e Obscene Mirror Image

Performance and trauma

Introduction
"It is always a question of proving the real through the imaginary, proving truth through scandal, proving the law through transgression, proving work through striking, proving the system through crisis, and capital through revolution, as it is elsewhere of proving ethnology through the dispossession of its object - without taking into account: the proof of theater through antitheater; the proof of art through antiart; the proof of pedagogy through antipedagogy; the proof of psychiatry through antipsychiatry, etc." - (Baudrillard, 1994, pp. 19) "(Traumatic) illusionism is employed not to cover up the real with the simulacra surfaces but to uncover it in uncanny things this approach is to tease out a trauma of the subject, with the apparent calculation that, if its lost object a cannot be reclaimed, at least the wound that it le behind can be probed however, this approach has its dangers too, for the probing of the wound can lapse into a coded expressionism (as in the bohemian romance of the photography work of Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson, and others). (e) very problem can be provocative, for it raises the question, crucial to abject art, of the possibility of an obscene representation - that is, of a representation without a scene that stages the object for the viewer. Might this one dierence between the obscene, where the object, without a scene, comes too close to the viewer, and the pornographic, where the object is stages for the viewer who is thus distanced enough to be its voyeur?" - (Foster, 1996, pp. 153) is essay will attempt to respond.

1. Agency, Structure, and Performance

Trajectories of play between subject-object relations and life-art distinctions In her excavation of performance art's 'hidden history' (beginning with the publication of the Futurist Manifesto in 1909) RoseLee Goldberg compels the reader to consider two theses: 1.) e genealogy of performance can be traced in gestures representing the artist's agency amidst sociopolitical conditions that structure artistic production (this implies that performance exists as the selfreferential movement of production itself, in its political articulations). 2.) e performance artist, as an anthropological subject, (characterized by Goldberg as one who "animates the formal and conceptual ideas on which art-making is based upon") assumes a dialectical relationship towards such structures, asserting a life of the artist that challenges the very history it produces. is means that while performance resists any pre-established artistic vocabulary, it also resists easy historicization because it cannot be exhausted by attempts to retroactively formalize it, a "past to be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past," (Goldberg, quoting T.S. Elliot). RoseLee locates such a performative operation within the application of a theoretical manifestos to futurist painting: "e gesture for us will no longer be a xed moment of universal dynamism: It will be decisively the dynamic

