Performance art: Thy Will Be Done

Perform: v.t. to do : to carry out duly :to act in fulfillment of : to carry into effect : to fulfil :to bring about : to render: to execute: to go through duly : to act : to play in due form. – v.i. to do what is to be done : to execute a function : to act, behave : to act a part : to play or sing : to do feats, tricks or other acts for exhibition.
Performance n. : act of performing,: a carrying out of something : something done : a piece of work : manner or success in working : execution , esp. as in exhibition or entertainment : an act or action;
(Chambers 20th Century Dictionary)

Performative, adj. One which does what it says it does.
( The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy)

Performativity: a reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effect it names.
(Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter)



A whole day long listening to a ‘performance art’ discussion, and then continued with transcribing, editing and translating it are enough for one to get sick of that term. However, as fed up as I may be of doing it, it does not prevent me to be intrigued of making a, let’s say, ‘review’ out of it. I apologize firstly if this is going to make fuss again about definitions etc and sound pretentiously theoretical, but I just stick to what Hendro Wiyanto said about our lack of theoretical grounds in analyzing this ‘performance art’ thing. So I just allow myself to offer some things that might be quite appetizing to the theory-hungry Indonesian contemporary art discourse.

Basically, it started with a question of how the word ‘performance’ is said and done. One point that pretty much disturbed me when trying to get an overlook at the discussion is an etymological problem of how the participants treated the word ‘perform’ or ‘performance’ itself. The term ‘performance art’, inevitably, is something that’s imported from the (English-speaking) Western art discourse. I have provided the English definition in the quotation above. It can be taken from there how the words ‘perform’ and ‘performance’ are implemented a bit differently between the Indonesian and the English language, which may not really be a problem in the matter of creation process, but may be so when it comes to encountering perceptions. The first, essential definition of ‘perform’, as we can see, is ‘’to do’ (transitive verb, action verb which takes direct object). On the other hand, ‘the Indonesian term of ‘performance art’ is– I don’t know if it’s already official or not, ‘seni rupa pertunjukan’, in which ‘pertunjukan’ correlates more to the intransitive verb (action verb which takes indirect objects) definition of ‘perform’: ‘to do what is to be done; to act, play, exhibit’.

Now, before getting to sound more like a dictionary salesman, I stop there to see the evidence of how meaning works out along the transits between layers, either within one language or, even particularly, when it’s translated to another. So here I am not trying to object to the Indonesian application of the term, compromising with this heyday of relativist discourses, where meanings and words have been ‘liberated’. Nevertheless, to look at it another way, this ‘relativist spirit’ that were shown by many of the performers in the discussion, is what at the same time bugs me, when I come to position myself as the audience. In several cases they indicated a reluctance to define what they were actually doing,: “whether it’s regarded performance art, or ‘theater’, or ‘music’, or ‘stage performance’, or whatever”.

I acknowledge the fact, though, that historically speaking, the artists have already explained the first tendencies of performance art here, as it developed (seemingly) unintentionally to enter the label of (Western-based) performance art, which is fairly admissible. However, as a ‘specifically targeted’ audience (this issue was brought up in some parts of the discussion), I find it hardly acceptable if I don’t get a clue of what I want to see. I don’t want to see ‘whatever’. I want to see ‘performance art’. Face it, it’s an established genre. And it is already institutionalized. And, no matter how lacking it is, it has its audience. If not, there wouldn’t be any occasion like this ‘Performance Art Discussion’ at ruangrupa, or, which is a more important issue, we really should rethink about the way we use terms.

So what I’m seeing is a conflict between the fact that performance art in Indonesia, as described in the discussion, has been historically developed at the beginning without an intention to adopt the discipline that had preceded in the West, and the fact that, in the end, it’s established as such, joining the label. This conflict is, for me, what basically grounds the way the artists argue about their different treatments of their media (‘stage’, ‘machines’, ‘digital’, ‘banana leaf’, ‘toygun’, ‘camera’ ‘lighting’), content (‘messages’, ‘social/political issues’, ‘entertaining effect’, ‘surprise factor’) and public (or audience). It shows their different application of the word ‘performance’, a word that somewhat missed to be requestioned in this discussion. Most of the time of the discussion took part largely in talking about the background, the medium and the public.

