The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art by Bertie Ferdman;Jovana Stokic;

Author:Bertie Ferdman;Jovana Stokic;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350057586
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 3.8.2 Catalina Insignares, us as a useless duet, 2017. Photo by Catalina Insignares. Cards by Zuzana Zabkova.

These pieces by Tunemyr and Insignares are aware that infrastructure appears, with interpersonal encounters and social relations, through practices that are maintained and supported in their durational temporality and usefulness. Only in this way can it also be possible to change the ways that performance artworks are happening to us, and how and where do we meet them. This awareness was at the core of the feminist explorations at the end of the 1970s, and it is hauntingly present in the films of Sander even today, especially in their atmosphere and feeling. All these works, even if made in different periods, show that a political problem exists in those practices, a problem of subjectivity, which can be detected by the failure of the environment and support structures for autonomous life. But what they offer is a stubborn persistence and desire to continuously shift the ways that it is possible to do something and be together differently. These works examine and experiment with the ways that art can be attended to in our precarious, troubled, and unstable world. They confirm how fruitful it is to think about the labor of the artist in proximity to a feminist understanding of both the labor of care and the labor of reproduction. Performances that challenge the labor of artists are mostly works that exist with limited infrastructural support, but exactly because of that, they establish a set of new relationships. They exist within instability; they disable and live with it at the same time. They challenge the lack of support without obsessive need for repair. Instead, they are simply ambivalently there, persisting, resonating, and caring.

NOTES

1. Similar issues were recently addressed in “Performance and Reproduction,” special issue of TDR (Capper and Schneider 2018).

2. As a representative of the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Council for the Liberation of Women), she held a historic speech at the conference of young representatives of the German Socialist Democratic Party in 1968. This speech is known as the Tomato Speech (Tomatenrede) and marks the beginning of the feminist movement in Germany. Before her speech, Sander threw some tomatoes on the stage, because all the speakers at the conference were men.

3. Man on Wire alludes to the work of the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit who gained fame for his high-wire crossing between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City (1974). See http://www.manonwire.com for details.

4. The crane as a means of production is similar to another iconic object of trade and global economic growth—the container. Its function reminds us of the minimalist invention, which was so thoroughly analyzed in the film The Forgotten Space of Allan J. Sekula and Noël Burch, where the container is positioned as the central agent and as the embodiment of the organization of large quantities of commodities and social, migratory, and economic flows (The Forgotten Space 2010).

5. “Reproduction” here is used as

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