Forum Modernes Theater
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0930-5874
Narr Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/1201
2018
291-2
BalmeContext as Critique
1201
2018
Shannon Jackson
What does it mean to lament the demise of theater in the same moment that we endure its ubiquitous proliferation? And how do actors – artists and citizens – make sense of theater’s precarity in the midst of this performative circulation? The gesture of “critique” is to question, not only what we know, but how we know, indeed, how we know what we think we know. As such, critique invites us to examine the contexts that have produced knowledge, exposing its provisionality as well as unanticipated spaces of possibility. What happens when those determining contexts are revealed to us? What happens when theater’s contexts change in ways that ‘theater’ did not anticipate? Within the visual art world of the late 20th century, “institutional critique” or “context art” emerged as an art form based in institutional selfreflexivity.
By this point in the 21st century, a cadre of experimental theater makers have arguably developed theater’s version of institutional critique. This article explores the possibility that theater’s processes of circulation, erasure, and re-contextualization are enactments of “critique,” oddly productive in the midst of theater’s undoing.
fmth291-20007
Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre Shannon Jackson (Berkeley) What does it mean to lament the demise of theater in the same moment that we endure its ubiquitous proliferation? And how do actors - artists and citizens - make sense of theater ’ s precarity in the midst of this performative circulation? The gesture of “ critique ” is to question, not only what we know, but how we know, indeed, how we know what we think we know. As such, critique invites us to examine the contexts that have produced knowledge, exposing its provisionality as well as unanticipated spaces of possibility. What happens when those determining contexts are revealed to us? What happens when theater ’ s contexts change in ways that ‘ theater ’ did not anticipate? Within the visual art world of the late 20 th century, “ institutional critique ” or “ context art ” emerged as an art form based in institutional selfreflexivity. By this point in the 21 st century, a cadre of experimental theater makers have arguably developed theater ’ s version of institutional critique. This article explores the possibility that theater ’ s processes of circulation, erasure, and re-contextualization are enactments of “ critique, ” oddly productive in the midst of theater ’ s undoing. “ Theatre ” and “ critique, ” “ critique ” and “ theatre. ” The relationship between these terms shifts and changes depending upon what one understands their referents to be. Below, I work with a multi-referential concept of ‘ theatre ’ and a fairly specific concept of ‘ critique. ’ Indeed, the relative specificity of the latter is, for me, quite key in exploring the range and ubiquity of the former. But let me back up to contextualize that ubiquity. I often find myself asking what it means to lament the demise of theater in the same moment that we endure its ubiquitous proliferation. Moreover, how do artists and citizens make sense of theater ’ s precarity in the midst of this performative circulation? By “ proliferation ” and “ circulation, ” I am referring to a very wide-ranging set of performance practices that “ may or may not be theatre, ” indeed, practices that produce a self-contradicting concept of what theatre can be. Of course, theatre is often linked to a classical conception of the stage, to the proscenium, to the amphitheater, to the theatron, and to fairly specific traditions of style, character, plot, and spectacle recounted in histories of Western theater. Those traditions also depended upon particular conceptions of public-ness and an espoused, if not fully actualized, link between theater and the public sphere. However, when I and we speak about theatre ’ s proliferation now, we are speaking about forms, emotions, tendencies, disseminations, and economic arrangements that seem to bear little relationship to this classical tradition. It is that apparent non-relationship that might prompt us to lament the demise of theatre in the same moment that we seem to find it everywhere. However, it is precisely by exploring that everywhere, the different ‘ wheres ’ within the ‘ everywhere ’ , that the concept and practice of critique becomes relevant. This is especially so when one embraces critique as a situated position, as a practice located in a particular ‘ where, ’ as a practice immanently conducted in order to demonstrate the dependence of ideas, values, ethics, and art on the space - the where - from which Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 7 - 19. