Of particular significance to my research are the ontological theories of generative performance as presented by David Davies (2004) who points out that artworks are not simply products of performance, rather an artwork is a performance in itself. For Davies an artwork is viewed firstly as a process completed by the product. When speaking of performance he is really speaking about action, not to be confused with performance art. Davies extends this performative
ontological discussion further in his thesis Art as Performance (2004) claiming that art is an action type whereby artistic content is enacted and articulated through materials. In Davies account
the product of an artist’s manipulation of a vehicular medium will then be the vehicle whereby a particular artistic statement is articulated..…The vehicle may, as in the case of Picasso’s Guernica, be a physical object, or as in the case of Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn, a linguistic structure-type, or as arguably in the case of Duchamp’s Fountain, an action of a particular kind. (Davies 2004, p59).
Davies main contention is that an artwork is a performance generated through a series of actions carried out by the artist in the execution of an artwork. His main conception is that “an artwork is a performance which articulates a content through a vehicle via an artistic medium” (Davies 2004, p 253). Davies’ theory is an effective focal point in locating the ontology of performative and
participatory art practices in this research. Davis’s theoretical anchor allows me to reflect on the extent to which my own practice negotiates spaces for performativity and participation to occur.
3.6 Radical Performativity
I acknowledge the work of Barbra Bolt (2008), who in “A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts” defends arts performative ontology when she argues that the subjectivity of the artist cannot exist before the repetitive practice of art. Through practice, the artist comes into being. She
contends that art practice is performative in that it enacts or produces 'art' as an effect. Artists' engage with, re-iterate and question the 'norms' of 'art' existing in the socio-cultural context at a particular historical juncture. Similarly, art practice conceals the conventions of which it is a repetition. The re-iteration that operates in an artist's practice produces a 'naturalized' effect, which we come to label as an artist's style (Bolt 2008).
Bolt’s work on performative, materialist ontology is informed by Martin Heidegger’s theory of art.
Bolt argues that it is in the fluidity of art practice, where the artist responds bodily, with hands and eyes, to the encounter with the materials of practice, that visual art produces real material effects.
According to Bolt art does not merely represent, it performs radically, through the praxis of encounter. In the process Bolt posits performativity as ‘real material effects’. She examines the way ‘representation’ has been constructed in twentieth-century thought, and argues that Heideggerian ‘truth’ and ‘real material effects’ result from the privileging of perception over knowledge. Bolt’s asserts that the referent can be rehabilitated in Western thought and traced in
‘real material effects’. She argues that ‘representation’ is an unstable process occurring within and outside signification, and that this very instability enables us to confidently predict that all art produces ‘real material effects’, or in other words, Heideggerian ‘truth’ (Bolt 2004).
3.7 Performativity as iteration within temporal process.
All artworks create various degrees of aesthetic experience. But from the beginning of post structuralism, an integral part of the artwork’s conception has been the formation and shaping of occurrences and events. Central to the theoretical question being examined in this research is the ontological issue related to the subject/object and event dichotomy and its authorship.
Numerous theorists have explored the idea that works of art ought be categorised as event or performative types as opposed to the products that may result from such activities or as discrete objects. Collingwood (1938), Dewey (1934) and Croce (1946) are early influential examples. In a review of Dewey’s aesthetics, Croce suggests familiar ideas to be found in Dewey’s work. One of these ideas is that there are no artistic things, but only an artistic doing, an artistic producing (Croce 1946). Similarly Jeffrey Maitland (1975) suggestion that the work of art is a “doing”, and that a work is a “performative presence” provided a versatile reference, in this research for ways performativity may be instituted to enhance artistic process. Denis Dutton states that, “As performances, works of art represent the ways in which artists solve problems, overcome obstacles, make do with available materials.” (1979. p 305).
A useful dissertation by Gregory Currie (1989) proposes that all artworks be appropriately classed as action types. According to Currie art works are types of events. Currie states that the artist does not create the work of art. Nor does the artist discover it. Rather the artist can discover a pre-existing artistic structure, but the work is an action type that the artist “performs” in so doing.
Currie explains that the heuristic path is the “way in which the artist arrived at the final
product.”(Currie1989, p 9). Neither a specific agent nor a particular time is essential to the action type that is the work of art: someone else could discover the same structure at a different time yet instantiate the same work.13 Through the work of Currie, Maitland, Croce and Dutton I have gained measurable clarification of performative, ontological procedures as they may apply to my art practice in this research project. Their writing has been helpful in focusing an interrogative procedure in my work.
Drawing from Alain Badiou in Being and Event (2005) an individual’s relationship to the present, changes upon the unintended manifestation of an event and its acknowledgment by the subject allied to it.14 The event is thus the initial spark for new subjective process and novel relationships of the individual to the world. For Badiou, the subject is a mode by which a body enters into subjective formation with regards to the production of the present. The subject represents not the individual but what the individual is ultimately capable of becoming. Through engagement with questions of subjective formation and events ontology the work of Alain Badiou has contributed to my understanding of performativity and its temporal foundations.
Žižek’s writing is particularly relevant to this research as it deals with the archetypal point of disturbance between, the “real” and “symbolic” orders, best signified by the traumatic event (Žižek, 1999) There are several theories of trauma and affect but the one this study is most concerned with elaborating is Freud’s concept of “nachtraglickiet ” or as it is frequently translated, repressed memory and deferred action (Freud,1966). For expansion of Freud’s psychoanalytical theory of repression into aesthetic concerns, I turn in this study to Foster’s discussion on the relation between pre-war and post-war avant-gardes. According to Foster the model of deferred action when applied to the historical avant-garde is a process of repression that responds and attempts to work through the initial unresolved trauma of modernity (Foster, 1996). Foster argues that the avant-garde returns to us, relocated by innovative practice in the present. Through application of Freudian analysis to contemporary discourses of ‘repression and return’ the writings of Foster and Žižek have helped me in this research to examine and disclose discursive practices in the subjective, psychoanalytic framing of performativity. This has been undertaken through the provisional blurring of boundaries between self, other and event.
3.8 Conclusion
In conclusion this review of literature is largely preoccupied with the philosophical underpinning of contemporary performative theory. The research draws upon relational-psychoanalytical,
ontological and performative theory, linked to post-structural thought and explores its implications for trans-disciplinary art practice.
13Citation from Livingston, Paisley, "History of the Ontology of Art", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/art-ontology-history/>.
14 According to Badiou subjectivity is not only formed as a consequence of an event but is dependent on its own affective conditions as a whole a bodily experience. This bodily experience is what will determine the path, procedure, existence and presentation into a new reality according to the form the subject takes.
The review of literature approaches performative events as a function of multiple, interacting forces within a field in which every part affects the whole. Three major themes have steered this review of literature. They include performativity as inter-subjective and participatory experience.
Secondly, performativity situated as a material ontology. Thirdly, performativity positioned as iteration within temporal process. They have generated discussion about self-concept in relation to others, the question of single authorship and ‘self’ as a unified and predetermined category, the performativity of lived experience, the inter-subjective, psychological dimensions inherent within performative exchange, the ontological experiences of subject-object relations and its significance as an event dichotomy.