EMPTY STAGES, CROWDED FLATS. PERFORMATIVITY AS CURATORIAL STRATEGY. E-Book

• Herausgeber: Alexander Verlag Berlin
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Performing Urgencies
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 286

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

During its impressive career over the last decades the term 'performative' has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, or economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats additionally applies the notion of the performative to the context of curating with the aim to unfold a potential that so far has been mostly unused. The book is following J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others in their belief in the performative capacity to transform reality with words and other cultural utterances, but it also emphasises the often dismissed, colloquial notion of the performative as something being 'theatre-like', believing that those two strands are in fact interdependent and intertwined. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats investigates an array of staged situations, from choreographed exhibitions, immaterial museums, theatres of negotiation, and discursive marathons, to street carnivals and subversive public-art projects, and asks how 'theatre-like' strategies and techniques can in fact enable 'reality making' situations in art, and how, as a consequence, curating itself becomes staged, dramatised, choreographed, and composed. With contributions by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Knut Ove Arntzen, Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi, Claire Bishop, Beatrice von Bismarck, Rui Catalão, Vanessa Desclaux, Tim Etchells, Galerie, Karin Harrasser, Shannon Jackson, Ana Janevski, Lina Majdalanie, Ewa Majewska, Florian Malzacher, Maayan Sheleff, Gerald Siegmund, Claire Tancons, Kasia Tórz, Rachida Triki, Jelena Vesić, Joanna Warsza, and Catherine Wood. A publication by House on Fire, Live Art Development Agency & Alexander Verlag Berlin. The book series Performing Urgency is supported by the Culture Programme of European Union.

Leseprobe

Empty Stages, Crowded Flats Peformativity As Curatorial Strategy

Edited by

Florian Malzacher & Joanna Warsza

EMPTY STAGES, CROWDED FLATS

PERFORMATIVITY AS CURATORIAL STRATEGY

Performing Urgency #4

A publication by House on Fire

House on Fire is supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union.

The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

House on Fire are:

Archa Theatre (Prague), BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen), brut Wien (Vienna), Frascati Theater (Amsterdam), HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Kaaitheater (Brussels), LIFT (London), Malta Festival Poznań, Maria Matos Teatro Municipal/EGEAC (Lisbon), and Théâtre Garonne (Toulouse).

Edited by

Florian Malzacher & Joanna Warsza

Performing Urgency Series Editor:

Florian Malzacher

Graphic Design:

R2

Copy Editing:

Harriet Curtis

Editorial Management:

Laura Lopes

Translations:

John Barrett, John Elliott, Abraham Zeitoun

Photos:

Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1969, Keith Sonnier, Martin Argyroglo, Thomas Aurin, Lutz Becker, Dunja Blažević & Student Cultural Center Belgrade (1, 2), Mahdi Belhassen, Dunja Blažević & Student Cultural Center Belgrade, Heithem Chebbi, Oli Cowling, Mikołaj Długosz (1, 2), Jürgen Fehrmann, Hugo Glendinning (1, 2), Adler Guerrier, Elsie Haddad (1, 2), Christopher Hewitt, Martina Hochmuth, International Festival, Toril Johannessen (1, 2), Florian Malzacher (1, 2), Robertas Narkus (1, 2), Akiko Ota, Caroline Pimenta (1, 2), Pere Pratdesaba / Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Thomas Raggam, Wolfgang Silveri, Tomas Sinkevicious, Bartek Stawiarski / Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (1, 2), steirischer herbst, Urszula Trasiewicz, Dorothee Wimmer

Transcription:

Susana Sá

Publisher:

Alexander

Verlag Berlin

Fredericiastraße 8

D-14050 Berlin

Co-publisher:

Live Art Development Agency

The White Building

Unit 7, Queen’s Yard

White Post Lane, London E9 5EN

ISBN: 978 3 89581 469 3

© 2017 the authors and House on Fire

For reprint and subsidiary rights, please contact Alexander Verlag Berlin

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Introduction

Essays & Conversations

Shannon Jackson

Performative Curating Performs

Florian Malzacher

Feeling Alive:

The Performative Potential of Curating

Joanna Warsza in conversation with Catherine Wood

Reinventing the Template

case studies

Exposing Constellations

Marcia Tucker & James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (1969)

Beatrice von Bismarck

On Performative (Self-)Production

Belgrade Student Cultural Centre’s Oktobar 75 (1975)