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen they emerge. This is what I mean when I say that I have a fairly particular notion of critique in mind, one that is indebted to those who have wrestled the concept of critique away from its association with ’ judgment ’ and toward a practice of immanent, situated, and self-reflexive revelation. Critique is about context. It is, even more precisely, about exposing the context-dependency of ideas and forms. As this essay continues, you will see that it is precisely theater ’ s strange proliferation across contexts that gives me a continuously altered view of what theater might be. Indeed, if it is possible to sustain a critique of theater, or a critique by theater, such a critique must reckon with this kind of contextual travel and be willing to mine the contexts such travel reveals in its wake. This essay proceeds in two parts. First, I explore this idea of theatrical proliferation, drawing from recent work and critical debates on the relation between the visual arts and the performing arts, where new practices are curated, appropriated, re-enacted, altered, and disseminated. Second, I will look more closely at the term “ Critique ” and recall parallel art movements in “ institutional critique ” that drive theater ’ s proliferation across the visual artworld now. In addition to understanding how institutional critique provoked the performative turn in the visual arts, I also wonder how theatre might appropriate “ institutional critique ” back for itself. On Art Experiences that May or May Not be Theater In my recent scholarship, I have been interested in the acceleration of art museum absorption of theater, dance, and performance. The last decade has seen a great deal of curatorial interest in bringing together the ‘ visual arts ’ and the ‘ performing arts, ’ a conjunction that can be quite different from bringing ‘ performance art ’ into the museum space. Indeed, what happens when traditional durational forms such as theatre or dance appear in the museum? In a special issue of Representations on “ time-based art, ” my co-editor Julia Bryan-Wilson and I explored the stutter or gap in these moments of trans-contextualization. 1 When a work initially staged for a proscenium theater is moved into a white cube gallery, it endures new forms of reception and a new temporality; unlike the durational conventions of the theatre, the gallery work is watched in brief, intermittent intervals with little regard for progression. The disjunctive temporalities of the gallery and the theater have been increasingly forced to sync due to the upsurge in institutional initiatives that facilitate the productive collision between these worlds. In order to track episodes of disjunction, friction, and experimental illumination, I began another research initiative entitled In Terms of Performance. In this coedited online site, Paula Marincola and I commission short reflections on keywords in contemporary art and performance, asking differently positioned artists, curators, and critics to mediate on terms like ‘ composition, ’ ‘ live, ’ ‘ duration, ’ or ‘ character ’ that might have quite different resonances in different artistic domains. 2 I will draw from this ongoing research to do some scene-setting about where and how those cross-art experiments have taken shape. We can take the year 2011/ 2012 as an exemplary moment, one that included experimental performance festivals like American Realness and Crossing the Line that considered the relationship between the gallery and the theater. So too, Performa, a performance art biennial founded by Roselee Goldberg, addresses the conversation largely by focusing on the category of visual art performance as a genre that differs from the traditions of the performing arts. In 8 Shannon Jackson Performa 2011, however, Goldberg decided to explore the category of ‘ theatre ’ in order to grapple with the expansion of performing arts curation, even if, as she said at the time, she “ hates theater ” . 3 The Under the Radar 2012 festival followed by hosting a conversation on the relation between the ‘ black box ’ and the ‘ white cube. ’ In the spring of 2012, Jay Sanders and Elisabeth Sussman offered a Whitney Biennial that was lauded in part for the performances curated inside it, including Wu Tsang ’ s Green Room, Michael Clark ’ s Who ’ s Zoo, Richard Maxwell ’ s installed rehearsals, and Sarah Michelson ’ s Devotion Study #1 - The American Dancer. The latter made history for being the first choreographic work to win the Whitney ’ s Bucksbaum Prize. 4 By fall of 2012, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York was commissioning and acquiring all varieties of performances - from the maybe parodic, maybe activist, maybe earnest “ events ” of the art group Grand Openings to the siting of works conceived and commissioned by choreographers like Ralph Lemon, Steve Paxton, Faustin Linyekula, Dean Moss, Jérôme Bel, and more. 5 Since taking over directorship of The Kitchen in 2011, Tim Griffin has activated both its gallery spaces and its theater to stage a conversation across art forms. Meanwhile, non-New York-based activity has been approaching those inter-art stakes from different angles. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has reconceived what it means to collect Merce Cunningham ’ s costumes, debating along the way whether their conservation required the preservation or the eradication of the sweat marks and make-up stains of the dancers who wore them. 6 In the United Kingdom, the Tate Modern opened a section of the museum called The Tanks in 2012 - committing “ permanent ” space to the presentation and exhibition of “ temporary ” art forms - by re-siting choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker ’ s Fase in its concrete space. 7 Antagonisms remained; Marina Abramovic´ ’ s famous statement that “ to be a performance artist, you have to hate theater ” still lingered in the ears and in the atmosphere of these and many other experiments. Arguably, however, those antagonisms have been the ground for more considered critique - and a host of new experiments that now populate visual and performing arts spaces alike. 