Performing Products: When Acting Up Is Selling Out

On 2 November 2014, Mexican artist Roberto de la Torre premiered AYOTZINAPA, búsqueda, muerte, y resurrección (Ayotzinapa, search, death, and resurrection) in Toronto. Presented by FADO Performance Art Centre as part of the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival, the piece centred on the forty-three students abducted in Mexico on 26 September 2014. De la Torre began by unearthing a spoon from an indoor plant box; then a trowel, a pair of long forks, and a rake, before moving outdoors to dig for more tools—a ladle, a spade. Now, a shovel, and then another, and another, until de la Torre invited the audience to take up these shovels and dig with him. Finally, he seemed to find what he’d been searching for: he drew clothing from the last hole he had dug as portraits of the students missing from Iguala, Mexico, appeared in windows of the building (which had once been a school) that surrounded the audience. De la Torre led those holding shovels in a rhythmic tapping on the ground while the rest of the audience stomped its feet. From an open window on the top floor of the building, an unseen assistant tossed photocopied images of protests over what had happened to the students down onto the audience. Less a call to action than a call to labour, de la Torre’s performance became something between artistic protest and restless requiem.

Writing in the popular visual art blog Hyperallergic, Abe Ahn contemplates the possibility and plausibility of artistic expression in the face of social unrest. Responding to the events in Ferguson, Missouri, that followed a grand jury’s decision not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson, for the fatal shooting of black teenager Michael Brown, Ahn warns, “[A] work of art can never be a substitute for political and economic action, and it’s helpful to understand what art can and cannot accomplish.” If we accept such limits on artistic action, and accept too that such work, whether implicitly (or, at times, explicitly), is always already imbricated within commodity culture, then its precarious economic status only adds to our anxiety that it cannot or should not intervene. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, considering what he dubs “stunt art,” asks, addressing an issue adjacent to that which Ahn brings up, what we might make of work that does risk such patent intervention. Invoking Banksy and Istvan Kantor—two artists whose work is included in this issue—Schjeldahl ponders just what to make of this “illegal” or “illicit” work. “Stuntists” (the would-be subgenre’s practitioners), he suggests, “usurp physical sites that they don’t own, as well as the time of people— police, cleanup workers—whom they don’t employ.” Implicit in Schjeldahl’s criticism is an understanding that this work, which also implicates de la Torre’s collective action in Toronto, might be little more than self-indulgent and navel-gazing, appropriating a labour that the artists have not earned to make a point that might not be worth it.

AYOTZINAPA, búsqueda, muerte, y resurrección (Ayotzinapa, search, death, and resurrection) by Roberto de la Torre, presented by FADO Performance Art Centre in the context of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art on 2 November 2014 (Toronto).

Photo by Henry Chan

These tensions and confusions, these preoccupations and paranoias are precisely what we are addressing in Performing Products: When Acting Up Is Selling Out. How can we, as artists, scholars, and critics, determine where art might and might not intervene into matters that exceed its immediate aesthetic parameters? Why is there such a pervasive fear within the art community that art might presume too much, getting in the way of “real action” and “real change”? Moreover, does art’s role, witting or not, within commodity culture render any political motivation it might carry with it a commodity as well? And if this is in fact the case, then is art—“art” here as inclusive of theatre, performance, music, dance, and...