Eiko & Komas performing Naked, Walker Art Center, 2010. Commissioned by the Walker, this livingenvironmental installation was open during museumhours throughout the month of November. Total duration: 144 hours.

Performativity and Its AddresseeShannon Jackson

The difficult time is when there is nobody when we are waiting to beseen but no one is there. Eiko 1

In November 2010 visitors to the Walker Art Center per-ambulated as usual through its gallery spaces. They lingered be-fore paintings and circled around sculptures, eventually happen-ing on a gallery that housed an enclosed room. Upon entering,visitors found leaves, rocks, water, and minerals. They mighthave discerned a tremor in a small pile of leaves, looked twice atthe pallor of what appeared to be a stone before realizing that thestructure also contained live bodies, two of them. With barelyperceptible movements, Eiko & Koma lay prone in what mighthave been defined as an ecological art piece, never fully still butnot exactly moving either, poised precisely to prompt awarenessof the precarious nature of aliveness itself. When asked to dis-cuss what it was like to perform this signature work, Naked, theysaid that the hardest part was not the length of time or the dis-comfort of being gazed on by strangers but the peculiar hollow-ness of moments when they were alone. As Eiko notes in the epi-graph to this essay, the absence of a spectator brought not reliefbut a strange tenuousness: it was as if the work, waiting to beseen, did not quite exist without anyone there to witness it.

Eiko & Koma are artists whose workalong with that ofthousands of othershas been characterized as performativein some way. Now we might ask what that characterizationmeans. Are their works performative because they are perfor-mance artists? Can art be performative without being perfor-mance? Can performance not be performative? Are some types ofart performative and some not? While I do not want to ignorethis tangle of questions, I do want to take another philosophicaltack to chart our way through them. Most generally, I would liketo consider the philosophical history of the term performative, fo-cusing especially on what the concept implies about the positionof the receiver. As it turns out, the receivers rolethe role of thefigure we might variously call the audience, the beholder, the visi-tor, the interlocutor, the participant, or the spectatoris funda-mental to understanding the uses of the term performativity. In-deed, the reception by the audience is key to constituting any art-work, action, speech, or event as performative in its power.This factor creates new philosophical tangles when we consider

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Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1965, DVD (black and white,sound); edition 6/10, 9 minutes. Collection WalkerArt Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2002,2002.210. Yoko Ono.

what it means to collect an artwork; an institution or collectordoes not simply acquire a performative object but also acquires astructure for renewing its relations of reception.

Given the wide range ofexpanded, cross-mediapractices that we find

ourselves encounteringin museums, on stages,

and in the streets, itseems important to

develop a more preciseand varied vocabularyfor what they might be

doing.

Let us first consider the term performativity in contempo-rary art discoursealong with its varied, fuzzy, and sometimescontradictory uses. The hazy understanding of the term arguablycontributes to its ubiquity, as performative becomes a catch-allin an art and performance scene that has undergone incredibleexpansion. First of all, performativity is often used to describework that seems to partake of performance but does not quiteconform to the conventions of the performing arts. Cross-mediapieces might incorporate a body, exist in time, or perhaps asktheir visitors to do something. But what is their medium? Theirgenre? They might be choreographed but are not quite dance.They are theater-like but not theater. Some might call such worksperformance art, and yet others would be unsure about the use ofsuch a term, especially if the piece lacks the chocolate (of KarenFinley), the scissors (of Yoko Ono), the loaded gun (of MarinaAbramovi), or the oozing blood (of Ron Athey) that would con-firm its place in the increasingly canonical history of that genre.In the face of critical confusion, the term performative comes into save the day. It seems to provide an umbrella to cluster recentcross-disciplinary work in time, in space, with bodies, in relation-al encounterseven if the term does this work without sayinganything particularly precise. Let me call this phenomenon theintermedial use of the performative vocabulary. As we will see,the audiencethe receiverin fact plays a central role in navi-gating this intermedial interplay. Depending on what art formthey understand the work to be challenging, their reception willtake different forms and make different judgments. Their re-sponses gauge a works closeness and distance to sculpture, todance, to theater, to film, to painting, or to other mediums. In-deed, such calibrations will in turn affect whether the receivercalls herself a beholder, an audience member, a spectator, a view-er, a visitor, or a participant. The imprecision of performativework in terms of medium thus gets tested most urgently in theencounter with someone who is deciding what kind of receivershe wants to be.

There is a second cluster of hazy and contradictory uses, however, al-though they are uses that acknowledge the more philosophical understanding ofthe term as linguistic action in the world. In this cluster, performative art seeksmost specifically to do something, to bring a world into being with its action. Theterm performative comes from a longer tradition of speech act theory that explores

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ACTING WITH WORDS/ACTING WITHPAINTING

the world-making power of language. In this school, language is understood notsimply to describe the world but to constitute it. Speech shapes our perceptionand also alters the conditions in which we live, structuring how we think aboutourselves, about our relationships, and about our environment. As a term thatarose within a strain of Western philosophy, it coincided with a Western history ofpostWorld War II art practice, one that was itself preoccupied with philosophicaland political questions of subjectivity, action, and autonomy. This is whereDorothea von Hantelmann, in her essay for this volume, steps in to argue that, bysuch a definition, all artwork is performative. It makes little sense to speak of aperformative artwork, she says, because every artwork has a reality-producingdimension. 2 Indeed, in the long history of aesthetics, scholars have debatedthe question but have largely concluded that representational acts of art are al-ways reality-producing actions, contingent upon their conditions of production.Interestingly, it is precisely at this point that the position of the receiver comes inonce again to advance and consolidate this process. As we will learn from examin-ing the work of one of the most formative speech-act theorists, J. L. Austin, the re-ality-making capacity of the performative happens in the moment of a receiversuptake. A world is made in that exchange. This is something that Eiko & Komaseem to understand with some degree of urgency. The reality made by their art-work is all too fragile, dependent upon someone to be there.

In what follows, I explore the frames and stakes of both the intermedial andreality-making contexts of performative practice, clustering my reflections aroundselected artworks and selected philosophers that span the mid-twentieth centuryto the present day. In reflecting on these uses, I find it important to understandand value the impulses behind them. Given the wide range of expanded, cross-me-dia practices that we find ourselves encountering in museums, on stages, and inthe streets, it seems important to develop a more precise and varied vocabularyfor what they might be doing. While this essay focuses on correspondences acrosstwentieth-century Western philosophy and Euro-American art practice, we willalso see that these correspondences are revised and critiqued by practices that en-gage a wider global history. After introducing some key concepts and conundrums,I focus on three different historical moments that are framed by different perfor-mative vocabularies. For the purposes of this essay, I will somewhat reductivelycall them the action turn, the Minimalist turn, and the relational turn, al-though we will soon see that such namings are themselves performative speechacts with their own blind spots. I hope that a general consideration of these threeturns can help us get back inside what are indeed true artistic puzzles about howwe encounter and evaluate contemporary art, contemporary performance, andtheir many antecedents. Following the position of the receiver in these varied con-texts provides a way to navigate their forms and their effects.