8 Though some versions of art history warned against the intrusion of temporality into visual art spaces, conversations amongst scholars of theater, dance, performance, and art are now increasingly hosted by art institutions, especially as they seek to stage live events and exhibit the residue that performance can generate (including but not limited to photographs, ephemera, and sets). Choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker has gone on to become a signature figure in this cross-disciplinary - and cross-professional - conversation. Her recent piece of choreographic endurance, Work/ Travail/ Arbeid (2015), premiered at WIELS Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels as part of the Performatik Festival 2015, the Brussels performance art biennial. Performatik itself was a citywide event conceived in collaboration with experimental theater spaces such as Kaaitheater and visual art spaces such as Bozar Centre for Fine Arts and WIELS. Its organizer, Katleen Van Langendonck, strategically decided to market Performatik as both an art “ biennial ” and a performing arts “ festival ” in order to invite and redefine different forms of durational art reception. 9 Work/ Travail/ Arbeid placed an ensemble of trained dancers within the WIELS galleries for six hours each day, inspiring them to move as sentient sculpture deliberately and responsively in and amongst the audience members who rotated in and out of the space each hour. 10 Audience members managed their own relationship to proximate dancers as they moved, some staying at the 9 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre perimeter of the gallery, some entering the center. Some stood, some sat, some walked, and even ran along with the dancers as they rushed across the space. In a public dialogue with fellow choreographer Xavier Le Roy, De Keersmaeker spoke about the paradoxes of dance-art collaborations. 11 Both she and Le Roy remarked on how their disruptions of dance in one context actually appear to reactivate dance in another context. Le Roy noted bemusedly, “ I am non-dance in the dance world, but in the art world, I am dance ” . 12 Even more recently, de Keersmaeker became implicated in a highly political conversation about aesthetic trans-contextualization when Chris Dercon, former Director of the Tate Modern, included her in his first (and last) program as incoming Intendant for the Volksbühne in Berlin. 13 While dance is curated now more often inside the museum, theater can be found as well, de-familiarizing the apparatus of the gallery even as the gallery de-familiarizes the theatrical form. Consider, for instance, the work of theater director and visual artist David Levine who has consistently pressed at the boundaries and corners of theater and Fig. 1: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Work/ Travail/ Arbeid at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Anne Van Aerschot. Fig. 2: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Work/ Travail/ Arbeid at Tate Modern, London. © Anne Van Aerschot. 10 Shannon Jackson the visual art. I am thinking of works like Hopeful (2009 - 2010) in which he displayed the headshots of out of work actors in gallery exhibition. In his ground-breaking piece, Habit (2010 - ongoing), Levine joined the conventions of visual art and theatre arts in a newly potent mix. The piece consists of a house-like structure constructed hyper-realistically to be installed inside a museum gallery space. Lights ‘ really ’ turn on, and the ‘ water ’ really runs through its pipes. Levine commissioned playwright Jason Grote and hired out-of-work actors to play roles in a painfully realistic drama; Marsha Ginsberg did the drawings for the set and lighting, also on commission by Levine. The conventions of dividing labor thus mimicked also deviated from the traditional conventions of repertory theater. Moreover, the performance process did as well. The actors committed to playing out scenes of this drama for several hours throughout the day, putting the performance ‘ on a loop ’ to accommodate the intermittent arrivals and departures of gallery spectators. Meanwhile, the spectators themselves managed their reception from a gallery space rather than a theatrical seat, moving from window to window of the set as the drama changed scenes. Throughout Habit, artists and receivers were challenged by a trans-contextual re-examination of art forms, perpetually asking the question of whether this work was theatre, and if so, why. Exploring this dense swarm of artistic activities and debates suggests a connection to what we might call the economics of ephemerality. Indeed, some critics have cynically interpreted the uptake of performance within museums as a moneymaking enterprise, since it has grown alongside the spectacularization of the contemporary art market. As I and others have explored elsewhere, the performative proliferation coincides, in some minds, with the rise of the socalled experience economy, a network of Fig. 3: David Levine. Habit (2010 - 2012). Installation view from Essex Street Market, New York City. Photo by Marsha Ginsberg. Fig. 4: David Levine. Habit (2010 - 2012). Installation view from Essex Street Market, New York City. Photo by Julieta Cervantes. Fig. 5: David Levine. Habit (2010 - 2012). Installation view from Essex Street Market, New York City. Photo by Adam Reich. 11 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre post-Fordist service practices in which workers are exhorted to ‘ act their roles ’ and ‘ set the stage ’ for late capitalist production. While far more complex, there is of course a relation between economics and the curated experience of duration. 