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The institutionalised and institutionalising discourse of modern art, the capitalist economy of collectable art, and the fetishised and fetishing ritual of artmaking and viewing are deeply conservative forces. That is, they manufacture knowledge and rely intrinsically upon and reinforce normalising power relations.
Our recognition of the artwork is founded upon subject-object power relations. This is not the artwork as ‘other’, the il/legitimate reflection of social dis/order. Art is not principally reliant upon the clean separation of artist and artwork, subject and object, self and other. Rather, it is principally reliant on their continuing, continuous bondage. The legitimising discourses return again and again to the (ob)scene relation—technics of attribution linking artwork and artist, frames and gallery spaces which fetishise the relation between viewer and art object, ritualising moments of entry and approach, recurrent transactions which improve value and provenance. Over and again, subject and object are identified and correlated, which is an operation of power, discursively producing normalcy and knowledge. Modern art does not simply access but actively manufactures a moralist-aesthetic economy which is profoundly conservative.
Is there another way of understanding the artwork which is not normative? Of course, many. We know the truth to be a multiplicity, the answers to be multiple even before the question exists. Of course, painting plays a definitional role in the conservative economy, as an original inscription on a blank surface. Yet there is another visual art genre which seems equally definitional, yet somehow outside recuperative forces. That is, performance art.
Performance art is completely proper to the visual arts and can be comprehended completely within its discourse. Whether it has any relation to theatre has simply no bearing on its interpretation. It is... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline