On “quality” and politics-of-form qualified by performance art
12/04/2016
Over in the literary world, prolific novelist Joyce Carol Oates ruffled feathers in 2016 by claiming artists could “thrive” on the “turbulence and estrangement” caused by the corporate coup of the US government and the global rise of fascism.[1] The pale[2] hope that there will now be an increase in the “quality” of art is all too common now amongst artists across disciplines, essentially ending a sincere conversation about resistant tactics with something like “well, punk’s going to be great…”[3] or “at least these disaffected bourgeois art students have something to make work about now…”
Normalizing and placating attitudes aside, there is something interesting here in terms of “increasing quality,” as “quality” is a concept that has long operated in particularly troubled configuration with “performance art” and its politics of dissidence, resistance, and de-commodification.
For a discipline (“performance art”) that has long been accused of obscenity and contribution to the “deskilling” of art at the very least,[4] ideas of quality and qualification are rarely centralized within our own discourse; we avoid the excluding and hierarchizing consequences of making quality judgments in general, recognizing that qualification schemas for “high art” are dominantly driven by capitalist values, white supremacy, colonial imperialism, Western/Judeo-Christian xenophobia, and misogyny, thereby maintaining oppressive orders of authorization, legitimacy, and value solely in terms of free market demand and on the very terms of enculturation that we so often reject.
However, when we do begin to investigate and theorize alternative definitions and schemas for “qualification” and “quality,” we may find methodological strength and hopefully expand our practical theorization regarding how and what performance art does and can do politically, perhaps beyond “degenerate posturing.”
In a previous text, I wrote that “Simultaneous fitting of form to ideal(ology) and taking on of responsibility are working definitions for ‘quality/qualification,’ performing alternatives to capitalist judgment and authorization schemas.”[5] Syntactical messiness of this statement aside, I’d like to unpack this conception now into a more thorough discussion of quality, performance art, and political agency.
FITTING OF FORM TO IDEOLOGY: HOW IS FORMATION PRACTICED AND HOW ARE FORMS “FIT”?
Susanne Langer echoes Bertrand Russell in her study of forms,[6] making a distinction between knowledge of things and knowledge about things. The former knowing is performing through sensuous relationship and somatic contact, while the latter forms of knowing are performed respective to laws and potentials for transformation. For example, we may know water sensuously to be wet, cold or warm, metallic or sweet, as we feel it meeting our lips and submerging our tongue, but we may also know H2O as a substance which may be in the form of liquid, solid, or gas. Water has material or “sensuous” form as well as logical or “intellectual” form.
The mind-body problems that this distinction re-raises are plethoric, but let’s defer this complication for a short moment; if we apply this distinction between materiality/sensuality and logicality/intellectuality to “performance art forms,” we may see a difference between feelingly “knowing” our situated, temporal, and sensuous tasks, “feeling the energy of the room” and sensations (performance artists often call such foci “presence”) and knowing of some art historical contexts, socio-political lenses, disciplinary frames, and analyses (performance artists often call these foci “discursive”)
Focusing solely on sensuous presence allows us to directly embody and practice states of becoming but it also reduces “reality” to that which is sensed by persons, advocating a radical constructivity[7] that can easily slide into solipsism or T***p-style self-serving lies. On the other hand, focusing solely on discursive “framing” or critical analysis of art-works distanciates our sensing and perceiving organs, reducing “reality” to that which is objective and autonomous from those constructing “it.”
The latter discursive emphasis is often seen as far more damaging to the ideology and intentions of performance art and its situators. The latter emphasis may easily be seen as a colonizing mentality that flattens human being into components and resources, turning over individual and social bodilies into materials ripe for extraction and engineering. Causing closure of performativities into distinct, objective “art works,” non-sensuous analysis may also restrict and deny the affective and energetic qualities of in-situ performance, commodify images for appropriative and marketable purposes, and/or condense the multiplicit sensing and perceiving agencies of the persons present into singular, coercive interpretations.[8]
On the other hand, however, insistence on any “totality of the sensuous” can also be exclusionary, reductive, coercive, and extractive; it may be seen as a “post-colonial” (as opposed to “de-colonial”) mentality, which supposes an impossible ideal state of open, organic becoming that excludes cognitive and analytic human capacities from views of “the natural,” reinforcing nativism, orientalism, and a transcendentalism that lifts responsibility from the shoulders of artists for the implications and affects of their actions.