14 If something occurs only for a few hours in the museum, a premium is placed on having been there in person to see it. For those of us used to managing the economies of theater, this premium is intriguing. The movement of performance from the context of the theatron to the context of the gallery somehow produces an added premium, forcing us to reckon with a theatrical durationality that perhaps we have taken for granted. Two kinds of intrigue - economic and otherwise - come with this transfer of context, especially when dance and theater enter into the collecting logic of a place like the MoMA or Tate Modern. The act of acquiring dance or acquiring theater has material ramifications, not only for choreographers and theater practitioners, but also for scholars, other artists, and students. How is access managed by these collecting practices once they are ‘ owned ’ by an institution? And how does that access differ from a repertoire model of performance, one that allows encounter only when permission is granted to re-stage? On the one hand, reperforming or recreating a piece might require a more stringent licensing process that includes a monetary charge, but, on the other hand, important historical documents and archival items might be better safeguarded against the ravages of deterioration and overuse. These institutional experiments force an awareness of a fragile durationality that all art forms share, and in the process, provoke a question about whether and how theater manages its own fragility as well as its own economy. The sweat stains on Cunningham ’ s dance costumes are a poignant reminder of some unresolvable contradictions regarding historicizing the live event. What is erased even as it is preserved? Some would argue that the museumification of the performing arts is a betrayal of its impulse to resist the commodification of art; others understand that performance has always sited itself within and among institutions of different kinds, and that it has, since its inception, been subject to circuits of marketing and circulation. 15 Once again, the switch across contexts forces this kind of artistic self-critique, exposes the contingency of processes and knowledges that might have become naturalized for us. The joining and swapping of contexts across theater and visual art expose professional conventions and habits of thought. Indeed, it exposes differences in how artists organize their work and are paid for it. There are substantial discrepancies with the monetary standards of remuneration for performance depending upon whether artists lodge their work in a museum or a theater; whether they are represented by a gallery or by a talent agent; whether they get paid by the hour or by commission; whether they sell documentation or secure a royalty contract; whether they work in a repertory theatre or do ‘ Project Work. ’ The context swapping also exposes the bodily conditions of labor; indeed, museum curators are constantly newly reckoning with the contingencies of installing embodied work in the gallery, bodies that need access to water, a bathroom, and a green room to change clothes. Beyond labor issues, such delineations around context also affect the organization of reception - whether they know that they can drop in any time, or whether they know they have to show up at a precise time to experience something that may or may not be theater. It affects whether receivers expect to encounter the work from their seats or expect to walk around it. In one context, they sit while the art moves; in another, they move while the art stays in place. In these new experiments, 12 Shannon Jackson audience members find themselves in an entirely new context, one that hybridizes the reception of both the gallery and theater. In that moment of hybridization, in that mix of standing and sitting, I would suggest that receivers are grappling with their contextdependent knowledge of art and of theater. In the mixing of contexts, their tacit knowledge of these art forms becomes explicit. In the momentary confusion about what they are seeing and where they are sitting, the capacity for critique emerges as visitors become attuned to habits and parameters that they always knew, but perhaps did not know they knew. If critique is about foregrounding how we know what we know, then this strategy of aesthetic transcontextualization allows participants to become critical - in the most capacious sense - of how they thought they knew the experiences of art and theatre. Institutions and Critique Above, I have considered how ‘ swapping of contexts ’ in fact exposes artistic contexts; these experiments expose the naturalized conditions and contexts that produce ordinary knowledge of what we think we know about theater, about dance, about the performing arts. They also expose under-theorized differences between performance art and the performing arts in the process. Such tacit differences are part of why ‘ performance artists ’ feel the need to ‘ hate theater ’ when their own processes come close to approximating its condition. Before continuing, I want to approach these examples from another direction by focusing more intently on genealogies of “ critique. ” My own perspective on this term is ‘ situated ’ in my context at UC Berkeley, and in particular our Program in Critical Theory co-founded by Judith Butler and Martin Jay. Butler ’ s “ What is Critique? An Essay on the Virtues of Foucault ” is primarily a piece on the French expat and Berkeley-bound Foucault, but Butler starts by considering other trajectories from Raymond Williams in the United Kingdom and Theodor W. Adorno in Germany. She reminds us: Raymond Williams worried that the notion of criticism has been unduly restricted to the notion of ‘ fault-finding ’ and proposed that we find a kind of response, specifically to cultural works, ‘ which [do] not assume the habit (or right or duty) of judgment. ’ And what he called for was a more specific kind of response, one that did not generalize too quickly: ‘ what always needs to be understood, ’ he wrote, ‘ is the specificity of the response, which is not a judgment, but a practice. ’ I believe this last line also marks the trajectory of Foucault ’ s thinking on this topic, since ‘ critique ’ is precisely a practice that not only suspends judgment for him, but offers a new practice of values based on that very suspension. 