In 1955 Austin delivered the prestigious William James Lecturesat Harvard University. In advance of his appearance, he had beenoffering earlier versions of these thoughts in a course at Oxfordthat he called Words and Deeds. It was the Harvard version, how-ever, that would be remembered, transcribed, and ultimately dis-tributed. The propositions, explorations, and qualifications that

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Robert Motherwell, Lyric Suite, 1965, ink on rice paper, 11 1/16 x 9 1/16 in. (28.1 x 23 cm). CollectionWalker Art Center, Gift of Margaret and AngusWurtele and the Dedalus Foundation, 1995, 1995.47.Dedalus Foundation/VAGA, New York, NY.

Franz Kline, The Chair, 1950, oil on canvas, 20 x16 in. (52.1 x 42.2 cm) framed. Collection WalkerArt Center, Donated by Mr. and Mrs. Edmond R.Ruben, 1995, 1995.74. The Franz Kline Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

appeared in those lectures ultimately became a book, How to DoThings with Words, that received a good deal of attention in itsown time and would become required reading for many studentsof critical theory as the twentieth century wore on. 3 I willexplore later why interest in speech act theory resurged in ourcontemporary moment, but first perhaps it is worth remember-ing a network of related developments at midcentury. This wasalso a moment in the art world when Abstract Expressionism hadestablished itself as a distinctively American postWorld War IIart movement that invoked but reworked the nonfigurative ab-stractions of the European and Russian schools. As many criticstried to come to terms with the large allover canvases of AbstractExpressionist painters, some found themselves just as preoccu-pied with the movements and processes by which painters madesuch works. Harold Rosenberg would give a name to this ap-proach, defining action painting in the United States in 1952 atthe same time that Austin was rethinking the nature of wordsand deeds across the Atlantic. 4 For Rosenberg, the distinc-tiveness of American Abstract Expressionist canvases camefrom a change in attitude toward painting itself. The conventionsof two-dimensional representation were undone by painters whono longer viewed painting as a domain to reproduce, re-design,analyze, or express, instead regarding it as an arena in whichto act. As Rosenberg described it, What was to go on the canvaswas not a picture but an event. 5 He attempted to call suchactions American, somewhat speciously mixing metaphors ofpolitics, spontaneity, and individual liberation; meanwhile, a vari-ety of (usually male) artists were placed under this umbrella, in-cluding Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, andCy Twombly. Jackson Pollock would of course become the mostemblematic American action painter of his time. That notorietywas solidified when Hans Namuth documented his painting inaction, following the cigarette-smoking, hypermasculine Ameri-can artist as he moved deftly and determinedly with his dripbrush across a canvas that was propped horizontally in the greatoutdoors.

I cannot do justice here to the histories and debates thatsurround both speech act theory and action painting. But for theconfined purposes of this essay, it is worth noting that their pur-suits share a number of implications and consequences. Withoutoverdrawing equivalences, we can spot a parallel betweenAustins attempt to overcome a purely descriptive understandingof languages function and Rosenbergs attempt to describe thestakes of action paintings refusal to represent. Said Rosenberg,The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in hismind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do somethingto that other piece of material in front of him. The image wouldbe the result of this encounter. 6 The canvas was thus a doc-umentary trace of an action, an encounter that was a doing tothe canvas rather than a brushstroke aimed to represent a priorimage in his mind.

A similar if not equivalent desire to dissolve the referen-tial relationthat is, the prior-ness of the referent, the image,or the signified before a signifierpreoccupied Austin. It wasfor too long the assumption of philosophers that the business ofa statement can only be to describe some state of affairs, or tostate some fact, he wrote. Rather than statements whose in-

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tegrity was determined by the veracity of their descriptionthatis, their representational or descriptive accuracyhe focused onstatements that approached the world with the intent to dosomething to it. Considering linguistic phrases like, I bet or Ipromise or, most famously, I do, he found them most interest-ing for their implosion of the referential relation. Indeed, it wasby virtue of that implosion that such phrases transformed reality.He called such phrases performative utterances, choosing theroot perform, he said, because it indicates that the issuing of theutterance is a performing of an action. 7 Both these 1950sWestern intellectuals were thus interested in reorienting our un-derstanding of their respective mediums, a reorientation thatforegrounded the capacity of language and the capacity of paint-ing not simply to represent an already-given world but to installtransformative encounters that brought the world into being.

This decade followed and preceded a number of transfor-mative and self-consciously active art experiments in Europe,Latin America, Asia, the Soviet Union, and the United States:Dada, Surrealism, the Bauhaus, Neoconcretism, Gutai, Construc-tivism, Minimalism, institutional critique, and more. BeforeAustin, after Austin, and whether or not they had read Austin,artists in various contexts were questioning the parameters oftraditional aesthetic forms in painting, sculpture, theater, anddance. Importantly, the action in self-consciously active art in-corporated and deflected the sociopolitical contexts in whichartists found themselves, responding to the emergence of psy-choanalysis (Surrealism), to collectivist aspirations (Construc-tivism), or to the rising corporate capitalism and the new wars(including cold ones) that defined the second half of the twenti-eth century. To notice that art movements invoke a term like ac-tion is thus not to assume that there is any equivalence amongthe realities that such performative acts seek to make.

With that caveat in mind, it is worth lingering just a bitlonger on Rosenbergs text and context to notice how this em-phasis on action affected the reception of the painting. For one, itredefined the relation between the artist and his work. A paint-ing that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist,said Rosenberg. The act-painting is of the same metaphysicalsubstance as the artists existence. The new painting has brokendown every distinction between art and life. 8 This lack ofseparation expanded the notion of the artists signature at apresumably existential level. Viewers were encouraged to see apainting as part and parcel of an artists existence, not simplyreading biographical content into its imagery but, more radical-ly, encountering the work as life itself. With this stance on thework, the artists actions were celebrated as much as the canvas-es themselves; when the canvases alone were displayed, behold-ers were encouraged to discern the choreographic actions thatproduced them.