Jelena Vesić

Through Days and into Nights

Christine Peters’ Portraits (2000)

Tim Etchells

The Borders of Visibility

deufert&plischke’s B-Visible (2002)

Gerald Siegmund

Foreign Strangers

Matthias Lilienthal’s X-Apartments (2002-)

Lina Majdalanie

Too Much, Too Soon

Tor Lindstrand & Mårten Spångberg’s International Festival (2004-2010)

Galerie

A Personal Alphabet

Hannah Hurtzig’s Blackmarket of Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge (2004-)

Karin Harrasser

Rehearsing the Political

Joanna Warsza’s Stadium X:

A Place that Never Was (2006-2009)

Ewa Majewska

Curator as Dramaturg

Pierre Bal Blanc’s The Living Currency (2006-)

Ana Janevski

The Curator-Critic

Kjetil Kausland & BIT Teatergarasjen’s No Más (2008)

Knut Ove Arntzen

Spectacular Insurgency

Carnival, the Curatorial, and the Processional (2008-)

Claire Tancons

Every Exhibition Needs a Panel Discussion

Boris Charmatz’s expo zéro (2009-)

Claire Bishop

Invading the Medias

Selma & Sofiane Ouissi’s Dream City (2010-)

Rachida Triki

Fear and Love in Graz

steirischer herbst’s Truth Is Concrete (2012)

Maayan Sheleff

Micro-Revolutions on the Periphery

Agata Siwiak’s Wielkopolska: Rewolucje (2012)

Kasia Tórz

Curating as one Dreams

Raimundas Malašauskas’ Oo (2013)

Vanessa Desclaux

Flipping the Table for Curating Colonial Legacy

HAU Hebbel am Ufer’s Return to Sender (2015)

Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi

For a Speculative Policy

Bruno Latour & Nanterre-Amendier’s Le Théâtre des négociations / Make It Work (2015)

Frédérique Aït-Touati

An Exhibition of 60 Minutes

Alexandra Laudo’s An Intellectual History of the Clock (2016)

Joanna Warsza

A Small Step, A Huge Gap

Teatro Maria Matos’ Marvila Maria Matos (2016-2021)

Rui Catalão

House on Fire

Authors

Introduction

‘You are more than entitled not to know what the word “performative” means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favour, it is not a profound word.’ With these critical lines British philosopher John Austin characterised his own invention in the essay ‘Performative Utterances’ (1979). And it is still true: during its impressive career over the last decades the term developed many parallel, sometimes opposing meanings in the humanities, philosophy, anthropology, arts, and economics. While we even witnessed in recent years a ‘performative turn’ that built up the influential discourse, it at the same time became overused, misused, and abused.

When we propose to apply the notion of the performative in the context of curating it is with the hope that its very openness unfolds a potential that so far has been mostly neglected. On the one hand we follow Austin’s and Judith Butler’s belief in the performative capacity to transform reality with words and other cultural utterances — in short, performativity as ‘reality-making’. Maria Lind referred loosely to this concept when she introduced the term ‘performative curating’ relating ‘to a pragmatic interest in the means and conditions of production’, as she says in ‘Going Beyond Display’ (2011).

This book also emphasises the often dismissed, colloquial, and yet more frequently applied notion of the performative to describe something that is related to the live arts, something being ‘performance’ or ‘theatre-like’. Not dividing these two strands but rather considering them as interdependent agents opens up a whole range of possibilities. Therefore we claim that using the notion of performative in curating can mean: adapting ‘theatre-like’ strategies and techniques to enable ‘reality-making’ situations.

Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy investigates a whole array of situations from choreographed exhibitions, immaterial museums, theatres of negotiation, and discursive marathons, to street carnivals and subversive public-art projects and inquires how curating itself has become staged, dramatised, choreographed, or composed. The opening essay by Shannon Jackson offers a detailed overview of the understandings and misunderstandings of the term performative, and how it can be situated within the concept of curating. Florian Malzacher then outlines how curatorial thinking and performative strategies can be combined, drawing on several examples from its practitioners. Tate Modern curator Catherine Wood, in a conversation with Joanna Warsza, describes her own approach of integrating live arts into the context of a museum which is set to present only objects — and how this becomes a performative challenge to the institution.

