in Visio 5, 2, Automne 2000: Les arts de l’action/Action Art, van Mechelen, Marga, & Sonesson, Göran, (eds.)

If modernism, particularly in the visual arts, is characterised by the ever recurring transgression of the norms set up by earlier periods (cf. Sonesson 1998a), then, of course, the most radical way to abolish the art object, is to turn it into something which is no longer even an object : that is, an action. In the process, creation may or may not overstep the border between art and life. And it may or many not redistribute the parts played by creator and audience. In any case, it certainly refuses to abide by the limits assigned to painting by Lessing, which, at least in some respects, have seemed to be valid for much of the history of visual art : it already becomes some kind of “moving painting ” which Lessing only thought possible in the theatre and which later semioticians have claimed to have discovered in the cinema (cf. Sonesson 1988, to be published b).

What today is known as “ performance ” or “ action ” seems to cover an bewildering variety of phenomena. The first step from object to action was undoubtedly taken by the Dadaists, although one may take different views of the importance of their contributions: for while they may not have abandoned narrativity completely, they were certainly concerned more with presentation than representation. Later, in the 1950ies, similar phenomena were codified under the name of “happening” by artists more or less associated with “Action Painting”. There was an almost immediate incidence on the theatre, as testified by such groups as the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre (cf. Jotterand 1970: 57ff); there is at present nothing new in the return influence, although it may have taken new forms. In many ways, the art of action is comparable to another invention of the Dadaists, the ready-made, which is an “ relic ” (that is, an index) of an action (minimally of the act of putting it where it can be seen by the audience). In fact, both the ready-made and action art are expressions of what I have elsewhere called the outward-going tendency of Modernism, which aspires to include ever more domains of reality within the sphere of art, as opposed to the inward-going tendency, which reduces art to its barest characteristics, and which critics such as Greenberg and Fried tend to identify with Modernism tout court (cf. Sonesson 1998a). Indeed, even more than the ”happening” , which is a codified, and thus restricted, art form, the “ performance ” of the contemporary art scene seems to overstep all boundaries : to life, to ritual, to play, and to the theatre.

If we take semiotics to be concerned with the way things mean, that is, how they mean, rather than what they mean, then there should be a place for a semiotics of the arts of actions, which precedes, and is presupposed by, any arthistorical reflection on the same phenomenon, just as a semiotics of ritual should go before its anthropology (cf. Sonesson 1999a). In fact, both the semiotics of “performance” and the semiotics of ritual, as indeed the semiotics of theatre, are concerned with basically the same issue : the way in which an action is differentiated from other actions by becoming a vehicle for some peculiar meaning, which is itself an action. What I want to do in the following is to situate “performance” (or at least some of its varieties, including the “happening” and some more recent avatars) in relation to ritual, theatre, play of different kinds, and everyday life. “Performance” will be considered to form part of the vast domain of a semiotics of spectacles. I will start with that kind of spectacle of which we know most, the theatre.

Theatre and ritual in the light of the Prague school

In the theatre we encounter actions which quite obviously are carriers of meaning, because they stand for other actions (or the same actions made by another person at another time and place). Scholars involved with the semiotics of the theatre, from the Prague school to our time, have repeatedly pointed to the polymorphous and multifarious character of what is known as theatre. Within the former circle, Jan Mukar&ovsky¤ developed during the 1940ies a model according to which theatre realises several functions at the same time, but always in such a way that, at different moments, some function or other dominates all the others, and thus overdetermines them, that is to say, that this element not only carries greater weight than they others, but also makes them subservient to its own purposes . These factors can be such things as the writtentext of the play, the work of the actor, the relation between the audience and the stage, etc. From this point of view, the Prague school goes much further than what is suggested by the customary references to what Barthes called the polyphony of the theatre and to Kowsan’s list of semiotic systems involved .

Two Swedish Slavic scholars, Olle Hildebrand and Lars Kleberg, have made an interesting attempt to develop this model, in part by isolating similarities and differences of these functions as found in the theatre, the sport event and the rite, and partly by considering some theories of the early Russian theatre vanguard from this point of view. What is important and new in their work, in relation to that of Mukar&ovsky¤ , is that they do not limit their study to internal relations in the theatre as a historically developing phenomenon, but also puts it in contrast to others phenomena which, in one way or another, appear to be similar to it. As I have shown in other contexts (Sonesson 1992b; 1998a), the resulting model is, unfortunately, not only insufficient but contradictory; but the main problem with it is, as wee shall see, that the selection of other elements with which the theatre is compared is quite arbitrary.

Kleberg and Hildebrand were really interested in the new tendencies of the Russian vanguard of the early 20th century. In one of his first texts, Hildebrand (1970) distinguishes the sport event, the ritual and the theatre by means of a cross-classification employing the dichotomies stage versus audience and expression versus content, where the sport event realises the first dichotomy, the ritual the second and theatre both. The first opposition is derived from Mukar&ovsky¤, and the second from Saussure and, more specifically, Hjelmslev. Put in terms more congenial to the Prague school approach, we have to do with the referential and spectacular functions, respectively (Figure 1).

