How to Do Things with Art - Dorothea von Hantelmann

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of language, but instead of the individual speaker, who for Austin is the central authority, she stresses the power of social conventions that empower the speaker but also relativize the impact of the individual’s intentions. A performative act, for Butler, produces reality not by virtue of will or intention, but precisely because it derives from conventions that it repeats and actualizes. Every utterance and every individual action needs to be part of a conventional context in order to be understandable and recognizable. It can only create an impact by drawing upon certain (linguistic) conventions. Only pre-existing conventions render a present speaking powerful, enabling it to produce effects that go beyond language, entering the realm of reality. 10 Yet, as no act of repetition is identical, it contains not only reproductive but also differentiating or deviating moments. For Butler it is only within this nexus of convention and innovation, repetition and difference that any action directed towards change can happen.

      Thus the theoretical model of performativity and the art form of Performance Art are based on not only different but antagonistic worldviews. While Performance Art, at least in its own constitutive self-understanding, was linked to the individual performer and the singular, autonomous act; performativity (in Butler’s sense) refers to a non-auto­nomous and non-subjectivist idea of acting. Performance Art operates with an ideology outside of the social systems of the museum and the market, while in Butler’s model of performativity there simply is no such thing as an outside. While Performance Art strived to break with the fundamental conventions of art, for Butler any form of acting is only thinkable within the constitutive and regulative structure of conventions.

      Given Butler’s argument, it is clear that the idea of a radical break with conventions must fail and is therefore uninteresting. Singular expressive acts that completely withdraw from discourse are not only irrelevant; they are not even thinkable. The idea of efficacy produced by a rupture from conventions is replaced by the use of conventions—a use that also contains a transforming potential. With this notion of performativity we can, for example, concretize how every artwork, not in spite of but by virtue of its integration in certain conventions, “acts”: how, for example, via the museum it sustains or co-produces a certain notion of history, progress and development. The model of performativity points toward these fundamental levels of meaning production. It puts the conventions of art’s production, presentation and historical persistence into focus, shows how these conventions are co-produced by any artwork—independent of its respective content—and argues that it is precisely this dependency on conventions that opens up the possibility of changing them.

       [1] Nick Foulkes, “Why art is the social lubricant of our great city,” London Evening Standard, 10.7.2009.

       [2] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Allen Lane, London, 1977. See also Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory. Evolution, Museums, Colonialism, Routledge, London and New York, 2004.

       [3] Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 4, trans. by Michael Shaw, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984, p. 49.

       [4] Werner Spies, “An Aesthetics of Detachment,” Werner Spies (ed.), Max Ernst. A Retrospective, Tate Gallery London, Prestel-Verlag, Munich, 1991, p. 18.

       [5] Hermann Lübbe, “Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Berliner Museumsgründung 1830,” JbPKB, Berlin, 17 (1981), p. 93.

       [6] Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory & Event (online Journal of John Hopkins University Press), 5, 3 (2001).

       [7] Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, an Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis, 1995, p. 20.

       [8] John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. J.O.Urmson, Clarendon, Oxford, 1962.

       [9] See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Routledge, New York, 1993; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Routledge, New York, 1997.

       [10] Butler refers to the sign theory of Jacques Derrida, accor­ding to which any use of signs is determined by a general iterability (see: Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982, p. 307-330). Signs are subject to a continuous play of repetition and difference, which on the one hand enables their meaning, but on the other prevents any meaning from being able to exist as such in a total sense. This double effect of repetition and difference, in which Derrida recognizes a structural principle of language, marks for Butler the principle by which fundamental societal parameters—such as identity and gender—are produced and reproduced in and through the actions of the individual.

      CHAPTER I The Temporality of Art

       Presence, Experience and Historicity in the Works of James Coleman

       Traditionally, an artwork endures in its material permanence in the museum. There, it is able to engage in a kind of inter-generational dialogue with other works of art and through this to provide us with information on how we position and reflect on ourselves in history. Visual artworks in museums, as Donald Preziosi points out, “are assumed to bear within themselves traces of their origins; traces that may be read as windows into parti­cular times, places, and men­tali­ties." 1 The museum is conceived as a place that enables the individual to experience his or her own formation as a historical process and as a process rooted in history.

       In contrast, the 1960s and 1970s saw the birth of an art practice—Fluxus, Happening and Performance Art—that lived in the moment and had no interest in making the present a repeatable or reoccurring experience. 2 “The culture of the 1960s was about immediacy and presentness,” writes Dan Graham.

       “The present was detached from historical time. It was thought that one was to experiment in the here and now: thus life was a per­ceptual experience.” 3 Yet today these forms of art are part of art history and have become part of the museum, albeit marginally. Not, however, in what is fundamental to them: their eventfulness, but rather transformed into something else, into a document or a relic. The art of the 1960s and 1970s pronounced the experience to be art. But it did not solve the problem of how event-oriented art can exist in the long term within a cultural framework that is geared towards permanency, conservation and archiving. For the most part it did not even touch upon this issue. “Event art is actually ahistorical art—it cannot be handed down,” writes philosopher Dieter Mersch, describing a “fundamental difference between event and historicity, between singularity and per­manence,” which ran through culture at the close of the 20th century. 4

      In opposition to this asserted “fundamental differ­ence”—and by means of James Coleman’s

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