For example, several contemporary performance art ensembles claim to be practicing “ritual” and “trance” performance art, yet their works have been consistently hurtful and offensive to people of color as these performance artists — opening themselves to the “automatic forces of nature,” i.e. dominant forces of conception and image — tend to “séance,” as white, male, upper-class persons, only their own most immediately tangible racist, myogynist (etc) images and views. Here, some self-analysis and “distanciated perspective” is required to contextualize, judge between and discard some easily-generated images, and pre-model actions considerately with regards for sensuous and intellectual knowledges different from and beyond the artists’ own.
Of course, a balance between presence and discursivity is sought, between being in time and contextualizing, between feeling and thinking. Here, of course, we find part of the ongoing pressing need to deconstruct mind-body dichotomies and to conjoin “sensuous” and “intellectual” practices and ways of seeing/feeling/doing.
It is such “balancing acts” that involve formal qualification. Before, during, and after performance, we are practicing balancing, fitting our forms to situation, presence of persons, context, and other potentially elemental qualification schematics.
It is further such formal qualification that enables “political” agency. Chantal Mouffe is perhaps the latest in a long line of “leftist” political scholars to describe political agency as the ability to put thinking into action.[9] This “putting of thinking into action” requires schematic or systems feeling-thinking which evaluates both correlationships between schemas/systems and the actions they qualify while qualifying the consequences of actions in terms of negative and positive qualities.
NEGATING AND POSITING QUALIFICATION SCHEMAS
“Any thing that has a definite form is constructed in a definite way. This does not mean, of course, that it has been deliberately put together by somebody.”[10]
If we propose that formation of “quality performance art” is practiced constructively — e.g. the formation of some temporal and spatial situation — when artists fit forms to qualification schemas (or directly do not), we can then ask at least two interesting compound questions of ourselves as performance artists:
1.) what are “our” qualification schemas? And how are these politically resistant to, re-constructive of, resilient to, and different from dominant senses of quality?
2.) what are some forms of performance art? And how are forms of performance art positively “fit” (or “of quality within”) their own qualification schemas?
In terms of the first question, towards defining and describing qualification schematization and them deliberating some of “our own” schemas, we find that resistance is easier to parse than intentional (re)constructivity.[11] This is partially because we may already have “sensuous” contact and experience with the negative (suffering-causing) affects and consequences of “existing” schemas, allowing us to then enter “discursive” processes of analysis, deconstruction, and reconfiguration.
Our particular current conditions of post-consensual capitalism must therefore provide our first array of “qualification schemas” that can be resisted and re-imagined. This array most generally defines “quality” as viability within particular modes of production involving competition, supply-and-demand relationships, consistency of product, and other more “conceptual” values like efficiency and ease of distribution, and reinforcement of the empowered, functionality within operant existing systems, as well as ability to “dominate” or “control” senses and perceptions via entertainment while remaining politically complicit and passive.
Qualification schemas here demand forms that successfully compete for attention, distribution, and popular consumption. Consequently, these schemas tend to demand performance art forms which are entertaining, sexually titillating, visually dazzling, and otherwise “pleasure-causing,” in their attempts to appeal the most deeply to the greatest number of people (supposedly). We can relate such capitalist qualification schemas to the most dangerous of “totally sensuous” forms, those which appeal to “common tastes” and “self-serving impulses,” avoiding any self-criticality or complexity in favor of “populist” biohegemony. Let us call this general schema “fast food franchise qualifications.”
