The nature of performance as event gained in relevance at the turn of the last century, when Peter Behrens, Georg Fuchs, and others proclaimed that theatre must again become festival.1 Soon after, Max Herrmann claimed to have found the “original meaning of theatre” in the “theatre-fest” which was constituted by its different participants, actors and spectators alike. All of them felt that the specific aestheticity of theatre was manifest in the nature of performance as event. Behrens, Fuchs, and Herrmann contradicted traditional convictions of an aesthetics rooted in the work of art and opened new perspectives for the debate on the arts and aesthetics.
For a long time, the work of art held a central position within this debate along with its creator, the omnipotent genius figure of the artist. The production of a work of art was frequently – if later only metaphorically– seen and described as analogous to God’s creation of the world: just as God had created the world completely and holistically, the artist also brought forth his work of art. And just as the eternal divine truth lay hidden within God’s work and only revealed itself to those capable of reading the book of the world, the artist’s work held a similar truth. Revelation would be the likely reward for immersing oneself in and patiently seeking to decipher the work of art. With the onset of the cult of genius at the close of the eighteenth century, the artist appeared as an autonomous subject that created an autonomous work of art, concealing truth. The assumption that the work of art is a cache of truth and that truth sets itself into work in it (das Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit), as Heidegger put it, also applies to philosophical aesthetics from Hegel to Adorno, with the striking exception of Nietzsche. It also characterizes Gadamer’s conception of the classical work of art, even if his concept of hermeneutics does not effectively support such an assumption.2
While structuralist aesthetics and the aesthetics of reception not only relativized but even categorically rejected the claim to truth in the work of art, the central position the work of art held in aesthetic reflection as a whole remained untouched. The recipient was granted the role of a co-creator and was even declared responsible for generating meaning. Nevertheless, the work of art remained the point of reference for all aesthetic reflection, allowing the recipients to perform their hermeneutic operations. The work of art is created as a “thing”
whose “thingness” never vanishes. It exists as an artifact, which remains consistent
with itself regardless of the recipient’s presence or even despite the changes that might occur over time: the colors darken, collaged newspaper cuttings yellow, and so forth. As a sculpture, monument, or score, the artifact is accessible to different recipients at different times. In the case of texts and music scores, its availability extends to different spaces. In principle, recipients can return repeatedly to the same work of art over the course of their life, discovering ever new peculiarities and possibilities for reflection and thereby generating new meanings within the work of art. In this sense, a recipient can be engaged in a life-long dialogue with a work of art.
Given the long-standing and venerable history of the concept of the work of art, Behrens’, Fuchs’, and Herrmann’s implicit negation of the concept in favor of the notion of event (even if, as we have seen, they were hardly consistent in dismissing the term entirely with regard to theatre but continued to use it) seems almost sacrilegious. It was sacrilege insofar as they denied the existence of two of the work of art’s fundamental prerequisites in the sphere of the theatre, thus challenging the traditional idea of art as a whole but nonetheless continued to insist on theatre as an art form. They replaced the artifact with fleeting, unique, and unrepeatable processes and relativized, if not abolished entirely, the fundamental division of producers and recipients. Therefore, they attacked the prerequisites for an aesthetics of the work of art, of production and reception. Its parameters could no longer be reasonably applied to performance. The artistic and aesthetic nature of performance would instead be derived solely from its nature as event.
What individual theoreticians postulated at the turn of the last century in order to establish a new form of theatre – and a new academic discipline – applies as a self-evident conditio sine qua non to performances of theatre and performance art since the 1960s. Among the many impulses for the creation of action and performance art was the urge to resist the production of artworks as marketable artifacts and commodities and instead replace them with fleeting events which nobody was able to buy and store away in a safe or display in their living room.
The ephemerality of the event, its uniqueness, and singularity became a focal point.
As the analysis of mediality, materiality, and semioticity revealed, each has their share in constituting the performance as event, and they influence one another throughout. In other words, not just performance as a whole occurs within the feedback loop’s autopoiesis but also each of its individual elements. Materiality is not given as an artifact but occurs as the result of the performative generation of corporeality, spatiality, and tonality. The actor’s presence, the ecstasy of things, atmospheres, and the circulation of energy “occur” in the same way as the meanings brought forth as perceptions or the emotions, ideas, or thoughts resulting from them. The performance’s aestheticity is manifested in its nature as event: the spectators respond to what they perceive just as the actors react to perceived audience responses and behavior patterns.
In order to describe and define it more accurately and in accordance with my overall approach, I will refrain from identifying established concepts of the event
– such as Heidegger’s, Derrida’s, or Lyotard’s – to apply them to the performances examined above. Instead, I will employ the findings produced by my analyses of mediality, materiality, and semioticity in performance as a basis to grasp the specific aestheticity of performance since the 1960s. In particular, three aspects have crystallized that directly constitute the nature of performance as event and indubitably are of central importance to its specific aestheticity. These are:
first, the feedback loop’s autopoiesis, which engenders the performance, and the phenomenon of emergence; second, a destabilization, even erasure, of binary oppositions; and third, situations of liminality that transform the participants of the performance. I expect that a closer look at these three aspects will yield clearer insights into the particular aestheticity of performances.
