DorotheavonHantelmannHow toDo Thingswith Art

Dorothea von HantelmannHow to Do Things with Art

JIlI'IIlING1Ek & L1,S PRESSES DU REEL

) Dorothea von HantelmannHow to Do Things with Art

What Performativity Meam in Art

Table of C6ntentsI

J

I'll EI'ACE

\Vily SU';l[:Jgems by Hans Ulrich Obrist 4

r''TItODUCTIOt\

The Socict::ll Efficacy ofAn 8

I II \I'T!::II I TilE TE.\tf'OII.AI.I1OY 01' ,\Irr

1'rt."SCncc, Experience :md lIistoricityin the Works ofJamt:S Colcm:m 24

CIIAPTEIlIl TilE KF.ALlTY OF ART

Come.n :md AgcnC)' in (he Works of Daniel !luren 70

'rilE ,\I,\TERIALITY OF ART

Ohjcct and Situation in the Works arTino Schb'al 128

t:llAI'TER IV (;I(ITIQJ.m ,\1'."1) COI\STKUCnON

Concluding with Jeff Koons 176

Tllf; TK\lI'OIl.\l.ITY 01' ~IlT

understanding of time with an idea of history that is seizedand actualized from the present and at the same time in thepresent, but because the artwork creaces an image withoutbeing a representation. Like Benjamin's idea of the dialecti­cal image, Bo.\' evokes an image of history that is beyondpictorial depiction. And this is because its actual location isneither the visual nor the aural medium but a visitor-bodythat is physically seized by the impact of the beat andintegrated into the work. It is only in the visitor's physicaland reflective experience that the individual parrs ofBo.t (thevisual pulse, the beat and the voice) blend to form the work.Only there does this installation materialize in itS entirety asan artwork. And only there does this work's conception ofcondensed time become concrcte-in a momcnt that is bothjetz/zeit and histOry simultaneously, like, to borrow Benjamin'swords again, u a muscle that contracts historical time."

In this staging Coleman brings twO distinct levels ofthe work of art together: the level of representation andportrayal, which shows and re-presentS something, and a di­mension within which this portrayal shows itself, makingits reality-creating effects explicit. Coleman's work producesan effect (the envisioning of a fragmentary and discontinu­ous image of history) that is already present in the (jUSt asfragmentary and dissociated) structure of the work. It is onlythrough the conjunction of these three areas of subject mat­ter, struCture and physical effect that the meaning of the workfinally emerges. It is in this particular aesthetic constructionthat the singularity of this work of art lies, and also its link toan aesthetics of the performative, in Austin's terms.

Digression: The Saying of Doing Uohn L. Austin)

When John L. Austin introduced the expression "performa­tive" in the mid-1950s, he was referring to the active charac­ter of speech. The underlying proposition of his argumentis that under certain conditions language creates the realityit describes, so that one actually does something with words.In the 1990s, Judith Butler gave Austin's linguistic theories asocial and political horizon by emphasizing the constitutiveand the restrictive powers of conventions; both are prerequi­sites to giving the individual the performative power to createa reality.

Buder's wider application of the performative subsequentlywas adopted by cultural studies, in that it is also possible to

examine the performativity of visual art as a specific area ofsocial praxis. In my view, however, this extension of Austin'stheory also led to the loss of an essential aspect of the con­cept: Austin nOt only describes how we take acrion withwords, but also develops a way of speaking in his own presen­tation in which his saying and doing with words are related to

one another in a performative manner.Austin's lectures, published posthumously in 1962 as

lIow to Do Thing} with Words', operate as a kind of instructionmanual; establishing the existence ofa performative level ofspeech by demonstrating how the production of meaningcan be created through "doing" while speaking. This view ofAustin is also suggested by Shoshana Felman and SybilleKramer (independently ofone another and with differentemphases), both of whom I draw on here.40 Their reading ofhis text varies from the usual one inasmuch as they under­stand How to Do Things with Wonu not only as a proposition,but also as a staging; not only as a text that speaks about doingthings with words, but that also does something throughspeech. According to Kramer, "understanding Austin not onlymeans listening to what he says, but also looking at what heis doing by saying it."'" But what docs Austin do? He beginshis lectures by aspiring to formulate a theoretical definitionof the performative, based on the distinction between aperformative-generative and an asscvcrative-constative useof language. Austin very soon realizes, however, that thisdistinction is untenable, as there is no unequivocal criterionhy which the performative and the constative can clearly bedifferentiated. At this point he decides to "go back to funda­mentals," as he puts itY He examines a series of criteria andrules through which he continually awakens new expectationsofa theoretical systemization. As the newly conceived rulesbecome more and more complex, the reader begins not onlyto doubt thei?validity, but also to wonder whether Austin ise\'en interested at all in establishing a clear theoretical defini­tion of the performative. He contrives a wealth of situationsin which the performative power of the act of speech comesto fail: he marries donkeys, baptizes penguins, appointshorses as consuls. In the end, every absurd and at times mys­terious attempt to fix the meaning of the term pcrformative