sensation made eternal." - Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (11 April 1910) Although Goldberg describes the Futurists' use of words like 'activity' and 'change' as "ill-de ned" (Goldberg, 2001, p. 14), it is through such looseness performance artists operating today may chart the development of attempts to resolve problems in performance that still persist today. Regardless of whether performance is treated as a surplus to art historicizing ("a means to attract publicity to seemingly wild and bohemian lifestyles,"(Goldberg, 1984. p. 26)) or as a supplement to artistic practice (the manifesto as performance; as conceptual preamble to the produced object that establishes the subject's critical distance from the social determinations of his work) an expression of a subject behind the art remains a common denominator - this is to say that the dialectic between agency and structure becomes sublated into a living framework in which Goldberg locates both the anthropological and formal genesis of the performance artist. Goldberg's traces performance back to a period where a minimum consensus of a shared reality can be still be acknowledged through performance. is is to say that subject-object distinctions (the relationship of the artist towards the work) assumed by the artist mirrors the socially constructed life/art boundaries (the relationship the performer stages between himself and reality). Goldberg's proto-performance is thus a productive movement between structure and agency, as the performer is able to reference (and challenge) the very coordinates that frame his subject. For example, consider the Dada artist's ability to allude to the production of distance between life and art in his declaration of a readymade: By emphasizing what appears to be a disproportionate amount of his agency by determining an object he has not produced as art (while still claiming a relationship towards the object nonetheless), he re ects the ideological tendencies behind art/life divisions that structure the rarity of institutionalized art objects as they are determined by a disproportionate in uence of critics. In short, the performed distance between a subject-object relation re ects a structured distance between life and art, in order to critically redeem this distance from stagnation. Dada thus achieves the anti-art critique of production the way surrealism achieves a psychological critique of ideology: both movements animate the problem of object-displacement through performance. According to Goldberg, performance has been the primary locus of this subjectivization, maintaining that the performer always exists as the edge of disciplines, as an 'avant-avant-garde' (Goldberg, 1984. p. 23). It is convenient that Goldberg grounds performance in modernism, because she nds a point in history in which the performer's presence could still be read as the primary locus of the subject, as a stage that frames the subject's image. What begins for Goldberg as a rejection of traditional theater begins in a theatrical context is "stage" of theatrical work-performance is recon gured to re ect objective conditions of the performance prior to the stage, inde nitely reformulating the subjective conditions in which we perceive the performance. is inextricably links live art to its revolutionary imperative because the performer's body still "stands for" the objective conditions of the ideological stage, which he has the agency to restructure and transform to his own whims. We can thus trace a morphology of the problem of object displacement as follows: What began as concerns regarding performance's ability to 'mirror' reality within an ideological subversion of theater lead to the condition in which the referential stage created by these object-relations become in nitely subjected to recon guration, resulting in two tendencies developing along each other. e rst tendency is a shi in subjectivity towards the simulacra, a de-centering of subject mediation that results in a secondary tendency: Abjection, when the subject's body embodies this de-centering. ese two tendencies produce a trajectory which moves from performance as a politically-didactic avant-garde towards a problem arising through performance: the radical subjectivization of the "authority" of media. is is the history Foster tries to trace in e Return of the Real, when he compels the reader to "rethink transgression not as a rupture produced by a heroic avant-garde outside the symbolic order, but as a fracture traced by a strategic avant-garde within the order" (Foster, 1996, p. 157). e "heroic" primacy of the performer's agency is threatened in latter half of the 20th century, when the artist's body-image becomes its own pure simulacrum: Nothing stages the subject for himself - his relationship to his own image is not a stable subject-object distinction, because his image is without 'a stage' and has become obscene proximity to the viewer. Foster describes a paradigm shi "from reality as an eect of representation to the real as a thing of trauma", marking a point where both ideological and anthropological

readings of performance collapse into the psychoanalytical: What was once easily described as the movement of subjects responding to (and thus reinventing) the structural determinations that produce them is irreducibly complicated by the analysis of the limiting structures that constitute subjectivity itself. e work of Dan Graham, in which the representation of anthropological data is frequently deconstructed as the psychological projections of the viewer, is emblematic of this tendency. In Performance/Audience/Mirror (pic 1) a stable relationship between the psychology of the performer and viewer is implicated within these limiting structures, revealing them to be already a minimal aect in reality. is lack is produced by Graham via an ambiguity in identi cation that reveals any articulation or reading of a formal framework in which a social relationship takes place does not allude to reality - rather, it becomes a shield against the trauma of the Real (what Foster, following, Lacan, calls a superimposed 'image/screen' that points towards, while simultaneously 'veiling' the real, thus taming it within a symbolic framework). In this sense, the mirror image becomes a postmodern counterpoint to the readymade, in that the artist's gesture draws a relationship towards his mirror image that produces a distance within himself, registering as a distance of time between Graham's description of his surroundings and the viewer's continual observation of the mirror. is results a condition what Foster also identi es in Cindy Sherman's work - a state in which one cannot help but catch themselves objectifying the artist. is is to say that the mirror image is not a referential stage, but a rupture in performer-viewer intersubjectivity

Pic 1: Dan Graham produces two kinds of projections while facing towards, then facing away from his mirror image.

