Map Week 6
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Where is the performance in Joseph Roach's "Culture and Performance"?
I’d like to ask for some help, both in sorting out an essay, and in answering the question, “What is performance theory for?” I’ve been struggling with Joseph Roach’s essay in Performativity and Performance . At first reading, it seemed to be a clear tracing of three funeral performances as examples of social memory. Stepping back from it, though, I feel like it wanders over lots of territory, and I’m having difficulty finding the main point he is arguing. I believe one of his main theses is that literature and orature are interrelated, “that these modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time” (45). Another thesis is that performance allows culture to change. I don’t see how these arguments are supported with the analysis of different funeral performances, though. The literature he refers to is the libretto of an opera (an obvious aesthetic performance form) or a newspaper. How is performance related to what has traditionally been considered literatu...
Adrian Piper's Cornered
ReplyDelete-Video instillation project in 1988 that is an interrogation of race by Piper to the audience
-Video monitor positioned in corner, behind table that is upside down, and hanging on each side of the instillation are two copies of her father's birth certificate one stating that he is black and one that he is white... the entire project is sitting next to art mounted on a wall in what appears to be a museum
-I could only find reperformances of Piper's project online with a few pictures of the original thing because the YT upload was removed. Its seems everyone used the same link on their websites and now it's completely disappeared. Here is what I watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KphHf5mLmEU
Here is what I read and saw about the original project: https://hammer.ucla.edu/take-it-or-leave-it/artists/adrian-piper/.
-And the end of the reperformance, we get a glimpse of Piper's original video. The focus is consistently on the act of questioning the audience. The questions focused on making moral decisions about race more apparent to white audience members. Both performer even tells the audience that most white Americans have black ancestry. WOW! That's a bold statement that many people undoubtedly refused.
-The reperformance of this project locates itself in the fluidity of Piper's original work and the focus on identity and how we understand racialized performance of self.
-The reperformanace also slightly alters the effect of the message because you find yourself questioning the race of the performer in the video (is this an inappropriate appropriation for a class project or is the performer justified in her own right to create the video). In essence I think my initial thought process while watching the video is an extension of Piper's original message that we carry biases and anxieties to surface when discussing race in America.
Performativity and Performance -Sedgwick and Parker
-"The performative is theatrical," p. 9.
-Deriving from the arguments made by J.L. Austin in "How to do things with words" that helps connect the ideas of performative utterances that drives the overarching theme to connect the collection of essays.
-The link between performativity and performance, in the theatrical sense, is an active theme explored in the essays (arguably explicit) that approaches culture and linguistics.
-Essay by Patton deals with performativity and spatial distinction in ways that made me consider the instillation by Piper. While this essay focuses on constituting other in terms of AIDS, it can be used to further interpret the Othering that is essential in Piper's video performance.
-"By eliding movement in the attempt to trace out regimes for separating self and other, the
critic must performatively constitute the very objects which are in the next moment viewed as empirically discoverable—the critic constitutes a group of subjects who effect the othering," p. 124.
-Butler: All speech is “excitable,” meaning that it is, at some level, beyond the control of the speaker. This is because language is produced out of a cultural and social matrix that precede and supercede the speaker. Therefore meaning can’t be dictated by the speaker. Furthermore, because the meaning stems from the context that precedes excitable speech, the speaker is actually produced as a subject from that pre-existing meaning and context.