Fig. 1. Comparison between theatre, ritual, and sport (according to Hildebrand)

According to Hildebrand (1978), ritual and theatre are united, in this particular sense, in the work of the Russian director Eivrenov, and, in particular, in his work “Harlequin the Saviour”. Since theatre is supposed to differ from ritual by adding one more category, stage versus audience, to that common to them both, expression versus content, is not easy to understand what, in this system of description, is peculiar to Eivrenov’s style. Perhaps this impression could be corrected by means of reintroducing the concept of dominant in the sense employed by Mukar&ovsky¤ : this would allow us to say that, although Eivrenov’s style, like any kind of theatre, embodies both dichotomies, it is expression vs. content, which is peculiar to ritual, which predominates. Or perhaps there is more to ritual than Hildebrand’s system permit us to say. Kleberg (1984:60s), for his part, speaks of Ivanov’s cultist theatre of in terms familiar to us from Hildebrand: “In theatre as an art form he was interested in a shift of emphasis from the ‘spectacle’ towards the cult. /---/ The abolishing of the dualism between actors and audience became a metaphor for the synthetic elimination of a series of other contradictions like Poet vs. Crowd, individualism vs. collectivism, etc.’ (p.60f). Here, the “shift of emphasis ” could be interpreted according to the Prague school concept of dominant, but the full meaning of this description remains unclear.

These definitions present us with a series of paradoxes. If ritual contains the opposition between expression and content, and if theatre then adds the opposition between stage and audience, then what can it mean when it is said that Eivrenov’s theatre units these oppositions? And if Ivanov’s theatre abandons the difference between stage and audience, which is supposed to differentiate theatre from ritual, then in what sense is his theatre still something different from ritual all over again? This suggests there is something more to ritual, and perhaps also to theatre, than the model indicates.

The ritual as spectacle

Going beyond these paradoxes, there arises a more fundamental question : which is the domain that theatre, the rite and the sport event divide into three parts? In other words, is there something that is common to these three types of meaning-endowed actions which they do not share with other types of actions? For clearly, theatre, ritual, and sport are all actions which seem to stand out from the mass of everyday actions, One could wonder why we should compare the theatre precisely with the rite and not, for example, with the circus act, the ballet (if these are not special cases of the theatre), the concert, the public lecture, or even with children’s play (i.e. with Piaget’s “ symbolic play ”), social encounters, markets, “live action role play”, – and indeed with “happening” and/or “performance”. Some of these cases may perhaps be rapidly discarded from the category of “ spectacles ” in the widest sense, since their dominant channel of perception is not vision but sounds and, more specifically, language. But if we are going to believe Hildebrand and Kleberg, ritual is even less of a spectacle, because it is not even offered up to perception.

Part of the problem is that the spectacular function, understood as an invitation to contemplate, is something too general, at least in two ways : in the first place, everything which is public (which is within the “public sphere”, in the sense of Habermas) is in some respects given to perception ; and, secondly, all works of art are, in a more specific sense, created in order to be perceived. The public sphere is obviously conceived as something which invites to perception when, following Goffman, for example, social life is seen as being divided into a stage and its “backstage”, separated, for instance, by the revolving door between the kitchen and the restaurant, or when, following Sennett, one opposes the theatrical character of public life until the XVIIIth century to the sentimentality of our time (which offers the spectacle to an inward, rather than an outward, audience), or when, with the situationists, one identifies the capitalist world order (which is, at the moment, all the world order which remains) with a “société de spectacle “ (cf. Sonesson 1995).

Without necessarily agreeing with any of these images of the world, we must nevertheless admit that many components of daily life exist in order to be perceived by others: this is true of all clothes and body decorations, not only different varieties of “piercing” and tattoos, which recently have become popular again, but also the more customary earrings and other adornments familiar in Western culture. To a greater degree, the medieval market stands out as a spectacle, even though Bakhtin was more interested in what was said than what was seen there; something similar can be said of the boulevards, the cafés and the passages in the capital of the XIXth century, as they were described by Baudelaire and Benjamin, just as in all latter-day capitals of Modernity, and it is valid already for the central square of the traditional village, and for popular festivals, both in the traditional sense of the term and as they have been reinvented during recent decades, in the form of tourist attractions promoted by the municipalities (Sonesson 1995).

Nevertheless, these phenomena are not spectacles, in any deeper sense, among other reasons because the spectacular function, also when it appears, is not dominant, or the visual modality is not ; or because the spectacular is only intermittently present, or also because it is symmetric. As far as the lecturer or another participant in the “public sphere” is concerned, it can be said that the visual modality is not dominant (except when the lecturer is also a celebrity, as were for instance Lacan and Barthes). In many cases, the spectacular function is not dominant or only appears temporarily, which can be said in minor or greater degree of many parts of the daily life. However, the at least potential symmetry of many spectacular situations may be a more fundamental factor. Mukar&ovsky¤, Hildebrand and Kleberg seem to imagine the spectacular function as an operation resulting in a division applied to a group of people, and separating those which are subjects and objects, respectively, of the process of contemplation; but, in fact, the subjects and objects of contemplation are often the same, at least temporarily. In the market, on the square, the boulevard, etc., observation is (potentially) mutual, but not so in the case of the sport event and the theatre.