2. e Mirror Stage as Image-Screen

Two hypothetical projects is rupture does not only problematize anthropological data, it also generates plural readings. For example, Foster cites two readings of Andy Warhol that appear wildly incompatible with each other and then reveals them to be part of the same phenomenon (Foster, 1996, pp. 128 - 130). e rst is omas Crow's reading of Warhol as a perfect suturing between a "referential object" and an "empathetic subject": According to Crow, Warhol is a deeply humanist artist involved in thematic concerns in the popular American tradition of truthtelling. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is a "super cial, impassive" Warhol, who desymbolizes himself and the art object by releasing them from a meaningful relationship with each other into a simulacral surface. Foster notes two further ideological interpretations that ensue from this 'releasing': For Roland

Barthes, this gesture belongs to the tradition of the avant-garde disruption of the art object. Barthes emphasizes Warhol's performance of the formal and conceptual ideas that structure artistic production, an an attack of "that old thing art" in the tradition of the Dadaists. Jean Baudrillard, on the other hand, nds no need for this last-ditch attempt to og the dead horse of representation, describing the pop art as an end of subversion - a total immersion of art into the simulacral sign economy. All moral and ideological critiques of Warhol are deferred by Foster, who describes all these readings as projections of readers identifying with Warhol's image, holding the artist himself complicit with these projections in his narcissistic self-identi cation with his own art. Foster avoids privileging a singular political critique of Warhol, insisting on deconstructing Warhol's work as "referential and simulacra, connected and disconnected, aective and aectless, critical and complacent" Foster, 1996, p. 130). is compels him to device a new way of seeing: traumatic realism, within which we may locate a dialogue between Barthesian and Baudrillardian projections: Project 1: Barthes mobilizes a crisis of representation through which we can maintain enough critical distance between a performer and his mirror image. It is within this distance (between the subject-image and the performer) Dan Graham's work thus can be read as a critique of simulacra. I mean to say that the simulation of the conditions within the performance reveals the performance itself to be a simulation (hence synecdochically blurring the art-life divide). at is to say the mirror simulation is performed as a mechanism similar to ideology, if not necessarily a referent of an actual ideological tendency in reality. e crisis has a performable trace, in that it is able to simulate ideology. e philosophical project of the actionist Hermann Nitsch can be used to exemplify this operation: rough theatrical division, Nitsch simulates a condition of ritualistic orders in order to produce a "psychological dramaturgy" of Taboos. is is to say that Nitsch externalizes the divisions in a subject through a self-re exive production of the abject, simulating conditions to signify the theatrical nitude of the project (the life-art/ lifedeath boundary ( g 2)). is means that because the symbolic boundary-sign is externalized from the artist, there is the risk of the simulated subject denying his complicity in the production of an aesthetically 'boundless' spirit of the gesamtkunstwerk. Jonas Vogt: But more people means more logistical investment. Do you sometimes feel like a musical conductor or a dictator? Hermann Nitsch: Please drop the political terms now. With that logic, every director would be a dictator. To me, it is the same artistic procedure as painting a picture. How many objects I use is not relevant. - (Nitsch, 2011)

Pic 2: Action 111 at Fondazione Morra in Naples in 2002.

By releasing the abject from its symbolist determinations in Nitsch's Actions, performance produces and problematizes simulated violence, unlimited by the thematic novelty of the abject. I prefer to read Nitsch as a hyperrealist as opposed to a ritualist - is is to say that the subject's symbolic investment in what becomes "abjected from" the performer's body is read laterally, as the production of a simulacral relationship between performer and his body image. Project 2: Nitsch's denial of responsibility as a 'director' (and consequently his formal 'directorial' relationship towards his crew of performers) can be read as a problem in performance congruent to the Baudrillardian crisis of subjectivity, which maintains that no single critique can stand in place of an overarching reality, prematurely resolving the simulacrum - if this were the case, neither Nitsch's work, nor Dan Graham's, would be unable to respond to the psychological and ideological morphology of the performance-viewer relationship, and Foster would be historicizing a Traumatic Reality, in which the abject signi er becomes thematically overdetermined.

