Performance by Diana Taylor (review)

“How would our disciplines and methodologies change if we took seriously the idea that bodies (and not only books and documents) produce, store and transfer knowledge?” (199). This question propels Diana Taylor’s Performance, an inter-media object-text compiled of images, script phrases, and meditations on the role of bodies in social and political contexts. “Performance” is a word with varying meanings in English, but no translation in Spanish, French, or Portuguese. This presents an intriguing problem for scholars like Taylor who collaborate across the culturally and linguistically diverse Americas, and thus the impetus for a succinct text on the topic. Adding to Taylor’s robust opus of writing on performance, here she offers a condensed synthesis of her own recent contributions to performance studies, as well as those of artists, activists, and scholars. The text is informed by her leadership in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a pioneering think-tank on performance for the last 19 years. Nine short chapters constitute Performance, making it a practical and valuable primer on what bodies can do and have done under diverse circumstances. Taylor stages an interactive engagement for the reader, even a performative event in the act of reading, by inserting snapshots of performances by provocateurs like Split Britches, Regina José Galindo, and 2boys.tv alongside key academic and activist interventions.

The book’s first half considers histories of performance art, the role of audiences and technology in performance, and the neoliberal uptake of performance within corporate spaces to signify evaluation. First, Taylor frames performance through Elin Diamond’s definition as a thing that one is doing and a thing that is done. She locates the genesis of performance art in the 60s and 70s with Fluxus, Carolee Schneeman, and Allen Kaprow’s happenings. At the same time, she troubles this narrative by acknowledging that indigenous and immigrant communities across the Americas hold diverse genealogies of performance, such as the legacies of human exhibition and display. These practices stretch performance art history further back than the mid-twentieth century, the period in which the field generally narrates its beginnings. Next, Taylor investigates how audience reception and spectatorship influence performance, as actors (including politicians) can shape the terms of engagement between bodies. She reintroduces the term “percepticide” to describe how the biopolitical aim of military dictatorships seeks to “render us deaf, dumb and blind.” (75). Readers of visual culture and theory will value the juxtaposition of analysis and examples, such as Lorie Novak’s Look/Not/Look, an image of the photographer holding her head overlaid with images of war and devastation. Connecting Latin American legacies of authoritarianism with European fascism, Taylor engages key scholars like Brecht and Artaud, whose influential works on national spectatorship sought to make the “familiar strange” and thus mobilize a public to question authority. These strategies give audiences fresh eyes to contest the messages enforced in their social sphere (81). Culling diverse examples from digital platforms that create a second life for the circulation and appropriation, such as the images of Abu Ghraib, Taylor uses her intellectual dexterity to demonstrate how seeing is a way of knowing—both in content and in the form of the book.

The second half of the text discusses how performance interventions emerge to interrupt systems of power. Taylor introduces two new concepts: “animatives” and the argument that performance studies is “postdisciplinary.” Building on Austin’s “performatives” (linguistic utterances that create action) and Butler’s theory of performativity (reiterative citational acts produced through discourse), Taylor adds the term “animative,” which she defines as an “inappropriate response to a performative utterance” (127). She uses the term to capture the act of breathing life into an action, a space, or a gesture. The Occupy movement’s refusal to leave Zuccotti square, for example, illustrates the “inappropriate” response to Mayor Bloomberg’s performative edicts and “official utterances” to vacate. Animatives are “affect in motion,” such as the energy, behaviors, and events that surround a performative event; they capture that which is beyond language. Finally, in her conclusion, Taylor argues that the field of...