As for the rite, it seems wrong to say that it has no spectacular function; in fact, frequently there is a division, just as in the theatre, between those which perform the rite and those who only participate, like for example, the priest in the Christian mass as opposed to the congregation : that is to say, there is a difference between those which only observe, and those which, in addition to observing, are also observed. However, there is probably nobody in the rite who is not a subject but only an object of observation, for also the officiator partakes in the experience of the rite; he performs it for himself, in the same sense in which he does so for the others (unlike the actor). Even if we consider rites of the type which seems to have been imagined by Hildebrand and Kleberg, where the difference between the officiator and the participants tends to dissolve in a collective trance (a more Dionysian than Appollonian kind of rite), there still remains a spectacular function of the participant without which the rite would lack any meaning. A correlate of this division is that different spatial expanses are normally assigned to the spectator and the observed, which offers the possibility of a transgression of limits between spaces independently of the respective subjects: and such transgressions are really what is often found in the work of Ivanov and Eivrenov, as well in more recent vanguard theatre, as for example the Living Theatre, Théâtre du soleil, etc. But there are also rites in which the space of the officiator is clearly separated from the space of the common participants; this also is true of the familiar Christian rites, particularly in their Catholic variant. But in these latter cases, the transgression of limits does not give rise to new forms of art, but to an act of sacrilege.

“Symbolic play ” and agôn

Another sense in which the spectacular function seems to be too general derives from the fact that all the works of art, not to say all signs, require a spectator/receiver in order to exist, and in this way they could all be said to be offered up for perception. This is made explicit in the situation of communication as it is described in the Prague school model, in which a receiver is called upon to transform an artefact into an object of perception by means of the process of concretisation. If we limit our considerations to that of the dominant visual modality, we can say about visual art that its rests on a division of something into the part which its observed and its observer. In fact, a division of this kind characterises all those locations which form part of the process of circulation of the art work, such as museums, galleries and other places of exposition. The ready-mades presuppose this condition in order to function: they may be objects which are originally not public or semi-public (home furnishings, such as irons) or perhaps public, but not visually displayed (the urinary), which are then placed in a position of contemplation.

The theatre, the sport event and the ritual are all sequences of conduct which are offered up for contemplation. In this they are different from the common art work, which is not a piece of behaviour but a static thing, at least in its expression. The theatrical act is composed of conduct, as much in its expression as in its content; the sport event and the rite are, too, at least as far as their expression is concerned. In this sense, Eco’s (1975) description of the elementary theatrical situation is not particularly enlightening: an alcoholic who is sleeping on a bank over which the Salvation Army hangs a banderole about the dangers of drinking alcohol. This scene has a static character which puts it much nearer to the contemplation of an object: it is a “tableau vivant”, which, from the point of view of life, is rather clsoe to death.

That aspect of the semiotic function which Piaget calls “symbolic play” can be seen as a predecessor to both theatre and the rite (Sonesson, 1992a). Here there can be no doubt that both expression and content are sequences of behaviour (what the little girl does with her puppet is the same thing as what her mother does with her little brother). At the same time, however, it seems that in symbolic play there normally is no audience which does not also take on the function of actor. In the previous argument we have arrived at a revised characterisation of ritual as something in which the spectator’s roll is granted to all the participants, whereas the actor part is not necessarily distributed to all of them. On the contrary, in play it seems that all those presents are as much participants as onlookers.

Piaget’s “symbolic play” only corresponds to one of the four types of play that Callois (1968) distinguishes: mimicry or simulacrum. The other play categories are agôn or competition, as for example football; aléa or chance, as in lottery; and ilinx or vertigo, as in organic states. These other types of play do not seem to have any semiotic function. We can identify the “sport event” of Hildebrand with agôn, but there is nothing in Callois’ classification that corresponds to ritual, if we do not take it to be something purely Dionysian, as Kleberg seems to do, in which case we can identify it with ilinx. This latter may possibly correspond to Malinowski’s conception of “phatic communion” (which is transformed into a communicatory function by Jakobson). But to reduce ritual to ecstasy does not seem to be a way to do it justice.

It may seem that some of the spectacles that we have mentioned previously, as for example the circus and the ballet, should be understood as cases of agôn, just like the sport event, and therefore does not rest on some division into expression and content. This seems to be true in particular about many circus acts which contain an element of progression. However, as Paul Bouissac (1981) has shown, this progression can turn out to be illusory: the acts are organised one after another according to what seems to be a gradual increase of difficulty, whereas the true part of effort may very well be the opposite. Already in the fact that it is important for the acts to look difficult there is an element of signification, a difference between expression and content. And in the same sense, I think it can be said that classical ballet also is endowed with meaning (completely independently of such pure element of imitation which it often contains), because it is fundamental that the acts look easy (that is to say, easy for those who execute them).

