Performance and Trauma

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e Obscene Mirror ImagePerformance and trauma

Introduction

"It is always a question of proving the real through the imaginary, proving truth through scandal, proving the lawthrough transgression, proving work through striking, proving the system through crisis, and capital through

revolution, as it is elsewhere of proving ethnology through the dispossession of its object - without taking into

account:

the proof of theater through antitheater;

the proof of art through antiart;

the proof of pedagogy through antipedagogy;

the proof of psychiatry through antipsychiatry, etc."- (Baudrillard, 1994, pp. 19)

"(Traumatic) illusionism is employed not to cover up the real with the simulacra surfaces but to uncover it in

uncanny things this approach is to tease out a trauma of the subject, with the apparent calculation that, if its

lost object a cannot be reclaimed, at least the wound that it lebehind can be probed however, this approachhas its dangers too, for the probing of the wound can lapse into a coded expressionism (as in the bohemian

romance of the photography work of Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson, and others). (e) very problem can

be provocative, for it raises the question, crucial to abject art, of the possibility of an obscene representation - that

is, of a representation without a scene that stages the object for the viewer. Might this one difference between the

obscene, where the object, without a scene, comes too close to the viewer, and thepornographic, where the object

is stages for the viewer who is thus distanced enough to be its voyeur?"

- (Foster, 1996, pp. 153)

is essay will attempt to respond.

1. Agency, Structure, and PerformanceTrajectories of play between subject-object relations and life-art distinctions

In her excavation of performance art's 'hidden history' (beginning with the publication of the Futurist

Manifesto in 1909) RoseLee Goldberg compels the reader to consider two theses:

1.) e genealogy of performance can be traced in gestures representing the artist's agency amidstsociopolitical conditions that structure artistic production (this implies that performance exists as the self-

referential movement of productionitself, in its political articulations).

2.) e performance artist, as an anthropological subject, (characterized by Goldberg as one who "animates

the formal and conceptual ideas on which art-making is based upon") assumes a dialectical relationshiptowards such structures, asserting a life of the artist that challenges the very history it produces.

is means that while performance resists any pre-established artistic vocabulary, it also resists easy

historicization because it cannot be exhausted by attempts to retroactively formalize it, a "past to be altered bythe present as much as the present is directed by the past," (Goldberg, quoting T.S. Elliot). RoseLee locates

such a performative operation within the application of a theoretical manifestos to futurist painting:

"e gesture for us will no longer be axed moment of universal dynamism: It will be decisively the dynamic


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sensation made eternal."- Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (11 April 1910)

Although Goldberg describes the Futurists' use of words like 'activity'and 'change'as "ill-dened" (Goldberg,

2001, p. 14), it is through such looseness performance artists operating today may chart the development of

attempts to resolve problems in performance that still persist today. Regardless of whether performance is

treated as a surplus to art historicizing ("a means to attract publicity to seemingly wild and bohemian life-styles,"(Goldberg, 1984. p. 26)) or as a supplement to artistic practice (the manifesto as performance; as

conceptual preamble to the produced object that establishes the subject's critical distance from the social

determinations of his work) an expression of a subject behind the artremains a common denominator - this is

to say that the dialectic between agency and structure becomes sublated into a living framework in which

Goldberg locates both the anthropologicalandformalgenesis of the performance artist.

Goldberg's traces performance back to a period where a minimum consensus of a shared reality can be still beacknowledged through performance. is is to say that subject-object distinctions (the relationship of the artist

towards the work) assumed by the artistmirrors the socially constructed life/art boundaries (the relationshipthe performer stages between himself and reality). Goldberg's proto-performance is thus a productive

movement between structure and agency, as the performer is able to reference (and challenge) the very

coordinates that frame his subject. For example, consider the Dada artist's ability to allude to theproductionofdistance between life and art in his declaration of a readymade: By emphasizing what appears to be adisproportionate amount of his agency by determining an object he has not produced as art (while stillclaiming a relationship towards the object nonetheless), he reects the ideological tendencies behind art/life

divisions that structure the rarity of institutionalized art objects as they are determined by a disproportionateinuence of critics. In short, the performed distance between a subject-object relation reects a structured

distance between life and art, in order to critically redeem this distance from stagnation. Dada thus achievesthe anti-art critique of production the way surrealism achieves a psychological critique of ideology: both

movements animate the problem of object-displacement through performance.