The second part of the book assembles 20 case studies mapping a field of the possibilities of performative curating, following the practices of both artists and curators in the words of their fellow colleagues. Marcia Tucker’s and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials from 1969, described by Beatrice von Bismarck, is an early example of maintaining an exihibition, which, for its duration, was in progress and subject to change. Jelena Vesić’s portraits Oktobar 75 at the Belgrade Student Cultural Centre in Yugoslavia, as a participatory endeavour of the community cultural workers — artists, critics, curators, and friends — gathered around the gallery, was based on the gestures of not-showing and non-representationalist exhibiting. Such negotiations between performing and visual arts continue with curatorial projects like the theatrical exhibition The Living Currency by Pierre Bal Blanc (penned by Ana Janevski), Raimundas Malašauskas’ Oo (described by Vanessa Desclaux), as well as the Musée de la Danse and its éxpo zero, devised by choreographer Boris Charmatz and, as Claire Bishop shows, as an exhibition without any sculptures, installations, or videos.

A number of case studies go back to the early 2000s, which, in retrospect, was a moment when the fields of theatre and dance started to become interested in a more considerate, more pronounced approach to curating, and to an understanding that programming performances, theatre works, dance pieces, or music can be more than just selecting or producing shows and instead emphasising larger contexts and the interaction between the different works as well as with the audience. Examples of this turn are Christine Peters’ series of Portraits (described by participating artist Tim Etchells) that commissioned theatre makers to present their own work and to contextualise it by inviting additional guests, or Matthias Lilienthal’s X-Apartments, the Beirut iteration of which is introduced by Lina Majdalanie. Comparable context-specific approaches are part of Joanna Warsza’s Stadium X, which used a derelict soccer stadium and its surrounding market for rehearsing the political, as formulated by Ewa Majewska; or Marvila Maria Matos, created by the Lisbon theatre with the same name, that focused on work with its direct neighbourhood as witnessed by Rui Catalão.

Using the public sphere as stage, content and context is also the aim of the Tunisian Festival Dream City, curated by Selma and Sofiane Ouissi and depicted here by Rachida Triki, as well as Agata Siwiak’s Wielkopolska: Rewolucje, the only example of a project in the book that purposely leaves the city and addresses the Polish province, in the words of Kasia Tórz. Claire Tancons’ practice is rooted in the tradition of the carnavalesque and how it informs her curatorial projects, which themselves often become carnival-like exhibitions. A different kind of mass event is analysed by Knut Ove Arntzen, who looks at Kjetil Kausland & BIT Teatergarasjen’s No Más. Here the black box became the site for a Mixed Martial Arts showdown between the artist and a professional fighter, which created high level political discussions about the borders of art and curation in Norway.

Understanding art not in, but as public space — to use a distinction by art theorist Miwon Kwon — might be one of the most important contributions of a performative curating that puts its focus on creation of a (temporary) community and spaces of mediation. Théâtre des Négociations was a political, diplomatic, scientific, and artistic experiment described by Frédérique Aït-Touati, initiated by Bruno Latour, where some 200 students from all over the world simulated an international conference on climate change. Maayan Sheleff portraits how Truth is Concrete at steirischer herbst festival invited hundreds of artists, activists, and theorists as well as a broad audience to discuss and rehearse the relation between art and politics in a seven-day around the clock marathon of 170 hours. Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi writes how HAU Hebbel am Ufer, in its programme Return to Sender, investigated the colonial legacy from an African perspective through a system of delegated curatorship.

Hannah Hurtzig’s way of creating a discursive public sphere has been developed over many years by her performative installation Blackmarket of Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge, one of the most influential artistic knowledge platforms, introduced here by Karin Harrasser. Blackmarket, together with other projects, are both curatorial and artistic works at the same time. Artists that not only curate but also see their curation clearly as a performance are also deufert&plischke, whose B-Visible presented at Kunstencentrum Vooruit is pictured here by Gerald Sigmund as a project that pushed the notion of queerness and played with the functions of time and space. While Tor Lindstrand & Mårten Spångberg’s International Festival (portrayed here by Galerie, an art project itself) can be seen as one of the few works of institutional critique in the field of theatre and dance, Alexandra Laudo’s An Intellectual History of the Clock (described by Joanna Warsza) is an exhibition in a form of a narrated lecture performance referencing other works without showing any of them.

