the Performative mark

This blog entry began life after EnSituDanza raised some questions about the project's development and flow as a comment on the Opening Thoughts page, specifically "So, what is the curating criteria in this call?". At that point it seemed to us that the word Performative was being used rather freely and this page was begun. Whether it solves any questions out there remains to be seen...

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At this rather late stage let us be clear about the words we use

  • performance as in performance art, otherwise known as body art, live art and figuring names like from way back, Vito Acconci and closer in time, Marina Abramovic.
  • performative meaning something that is not just descriptive, but also has the power to bring about a new reality or change in the world. It is often used in the context of language, where certain utterances or statements have the ability to perform an action or create a new state of affairs, rather than simply describe an existing one. For example, when a judge declares "guilty" in a courtroom, the statement not only describes the defendant's legal status but also performs the action of convicting them.

Good Question: shouldn't all art be performative? Don't we all try and change the world, our neighbourhood, our minds, even our bank-accounts? It might be easier to ask of any specific art work whether it does it for us as viewers, whether we "get" what the other artist is going for 

our first response to a work of art may be the puzzled exclamation 'uh,' and only later, as we grasp its meaning, the cry of 'ah ha'

And for a guess, perhaps the divergence in response to our art is the reason artists don't get rich, but the absence of obligation to understand an art work keeps us sane. And when we don't understand our own artwork we keep going.

So in the context of performance and performance art let us go back to where this project began 

... this project is about that moment in a performance when the reality of the performance is captured / made real / actualized at the instigation of the performer ...

The problem here is to collapse the duration, the length of time of the performance into a single frame; to make the frame stand for the whole performance. 

This project is destined to end up as a hard-copy book because that's the business that we are in and because Aldo likes the printed form and the illustrations for that book will be selected from the contributors to this blog. With that in mind we're looking for images that seem to do that trick with time in freezing the moment in a performance, and now in the present spark debate and discussion. 

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