Performance by definition is temporal. Practitioners and critics alike frequently bemoan its fleeting, even fragile nature. While it can be frustrating to stand with nothing but memory and nostalgia after closing night, our current performance-making/performance-critiquing culture has developed an attitude much more dangerous – one that renders performance not only temporal, but disposable.
In the post-modern era, artists’ rejection of the “object” as focus in favor of a focus on “action” led to a rise in performance art and lots of intermingling among visual art, dance, theater, music, film, etc. Initially an anti-capitalist trend, the market snuck in and started packaging the artist as celebrity, making the artist him/herself the object.
In the post-post-modern era, (which will someday earn a shorter name, I hope), where celebrity culture grows like a weed, this concept of artist as object plants even deeper roots. We as artists and audiences alike spend less and less time looking at the work that is made, and more and more time packaging and perfecting our own status as “Artist.”
Our work is defined in glib sound-bytes that communicate very little, but sound super-slick, and the question most often asked is “what are you working on next?” This question pops up almost before the last performance of whatever it is we’re working on now. The present is so over, man. What’s next? What’s next? A curator wants what’s new, and if you’re not giving it to them, how will you ever get the gig that’s going to get you the next gig, that’s going to get you the NY Times review, that’s going to get you the grant, that’s going to get you the… wait a minute. Weren’t we just trying to make something interesting?
Performance will always disappear quickly, but the more we look closely at what we’re making, what others are making, and why, the longer our memory of a work has to settle and the more we can learn from our explorations, which will make us less vulnerable to the buffeting winds of the market.