Obviously this list is subjective and incomplete, lacking some famous examples like Il Tempo del Postino curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno, proclaimed as ‘The World’s First Visual Arts Opera’ presenting in 2007 time-based art on the theatre stage. Or the use of curatorial strategies in performances by Tino Sehgal or recently by Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen, as they are mentioned in some of the essays in this book. And most of all, we also lack an essay devoted solely to the patron of the genre, Harald Szeemann, as much as his spirit can be felt in several texts. Even before knowing the term curator, he actually used to say that his exhibitions were staged. In this regard we consider ourselves in line with his thinking when we propose that the field of performing arts has more to offer to the field of curation — both in its form and its content — than one might think. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats hopes to encourage the practice but also the thinking about these possibilities.

Essays & Conversations

Shannon Jackson

Performative Curating Performs

How do we know when curating is performative? Does it happen when one is curating a performing artist? Does it mean that the act of curation is itself performative, regardless of the nature of the artwork? Are some types of curating performative and some not? While I do not want to ignore this tangle of questions, I do want to take another philosophical tack to chart our way through them. Let’s first consider the philosophical history of the term performative, focusing especially on what the concept implies about the receiver that any curator is trying to address. As it turns out, the receiver’s role — the role of the figure we might variously call the audience, the beholder, the visitor, the interlocutor, the participant, or the spectator — is fundamental to understanding the uses of the term performative. Indeed, the reception by the audience is key to constituting any artwork, action, speech, or curation as ‘performative’ in its power.

The term performative comes from a longer tradition of speech act theory that explores the world-making power of language. In this school, language is understood not simply to describe the world but to constitute it. Speech shapes our perception and also alters the conditions in which we live, structuring how we think about ourselves, about our relationships, and about our environment. The title of J. L. Austin’s formative book, How to Do Things with Words (1962), enacts the philosophy it describes. Language is not simply descriptive or representative of a prior reality; language has active power to make the reality to which it refers. As a term that arose within this strain of Western philosophy, theories of performativity also coincided with a Western history of post-Second World War art practice, one that was itself preoccupied with philosophical and political questions of subjectivity, action, and autonomy. Arguably, this historical link explains, at least in part, the ubiquitous use of the word ‘performative’ in modern and contemporary art parlance. It coincided with the use of a string of associated terms — action, happening, event, experience, engagement, interaction — that artists, critics, and curators used to come to terms with heteronomous experiment. For some Modernist art critics, such as Clement Greenberg or Michael Fried, such Minimialist and post-Minimalist work risked a compromising ‘theatricality’ that was the ‘enemy’ of art. For others, such as Harold Rosenberg or Allan Kaprow, such work presaged an increasing turn to ‘action’ in the world of art. Like other forms of linguistic action, such art works sought specifically to do something, to bring a world into being through its action. But, as Dorothea von Hantelmann has argued in ‘The Experiential Turn’ (2014), a deeper understanding of speech act theory would suggest that all artwork is performative. ‘It makes little sense to speak of a performative artwork,’ she says, ‘because every artwork has a reality-producing dimension.’ Indeed, in the long history of aesthetics, scholars have debated the question but have largely concluded that representational acts of art are always reality-producing actions, contingent upon their conditions of production. Interestingly, it is precisely at this point that the position of the receiver comes in to advance and consolidate this process. As J. L. Austin would argue, the reality-making capacity of the performative happens in the moment of a receiver’s ‘uptake.’ A world is made in that exchange. Moreover, that exchange is made whether the work self-consciously understands itself to be performative or not.

Of course, the language of performativity circulates ubiquitously without necessarily acknowledging this deeper philosophical history — or the redundancy of its application. As a critic, one can decide to be annoyed by the imprecision, or one can decide instead to read this use symptomatically. Let’s try out the latter. Questions of philosophical integrity aside, what explains the ubiquitous use of this p-word as the century turned from the twentieth to the twenty-first? Indeed, much recent conversation about ‘the performative’ in contemporary art came about not so much to recall action painting or to embrace Minimalism’s ‘theatricality’ or to descsribe performance curating, but to come to terms with more recent ‘relational’ art practices. Many contemporary artists have been creating extended events of social encounter under a variety of newer labels, and each of the terms — social practice, community engagement, participatory art, relational aesthetics — has a different resonance and different stakes. A number of artists tend to serve as indexes of more recent experimentation — including Felix Gonzalez-Torres with his ‘stacks’ and ‘spills’, Rirkrit Tiravanija with his cooking installations, Santiago Sierra with his disturbing installations of unemployed humans in the gallery, and many more. The phrase ‘relational aesthetics’ is often credited to the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, who used the term to describe a variety of work in which ‘intersubjectivity’ functioned as the ‘material substrate’ of the art event. That is, rather than paint, clay, wire, metal, or canvas, the ‘material’ of the art object becomes the relational exchange that it provokes. As I have argued at length elsewhere, the ‘new’ turns of these participatory forms can certainly be found in earlier work and in a variety of mediums.

