In his the instruction to his book, Performance: A Critical Introduction, Marvin Carlson claims that the term "performance" is "an essentially contested concept." Carlson argues that it is futile to seek some overarching definition of "performance" because there are so many disparate uses of the term.
He does however, praise "one highly suggestive attempt" by Richard Bauman. In the International Encyclopedia of Communications, Bauman claims that all performance involves "a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action." For Bauman, performance is always performance for someone, "some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is occasionally the case, that audience is the self."
Bauman's articulation of performance as characterized by "a consciousness of doubleness" is highly suggestive and aligns well with the semiotic interpretation of art. In Bert States introduction to his book, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre, he writes about need for a "phenomenological renewal" in our approach to theatre. At the time that this article was written, semiotics - "the scientific analysis of the means, or apparatus, of the mimetic process" - was the dominant lens through which to speak about theatre. The "mimentic process" refers to the understanding of art as referential. The conception of art as an imitation of something else is ancient. In Plato, for instance, art was an imitation of this world, which is itself an imitation of the the world of the Forms. Art is a third removed from truth and thus, in the Republic, Plato banishes the poets. For Aristotle, although he did away with Plato's world of the Forms, art is still an imitation of an action. Art is a process of meditation between artist and culture - it provides us with signs which represent different aspects of reality.
States argues that the problem with semiotics is "the implicit belief that you have exhausted a thing's interest when you have explained how it works as a sign." He relies heavily on the 20th century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who in his essay Poetry, Language, Thought, claims that art is characterized by the fact that it is never used up: "it does not, like a tool, 'disappear into usefulness.'" To illustrate the danger of thinking of art merely as referential, Stokes refers to Van Gogh's painting of the peasant shoes. It is obvious that in this painting we recognize the forms as shoes. But is that all it is? Stokes uses Heideggerian language to say that the painting is not a place of reference but a place of disclosure. What is disclosed in this painting cannot be found somewhere else. In other words, this painting brings something new into reality.
In a phenomenological understanding of art, therefore, the observer withholds judgment and analysis and simple allows him or herself to experience the thing. While Stokes agrees that semiotics is very useful in that art often does have a referential character, we must not forget our an immediate experience of a thing.
To further elucidate the phenomenological understanding of art, he refers to Roland Barthe's Camera Lucida and his differentiation between studium and punctum. In a photograph, the studium refers to what one perceives as a result of one's cultural training - (e.g. our pictorial mythologies of beautiful sunsets, polluted streets, children being themselves, etc). It is what is knowable in the photograph. The punctum, however, is a much rarer element. Barthe claims that it is what elevates a particular photograph beyond the studium, beyond what we expect or understand. It is "the wound," made by a detail which somehow fills the picture, annihilating itself as a medium or sign, becoming the thing itself.
Barthe's distinction reminds me of James Joyce's take on art in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. He makes a distinction between proper and improper art. By proper he means that which belongs to art. Proper art for Joyce, is about the aesthetic experience of the thing. By aesthetic he means, having to do with the senses; the pure perception of the thing. Joyce claims that proper art leaves the observer in a state of stasis - you are immobilized - not moved to do anything. Improper art, he says, is kinetic - it moves you. He describes two types of improper art: the Pornographic, which elicits desire (i.e. art in the service of selling you something), the Didactic which repels you away (e.g. plays and novels that focus on social criticism - art in the service to something).
What then is proper art? Joyce (being a good ex-Catholic - you can take an Irishman out of the Church but you can't take the Church out of the Irishman!) turns to St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas speaks of beauty as that which pleases - that which delights. There are three moments in the experience of a beautiful piece of artwork: 1) Integretas -Wholeness - (e.g. the piece of artwork must be unified), 2) Consonantia - Harmony - (the parts relate to the whole and the whole to the parts), and 3) Claritas - Radiance. This last moment is the most mysterious. It relates very much to Barthe's description of the punctum. Joyce says that the beauty in a piece of proper artwork leaves the viewer in "aesthetic arrest." One is not moved with desire or loathing but is held in stasis; the rhythm of beauty stills the heart. The pure object of the piece of art turns you into pure subject - you are the pure "I" beholding the "thing" - there's nowhere to go and nothing to do.