I'!I~ '''U\l'()R~I.tTY 01' ,IR"I'

demonstrates the failure of the rule. For most academicreaders, Austin's lectures are a seminal but flawed attempt todefine a theory of the performative, and therefore in needof improvement:B Read with Felman and Kramer, however,How to Do Thing; with Wimir seems more like a performanceof the failure to establish the meaning of the performative­with the effect that, precisely because the performativeClnnOt be determined in a conventional manner, a differentmodus operandi is needed to approach the concept andelucidate irs meaning.

Austin, who taught at Oxford University, belongedto a continental tradition of analytic philosophy, a systemof thought characterized by seeking meaning in conceptsthemselves, and not in their efficacy. In How to Do Thingswith Wonis he initially operates within this tradition-as hisexcessive usc of examples illustrates-but eventually causesits internal logic to collapse. Austin shows that in sayingthere is always a doing and that this doing always brings forthmeaning. Finally he demonstrates how this interactioncan be configured. Austin devises a concept that eludes itsown determinability, but that through a praxis, through use,becomes concrete, and in its application provides the mOStconsistent definition of its own idea. Because of his subtleability to connect various points of view and ways of think­ing, the Wittgenstein philologist Georg Henrik von Wrightdubbed Austin the "doctor subtilis" orOxford postwarphilosophy, recalling a 13th-century Oxford colleague whohad been given this epithet. Wright sees a similar talent inAustin, describing him as "the unrivalled mastcr in dctcctingconccptual shades of linguistic usage-superior in this arteven to \Vittgenstein."44-

From this perspective Austin's failure to reach atheoretical definition of the performative is nOt a methodicalfailure, but a failure with method. In How to Do Things withWonts, his speech employs aspects of an aesthetic model oftension that is nOt only rhetorical but also dramaticallystaged between the levels of saying and showing, message andperformance, in which words come to act and through thisto mean. Within this conceptual frame, Austin Cln be seennot primarily as the theorist of a basic but deficient clas­sification of the performative, but rather as a thinker whointroduces a new relationship between act and referent.

III the separation between word and deed, between the sign~1nd what it signifies, there is a foundation of enlightenedthinking that underlies every cultural praxis. "This is thenerve centre of the idea of 'representation': not epiphany,i.e., presentness, but rather surrogacy, i,e., envisioning, iswhat signs have to accomplish for us," writes Kramer:""' Thiskind of relationship to the world, which is rooted in thesemiotics of representation, is countered by Austin, in hisconcept of the performative, an approach that substitutesan oncological distinction between sign and being, word anddeed with an intertwining and mediating of these levels. In/1O'W to Do Things with WOrdr Austin shows that action Cln betaken with words and also hO'W such action is organized andgh'cn significance. He demonstrates, accentuates and frames.1 performative level of speech, while at the same time pro­\-iding a model for the consequences of shifting the produc­tion of meaning OntO this performative level: the perceptionof the meaning ofan utterance or text not only, or not evenprimarily, in what it says, represents or depicts, but above allin what it does, i.e., the real effects it brings about.

There is a methodical challenge in this emphasis shiftfrom saying to doing that, as I think, can be made productiveto the understanding of works of art. What is the relation­ship between an artwork's meaning and its effect? How docontemporary artists work with different modes of produc­tion of meaning? Every work of art functions by bringingforth a moment of aesthetic experience that can endure, yetis repeatable, thus enabling the work of art to exist in his­tOrical time. On a thematic level, Coleman's Bo.\' allegorizesthis temporal existence of a work ofart as an experience andportrayal of time. Performatively, however, it shows how theartwork itself can bring about these various levels of tempo­rality and make them tangible-in an artwork that createsa moment that is both now and historical. Coleman's worksthcmatize t1~practicesofcultural memory, consciouslyaware of being a part of such a praxis whieh they also modifY,md form. Coleman sets up relationships between the por­trayal and the creation of history; he gives expression withinthe work ofart to a discontinuous understanding of history,and also intervenes formatively and transformativcJy in thesimilarly discontinuous passing on of his work intO histOricalrecord. Understanding this approach as significant and as an

,-u£ TF..\\PORALITY OF ART

element of his artistic message-in other words, to perceivethe saying ofdoing-requires the methodical shift ofem­phasis that Austin instigated with his concept of the perfor­mative and put into effect with How to Do Things with Wonis'.