In order to frame a deeper connection between speech act theory and contemporary art, let’s try focusing on a particular work. The performative task of curating relational work comes to the fore quite precisely in the practice of Tino Sehgal, an artist who tellingly has rejected the word performance to describe his work, but not the word performative. Consider how the curatorial paramters of a piece like This objective of that object (2004) differently refracts these philosophical puzzles. Sehgal’s objectless pieces have received worldwide attention, in part because they actively resist the structures of both visual and performing art. Trained in economics and dance, he seeks to make work that uses no natural resources and leaves no material imprint. Previous pieces have drawn on experimental choreography, distinctive in part because he forbids documentation or any reproduction that could substitute for the live event. This objective of that object shares company with a number of pieces that make use of a game-like structure, including This Situation, acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and This Progress, originally sited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and remounted at the Guggenheim Museum in New York to bemused renown. Arguably, its structures can be found in expanded form in recent larger-scale projects at the Gropiusbau Berlin and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

This objective of that object is composed of five interpreters who form a loose circle around gallery visitors with their backs turned. The interpreters breathe softly, and then each successively begins to whisper, ‘The objective of this work is to become the object of discussion.’ As noted in the relatively spare acquisition documents of the Walker Art Center, these interpreters repeat the phrase, ‘in expectation of the visitor’s response.’ If there is none, the interpreters will gradually lower their voices and, after pauses and moments of silence, sink to the floor, apparently undone by the fact that their performative utterance has not produced a felicitous uptake. If, however, a visitor does offer a response, the interpreters actively celebrate the apparent ‘happiness’ of the performative encounter. There may or may not be a self-conscious exchange between a visitor and an interpreter. Either way, the interpreters may decide at any moment to initiate a circular dance, to speak a series of phrases, and then to exit the room, often leaving one remaining interpreter behind to sustain a conversation with the visitor. As in other works by Sehgal, the interpreter may finish by reminding the visitor of the name of the artist, the name of the work, and the year it was made, both parodying and reinforcing visual art conventions of attributing artistic authorship.

If much contemporary relational art has called upon the receiver to avow her role in the constitution of the art object, then this piece isolates that directive in its skeletal structure. The piece is an encounter about encounter. Because it self-consciously uses text and language as art materials, the Sehgal piece also more explicitly returns our discussion of the performative to the exchange of speech. How, after Austin, is this piece doing things with words? The ‘objective’ is the intention of an utterance as well as the intent of the work. Reciprocally self-constituting, the work is itself the ‘discussion’ that it seeks to produce; if felicitous, that exchange will be both the form and the content of the work. To continue the Austinian frame, the utterance of the work is ‘happy’ when the ‘object’ of the discussion becomes the discussion itself. Meanwhile, the work has less than satisfying mechanisms for contending with a lack of uptake; interpreters sink to the floor until the process can start again. But the aspiration is also to induce awareness in receivers of their own role in producing the outcome. Importantly, that sense of a receiver’s embeddedness comes within a structure that is simultaneously the work’s theme. It is an exchange about exchange whose misfires are about misfiring. There is a kind of recursive quality to Seghal’s work — one that in turn produces recursive sentences from critics like me who are trying to come to terms with it. However, we can also interpret this recursive structure as a kind of perpetual self-curation. Seghal’s artistic parameters are also curatorial parameters; by embedding the game of its own curation within the medium of the work, he creates a self-conscious awareness amongst interpreters and receivers of their own tacit, diffuse, and ongoing curatorial role. Even if all curation is performative, Seghal makes its recursive processes available for reflection.

It might be exactly that sense of recursion that explains the interest of so many critical theorists and contemorary art curators in Sehgal’s work. Earlier I noted that interest in the mid-century reflections of speech act theorists resurged as the twentieth century wore on. The recent revision of performativity theory was thus part of a broader effort to understand the complexities of subject formation, a project that questioned the assumption that self-making was essentially a voluntary operation, regulated only by the exercise of internal will. More recent thinkers as varied as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and many others began to excavate a history of critical philosophy to mount alternative conceptions, frames that took seriously the degree to which social ‘circumstances’ in fact produce our internal perception of a voluntary will, often with particular ideological effects. It was in such a context that the notion of the ‘performative’ was revived, this time to tease out the implications of the constitutive power of language that J. L. Austin himself might not have pursued. Indeed, for many recent theorists, it is most important to consider the degree to which the primary ‘doing’ of the performative is the ideological constitution of the doer herself.

