Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960 by Lara Shalson (review)

Enduring is always already contingent on the political materiality of performing, and in Lara Shalson’s book four connections to endurance — objecthood, protests, life, and documents — are proffered as ways in which performance happens in duration. The book investigates performances in art and life in which, to use straightforward language, people stick around. From that clear premise, Shalson’s arguments are pleasurably surprising in the depth of erudition she wrings from seminal artworks and protest actions. Just as the performances in this book so energetically endure, so does Shalson’s analytical tact.

The book positions endurance not in an affective relation to pain, but rather formally as the experience of undergoing a plan without complete control of the endpoint: “This intentional commitment to a plan whose outcome cannot be determined in advance shapes all of the performances considered in this book” (10). Plans extend the endurance of performance past embodiment, stretching into mediation and documentation. The introduction looks at Shoot (1971) by Chris Burden, not by any means an obscure piece, yet Shalson strikingly notes that the work is not so much a heroic act of Burden’s own agency but instead demonstrates “his capacity as an embodied subject to be acted upon” (16). Endurance is how Burden enacts his own agency through receiving rather than giving. Through Performing Endurance, well-known works of art are returned to and seen in a rigorously new and resolutely political light. Burden’s receptive enduring prompts a reconsideration of agency as both active and passive.

Objecthood, especially embodied forms of it, is a dominant thread of Performing Endurance. Shalson is less interested in the emancipatory potential of performing possessive subjectivities than more ambivalent acts of allowing objecthood to permeate encounters. She takes a sustained look at Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964 –) and Rhythm 0 (1974) by Marina Abramović as departure points for a theoretical discussion grounded in the foundationally adversarial Artforum essay by Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967). Cutting through much discussion of these works, Shalson adds that Ono and Abramović “both challenged their audiences to discover an ethics not dependent on a reciprocal relation, nor contingent upon the recognition of subjectivity over and against objecthood” (77). Rather than reading these works as using subjectivity to protest against objectification, Shalson argues that these artists embody objecthood in a more ambivalent and progressive sense. Ono and Abramović deploy objecthood by allowing the audience to act on them, as a strategy of endurance that evades tokenistic claims for subjectivity in favor of problematizing the overarching structures that determine how objects and subjects perform. Both artists resist participating in relational subjectivities that fight for more agency within the terms supplied by misogynist and white supremacist logics and instead perform a transgression by enduring in a receptive rather than authorially controlling mode. Performing Endurance sheds light on how artworks might rewrite structures of power through redefining agency as a practice in relation to objecthood.

The discussion of embodied objecthood carries into Shalson’s consideration of protest, specifically the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins of 1960. The action of the protest provides a deeper dimension of the political relevance of the form of endurance. After a documentary account of the sit-in, Shalson moves into a discussion of racism and colonialism through the work of Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon, before asserting that in the case of the sit-ins, the protestors create an entirely different relation of power through endurance.

Occupying space, confronting the colonist with the object-body of the colonized, and insisting upon the encounter with objecthood — insisting, that is, upon an encounter with the embodied vulnerability and opacity that both parties share [...] — might be the very means through which to enter the self/other relation.

(98)

Performing Endurance therefore links objecthood with vulnerability as a process that escapes the competitive logic of expansionist subjectivity. Ono, Abramović, and the sit-in protestors all refuse to narrate their encounters. Instead, each in their...