Intriguingly, Rosenberg began to use the language of thetheatrical medium to describe a new kind of viewing. Criticismmust begin by recognizing in the painting the assumptions inher-ent in its mode of creation. Since the painter has become an ac-tor, the spectator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its incep-tion, duration, directionpsychic state, concentration and relax-ation of the will, passivity, alert waiting. He must become a con-noisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the sponta-

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Yves Klein, Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo CaneShroud), 1961, pigment, synthetic resin on gauze,108 x 118 in. (274.3 x 301 cm). Collection WalkerArt Center, Gift of Alexander Bing, T. B. WalkerFoundation, Art Center Acquisition Fund, Professional Art Group I and II, Mrs. Helen Haseltine Plowden, Dr. Alfred Pasternak, Dr. Maclyn C. Wade, byexchange, with additional funds from the T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2004, 2004.63.1-.3. YvesKlein and Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork/ADAGP, Paris.

neous, the evoked. 9 Intriguingly, the art critic tried to dis-cern the duration of the works creation, imagining the gallerydisplay as a kind of performance piece; with this kind of en-counter, the paintings beholder took on the qualities of a the-aters audience member. The performative gesture of actionpainting thus required an intermedial calibration, one that im-plied duration, one that reflected on the difference between ges-tures that were spontaneous and those that were evoked. Toencounter action painting meant learning from other art forms inorder to become a different type of receiver.

Let us compare such work with another early examplethat exposes the intermedial and reality-making performativityof painting: Yves Kleins famous two-hundred-piece series of An-thropometry paintings. During what would be an unfortunatelyshort career, Klein began to produce monochrome block paint-ings in his beloved blues, a pursuit that was for him about access-ing a life force, albeit one inflected by an unorthodox combina-tion of Rosicrucian spiritual and existential reflection. Kleinssearch for absolute freedom in painting meant pushing theboundaries of painting itself; his language called for a spatial ex-pansion beyond the two-dimensional: Today anyone who paintsmust actually go into space to paint. 10 Klein famously wentinto space with his Leap into the Void, a moment of apparentflight and apparent danger captured in a photograph and circulat-ed in a self-published journal under the intermedia title Thtredu Vide. The Anthropometrie paintings were another mecha-nism for the spatialization of painting, one whose theatrical ele-ments were also quite pronounced. Beginning in 1958 and hiringwomen to serve as living paintbrushes, Klein organized numer-ous salons in which spectators were invited to watch as femaleensemble members immersed themselves in human-size trays ofhis trademark ultramarine blue paint, prostrating themselves inturn across a huge horizontal canvas on the floor. In looking atthe canvases now, we find ourselves speculating about the chore-ography behind the images. We can see how the intensity of theblue varies with the intensity of the press of the three-dimen-sional body parts as they made contact with the canvas. Thewomens own acts of self-paintingthe smears over the ab-domen and circular swirls over their breastsnow remain on thecanvas as the signature brushstrokes of the artist. Meanwhile,the white space of the canvas marks absent spaces where the restof their limbs should be; their hands are isolated in negativewhite space, detached from their limbs and seemingly splayed inpanic. The effect of the Anthropometries is thus one that recallsRosenbergs formula; the performed painting was one in which apainters material is doing something to another material, inwhich the image would be the result of that encounter. Knowl-edge of those historical actions affects how we encounter themnow. The paint presses and brushstrokes are indexes of actionswhose gradations we try to discern, speculating upon the exis-tential biographies of their makers as we do.

While the concept of action painting seems to resonatewith Kleins practice, it is also important to note that he resistedthis alignment. In fact, the terms in which he rejected it bringforward other intermedial and philosophical questions:

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Many art critics claimed that via this method of

painting I was in fact merely reenacting the technique

of what has been called action painting. I would like

to make it clear that this endeavor is opposed to action

painting in that I am actually completely detached

from the physical work during its creation. I would

not even think of dirtying my hands with paint.

Detached and distant, the work of art must complete

itself before my eyes and under my command. Thus, as

soon as the work is realized, I can stand there, present

at the ceremony, spotless, calm, relaxed, worthy of it,

and ready to receive it as it is born into the tangible

world. 11

Initially it is perhaps a little hard to reconcile Kleins de-sire to enter into space with the assertion that, in the Anthro-pometries, he preferred to be detached, distant, and spot-less. Interestingly, the apparent contradiction uncovers anotheralignment with the conventions of theater as a practice. Unlikethe action painter, who positions himself as the instrument ofaction, Klein essentially delegated and ordered the actions ofothers, a position very much akin to the directors role in the the-ater. Moreover, he was more able to remain calm and to receivethe work as it unfolded by practicing the piece with his ensemblefirst: like any theater director, he rehearsed. Hence, the dele-gated and rehearsed quality of this performed painting did notconform to the lone and spontaneous conventions of Americanaction painting as Rosenberg had celebrated it, a fact that makesa painting like Suaire de Mondo Cane all the more intriguing. As apiece that was made in rehearsal in 1961, it is an index of a cen-tral aspect of Kleins practice. One can thus look at the canvasand wonder what was automatic, spontaneous, or evoked, butone looks simultaneously with an eye toward speculating as towhat spontaneous acts Klein might have kept in the script.What evocations did he decide to eliminate? And what ele-ments could have been rehearsed until they were automatic?More pointedly, different kinds of contemporary receivers mightfind themselves reading different kinds of content into the can-vas. Certainly for a spectator asking feminist questions about thepaintings production, the imprint of the female body parts has aparticular urgency. By what logic could this male artist imaginethat his own freedom would be expressed from such a spotlessposition? And what were the stakes of that freedom for the mute,unnamed female nudes who became his living paintbrushes?

The intermedial expansion of painting has taken manyshapes. Allan Kaprow shared Harold Rosenbergs stance on Pol-lock and wrote his own account of what he felt was most impor-tant in The Legacy of Jackson Pollock. 12 Kaprow devel-oped an array of Happenings to extend the action of action paint-ing, positioning them as experiments that further blurred theboundaries of art and life and that carried Pollocks action legacyeven further into the sphere of the everyday. It is also importantto recognize, however, that other artists innovated in the experi-mental expansion of paintingand not necessarily in the samelegitimating spheres in which Rosenberg and Pollock circulated.

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Kazuo Shiraga, Untitled, 1959, oil on canvas, 70 x110 in. (180 x 279.4 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1998, 1998.109.

Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 19581966, oil with wood andmica on canvas, 128 92 11 in. (327.3 234.3 27.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, NewYork, Gift of thhe Estate of Jay DeFeo and purchasewith funds from the Contemporary Painting andSculpture Committee and the Judith RothschildFoundation 95.170. 2009 The Jay DeFeoTrust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

MINIMALISM AND ITS MISFIRES

In 1954, in another part of the world, Japanese artistsformed the Gutai Art Association to craft alternative techniquesand an alternative place for the artist in postwar Japan. Invokinggutai, or embodiment, as a first principle, they explored theperformance of painting, developing new gestures and methodsof working with paint, throwing it, applying it with their feet,spreading it with their own bodies. As actions, these artworkspreceded Kaprows Happenings and developed independentlyfrom the work of either Pollock or Klein. Staged in a Japan thathad recently surrendered in World War II, the actions of artistssuch as Jir Yoshihara, Sabur Murakami, and Kazuo Shiragawere deliberate attempts to create an alternative embodimentto the one they found in the political atmosphere of their home-land. As Ming Tiampo has argued, the regional specificity ofthese actions decenters narratives of innovation and experi-ment recounted from an exclusively Western modernist perspec-tive. 13

The frame of action painting can become more heteroge-neous when we consider not only global and gender diversityoutside of Euro-American exchange but also diversity within it. Agreat deal of visual art made by women can be helpfully under-stood as an extensionand often a parodyof the actions ofmale painters. In San Francisco in 1958, Jay DeFeo took the ideaof action, art, and the everyday to different extremes when shebegan working on a huge canvas in her Fillmore studio. Layeringwhite and gray paint into forms that became sculptural in theirthree-dimensionality, she undertook a process of scraping andrelayering, turning her own actions as a painter into a daily ritualthat lasted for nearly eight years. In her hands, the action ofpainting was not simply spontaneous but also continuous, trans-forming the creation of what she would eventually call The Roseinto a durational and social relation in her studio. If a feministrereading of the everyday in action painting is made possiblethrough the example of DeFeo, feminist critique becomes morepointed and direct when considering something like ShigekoKubotas Vagina Painting (1965) or Carolee Schneemanns InteriorScroll (1975). Whether squatting to paint a horizontal canvas witha brush secured beneath her dress (Kubota) or displaying hernaked body as a locus and container of textual authority (Schnee-mann), these artists addressed the gendered undercurrent ofprevious action experiments. For historians of feminist art of the1970s such as Amelia Jones and Rebecca Schneider, the interme-dial challenge was clear. 14 If access to life was going to bepossible for the female paintbrush, it could happen only underher signature and when she controlled her own relationship tothe canvas.

The performative role of the addressee would become newly heated and newly de-bated with new sculptural movements in the 1960s and 1970s. The term Minimal-

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ism became a catchall for this turn in art and performancevariously defined asliteralist art, primary structures, or specific objectsone that reduced theparameters, materials, and gestures of art in order to provoke an expanded reflec-tion on what it meant to be encountering it. Before considering these art move-ments and their critical reception, however, it is important to elaborate uponsome other dimensions of performativitys propositions. Indeed, having concludedthe previous section with examples of feminist reinterpretation, it seems impor-tant to return first to historic discussions of performative utterances. As much asconnections between art and Austin can be found in the emphasis on action, adeeper investigation shows just how much the felicity of those acts dependsupon their reception. Indeed, How to Do Things with Words is most interesting forAustins meditations on what he called the uptake of an utterance. He concededquite early that performative utterances could not have world-making power un-less theysomewhat paradoxicallyalso had the cooperation of the world aroundthem. Speaking generally, it is always necessary that the circumstances in whichthe words are uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate. 15 Suchcontingent circumstances empowered speech to be performative. Austin thus be-came fully engaged with all the inappropriate or precarious conditions that short-circuited performative efficacy, creating a vocabulary for what he called unhappyperformatives, or the doctrine of the things that can be and go wrong. 16 Elabo-rating on different types of infelicity, he thought at length about the concept ofthe misfire, speech that missed its mark. He explored a variety of examples inwhich the intended meaning of speech differed enormously from a receivers up-take. He further distinguished the misfire from what he called an outright abuseof language. Abuses were not simply mistakes but utterances in which the sinceri-ty of the speaker was in fact dubious. The difference between the sincere misfireand the insincere abuse prompted a great deal of anxious reflectionnot unlikeour most fraught debates around the effects of contemporary art.

One of Austins most famously fraught reflections involved the theater: aperformative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if saidby an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in a soliloquy. Thisapplies in a similar manner to any and every utterancea sea change in specialcircumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special waysintelligiblyused not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal useways that fall underthe doctrine of the etiolations of language. 17 The idea that theatrical represen-tation was hollow, void, and parasitic thus had intermedial implications. Certainlyit resuscitated a historic Western antitheatrical prejudice that has led commenta-tors since Plato to worry about the effects of letting actors and poets into the are-na of serious civic debate. Austins argument on the nonserious nature of the-atrical language would be quoted and critiqued by subsequent thinkersincludingJacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Shoshana Felman, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwickwho worried about its implications for a variety of aesthetic sites at risk of beingdubbed nonserious or insincere. 18 After all, the history of Western art hasseen artists, poets, and actors constantly renewing their bid to gain legitimate en-try into the public sphere. Meanwhile, much of the recent history of late twenti-eth-century experimental art has given itself a more urgent charge, seeking toundo the art-life binary that would define theateror any artas parasitic inthe first place. If parasitism assumes a reality that precedes it, much contemporaryart and performance exposed the dependence of that reality on a language that de-fined it. Perhaps reality is actually the parasite.

While much of the art criticism that invokes Austin focuses on his reflec-tions on parasitism, there are other dimensions of his theory worth emphasizinghere. In fact, in the same period that Rosenberg was writing and painters wereacting, a variety of critics were decidedly unhappy about this nascent performa-tive discourse. Clement Greenberg is the powerful art critic most famous forlaunching analyses of Abstract Expressionist painting that critiqued Rosenbergsvocabulary in the strongest of terms. Keen to develop a specifically modernist

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art criticism, Greenberg found it necessary to reassert the autonomy and essen-tially self-critical qualities of modernist painting. Joining AbEx painters withother artists he admired, he posited that the modernist strength of their paintingslay in the degree to which they did not reference conditions outside themselves;properly modernist paintings focused on their own essential medium-specificity,their two-dimensional uniqueness as a work on canvas. It was the stressing ofthe ineluctable flatness of the support that remained most fundamental in the pro-cesses by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. Flat-ness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no otherart, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.

