Regarding a performance in "All future time was always better", by Wilma Ehni.

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Intervention by Emilio Santisteban in the discussion of the exhibition "All future time was always better" by Wilma Ehni, on February 20, 2018, Luis Miro Quesada Garland Hall, Miraflores, Lima, Peru.

Performance is fundamentally a social and cultural phenomenon, and within this broader context, we find artistic and aesthetic performance. We will discuss the latter, bearing in mind that it is embedded within and, therefore, shaped by the former.

I will propose two common assumptions to question regarding artistic aesthetic performance, as well as four simple concepts that can—among others, surely—serve as elements of judgment on this category and its realizations, and I will suggest, based on this, the obsolescence of art performance as we know it.

A common initial assumption surrounding performance art is that it is essentially a form of contemporary art. In other words, we assume that any artist who performs is a contemporary artist. Questioning this assumption seems pointless, but it is not, since it is worth remembering that being contemporary, contrary to popular belief, is not the same as being current and up-to-date.

In this regard, Giorgio Agamben says—quoting Roland Barthes's statement on Nietzsche, "The contemporary is the untimely"—three key points: First, the contemporary person casts an anachronistic gaze upon their own time, observing it from a distance, distancing themselves from their era in such a way as to mark the most recent as archaic. Second, that nevertheless, the contemporary person's gaze is fixed on their own time (they do not dream of other decades), and this gaze sees darkness where others see the light of the era. Darkness not due to an absence of beams, but because these beams have not yet reached from very far away, the darkness seen by the contemporary being an uncertain light. Third, that the contemporary person feels directly addressed by this darkness-light that has not yet arrived, being capable of transforming their time, placing it in relation to other times. In short, the contemporary person is better suited to their time than anyone else because they see its dissonance, while others only celebrate or lament the times.

On this very issue, Javier Gomá distinguishes between the contemporary and the coetaneous. The contemporary differs ethically, ideologically, culturally, and sensibilities from the coetaneous, even though they occur within the same chronological time. At first glance, the contemporary would correspond to the hegemonic mentality of the era, while the coetaneous would be that which exists in the present but is governed by past mentalities. Nothing could be further from the truth: what we usually identify at first glance as contemporary, in the sense of being up-to-date, with the latest creations, the most recent thought, is in reality already coetaneous, that is, coexisting. But the contemporary, Gomá tells us, has their attention focused on the moon being pointed at, and not on the finger pointing at the moon ; that is, the contemporary has their mindset focused on what is critical in the present in order to move toward the future. In the critical sense, insofar as crisis is painful change and insofar as critical thinking is adventurous, there lies that proto-enlightened darkness of which Agamben speaks.

This relates to what Raymond Williams has told us about the cultural dynamics between the hegemonic, the residual and its crisis, and the emergent. The contemporary individual would be one who, recognizing themselves as a prisoner of the hegemonic, of the guiding mentality of the elites of their time, struggles from within the emergent, seeking a different mentality that—connecting with the archaic aspect of the contemporary as described by Agamben—can even arise from a rescue of the residual, of what has been defeated, subjugated, when in it lies the immemorial.

So, is performance art contemporary art? No, but it can be if it distances itself from the hegemony of performance art. The contemporary performance artist wouldn't be the one who exclaims "Perform or die!", witnessing the ecstasy in performance art that surrounds us in current art; the contemporary performance artist engages with the pain of seeing the darkness of performance art in their time, recognizing in forms that were once liberating the pastiches that drag hegemonic performance art toward historical modernism and even toward the nineteenth-century romanticism that pervades us today in that watered-down and distorted form that is permanent adolescent narcissism.

Some will demand, “And what alternative do you offer us!” The starting point is inevitably the hegemonic prescription, current though not contemporary, that performance is a hybrid medium, fluid in time, sustained by the physical body and experience, originating from models that emerged in the 20th century. On other occasions, I have demonstrated the falsity of this last point by analyzing absolutely legitimate, though not officially recognized, cases of artistic and aesthetic performance that were fully realized, not merely as antecedents, during the height of Romanticism in 1838 and amidst the transition from Rococo to Classicism in 1772, with the full forms of Romanticism and Classicism, and with the most complete forms of contemporary performance.

I won't revisit those cases so as not to bore those who were present on those occasions, and because we don't have time for it tonight. I will, however, reiterate, as I said at the beginning, that we consider performance art based on the following four elements : the role of behaviors as creative material for performance; its unique repeatability as a process that injects it into life; its power to suspend social conditions when life itself is injected into art; and finally, its power to establish concern, engagement, and even meaning for people and their institutions, practices, and ideologies—which is its very performativity.

Richard Schechner proposes performance as the Restoration of Behavior . This implies that performance, whether aesthetic, artistic, or socio-cultural, is constructed through patterned and repeated behaviors. A performance is always a ritual reiteration, finding in repetition and progressive transformation the symbolic power of reactivated conventions, transmitting traditions, but also making explicit and negotiating conflicts. The behaviors are external to the individual, who can take them and use them, modifying them in relation to their temporal and contextual origin; this is the creative act of performance. It is a concept that focuses precisely on what is external to the body, which is its epiphenomenon: behavior. This underscores that this behavior exists outside the body to be taken and recoded.

Peggy Phelan proposes that performance is Representation without Reproduction , an act that is always performed only once. She does not claim that performances cannot be repeated, but rather that every repetition is a new representation that cannot reproduce the previous performance, because performance acquires meaning in the present moment, so that each repetition will be another performance whose meaning will be that of its own situation, circumstances, context, and subjects.