Box and Minimal Art: Historicity and Experience

Coleman alludes to the distinctive iconographic featureofMinimal Art with the title BO:l: and, at the same time, to acertain extent also takes up what Rosalind Krauss calls theprimacy ofMinimalist sculpture's "lived physical perspective,"namely its spatial orientation to the viewer's body.-.6 MinimalArt fundamentally changed the relationship between theobject and its viewer, between art and its venue, by shiftingthe meaning of the object completely to the experience thatis made with and through the object. The level of representa­tion and that of narration both step behind the object'simpact on a situation; an impact that throws the viewer backon him or herself, in space and in a situation. Although itis difficult to pinpoint this experience, it is not only the con­stitutive role of the viewer that comes intO focus here, butalso the spatial and atmospheric conditions.

For Krauss this phenomenological orientation tOwardsexperience, something she elaborates primarily in referenceto Robert Morris's sculptures, brought with it nOt only anew approach to the physicality of the body, but even a kindof compensatory, if not utopian gesture.4? A viewer-subject,alienated in everyday life from his or her own experiences,was to be fe-aligned with them through the experience of art."This," Krauss says, "is because the Minimalist subject is inthis very displacement returned to its body, re-grounded in akind of richer, denser subsoi.l of experience than the paper­thin layer ofan autonomous visuality that had been the goalof optical painting." 48 In the course of time, Krauss revisesher original position, acknowledging that the promise ofM.inimal Art not only remained unredeemed, but to a certainextent had even turned into its opposite. Looking back, sheno longer considered Minimal Art to be the seedbed ofa richer form of art experience, but rather as having pavedthe way for its own depletion. Because the Minimal Artobject focuses nOt only on the viewer's body but also on thesurrounding situation, i.e. the exhibition context, this

desubstantiation of the art experience also impacts on themuseum. For what is in the final instance bereft of contentis, Krauss suggests, the historical dimension of the art experi­ence, or, more specifically, a dimension that references thehistorical Krauss becomes aware of this at that very momentwhen, at the end of the 1980s in America, the social functionof the museum profoundly changed. A new ta."\': law enabledobjects to be sold from collections, which affected the statusof the museum collection, as did new spatial concepts,new museum design and presentation forms. Krauss quotesThomas Krens, then the director of the GuggenheimMuseum in New York, a key protagonist in this change, whorcfcrred deliberately to Minimal Art in explaining thesedevelopments: "It is Minimalism that has reshaped the waywe [ ... ] look at art: the demands we now put on it; ournced to experience it along with its interaction with thespace in which it exists; our need to have a cumulative, serialcrescendo towards the intensity of this experience; ourneed to have more and at a larger scale."~9 Krens understoodthat conventional museum architecture was not able to

provide the kind ofexperience that these Minimal objcctsrequired. These sculpturcs promptcd him to Opt for newdesign paradigms, preparing and anticipating new spatialconcepts that took their cue from warehouses and factoriesand presentation formats that wcrc geared towards com­prehensive, monographic shows. "Compared to the scale ofthe Minimalist objects, thc earlier paintings and sculptureslook impossibly tiny and inconsequential, li.ke postcards, andthe galleries take on a fussy, crowded, culturally irrelevantlook, like so many curio shops," Krauss observed.50

When, in 1989, Krauss visited the Panza Collection inParis and saw an exhibition of works by artists such as RobertMorris, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, she realized in whatway Minimal Art indeed heralded a "radical revision" or themuseum. The powerful presence of these objects, she wrote,renders the room itself the object ofan experience. Thusthe museum itself becomes for the viewers an objectified andabstract entity, "from which the collection has withdrawn."5 l

This experience, as Krauss explains, is very intense and ef­fective, but in the final instance remains essentially empty, asit is merely aesthetically and not historically determined.The experience evoked by the Minimal Art object is oriented