16 Butler goes on to note that this sense of critique as a practice also informed Adorno ’ s thinking. She writes: For critique to operate as part of a praxis, for Adorno, is for it to apprehend the ways in which categories are themselves instituted, how the field of knowledge is ordered, and how what it suppresses returns, as it were, as its own constitutive occlusion. Judgments operate for both thinkers as ways to subsume a particular under an already constituted category, whereas critique asks after the occlusive constitution of the field of categories themselves. 17 In the case of both Williams and Adorno, critique is highly situated because thinking is a situated activity. It is to mine, not simply what we know, but how we think we know - the conditions that produce ourselves as knowing subjects. Williams called that situatedness, the “ specificity of the response ” , and it was both a clarifying act and a 13 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre generous act to avow that specificity. For Adorno, that specificity often included a degree of occlusion, a degree of repression of contingent factors. Every knowledge order repressed other possibilities, and it was the job of critique both to explore the productivity of an order as well as to ask what it occludes. With Williams and Adorno at her side, Butler continues to clarify the contribution of Foucault to this longer genealogy of critical theory, one that resists evaluation per se in favor of an immanent excavation about how terms of value are produced in the first place: Thus, Foucault seeks to define critique, but finds that only a series of approximations are possible. Critique will be dependent on its objects, but its objects will in turn define the very meaning of critique. Further, the primary task of critique will not be to evaluate whether its objects - social conditions, practices, forms of knowledge, power, and discourse - are good or bad, valued highly or demeaned, but to bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself. 18 If the job of critique then is “ to bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself ” , I am interested to bring this proposition back to the domain of theater and to its context of aesthetic circulation. Obviously, we can see a clear link between critique and theater ’ s etymological history; many theorists of the theatre regularly invoke the etymological link between theory and theater — a place for viewing — in order to foreground theater as a space of critique, as a space for ‘ viewing the very framework ’ of social and artistic evaluation. Having started with a review of contemporary performance activity in the art world and returned now to the concept of critique, let me bring both of these genealogies together by focusing on an artworld practice of “ institutional critique ” . Institutional Critique is the moniker given to a group of artistic practices that set their sights - and their sites - on the institutional processes of art organizations, especially the world of museums, as well as its associated systems of gallery, biennial, nationalist, and art market processes. 19 Having been adopted by a variety of artists and critics, institutional critique remains a catchall term for the disparate practices that extended Minimalist art ’ s engagement with the gallery to address the museum ’ s wider network of economic and institutional relationships. 20 Alexander Alberro, one of its many historians, reminds us that the Enlightenment concept of the public sphere — and art ’ s civic function therein — was a primary motivator for ‘ institituionally critical ’ practices. “ The artistic practices that in the late 1960 s and 1970 s came to be referred to as institutional critique ” , Alberro writes, “ revisited that radical promise of the European Enlightenment, and they did so precisely by confronting the institution of art with the claim that it was not sufficiently committed to, let alone realizing or fulfilling, the pursuit of publicness that had brought it into being in the first place ” . 21 Artists identified with Institutional Critique staged that confrontation in a variety of ways. For Daniel Buren, such a challenge meant interrogating the decontextualizing logic of the studio-museum relation as well as the inside/ outside logic of the public museum. For Hans Haacke and Martha Rosler, the investigation of the museum ’ s relation to public space meant understanding and critiquing its economic dependencies, including its embeddedness in the world of real estate speculation. For Michael Asher, “ Institutional Critique ” meant mimicking the museum ’ s didactic processes but turning that didacticism on the institution itself. For Mierle Laderman Ukules, it meant exposing the gendered and classed processes of custodians and conservators that kept the museum clean. For Fred 14 Shannon Jackson Wilson, it meant exposing the race and class processes that kept the museum secure. Dan Flavin and Lawrence Weiner unsettled the object status of the artworks on which the art apparatus depended, turning to the fragile structures of lighting or text as alternatives. For Louise Lawler, Institutional Critique meant “ appropriating ” or re-contextualizing the central props of the museum within defamiliarizing didactics and conventions of display. Andrea Fraser created counter-docent performances. Rather than offering tours of the museum ’ s artwork, she focused on its apparatus, discoursing at length upon the arrangement of the subscription desk, the sculptural proportions of the drinking fountain, or the social and economic function of the museum cafeteria. 