.

In editing this issue, we were repeatedly aware of the layers of un- and under-compensated labour that go into bringing any kind of writing to the public eye, on the part of the authors, referees, content editors and copy editors, staff, designers, and printers. Scholarship is as much enabled by generosity as it is aided by (and hampered) by institutions. We reject as cynical a zero-sum logic of generosity, where a gift to one is a loss to another or to the giver. We prefer to see generative possibilities in sharing and exchange. In culture and performance especially, generous acts trigger generous responses.

This is the scaffold of much social practice art, that generative ‘acts of kindness’ have force. Within the now less-used framework of ‘relational aesthetics’, acts of giving furnished a key mechanism for instantiating or disrupting relations. Nicolas Bourriaud suggests that ‘art was intended to prepare and announce a future world’ (1998: 13). Writing about Félix González-Torres, Bourriaud highlights ‘the democratic concern that informs’ (57) his generation of artists and the ‘temporary collective form that [the artwork] produces by being on show’ (61).

Our arts collaborative, Spatula&Barcode, pursues ‘temporary collective forms’, sometimes through ‘show’ but often through acts that are quotidian or even invisible. Gift-giving (along with commensality) has become a core practice within the artworks that we have made together with friends and strangers since 2008. For example, in our intervention in the Nashville, Tennessee conference of the American Society for Theatre Research, titled ‘Red Eye Gravy’ (2012), we asked that conference-goers bring us a ‘host gift’ (as one might in visiting someone’s home) and reciprocated by staging a series of para-conference discussions and other explorations of hospitality. In the end, we re-gifted the host gifts to departing attendees.

Often we hope that simple gifts will provoke critical engagement; in Ted Purves’s terms,

confrontational generosity, the possibilities of detournement through the tactical use of gifts, or the democratic gesture of redistributing your own privileges as an artist to an audience or community – all can be read in light of critical exchange. (Purves 2014: 2)

Concurrent with this publication, we’ve been in the midst of staging Soup:Bowl – a table to farm project. In partnership with ceramicist Grant Gustafson, we’re giving hand-crafted ceramic bowls to 150 vendors at the Dane County Farmer’s Market (the largest producer-only farmer’s market in the United States) and filling them with homemade soup at a bespoke meal.

In our nascent project How Can I Help? Spatula&Barcode will try to take on both the discomfort of being on the receiving end of generosity and the overwhelming sense of not knowing what to do that many experience in the face of some of the world’s greatest iniquities. The question ‘How can I help?’ invokes both desire and despair. What prompts so many people to respond to interesting community projects or arts endeavours by volunteering participation? Faced with a personal offer of help, how often are we reluctant to accept, whether out of a desire for self-sufficiency, prideful self-reliance, or suspicion of the other’s motives? Faced with deep inequalities and terrible suffering around the world, how tempting is it to ask the question out of futility, already answered in the negative ‘How could I possibly help?’ If you, as readers, have thoughts on how to approach this question, we’d love to hear from you at [email protected]

Kay Jensen (pictured right) receives a gift from Laurie Beth Clark (pictured left), Michael Peterson, and Grant Gustafson. Soup:Bowl – a table to farm project. Photo Maryam Ladoni

In our call for contributions to this volume, we hoped to approach generosity ‘without recourse to a naïve faith in its potential, but also without devolving into cynicism about its limits’. Our own suspicion of the generosity in our work suggests a wariness about the satisfaction or aesthetic pleasure that might be gained from a small act of aligning the world differently. We hope that On Generosity maintains a scepticism about the concept, but also embraces the risk of believing in it.

The authors in On Generosity explore generosity from multiple perspectives in diverse contexts, investigating it as intention, as rhetoric and as experience. The volume begins with ‘A Rhapsody For You’, Helen Paris’s lyrical account of her experience of an intimate performance – ‘For You’ by Chong Shuch, Rowena Richie and Ryan Tacata – the generosity of which is manifest in the lengths to which the company went to craft an experience especially for each individual participant. While Paris is clearly conscious of the rarity and privileged nature of such experiences, her essay models one form of the ‘critical generosity’ that Roman and Dolan discuss. She also succinctly and poignantly conveys how fine particulars of context – from the personal to the political – suffuse and are transformed by exceptional artistic moments.