However, that is not what I want to argue, it’s just that by trying to overlook at it, I find myself raising back the perspective of ‘performance’ as a ‘doing’, seeing the different ways of how the artists ‘do’ that word. Thinking about how the Word is Done, or vice versa – how the Deed is Said, leads me to one standpoint of looking at this issue, i.e. speech-act theory, the performative aspect and the performativity of performance. Because performance art itself is about speech-act. And actually, in the discussion, the issue of performativity made cameo appearances here-and-there in incognito. I highlighted some of the most obvious parts, such as Afrizal Malna’s description of the performing culture, Reza Afisina’s utterance about ‘daily life’ performances, and Amanda Katharine Rath’s argument about the site-specificity aspect of performance works. What they referred to (consciously or not), for me, is about performativity.

So what are performative and performativity? I can’t find them in my 1981 English dictionary and we will always find them getting a red underline in the Microsoft Word. They are actually parts of the domain of the ‘hyped’ terminologies in the critical theory world, just as ‘discourse’ or ‘deconstruction’. It was JL Austin, a British linguistic theorist who firstly introduce the word in his speech-act theory, ‘performative’, i.e. saying and doing at the same time, which then produces signs. The most famous example for this is: I do take this woman as my lawful wedded wife’. ‘I do’ is an action, not a report or a description of the deed. It’s the same like saying ‘I promise’, by saying it, you’re not describing ‘a promise’, you’re doing it.

Later on, this grammatical concept was developed by some theorists and philosophers after Austin, who applied it into a broader scope of analysis than merely linguistic. Derrida reformulated Austin’s concept of performative which includes illocutionary act (utterance invokes a conventional force) and its consequences – Perlocutionary effects, i.e. when saying we’re actually doing something (or vice versa) and causing something afterwards (in the form of affect or inviting reaction); Say-Do-Make Something Happen-all at the same time.

He used this as a reference to define communication (which seemed to be taken a great deal in this discussion, since it brought up more about public interaction and public space): “[…] communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and “communication of consciousnesses”. […] But indeed (we are witnessing) a more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth etc, would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such.” So communication in this case is not designated to transfer or exchange meanings, or in this case, deliver messages. Messages are effects produced by communication as a performative operation. Arahmaiani mentioned about ‘contentless’ performances can contain content as well., and this kind of notion might well explain it. On the other hand, Amanda raised an interesting issue about interrupting the public space: what would happen if a performance is done by displacing it from its specific time and space, what kind of effect would it produce to the audience in the different space (and to him as well), or would it produce any effect at all?

From that point, in other words, what can a single performance, which brings its own specificity, do to a space that already has its own performativity, its own construction of norms? The notion of performativity as a mode of construction also was firstly offered by Derrida, who (as what he usually did) also deconstructed Austin’s categories of performatives which separate ordinary speech act performances with theatrical citational practices, where the former is closer to ‘an eventual reality in a specific time and space’, and the latter as a hollow, ‘unreal’ performative. Derrida regarded both as structured by a general iterability, a generalized theatricality common to the stage and world alike. He argued that a performative can enforce an effect and have power to establish norms if it’s reiterated.

The power of performativity as a construction process of constructing meanings/representations/identity was taken into a very great account by Judith Butler, saying that construction is a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms. Things like identity, values, gender, or even religion, in this case are performativity. It can be seen in this context that performative may somewhat be equivalent to the Foucauldian notion of discourse, whereas discourse concerns more with knowledge, performative concerns with deed. The relation of being and doing, where doing becomes being. It is like a different way of taking a Cartesian formula :‘I do, therefore I am’. From this standpoint, it can be seen that religiousness, or morality is not a state of being, but doing. The doing itself, in the end is also trapped in a conflict within the text. Afrizal’s argument about ‘the war of codes’, I guess, refers more or less to this issue. And it can be likely said that nowadays, the‘war’ is intensifying because media replaces the body in reiterating the performativity of the culture.