From this it may be seen that the circus act and the ballet have something in common with the theatre and the symbolic play: their value is in the act as such, in all its details, as it is perceived and/or is experienced. On the contrary, the sport event and all kinds of agôn only derive their value from that which they obtain, and this is , in a sense, also the case of the rite; they are instrumental acts, means to a goal (even if they, as play, do not have their goal outside their own sphere). Theatrical action is an expression which is defined in relation to a content; agôn and rite are defined in relation to their use. These groups of actions differ between them as what Greimas (1968) calls gestures and praxis; the former serve to interpret the world, they latter to change it. As praxis, the rite is of course something of a paradox: it does not change the world materially (in any case not fundamentally), but in some kind of “spiritual” way. It could be said that what it changes in the world is its interpretation.

It was in a similar way that one of the members of the Prague circle, Jindrich Honzl (1982) described the difference between theatre and rite. Both, he said, are semiotical actions, which is why they are often confused, as for example by Wagner and his successors. However, while theatrical action represents a real act, the ritual act is a way of changing the world by imposing on it a religious interpretation. But Honzl also thinks that the rite, unlike theatre, does not, for those who believe in it, represent another action, but it is that very action. In the Christian communion, for example, the reception of the sacramental wafer and the wine is not a representation of the sacrifice of Christ but that same sacrifice once again. If this is true, the rite would not be an expression which points to another action as its content; rather, each ritual occasion should be related to its original act like a token to a type, or, more precisely, to the unit that has created the type; for it must obviously be question of that kind of type which is experienced as having been created from a particular unit located in time and space, as is the original of an art work to which all the reproductions point (Sonesson 1997b; 1998b). However, in this sense the rite is not so special: all actions are of this kind, at a greater or smaller level of organisation (and we will return to this point later). Moreover, contemporary anthropologists have claimed that explanations of this nature make the “primitives” all too naive: in actual fact, according to Douglas (1996), they only execute the rain ritual when they know that the rainy season is anyhow about to begin.

It is also no doubt a mistake to assimilate the rite without further ado to the instrumental actions, as we did previously. The principle of relevance of the instrumental actions is found in their objectives, not in their contents; an instrument may have any shape, as long as it serves its objective, and the runner can run as he wants as long as he arrives first to the goal. In the rite, the details of the action are, nevertheless, important, and in this it is similar to the theatre. To be relative to its objective, the ritual act must first be relative to the action which it repeats.

The theatre of daily life

So what is then lacking for any part of the chain of daily life to become theatre? Lotman (1976) has written on the theatrical conduct in a group of Russian poets, the so-called Decembrists, presenting it as something which serves to semiotize daily act (comparable to the behaviour of our romantics, dandies, dadaists, surrealists, and situationists, as well as the more recent skin-heads and punks). Semiotization cannot here mean to introduce a division between expression and content. Rather, attention is directed onto something, which then becomes manifest in its materiality, as in the case of the poetic function according to Jakobson. Although these actions are integrated by the nexus of cause and effect characterising everyday life, they appear to have been extracted from it.

Veltrusky¤ (1984), another representative of the Prague school, affirms that common behaviour is transformed into theatre when it becomes distinct, has its own consistency and is meant to be perceived. We have already mentioned perception, and to the notion of consistency we are going to return, but the distinctiveness may perhaps be identified with our interpretation of semiotization. Theatre, sport events, and ritual are demarcated, they begin and finish in time and space, whereas the theatrical gesture only gives the impression of doing so, because it attracts attention towards itself for a determined period of time and space (as does also Eco’s alcoholic under his banderole).

That which, since Kaprow and Kirby, has been known as a “happening” appears to be something that is finished in time and space and that is offered to perception (in spite of having a less clear division of spectator vs. observed and/or stage vs. audience), but that in a certain sense does not seem to be consistent. One of the first persons to write theoretically abut the “happening”, Michael Kirby (1965, 1969), affirms that it lacks a “narrative matrix”. In its place, it has a “compartment structure” which assures that “no information is passed from one discrete unit to another”. Actually, I believe that for the spectator information is passed, and contradiction arises. There are two ways for this to happen: either everyday actions are executed without even being put together to some higher unit of any interest (which is in opposition to the well-known description of narrativity given by Barthes, according to which “if there is a rifle on the wall at the beginning, it must be used before the end”); or actions are executed which are not usually executed together in daily life (for example to smear jam on a car radiator). Another way of putting this is to say that the “happening” is composed of basic actions (i.e. actions which do not contain allusions to any objective, for example, to raise an arm) – or something close to it – which are not integrated into a practice (e.g. to raise an arm in order to greet, and thus to be amiable with, one’s neighbour, etc.) or combinations of basic actions which do not form any well-known practice. This is analogous to the two types of ready-mades, those which are simply trivial (the air container, the bottle dryer), and those which consist of impossible combinations (the iron with spikes, the bicycle wheel on a chair). In one case we are faced with a narrative point zero, in the other with a rhetorical deviation.

Within narratology, many authors now distinguish between narrativity in a vague, and a more precise, sense (Prince 1995; Sonesson 1997a). The elementary fact of narration is a passage from one state to another one. “Real” or “good” narrativity involves, in addition, interesting reversals of fortune. This is something which is lacking, to a greater or smaller degree, in the “happening”, whereas theatrical conduct in ordinary life possesses it to the extreme. The theatre, the sport event and the rite all have some form of narrative matrix (the peripeteia of somebody winning, etc.). Bouissac describes how the circus act constructs a peripeteia, that is, an increased degree of difficulty (which may be merely apparent, when the act becomes more easy when it seems to become more difficult). The opposite of this is the sport event whose increase of difficulty is real, that is, nonfictional.