According to Goldberg, performance has been the primary locus of this subjectivization, maintaining that theperformer always exists as the edge of disciplines, as an 'avant-avant-garde' (Goldberg, 1984. p. 23). It is

convenient that Goldberg grounds performance in modernism, because she nds a point in history in whichthe performer's presence could still be read as the primary locus of the subject, as a stage that frames thesubject's image. What begins for Goldberg as a rejection of traditional theater begins in a theatrical context -is "stage" of theatrical work-performance is recongured to reectobjective conditions of the performanceprior to the stage, indenitely reformulating the subjective conditions in which we perceive the performance.

is inextricably links live art to its revolutionary imperative because the performer's body still "stands for"

the objective conditions of the ideological stage, which he has the agency to restructure and transform to his

own whims.

We can thus trace a morphology of the problem of object displacement as follows: What began as concerns

regarding performance's ability to 'mirror' reality within an ideological subversion of theater lead to the

condition in which the referential stage created by these object-relations become innitely subjected to

reconguration, resulting in two tendencies developing along each other. e rst tendency is a shi insubjectivity towards the simulacra, a de-centering of subject mediation that results in a secondary tendency:

Abjection, when the subject's body embodies this de-centering. ese two tendencies produce a trajectory

which moves from performance as a politically-didactic avant-garde towards a problem arising through

performance: the radical subjectivization of the "authority" of media. is is the history Foster tries to trace ine Return of the Real, when he compels the reader to "rethink transgression not as a rupture produced by a

heroic avant-garde outside the symbolic order, but as a fracture traced by a strategic avant-garde within the

order" (Foster, 1996, p. 157).

e "heroic" primacy of the performer's agency is threatened in latter half of the 20th century, when theartist's body-image becomes its own pure simulacrum: Nothingstages the subject for himself - his relationship

to his own image is not a stable subject-object distinction, because his image is without 'a stage' and has

become obscene proximity to the viewer. Foster describes a paradigm shi "from reality as an effect ofrepresentation to the real as a thing of trauma", marking a point where both ideological and anthropological


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rea ings of performance collapse into the psychoanalytical: What was once easily escribe as the movement

of subjects responding to (and thus reinventing) the structural determinations that produce them is

irreducibly complicated by the analysis ofthe limiting structures that constitute subjectivity itself.

e work ofDan Graham, in which the representation of anthropological data is frequently deconstructed as

the psychological projections of the viewer, is emblematic of this tendency. In Performance/Audience/Mirror

(pic 1) a stable relationship between the psychology of the performer and viewer is implicated within theselimiting structures, revealing them to be already a minimal affect in reality. is lack is produced by Graham

via an ambiguity in identication that reveals any articulation or reading of a formal framework in which a

social relationship takes place does not allude to reality - rather, it becomes a shield against the trauma of the

Real (what Foster, following, Lacan, calls a superimposed 'image/screen' that points towards, while

simultaneously 'veiling' the real, thus taming it within a symbolic framework). In this sense, the mirror imagebecomes a postmodern counterpoint to the readymade, in that the artist's gesture draws a relationship

towards his mirror image that produces a distance within himself, registering as a distance of time between

Graham's description of his surroundings and the viewer's continual observation of the mirror. is results a

condition what Foster also identies in Cindy Sherman's work - a state in which one cannot help but catchthemselves objectifyingthe artist. is is to say that the mirror image is not a referential stage, but a rupture in

performer-viewer intersubjectivity

Pic 1: Dan Graham produces two kinds of projections while

facing towards, then facing away from his mirror image.