Other capitalist qualification schemas for forms of performance art are more complex and difficult to summarize. We may initially say that they demand “normality,” “knowability,” or “familiarity,” tending to value and model conservative and conservationist forms which are easily recognizable as “art,” but also may fit in with dominant senses of “morality” and/or “beauty.” These qualification schemas may demand performance art forms which fit “universal ideals” and “normative ideologies” of ruling classes, corporate interests, and authorized persons, either reinforcing existing beliefs and values or at least passive and sublimated to and within these. Let us call some generally “acceptability” “judgment-oriented” or “hegemonically-demanding” schemas “county fair qualifications.”
Third, and finally (for now, though of course there are many other ways of describing and defining what we are talking about here), we can perhaps delineate qualification schemas which are “logistically” viable, with regards to capitalist modes of production. Economies of attention and modes of production are extremely demanding here, viewing artistic practice purely as production of luxury goods and products. Gallery, auction, and private collector models here form the “art worlds” which see performance art as mostly “unfit” in form, only rarely commodifiable enough to participate as “quality products.” Here, performance art is largely seen as an art-historical movement[12] producing some valuable celebrity artists, some ephemera that may be fit in form to gallery exhibitions, and little else. We might call these schemas “gallery exhibition qualifications.”
Since we are using these tongue-in-cheek descriptors for qualification schemas, we could possibly also describe some schemas which demand that performance art forms be qualified as “real estate,” (mapped territory pressing forth in manifest destiny-style towards more complete human ownership of experience) as “steam valves” (forced transgressions devised to maintain the structural integrity of a machine) as “strip club” (stylized staging of sexuality designed to maintain cis/het/masc-dominant sexual power paradigms) and so on. Each way we might (following each to our own values) describe “negative” qualification schemas allows us to imagine some resistant or constructively “positive” qualification schemas and their correlatable/demanded “fit” forms.
For the sake of this text, I will constrain such description to these three general qualification schemas that I have called “fast food franchise,” “county fair” and “gallery exhibition.” I have chosen these three labels due to their combinative fabrication as types of “conditioned/conditioning environments” which of course first involve specific modes of production but also tend to be coercive situations regarding who is there and what they are doing there. When we call these schemas “coercive” or say that they “demand” certain forms of performativity, we are talking about how qualification schemas define quality, thereby demanding that forms (including actions, persons, relationships, anything and any way involving performativity) become fit in form (qualified) in order to be considered of quality.
Qualification schemas of post-consensual capitalism rarely allow any “sensual” agency, just as the qualification schemas of white supremacy do not allow any intellectual agency regarding definitions (or deconstructions) of whiteness. In general, I am proposing that performance art resist any qualification schemas which qualify within strict role-paradigms (i.e. fast-food worker vs. hamburger consumer, carnie vs. fair-goer, artist vs. collector), are easily recognizable as the “kind of thing it is,” (i.e. marked by a globally-recognizable logo, the towering ferris wheel and pens of pigs, the whitebox space filled with white people, etc), and demand, ultimately, absolutist fitting of performative forms (i.e. making and eating a particular selection of mimetic food products, staging judgment of animal bodies and vegetables and riding rides, looking at art and drinking wine…). Within such schemas, doing anything “otherwise” in relationship with situated qualifications, for example reading aloud at McDonalds[13] submitting oneself instead of a pig to a 4-H fair and staying in a pen all week[14] or masturbating in a diaper with a visual impairment cane amongst dressed-up patrons at a Chelsea gallery[15] reveals the strict, scripting ways in which “qualification schemas” emerge in governance and in-formation/formulation of how, who, what, and why some qualified or unqualified “performances” are performed (included as “of quality”) or not performed (excluded as “not of quality”).
Specifically, I am identifying forms of qualification schematization here which I deem “negative,” including role-playing, normalization/ritualization of situation, and coercive/extractive behavioral engineering. I believe that these formal aspects are not inherent to qualification schemas, though they are so common and dominant that they have come to define qualifying schematization at large.