Autopoiesis and emergence
As we saw in Chapter 3, the autopoietic feedback loop, consisting of the mutual interaction between actors and spectators, brings forth the performance. The notion of the artist as autonomous subject creating an autonomous work of art, which each recipient may interpret differently but cannot change in its materiality, evidently no longer applies here, even if the majority of audiences still fails to acknowledge it.
This conclusion gives rise to a number of questions. Is it really legitimate to equate actors and spectators? Is not the contribution of the artists who prepare the production larger, given that they determine the course of the performance, while the audience at best reacts to it? How can the proclaimed dismissal of the artist as autonomous subject be reconciled with the common complaints about the despotism of theatre directors since the late 1960s who seem to consider themselves almighty? In order to answer these questions, I would first like to distinguish between performances of performance art, usually initiated by a single performer, and theatre performances, which are prepared by the director, set designer, composer, actors, musicians, and so forth.
Through their performances, the performance artists create specific situations to which they expose themselves and the spectators. When Beuys spent three days living with a coyote, or when Abramović wrapped pythons around her body, the artists relinquished whatever limited control they might have had over the course of the performance. They created situations which made predictions about the performance’s further development difficult, if not impossible. The development depended no longer on the artist alone but for a large part on the audience and, in this case, also the animals. The artists exposed themselves and others to an uncontrollable situation created by them and thus made the spectators aware of their shared responsibility in the event. Negative influences on the coyote or the snakes could literally have catastrophic consequences for the artist. The behavior of the animals was largely unpredictable. All other participants, first and foremost the artists but also the spectators, had to adapt to the situation. The scenario also reveals the dependence of the artists on the spectators. The artists relied
on the spectators’ sense of responsibility to contribute to the given situation by participating in the performance.
It can therefore be argued that such performances articulated a new self-understanding of the artists. No longer god-like creators of the work of art, they instead established similar conditions to laboratory researchers to which they exposed themselves and others. The artists could determine a specific time frame for the performance, though it remained uncertain whether it could be upheld in the actual event, as Schlingensief ’s case demonstrated.
We must clearly distinguish here between the intensive preparation of theatrical performances, often lasting several weeks or even months, and the performance itself. The rehearsal process plays an important role for the overall shape of the performance insofar as they determine which theatrical elements are to appear in what form, place, and time. The rehearsal process establishes crucial guidelines for the audience’s perception during the performance. The director, although he is the ultimate decision maker, is not comparable to the author of a poem, who creates his work of art on his own. Rather, the other artists and, to an extent, the technical and design staff who develop ideas and make suggestions collaborate on the entirety of the production.3 Generally, the autopoietic feedback loop is affected only by what actually appears in the performance regardless of what was discussed, decided, and planned.
The director does not usually participate in a performance and cannot directly influence the autopoietic feedback loop – except as actor or spectator. While every actor, technician, and stagehand constantly influences the feedback loop’s autopoiesis – albeit in ways different from that prepared in rehearsal – the director is generally incapable of influencing the performance event while it occurs.
The theatre performances to which I have referred are comparable to performance art events insofar as the mise en scène established certain situations to which all participants were exposed and to which each individual responded differently. Here, too, we are dealing with experimental set-ups that invited diverse reactions – be those Schechner’s guidelines for audience participation, the spatial arrangement at the Frankfurt Depot in Schleef ’s productions, or Castorf ’s use of video technology.
Since performances from the 1960s onwards have been drawing attention to the feedback loop’s autopoiesis through role reversal, community building, and other strategies, they have simultaneously been articulating a new image of the artist.
One might even go as far as to say that these performances have propagated a new image of humans and society, although it remains questionable whether this new image has as yet arrived in society at large. The effect of the autopoietic feedback loop negates the notion of the autonomous subject. The artist, like all participants, is assumed to be a subject engaged in a continuous process of determining and being determined. This mutual determination contradicts the notion of a subject that sovereignly exerts their free will and can fashion themselves independently of others and of external directives. Equally, this conception vehemently opposes the notion of a spectator determined exclusively by outside forces and escaping
all responsibility for their actions. The perceptible workings of the autopoietic feedback loop, apparent in all forms of role reversal between actors and spectators, allows all participants to experience themselves as co-determinate participants of the action. Neither fully autonomous nor fully determined by others, everyone experiences themselves as involved and responsible for a situation nobody single-handedly created. Herein lies a fundamental component of aesthetic experience that enables the autopoiesis of the feedback loop.
The feedback loop functions as a self-organizing system which must permanently integrate newly emerging, unplanned, and unpredictable elements. For the actors, these elements include, most prominently, the spectators’ behavior and actions together with their own or their colleagues’ reactions. Furthermore, they extend to unpredictable events on the stage, such as a sudden stumbling, a spot-light crashing down, a missing prop, or the behavior of participating animals – a monkey biting an actress, a horse defecating on stage, a barking dog leaping into the auditorium.
From the audience’s viewpoint, all elements flowing into the autopoiesis of the feedback loop constitute emergent phenomena. In the performances discussed, the appearance or disappearance of emergent phenomena did not follow a clearly comprehensible and predictable logic of action or causal nexuses but was dependent on rhythmic patterns, time brackets, chance operations, and so forth.