It was reflected in the discussion which moved further to argue about the ‘consciousness of the medium’. Now, it leads to another query, what’s this ‘medium’ in question, is it more concerned with the medium as ‘material’ (as gadgets, tools, objects etc; Reza seemed fond of calling it ‘alat’: equipment/apparatus), or is it the very essential medium of performance itself, i.e. the body, in its specific space and its specific time? This is important since the artists showed a great emphasis on the somewhat progressive idea of ‘exploring possibilities’. What possibilities, and what to explore? Is it the exploration of what they do, or what they use? It sounds like a validation of the McLuhanistic hype of media as the extension of man, an entity that determines the way the world run (McLuhan’s ‘Medium is the Message’ was referred in this point of the discussion). Hasn’t there been enough exploration of the media? What more to be invented? Isn’t the world already full with things? It sounds like the body alone just cannot do anything anymore. Do we really take McLuhan that seriously?

Being someone from this indigenous/globalized half-breed space – who has troubles teaching her parents to use emails, I have to say that I personally don’t. But I can see that at least the fashion of the world, including contemporary art practice, does.

So with this media-crazed cultural performativity, is it the end of performance?, as Peggy Phelan, a contemporary of Butler, says:

“You will perform your death once, supposedly, but it will circulate for its witnesses in the performativity of death as a technological, historical, psychic and political experience. That is why death in 1999 means something very different than it meant in 1943. And that is an extremely important thing to keep in mind as when we talk about performativity, which is what we are mostly talking about these days, we are losing performance. We are losing the singularity of a particular person’s act and that’s a big deal, people should notice that. That’s an important sliding.”

I leave the statement open for argument. I relate this to the point that was also taken into a great account in the discussion, i.e. about resistance. If there were any resistance nowadays, perhaps it would be a resistance against this hype of ‘The end of everything’, where everything is just merely reiteration or citation, and life then, including art, becomes boring. And I guess it is true that we are facing this situation nowadays where people get bored more easily and more frequent. And art still can’t change the world anyhow. We can only try to save its ass from becoming more boring.

So for me, in the case of performance art, to what extend can performance art lead us to, is it only up to the question of performing things with objects (or discourse) that is already there in our surroundings, or can the performance itself still function as a medium to evaluate the performativity of our culture? Does the body still matter to make something more effectual like, let’s say, defining/formulating new performatives, the possibility of creating a new sign/language, to the world that is suffocated by reiterated signs. Afrizal mentioned about the new generation getting choked by discourses and performance art as a visual language, thus maybe that’s it. The possibility that it can offer is that it still serves as a subject that can lead us to think about what more that the body can say and do. Of all the things that’s been constructed and deconstructed, it may still create a reconstruction of what’s said and done, or maybe, what seems to be unspoken and undone.



Farah Wardani is a writer, lecturer, and art curator. She was an editor at the Karbon Journal until 2006 and editor at the Visual Arts magazine until 2007. She is now the Executive Director of the Indonesian Visual Art Archives in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.



Reference
1. JL. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 1975
2. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context” in The Margins of Philosophy, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982.
3. Andrew Parker & Eve Kosowsky Sedgwick, Performativity and Performance, Routledge, New York, 1995
4. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Routledge, New York, 1993
5. Marschall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, MIT Press, Massachussets, 1994.
6. Henry Rogers and David Burrows (ed.), Making a Scene, ARTicle Press, Birmingham, 1999.

I also recommend this more trivial kind of writing on performativity and pop culture, for any of you interested enough to check it out online: Nathan Tipton, Judih Butler Meets Cow and Chicken: The Cartoon Network’s Performative Postmodern Condition, http://to-the-quick-binghamton.edu/issue%202/cow.html


APOLOGIA
Penulis yang sekaligus merangkap redaksi dan penerjemah mohon maaf karena tak bisa menyediakan versi Bahasa Indonesia dari tulisan ini. Selain karena keterbatasan tempat, juga karena penulis merasa tak berhak menerjemahkan beberapa terminologi penting yang digunakan. Dengan ini semoga hal tersebut dapat dimaklumi.