2.e Mirror Stage as Image-ScreenTwo hypothetical projects

is rupture does not only problematize anthropological data, it also generates plural readings. For example,

Foster cites two readings of Andy Warhol that appear wildly incompatible with each other and then reveals

them to be part of the same phenomenon(Foster, 1996, pp. 128 - 130). e rst is omas Crow's reading of

Warhol as a perfect suturing between a "referential object" and an "empathetic subject": According to Crow,

Warhol is a deeply humanist artist involved in thematic concerns in the popular American tradition of truth-telling. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is a "supercial, impassive" Warhol, who desymbolizes

himself and the art object by releasing them from a meaningful relationship with each other into a simulacralsurface. Foster notes two further ideological interpretations that ensue from this 'releasing': For Roland


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Barthes, this gesture belongs to the tra ition of the avant-gar e isruption of the art object. Barthes

emphasizes Warhol'sperformance of the formal and conceptual ideas that structure artistic production, an an

attack of "that old thing art" in the tradition of the Dadaists. Jean Baudrillard, on the other hand, nds no needfor this last-ditch attempt to og the dead horse of representation, describing the pop art as an end of

subversion - a total immersion of art into the simulacral sign economy.

All moral and ideological critiques of Warhol are deferred by Foster, who describes all these readings asprojections of readers identifying with Warhol's image, holding the artist himself complicit with these

projections in his narcissistic self-identication with his own art. Foster avoids privileging a singular political

critique of Warhol, insisting on deconstructing Warhol's work as "referential andsimulacra, connected and

disconnected, affective and affectless, critical and complacent" Foster, 1996, p. 130). is compels him to

device a new way of seeing: traumatic realism, within whichwe may locate a dialogue between Barthesian andBaudrillardian projections:

Project 1: Barthes mobilizes a crisis of representation through which we can maintain enough critical distance

between a performer and his mirror image. It is within this distance (between the subject-image and theperformer) Dan Graham's work thus can be read as a critique of simulacra.

I mean to say that the simulation of the conditions within the performance reveals the performance itself to bea simulation (hence synecdochically blurring the art-life divide). at is to say the mirror simulation is

performed as a mechanism similar to ideology, if not necessarily a referent of an actual ideological tendency inreality.e crisis has a performable trace, in that it is able to simulate ideology.

e philosophical project of the actionist Hermann Nitsch can be used to exemplify this operation: rough

theatrical division, Nitsch simulates a condition of ritualistic orders in order to produce a "psychologicaldramaturgy" of Taboos. is is to say that Nitsch externalizes the divisions in a subject through a self-reexive

production of the abject, simulating conditions to signify the theatricalnitude of the project (the life-art/ life-

death boundary (g 2)). is means that because the symbolic boundary-sign is externalized from the artist,

there is the risk of the simulated subject denying his complicity in the production of an aesthetically'boundless' spirit of the gesamtkunstwerk.

Jonas Vogt: But more people means more logistical investment. Do you sometimes feel like

a musical conductor or a dictator?

Hermann Nitsch: Please drop the political terms now. With that logic, every director would be

a dictator. To me, it is the same artistic procedure as painting a picture. How many objects I

use is not relevant.

- (Nitsch, 2011)


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Pic 2: Action 111 at Fondazione Morra in Naples in 2002.

By releasing the abject from its symbolist determinations in Nitsch's Actions, performance produces and

problematizes simulated violence, unlimited by the thematic novelty of the abject. I prefer to read Nitsch as ahyperrealist as opposed to a ritualist - is is to say that the subject's symbolic investment in what becomes

"abjected from" the performer's body is read laterally, as the production of a simulacralrelationship between

performer and his body image.

Project 2: Nitsch's denial of responsibility as a 'director'(and consequently his formal 'directorial' relationshiptowards his crew of performers) can be read as a problem in performance congruent to the Baudrillardian

crisis of subjectivity, which maintains that no single critique can stand in place of an overarching reality,

prematurely resolving the simulacrum - if this were the case, neither Nitsch's work, nor Dan Graham's, would

be unable to respond to the psychological and ideological morphology of the performance-viewerrelationship, and Foster would be historicizing a Traumatic Reality, in which the abject signier becomes

thematicallyoverdetermined.

