Bojana Kunst - Strategies of Subjectivity in Contemporary Performance Art

Strategies of Subjectivity in Contemporary Performance Art

text by Bojana Kunst
First published in Maska, Performance Territories, 2002, Year. XVII, No. 74-75, p. 10-14, 77-80.

Strategies of subjectivity are those displayed by bodies of orifices and fluids, gender bodies, leaky bodies, everyday and commodified bodies, ecstatic hybrid bodies - as featured in the performance art by Gina Pane, Carolee Schnemann, Rebecca Horn, Bob Flanagan, Katarzyna Kozyra, Orlan, Rebecca Horn, Stelarc, Annie Sprinkle, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman, Michele Chantal etc. Naturally, the aforementioned artists differ to a great extent; springing from various individualist, social and aesthetic contexts, they are difficult to interpret under a common denominator. Moreover, our attempt to do so can result in the very thing that their art, insisting on the "unframeable body of embodied subjectivity"[1], is trying to avoid - in an enforcement of our own disciplinary logic of classification, and a suppression of what these works obsessively display for us to see. The ecstasy, pleasure, obscenity, perversion as well as danger of self-performing bodies, plays impudently and dangerously with our desire: we are faced with objects insistent upon our enjoying them, and at the same time, with an indication that this enjoyment is never really pure. According to A. Jones, the interpretational relation is eroticised: it is ecstatic, but not entirely comfortable - venturing to speak, the spectator has to be aware that he has already been included into the generation of the process, we could say he is a part of the open play of dangerous connections.[2]

Despite the playfulness and interpretational discomfort (indeed, the two phenomena will always accompany every good erotic relationship to some extent), the body of performance art can nevertheless be dealt with in a coherent manner. That is possible within a broad cultural and philosophical context, that of the general history of the modern Western body. During the last few decades, contemporary performance art has become involved in an obsessive romance with self and the body, to the extent that 'the performer is obsessed with the urgency of displaying his own body in order to be able to exist in the first place' (Lea Vergine), and depicts the contemporary visibility of the body as a field of dangerous connections. I do not only wish to point out that performance art abandons static representation of the body (Elizabeth Grosz) - a coherent, organized, integrated image regulated by reason - in order to reveal an open, diffused and diverse physical identity. Not only the fact that, instead of an empty location of the body (which also haunted the fragmentarisation and abstraction of the body in the art of high modernism), it introduces the postmodern organic, gendered, social, constructed, relational body.

The body reveals itself as the topos in which, according to the American feminist performer Carolee Schnemann, there arise 'all the splits of Western culture', as well as the deep problematics of their instrumental and rational connections. The body of performance art constitutes itself as a process, showing us the inevitable and problematic intervention of the other. According to Elisabeth Grosz, the body itself is nothing but "organically, biologically "incomplete"; it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities that require social triggering, ordering, and long-term administration". [3] During the last few decades, as a potentiality (or relationarity), the body in performance art has been obsessively confronted with the trauma of its articulation and its liability to intervention. On the one hand, it has to succumb to the increasing commodification and grow more and more efficient to meet the obsessive rational imperatives. On the other hand, the gradual disappearance of its empty place opens the possibility of new choices and perspectives.

This broad context, which renders the contemporary body as a front of dangerous connections, involves and points at deep changes; it calls for an urgent change in our perception of the Western body, and represents the kernel of its political and ethical problematics. Arthur Danto defines artistic praxes of this kind as “arts of disturbation”, ascribing to them the demolishing of borders between art and life; despite its ecstasy, however, this demolition always entails a certain threat and danger, venturing to compromise reality itself. Reality namely stands for the actual component, and is thus a reality without a representational value, with the latter never having been bestowed upon the former.[4] What we have to deal with is the visibility of something which, throughout the history of modernity, was constantly banished into invisibility, to only intermittently surface as a horrible, yet incredibly attractive immoveability of the indistinguishable which penetrated art and aesthetics through the field of the sublime.[5] It is the visibility of the in-between, the connected, the relational, that of the phenomena which, throughout the history of modernity, indirectly symbolized and constituted the topos of the monstrous. Modern history of aesthetic framing in artistic reception is accompanied by a general modern obsession with differentiation - in science, philosophy as well as art. In fact. differentiation is the only way in which the modern subject can be placed into the centre of the world. The autonomy and certainty of the modern subject can only be achieved by means of a purification of the dichotomies between man and woman, culture and nature, the natural and the artificial, the living and the non-living. The monstrous, the composed, the unusual, the in-between, and connecting in general, posed a constant threat to the location and status of the modern subject throughout the history of modernity. In a way, it is the connecting that is suppressed in Western culture. Especially traumatic, of course, are impossible, dangerous connections (between man and beast, man and woman, master and slave, the organic and the inorganic), now confronted in a variety of ways by contemporary open bodies and their entire ecstatic range of pain and pleasure. Throughout the history of modernity, the field in-between was more or less reserved for special creatures, monsters. Composed, fluid, transgressive and elusive, they follow the modern placing and certainty of the subject like a shadow, and stand for the field of the horrible precisely because of their obsessive demand for (dangerous) connections - in search of a body in the Enlightenment, a family in the Romantic period, an erotic connection in the early 20th century, and a political legitimacy / representation in the end of it. The monsters' need for their obsessive connecting springs precisely from the fact that, throughout modernity, they are banished into the field of the other, externalised, veiled, and confined into a closed entity, although that is not really their true home.

