Event and Difference: The Performative-Conceptual Turn of Contemporary Art

Abstract

This chapter analyses the performative-conceptual turn in contemporary art, starting from the idea of two bodies and two worlds—life and artificial or aesthetic—in the media-created reality. The emphasis lies on the changing of the concept of interactivity, which replaces the aesthetics of the event. Language, speech and body are opened as a complex unity of the biosphere and technosphere in the situation and the context of freedom of action. From Duchamp to the neo-avant-garde, the problem of freedom of human action can be shown in the aestheticization of things/objects that replace the originality of the work. The technosphere which generates the assemblage of media art is coming to a radical change in the event of art as the reproductive difference. The question of truth in the event of contemporary art can now be derived from distinctive events in a work that requires new interpretations.