performance and performance

So, lately I've been thinking about performance, probably because that's what I'm writing my dissertation on, and so I've surrounded myself with it like a million ermine coats, reflected in a million mirrors. Yikes. It's getting a little intense in here. But anyhow, I went to a conference in Bogotá that featured a number of moments that really challenged my understanding of performance and its purposes/effects/whatever. And I want to put this together with a book that I'm reading, The Spectacular City (by Daniel Goldstein), which echoes and invokes many, many similar books on the (short-lived, I hope) phenomenon called "cultural performance." Is it just me, or are we waaaay past the cultural thing? In case it's not just me, I'll explain below.

First, the performance that for me (and most other conference attendees) most jarred our thinking about performance-vs-everyday life. The artist, a Cuban woman named Tania Bruguera who also works in Chicago, curated a panel discussion featuring (presumably) a Colombian ex-guerilla and a paramilitary officer who were supposed to duke it out. This was some of the rhetoric surrounding the panel, and I'm not sure whether or not it's true. Anyhow, other rhetoric had said that when asked what materials she required for her performance, Bruguera had said, "A gun and a pound of cocaine." So perhaps a gun was supposed to be present at the panel, but to my knowledge it wasn't. Then, while the panel was discussing the topic of what constituted heroism, Tania's assistant came around with plates of cocaine, offering lines to people, who, to all appearances, snorted it eagerly. (Tania later stated in her defense that she'd only purchased enough for "two lines per person," hardly an amount to make anyone go crazy.) Anyhow, the place apparently erupted into chaos, with Colombian university students and officials storming the stage, grabbing the microphone and crying/screaming about the offense of this display. I say "apparently" because I wasn't actually there: the performance took place alongside another one in the small Artes Plásticas building, and I couldn't see anything and left to watch the other performance (a spectacular panorama of conquest and fetish scenes staged by Guillermo Gomez-Peña and a gorgeous naked Brazilian woman who danced en pointe with bound breasts) unfold on a giant screen outside. People eventually came pouring out of the building, looking perplexed or ripping up their nametags and the like, and someone mumbled something like "I hope that Tania doesn't get lynched." There was widespread unhappiness, both from authorities (the media was there, police were ushered to the building, the university was angry and regretting its investment in the Hemispheric Institute, and Hemi officials were worrying that their Ford and Rockefeller money would be pulled, and that people in the upper echelons would lose their jobs, etc - lots of hurried meetings with government and university admin were to follow). Anyhow, the performance had been a resounding success.

Yet it was also resoundingly problematic on several levels. For one, Tania was an outsider to the Colombian scene, and she couldn't have known that the performance, staged as it was within campus grounds, would endanger the lives of student activists like Nikita, who were on the paramilitary's wanted lists. Subjunctive questions emerged: what if she had been a Colombian artist? What if the cocaine had been powdered sugar, as had been allotted her when she pitched the idea? What importance did 'real' have here (we all knew that it had a lot)? Moreover, she did little to demystify the chain of production and consumption of cocaine in Colombia, and that - always a goal of proper Marxists - would have greatly enriched the performance, though possibly endangered her mules. The fact was that she knowingly tapped an extremely sensitive vein, and did so in a way that both broke the fourth wall and remained a performance, oscillating between the two and fuzzying our understandings of binaries that we had built to keep ourselves safe. After all, her performance had real effects (but what performance doesn't?). Hers dealt with violent and timely subject matter (again, a common theme throughout the conference). What was the difference, then, between this and other spectacles that we'd seen, especially the extreme body performances of Rocío Boliver, "La Congelada de Uva," which involved painful perforating and sewing of heavy weights into the vaginal lips?

Perhaps the difference was the nature of Tania's offense - the proffering of an illegal substance that is literally tearing the country apart to countrymen who barely acknowledge their guilt in the means of production of cocaine, while most likely consuming it (as do we all from time to time), even inside the walls of a prestigious university - and let's not forget the fact that at least half of the 'audience,' or the co-performers/ co-consumers at this event were non-Colombian citizens, many living and working in the US, many members of the academy. So ideally the culpability could extend to almost everyone present at the event, but owing to its setting in Colombia, at the national university, this shared guilt was obscured by a sort of nationalization of the problem, which was likely not intended by the artist.