Moving now into attempts to design our “own” qualification schemas, we must ask, why construct or fit our forms to qualification schemas at all? Why not simply ignore and resist any and all way in which performativity is qualified or schematized?
To this, I can only refer back to the last paragraph of the first section of this text and then respond extremely subjectively, in alignment with very personal values, ethics, and beliefs. Perhaps acknowledgement that each “conditional/conditioning environment” or “qualification schema” must be constructed situationally, contextually, and balance somatic/sensuous/sensory knowledges with intellectual/contextualizing/discursive knowledges emergent from and practiced performatively by persons not business plans or franchise contracts or agricultural-cum-military clubs or markets, does something to further qualify what “positive qualification” might mean.
Further, barring the infusion of a huge number of other factors, respective to each of the above (limited and generalized) descriptions and definitions of “a qualification schema,” I propose that we are seeking qualification schemas that are qualified by their ability to alternate, resist, and re-construct qualification schematics. These abilities to qualify do, in my view, require some schematization; it is less possible to practice “arbitrary qualities” and simply hope that, feelingly, sensually, we can become “otherwise” from extremely coercive, extractive, and controlling schemas which indeed position themselves as wholly natural, normal, and “of quality” qualification schemas and largely condition our deepest mentalities, fears, desires, and ways of behaving.
It is my hope then, that by targeting individual elements of “negative” qualification schemas, we can thus perform responsibly in ways that directly qualify these negative qualification schemas, even if we cannot entirely escape qualification as an element of per(as per particulars)form(in-formed)ance-construction.[16]
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY: ANYONE CAN MAKE PERFORMANCE ART
Moving through the “negative” abilities of “negative” qualification schemas to enforce, model, demand, and in-form 1.) strict role-player paradigms, 2.) absolute normativity as the “kind of thing this is” and 3.) absolutist fitting of performative forms to singular schematics, we may construct particularly-resistant qualification schemas.
In terms of role-player paradigms, we reify this old accusation about performance art being a “deskilled art” first of all. We do not demand that performance artists hold MFAs or produce any objectively-virtuosic ability. Further, we do not even maintain the strict divide (oftentimes) between “artist” and “audience member.” Along spectrums between “artificial hell” forms of participation (which are far less resistant to qualification schematics for role-playing) and mutually constructive or “co-constructive” qualification, we refuse functionalist and hierarchical views of social hegemony, authority, and re-conceptualize how sensual and intellectual knowledges are performatively materialized and recognized.
Hence, for example, an idea or image is not “of quality” because it is owned, produced or made by an over-educated cis white man, it is “of quality” only when it is of formative qualification to the sensual and intellectual practices and processes of those related to the particular idea or image. Here, particularly resistant qualification schemas do not qualify forms of behavior or action based on the institutional qualification of the person behaving or acting, rather upon the “qualification” of processes of ideation and imagination to generate further (related and iterative) processes. What is this? How am I hearing this? Why is this person doing this? How does this make me feel and why?
In terms of absolute normativity as to the “kind of thing this is,” we may seek anti-normalizing qualities which are neither complicit within existing designs for events and artforms nor immediately recognizable as schemas for particular behaviors. A distinct lack of expectations for normative behaviors is actually quite difficult to situate, requiring a formal coherency or even conflation between artformation and event-formation, life-as-art framings[17] and considerate positioning of temporal and spatial elements such as start-times, duration of “a performance,” dispersed, obscured, selected, or conditional abilities to observe or experience performativities, and/or forms of discursive framing which destabilize and diversify interpretations as to appropriate or potential occurances and behaviors.
Hence, for example, we may call performance art gatherings “conferences” or “thinktanks,” “birthday parties”[18] or “monster truck rallies”[19] so as to scatter and diversify preconceptions and expectations. Instead of a qualification schema asking how well an artwork or produced/presented performance fits the pleasures and interests of an assembled audience or fits its forms to the modes of production of a theater festival or museum exhibition, particularly resistant qualification schemas allow correlational or “presently discursive” qualification, perhaps communicable only in those moments described by performance artists and other performance-situators (witnesses, participants) as “those moments when I understand myself alive.” Here, we are breathing in rhythm, feeling our bodies jerk in sympathetic proprioception with other bodies, wincing as that razor seems to slice across her skin and ours simultaneously. How is this happening? Where am I? How are we here? How am I becoming?
