Practice and performance: modernist paradoxes and literalist legacies

Abstract

“Getting a show up is so gross. What feels like boredom is really panic. Everyone is exhausted, nauseous, perfectly happy.” Deb Margolin “Artists of the world, drop out! You have nothing to lose but your professions.” Allan Kaprow Practice versus theory This chapter takes the issue of practice as a central organizing concept. I begin with an epigraph from performance artist Deb Margolin in order to remindmyself andmy reader that the gross, boring, panicky, and exhausting process of “getting a show up” is often what people mean when they refer – generously or disparagingly – to the practical nature of performance. For some, this grossness is redemptive in its cumbersomeness. For others, it is … just gross. Accounts of production often use a literal language. While for some theorists and scholars, this literal mode is philosophically uninteresting, for other performance practitioners and artists, the invocation of the literal is a celebration of the concrete. Terms such as practice and the practical can also be aligned with the professional, something valued in certain contexts and repudiated – including in the declarations of Allan Kaprow. When considering the assumptions behind these and other practices, I try to remember that, following Deb Margolin, various debates about different ways of seeing, doing, and interpreting performance, practice, or anything else are often about a kind of “happiness,” attempts by various persons to argue for the value of what they are good at doing and to see legitimated that which obsesses them, i.e. that which makes them nauseous and perfectly happy.