It is at this point that one begins to understand the political stakes of performative doing. To ground this political, philosophical, and aesthetic complexity, let us look at one famous philosophical example that dramatised recursion — and, incidentally, served as a resource for Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. Louis Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970) is a key text in this conversation, particularly for his vocabulary of ‘hailing’ and ‘interpellation’ and for the example he used to describe how we participate in our own ideological formation:

That very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing […] can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one hundred and eighty degree physical conversion, he comes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed.

Althusser’s teachable example proved fruitful for many subsequent conversations in critical theory. It temporarily anthropomorphised ‘ideology’ as a cop whose performative utterance sought an addressee; moreover, it was by physically and psychically allowing ourselves to be addressed that ideology did its work. That famous ‘turn’ was a form of uptake that ensured the felicitousness of ideology’s performative reach. Moreover, Althusser was keen to note that the process of address and uptake had a temporal coincidence:

Naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession. […] But in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.

Althusser thus posited interpellation of subjects by ideology as itself a recursive process, as ‘one and the same thing.’ Joining an Austinian language with an Althusserian one, Judith Butler would, in ‘Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault’(1997), attempt to tease out a degree of variability in the process of hailing:

As Althusser himself insists, this performative effort of naming can only attempt to bring its addressee into being; there is always the risk of a certain misrecognition. If one misrecognizes that effort to produce the subject, the production itself falters. The one who is hailed may fail to hear, misread the call, turn the other way, answer to another name, insist on not being addressed that way.

At the same time, if misfire or misrecognition is possible, it still occurs within a recursive structure that both constrains and enables the subjects it made.

It is no coincidence that some bloggers, curators, and other commentators have used the language of Althusser’s ‘hailings’ to describe the exchanges at work in Sehgal’s pieces. Since Sehgal is concerned with exposing the ideological nature of subject formation within museum institutions, we could say that This objective of that object is an interpellation about interpellation, a hailing about hailing. Indeed, the curatorial choreography of the piece seems to invoke but revise the choreography of Althusser’s ‘theoretical theatre.’ In Seghal’s piece, in fact, the addresser’s back is turned while the addressee reckons with being hailed by the piece. Any ‘comment’ is registered as a felicitous ‘recruitment,’ prompting the addresser to instantiate its success by making her own 180-degree turn. Moreover, the piece seems to hail participants whether or not they fully intend to be recruited. In Von Hantelmann’s accounts of the enactment of this piece, its structure accommodates a wide range of responses, even turning ringing ‘cell phones’ or discreet ‘comments in a foreign language’ into a felicitous uptaking. Visitors thus find themselves ‘hailed’ despite themselves, reckoning with the process of recruitment. It is thus perhaps no wonder that accounts of Sehgal’s pieces include so many critics’ chronicles of their own process of reception. We find critics using the first person more often in their accounts, as the evaluation of the work coincides with a highly personal process of exchange. (I have my own story, one that involves the effects of bringing my children to This Situation in Paris and watching how their presence unsettled the commentary of the players until one found a way to interpellate my son into the piece). We also find critics trying to push the structure of the work to test its hailing capacities. When he participated in This Progress at the Guggenheim Museum in 2010, a ‘theoretical theatre’ that included structured conversations with child players, the critic Jerry Saltz was not sufficiently attentive to its discursive conventions. The result was that his child interlocutor burst into tears, prompting Saltz to write an account titled ‘How I Made an Artwork Cry.’

As noted above, the match between this work by Seghal and the concept of performative curating is easier to surface, in part because lingustic interaction is its primary material. We could imagine adapting the arguments above to address different uses of curated speech, in say, Hannah Hurtzig’s structured forms of knowledge exchange in Blackmarket (2004-). Moreover, the political stakes of ideological hailing — and counter-hailing — helps us understand the structures and effects of ambitious experiments in curation, including Hebbel am Ufer’s, Return to Sender (2015), Joanna Warsza’s Stadium X (2006-09), or Teatro Maria Matos’s current efforts to curate the city in ways that provoked counter-ideological ‘turns.’