After Paris’s focused meditation on reception (and the receiving of art-as-gift), we turn to artist Charles Simonds’s long career of bestowing gifts: precious, fragile works of art that by their very nature resist the transformation of artistic gift into commodity. Lauren van Haaften-Schick’s extended interview with Simonds, ‘To Offer/To Exchange’, evidences a deeply developed sense of artistic ethics and an aesthetics of giving, but also the artist’s ongoing questioning of the social relations that surround the making of beauty and the machinations of the art world. In Simmonds’s tiny, vulnerable installations can be recognized a provocative occupation of space by a ‘useless’ aesthetic action; his works perform almost an artistic civil disobedience, ‘ruining’ their sites for any conventionally ‘productive’ activity.

Jisha Menon’s essay ‘Toxic Colonialism and the Gesture of Generosity’ is the first of six pieces that examine generosity within explicitly political frames. Installation artist Krishnaraj Chonat’s work about the global trade in toxic e-waste has included trading sandalwood to gallery-goers for electronic waste products; Menon describes this as an act of giving that ‘troubles conceptions of individuals as self-interested, economic actors in a profit economy, and puts into play a radical and absolute gesture of generosity’. Ruinations both deliberate and un-asked-for populate Patrick Anderson’s essay ‘To Be Undone’, which ranges from ‘reading’ both sides of the classical sculpture ‘torso of Miletus’, to Leo Bursani’s conception of sexual ‘bottoming’ as ‘a giving-over of oneself to the shattering of the ego itself’, to Eric Michaels’ account of the endurance required to die of AIDS, recounted in his diary Unbecoming. Anderson does not mention Hyde’s contentions about the inherent generosity of art, but his consideration of Rilke’s encounter with a Rodin sculpture suggests one way that artistic experience on an intimate individual level can be both generous and ravenous. Anderson further wraps this conception of an artistic and/or sexual being-undone around the career of the conceptual artist On Kawara, finding in his life’s work recording the passage of time a ‘Rilkean entanglement’ created by the artist’s imposition of his own mortality on the viewer. Anderson’s brief discussion of Mauss develops a complex reading of ‘the gift’ as ‘a kind of ontological intimacy between the objects of exchange and the subjects who give and receive them that rehearses and reproduces the very structure of sociality itself’.

The artist pages by Jeanine Shinoda that follow (‘Whole Parts: On rupture and the other side of generosity’) seem almost to echo or respond to Anderson’s evocation of absence, presence, want and fullness. Shinoda offers a visual composition that invites the viewer to become lost in the fractures of the work, but also a performance recipe for a ‘shattered’ meal that enacts a complex interplay of loss and nurturance.

These first pieces in the volume extend our understanding of the play of generosity in making and encountering works of art; the next three explore the theme in cases drawn from the theatre. In ‘Have I Done Enough?’, the acts of generosity that Laura MacDonald details among the creators of the musical Hamilton and which they inspired in their fans seem more ordinary, but MacDonald reads generosity at every level of this global phenomenon, from thematics of the show itself to its treatment of its fans to the philanthropic drives originating in that community. While MacDonald recognizes that generosity is also part of the show’s marketing, the genuine love she finds circulating in the Hamilton universe is a contrast to what Alisa Zhulina analyzes (in ‘Performing Philanthropy from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates’) as the ‘host of processes, practices and conflicting ideologies that performatively give rise to the economic effect known as “philanthropy”’. Reading the philanthropic careers of Andrew Carnegie and other industry titans alongside George Bernard Shaw’s critique of philanthropy, Zhulina argues that this history of philanthropic performance must be understood if we are to resist the corrosive effects of contemporary philanthropy’s role in the world order.

In ‘Radical Care: Performative generosity and generativity in Third Theatre’ Jane Turner and Patrick Campbell suggest that Yuyachkani (Peru) and the OdinTeatret (Denmark) enact such resistance through ‘micro-political strategies informed by generosity’. Their reading of these groups’ practices moves beyond messianic Marxism through Jacques Derrida’s consideration of ‘unconditional hospitality’ as an encounter with radical difference; they see in the companies ‘an ethos of performative living labour predicated on generosity, hospitality, and radical care’.