For Victor Turner , social cultural performance (which, we recall, conditions artistic aesthetic performance) cannot occur without a state of suspension of hierarchical and social relations. This state of suspension is what he calls Communitas , in which a liminality or transition takes place where the earthly becomes celestial, the dead becomes alive, the one who commands becomes the one who obeys, and vice versa. “Performance” is linked to parfournir , “to complete,” and society completes itself in its processes of negotiation and healing through the ritual that gives way to communitas.

A fourth issue that can be articulated with the previous ones, and is essential to understanding the nesting of artistic aesthetic performance in social cultural performance (without which the common statement that performance is life and art confused will not be true), is the antithetical pair of the notions of performative and misfortune proposed by John Austin six decades ago.

The performative—as opposed to representative or constative utterances, those in which we utter accounts, descriptions, opinions, explanations, affirmations, or negations—is an expression that, instead of describing, affirming, or representing an idea or fact, produces a psychological, behavioral, and personal shift in meaning among those involved in the situation in which it is uttered. It is a communicative statement articulated around language but integrally constituted by the situation itself and by the meaning that the people involved carry within it. It is a ritualized utterance: all participants know their respective roles in the communication as well as its conventional procedure. Therefore, the performative utterance modifies both the situation and the people involved. An example that Austin develops is marriage, which, when it is real and not a staged event, transforms single people into married people and the attendees into social witnesses. Another example is that of the homeowner who tells the cleaning person, "The cat is on the rug," a phrase that empowers one and subjugates the other simply because of the established roles between the interlocutors. The performative addresses us and makes us relevant; it doesn't give us license to pretend to be something we're not, nor to be merely curious and detached observers. The performative carries the force of one or more of five types of verbs: judicative verbs (which pronounce judgment; such as judge, condemn, order), exercitative verbs (which exercise authority; such as agree, demand, forgive), commissive verbs (which establish concern; such as promise, guarantee, adhere), behavioral verbs (which express a social attitude; such as apologize, thank, deplore), and expository verbs (which express a mode of argument; such as reply, accept, agree). This is so even when the word is absent and is replaced by what Austin calls an intermediate instrument (a sign that, without words, prohibits smoking in a kindergarten classroom, for example).

Austin states that if a performative succeeds in producing, instigating, what it utters, it is because it fulfills all of the following conditions: the conventional procedure is fully accepted, with certain utterances by certain people in certain circumstances, and inclined toward a certain effect and not another; in turn, the particular people and circumstances are exclusively those appropriate for the particular procedure. Absolutely all participants carry out the procedure in the conventional form established in the ritual; and this form of the ritual is fully observed in all its steps. In fact, the participants fulfill the role of exercising certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors prescribed by the convention of the procedure.

When any of these conditions are not met, there has been no transformation; the utterance fails to produce what it states, it does not establish what it states. Austin calls these simulations and failures of performative action " infortune ," a concept unjustly forgotten in theoretical and practical concerns surrounding performance: like trying to think about heat without understanding cold.

Misfortunes can be of poor appeal (when there is no established procedure), of poor application (when the procedure is irrelevant to the situation, the context or the people), of a flawed act (when the procedure is violated in one of its steps), of an incomplete act (when the last step of the procedure is not carried out), of an insincere act (when the feelings and thoughts that correspond to the procedure are faked), or of a hollow act (when the subsequent behaviors expected by the procedure are not fulfilled).

Here I will comment on the second common assumption . Paul Preciado warns us against assuming—perhaps mistakenly, because there can be communitas within performativity—that performativity is constitutively moral, reminding us that Jacques Derrida warns that the performative can camouflage the historicity that legitimizes it, pretending to be a mere representative description, and yet, perversely, establish meaning and subjects, as ideologies do, or as totalitarian cultural institutions representative of monarchies, or in our case, post-oligarchies, institutions of exclusionary inclusion , do in their activities, says Preciado . That is to say, the performative and the performance it produces—like creativity itself, which history shows is often quite fatal—do not necessarily establish positive human meaning in ethical terms.

Without losing sight of this ambivalence, let us return to the three concepts of the performative discussed earlier. The universality of the notion of Restored Behavior can be debated , since there are no second times without firsts, and every practice was established at some point. It can also be argued that performance is always unique, not reproduced , in its repetition, because situations themselves can sometimes be cyclical, and if the social can be relived, so can its performance. Sometimes rituals do not entail communitas because the community performing them is so homogeneous (a group of artist friends, for example) that there are almost no hierarchies left to suspend or invert. What cannot be lacking in a performance is concern for the events that occur among the participants, and this concern is built through the totality of the conditions of the performative.

It is not easy to offer alternatives, but that does not invalidate the question of obscurity. In the artistic realm of performance, how frequent are poorly executed acts, justified by the freedom of chance? Misapplied acts, justified by the freedom of appropriation? How frequent are flawed acts, justified by the freedom to change one's mind? Incomplete acts, excused by bad luck? And how frequent are inscrutable, insincere acts? Or hollow acts, justifiable by the fact that the show is over?

If anyone is inclined to think that these misfortunes are quite frequent, it might be pertinent to say that to recover the relevance of performative procedures in artistic aesthetics, it is necessary to free performance from several of its current constraints. One of these is its dependence on the recent history of art (because that makes it coeval, but not contemporary). Likewise, it must be freed from the artist's authorial responsibility, since it follows from what has just been said that, in the most intimate sense, performance is only real, or conversely, it is flawed, in each individual mind involved. No less necessary is to free performance from its service to the spectacularized body, as well as from its supposed debts to immateriality and temporal fluidity. These are supposedly universal rules, and those rituals that are performative procedures, valid only in their specific circumstances, cannot be circumscribed by international standards, much less by professional manuals. Therefore, if artistic aesthetic performance was ever liberation, perhaps now it needs to emancipate itself from itself.