Thus, we can say that bodies of contemporary performance art can be viewed as our contemporary monsters. Their openness and weak potentiality, their entropy, their orifices and fluids tell of the ways of illegitimacy / legitimacy, contemporary articulation, and visibility / visibility. It is here that the body reveals itself as the exteriorised other – leaky, vulnerable, achy, mortal, reduced to an organic specimen, a bothersome remnant of nature, and an obsession of culture. Moreover: monstration proves a way of embodiment, a necessary position tactic of contemporary subjectivity (which, consequently, is itself a result of impossible and dangerous connections). The traumatic and at the same time, delicious excessiveness of the contemporary body is not only a consequence of an extremely suppressed position that the body generally occupies in Western culture. It also signifies a dawning of the posthuman body image where the connection with the non-human (dangerous, unusual) is actually one of the most fundamental traits.

The hybridity of contemporary performing bodies can be viewed as a symptom of a very important feature of contemporarity - that of its amazing obsession with connections. It seems that, due to the complex role of technology and science, the clear-cut borders of modern production (i.e. territories where modern non-human objects were generated/regulated), are now being demolished. The difference between modern and postmodern interpretations of these problems can be found in the contemporary visibility of hybridity. It is no longer veiled by the thoughtlessness, non-representation, and regularity previously set by modern institutions; the visibility brings about a reinterpretation of traditional boundaries and categories. Furthermore, this visibility results in a pure transparency of excess. What once used to cast a shadow upon the contract - a shadow of obscurity, enigma and passion of connections - and posed a threat to the autonomy and independence of the modern subject, seems entirely transparent, open and omnipresent nowadays. The effect of multiple layers and diffuseness, the openness of hybrid connections, of their palimpsest and nomadic traits is almost hallucinatory. Our experience are constituted through a subtle matrix of connections, not only those between bodies, but between everything from the non-physical to the utmost material. It is therefore not unusual that the French philosopher B. Latour states that "we have to slow down, reorient, and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially. Will a different democracy become necessary? A democracy extended to things?"[6] In other words: today, we are again confronted with questions of legitimacy, officiality, visibility and representation - but not only that of the human (which used to obsess modernity), but primarily that of the non-human. We ponder over how to provide the non-human with an official place.

The obsession with the body gives artistic praxes a specific place in the omnipresent ecstasy of this kind. These arts constitute an important field in the contemporary articulation of the political, forming articulations of contemporary identities and subjectivity. They enable us to confront everything which, due to the omnipresence of connections and diffused experience, seems uncapturable sometimes. It is here that we can find the modern "minority" of passion, emotion, femininity, connections, vulgarity and boundless imagination. By means of the erotization and transmutation of the interpretational relation, however, performance art parodies and transforms both the traditional as well as the omnipresent contemporary connections. Performing bodies may be our contemporary monsters; but this does not mean that, simply on account of their openness, their ecstatic presence is indeed fluid, obsolete or fading, and that their monstration enables an insight into an quasi-collective subjectivity in which the symbolic moment of identification between self and the subject is constantly postponed (E. Grosz).[7] In my opinion, we should follow the thesis of M. Shildrick, and be careful when extolling their alleged total openness and dislocatedness. What our contemporary monsters reveal is the fact "that the relation between self and the other, as with body and body, is chiasmatic, precisely insofar as corporeality and subjectivity - body and mind - are themselves folded back to each other, overflowing, enmeshed and mutually constitutive."[8] Contemporary monsters are the elusive topos in-between precisely because they enable us an active, creative, pleasurable experience of our subjectivity (Jones). This experience, however, also warns us of the boundaries of the singular embodied subject, and mirrors the insecurity and instability of our identities. The monsters arouse both a nostalgia for identification and a dread of incorporation.