19

For Greenberg, Jackson Pollocks paintings were groundbreaking not be-cause of the actions that coincided with them, not because of the existence or lifeforce of the painter, but because the paintings foregrounded the specificity ofpainting qua painting, meditating upon their own essential flatness. For Greenbergand other critics, such as Michael Fried and Hilton Kramer, there was nothing in-termedial about such painting. What does he mean by the canvas as an arena inwhich to act? Kramer asked of Rosenberg in frustration. 20 To recall suchclaims and such frustrations is to remember that many disagree with the notionthat all art is performative. Moreover, as Greenberg had elaborated, a paintingwas a good painting when it did not depend upon the uptake of the receiver. Afterall, properly modernist painting criticized and defined itself.

Certainly the most notorious and hence most often circulated argumentagainst the intermedial and performative turns in contemporary art came from aformer student of Greenbergs, Michael Fried. His Art and Objecthood is a textthat is returned to again and againsome might say too often. I return to it brieflyhere only to remind ourselves of how the receiver figures in the text. Fried trainedhis attention largely on Minimalist sculpture and the influence of what he per-ceived to be its theatricality. His scandalized concern focused on many aspects ofthe work: its supposed literality, its durationality, its in-between-ness as an in-termedial form. But one of his prime anxieties about Minimalist sculpture had todo with its effect on the beholderindeed, its dependence on the beholder. Fortheatre has an audienceit exists for onein a way the other arts do not; in fact,this more than anything else is what Modernist sensibility finds intolerable abouttheatre generally. 21

While Fried found the audience relation intolerable, many Minimalistartists sought actively to cultivate it. They were interested in creating artworksthat encouraged viewers to avow their own relation to the work of art; receivershad to reckon with themselves in shared space with an artwork whose constitutionas a work depended upon them. Robert Morriss reflections on what he called thebetter new work defined this pursuit: One is more aware than before that hehimself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various po-sitions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context. 22 And Mor-riss own work incarnated the pursuit as well. In his historic solo exhibitions at theGreen Gallery in 1964 and 1965, the gallery space was reorganized and even over-whelmed by the arrangement and volume of Morriss large geometric structures.Viewers had to adjust their comportment in the space, noticing heretofore unac-knowledged spatial elementsincluding the corner occupied by his Untitled (Cor-ner Piece) (1964)and questioning the assumed boundary between artwork andgallery space, which was blurred by his Mirrored Cubes (1965). Mel Bochner wouldjoin his own interest in numerical systems with the environmental expansivenessof Morris in works like Measurement Room (1969). Lining walls, ceilings, and floor-boards with a tabulation of the rooms dimension, Bochner called viewers atten-tion to the gallery as a spatial container, indeed, positing the work as coincidentwith the container in which it is viewed. If Minimalist art encouraged viewers tocome to terms with themselves as bodies in a space, Eva Hesse pushed that em-bodied awareness further, transforming rigid geometries into serial presentations

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Paul Thek, Hippopotamus from Technological Reliquaries, 1965, beeswax, plexiglass, metal, rubber, 11 x 19 x 11 in. (28.9 x 50.2 x 29.2 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker AcquisitionFund, 1994, 1994.196.

of soft, bulbous, spindly, and sometimes prickly materials that seemed to invite atactile encounter.

Even if Morris, Bochner, Hesse, and other formative Minimalist and Post-minimalist artists did not cite Austin explicitly, they were well aware that art wasconstituted in the moment of uptake, and they conceived art that exposed itsown interdependence upon this primary encounter. For Fried and other allied artcritics, however, such a gesture was not only formally compromising but decidedlyunnerving as well. Fried famously analogized the encounter with Minimalist sculp-ture as a kind of threatening rapprochement with the silent presence of anotherperson. Furthermore, Minimalist art called increased attention to what Austinwould have called circumstances, an extended imagining that was, for Fried,hard to bear: But the things that are literalist works of art must somehow confrontthe beholderthey must, one might always say be placed not just in his space butin his way. It is, I think, worth remarking that the entire situation means exact-ly that: all of itincluding it seems the beholders body. Everything countsnotas part of the object, but as part of the situation in which its objecthood is estab-lished and on which that objecthood at least partly depends. 23

Ultimately the performative role of the address would becelebrated by some as vociferously as it was condemned by crit-ics like Fried. In this reconsideration of the crux of Minimal-ism, Hal Foster expressed the change in the viewers relation-ship to the art object as follows: Rather than scan the surface fortopological mapping of properties of its medium, he or she isprompted to explore the perceptual consequences of a particularintervention in a given site. 24 Although Foster was dis-cussing a different kind of art than was Rosenberg, his termschime with Rosenbergs account of how action painting trans-formed the viewing relationship. In both action painting andMinimalist work, the viewer focuses on the artists gesture as it-self an intervention. Whether standing before a canvas or in asite, she becomes a connoisseur of the gradations of that ac-tion, taking account of its perceptual consequences.

Looking back at this kind of thinking from the vantagepoint of the early twenty-first century, we know that Fried andGreenberg would not have their way. Much contemporary experi-ment seems an active attempt to reinforce the notion that all artis performative, even if some artists and critics have had an in-terest in disavowing the degree to which this is so. Meanwhile,many developments in contemporary art are explicitly influencedby the challenge launched by Minimalism and have extended it inways that even Minimalisms founding fathers might not haveanticipated. For Paul Thek, Minimalist sculpture hardly went farenough in engaging the perceptual and political imaginary of itsbeholders. In the mid-1960s, frustrated by a cool geometry thatdid not come close to responding to the entire situation of theVietnam War, Thek installed fabricated meat pieces inside cu-bic vitrines, pushing beholders to reflect on what it meant to en-counter material that looked like it could have once been alive.Decades later, Glenn Ligon took the geometry of the Minimalistblock in another direction. In To Disembark (1994), he further lit-eralized Frieds silent presence by imagining such blocks ascontainers of cargo of another sort, recalling the story of HenryBox Brown, a slave who gained freedom when he allowed him-self to be shipped in such a box from Richmond, Virginia, to Phil-adelphia. The geometry of To Disembark thus reminded receivers

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Eiko & Koma, Naked, installation view, Walker Art Center, 2010.

UPTAKING PERFORMANCE AND OTHERRELATIONAL TURNS

that the legacies of slavery are part of the entire situation.

