A Cyclopean, Evil Eye: On Performance, Gender and Photography

Abstract

One of the questions which continues to be of interest concerning performance art is its relation to photography, and through photography to gender and sexual identity. At a superficial level, of course, photography has been a medium of convenience to performance artists – one of the few ways in which much past work now exists. However, as Mary Kelly and others have argued, performance has been seen to be much more deeply a part of that tradition in modern art which, at least since Baudelaire, opposed the intrusion of photographic reproduction. Performance, like abstract expressionism with its irrefutable presence of the artistic gesture, or minimalism with its emphasis on experience and duration, would seem to be not merely resistant to photography, but entirely opposed to its “cyclopean evil eye”, the distinctly malevolent look that converted “every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image” (Morris 203). Refuting photography, performance appears as the logical end-point of the modernist path of self-reflexiveness – a path that was initiated by painting in response to the technology of photography, as the affirmation and self-definition of art as purely subjective, living gesture, and as the pure inscription of bodily gesture and presence in the work of art. In fact, against those tendencies within the avant-garde of the 1960s that expelled gesture, denied expression, and contested the notion of an essential creativity through photography, performance was the return with a vengeance of artistic subjectivity in the figure of the artist (in privileged masculine terms) himself: his person, his image, his gestures (Kelly 95). As Kelly writes further on, “the discourse of the body in art ismore than a repetition of the eschatological voices of abstract expressionism: the actual experience of the body fulfills the prophecy of the painted mark” (Kelly 96).