The play with impossible and dangerous connections takes place in several fields. On the one hand, it can be viewed as a reaction upon the suppressed position that the body occupies in Western culture - especially as to invisible gender, racial and social articulations which are always in opposition to the rationalized and hierarchical divisions of modern regulation.[9] On the other hand, the disclosure of dangerous connections is present in the articulation of the body and subjectivity within the technological, scientific, and economic fields of complex contemporarity, especially in postmodern body articulations. In its transparent and liberating play with monstruosity, the contemporary posthuman subject, if we employ this definition due to the transparency of its play with monstruosity, is becoming posthuman precisely because of the new kind of connection, a new partnership disclosed with the omnipresence and complexity of the objects of our exterior. The contemporary monstration in performance art mirrors this kind of embodiment and subjectivity (with the two firmly intertwined) in a specific way: the ecstatic openness of its connections will turn, parode, fortify and demolish its own as well as other contemporary connections. Not only does performance art reveal that monstruosity is both marginal and central for the understanding of man's subjectivity in this world of connections, but also the importance to know 'which are made and which not' (Donna Haraway). The legitimacy of our connections shows through this awareness, through the constant connecting and the accompanying rise of position / opposition. In other words: in modernity, the monster is indeed exteriorised into the field of the singular, invisible other. But precisely therefore (with the exteriorisation never absolute and successful), the monster becomes the most interiorized object of passion and desire, an object of a bizarre and at the same time irresistible eroticism which followed and demolished the foundations of modern differentiability. Today, when we are faced with an omnipresence of connections, this invisible other, as says Baudrillard, primarily reveals itself as an object of production and commodification. Although it seems that we are immersed in countless connections, it now becomes problematic to what extent a dangerous connection can be articulated at all anymore. This is a point addressed by the more or less radical strategies of displayed bodies.

According to A. Jones, the visibility of the contemporary posthuman body calls for enjoying the blurring of boundaries rather than anxiety. It is neither about a phobic loss nor an ecstatic gain; the enjoyment of contemporary performance art is quite specific, and can by all means be defined as "tactic pleasure" - a strategy of dangerous connections that primarily reflects a different understanding of subjectivity. In our world of relationarity and reflections, this subjectivity calls for a standpoint, place, position, and location. Indeed, we no longer consider the all-encompassing Cartesian strategy “imagine the world …”, or “imagine the body”; however, it was not one of endless multi-layer connections, but a particular and relational strategy of tactic positions, in which subjectivity is disguised, or taken over. According to A. Jones, the contemporary embodied subjectivities disclosed by the strategies of tactic positions are of racial, sexual, class, and gender nature precisely because of their changing relations with the others.[10] Accordingly, the body of performance art is not an open, diffused, autonomous or, in other words, narcissistic container of signs, one-way relations and fragments of identity; its rationality and the proper place are acquired and revealed only as a specific (interactive) front in-between, with articulations taking place through a relationarity and inevitability of connections. The changing relations with others are ecstatically open, and deeply problematized through the constant staging of desire. In the diffusion of traditional dichotomies, in the endless transgression (between the outside and the inside, the male and the female, the body and the artificial), the thought and self are no longer stable, and their boundaries no longer represented by one's skin or the end of the world. "The skin is deceptive ...in life one only has one's skin...there is an error in human relations because one never is what one has...I have an angel's skin but I am a jackal...a crocodile's skin but I am a puppy, a black skin but I am white; a woman's skin but I am a man; I never have the skin of what I am. There is no exception to the rule because I am never what I have."[11]

