«It is language, words and semiotics, and we don’t need to throw away everything that we invented because neo-liberal ideology adopts the strategies from the art world and twists and turns them, adapting the denotation of the words», my friend said the other day (or something along those lines, anyway), when I proclaimed I would never use the word performance again when describing my work.
My friend, is a choreographer and has been making work for the black box and the occasional white cube for many years, and she is an avid observer of how late capitalism has adopted the methodologies of artists and have given them new names like entrepreneurship only to throw them back out in the system of cultural production as i.e. «The artist as entrepreneur» - something the various actors within cultural politics have understood uncritically and only as a positive.
So in that light, I thought my proposal to throw away the genre-denominator of performance would resonate with her, but clearly it did not. However, I couldn’t just let the idea slip and I really, thought I was onto something groundbreaking – a furious engagement with capitalist criticism seen through the lens of high performance society reflected in a growing interest from the art world in performance art as an easy fix and as an entertaining and possibly subversive distraction for this art opening or that summer party drinks in hand – or worse – as festivals of performance art.
The notion of performance had undergone the semiotic movement – from the arts to the sphere of capital and back again – sullied by the blue world of cold lit stock photography, wide smiles, perfectly tied ties, shiny office plants, water dispensers and humidifiers, a place I wouldn’t mind living actually. And with that also by a language posing as precision, but really, a language nobody understands, pure as ornamentation, so called business-lingo:
Best practice, core competence, mission statement, move the needle, open the kimono, tiger teams, make hay (while the sun shines), scalable business, think outside the box, get your ducks in a row, create an ecosystem, a solution, we are leveraging our assets, full service, drill down, it is what it is, robust, take it offline, synergize, boil the ocean, reach out, hard stop, impact, giving 110%, body of work, take it to the next level, cut and dry, window of opportunity, low-hanging fruit, peel the onion, performance, perform, performing.
Then I went to London – financial hub, Margaret Thatcher Never Land - to excel at my core competence of making a performance in a small non-profit art space, myself not making any profit. And it so happened that, at the Airbnb where I stayed, there was an issue of the Italian art press, Mousse Magazine from last summer. Midway in the magazine I found a discussion about post-performance, the term I also proposed as an alternative to the business lingo-ed term of performance, which had migrated through and was appropriated by the commercial world as a signifier of success and efficiency.
Okay, so that already happened, old news, part of the general discussion. Time to think out of the box then, I thought, as I tried to detect how my body reacted to the amount of Licorice Allsorts that I had just drilled down faster than you can say “venture capitalism”. It could be that I am actually right now developing a robust case of diabetes, I said out loud to nobody. I hope not, I hate the smell of Insulin, I cannot move the needle (into my own flesh). I stuffed another three pieces in my mouth, my sugar levels rising at the same rate as the stocks of a medical company after releasing news of a newly patented wonder drug, only to plunge right after, into a deep, sugar drugged daze.
I started hallucinating:
Under a sky the color of detergent, I found myself in the act of committing a murder. I, now a person with two perfect breasts and a huge penis, rock hard under the high performance fibers of my gym clothes, was getting rid of my editor and sometimes lover, more pussy than pussy, rain from the ground up, smooth operations, camera on the tip of each finger. I took off my left arm with my right arm, and swung it in one single movement, one line of motion through the perfumed air, and landed a strike at the editor’s left kneecap, then swung it around again clockwise and breaking the movement off at the back of her head, giving it 110%. I had never killed before. I felt like licorice, molded, strong and shiny, not for everyone. I slowly opened the kimono which was perfectly folded around the editor’s waist. I took it off her shoulders, off her naked arms, and lay it in the river, as if serving the river a dish, a poached egg.
Coming out of my dazed dream state, I sat on the table, legs crossed, A-level lotus position, and readied myself for the disintegration of a short yoga-breathing practice, to brush off the mishmash of hormonal debris. That should help me to get my thoughts organized, my ducks in a row, I thought. Democracy is characterized by a high number of institutions and a low number of rules, fascism by many rules, and few institutions. I repeated this sentence to myself, a mantra of sorts, and thought, that I would get back on track, back to my research.
Lean bodies - colon clean. Is there a linguistic connection between the words colon and colony? There is a colony in my belly. I keep my colony in check, under lock, feed it only every so and so often, sugar sometimes, it loves mother’s milk, the machine of the breast to the mouth is the factory for my colony. After the breathing session, I - and my intestinal colony - felt no younger than when we woke up earlier that day. It was time to take it to the next level.