Before concluding, however, I think that it is important to return to my opening gambit and acknowledge that the concept of ‘performative curating’ is relevant for some, not necessarily for its links to speech act theory, but more to describe the practice of curating performance. Indeed, this collection appears after a renewed interest in curating performance in museums, galleries, and biennials. And it also coincides with a newer interest amongst theatre directors and performance presenters in adopting the language of ‘curation’ to describe their practices. Between artistic leadership positions at the HAU and in Munich, Matthias Lilienthal adopted the language of curation to experiment with the alternate ‘formats’ of X-Appartments. And as co-editor Florian Malzacher has noted, curation now describes acts that used to be the function of the theatre producer or presenter who ‘booked’ a season or a festival. As a result, the languages and practices usually associated either with the visual arts or with the performing arts find themselves curiously mixed.

So what happens when we take questions of performative curation back to this burgeoning practice of performance curation? First off, we will hear objections from the likes of Tino Seghal who quite actively refuses the language of theatre and performance to describe his structures, using terms like interpreter or player to refer to the interlocutors he hires. At the same time, he is perceived as challenging the conventions of a visual art world motored by the creation and purchase of material objects. As Rebecca Schneider has argued in Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011), whether he welcomes it or not, these pieces seem to accrue a good deal of ‘medial panic’ as artists, critics, and curators debate different frames of legitimation and delegitimation. But ‘medial panic’ also engenders new senses of medial productivity, if sometimes to provoke renewed reflection about what performance is. Sometimes, performativity is used to describe work that partakes of performance but that reworks the conventions of the performing arts. Philippe Parreno’s ‘set designs’ for The Bride and the Bachelors (2013) also offered a dynamic curatorial platform in which to house a meeting of artistic cross-pollination (from Duchamp to Rauschenberg to Cage to Cunningham). Meanwhile, his self-transposition (along with Hans-Ulrich Obrist) into the role of Manchester International Festival curator de-familiarised the medium-specific nature of curation itself. As we consider a range of work collected in this book, we find ourselves constantly asking how we know ourselves to be in the presence of performance curation. The works presented might incorporate a body, exist in time, or perhaps ask their visitors to do something. But what is their medium? Their genre? They might be choreographed but are not quite ‘dance.’ They are theatre-like but not theatre. Some artists gathered in this collection position their work as a break from or revision of a performing arts tradition — Boris Charmatz revises ‘dance,’ Matthias Lilenthal rejects ‘theatre’ in favour of new ‘formats’ — whereas other artists do not particularly worry about their relation to those traditions.

Indeed, when one looks at the exciting work featured in this book, one might ask whether we could find one descriptive term to unify this gathering. Some might call such works ‘performance art’, and yet others would be unsure about the use of such a term, especially if the piece lacks the chocolate (of Karen Finley), the scissors (of Yoko Ono), the loaded gun (of Marina Abramović), or the oozing blood (of Ron Athey) that would confirm its place in the increasingly canonical history of that genre.

In the face of critical confusion, the term ‘performative’ comes in to save the day. It seems to provide an umbrella to cluster recent cross-disciplinary work in time, in space, with bodies, in relational encounters — even if the term does this work without saying anything particularly precise. Let me call this phenomenon the intermedial use of the performative vocabulary. It is a use that foregrounds the sometimes productive, sometimes uncomfortable, relation between the performing arts and the visual arts. And in fact, that discomfort and productivity brings us back to the role of the receiver in navigating this intermedial interplay. Depending on what art form they understand the work to be challenging, our reception will take different forms and make different judgments. Our responses gauge a work’s closeness to and distance from sculpture, to dance, to theatre, to film, to painting, or to other mediums. Tim Etchells contribution to Christine Peters’ Portraits series will be differently encountered if they are curated as revisions of ‘theatre’ or as a revision of ‘portrait painting.’ Tacita Dean’s contribution to ‘Il Tempo del Postino’ placed an aging Merce Cunningham in a seat for four minutes and 22 seconds; the performativity of this durational piece would be differently understood if a receiver read Cunningham’s body as a sentient sculpture than if she read it as a dancer stopped in time. The difference would affect how it hailed her, and how it hailed you. Indeed, such intermedial calibrations will affect whether the receiver calls herself a beholder, an audience member, a spectator, a viewer, a visitor, or a participant. The imprecision of ‘performative work’ in terms of medium thus gets tested most urgently in the encounter with someone who is deciding what kind of receiver she wants to be.