Therefore, spectators might have found instances of emergence and their own reaction or the behavior of other spectators equally difficult to predict. To them, everything must have appeared emergent.
This circumstance has far-reaching consequences for how spectators watch a performance. For as long as a certain, possibly familiar, logic of action is upheld, one’s perception can operate selectively. That is to say, spectators do not distribute their attention equally over all that appears in the space but merely follow that which aids the understanding of the plot or character development. Without such principles of selection that structure both performance and everyday life, the much talked-about attention economy (Goldhaber 1997; Crary 1999) must reorganize itself according to different criteria. These include the level of intensity of the appearance, deviation, surprise, or conspicuousness (Seitter 2002: 171–82).
However all of these criteria easily apply to the performances analyzed above.
Generally, multiple selection criteria interact in the emergent phenomena at play in the performance. The intensity of emergence, for example, becomes relevant for the actor’s presence, the ecstasy of things, and the atmosphere, to which presence and ecstasy contribute to a considerable extent. The strong concept of presence guarantees that the physical appearance of an actor dominates the space and forces the spectators to direct their attention to them. By setting free forces in themselves and the spectators, the actor generates a shared energy circulation in the space that can be physically sensed by all. In the ecstasy of things, objects are no longer self-contained but step out of and exhibit themselves. They appear as particularly intense and grab the spectators’ attention. In particular, this applies to the so-called secondary qualities of things: their colors, smells, or sounds.
Since atmosphere is constituted both by the actors’ presence as well as the ecstasy
of things, it impresses itself particularly intensely onto the perceiving subjects.
Atmosphere envelops the subjects who become immersed in them, penetrating the subjects’ bodies as light, sounds, or odors.
As demonstrated above, theatre and performance art since the 1960s have developed a number of methods marking the presence of the actors as well as the ecstasy of things. Together, they contribute to creating dense atmospheres. The created intensity is evidently not an isolated experience but can last for an entire performance. In Schleef ’s Sport’s Play production, for example, the 45-minute chorus scene maintained a high level of intensity, which even increased over its course. Merely considering the intensity factor makes it clear that performances demand a heightened level of attention from the spectators for extended time spans, if not for their entire duration.
Similarly, deviation and surprise featured in all performances. Since the performances established their temporal sequences through time brackets and rhythm, deviation was a predominant principle. In each time bracket, the beginning and ending of the activity could be determined individually. Rhythm, likewise, is defined by deviation. No repetition actually repeated that to which it referred in exactly the same way, as the Noh-walks in Wilson’s Knee plays and the various chorus scenes in Snuff demonstrated. It is typical for the performances under discussion that they directed the audience’s attention to even the smallest, most “inconspicuous” deviations, which usually elude us in our daily lives. Here, they were the focus of attention. Rhythms were created through repetition with slight variations. Constantly on the lookout for deviation, the spectator could still be surprised by its actual, unexpected appearance. The principle of deviation and surprise applied throughout the performances. It offered a special challenge for the spectators’ attention.
Finally, let us probe the criterion of conspicuousness that guides the audience’s attention. For one, we find a range of phenomena in performances, which would stand out not only in our daily lives but even in the context of sensationalist shows and spectacles, as is the case with performances involving self-injury. Within the frame of performance art events and theatre performances such actions undeniably become particularly conspicuous. As we have seen, participating animals are always conspicuously present, be it wild animals, such as the snakes, the coyote, a monkey, an African night owl, or a tarantula that even attract attention in a zoo, or domestic animals such as dogs, cats, horses, canaries, and fish, which are more common in daily life. Second, the performances also repeatedly succeeded in making the ordinary appear conspicuous. When actors appear to the spectators as embodied minds, or an ordinary coal oven dominates the spectator’s full attention, a situation occurs which Arthur Danto labeled the transfiguration of the commonplace. The commonplace appears transfigured and becomes conspicuous.
Moreover, performances repeatedly draw attention to how spectators perceive by motivating shifts between the orders of presence and representation. The art of performance evidently consists in making conspicuous all that appears within
it. Since everything in performance appears unpredictably, conspicuousness and surprise lie side by side here.
The performances under discussion thus fulfill all three criteria for capturing attention intermittently but persistently. An economy of attention in the original sense of the word does not apply here. We are dealing instead with an excess of attention, a “waste” of this precious resource. This applies not only to the actors, in whom we take a heightened level of awareness of themselves and others for granted but also to the spectators whose attention is captured by each element appearing onstage. Nevertheless, individual spectators possess their individual economy of attention, which will prevent them from being permanently alert. A
The performances under discussion thus fulfill all three criteria for capturing attention intermittently but persistently. An economy of attention in the original sense of the word does not apply here. We are dealing instead with an excess of attention, a “waste” of this precious resource. This applies not only to the actors, in whom we take a heightened level of awareness of themselves and others for granted but also to the spectators whose attention is captured by each element appearing onstage. Nevertheless, individual spectators possess their individual economy of attention, which will prevent them from being permanently alert. A