In my reading of Joyce and Barthe, both fall very much on the side of the phenomenological view of art. How does Carlson's statement that all performance involves a "consciousness of doubleness" fit into this perspective? It clearly works with the semiotic understanding but does it do justice to the phenomenological? If the phenomenological view of art emphasizes the value of art in its standing forth, here, now, do we loose the sense of art as consciousness of doubleness? I don't think we do. To explain why, I turn to Alice Rayner's article, Presenting Objects, Presenting Things. In this work she utilizes Heidegger's distinction between objects and things. Objects, for Heidegger, are relational. They set a boundary for the subject and are only understood in light of the subject's need or use. A thing, however, is that which rests "in themselves." Instead of something that stands before, over against, or opposite us, a thing, for Heidegger is "what stands forth."
But what stands forth? What is the thingness of the thing? In Heidegger's essay Things, he asks "what is the thingness of a jug?" Does the jug have an essential nature which stands forth or if so, what is this nature?To answer this question, Heidegger invites us to take a step back and reflect upon our mode of thinking. How do we think about our world? Are there different modes of thinking? Does reality change depending upon how I look at it? Heidegger makes a distinction between the "theoretical attitude," in which we encounter decontextualized entities "present-at-hand," and "engaged coping," in which we encounter context-dependent entities "ready-to-hand." The former is what we call the scientific attitude, the later is common sense knowledge. In our materialistic and technocratic society we assume the scientific mode of understanding is the only route to objective truth while in day to day lives, we rely on our common sense knowledge to "cope" with our world. Heidegger claims that there is another mode of thinking that neither seeks an objective essence nor merely relates to objects as they are of use to us. This other mysterious (and ancient) way of thinking precedes both modes of thinking. This is the mode of pure perception - the perception of the whole before we break reality into parts. As Merleau-Ponty says: "the whole is prior to the part." The invitation of phenomenology is to return to this place of pure perception. When we bracket off what we think we know about reality and simply let the world be (as "things"), we enter into a rich a mysterious world. In this mode, the thing is not a product of mind but rather, a recognized otherness that has its own life process.
What Heidegger is after is an expansion of possibilities. Rather than reduce the object to an understandable essence, Heidegger encourages a mythopoetic stance which sees the jug in terms of its origins in the earth, through the clay that makes it, the wine that comes from earth, water, and sun, and its purpose, or gift, to humans, in giving out drink and to the gods, in concentration.
This type of thinking is illustrated beautifully by the poet William Blake in Auguries of Innocense:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
The artist lives in a world of things and allows him or herself to be moved and affected by them.
But again I ask, what does this have to do with Carlson's statement about "consciousness of doubleness." Does the phenomenological approach to art retain this doubleness and if so, doubleness of what? What is the criteria with which it compares itself? The answer lies, I think in a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "The circle is a beautiful figure in itself; it becomes sublime, when I contemplate eternity under that figure." I think what Coleridge is saying (and what Blake is saying in Auguries and Aquinas in his notions of Integretas and Consonantia ) is that the artist is conscious of the whole within the part. Blake sees eternity in a grain of sand where Van Gogh sees it is in a pair of peasant shoes. The point here is that when one allows him or herself to live in a world of things, one enters into a world that transcends understanding. Things are boundless and mysterious. A thing has infinite possibilities because it is interconnected with every other thing in the universe.
For the artist, each and every thing has the potential to become a manifestation of what Wordworth calls a "presence" - i.e. God, "Ground of Being", "Being," "Buddha Nature," etc. The vocation of the artist, one who is gifted (or plagued), with "consciousness of this doubleness" is to open up a space where this presence can shine through. A proper piece of art, to use Joyce's language, should reveal a world of things. Through the integretas and consonantia of his or her work the thingness of the thing things and thus brings the viewer to a place of aesthetic arrest. This stasis is the privileged space where the world is temporarily free from human objectification and the human person is free to simply let the world be what it is.
One brief personal experience of this: I was a junior in college and very much stuck in my head. I went to a concert at the Boston Symphony. They were playing Beethoven's 6th. At first I obsessed about trying to understand what the music meant. What was Beethoven after? What ideas were embedded in the music? After awhile I realized the futility of this task and allowed myself to sit back in my chair and let the sounds speak for themselves. They washed over my and I felt the music enter into my body - move me in different directions. This wan't a matter or right or wrong. I realized that if Beethoven wanted to convey meaning, he would have written an essay. One does art because the intellect is never enough. Since that moment I have gradually grown in the realization that truly living is not about understanding the "meaning of things," but rather, it's about being open to the world as it is.
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