So there were the facts of illegality and offense. But this also troubles - productively, I think - attempts to keep performance separate from politics. As many have shown, performance, seen as "spectacle," is often confined to that which happens when 'real' politics aren't happening, the side-show, as it were, or the framing device that ornaments what is 'really' going on. I think that Latin American artists have done more than anyone to challenge this separation, perhaps since Latin American politics is often generalized as a circus/carnival of sorts.
To link this incident to the Goldstein book: Goldstein opens his discussion of 'spectacle' in Bolivia with two figures: on one hand, a mob lynching; on the other, a festival (the fiesta de San Miguel). He cites both of these as incidences of 'cultural performance' because they both serve to make explicit the needs of marginalized groups on the stage of the nation-state. In the case of the lynching, the spectacular means of rendering justice demonstrates the need for more state involvement in policing crime in the peripheral barrios; the festival, on the other hand, performs the connection of the barrio denizens to the nation-state and argues for their legality (because apparently rural-to-urban migrants are not legal citizens; citizenship does not seem to be automatically granted on the basis of birth within a natal state. This point is, and continues to be, a bit unclear to me).

The problems here are manifold. First, an until-now unrelated point: as Peter Kulchyski stated regarding indigenous autonomy in his keynote, citizenship is not always the goal, in fact, despite the suppositions of the implicitly US-oriented model of immigration theory. I was just reading a book by Michael Chang that argued for a range or continuum of legal statuses within the umbrella of citizenship, but this thesis still seems to posit that citizenship is the desired, if often thwarted, end-goal for immigrants. Kulchyski showed, on the other hand, that native peoples in Canada actually didn't want to become citizens if this would mean vacating their identities as tribespeople, with all of the very real and significant (albeit not recognized by the Canadian government) attachments and connotations therein. Anyhow, so that's to say that citizenship, or inclusion in the citizen body (whatever that is nowadays) may not always be the end goal. Also, Goldstein's discussion of governance in Bolivia feels historically thin to me; he discusses the demands that these barrios are making on the nation-state in neoliberal times (this was written pre-Evo), but he doesn't say (at least not within the first 50 pages or so - and it really should be there) what the state provided for the people before neoliberalism. He also gives copious examples from his fieldwork of people purposefully thwarting the state's attempts to include them (for taxation purposes, of course) and so showing a strategic and ambivalent desire to be un/included in the citizen body. This he acknowledges, but it would seem to throw some obstacles onto the path of his incessantly grinding introduction, a disjointed lit review that has more to do with the Hausmannization of Paris than it does with Cochabamba.

That gripe aside, there is another problem with Goldstein's invocation of a lynching and a festival in the same breath. I have been grappling with this issue for a while, but it came up as a primary stumbling-block in the class that I taught on festive culture, in which we explored the possibility of theatre and performance to foster "real change," "social transformation," "politics," what have you. When we discussed Trinidadians' cannes brulees activities in Carnival, a reference to the slaves' ordered and insurgent burning of the sugar cane around harvest time, the festival seemed to reenact moments of violence, yet in a benign and sedate way, as if to put past violence to rest via the reenactment of it in performance. So in a way, performance functioned here both to resolicit the memories of audience members of historical violence done against and by the slaves of Trinidad AND to imply that this type of violence was not happening any more (hence, that's why it had to be represented annually in memorium). For me, this is precisely why a festival and a lynching are not the same types of performance, and to reduce them via analogy seems to put the concept of 'social dramaturgy' into a very dangerous and culpable place - as if we can analyze everything through a performatic lens if there is representation involved, whether or not the "performers" are even aware that they're performing.

I was onto this before, when I discussed the touring performance as an interface between figure and ground. By this I stipulated that not every performance will make political/social meaning, actually - a hard line, but one that I felt forced to take, considering the watered-down mush that passes for cultural performance analysis these days. It simply isn't the case that all performance has political value. Culture is not inherently political, and to say so reduces everything to an unworkable base. Therefore, I had to draw lines in the sand.

And yet to create those binaries seems to impose a sort of metaphysics of morals - killing is 'real,' whereas eating a grape could be a performance...? I'm not sure that more structuralism is what we need, but I am sure that poststructuralism has left us in the lurch regarding the performance/real/efficacy/politics tangle - the Bermuda quadrangle. So this is something that I'm still grappling with. I'm thinking of the division between "efficacious performance" and "reproductive performance" or something - but doesn't this lead us back to Schechner's transportation/transformation divide? Ugh, a major theoretical dilemma, and one that I have to think through more thoroughly.