Kirby also affirms that the “happening” lacks a fictional level: it is rather to be compared to the work of the stage-hands. Against this it could be said that the “happening”, but not the work of the stage-hands, is the object of a spectacular function. What the stage-hands do is something that traditionally happens on Goffman’s “backstage”, even when this function is only marked with dimmed lights instead of a curtain-fall. In any case this should not be taken to imply that the “happening” lacks the distinction between expression and content. Its content is no doubt not given in the form of a story, but as broken narrativity. It could be said that it carries the general meaning of everydayness and/or absurdity, etc. , to the same extent that the rite points beyond reality to the supernatural, the divine, etc.

But Kirby may well touch on something more fundamental, when he says that the “happening” does not have any “time/space matrix”. We may take this to mean that the “scene” does not stand for another space at another time containing another person. In the traditional theatre, when we see the actor perform some determined action, we are of course to understand that it was done by Ophelia in the Renaissance or by Nora at Ibsen’s time. In the “happening”, on the contrary, the I/here/now of expression is identical to its content. The actor is truly similar to the stage-hand in doing what he does in his own name. The only thing he represents is the action-type. According to what was said previously, the rite is different again: on one side, it seems to represent a particular action originally performed at a specific time and in a specific space and realised by a specific person, but, at the same time, it is concerned to reinscribe this action in the time and space of the scene, instead of only representing it.

It should be noted that a comparison between the “happening” and the rite does not immediately lead to equally absurd consequences as the comparison between the “happening” and the theatre. Trivial actions such as washing clothes or absurd combinations of actions such as smearing jam on a car radiator can very well be integral elements of a rite. It is possible to find comparable examples in all anthropological texts on the rite. The difference is that the rite points outside itself: it receives its meaning of a conjunction of beliefs. There is nothing comparable in the “happening”, or at least, there was nothing comparable at the beginning.

From “activity” to “Live action role play”

Apart from the “happening”, Kirby also speaks about something which he calls “activity”: in the case of the latter, people receive the task of going to different places and of making different things, but they cannot see each other, and nobody else is watching them. They are themselves the only possible spectators. Considered as a difference from the theatre, this goes further than the ritual, in which there is no unique, external and fixed, position of the spectator; here there is only an internal spectacular position, directed to the own subject (or several positions of that same type, if we understand “activity” as the sum total of all the things that the different persons do).

This is strangely similar to what today is often called LARP, Live Action Role Play, a development of “Dragons and Dungeons”, which is periodically realised during a whole day, or several ones, by groups of “fantasy”-enthusiasts. In LARP, exactly as in the theatre, a script is written, and each person is assigned a part; however, more than the theatre, LARP resembles Kirby’s “activity” in that different persons realise their task in different parts of the landscape, at least part time being out of view of the others, without no one watching but themselves. LARP certainly seems to have more of a narrative matrix than an “activity”, which in this sense is more similar to a “happening”, but, on the other hand, the great number of participants and long duration of the play has the effect of allowing less context than in a theatre piece. Like life itself, LARP lacks a central stage where the spectacular function may be focused and all the events come together. It is easy to think about LARP as well as “activity” as some kind of “symbolic plays” for adults, but the latter are actually more similar to the theatre in requiring the participant’s co-presence to each other, at least during most of the play time. In this sense, another development of “Dragon and Dungeons”, which has taken place on the Internet, that is to say MUD-MOO, is more similar to symbolic play: for although the players cannot see each others, the play only exists as long as they are connected, if not necessarily at the same time, in any case in the same digital space (Cf. Sonesson 1995; Turkle 1996). On the other hand, LARP and MUD-MOO, contrary to the “activity”, are clearly fictional sequences of behaviour: their I/here/now is not that of the persons performing.

Another thing seems surprising in this context: even the person who performs an “activity” follows some kind of script, that is to say that what he does constitutes a token of a type that a text prescribes. This is what distinguishes it from everyday behaviour and that makes it similar to the theatre, the rite and the sport event; all are accomplishments in time and space of some kind of pre-given type: the theatre because it follows a dramatical text in the strict sense (with exceptions), the rite because it follows a custom, the sport event because it is limited to a situation-type (in its quality, not in its quantity). The point of the cultist theatre, as conceived by Ivanov, must be to create a passage from a standardisation by means of the text to a standardisation by means of an (apparent) custom. The “happening” seems to be twice standardised: first because of being composed of standardised elementary actions (it realises “scripts” or schemes in the sense of cognitive psychology, e.g. the scheme of going to the restaurant, etc. — but of course in deviant ways, with a rhetorical effect); and on the other hand because of having a specific score which combines these basic acts in a particular way. This is valid even if the manuscript has never been written down and if the “happening” is only executed once (cf. Figure 2).