Let us now return to the work of Eiko & Koma. We left them prone amidminerals, plants, and water, waiting for someone to enter the gallery space inwhich Naked was on view. It is easier to see the significance of their realization ofhow difficult it was to sustain Naked without a receiver in the room; the felicitous-ness of their works performative gesture depends on the presence of an ad-dressee. It also seems fairly clear that the installation violates a variety of mod-ernist art principles and embodies much of what modernist art critics feared. IfFried was menaced by a Minimalist sculpture that came upon visitors like thesilent presence of another person, then Naked also literalized that supposed liter-alism by using silent people to create a kind of sentient structure. Like other Mini-malist challenges that expanded attention to an entire situation and includedthe beholder, Eiko & Komas piece had an environmental reach. The floor of thegallery strategically functioned as a sound trigger when a visitor entered the room.With each step, one announced ones presence, and the artwork seemed to re-spond. The resulting self-consciousness in the visitor might have felt welcoming to

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some and distressingly in the way to others.Moreover, Eiko & Koma are very aware that uptaking takes many forms.

They know that some visitors pass relatively quickly through the gallery while oth-ers linger for multiple hours. The artists sense of their own relation to the behold-erone that might include the beholders bodyexpands as well. Their eyesnot only see the entire frame. They travel to some other area and back to my bodypart. Sometimes they see one part of us, sometimes Eikos knee. We are invitingpeoples gaze to travel. Intriguingly, the structural pursuit of Naked lies in part inits ability to accommodate different types of uptaking. Rather than hoping for oneparticular kind of encounter, Eiko & Koma want receivers to notice how they areco-constructing the exchange. They have to put themselves in the mind, changetheir conditions sometimes people say, Thats enough I want to stay more butI have more important things to do. 25 The invitation to beholders to cali-brate the conditions of beholding means that Eiko & Koma also have to respondand accept the results of those choices. The performers thus have to maintain aflexible notion of what qualifies as felicity in this performative encounter.

With the work of Eiko & Koma, we also get the opportunity to think aboutother intermedial puzzles and tensions. As Japanese expatriates influenced byGutais aesthetics of embodiment, they bring to their work a cultural specificitythat is registered to varying degrees by receivers on the global art and performancecircuit. Moreover, while Naked was created for a museum gallery, and perhaps ap-propriately understood as an expansion of the display conventions of visual art,Eiko & Koma have also conceived work for other types of venues. Their pieces areoften sited in theaters, for instance, a different kind of aesthetic location that en-gages different horizons of expectation for its receivers. When they work on-stage, say Eiko & Koma, viewers tend to think about one evening as a wholething, whereas in a gallery the durational parameters of the whole are much lessfixed.

Those temporal and spatial horizons widen and retract in more ways whenwe think of other sites in which Eiko & Koma have located their work, includingschools, streets, and even a large lake outdoors. Indeed, dance critics are just aslikely as art critics, if not more so, to review their work. And just as visual art crit-ics have had to adjust the parameters of evaluating their sentient sculpture, so toohave dance specialists. Deborah Jowitt once argued that the pair seeks to de-con-dition you for dancing, a statement that both unsettles the category of dance andreinstalls dance (rather than sculpture) as a compass from which their works in-novation is measured. 26 For their own part, Eiko & Koma are quite clear thatdifferent kinds of venues have medium-specific ways of uptaking, however inter-medial any artwork or performance piece happens to be. The decision to placeNaked not in the theater but in a gallery space was thus deliberate, a key dimensionof the kind of experience that they were trying to create for receivers. Rather thantaking a seat in a row within a theater setting, waiting for the curtain call beforedeparture, gallery visitors participate in the creation of the whole thing. As Eiko& Koma elaborate, They have to choose which bench, where to sit they make adecision to leave us. 27

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Installation view of the exhibition Dance Works I: Merce Cunningham/Robert Rauschenberg, Walker Art Center, 2011.

The intermedial stakes of performance-based work thus shift depending onthe conventions of the venue in which they are received. This contingency is anintriguing one for many of the artists gathered in the Walkers collections, espe-cially if one considers the Walkers relationship to a history of experimental per-formance. Eiko & Koma are part of the collection, says Philip Bither, the muse-ums William and Nadine McGuire Senior Curator of Performing Arts, because ofthe institutions long history with them as a commissioning partner. 28 Thiskind of tacking between the professional spheres of different mediums has oc-curred with other performative artists. William Kentridges drawing videos havebeen displayed in the Walkers galleries, but his work with Handspring PuppetCompany appeared on its stages in 2011. Merce Cunninghams company has ap-peared on the Walkers stages for decadesand made its own contribution to thedeconditioning of dance. Now, however, the Cunningham companys materialswill be part of its collection (a status, it should be said, that is much differentfrom being part of a performance librarys archive). This means that RobertRauschenberg is represented in the Walkers collection not only by a discretepainting like Trophy II (1960) but also by his intermedial redefinition of the the-atrical set in his work with Cunningham. Meanwhile, Trisha Browns dance Lat-eral Pass (1985) premiered at the Walker, and her canonical choreographic workMan Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) was remounted in Minneapolis in2008. Moreover, pieces such as Its a DrawFor Robert Rauschenberg (2008) giveBrown a place in the Walkers visual art collection as well.

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Trisha Brown, Its a DrawFor RobertRauschenberg, 2008, charcoal, pastel on paper, 81x 108 in. (205.7 x 274.3 cm). Collection Walker ArtCenter, Julie and Babe Davis Acquisition Fund andthe Miriam and Erwin Kelen Acquisition Fund forDrawings, 2008, 2008.54.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1991, offset printon paper, endless copies, 7 x 38 x 45 in. (17.8 x97.8 x 114.9 cm) ideal stack dimension. CollectionWalker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund,

Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Walker Art Center, 2008.