22 These works unfolded from the late sixties through the nineties and primarily measured their distance from the visual art world; indeed, they sited themselves within the art world as a proximate irritant within it. Alberro and others have chronicled Institutional Critique as an embedded practice of negation. 23 They were practices that interrupted, foregrounded, short-circuited, or otherwise redirected the apparatus of the museum and visual art world in order to make its processes explicit, in order to make visible processes that were oft-occluded. If art was represented as autonomous and selfauthorizing, Institutional Critique artists exposed the institution that produced that perception of autonomy. Upon considering this art-based trajectory of institutional critique, a few elements are relevant for a conversation about Theatre and Critique. First off, Institutional Critique is about the revelation of context, indeed, about the incorporation of the contextual, the background, the backstage into the art itself. Institutional Critique directed attention to that which was ‘ outside ’ of art, precisely to expose the outside ’ s construction of the inside. Indeed, translations of Institutional Critique in German and elsewhere billed it as “ Context Art ” [Kontext Kunst]. 24 To mine that context was to mine the apparatus of knowledge-production in art; it focused less on what we know about art than on how we know, on the apparatus that undergirded the boundaries and schemas for what we think we know about art. More importantly for this essay, the contextual expansion of Institutional Critique also undergirded the contextual travel of performance and theater - the context swapping that I described above. The shift to context enabled a shift across context; the critique of context opened the door to new inter-art experiments, including those that brought new objects, bodies, actions, and theatrical gestures that further exposed the contextual underpinnings of the institution. Indeed, one might further suggest that theatre was/ is, not only an object of critique, but itself a vehicle for artistic self-critique. As recounted in my gloss of artistic practices above, one finds that the institutionally critical gesture consistently used theatrical techniques to expose that institutional context. Art objects were placed within scenes. Visual artists made art objects into props and sometimes into scripts (Ukules, Lawler). Visual artists hung lights, cast actors, and engaged in ambiguous role-play themselves (Flavin, Wilson, Fraser). Museum didactics started to sound like stage directions (Weiner, Asher, Rosler). The unveiling of the institutional apparatus seemed to require varied forms of theatre and scene-setting (Fraser, Wilson, Haacke, Buren, Rosler). At the same time, those heterogeneous forms worked with different conceptions of what theatre might mean. Theatre became a central vehicle by which to conduct a critique, not only because of its themes, stories, and characters, but also because of the contextual heteronomy of the form itself. Even as the artworld critiqued the ubiquity of theatricality in the experience economy, 15 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre even if performance artists say that they ‘ hate theater ’ , this world deployed (and deploys) theatre to conduct its own selfcritique. As such, Institutional Critique further contributes to the proliferation of performance described above; whether theater-makers noticed or not, the institutional critical gesture readied the visual art world for a wider array of bodily arrangements, spaces, objects and actions. Before concluding, it is worth exploring just how trenchant and just how intimate these philosophical and aesthetic genealogies of critique can be. Such an exploration means foregrounding the situated and internalized position of critique, and of the critic who performs it. If we earlier noted that a contemporary understanding of critique resisted the notion of critique as outside judgment, that same structure applies to the artistically and institutionally-engaged critic as well. The would-be institutional critic recognizes her own embeddedness within the site critiqued. If Institutional Critique has a ‘ place for viewing ’ , it is not positioned outside the apparatus it views and evaluates, but avowedly inside, never fully capable of taking a detached, exterior position. Artists identified with Institutional Critique thus performed a Foucauldian concept of the institution, akin to the scheme Judith Butler described in her own meditations. In many artistic contexts, such Foucauldian principles were enacted in processes that avowed the artist ’ s position within the institution; as Alberro writes, “ they dialectically negated that which was the vehicle for their own voice, yet held on to it at the same time ” . 