Fig. 2. Overview of differences between different kinds of standardized sequences of actions (Not to be taken as a structural matrix, for there are no doubt other examples to be found. + - means both alternatives are possible; the mark outside of the parenthesistands for the dominant in case of co-presence)

The “happening” and the activity are of course different from the theatre, also because they are made by people whose professional part is not that of being a actor but a visual artist, and because they often have had a gallery or some similar place as their stage. Once again, the “happening” is to actions, what the ready-made is to objects: both becomes art (at least in part) by being taken out of their original context and placed in a situation in which art is expected.

The narrativization of “performance”

Today it is more common to speak about “performance” – and of particular “performance artists”. Rather than being something different from the “happening”, “performance” seems to be a much more general category, which has shed some of the limitation of the “happening”, while retaining some of its characteristics. Actions do not have to be trivial or absurd (but they still can be); they may actually be highly dramatic. Thus, narrativity, in the strict sense, may well be present. The “performance” does not have to take place in a visual art context. It does not have to be performed by visual artists, since there are artists who merely consecrate themselves to performance art. More unrepentantly than the “happening”, “performance” often accepts the division between stage and audience. The stage part of the spectacular function is thus clearly separate from the audience function, and the space of the former is more or less divided from the space of the latter (our asymmetric spectacular function).

What Marina Abramovic& presents as “performance” (van Mechelen 1998) does not agree at all with the description of the “happening” made by Kirby. To begin with, there is a compartment structure, or rather a chain of events which is not only true but goes over into real life (e.g. the wounds subsist). Also, we can speak of a narrative structure with different decisive dramatic points when wounds are inflicted. Nevertheless, there is no fictional time and space (except in Abramovic&’s later works, in which she represents her memories of childhood, etc.): what we see is Marina here and now. Like in the theatre and the “happening”, there is a script, but it lacks any real possibility of repetition (the same wound cannot be inflicted twice). This obviously applies to any kind of “performances” which include the mutilation of one’s own body – or which introduces any other irreversible physical change of the state of the world. Paradoxically, Abramovic& does repeat her acts, both within the same “performance” (for instance, in “Rhythm 10”), and as part of her biographical pieces; but then it is not really the same thing once over again. Unlike what happens in the circus act (to which, for this reason, van Mechelen 2000 may be wrong to compare it), in ballet and in the theatre, the increase of difficulty is a real one, not merely fictional: rather, like in the sport event, there is an aspect of agön.

However, the action is only apparently demarcated, that is to say, separated from life. It can only be finished, as was the case with the theatrical behaviour of the Decembrists, as a piece of life which stands out, because it is perceived. Between the Decembrists and Marina Abramovic& similarities can be found, but fundamentally, their situations are mutual inversions: for the former, life stops for a moment to become theatre; for Abramovic& it is theatre which never finishes being part of life.

Another limiting case is the “Orgien Theatre” of Hermann Nitsch (cf. Sternudd 1998; 2000). What Nitsch and his collaborators realise under the name of “performance” seems largely to be a reproduction of a traditional rite. Naked people, sacrificed animals, intestines, fruits and flowers, blood and wine are well-known ritual elements. As in a rite, all participants seem to be spectators at the same level, independently of whether they act or not. What evidently makes the difference between such a “performance” and a true rite is that Nitsch follows a script and not a custom. The actions that compose this “performance” are not the expression of other acts formerly taking place elsewhere and performed by other people; they are these same acts. But for want of a system of customs, a mythology, these actions cannot refer to any fundamental and significant actions which they repeat. Or, if they can, this implies that Nitsch has founded a sect which performs the rites that respond his mythology. And instead of “performance”, we simply have a return to the rite.

Ritual, in order to function as such, must refer to a system of collective norms and interpret reality in the spirit of this system; that is, it is subordinated to a mythology. In this sense, what Nitsch does may really be a manner of ritual, for some kind of collectivity (however precarious) is involved in his work. But it is more difficult so see how Finley’s “performance” may be “a pagan rite of cleansing” (quoted by Mintcheva 2000), since there are no participants adhering to her values: in fact, there are really no participants, only an (in the end rather unwilling) audience. Finley’s rites are as personal as her myths: psychoanalytical rather than mythological.

Reality and fiction in “performance”

There are several ways, however, in which all “performance” still seems to share properties with the “happening”. First of all, like all the actions which we have considered here, “performance” is different from ordinary life in being scripted at a low level (not only as actions types, as is the case with ordinary life). And it is clearly scripted by a text, not by custom, as in the ritual. In other words, the behaviour sequence, as a whole chunk, not just in its parts, appears as the token of a type. This is actually an effect of the actions having been demarcated and offered up for perception (as was seen most clearly in the case of theatrical behaviour, although it is also operated by the space of the stage as such). It is therefore curious that some persons have argued that “performance” is characterised by the “ singularity ”, and thus non-repeatability, of the action involved (Phelen as quoted by van Mechelen 2000). As in many other cases of “ using self ”, a “performance” may be executed once only by the artist, but it is (as Sandin 2000 points out) offered as a receipt which anybody can realise any number of times. Nitsch’s “ Six day play ” (cf. Sternudd 2000) will probably never be performed again in that particular form; but in principle, it can always be repeated, not only because the “ score ” still exists, but because its elements are the same as those appearing in a lot of earlier – and perhaps later – “performances” by Nitsch. Several qualifications will have be made to this affirmation, the most obvious one of which is that there is a strong tendency for “performances”, as opposed to theatre plays, being “ interpreted ” by persons, at least one of which is also the “ author ” of the script.

