no OOUIU AGENT I CONTlXTUAl MATERIAL 111 issues it rais es around authorship and authenticity, ,md to provi de a broader historical and cultural framework fo r understanding its development. 2. THE I 990S To recap: I would li ke to assert t hat artists of the late '60S and early '70s- for example, Mari na Abram ovic, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, and Gina Pane- turned to their own bodies as the privileged site of artistic action. Authorship and authenticity were bou nd together in the irreducible singularity I. I NTRO DU CTION of the individual performer. The artists' bodies Performances produced by visual artists have are indices of authorship, even while they also shifted si gn ific ~ ntly in the last decade. Instead carry a broader symbolic or metaphorical meaning of artists using ~heir own bodies as the medium and as icons of gender and ethnicity and (in the case material, with a, corresponding emphasis on of some artists) the constructed, fragile, or perfo r­ physical and psychological authenticity and oppo­ mative nature of this identity! To day their si tional transgression, as was the case in the bodi es also fu nction art historically, as signs of an I 960s and '70S, today's artists do not necessarily artistic practice that consciously placed itself privilege the live moment or their own body. at one remove from the market: in Western Europe Rathe r, they e n~ ag e in strategies of mediation that and North America, performance and body art include delegation, re- ena.ctment, and collabora­ of the late '60S and early '70S fr equently stood as a tion. One only has to think of recent works by Tina refusal of the portable obj ec t and the circulation Sehgal, Elmgreen and Dragset, Artur Zmijewski, of commodities) This trajectory of performance Tania Bruguera, Phil Collins, Roman Ondak, and body art could be reductively summarised fo hanna Billingr feremy Deller, and Dora Garcia, - both through the artists' own accounts and to name only a few, in order to appreciate the its critical reception - as grounded in the phenom­ distinctiveness of this shift. In the works of these enological immediacy of the live body, its singular artists, performance is delegated- or, to use authen tic ity, and its aim to chafe against more managerial language, 'outsourced' - to other the institutional frameworks through which the performers. These people may be specialists or commodity object ci rculates. The presence of nonprofessionals, paid or unpaid, but they under­ documentary photography and video does nothing take the job of being present and performing at a to reduce the overall stakes of this authentic, particular time in a particular place on behalf of indexical relation between the artis t and their work the artist, and following their instructions. of art.4T his convergence between visual art Although the use of actors and performers has a and performance in the '70S began to drift apart in long history in traditional theatre and classical the ' 80S: in the work of Adrian Piper, Coco Fusco, music, what distinguishes this trend in visual art is Orlan, and the early efforts of Andrea Fraser, the the fr equency with which perfonuance i.s delegated artists remain the central performers, but they to non-professional people who are asked to make a point of discursively embodyi ng multiple pelform themselves.' In tandem with post-structuralist and/or fic tional iden tities.s By the late '90S, the idea critiques of presence, delegated perfo rmance also of an authentic artist-performer seems to be an differs from its '70s-era forbears in its modes of anachronism, associated with fi gures like Stelarc distribution: it Can be mediated through video or and Franko B,6and much of what is known in the exist in the gallery fo r the duration of an exhibition UK as 'Iive art',7 - both strategies that reduce the intensity of a At the same time, in the early '90S, particularly one-off performance. This shift raises a number of in Europe, there began to be a shift away from this questions aboue the present-day status of perfor­ paradigm. Art ists started to payor persuade mance art, authorship, and, inevitably, the ethics of other people to undertake their performances. representation: when an artist uses oth er people's AUlhenticity was relocated from the singular body bodies as the medium of his or her work, the results of the artist to the collect ive authenlicity of can often prompt accusations of exploitation the social body, particularly when those performers or man ipulation. This essay aims to explore this constituted an economic, gendered or racialised tendency more closely, and to reflect on some of the Other. This change can be seen, fOT example, in the c CONTEXTUAL MAn.'Al '13 early works ofMaurizio Caltelan and PaweJ conventional relationship between actor and Altha mer. Cattelan's Southern Suppliers Fe (1991) audience. Warsaw continued its activities oblivious marks a