In terms of resisting qualification schemas demanding and in-forming absolutist fitting of performative forms to singular schematics, we refer sensuously and recursively to texts, discourses, diagrams and scores, and other practices which conflate “performance art works” with their processes and modes of situation (nee “modes of production”). Here, qualification schemas are specific, directly correlated with particular forms, and generally involving what we might call causative/Caucused qualification. While this semantic jumble stinks of an entire other essay, here we can briefly say that each “performance art” in-forms its own qualification schematic just as each qualification schematic is sensually and intellectually carried, held, embodied, projected, and performed by person(s), thereby in-forming its own “art-ifice” of performance.
Hereby, for example, texts such as these dissolve into particular methodological speculations, only able to provide “examples” of how one might go about methodological qualification schematization. Personally, I am deeply stimulated by attempts to ideate, in-form, and speculate collectively, somatically, sensually, intellectually, and discursively in qualification. I believe that feeling-thinking speculation and ideation as performance art are “of quality” to qualification schemas for modes of “putting of thinking into action” which enable political transformation, reconfiguration, and re-qualification of forms.
IN CONCLUSION
So what does it mean for the “quality of performance art” to “increase” in such dangerous and oppressive times? Over the past year, many organizers and fellow performance artists have agreed that we are seeing the “quality” of performance art increasing. By this, perhaps we mean that performance artists are more and more able to infiltrate and respond to a broader range of contexts,[20] that qualification schemas and performance forms are becoming more mutually constructive, that our causes are becoming more directly interrelated with our actions, that our political abilities to feel-think and presently-perceive through live situational qualification and perform mutually-considerate formalization are complexifying and proliferating.
[1] See original Tweet and responses here: https://twitter.com/JoyceCarolOates/status/793816434073739264
[2] pun intended
[3] They’re not wrong, check out LIBRARY, for example: https://newyorkcitylibrarycard.bandcamp.com/album/pussy-sic
[4] also maintaining a long history of censorship and targeting as “obscene,” “Satanic” “sex-worshipping” etc, see this most recent cluster of faux-journalistic propaganda: http://www.dangerandplay.com/2016/11/03/podesta-emails-reveal-clintons-inner-circle-as-sex-cult-with-connections-to-human-trafficking/
[5]https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzOM9IHiBu_AVFBNS2ZmcnNqU1E/view?usp=sharing
[6] Langer, Susanne, An Introduction to Symbolic Logic (1953)
[7] Ernst von Glasersfeld for a discussion of the difference between radical constructivity and “general solipsism” Radical Constructivism (1995)
[8] see Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966)
[9] Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (1993)
[10] ibid, Susanne Langer
[11] primacy of “the negative” is always an interesting problem for radical politics. See Diana Coole Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (2000)
[12] see Roselee Goldberg’s art-historical writing and PERFORMA
[13] see Miles Pflanz, Elinor Thompson, and others, LONG CENTURY (2013) https://youtu.be/EKR06xCqnss
[14] one of my own scores
[15] see Uniska Wahala Kano, image and video in caption above.
[16] removal of the word “art” from the tail of our terminology moves us more in this direction; it is arguable that “art” is already a word complicit within and fit to forms of quality we deem negative.
[17] See Linda Mary Montano
[18] See Tsedaye Makonnen’s CAKE
[19] see TRUX, by Sophie Sotsky, Ben Demarest, Ashur Rayis, Lillie De, Ra Schapira, and
Alexander Symes (image above)
[20] see Marilyn Arsem’s Some Thoughts On Teaching Performance Art in Five Parts, http://totalartjournal.com/archives/638/some-thoughts-on-teaching-performance-art-in-five-parts/