Phelen’s claim may be related to the idea of “performance” being a case of presentation, rather than representation. It will be remembered that Kirby referred obliquely to this idea by affirming that the participants in a “happening” should rather be compared to the stage-hands than to the actors ; obliquely, because, contrary to the actors, the stage-hands are not, as we pointed out, offered up for perception ; they are thus not even presented. If so, it may seem, “happening” and other kinds of “performance” are more similar to ritual than to theatre. However, following Hildebrand, we accepted above that even ritual contains a distinction between expression and content, which makes it into a kind of representation ; and with Honzl we admitted both that ritual is a semiotic action, and that it somehow presents itself as being a further occurrence of a token of a particular type, rather than being an expression having another action as its content. We can easily find the same ambiguity in “performance”. In spite of his claims to “ be doing the real thing ”, Nitsch does not really slaughter human beings ; he slaughters animals, which, by means of a metonymic displacement, become signs for human sacrifice (see Sternudd 2000). And in spite of or her violence, Finley does not smear herself with real excrements, but uses chocolate as a metaphoric sign of substitution (Mintcheva 2000). Even here, then, reality is all the time shot through with signs.

In this sense, it is clear that “performance”, as well as ritual, contain elements of representation – but it might still be argued that the dominant function of “performance” is not to be found in this aspect. Sternudd (2000) affirms that in “performance”, as opposed to the theatre, it is not important how something is done, but only that it is done ; and in a similar vein, Lehmann (as referred to by Bleeker 2000 and van Mechelen 2000) suggests that “performance” is more involved with pragmatics (what does it do ?) than with semantics (what does it mean ?). Correlatively, Mintcheva (2000) notes that Finley has been criticised because of her “ bad acting ”. However, when she goes on to suggest that this “ bad acting ” should really be seen in relation to what it accomplishes in the “performance”, this implies that “ bad acting ” is really “ good acting ” in this context. To some extent, at least, this is a point that can be generalised : it is not that it is not important how the action is performed in a performance ; rather, it is part of its point that is should be performed ” badly ”.

What Lehmann and Sternudd say about “performance” seems to me really to apply to the sports event : here, in effect, as I observed above, the only important thing is to win, no matter how you do it (within the limits set by the rules of the game). In the case of sports, it may actually be sufficient to know the results, or see a picture taken at the precise moment when all arrive at the finishing-line, which is why the newspapers offer us this service ; but nobody would think of accounting for a piece of theatre, nor a “performance”, in that way. Of course, it is not entirely true that reading the results is the same thing as seeing the entire sports event : for the whole point of sports, as in any other case of agôn, is that all through the event, suspense is being built up, which is then released at the moment of reaching the goal. There is a clear, well articulated, if somewhat monotonous, narrative matrix.

“ Bad acting ” is still acting, however. The performance artist, like the actor, makes up a double structure, consisting of an expression and a content. But if the expression is the self, what then is the content ? Mintcheva (2000) rightly contrasts Finley’s “ normal persona ” with her “ trance characters ”, and the opposition could no doubt be generalised. But is this really different from the way we all act differently at home and at work, as in Goffman’s “ backstage ”-model ? It certainly is, because the “performance” is a spectacle, something which is offered up to perception, unlike our different doings at home and at the workplace, where the spectacular function and the visual modality are not dominant. The question then remains what is the content of the “performance” character. In Abramovic&’s later work, it could be said that there is a fictional 1/here/now : here and now Abramovic& shows us what happened there and then – to some earlier ego of hers. Or, to put it in Sandin’s (2000) terms, her present-day self “ uses ” her past-time self to accomplish the “performance”. But, in these works, Abramovic& seems to be rather close to doing “ traditional ” theatre. If we look at the other types of “performances” reviewed here, including Abramovic& early work, the part played by the performance artists rather seems to make up a category than a self : not king Lear or Nora, but the hysterical woman or the sacrificial victim. The self is used to signify a type, not a person. Curiously, at the same time, this same self which signifies a type seems to be an experiencing self. This paradox again seems to bring us close to ritual.

“Performance” as psychodrama and semiodrama

A characteristic feature of performance art seems to be that of the artist putting his/her endurance to a test: van Mechelen (2000) mentions the cases of Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but many of Abramovic&’s pieces also are of this kind. In other cases, such as that of Finley, it seems to be the audience which is called upon to endure (cf. Mintcheva 2000). To some extent, we have already accounted for this, when we observed that “performance” may be made up of instrumental acts: unlike theatre, it can have real consequences (wounds, for instance, or even death). However, this view of the issue puts the emphasis on the consequences, rather than on the act of endurance itself. According to van Mechelen (2000), “performance” is similar to the circus art, but, as we have seen, the sport event may be a safer analogy. But even the latter may not really account for the experience of endurance. For a semiotician, it is difficult not to think of the tests of the hero, so often found in myths and folklore, and generalised in Greimas’ narratological model as the qualifying, principal, and glorifying, tests. And, since myths are the other side of rites, we seems to be brought back to the analogy with ritual.