significant change of tone from identity­ to the fact that it was being watched as a real-time based works of the '80S: the artist assembled a film played out for the benefit of this disenfran football team of North African immigrants to play chised audience. Althamer's untitled project for the local football matches (all of which they lost), 1994 exhibition Germinations at Zachfta Gallery in shirts emblazoned with the name of a fictional in Warsaw pursued this line of investigation on an­ sponsor Rauss (the German word for 'get out', indoor stage: one of the gallery's female invigilators as in the phrase ausliinder raus,or 'foreigners out'). was invited to bring to her workplace a series The tit le aJludes to immigrant labour, but also of objects that would make her environment more to the trend, then debated in the Italian press, comfortable and relaxing. The resulting tableau PW< a.,x i.e EO 'W M.lIuril.io C.mebn of hiring foreign footballers to play in Ital ian tea ms. staged the invigilator as a minimal performer in the Cattelan's gesture draws a contTast between two gallery. Rather than being the unnoticed observer .'tC f'onIirurtS"d(5ou,.lJtrfI SUPplitrrsFC). 1 991 Annik.ll Eriksson Coilige types of fo reign labour at different ends of the eo,-lwgtfI f\Is(1It('II5 OrclttsrrQ, 1996 of visitors to an exhibition, she became the focus of economic spectrum-star footballers are rarely Video still their attention as a live portrait or living sculpture. perceived in the same terms as working-class imrni Althamer's subsequent works are frequently based grants-but without any discernable shred on identification with so-called marginal subjects, of Marxist rhetoric: through this work, Cattelan such as children (including his own), the homeless, fulfills the megalomaniac male dream of owning a and a group of adults with physical and mental football club, and apparently insults the players by disabilities called The Nowolipie Group. Althamer dressing them in shirts emblazoned Rauss. At the treads ambiguously between coercion and collabo same time, he nevertheless produces a confusing ration, and has coined the phrase 'directed reality' image: the word Rauss, when combined with to describe an approach in which the artist's the startling photograph of an all-black Italian foot­ predetermined premise or structure unfolds with ball team, has an ambiguous, provocative potency, the unpredictable agency of his participants.' especially when it circulates in the media, since This tendency to 'delegate' performance gathers it seems to actualise the unspoken fear of being del­ pace in the mid '90S, most spectacularly in the work hwel Althlmer uged by immigrants from outside 'fo rtress Eu rope'. of Vanessa Beecroft (1993-), but also with Annika Obsn'tl"ro~. 1991 Ptrfonn.llna Southern Suppliers FC is therefore social sculpture Eriksson's Copenhagen Postmen's Orchestra (1996) and as cynical performance, inserted into the real-time Jeremy Deller's Acid Brass(1997), two projects that social system of a football league.' As such, .. invite workers' bands to perform recent pop music Francesco Bonami seems to put too worthy a spin in their own idiom. (The Copenhagen Postmen's on the work when he claims that Cattelan aimed Orchestra played a song by the British trip-hop "for a democratic new way to play the artist, leremy Deller _Willi.llms r;airey Band group Portishead, while the Williams Fairey Brass Add BnI$$, 1997 whilst remaining central to the work as the coach Band interpreted a selection of acid house tracks.) and manager of the teams.'" At a push, Southern Eriksson's event resulted in a five-minute video, '. Suppliers FC could be said to share the performance while Deller's has become numerous live limelight, but from all other perspectives it is performances, a CD, and a diagram elaborately con­ highly manipulative and far from straightforward necting these two forms of regional working-class in its political message_ music_ Beyond the aesthetic frisson of mixing two Pawel Althamer, by contrast, demonstrates a types of popular music, part of the appeal of both different approach to delegation: more minimal projects lies in the fact that the artists employ real and discreet, and-in a manner that is perhaps bands. They are not professionals or actors hired to P.lIwel Alth.llmer Unruled. 1994 typical of anists from ex -Socialist countries-less play electronic music on brass instruments, but Inst.llll.lltion ,·iew.llt G,nlillfalloll.s 8. uchrt.ll G.lIllery. 199~ interested in the mass media as a site [or interven. apparently authentic working· class collaborators ti on. Obseroator(1 992) is a series of photographs who have agreed to participate in an artistic experi­ that document a performance with homeless peo ment-a rather formal one in the case of Eriksson pIe in Warsaw, each of whom was asked to wear (the camera remains static throughout the video), Etmgr~n ;and Oragsel a sticker bearing word observer.