3. A hypothetical resolution of simulacrum

Published in 1966, Louis Althusser's essayCremonini, Painter of the Abstractstands as a curious piece of art

criticism in that it coheres through a rigorous disavowal of all possible readings of the paintings of Leonardo

Cremonini that begin with the presumption of a human subject, may this be the creator, viewer, or even

people represented in the paintings themselves. e peculiarity of Althusser's theorizing becomes moreapparent when we compare it with its object-centric analogue: while the readymade artist used performance

to frame an absence of values in the subject-object relationship, Althusser goes even further, establishing

Cremonini's relationship to the painting through an absence of the human subject (thus denying the primacy

of an agency that assigns meaning to art). Althusser rejects a description of Cremonini's paintings as"expressionism", along with a gallery patron's opinion that the works are "uninteresting", on the grounds that

such expressions are a misunderstanding of allcritical judgement, merely accomplishing a commentary on

aesthetic consumption - following this, Althusser even denies the the category of thepainterhimself, claiming

that subjectivity of creation is no more than the "mirror reection" of the subjectivity of consumption, andcannot provide a framework in which art can be critiqued beyond aesthetic ideology:

"Cremonini thus follows the path which was opened up to men by the great revolutionary thinkers who

understood that the freedom of men is not achieved by the complacency of its ideological recognition, butby the knowledge of the laws of their slavery, and that the `realization' of their concrete individuality is


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achieve byanalysis and mastery of the abstract relations which govern them." (Althusser, 1966, p. 241)

When Althusser calls Cremonini a 'painter of the real abstract' what he is really saying is that Cremonini isprimarilytheperformerof a ideological project. Ideology, according to Althusser is similar to the imaginary,

in that it is ahistorical, and is "eternal, exactly like the subconscious". Althusser uses 'abstract' in an

epistemological way - Art is treated as if it were able to refer to knowable abstract relations in reality. is is an

epistemologicalclaim on the function of art, which I will reject in favor of apragmatic reading of Cremonini,in which Althusser praises his work on the basis that is able to demonstrate that art's relationship to ideology

is unique because it makes lived ideology representable. I prefer not to question the reality Cremonini

represents; what is more important in the context of this essay is the question of how Cremonini makes the

imaginary representable (in that he performs ideology). We can can thus defer a Marxist-historicist reading ofculture as ideologyin order to illustrate a formal property of Cremonini's work that Althusser identies with:

Art as a performance of a referentialart/ life division. is is to say that the epistemologicalreading of artistic

imperative is not denitive but a projection of Althusser's own ideological concerns: "(Art) maintains far

closer relations to ideology than any other object it is impossible to think the work of art, in its speci cally

aesthetic existence, without taking into account the privileged relation between it and ideology, i.e. its directand inevitable ideological effect." (Althusser, 1966, p. 242)

We should retain, at the very least, Althusser's claim of art's unique position in the production of ideologywithout presuming his more grandiose claims. Let us attempt a Traumatic Realistreading of the ideological

subject, through Hal Foster's delineation of Lacan's Image-Screen, which Foster describes through thesuperimposition of two cones:

e Lacanian relationship between the subject and the object gaze

Althusser, who believes that ideology (cultural abstraction from the nature) is the subject's imaginary

relationship to the real (thusclaiming that the human subject is necessarily ideological), stabilizes a stage of areferential orderin the Lacanian reading:

Althusser claims that Cremonini reproduces the object gaze as anabsence within the object (an operation of material subtraction

within the subject) rather than a lack in the subject.

He conceptualizes a referential order of the image-screen that refers to the subject's absence in reality. eimage-screen is thus read as a metaphor for a "self-reexive mirror": e top cone represents a material real, in

which Cremonini's work achieves the epistemological break for painting that Marx achieves for a material

conception of history. is literal break (registered in painting as an absence) is also reected laterally, within

the human subject in the bottom cone, who is revealed to be merely an effect of an idealist order abstracted

from reality. e suturing of the two reections in one another represents the 'ideological project' of anti-humanism. Althusser claims through this project the human subject can knows himselfto absent in thepositive

sense, in that this absence is "that of the structure of the world which determines them" - a distance betweenthe subject and the object-relations that Althusser positivizesas the ontological Real.


