CIRCA 111 article

Performing Life

So there’s life, and there’s Performance Art? Ciara Finnegan is not so sure.

Theo: And then you began to doubt.

Ciara: Yes.

Oscar: I dunno. This is all very confusing and rather dull.

Ciara: Let me tell you a story from back then. Maybe that’ll throw some light on the matter for you. I was living in New York, and was interested in ideas about acting and not-acting and curious about living art, by which I mean, art as a way of life. To facilitate this enquiry, I presented myself as an extra in a variety of different movies and videos. I didn’t care what the plot lines were, to me they were completely irrelevant. I just wanted the chance to explore these ideas in a place where an authentic document of the action (one in which I had no hand in the direction of) was simultaneously created. The ‘document’ of my performance was the film of another and, of course, the filmmakers were completely oblivious to my intention.

Oscar: Do you know any jokes?

Ciara: WHAT?! Are you listening to this?

Oscar: Eh…yeah.

Theo: So what happened?

Ciara: On one occasion I interviewed for the part of an extra to appear in an ‘MTV style’ music video. The interviews were held in the Black Theatre, Harlem. I had no idea what to expect (nor did I care - I extra-ed - it didn’t matter what I was doing very little in…it simply mattered that I was doing it). However, when called to audition, the panel - a colourful crew variously clad in full Nigerian national dress - asked me to identify my particular talent. Did I sing? Dance? Act? It seemed inappropriate for me to answer “none of the above, actually” so, without a moment’s thought for the consequence of my answer, I plopped for dancing. They asked me if I would like to dance to a track they had lined up, or to my own musical choice. In the same spirit of recklessness that prompted me to declare “dance” in the first place, I volunteered my own choice, taking from my walkman an old compilation tape that included favourites such as, My old man’s a dustman, The Wombles theme tune, and I’ve got a loverly bunch of coconuts. What followed was a kind of extra-corporeal experience - I had an intense sensation of being audience to my own bizarre behaviour. Have you ever felt this?

Oscar: Er…not really…But I do have the distinct impression, from time to time, that someone else is placing words in my mouth.

Ciara: Odd that…But back to my tale…I had the strangest feeling that my familiar self was hovering somewhere on the audience line watching the body it normally inhabited flail its limbs in an absurd ‘dance’ to I’ve got a loverly bunch of coconuts.

Not only did I feel like a spectator to my own peculiar performance, I could also, from my vantage point outside my puppet-body, read expressions of sheerest surprise and confusion on the faces of the auditioning panel.

Oscar: That sounds a bit daft.

Ciara: You could say that…Anyway, they didn’t expel me immediately, in fact, they left me enough reason to believe that I may end up ‘dancing’ in the background in Lagos and London…

Theo: They were probably too surprised to know what to do! But, in terms of your exploration of acting and not-acting, did you draw a distinction between the time you spent in front of the camera and the rest of your life?

Ciara: I found it almost impossible to avoid the sense that I (and everyone else) was living on a film-set, a feeling accentuated by being in New York. I entertained the notion that I was an extra in a grand, overwhelming film - perhaps somewhat extraneous to the main action but, nonetheless, very necessary as a performing unit in the overall scenic composition.

Theo: “All the world’s a stage…”?

Ciara: Kind of…I just mean that…well…here I am performing everyday life to the best of my ability and maybe that’s significant, maybe that’s art.

Theo: So that is what it meant to you. Then. That life was performance art, and performance art life. That it was possible to blur the distinction until there was no distinction?

Ciara: Yes.

Theo: Why did you think that?

Ciara: I’d been pursuing, with great enthusiasm, the idea put forward by Allan Kaprow that things could happen - with or without an agreeable audience - things more or less indistinguishable from actions in everyday life and that these actions could be art. I wanted to see how far I could take this - how life-like could performance be? Could I collapse performance completely into the everyday? And I wondered what the artistic merits of the everyday were exactly. In creating or evaluating an artwork one considers things like composition, balance of form and colour, and, in durational works, timing. But in life - the idea of leading a good life - the evaluation is different - we tend to pass more ethical than aesthetical judgements about our everyday actions. If life is a work of performance art, can one perform life in a way that is both ethically and aesthetically satisfying?

Oscar: Did you think you were doing a good job?

Ciara: Er, could’ve been better, I must admit.

Oscar: I don’t make these kinds of assessments. I just do whatever comes into my head.

Ciara: That’s what you think!