So claims Orlan, a French artist and professor of art history, moving in the field of monstration and disclosing strategies of embodiment. Due to the elusiveness of its interpretational position, Orlan's work has been met with a variety of responses. It is not unusual that she has also been looked down on to an extent - considered someone who strives to become 'the first posthuman celebrity of artistic world'[12], and her work an expression of the narcissism and "pathology of a culture drowning in imagery."[13] Of course, such standpoint signifies an opposition to the uncritical ecstatic obsession with posthuman ways of representation; the disclosure of Orlan's body, however, should not be read along these lines. Her disclosure strategy can be read as the "unusually rich source" by means of which one can avoid and influence the predominating field of cultural obsessions and fantasies.[14] The strategy of this "rich source" is very specific, and meticulously planned: in most cases, it makes use of the aforementioned cultural obsessions, ecstatic images and commodities, yet with a basic regression which opens the field in-between. Orlan opens the visibility of the contemporary monster, as well as the possible constructions of our identities and the deep problematics of their constitution. She defines her work as constituted in the field in-between, between "the madness and the inability of the gaze."[15] It is the monsters that are now taking over the familiar tactics of self-awareness, and turning them inside out. The strategy employed is always of double nature. On the one hand, it opens the kind of monstration which represents the interlacing and severing of traditional dichotomies, and gives rise to their criticism. On the other hand, however, it is also the point where new ways of articulating disconnections / connections come to life. In her exteriorization and manipulation of the body, Orlan strives to inhabit it with a newly constructed identity by making use of playful dichotomies between soul and body. Paradoxically, this way of inhabitation always proves transcendental and ideal (that of a saint, Madonna, Jean d'Adc, Mona Lisa ...).[16] Manipulating the body with bloody incisions, and battling with "the programmed, nature, DNA" in order to blasphemically invade the body with cultural imagery, Orlan reflects contemporary dichotomies between culture and nature; her biological iconoclasm, however, proves that biology has always been culturally contaminated. By directing and selecting dangerous connections, she establishes transparent technology, and operating techniques, employing the commodification of disguising and transforming the body. The commodificaiton becomes a painful, bloody and ironic tactic of subjectivity: technology is not nearly as pure as we may imagine, and neither is the subjectivity itself.

Orlan shows that the embodiment and articulation through dangerous connections comes before any sort of identity. Her embodiment is marked by danger, passion and provocation; it is a privilege of sex as a transgressive play of imagery; a play which, due to its perspective, is extremely blasphemic in relation to everyday cultural narcissism.[17] There is even more layers to Orlan's position, because the final construction of identity is monstrous; it is transformed into the exteriorized other, which (during the bloody incisions) is alternated even further through our purified, transcendental, ideal imagery. As our contemporary monster, the body offers to our gaze the very presence (or the joy of presence) of embodiment, symbolising open choice, fluidity, secrecy and playfulness. At the same time, it never ceases to remind us of the fact that monstrous, different, and inhuman traits are inscribed deeply into our own selves, with us being part of the indistinguishable. There is no narcissistic construction of individuum, or, according to Donna Haraway, the notion of individuum is no longer the only possible historical limitation, but a new identity made of the trap of relationarity,[18] More then the obsession with imagery, the work of Orlan and other subjectivity strategies revealed by the aesthetics of the body and postmodern art, address the phantasm of monstration. But not because it may seem that, with the development of technology and science, we have come closer to its realization than ever before. This phantasm obsessed the history of modernity from the very beginning, as a basic consequence of the subject's disconnection from the world, as an essential companion of his autonomy and self-assurance, an essential character in the all-encompassing fable "imagine the world …". The presence of tactic pleasure in the strategies of subjectivity reveals that embodiment is not a product of differentiability with which the history of modernity used to be obsessed, but something that reaches deeply into the present. It is an embodiment of open, individual and positional connections, also present in the cyborg notion as developed by Donna Haraway.

It is here, on the edge (by no means meant as the periphery) that contemporary identities are established. It is here that the field in-between will open; in the trajectory of its articulation, it will always include the other, and be embodied through the monstrous, acknowledging differences and making a connection. How is the articulation of contemporary subjectivity constituted and uncovered by the field in-between? The strategy of this articulation is always framed, resulting from nets and an interdependence which is not only a flirtation (a play with constructions and deconstructions on the surface only) but a tactic awareness that, sometimes, it is necessary to be reduced in order to be noticed in the first place. We can thus say that, by means of new strategies, there opens a way to overcome the given ways of visibility, connections and representation. What opens, however, is of a different nature; furthermore, its revelation is similar to that of pathology - offering an insight into the dark crevice (Susan Buck-Morris). The image of contemporary body is no different - characterised by weakness, entropy, and paradoxes. It is a place of visibility and invisibility, a disturbing remnant of nature and a commodified construction of culture, a potentiality we have just recently inhabited and are thus establishing our own disconnections and connections. The pleasure of embodiment is never self-assured, autonomous, but a plain changing of positions. It is but a tactic of subjectivity; the latter, however, can never be final and determined as to borders, and yet it always expresses the need for a centre of locution. Currently, our main problem is whether this centre can at all be established: it would definitely be the only way for this dark hiatus to be overcome. The only way for the endless loss (which, throughout the history of modernity, was closely associated with the body), to turn into gain. Subjectivity is no longer original nor mimetic; according to Hal Foster, it is now returning as alternated by numerous subjectivities, fluid sexuality, borders and ethnicities. The strategies of subjectivity indeed entail the entire experience of connections; it is only after the difference has been recognized, however, that the connection can in fact be made.