All rites seems to imply some kind of crossing of limits (Douglas 1966). This is less obvious in the case of the calendar rites, which mark temporal thresholds, without introducing us into any new sphere (already because they follow a cyclical course). The rites of initiation or of passage, on the contrary, can be seen as acts in which somebody is assigned a new property in the culture which he will henceforth hold. In the rites of crisis or transgression, again, elements are only temporarily assigned to somebody or something, e.g. that which is normally being prohibited becomes proscribed, etc. (Cf. Bataille 1957). It is possible to understand the limit between two areas, either as something that belongs at the same time to the two areas, or as something which does not belong to either. If we identify areas with concepts, this would be equivalent to what Greimas called complex and neutral terms, respectively. Following van Gennep’s famous description of the passage rites, this would mean that someone is taken from a defined area of culture through a neutral area to another defined area of culture. The limit here appears as a neutral term. The transition take place through an intermediate term which does neither belong to one area nor to the other. In the rites of transgression, on the contrary, the limit is understood as a term full of contradictions. The crossing is a direct confrontation between defined spheres of the culture. The limit appears as a complex term (cf. Sonesson 1999a).

In performance art, is easy to recognise elements of both rites of passage, and rites of transgression. The space of “performance” may appear, at different moments, as both a neutral and a complex area. It is natural that this should be so in the case of Nitsch, whose works appear to be an authentic ritual performed by some kind of latter-day sectarians. But in most others cases it is clear that there is no body of truths, no mythology, shared by a collectivity, which justifies the ritual acts. So, in what sense may it still be said that the “performances” of Abramovic&, Finley, and others, contain elements of ritual ? We would need to conceive of something like “ personal myths ” to justify this description. But, of course, this is not such a new idea : rituals embodying personal myths are known from psychoanalysis and psychology under such names as psychodrama and sociodrama.

Psychodrama may be understood, as its name suggests, as a theatre-like structure, which is, nevertheless, not organised for the benefit of an audience, but for that of one of the acting subjects, and more precisely, in order to modify the experience of this acting subject. Sociodrama is, from this point of view, as the name does not suggests, fairly similar : it is also geared to the experience of an individual subject, but it takes this experience to be contained in the relationships of the individual to those which whom he customarily interacts. If ritual exists, in order for society to ascribe properties to an individual, psychodrama and sociodrama serve self-ascription : the individual’s own attributions of properties to his self. performance art often seems to be similar to psychodrama or sociodrama, with the added twist than an audience is present, and (sometimes) that the context is that of the art world. Those, like Abramovic&, who puts themselves to hard tests of endurance, are more on the psychodrama side ; while those, like Finley, who put the strain on the relationship to the audience, rather seems to be acting out a sociodrama. But in all cases, the real benefactor of the act seems to be the artist him- or herself.

The problem with sociodrama lies in its very limited idea of what society is : a network of interrelations between individuals. It is significant that it grew out of “ small groups research ”, which was involved with “ primary groups ” like families, peer groups, etc. But society cannot be reduced to interrelations merely : it also consists of enforced constraints, also known as norms, codes, or structures. In the middle of the seventies, when I was a young student of semiotics in Paris, I invented something which I called semiodrama, which did not turn out to be promised to any great future. The idea was to use insights gained from proxemics and other semiotic disciplines, combined with the customary drama exercises, in order to understand the workings of norms and rules in our society. Unlike the psychodrama and the sociodrama, semiodrama was not centred on the individual, but on societal structures (which may explain it was no success). Actually, what I was trying to do was not so new as I thought at the time : Harold Garfinkel (1967) and his “ ethnometodologists ” had already been trying for some time to expose the presuppositions of everyday actions by acting against the grain of ordinary expectancies, for example by not abiding by the rules while playing chess, or not saying a word at home a whole day through, etc. By one of the members of the school, ethnomethodology was described as “ sociology as ‘happening’ ” (Gouldner 1970). Later, similar techniques were used by Manar Hammad (1989) and his students, during a congress of architecture, in order to make the participants aware of the constraints underlying our everyday use of space. Analogies to the semiodrama, in this sense, can also be found in performance art : the work, for instance, of Adrian Piper (referred to in Sandin 2000), which consists in appearing in public contexts equipped in ways which run counter to expectations. Here, it seems, the self is really used, not for the sake of the self, but to expose societal structures.

In performance art, most of the time, the artist lives through his or her personal myths in front of the audience. In Bakhtin’s terms, the author is also the hero, as in the psychodrama. It is the artist’s experience which counts. So, in this sense, “ performance ” is a typical product of the subjectivist culture of Modernism (exacerbated in the late phase often called Postmodernism). But, as many other creations of art, “ performance ” is not pure : it also contains elements of “ semiodrama ” : the uncovering and societal structures and their underlying framework of signs. In this latter sense, “ performance ” appears to be (to paraphrase Clausewitz) the continuation of semiotics by other means.

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