You should follow artists and bodybuilders on Instagram.
Since the late 1990s, there has been talk of a performative turn within visual art, talk in academia and art criticism and curation. All aspects of the art experience were suddenly seen as performative. A work of art no longer was but did. The act of a sculptural surface and a mediated surface and a process of creating a work of art, are lingering still in the reception and understanding of most contemporary art. An awareness of a performed situation, stretching from the colon bacteria of the artist, along the physical actualization of the idea or concept or somnambulistic practice, the institutionalization of the piece, the reception within media and criticism, and the centripetal circulation of everything within an economy of the arts. What began with the introduction to the art world, at large, of the writings of say, Judith Butler and her reading of the performative linguistics of J.L. Austin, may today be reflected most clearly in the surface of a can of Red Bull, floating in the ocean. Blink blink.
The character of the Red Bull is not a far cry from the character of the bronze bull of Bowling Green Hill in New York’s financial district.
Following the 1987 stock market crash – Black Monday, October 19, the bull sculpture was created by the Italian-American artist, Arturo Di Modica. Nobody asked for that sculpture, it was not commissioned, instead, in an act of ‘guerrilla art,’ Di Modica trucked it to Lower Manhattan where, on December 15, 1989, he installed it beneath a 60-foot Christmas tree, in the middle of Broad Street, in front of the New York Stock Exchange, as a Christmas gift to the people of New York. That day, crowds came to look at the bull, with hundreds stopping to admire and examine the gift, as Di Modica handed out copies of a flier about his artwork. It was later removed, but then repositioned in its current location, by public demand.
The energy drink, Red Bull, was created the same year that Di Modica had the idea for his bronze bull sculpture, 1987, the year of the Black Monday financial crash.
Red Bull owes its name and entire existence to a Thai energy drink called, Krating Daeng, which means Red Indian Bison. The bull-connection, however, is not just a fleeting metaphor for power, strength and performance abilities, but is found in the list of ingredients. The drink contains the acid, taurine, which is named after the Latin Taurus (a cognate of the Greek ταῦρος), which of course, means bull or ox.
Taurine was first isolated from ox bile in 1827 by German scientists, Friedrich Tiedemann and Leopold Gmelin. It performs essential tasks for cardiovascular functions, and for the retina, and the central nervous system. In that sense, there is more than one direct link between the eye (retina, central nervous system) and the blinking can of Red Bull bobbing around in the ocean, the reflection; the becoming bull.
The loop happens between the body of artist, the body of bull, the body of work, the performance of the stock market, the performance of the Red Bull company on the stock market, the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, the Red Bull Air Race, the Red Bull Crashed Ice, the Red Bull served with ice cold Absolut vodka, the sports team ownerships: RB Leipzig, FC Red Bull Salzburg, Red Bull Brasil, New York Red Bulls, Red Bull Racing, Scuderia Toro Rosso, the celebrity endorsements, and music, the record label Red Bull Records, the DIS art work at the Triennale at New Museum in New York, in part funded by Red Bull and the DISown exhibition held at Red Bull Studios at 220 W. 18th Street in New York, the Red Bull Art Academy, which might soon open on a raft in the middle of the Indian Ocean: silver, blue and pink.
Joris Verster and his colleagues at Utrecht University concluded after serious research that Red Bull Energy Drink reduces driver drowsiness and enhances driving performance during prolonged highway driving.
Red Bull is headquartered in Fuschl am See, an Austrian village of 1500 people near Salzburg, a mere 1157 km drive from Copenhagen. The building sports no logo, is heavily guarded, and looks like a cross between a West African hut and a missile launch platform. The company does not grant any interviews.
Post-Red Bull, I decided to dress like a woman, to walk to the gym, to take off my clothes, put on other clothes, walk out of the changing area, and enter the weightlifting room, to adjust the weights, to pull the bars, the ropes, the sticks the bells, the tiers. To count the repetitions, the seconds between the sets, the reps, the breaks, the systems of breaking down fibers. I stuck my sweaty head in the protein vapor dispenser every now and then, inhaling until my anus popped out, tucked in again, let out a small sigh, and a small cry, the distance between the sigh and the cry so short, measurable only by tweezers.
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