Endnotes:

Amelia Jones: "Interpreting Feminist Bodies: The Unframeability of Desire", in: The Rhetoric of The Frame, Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 241. According to Jones, we enforce our own logic of framing upon these works; the employment objective criteria, however, results in a suppression of own our desires. Nothing is more radical and threatening to the system of framing than an artistic praxis that insists on a transgressiveness of subjects and objects in cultural production.
Jones deals with the collapse of the distance between the spectator and the object. This collapse testifies to the changing of the notion of the political in artistic praxes. In traditional, conventional left-oriented models, a collapse of the distance is a sign of political suspiciousness of an artistic praxis. The attitude of performance art in question, however, is quite different: the collapse additionally signifies the powerlessness of the framing system of interpretation. Without distance, there is no location, no starting point within which one can speak and (politically) frame the world or an artistic work. Politicalness now dwells in one's direct and joyful participation in the generation of the process, in the unclosed frame. Compare: Amelia Jones: "Interpreting Feminist Bodies: The Unframeability of Desire", in: The Rhetoric of The Frame, Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 223 - 243.
Elizabeth Grosz: "Bodies - Cities", in: Space, Time and Perversion, Essays on the Politics of the Bodies, Routledge, New York & London, 1995, p. 104.
Arthur Danto: "Art and Disturbation", The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, Columbia University Press, New York, Guildford, Surrey 1986, pp. 119 - 125.
Descartes' inappropriate feeling of surprise entails both attraction and horror, with this fundamental 'unclarity' rendering it a bodily excess.
Bruno Latour: Nous n'avons jamais été modernes, Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 1991, p. 12.
Elizabeth Grosz: "Freaks", Social Semiotics, 1 (2), 1991, pp. 22 - 38.
Margrit Schildrick: "The Body Which is Not One", in: Body Modification, ed. Mike Featherstone, Sage Publications, London 2000, Body&Society, Volume 5, Numbers 2-3, p. 90.
These articulations are especially noticeable in the everyday and activist body of the sixties and seventies performance art. Their then position can not be understood without the aforementioned context, which can shed light upon both the variety of strategies and certain criteria which enable us to deal with these works of art.
Amelia Jones: Interpreting Feminist Bodies: The Unframeability of Desire, in: The Rhetoric of The Frame, Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
This is an abstract from a text by the French psychoanalyst Eugénie Lemoine - Luccioni, read by Orlan during one of her operations. Quoted from: Julie Clarke: "The Sacrificial Body of Orlan", in: Body Modification, ed. Mike Featherstone, Sage Publications, London 2000, Body&Society, Volume 5, Numbers 2-3, p. 193.
An argument definitely supported by her pricelist. Orlan is currently one of the most expensive authors at the artistic market of postmodern bodies.
Mark Dery: Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the end of the Twentieth Century, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1996, p. 164 Dery mentions Orlan together with other narcissist fantasies - Hans Moravec, Stelarc, a good deal of science fiction etc.
In order to avoid the fields of predominating cultural obsessions, we need to make use of "unusually rich sources". Donna Haraway, in: Penley Constance in Andrew Ross: "Cyborgs at Large, Interview with Donna Haraway", Technoculture, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 167.
Orlan: "Orlan Conférence", Une Oeuvre de Orlan, Collection Iconotexte, Éditions Muntaner, Marseille, 1998, p. 53.
The title of the series of her ten operations is "The Reincarnation of St. Orlan".
It is interesting how the everyday narcissism and fascination by imagery makes us forget about pain, mortality etc.
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve: "How Like a Leaf, A Conversation with Donna Haraway", Fleshfactor, Informationsmaschine Mensch, Ars Electronica Center, Springer, Wien & New York, 1997, pp. 46-69.