The protocols and paradoxes of acquiring performance-based works create their own new puzzles that exceed the para-meters of this essay. To the extent that such acquisitions are alsopromises on the part of art organizations to sustain a future ofcontinued reception, however, it is worth lingering on somemore recent turns within the artistic history of performative en-counter. Indeed, much recent conversation about the performa-tive in contemporary art came about not so much to recall ac-tion painting or to embrace Minimalisms theatricality or tonotice a history of performance curating that has been going onwithin visual art contexts for many decades, but to come toterms with more recent relational art practices. Dorothea vonHantelmann captures much of this discussion in her account ofthe experiential turn in her essay in this volume. Many con-temporary artists have been creating extended events of socialencounter under a variety of newer labels, and each of the termssocial practice, community engagement, participatory art, rela-tional aestheticshas a different resonance and different stakes.A number of artists tend to serve as indexes of more recent ex-perimentationincluding Felix Gonzalez-Torres with hisstacks and spills, Rirkrit Tiravanija with his cooking installa-tions, Santiago Sierra with his disturbing installations of unem-ployed humans in the gallery, and many more. The phrase rela-tional aesthetics is often credited to the French curator NicolasBourriaud, who used the term to describe a variety of work inwhich intersubjectivity functioned as the material substrateof the art event. 29 That is, rather than paint, clay, wire, met-al, or canvas, the material of the art object becomes the rela-tional exchange that it provokes. As I have argued at length else-where, the new turns of these participatory forms can certainlybe found in earlier work and in a variety of mediums, includingthe performative encounters of performance. 30 As we havealso seen thus far, the relational exchange among participantswill certainly have different stakes depending upon how receiversunderstand the regional politics and perceptual parameters of

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1991, 1991.130.1-.4. The Felix Gonzalez-TorresFoundation.

the situation in which an encounter occurs.The task of contextualizing, mounting, and collecting re-

lational work comes to the fore in yet new ways when we consid-er the work of Tino Sehgal. A piece like This objective of that object(2004) differently refracts the puzzle of the performative in con-temporary art. Sehgals objectless pieces have recently receivedworldwide attention, in part because they actively resist thestructures of both visual and performing art. Trained in eco-nomics and dance, he seeks to make work that uses no naturalresources and leaves no material imprint. Previous pieces havedrawn on experimental choreography, distinctive in part becausehe forbids documentation or any reproduction that could substi-tute for the live event.

This objective of that object shares company with a numberof recent pieces that make use of a game-like structure, includingThis Situation, recently acquired by New Yorks Museum of Mod-ern Art, and This Progress, originally sited at the Institute of Con-temporary Arts in London and remounted at the GuggenheimMuseum in New York to bemused renown. This objective of thatobject is composed of five interpreters who form a loose circlearound gallery visitors with their backs turned. The interpretersbreathe softly, and then each successively begins to whisper,The objective of this work is to become the object of discus-sion. They repeat the phrase, as noted in the Walkers acquisi-tion write-up, in expectation of the visitors response. If thereis none, the interpreters will gradually lower their voices and, af-ter pauses and moments of silence, sink to the floor, apparentlyundone by the fact that their performative utterance has not pro-duced a felicitous uptake. If, however, a visitor does offer a re-sponse, the interpreters actively celebrate the apparent happi-ness of the performative encounter. There may be an exchangebetween a visitor and an interpreter. The interpreters may thendecide at any moment to initiate a circular dance and a series ofphrases and exit the room, often leaving one remaining inter-preter behind to sustain conversation with the visitor. As in otherworks by Sehgal, the interpreter may finish by reminding the visi-tor of the name of the artist, the name of the work, and the yearit was made, both parodying and reinforcing visual art conven-tions of attributing artistic authorship.

If much late twentieth-century art has called upon the re-ceiver to avow her role in the constitution of the art object, thenthis piece isolates that directive in its skeletal structure. Thepiece is an encounter about encounter, thereby making explicitthe primary condition that Eiko & Koma endured. Because it usestext and language more than the other artworks described so farin this essay, the Sehgal piece also more explicitly returns ourdiscussion of the performative to the exchange of speech. How,after Austin, is this piece doing things with words? The objec-tive is the intention of an utterance as well as the intent of thework. Reciprocally self-constituting, the work is itself the dis-cussion that it seeks to produce; if felicitous, that exchange willbe both the form and the content of the work. The utterance ofthe work is happy when the object of the discussion becomesthe discussion itself. Meanwhile, the work has less than satisfyingmechanisms for contending with a lack of uptake; interpreterssink to the floor until the process can start again. But the aspira-tion is also to induce awareness in receivers of their own role in

http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/this-objective-of-that-object

producing the outcome. Importantly, that sense of embedded-ness comes within a structure that is simultaneously the workstheme. It is an exchange about exchange whose misfires areabout misfiring.

There is a kind of recursive quality to Seghals workone that in turn pro-duces recursive sentences from critics like me who are trying to come to termswith it. However, it might be exactly that sense of recursion that explains the in-terest of so many critical theorists in Sehgal. Earlier I noted that interest in themid-century reflections of speech act theorists resurged as the twentieth centurywore on. The recent revision of performativity theory was part of a broader effortto understand the complexities of subject formation, a project that questioned theassumption that self-making was essentially a voluntary operation, regulated onlyby 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 crit-ical philosophy to mount alternative conceptions, frames that took seriously thedegree to which social circumstances in fact produce our internal perception ofa voluntary will, often with particular ideological effects. 31 It was in such acontext that the notion of the performative was revived, this time to tease outthe implications of the constitutive power of language that J. L. Austin himselfmight not have pursued. Indeed, for many recent theorists, it is most important toconsider the degree to which the primary doing of the performative is the ideo-logical constitution of the doer herself.

To ground such a complex notion, let us look at one famous philosophicalexample that dramatized this kind of recursionand, incidentally, served as a re-source for Bourriauds relational aesthetics. Louis Althussers Ideology and Ideo-logical State Apparatuses is a key text in this conversation, particularly for the vo-cabulary of hailing and interpellation that he introduced and for the examplehe 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. 32

Althussers teachable example proved fruitful for many subsequent conver-sations in critical theory. It temporarily anthropomorphized ideology as a copwhose performative utterance sought an addressee; moreover, it was by physicallyand psychically allowing ourselves to be addressed that ideology did its work. Thatfamous turn was a form of uptake that ensured the felicitousness of ideologysperformative reach. Moreover, Althusser was keen to note that the process of ad-dress and uptake had a temporal coincidence: Naturally for the convenience andclarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of asequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succes-sion. But in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence ofideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and thesame thing. 33 Althusser thus posited interpellation of subjects by ideology asitself a recursive process, as one and the same thing. Joining an Austinian lan-guage with an Althusserian one, Judith Butler would attempt to tease out a degree

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of variability in the process of hailing: As Althusser himself insists, this performa-tive effort of naming can only attempt to bring its addressee into being; there isalways the risk of a certain misrecognition. If one misrecognizes that effort to pro-duce the subject, the production itself falters. The one who is hailed may fail tohear, misread the call, turn the other way, answer to another name, insist on notbeing addressed that way. 34 At the same time, if misfire or misrecognition ispossible, it still occurs within a recursive structure that both constrains and en-ables the subjects it made.