3. A hypothetical resolution of simulacrum

Published in 1966, Louis Althusser's essay Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract stands as a curious piece of art criticism in that it coheres through a rigorous disavowal of all possible readings of the paintings of Leonardo Cremonini that begin with the presumption of a human subject, may this be the creator, viewer, or even people represented in the paintings themselves. e peculiarity of Althusser's theorizing becomes more apparent when we compare it with its object-centric analogue: while the readymade artist used performance to frame an absence of values in the subject-object relationship, Althusser goes even further, establishing Cremonini's relationship to the painting through an absence of the human subject (thus denying the primacy of an agency that assigns meaning to art). Althusser rejects a description of Cremonini's paintings as "expressionism", along with a gallery patron's opinion that the works are "uninteresting", on the grounds that such expressions are a misunderstanding of all critical judgement, merely accomplishing a commentary on aesthetic consumption - following this, Althusser even denies the the category of the painter himself, claiming that subjectivity of creation is no more than the "mirror re ection" of the subjectivity of consumption, and cannot provide a framework in which art can be critiqued beyond aesthetic ideology: "Cremonini thus follows the path which was opened up to men by the great revolutionary thinkers who understood that the freedom of men is not achieved by the complacency of its ideological recognition, but by the knowledge of the laws of their slavery, and that the `realization' of their concrete individuality is

achieved by analysis and mastery of the abstract relations which govern them." (Althusser, 1966, p. 241) When Althusser calls Cremonini a 'painter of the real abstract' what he is really saying is that Cremonini is primarily the performer of a ideological project. Ideology, according to Althusser is similar to the imaginary, in that it is ahistorical, and is "eternal, exactly like the subconscious". Althusser uses 'abstract' in an epistemological way - Art is treated as if it were able to refer to knowable abstract relations in reality. is is an epistemological claim on the function of art, which I will reject in favor of a pragmatic reading of Cremonini, in which Althusser praises his work on the basis that is able to demonstrate that art's relationship to ideology is unique because it makes lived ideology representable. I prefer not to question the reality Cremonini represents; what is more important in the context of this essay is the question of how Cremonini makes the imaginary representable (in that he performs ideology). We can can thus defer a Marxist-historicist reading of culture as ideology in order to illustrate a formal property of Cremonini's work that Althusser identi es with: Art as a performance of a referential art/ life division. is is to say that the epistemological reading of artistic imperative is not de nitive but a projection of Althusser's own ideological concerns: "(Art) maintains far closer relations to ideology than any other object it is impossible to think the work of art, in its speci cally aesthetic existence, without taking into account the privileged relation between it and ideology, i.e. its direct and inevitable ideological eect." (Althusser, 1966, p. 242) We should retain, at the very least, Althusser's claim of art's unique position in the production of ideology without presuming his more grandiose claims. Let us attempt a Traumatic Realist reading of the ideological subject, through Hal Foster's delineation of Lacan's Image-Screen, which Foster describes through the superimposition of two cones:

e Lacanian relationship between the subject and the object gaze

Althusser, who believes that ideology (cultural abstraction from the nature) is the subject's imaginary relationship to the real (thus claiming that the human subject is necessarily ideological), stabilizes a stage of a referential order in the Lacanian reading:

Althusser claims that Cremonini reproduces the object gaze as an absence within the object (an operation of material subtraction within the subject) rather than a lack in the subject.

He conceptualizes a referential order of the image-screen that refers to the subject's absence in reality. e image-screen is thus read as a metaphor for a "self-re exive mirror": e top cone represents a material real, in which Cremonini's work achieves the epistemological break for painting that Marx achieves for a material conception of history. is literal break (registered in painting as an absence) is also re ected laterally, within the human subject in the bottom cone, who is revealed to be merely an eect of an idealist order abstracted from reality. e suturing of the two re ections in one another represents the 'ideological project' of antihumanism. Althusser claims through this project the human subject can knows himself to absent in the positive sense, in that this absence is "that of the structure of the world which determines them" - a distance between the subject and the object-relations that Althusser positivizes as the ontological Real.