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I prefer to relocate this order as an order of referentiality in which the the boundary of the simulated is

signied through the image - this 'movement of perception' is represented by the rst cone, which Foster linkswith Renaissance treaties of perspective. It is through this tradition which Althusser claims Cremonini

produces "a meaning in the order in which he had reproduced this History while living his own history: it couldbe the order of a Genesis (even a materialist one), i.e. of a descent from an origin containing the true meaning of

things, the true relationship between man and nature, and his objects"(Althusser, 1966, p. 232).is is where itbecomes clear that Althusser is not so much writing art criticism as much as he is criticizing humanism

through art. is results in Althusser's reading of Cremonini becoming a lot more convoluted than it needs to

be, though he does provide us with an accessible metaphor in which we may summarize it: e mirror (evokedhere as an analog to painting itself), in which the subject sees himself to be absent (pic 3):

"e circles of the mirrors 'depict' the fact that the objects and forms, though related among themselves, are

only so related because they turn in the same circle, because they are subject to the same law, which now

visibly dominates the relations between objects and their man." (Althusser, 1966, p. 235)

Pic 3: Althusser devotes an analysis of the mirror trope in Cremonini's

painting as he wishes to communicate a 'process without a subject' thatCremonini captures.

is "attening" of reected images into reective surfaces is a property something Hal Foster attributes to

superrealism (Foster, 1996, p. 141): "the reproduction of reality as a uid surface, as a subterfuge against the

Real. is subterfuge results in a 'denial of recognition', represented by the second cone of pictorial reexivity,

in which the structural absence between the subject and the object (the mirror, or the canvas) is represented as

an absence in the subject's mirror image (a metaphor for his subjectivity).

is is to say that an internaldifference is reproduced inside the subject that is the mirror reection of the positive absence in the order of

the material real. Althusser claims that this difference in subjectivity is a negative absence, which Cremonini

successfully captures, bringing the anti-humanist project to its apotheosis. For Althusser, the faces in the

mirror do not represent faces of subjects, but they also cannot be abject because because the abject, forAlthusser, would be an idealistic notion, a "subjectivity of consumption and creation (production) whose

primacy Althusser rejects, insisting that "the gaze we need is different from that of desire or disgust of

objects"). How can there be a subject, and no subject at the same time? Althusser resolves this by saying

Cremonini 'represents the subject's absence':

"at is why they are so `badly' represented, hardly outlined, as if instead of being the authors of their gestures,

they were merely their trace. ey are haunted by an absence: a purely negative absence, that of the humanist

function which is refused them, and which they refuse; and a positive, determinate absence, that of the structureof the world which determines them, which makes them the anonymous beings they are, the structural effects of


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the real relations which govern them is is why his painting denies the spectator the complicities ofcommunion in the complacent breaking of the humanist bread, the complicity which conrms the spectator in his

spontaneous ideology by depicting it in 'paint' this is why his painting itself prevents him from recognizing

himself as a 'creator' and thus rejoicing in the pictures he paints: for these pictures are (a refutation of) the

ideology of creation."(Althusser, 1966, p. 239)

Does being a bad painter make you a social realist? ough I am being facetious here, isn't 'bad' an idealisticcategory in itself? And what is preventing anyone from reading what Althusser theorizes as "representation of

absence" as a theme subjectively applied to painting (rather than ideologically identied)? Furthermore, how

could someone perceive, let alone represent, an 'absence' in presence, without psychological projections?

Althusser's projections of 'absence' are really attempts to resolve problems of the abject signier. Foster

advanced a critique similar to the one I'm making now in regards to Fredric Jameson's claim that pop "hasrendered the surrealist object gone without a trace". Foster does not feel that these tendencies necessarily

representa historical break from modernism, arguing that "ese old objects may be displaced(already for the

surrealists they were attractively outmoded) () Certainly the subjects related to these objects have not

disappeared; the epochs of the subject, let alone the unconscious, are not so punctual." (Foster, 1996, p. 144)us the subjectpersists despite the de-centering of ideology itself.