It is no coincidence that some bloggers and other commentators have usedthe language of Althussers hailings to describe the exchanges at work in Sehgalspieces. 35 Since Sehgal is concerned with exposing the ideological nature ofsubject formation within museum institutions, we could say that This objective ofthat object is an interpellation about interpellation. Indeed, the choreography ofthe piece seems to invoke but revise the choreography of Althussers theoreticaltheatre. In Seghals piece, in fact, the addressers back is turned while the ad-dressee reckons with being hailed by the piece. Any comment is registered as afelicitous recruitment, prompting the addresser to instantiate its success bymaking her own 180-degree turn.

Moreover, the piece seems to hail participants whether or not they fully in-tend to be recruited. In Von Hantelmanns accounts of the enactment of thispiece, its structure accommodates a wide range of responses, even turning ringingcell phones or discreet comments in a foreign language into a felicitous uptak-ing. Visitors thus find themselves hailed despite themselves, reckoning with theprocess of recruitment. It is thus perhaps no wonder that accounts of Sehgalspieces include so many critics chronicles of their own process of reception. Wefind critics using the first person more often in their accounts, as the evaluation ofthe work coincides with a highly personal process of exchange. (I have my ownstory, one that involves the effects of bringing my children to This Situation inParis and watching how their presence unsettled the commentary of the playersuntil one found a way to interpellate my son into the piece.) We also find criticstrying to push the structure of the work to test its hailing capacities. When he par-ticipated in This Progress at the Guggenheim Museum in 2010, a theoretical the-ater that included structured conversations with child players, the critic JerrySaltz was not sufficiently attentive to its discursive conventions. The result wasthat his child interlocutor burst into tears, prompting Saltz to write an account ti-tled How I Made an Artwork Cry. 36

The intermedial puzzles of contemporary art create newperformative realities (and new performative problems) for

receivers trying to make sense of them.

Like all the work chronicled in this essay, Sehgals oeuvre also brings for-ward intense reflection about the intermedial nature of so-called performative

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ENDNOTES

1. Eiko, in interview with Justin Jones, November 30, 2010,http://channel.walkerart.org/play/eiko-koma-on-naked/.

2. See Dorothea von Hantelmann, The Experiential Turn, in OnPerformativity, edited by Elizabeth Carpenter, Vol. 1 of Living CollectionsCatalogue. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2014, para 2.http://walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/experiential-turn

work. He quite actively refuses the language of theater and performance to de-scribe his structures, using terms like interpreter or player to refer to the inter-locutors he hires. At the same time, he is perceived as challenging the conventionsof a visual art world motored by the creation and purchase of material objects. AsRebecca Schneider has argued, these pieces seem to accrue a good deal of medialpanic as artists, critics, and curators debate different frames of legitimation anddelegitimation. 37

Finally, the intermedial puzzles of contemporary art create new performa-tive realities (and new performative problems) for receivers trying to make senseof them. If a residual antitheatrical discourse still influences the evaluation ofself-consciously performative art, then artists like Sehgal have an interest inmaking sure that no one calls their work theater. And if performing artists such asTrisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, and Eiko & Koma are to receive the legitima-tion of a visual art-world context, it certainly helps that they have created work forgallery spaces and produced objects that are collectible. But it also seems impor-tant to explore the possibility of recursion and reciprocity happening in more thanone direction. A museum context does something to these intermedial works, butthese works also do something back to the museum. They require new presentingapparatuses; they ask the institution to make new kinds of promises. It will be ex-citing and intriguing to see whether and how intermedial panic can be turned intointermedial transformation. The performativity of art will, in the end, perpetuallytransform the institution that houses it.

Shannon Jackson is director of the Arts Research Center at the University of California,Berkeley, where she is also Goldman Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and

Performance Studies. Along with numerous contributions to museum catalogues, jour-

nals, edited collections, and art media outlets, her publications include the books Lines ofActivity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (University ofMichigan Press, 2000); Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy fromPhilology to Performativity (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Social Works:Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge, 2011). Forthcoming projects include abook about intermedia performance for MIT Press and an edited collection on keywords

in the curating of time-based art and performance, created in collaboration with the Pew

Center for Art and Heritage.

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3. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1962).

4. Harold Rosenberg, The American Action Painters, Art News 51(December 1952), reprinted in Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 2339.

5. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 25.

6. Ibid., 25.

7. Austin, How to Do Things, 6.

8. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 2728.

9. Ibid., 29.

10. Label text for Yves Klein, Dimanche (1960), from the exhibition Art in OurTime: 1950 to the Present, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, September 5,1999September 2, 2001,http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/dimanche.

11. Yves Klein, The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto, Yves Klein, 19281962 (Houston:Rice University Institute for the Arts, 1982), 124.

12. Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, Art News 57 (October1958): 2426, 5557.

13. See Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2011).

14. See Amelia Jones, Body Art / Performing the Subject (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

15. Austin, How to Do Things, 8.

16. Ibid., 14.

17. Ibid., 22.

18. Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context, trans. Samuel Weber andJeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UniversityPress, 1977), 123; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge,1993) and The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1997); Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, QueerPerformativity: Henry Jamess The Art of the Novel, GLQ: A Journal ofLesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 116.

19. Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, in The New Art: A CriticalAnthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 6869.The first version of the essay, using the term support, appeared in ForumLectures (Washington, DC: Voice of America, 1960).

20. Hilton Kramer, The New American Painting, Partisan Review 20 (JulyAugust 1953): 427.

21. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress, 1998), 163.

22. Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture, Part II, Artforum 5 (October 1966):21.

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23. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, 15455.

24. Hal Foster, The Crux of Minimalism, in The Return of the Real(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

25. Eiko & Koma, interview with Justin Jones.

26.

27. Eiko & Koma, interview with Justin Jones.

28. Ibid.

29. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Rel,1998).

30. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (NewYork: Routledge, 2011).

31. Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context, trans. Samuel Weber andJeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UniversityPress, 1977), 123; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge,1993) and The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1997); Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, QueerPerformativity: Henry Jamess The Art of the Novel, GLQ: A Journal ofLesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 116.

32. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin andPhilosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 16263.

33. Ibid.

34. Judith Butler, Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud andFoucault, in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 95.

35. See, for instance, Katie Kitamura, Tino Sehgal, Frieze, no. 131 (May 2010),http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/tino_sehgal2/.

36. Jerry Saltz, How I Made an Artwork Cry, New York, February 7, 2010,http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/63638/.

37. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times ofTheatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 129.

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