I prefer to relocate this order as an order of referentiality in which the the boundary of the simulated is signi ed through the image - this 'movement of perception' is represented by the rst cone, which Foster links with Renaissance treaties of perspective. It is through this tradition which Althusser claims Cremonini produces "a meaning in the order in which he had reproduced this History while living his own history: it could be the order of a Genesis (even a materialist one), i.e. of a descent from an origin containing the true meaning of things, the true relationship between man and nature, and his objects" (Althusser, 1966, p. 232). is is where it becomes clear that Althusser is not so much writing art criticism as much as he is criticizing humanism through art. is results in Althusser's reading of Cremonini becoming a lot more convoluted than it needs to be, though he does provide us with an accessible metaphor in which we may summarize it: e mirror (evoked here as an analog to painting itself), in which the subject sees himself to be absent (pic 3): "e circles of the mirrors 'depict' the fact that the objects and forms, though related among themselves, are only so related because they turn in the same circle, because they are subject to the same law, which now visibly dominates the relations between objects and their man." (Althusser, 1966, p. 235)

Pic 3: Althusser devotes an analysis of the mirror trope in Cremonini's painting as he wishes to communicate a 'process without a subject' that Cremonini captures. is " attening" of re ected images into re ective surfaces is a property something Hal Foster attributes to superrealism (Foster, 1996, p. 141): "the reproduction of reality as a uid surface, as a subterfuge against the Real. is subterfuge results in a 'denial of recognition', represented by the second cone of pictorial re exivity, in which the structural absence between the subject and the object (the mirror, or the canvas) is represented as an absence in the subject's mirror image (a metaphor for his subjectivity). is is to say that an internal dierence is reproduced inside the subject that is the mirror re ection of the positive absence in the order of the material real. Althusser claims that this dierence in subjectivity is a negative absence, which Cremonini successfully captures, bringing the anti-humanist project to its apotheosis. For Althusser, the faces in the mirror do not represent faces of subjects, but they also cannot be abject because because the abject, for Althusser, would be an idealistic notion, a "subjectivity of consumption and creation (production) whose primacy Althusser rejects, insisting that "the gaze we need is dierent from that of desire or disgust of objects"). How can there be a subject, and no subject at the same time? Althusser resolves this by saying Cremonini 'represents the subject's absence': "at is why they are so `badly' represented, hardly outlined, as if instead of being the authors of their gestures, they were merely their trace. ey are haunted by an absence: a purely negative absence, that of the humanist function which is refused them, and which they refuse; and a positive, determinate absence, that of the structure of the world which determines them, which makes them the anonymous beings they are, the structural eects of

the real relations which govern them is is why his painting denies the spectator the complicities of communion in the complacent breaking of the humanist bread, the complicity which con rms the spectator in his spontaneous ideology by depicting it in 'paint' this is why his painting itself prevents him from recognizing himself as a 'creator' and thus rejoicing in the pictures he paints: for these pictures are (a refutation of) the ideology of creation." (Althusser, 1966, p. 239) Does being a bad painter make you a social realist? ough I am being facetious here, isn't 'bad' an idealistic category in itself? And what is preventing anyone from reading what Althusser theorizes as "representation of absence" as a theme subjectively applied to painting (rather than ideologically identi ed)? Furthermore, how could someone perceive, let alone represent, an 'absence' in presence, without psychological projections? Althusser's projections of 'absence' are really attempts to resolve problems of the abject signi er. Foster advanced a critique similar to the one I'm making now in regards to Fredric Jameson's claim that pop "has rendered the surrealist object gone without a trace". Foster does not feel that these tendencies necessarily represent a historical break from modernism, arguing that "ese old objects may be displaced (already for the surrealists they were attractively outmoded) () Certainly the subjects related to these objects have not disappeared; the epochs of the subject, let alone the unconscious, are not so punctual." (Foster, 1996, p. 144) us the subject persists despite the de-centering of ideology itself. So neither a historical or epistemological break in painting is achieved, as what Jameson and Althusser are talking about are more properly communicated within a continuum of problems in performance (the performer in the place of object-displacement) than the represented subject himself. is is apparent when Althusser says that Cremonini "never 'painted' anything but the absences in presences: the rhythm, the spurt, the snap of time 'depicted' by instantaneous, i.e. eternal, plants - and the cry of a voice, 'depicted' by something quite dierent, by gestures, trajectories and suspensions" (Althusser, 1966, p. 232). Althusser's insertion of inverted commas around the adjective ('painted') indicates some awareness of the problems in representation necessitating a performative reading, yet a reluctance to properly formalize these problems within life itself. e sum of Althusser's theorizing is antithetical to Goldberg's uidity: His insistence of the primacy of structuralism frequently comes at the expense of a exible relationship between the performer and history - a structural materialism is asserted in place of cultural anthropology. However, one should at least risk revisiting Althusser's essay, because it hypothesizes a radically alternate trajectory (as far as Hal Foster is concerned) in which simulacra can be challenged by through an animation of the formal relationships between the subjectimage and its other. Althusser sets the minimal conditions in which performance does not simply operate as a didactic representation of ideology, instead, it operates in a manner similar to ideology itself, reproducing an identi cation with an imaginary dimension that is always minimally constitutive of the subject's relationship to the Real, keeping agency and structure in constant dialectical relation to each other. 4. Towards a formulation of Performance art as Traumatic Realism

