Svelte Minds and Thinking Bodies

Jillian, I think your point that performance breaks down the binary of process and product is absolutely key. I think this achievement descends, in part, from feminist ambitions which sought to challenge the tendency to fetishize subject (be it a person or art itself) as object, and experience as consumable relic.

I posed that question hoping to highlight what I suspect to be a false duality between process and product. It’s a question that poses an artificial choice, but like Jillian and Michelle, it’s a choice I too have grappled with in my photographic work. I suspect we can have both and perhaps even find a way of approaching potential answers which would validate the product more. It’s the notion that the product must be somehow solid and tangible in order to be taken seriously as a “product” which points to the privileging of certain senses and modes of perception over others. Objects, as relics, provide a kind of comfort by proving to us that an experience has transpired, but somehow not completely vanished. There’s that choice between investing oneself fully in an experience and deciding to retain the distance needed to produce a relic. This is a debate I frequently think about when I feel the urge to pull out the camera during an extraordinary moment which pervades my senses. It’s so circular; you feel an impulse to create an image-artifact of a moment of palpable presence, which will in turn solidify the bond between desire for the present and distance from it.

I'd like to propose we explore going beyond these so-called relics and documentations for tomorrow. What do we think about images which are themselves performed, in which the performance is the image? Is the separation between the two an absolute divide or merely another false duality in disguise? At what point (if any) does a documentation transcend itself? Though forms of documentation can't enable us to fully access the present which is now past, perhaps they can help us touch a new moment. What is the value (if any) of new moments created via processes of documentation? The photograph of Michelle's aura in particular makes me want to probe this dimension of purely visual events or events which are solely made possible by appropriating optics traditionally used for documentation.

Lastly, the distinction between performance and performativity remains key to our discussion as it evolves. I think Jillian’s excerpt from the Butler text goes to the marrow of the contrast. It immediately brought to mind Yvonne Rainer’s late 70’s performance, The Mind is a Muscle, in which Rainer deconstructed dance/performance by stripping its gestural customs away and instead presented a performative dancer–subject who defined her subjectivity on her own terms.

Til tomorrow...


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