Duration Materialised: Investigating Contemporary Performance as a Temporal Medium Saini Liina Annikki Manninen Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen Mary, University of London September 2013 1 ABSTRACT Theatre and performance have historically been thought of in terms of the temporal while visual arts have been consigned to the field of spatial representation. Performance’s temporality, the fact that it happens in time, is highlighted in many discourses as performance’s greatest asset. This thesis investigates what we can find out about performance’s temporality by examining the material conditions of production and reception. By placing the focus off the event of performance and exploring issues around labour, work and leisure time; the art historical and economic relationship of performance and visual art; and the material remains of performance, the thesis seeks to reveal how performance’s temporality functions within a capitalist society. The research sets performance’s duration against different economies of time. It does this within a framework of cultural materialism and the materiality of performance while also situating the work art historically. It investigates the sites of negotiation between performance and the capitalist economy’s temporal logic and interrogates how cultural understandings of time affect experiences of attending to performance’s temporality. In focusing on performance work of both extremely long and short duration, as well as more traditionally staged, theatrical performance, the thesis maps out a genealogy of performance interested in making its temporality visible and often tangible. Placing different art forms alongside performance allows for a symbiotic relationship and thus facilitates new and productive ways of thinking about temporality and duration. Such an approach also makes it possible to identify any blind spots in the theorisations of the temporal in performance studies. The thesis thus proposes a re-evaluation of the terms used in discussion on temporality in performance with a focus on the social, economic and material relations within the production and reception of performance. 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The work presented here was done while living in two cities and my debts of gratitude are due to people in both. In London, I would like to thank my supervisors Dr Nicholas Ridout and Dr Dominic Johnson for their generous reading of the work and their astute feedback which helped me articulate my ideas. Thanks, too, to all my fellow PhD students and the academic staff at the drama department at Queen Mary University of London which is a genuinely inspiring place with the most supporting company I have had the pleasure of working in. Some of the ideas presented in this thesis have been tested in class with some of my undergraduate students and I thank both my students and my colleagues for facilitating such testing. In Bristol, artist collective Residence was the perfect place to do the early work and I benefited greatly from the support I got from my fellow members. I would especially like to thank our book club members for listening to and encouraging my ideas. Also in Bristol, Stephen Robins has been a constant presence and his detailed feedback for some of the work has been invaluable. Heart-felt thanks to Jo Bannon, a friend who always says the right thing. Closer to home (although still quite far away), I must thank my parents for keeping me afloat and never asking me to get a real job. Finally, my biggest thanks to James Dixon who was there at the beginning and who is still there at the end. His intellectual, practical and emotional support has been vital throughout, although his greatest contribution is the continuing realisation of his life’s ambition to make me laugh every day. 3 CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................................. 6 1 Begin to begin....................................................................................................... 6 2 Temporalities ........................................................................................................ 9 3 Early avant-garde and Gertrude Stein ................................................................ 14 4 Literature review and genealogy of terms .......................................................... 17 5 Space and time .................................................................................................... 23 6 Materiality, labour and precarity ........................................................................ 27 7 Chapter outlines .................................................................................................. 33 Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................... 38 From Phobia to Philia: Debating Time in the Art of the 1960s................................ 38 1 Beginning time ................................................................................................... 38 2 Temporality, theatricality and stage presence .................................................... 47 3 Present and future in the work of Andy Warhol and Barnett Newman .............. 58 4 End of endlessness: Beginning performance ...................................................... 69 5 Restaging the 1960s ............................................................................................ 79 Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................... 84 Stay a While: Performance’s Wasteful Duration ...................................................... 84 1 24 Hour Society .................................................................................................. 84 2 Durational performance ...................................................................................... 88 3 Work time ........................................................................................................... 91 4 Marina Abramović and the rhythm of Fordism ................................................ 103 5 Techching Hsieh and passing the time ............................................................. 119 Chapter 3 ................................................................................................................. 130 Instances: On Consuming Encounters .................................................................... 130 1 What to do with a minute? Taking part in Carpe Minuta Prima ..................... 130 2 The material conditions of performance ........................................................... 135 3 One to one performance ................................................................................... 147 4 What does it sell? Museums and galleries ........................................................ 155 5 Gift, giving, time .............................................................................................. 162 Chapter 4 ................................................................................................................. 167 Space and Pure Duration: Looking for Qualitative Time ....................................... 167 4 1 Henri Bergson and pure duration ..................................................................... 167 2 Goat Island and waiting, still ............................................................................ 175 3 Einstein on the Beach and climatic time .......................................................... 190 4 The wrong place ............................................................................................... 212 Chapter 5 ................................................................................................................. 216 The Art of Leftovers: Memory, Matter and Decay .................................................. 216 1 Performance vanishes ....................................................................................... 216 2 Alistair MacLennan: actuation as archive ........................................................ 222 3 Materiality of things ......................................................................................... 230 4 Memory and re-enactment ................................................................................ 242 5 Repetition and iconic images ............................................................................ 248 6 Decasia and decay ............................................................................................ 253 Conclusion............................................................................................................... 257 On and on ............................................................................................................ 257 Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 266 5 Introduction 1 Begin to begin The audience has arrived in the theatre in good time, no one wants to be late, to rush in the last minute. The audience goes in, takes their seats. The curtain rises. The stage lights come on gradually and reveal that the stage is littered with rubbish. Random objects, some of them indistinguishable. The light gets brighter and then a scream, after which the lights dim down again, the curtain falls. The audience get up from their seats and go home (or leave the theatre at any rate). The performance