Consecuencias de la resección de la cabeza radial

Contract with a Heckler was a performance-based collaborative project involving

two sets of physical and written participation contracts that set out conditions to be performed. Both X and myself understood the contracts as having a multi- function as: legal agreement; artwork; a durational prop, which simultaneously developed and tested the boundaries of our collaboration in terms of power relations. In this section, I emphasise discussion upon the possibilities of contractual arrangement within the second contract and highlight different moments during our project as providing useful examples of shifting power relations.

Our usage of contractual arrangement contributed to the current field of artists and performance makers who use the term ‘contract’ as a trope with a specific performativity in their practice. For example, beyond literature that deals with the contract as setting out legal rights for artists and other parties (for example, in 1971, gallery owner Seth Siegelaub produced The Artist’s Contract), artist Carey Young has produced a series of artworks using legal jargon relating to contracts to explore the relationship between artist and viewer within a visual arts context. In O’Dell’s (1998) appraisals of masochistic Performance Art from the 1970s, she suggests participation between performer and audience can be viewed as modelled upon ‘tacit or specified terms of a 'contract' (1998:2) and refers to contractual arrangements underpinning all social relations; ‘everyday agreements - or contracts - that we all make with others but that may not be in our own interests’ (ibid). Josette Feral (2002) combines the terms ‘tacit’ and ‘contract’ to suggest ‘the tacit contract between spectator and theater’ (Feral, 2002:104). There is, of course, the specific quality of such conventional set-ups in art: that the audience is either expecting or delighted or disturbed by their being broken or exceeded.

My engagement with X as a form contractual exchange provides extension to O’Dell and Feral’s work by using a physical and written contract to condition the nature of collaborative exchange. Explicit contractual arrangement was not only used to premise the two protagonists’ actions (myself and X) but to also (implicitly) organise exchange between the protagonists and the audience. During

member whose purpose was to manage the other members in the audience through the enactment of her interruption. By myself and X agreeing to keep the contract confidential from visitors and organisers until after I had delivered my presentation at which point the contract could be discussed, we had also generated a situation for the audience to reflect upon how their actions during my presentation resulted from contractual obligation unbeknown to them at the time. Power relations between X and myself during our project can be construed as existing in a perpetual state of flux and re-definition. The issuing of a physical, written and visible participation contract by X to me at the start of the project made visible the power relation between us; the contract made visible X’s assertion of authority over me. She told me she wanted to have physical hard- copy written evidence of our specific roles within the collaboration, as this would protect her in the event of a dispute between us. I took this to mean that she did not trust me. Likewise, the contract also acted as a form of self-assurance for me and could be used as a point of reference considering any disagreements or misunderstandings. I started to think about the enforceability of the contract, which would in fact make it legally binding.

Referring to slapstick as language slippage in Chapter One, X performed slapstick on me by using terminology provocatively within the contract that was ambivalent in nature to arouse my anxiety; e.g. the term ‘abusive’ is so ambivalent. What did she mean by ‘abusive’ actions? Audience members present at the start of my performative lecture (apart from X and her assistants) may indeed have construed the power relation between myself and X (in her role as an audience member) as replicating speaker/listener behaviour in terms of an audience listening attentively to the speaker. However, the audience was unaware of my engagement with X during this time (before and after her interruption). I tried not to externalise the trepidation that I was feeling at the time to the audience by way of facial expressions or punctured moments in what I am saying/displaying anxiety in the tone of my voice. The majority of the audience was unaware that my emotional investiture with X was entirely different from that which I had with everyone else in the room at that time. Although X did not reveal herself as the perpetrator of the interruption to my paper until later in the question and answer session, audiences were unaware of the power relation at play in terms of me

being at the mercy of X.

Upon X handing me a participation contract at the start of our project together my initial reaction was one of astonishment: “Gosh, how formal” I thought to myself. This sentiment was echoed by an act of physical and linguistic interruption by an audience member during a joint paper that X and I gave during Heckler in Nottingham that discussed our joint engagement with contractual arrangement. As we read aloud our paper, “How bourgeois” shouted the audience member, “A really nice bourgeois way of ordering a relationship so to heckle you are constricted to a very bourgeois order to allow the heckler to stand outside it.” I argued, in response to these comments that our heckling participation contract was useful in terms of thinking about collaboration and the problematics involved and the relationship between heckling, language and power relations. I understood the audience member’s dismissal of our contract as meaning that he thought we had written out the possibility for the heckler to be disruptive and transgressive of the implicit power structures that underpin all aspects of our lives (Foucault, 1980). I underlined my claim further by drawing upon how X and I sought exchange of power relation during my delivery of ‘Slipping and Slapsticking: In Promotion of the Heckler’. I went on to suggest that heckling is useful as a physical, visible demonstration of the implicit power relations that are at play in terms of direct exchange between performer and audience and secondly, the heckler actually use a combination of impoliteness and interruption to reinforce the status quo in terms of power relations between audience and performer. Whilst one can experience heckling taking place in different contexts, and in some more than others, e.g. stand-up comedy, Dániel Z. Kádár’s presentation, ‘Heckling: A Mimetic-Interpersonal Perspective’ that day supported my claim that understanding and analysis of the issues involved in heckling across several contexts and disciplines is scant. This underlines the significance of Contract with a Heckler in terms of demonstrating heckling as a performative technique that speaks of interdisciplinary practice.