25 Perhaps no artist has displayed and endured the intimacy of Institutional Critique more than Andrea Fraser. As I argued in Social Works, Fraser consistently embodies and articulates Foucault ’ s institutional construction of the subject, whether in characters such as the ’ counter ’ museum docent Jane Castleton, or in statements like the following: So if there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly closed, or exists as an apparatus in a ‘ totally administered society ’ or has grown all-encompassing in size and scope. It is because the institution is inside of us, and we can ’ t get outside of ourselves. 26 As I have also argued, it is striking that she uses a decidedly theatrical technique — the technique of acting — to stage this insidedness. For Fraser, this embeddedness, this hyper-contextuality, underwrote an entire oeuvre that redirects theater as a vehicle for Fig. 6: Andrea Fraser. Projection (2008). Two-channel HD video installation. 40 minutes. Video still. Courtesy the artist. 16 Shannon Jackson artworld critique. More recently, it prompted new forms of theatrical and even therapeutic engagement projects such as Projection (2008). Installed in a blackened gallery, with screens projected on either side, Fraser performs ‘ herself ’ and her therapist in an apparent re-enactment of an exchange between analysand and analyst. Inside this dual structure — a two-hander ‘ play ’— she and her therapist face down her embeddedness within the economic institution of the artworld. Here is a sample of her script: Well, yeah, I mean there ’ s, there ’ s a kind of double game, you know. On the one hand, I reject a kind of culture of, you know, money, and, and I don ’ t want to be a part of this market and, and, you know, the gross inequality that it ’ s a product of, and then on the other hand, I like, like a lot of artists, I live in a very, very privileged world that I ’ m a kind of guest in. But we have all these strategies to feel superior to people who have more than we do. 27 Throughout Projection - sometimes weeping on screen - Fraser gives voice to the daily challenge of living in a culture of gross inequality in which she is a ‘ guest ’ , and privileged for being so. We see her living, emotionally and intimately, within the institution that is simultaneously the object of her artwork ’ s critique. Once again, the theatrical technique of ‘ acting ’ provides a means of surfacing a double position, alighting upon the place where one ’ s investment in the art institution coincide within one ’ s desire to leave it. As I conclude this essay, I am mindful that the entire text can be cast as a contextdependent chronicle, one that marks the travels of a theater scholar who now finds herself talking about theater to critical theorists and to visual artists as much as she does to theatrical ones. In my own context swapping, and my own context traveling, I find myself disoriented at times, but also inspired — often at the same moment. Such travels produce productive de-familiarization of what I thought I knew about Theatre - and what I thought I knew about ritique. Indeed, it is by following theater ’ s processes of circulation, erasure, and re-contextualization that I find new opportunities for critique. In the midst of theater ’ s undoing, I find the capacity to redo my own thinking about theater and what it means for it to be, indeed, a place for viewing. Notes 1 Shannon Jackson and Julia Bryan-Wilson (eds.), Time Zones: Durational Art and is Context, Representations, special issue of Representations 136 (Fall 2016). 2 Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola (eds.), In Terms of Performance (January 2017). http: / / intermsofperformance.site/ [accessed 30 September 2018]. 3 Statement from conversations with the author. For a more detailed account of Goldberg ’ s distinction between theatre and visual art performance, RoseLee Goldberg (ed.), Performa 11: Staging Ideas, Performa Publications, 2013. 4 Among others, see: Roberta Smith, “ A Survery of a Different Color: 2012 Whitney Biennial ” , in: New York Times, 1 March 2012, https: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2012/ 03/ 02/ arts/ design/ 2012-whitney-biennial.html; Andrew Russeth, “ Whitney ’ s 2012 Bucksbaum Prize Goes to Sarah Michelson ” , in: The Observer, 19 April 2012, http: / / observer.com/ 2012/ 04/ whitneys-2012-bucksbaum-award-goes-tosarah-michelson/ ; and Brian Schaefer, “ Sarah Michelson and the Infiltration of Dance ” , in: Out Magazine, 30 January 2014, https: / / www.out.com/ entertainment/ theater dance/ 2014/ 01/ 30/ sarah-michelson-whitney-museum. 5 See MoMA Press Release, “ The Museum of Modern Art Commission Six International Choreographers to Present Dance Perfor- 17 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre mances at the Museum in a Series Co-organized with Ralph Lemon ” , https: / / www. moma.org/ documents/ moma_press-release_ 389341.pdf [accessed 30 September 2018]. 6 See Abigail Sebaly, “ Cold Storage and New Brightness: The Cunningham Acquisition Moves in at the Walker ” , in: Walker Art Online Magazine, 29 July 2011, https: / / walkerart.org/ magazine/ cold-storage-and-newbrightness-the_cunningham-acquisitionmoves-in-at-the-walker. 7 See “ The Tanks ” , in: Artforum.com, 10 October 2012, https: / / www.artforum.com/ interviews/ stuart-comer-and-catherine-woodtalk-about-the-tate-tanks-35105. 8 For elements of the original interview, see “ Marina Abramovic´: What is Performance Art? ” on the Museum of Modern Art You- Tube channel https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=FcyYynulogY. Also see Chris Wilkinson, “ Noises off: What's the difference between performance art and theatre? ” , The Guardian, July 20, 2010, https: / / www. theguardian.com/ stage/ theatreblog/ 2010/ jul/ 20/ noises-off-performance-art-theatre [accessed 30 September 2018]. 