Fig 6: Dan Graham's Past Future/ Split Attention To conclude, let us revisit the Futurist's declaration that performance should embody "a dynamic sensation made eternal", by invoking Alain Badiou's thesis that contemporary art "is not the sublime descent of the in nite into the nite abjection of the body and sexuality, but the production of an in nite subjective series through the nite means of a material subtraction." (Badiou, 2003) I quote Badiou to say that the movement of

the abject is not a materialization of some expressionistic or deconstructive impulse, read as a theatrical trope. It the movement of a subject subtracted from simulacra. To metaphorize this as a gesture, - e performer says 'I am not in the place where I thought I was', thus producing a lag between the rst and the second "I" (the lag being the moment of material subtraction). Dan Graham's Past Future/ Split Attention (1972) animates this movement of "I" through the intersubjective suturing between two performers, producing a rupture in what is simulated as a subjective continuum (Fig 5). e Traumatic Realist performer can be de ned in the negative. He is not someone who is interested in the formal novelty of the abject, as counter-ideology to happiness (Badiou, 2003) or its proxies within a eld of humanist constructs. is is to say that abjection in performance should not be passively read, as a means of grounding reality in an unsublimated ontological real, because such a project simulates the abjected as a signi er of a pornographic distance towards the real - that is to say that it creates new ways of romanticizing a nitude of subjectivity. When the Traumatic Realist performer "alludes to reality", he produces an obscene decentering of relations, thus ensuring the dynamism of the performative and avoiding formulaic responses to social dichotomies. A performer can be read as a Traumatic Realist if he locates how performance produces the obscene as it comes to be signi ed within live art, i.e. within the very relations which it probes.

Bibliography
Books Althusser, L. (1966) Cremoni, Painter of the Abstract. In Lenin and Philosophy and other essays (pp. 157 - 166). NY: Monthly Review Press Goldberg, R. (1984). Performance, a hidden history. In G. Battock & R. Nickas (Eds.), The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology New York: Plume. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Foster, H. (1996). The return of the real: Art and theory at the end of the century. Cambridge: MIT Press. Goldberg, R. (2001). Performance art: From futurism to the present . London: Thames & Hudson.

Websites Nitsch, H. (2011, Nov 1). Interview by Vogt Jonas [Personal Interview]. Hermann nitsch. HERMANN NITSCH, Retrieved from http:// www.vice.com/read/hermann-nitsch-595-v17n11

Image Sources Fig 1. Graham, D. (1975) Peformance/Audience/Mirror, [photographs of performance], From Rock My Religion (pg. 114 - 115), 1993, Massachusettes: MIT Press. Fig 2. Nitsch, H. (Artist). (2002). [photograph of performance], A group of actors organized by nitsch tore apart a calf carcass as a crucied and blindfolded man held still underneath during action 111 at fondazione morra in naples in 2002. [Web Photo]. Retrieved from http://www.vice.com/read/hermann-nitsch-595-v17n11 Fig 3. Cremonini, L. (Artist). (1974). "le soleil dehors, dedans". [Web Photo]. Retrieved from http://joomlarunner.com/ nataliart/en/articles/ 7-articles-about-art/53-leonardo-cremonini