PERFORMANCE//PROXY : Curators’ Note
Performance//Proxy is a series of performative works which seek to develop a nuanced understanding of the mediated experience as it exists in 2019. These works collectively operate within the cultural language of art to start a dialogue about the ways mediated events shift our engagement with reality as a whole. Throughout the course of curating this show, we’ve come up with more questions than conclusions, as evinced in this statement.
First, for context, we subscribe to Caroline A. Jones’ notion of acceleration; the ubiquity of the supplemental “no longer provoke(s) the apocalyptic excitement” sensorially they did in the past and that this relative calm “gives us time for reflection: a propitious moment for artists and other culture workers to interpret, think, and reckon with the sense of our mediated sensorium.”[1] To consider the supplemental, then, is to question how the role of smartphones, Instagram handles, self-driving cars etc. alter the way we form meaningful relationships and find mutual understanding in the present.
Performance, like all media, transforms and adapts to the era in which it exists. Do we now live in a time where the performer, the viewer, and ultimately the self, is no longer integral to a performative experience? The Mars Rover would still sing itself happy birthday every year even if the world exploded and nobody was here to witness it. In this series of works we are interested in performance as it relates to Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance—an affective exchange and an openness triangulating artist, proxy, viewer—as an engagement that exists beyond the ocular.[2] Similarly to the Mars Rover, none of the works within this series require all three of those things to function or exist in their intended capacities. We consider the ways in which the proxy functions as a mediating agent and, in turn, as a conduit for resonance as a form of resistance against alienation. Key to Rosa’s idea of resonance is the refusal of defining exactly what it is and continuing to think of it as a moving target. For us, the proxy becomes that catalyst for resonance, and in these works it fluctuates from being the simultaneous corporealization and decorporealization of the body, to the act of role play, to a useless prosthetic, to performativity itself.
In Jennifer Doyle’s book Hold It Against Me she speaks briefly about how one of cultural studies’ primary contributions is the observation that aesthetic taste and judgment are historically and socially conditioned: “what you enjoy, how you enjoy it, and how you express that enjoyment can reveal a lot about who you are and where you come from. For this reason, few places will make people more self-conscious of their reactions than a museum or art gallery.”[3] We bring this particular idea up because in many ways it forces us to think about the performativity of the viewer. At which point of engaging an artwork does the viewer make the shift into the role of a performer? Is that transformation even something the viewer is conscious of? What does that look like in specific regard to the medium of performance in its expanded definition?
So why performance? Why proxies? Why mediation? And why now? As curators, as artists, we have a virtually limitless stream of ideas (most of them bad); this one however, felt bigger, and not only important to consider within the context of contemporary art, but in the broader zeitgeist. When first visualizing what we wanted this series to look like, we considered artists whose practices fell in line with our ideas and whose work we found compelling. We also had dozens of our own ideas about what a proxy-based performance could mean. Luckily, most of the feedback relating to the nature of the series showed parallel impulses, further confirming the notion that maybe this is actually an important conversation to have. Ultimately, we found a topic that was generative for artists and curators alike to mine for relevant, even resonant, discourse.
Rachel Pontious and Finn Schult
11 October 2019
[1] Caroline A. Jones, “The Mediated Sensorium,” in Sensorium (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 5.
[2] Thijs Lijster & Robin Celikates, “Beyond the Echo Chamer: An Interview with Hartmut Rosa on Resonance and Alienation” in The Future of the New: Artistic Innovation in Times of Social Acceleration ed. Thijs Lijster (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2018) pp. 23-54.
[3] Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013) p. 5.