So neither a historical or epistemological break in painting is achieved, as what Jameson and Althusser aretalking about are more properly communicated within a continuum of problems in performance (the

performer in the place of object-displacement) than the represented subject himself. is is apparent whenAlthusser says that Cremonini "never 'painted' anything but the absences in presences: the rhythm, the spurt, the

snap of time 'depicted' by instantaneous, i.e. eternal, plants - and the cry of a voice, 'depicted' by something quitedifferent, by gestures, trajectories and suspensions" (Althusser, 1966, p. 232). Althusser's insertion of inverted

commas around the adjective ('painted') indicates some awareness of the problems in representationnecessitating a performative reading, yet a reluctance to properly formalize these problems within life itself.

e sum of Althusser's theorizing is antithetical to Goldberg's uidity: His insistence of the primacy of

structuralism frequently comes at the expense of a exible relationship between the performer and history - astructural materialism is asserted in place of cultural anthropology. However, one should at least risk revisiting

Althusser's essay, becauseit hypothesizes a radically alternate trajectory (as far as Hal Foster is concerned) inwhich simulacra can be challenged bythrough an animation of the formal relationships between the subject-image and its other. Althusser sets the minimal conditions in which performance does not simply operate as a

didactic representation of ideology, instead, it operates in a manner similar to ideology itself, reproducing anidentication with an imaginary dimension that is always minimally constitutive of the subject's relationship

to the Real, keeping agency and structure in constant dialectical relation to each other.

4. Towards a formulation of Performance art as Traumatic Realism

Fig 6: Dan Graham's Past Future/ Split Attention

To conclude, let us revisit the Futurist's declaration that performance should embody "a dynamic sensationmade eternal", by invoking Alain Badiou's thesis that contemporary art "is not the sublime descent of the

innite into thenite abjection of the body and sexuality, but the production of an innite subjective series

through thenite means of a material subtraction." (Badiou, 2003) I quote Badiou to say that the movement of


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the abject is not a materialization of some expressionistic or deconstructive impulse, rea as a theatrical trope. It

the movement of a subject subtracted from simulacra. To metaphorize this as a gesture, - e performer says 'I

am not in the place where I thought I was', thus producing a lag between the rst and the second "I" (the lagbeing the moment of material subtraction). Dan Graham's Past Future/ Split Attention (1972) animates this

movement of "I" through the intersubjective suturing between two performers, producing a rupture in what is

simulated as a subjective continuum (Fig 5).

e Traumatic Realist performer can be dened in the negative. He is not someone who is interested in the

formal novelty of the abject, as counter-ideology to happiness (Badiou, 2003) or its proxies within a eld of

humanist constructs. is is to say that abjection in performance should not be passively read, as a means of

grounding reality in an unsublimated ontological real, because such a project simulates the abjected as a

signier of a pornographic distance towards the real - that is to say that it creates new ways of romanticizing anitude of subjectivity. When the Traumatic Realist performer "alludes to reality", he produces an obscene de-

centering of relations, thus ensuring the dynamism of the performative and avoiding formulaic responses to

social dichotomies. A performer can be read as a Traumatic Realist if he locates howperformance produces

the obscene as it comes to be signied within live art, i.e. within the very relations which it probes.

Bibliography

Books

Althusser, L. (1966) Cremoni, Painter of the Abstract. In Lenin and Philosophy and other essays (pp. 157 - 166). NY: Monthly Review

Press

Goldberg, R. (1984). Performance, a hidden history. In G. Battock & R. Nickas (Eds.), The Art of Performance: A Critical AnthologyNew

York: Plume.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Foster, H. (1996). The return of the real: Art and theory at the end of the century. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Goldberg, R. (2001). Performance art: From futurism to the present. London: Thames & Hudson.

Websites

Nitsch, H. (2011, Nov 1). Interview by Vogt Jonas [Personal Interview]. Hermann nitsch. HERMANN NITSCH, Retrieved from http://

www.vice.com/read/hermann-nitsch-595-v17n11

Image Sources

Fig 1. Graham, D. (1975) Peformance/Audience/Mirror, [photographs of performance], From Rock My Religion (pg. 114 - 115), 1993,

Massachusettes: MIT Press.

Fig 2. Nitsch, H. (Artist). (2002). [photograph of performance], A group of actors organized by nitsch tore apart a calf carcass as a

crucified and blindfolded man held still underneath during action 111 at fondazione morra in naples in 2002. [Web Photo]. Retrieved

from http://www.vice.com/read/hermann-nitsch-595-v17n11

Fig 3. Cremonini, L. (Artist). (1974). "le soleil dehors, dedans". [Web Photo]. Retrieved from http://joomlarunner.com/ nataliart/en/articles/

7-articles-about-art/53-leonardo-cremonini

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