9 “ Performatik 2015 Presents Performances, Exhibitions, and Talks By Over 35 Artists and Curators ” , Biennial Foundation, 26 January 2015 http: / / www.biennialfoundation. org/ 2015/ 01/ performatik-2015-presentsperformances-exhibitions-and-talks-byover-35-artists-and-curators/ . 10 Chris Dupuis, “ In the Move from Stage to Museum, a Dance Becomes Performance Art ” , in: Hyperallergic, 27 April 2015, https: / / hyperallergic.com/ 202056/ in-themove-from-stage-to-museum-a-dance-becomes-performance-art/ . 11 “ Dance and the Exhibition Form: Conversation with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Xavier Le Roy and Elena Filipovic ” , at: WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Belgium, 22 March 2015. 12 Xavier Le Roy in public conversation at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Belgium, 22 March 2015. 13 The political furor over the appointment and subsequent resignation of Chris Dercon as Volksbühne director - in the year after our Frankfurt conference “ Theatre and Critique ” - exemplify the cross-arts frictions I explored in this essay. A detailed examination of that example will require a separate essay. For now, see, for instance, essays collected in, “ We are the Revolution ” in: Texte zur Kunst (December 2017) and a recent special issue of Theatre Survey 59, 2 (2018). 14 The ‘ experience economy ’ has traveled through numerous contexts; amongst others, see: in the realm of art history see Rosalind Krauss, “ The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum ” , in: October 54 (Autumn 1990), pp. 3 - 17; and Hal Foster, “ The Archive without Museums ” , in: October 77 (Summer 1996), p. 97 - 119. For discussion of experience and performance within the contemporary museum, see Robin Pogrebin, “ Once on Fringe, PerformanceArt is Embraced ” , in: New York Times, 26 October 2012; Judith Butler and Shannon Jackson, “ How Are We Performing Today? ” , at: Annual Performance Symposium, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 16 - 17 November 2012; and Dorothea von Hantelmann, “ The Experiential Turn ” , in: Elizabeth Carpenter (ed.), Living Collections Catalogue, Volume 1: On Performativity, Walker Art Center, 2014. For on the experience economy in the commercial marketplace, see Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage, Cambridge, Mass. 1999. 15 Peggy Phelan ’ s Unmarked: The Ontology of Performance offered a now classic argument on the former point; for examples of the latter, see scholarship as varied as Tracy Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, Cambridge et al. 2007, Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains, London et al. 2011; or my essay “ Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity, ” in: The Drama Review Vol 56 (November 2012). 16 Raymond Williams quoted in Judith Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtues ” , in: Sara Silah and Judith Butler (eds.), The Judith Butler Reader, Oxford 2004, p. 304. Also see Raymond Williams, 18 Shannon Jackson “ Criticism ” , in: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London 1983. 17 Butler, “ What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault ’ s Virtues ” , p. 305. 18 Ibid., p. 306. 19 See (among others): Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds.), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists ’ Writings, MIT Press, 2009; and Andrea Fraser, “ From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique ” , in: Artforum 44 (2005), p. 100 - 106. 20 For more on these disputed origins see my “ Staging Institutions: Andrea Fraser and the ‘ Experiential ’ Museum ” , in: Sabine Breitwieser and Tina Teuffel (eds.), Andrea Fraser: A Retrospective, Museum Moderner Kunst, 2015, pp. 21 - 29. 21 Alexander Alberro, “ Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique ” , in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists ’ Writings, p. 3. 22 For more on Buren, Rosler, Haacke, Asher, Ukeles, Wilson, Flavin and Weiner, Lawler, Fraser, see their writings in: Alberro and Stimson (eds.), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists ’ Writings. Especially see: Buren, “ The Function of the Museum ” (1970); Haacke, “ Provisional Remarks ” (1971); Asher, “ September 21 - October 2, 1974, Claire Copley Gallery ” (1974); Ukeles, “ Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! ” (1969); Rosler, “ Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on Audience ” (1979); Ivan Karp and Wilson, “ Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums ” (1992); and Fraser, “ From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique ” (2005). 23 Alberro, “ Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique ” . 24 See Peter Weibel (ed.), Kontext Kunst, Köln 1994. Exhibition catalogue produced on occasion of the exhibition “ Kontext Kunst: The Art of the 90 s ” at the Steiermärkisches Landesmuseum Joanneumk, Austria, October - November 1993. 25 Alberro, “ Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique ” , p. 4. 26 Fraser, “ From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique ” , p. 104. For a prior discussion, see Shannon Jackson “ Staged Management ” , in: Social Works: Supporting Art, Performing Publics, New York 2011. 27 Fraser performance script cited in “ Staging Institutions: Andrea Fraser and the ’ Experiential ’ Museum ” , p. 27. 19 Context as Critique: On Experiences that May or May not be Theatre
