Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity

Abstract

OCTOBER 140, Spring 2012, pp. 91–112. © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Let’s begin with a generalization: one of the most conspicuous manifestations of the “social turn” in contemporary art since the 1990s has been the hiring of nonprofessionals to do performances. This stands in sharp contrast to a tradition of performance from the late 1960s and early 1970s in which work is undertaken by the artists themselves; think of Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, and Gina Pane. If this tradition valorized live presence and immediacy via the artist’s own body, in the last two decades this presence is no longer attached to the single performer but instead to the collective body of a social group.1 Although this trend takes a number of forms, some of which I will describe below, all of this work maintains a comfortable relationship to the gallery, taking it either as the frame for a performance or as a space of exhibition for the photographic and video artifacts that result. I will refer to this tendency as “delegated performance”: the act of hiring nonprofessionals or specialists in other fields to undertake the job of being present and performing at a particular time and a particular place on behalf of the artist, and following his or her instructions. This strategy differs from a theatrical and cinematic tradition of employing people to act on the director’s behalf in the following crucial respect: the artists I discuss below tend to hire people to perform their own socioeconomic category, be this on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age, disability, or (more rarely) profession. Much of this work has not been addressed or analyzed in depth by art historians or critics, so the position outlined below forms a response not so much to existent writing but to the reactions that this work repeatedly elicits—both from the general public and specialist art world—at conferences, panel discussions, and symposia. One of the aims of this essay is to argue against these dominant responses and for a more nuanced way to address delegated performance as an artistic practice engaging with the ethics and aesthetics of contemporary labor, and not simply as a micro-model of reification. I will begin by outlining three dif-