Theo: Hmm… There’s a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a group of cartographers who set out to make the perfect map. The perfect map, of course, tells you everything about the landscape. And so, as they worked on the design, the cartographers’ map grew until it was identical to the land it surveyed - a vast cloth covering the land itself completely.

Oscar: And?

Theo: The map was perfect, of course, and also perfectly useless. The value of a map (and remember a map is a guide to understanding, to finding direction) lies in the abstraction of key features and suppression of details that obscure these.

Ciara: Are you saying that Art as an attitude toward living, performance art as a way of life can be too perfect and also utterly useless?

Theo: Well, one hates to criticise…

Oscar: I don’t…

Theo: But yes. The value of art (and equally the value of science) lies in the abstractions, the isolating of the essential that illuminates the whole. If all one has is the whole then the art (and science) tells you no more than what you started off with.

Ciara: But perhaps the process…????

Theo: What process?

Ciara: The process of creating this perfect representation, the making of the map, to use your analogy…If one considers life to be a performance, then the process of living one’s life could be the artwork.

Theo: Well, perhaps that teaches the artist something, but it can hardly enlighten the audience. Can it?

Ciara: But, if the artist is sharing the process with the audience?

Theo: Then the process is the work. Not the finished product.

Ciara: Exactly! Life - the process - is the work…there is no finished product so to speak. And, like life, Performance art is fundamentally process.

Theo: (silence)

Ciara: (silence)

Oscar: (silence)

Theo: Actually, erm…perhaps what I really meant was that work too aggressively grounded in the idea that everything is art, that seeks to demolish all boundaries between ‘everyday life’ and art is in danger of making itself irrelevant or, at the very least, ‘perfectly useless’.

Ciara: Perhaps it is perfectly necessary from time to time though, lest we become complacent…Perhaps we need the occasional rousing call to “throw theatre back into life”1 to blur the boundaries between art and life, to prevent art from relaxing in the distance…

What do you think of this exchange between the performance theorist, Richard Schechner and the artist, John Cage?

Schechner: Is there a difference between a group of people deciding to go to the beach and watching what happens on the beach, and a group of people deciding to go to an Event or an Activity and watching or participating in it?

Cage: If a person assumes that the beach is a theatre and experiences it in those terms I don’t see that there’s much difference. It is possible to take that attitude.2

Theo: Interesting question and, superficially, a very attractive argument. Clearly there is a direct path from here to the idea that everything is performance. So let’s, for the sake of argument, consider this question: is there a difference between someone sitting by the side of the beach and watching things happening and someone watching a play that happens to be exactly the same events - exactly the same conversations, actions, and so on? I am going to suggest that there is a difference, and that the events in the latter case constitute a work of art, but don’t in the former.

Ciara: What is that difference?

Theo: The difference is the presence of the artist. In the first case you are watching a random slice out of people’s lives. In the second case, what you are watching is a random slice of events that somebody (the artist) chose to isolate and bring to your attention for some reason. The fact that the actual events might be identical is a coincidence of no great consequence. So, perhaps, to summarise, going to beach and watching it and considering that a work of art (as opposed to simply voyeurism) is only valid if you consider the artist unnecessary to the production of art.

Ciara: But…

Theo: There is another way to look at it. And that’s to consider the person doing the watching the artist.

Ciara: That’s what I’m suggesting!

Theo: But I’m not sure that that really captures…

Ciara: Really captures what?

Theo: A useful distinction.

Oscar: Help! I’m lost. Theooooo???

Theo: (laughs) You might think of it as the artistic equivalent of solipsism, a philosophy I find distinctly unsatisfactory.

Oscar: Ah ha! I see and I agree.

Ciara: You agree!

Oscar: Well, don’t you?

Ciara: I suppose so. It isn’t possible to perform life, not all the time. But the thing is…I’m not sure I can help it…If you choose (and it is a choice) to adopt this way of doing life, then there is really no escaping it…or maybe there is…maybe sometimes you’re an artist…sometimes you’re not. Am I an apostate? Is it possible to switch on and off like this? Is it, Oscar?

Oscar: I dunno. What do you think, Ciara?

Ciara: I can’t say, Oscar. Is it?

Oscar: I guess so. What do you think?

Ciara: Can’t be certain. Are you sure, Oscar?

Oscar: Yes. I…

Theo: So, ahem…let’s get back to performance, shall we?

Ciara: Get back? I don’t believe we ever left.

Theo Pillay is a physicist.

Oscar O’Sullivan is a ventriloquist dummy.

Ciara Finnegan is an artist (…sometimes).

1Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 1938

2Kirby, The New Theatre, Sandford, 1995

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.40–43

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