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Common Carrier: Performance by Artists PHILIP MONK Performance is Dot a twentieth-century history thatcan be elaborated, but adevelopment from two specific moments ofart and dance in the early '60s and '10S. Rather than rush to provide a theoretical base or historical context for a phenomenon that is no one thing, this paper examines one particular peIfonnance by a dancer/choreographer turned performance artist. The original delivery of this paper was preceded by a screening ofElizabeth Chitty's Demo Model, avideotape documentationof a performance at the "Fifth Network" video conference in Toronto in 1978 on the theme "Teleperformance." Chitty both perfonns and makes videotapes that are performable. The video-performance axis is consequential : modes of performance were explored early in video; and a number of artists pass fluently between the two. The axis brings together two concerns of performance in Toronto: social narratives of coded behaviour; and the semiotics or image·practice ofthe body. Demo Modi!! is about Janguage and information; or rather, about the transmission of languages and the registers of information. In her work, Chitty investigates representa· tions of the individual in technology and socia1 codes/poses - what is imposed on and what composes body and speech. Her other work includes the videotape Telling Tales (1979), andthe perfonnances Handicap (1980) and History, Colour7VandYou (1980). The early history of perfonnance distinguished between theatre as representation and perfonnance as the literalization of event - where meaning was inscribed from outside through material and context, in the real time and space ofthe artist's actual body. At that time, perfonnance and theatre wereperceived as antithetical, as the difference between material and representation. Now, questions to be asked are: what use does theatre make ofperfonnance, and why is artists' perfonnance interested in theatricality? More than an interest in theatre per se, although now there is that interest, perfonnance takes over moments of theatricality - coded moments of the pose, or consumption of a complete code. PHILIP MONK The latter we might call inhabitation, in the manner that Barthes wrote: "In fact, today, there is no language site outside bourgeois ideology: our language comes from it, returns to it, remains closed up in it. The only possible rejoinder is neither confrontation nor destruction, but only theft: fragment the old text of culture, science, literature, and change its features according to formulae of disguise, as one disguises stolen goods."I In art, inhabitation was assumed as affecting a disguised discourse within another conventional language for the purpose of critical disruption. Tending on the one hand to modes of entertainment and on the other to fictional narratives, inhabitation ironically masters, resists, or disrupts its chosen/imposed conventions.2 If theatricality is setting up of a scene (a mise en scene) rather than representation of a text, then in order that theatricality not fall into a succession of dramatic moments or poses leading to a climax within a logic of representation, the scene must be delayed or held - as a frozen frame or film still - to be dissolved either by the device of the tableau vivant (which collapses or decomposes itself under its own inertia or artificiality - its production is made evident, displayed as a representation), or by repetition (which empties the gesture and presence of the performer). Rather than recognition of a genre-scene - the tableau vivant - performance effects the realization of a coded body. Peformance actualizes this body, and makes us realize it. Performance sets up a scene only to repeat it, forcefully inscribing its representations onto the body. The scene dissolves in an excess of repetition, in the excessive presentation ofthe body. This method ofrepetition was introduced formally by minimal art to combat the representational theatricality of European painting and American abstract expressionism, and by "task-oriented" dance to displace the virtuosity, phrasing, development, and climaxes of both classical and modem dance.3 Performance, bound by this structural innovation, repeats it; but now its materials of repetition are not abstract forms but representations. Since it is a matter of a scene within a code, or a coded scene, what is the space of performance? Demo Model brings together the literal space of performance (the real space and time of presentation) and video, which, as a...

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