This volume next shifts focus to ‘social practice’ and activist art understood in their relation to social generosity and self-interest. In ‘Even Better than the Real Thing’, Ciaran Smyth offers a trenchant critique of ‘economies of ontological authenticity in socially engaged art practice’ that construct social practice art as ‘cultural philanthropy’. Particularly in its production by and for art museums, Smyth sees social practice as risking complicity in a system where artists’ presences function to guarantee the transformation of subjectivities through experience; Smyth attacks an art world that trades on the experience of ‘the real’. As social practice artists we found it crucial to include Smyth’s indictment of how even when social practice involves ‘acts of material generosity’ they may serve to reproduce rather than address ‘real social antagonisms’.

Christian Nagler’s account of activism in favour of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), ‘Performing Labour’s (Non)Futures’, pursues the ‘monetary imagination’ across both street-level performance actions and political rhetoric and policy, emphasizing the ‘strange bedfellows’ from across the ideological spectrum who advocate for UBI. Beyond charting the nuances of the movement(s), Nagler teases out the ‘universal’ in UBI, locating in it a potential ‘economic citizenship’ that might challenge nationalistic conceptions of belonging to the social order.

Among these ‘political’ essays are two pieces that particularize our understanding of generosity: in their artists pages, ‘Assister au spectacle’, Julia-Kristina Bauer and Carl Lavery literally look at the theatre audience, finding a generosity of spectatorial renunciation of the self that resonates with Anderson’s essay and with our desire to understand generosity as generative; Jenny Lawson’s deceptively straightforward performances, described in ‘The Gift of Cake’, ground celebration, labour and community in their direct relation to individual participants, recalling Paris’s account of ‘For You’.

In ‘Contagion as Method’, Rebecca Close and Anyely Marín offer a manifesto-like account of their work, as diásporas críticas, in public political performances constructing ‘stages of enunciation’ on which varied participants coalesce around a ‘manifesto-contagion’ that generates ‘through the simplest gestures – reading, lending your voice and listening’. We place this after the more academic writing in the volume not just to foreground a different stylistic voice but for the way that diásporas críticas model the laborious work that generative generosity requires.

We were bemused by the forthright way that two of the contributions addressed us personally as editors: Paris in the dedication of her gem-like essay, and Amaara Raheem and Mick Douglas in their cheeky closing ‘letter to the editors’. While there’s something potentially immodest about including these callings-out, we also appreciate their potential to foreground the webs of social relations that are at work in instigating, coalescing and finishing artistic and intellectual work. And so, with reassurance from the Performance Research powers that be, we’ve bookended this volume with these two pieces. Raheem’s and Douglas’s work further aids in our desire to suspend the question of generosity, rather than to close it; their poetic conclusion alludes to a self-organizing generativity, one ‘without permits or permissions … no one asked for it yet everyone seems to overwhelmingly feel warm toward it’.

We approached editing this volume as an inaugural action for a phase of work that will more explicitly pursue generosity as a theme (just as our ‘Foodways’ series incorporated food-based projects across three years and three continents). We want to understand what it means to make work about generosity. And so with selfish intent (but, we believe, generous effect) we have here curated a ‘Cabinet of Generosities’ featuring thirteen artists who deploy generosity as tactic and strategy. The work in the Cabinet pushes the boundaries of our thinking, proliferates examples and suggests the seeming boundlessness of the question of generosity.

Our call for proposals sought to provoke with a question (‘Can generosity fix what is wrong with the world?’) that this volume does not necessarily answer. But while ‘generosity’ may not be a simple answer to the world’s problems, selfishness is one of their primary causes. While some essays here refer to the global failure to care for refugees, asylum seekers and others on the move, our entire endeavour is haunted by this crisis of generosity, which has only worsened since we began the process of making this volume. The global rise of authoritarian regimes involves diverse forces and many cultural differences, but many of them share a rhetoric of possessiveness, of anti-generosity, that is a key component of their taste for cruelty.

In closing this introduction and opening the volume, we wish for a future in which we can ‘establish common ground between different bodies’ (Diprose 2002: 177) in a society that is built on some form of the ‘unconditional hospitality’ that Turner and Campbell invoke, founded in a politics of generosity and its generative potential. Our world has everything to gain from generosity.