The Performative Presence of the Artist

The human body’s role in performance

This current issue of Maakaf was scheduled for the beginning of this summer, a plan impeded (again) by the state of affairs in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The articles appearing in this issue do not refer directly to the recent, difficult developments; they do propose, however, that we rethink human communication and the very definition of human, a proposal which is relevant to Israel’s anomaly.

Almost five years have passed since the first issue of Maakaf, and the current tenth issue is an opportunity to review our self-definition and update our concepts. The “About” section on our website defines Maakaf as “an online magazine dedicated to creating a discourse around artistic platforms that involve a performing artist.” This statement presupposes the need of the presence of a performing artist in order to create an artistic performative event. But what sort of presence is needed? Is it an actual, physical presence, or rather a conceptual, theoretical one? And what about the presence of the viewer?

The relationship between artist and audience - the two necessary parameters for the existence of a performative situation - stood at the center of Maakaf’s first issue. Now we return to these two foundations, wishing to illuminate their relationship through performances which challenge the unmediated encounter. This is happening as technology becomes ever more present in our everyday life. We now spend most of our waking hours in front of a screen, involved in complex virtual relationship with people we have never met, receive driving directions from technological entities, use a keyboard to shop for groceries and order books without having leafed through them.

This issue focuses on the tense relationship between human body and machine in performance, which has a significant role in the history of modern performance. A famous illustration of this tension can be found in Heinrich von Kleist’s 1801 essay, On the Marionette Theater, where the marionette (mechanical movement) is seen as superior to the dancer (organic movement). More than a century later, Oskar Schlemmer rejected the human as the core element in theater in his 1923 article Man and Art Figure. In this article, he recognizes the centrality of technological inventions in his time and the theater’s obligation to respond to these innovations. In this issue we wish to accept this obligation, especially as we move from a technological to a digital age, and examine how this change affected the body and its presentation in performance. In other words, this obligation becomes all the more urgent in a time where the physical presence of the body is not taken for granted, in theater or outside of it. In her 1983 Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway describes the elimination of the categorizations and boundaries of the human body in the digital age: the borders between the subject and “the rest of the world” have been redefined, and concepts such as “natural” or “artificial” became irrelevant. Haraway’s Cyborg is the result of the possibility technology has granted us to blend the organic and technological systems – a description which no longer seems like science fiction.

It is precisely in the context of these technological innovations which allow the absent presence of the body, that Amelia Jones recognizes a return to corporeality in the performances of this new millennium: they “looped subjectivity back toward the explicit embodiments of the heyday of performance around 1970” . In this present era, however, “the body has been dramatically reconceived as nonauthentic, defined through otherness (alienated in the visual or carnal experience of others), and specific in its identifications”. So even when the human body is present in performance, its presence is different, unlike its presence in the past. Technology not only transforms our way of doing things, claims Jones, it also “profoundly conditions our experience of ourselves and others”.

How does this new experience affect our perception of our bodies, our perceptions of human communication? How do these questions enter performance, traditionally understood to be based on “live” encounter, in real time, between human beings? Are we still interested (as Peggy Phelan, for once, believes) in the human body, in a real physical experience between humans?

In Maakaf’s first issue, Guy Gutman wrote: “In addition to the active viewer and the random audience, we have the typical modern viewer, sitting in an office chair in front of a computer […] We are the sole rulers of a world in which we do not participate.” In our current issue, Erez Maayan challenges the assumption that viewers of web performances do not “really” participate in the virtual event. He claims that cybertheater (performance in the virtual realm) is a new form of performance; it opens new possibilities and new concepts of performance which expand the limits of theatrical medium and live performance.

In that same first issue, Gutman discussed Brecht’s ideas of a smoking audience, and suggested that smoking (like de-familiarization) is simply another way to get the audience involved. In our current issue, the Turing Dames also demand involvement in their performance Maybe Attending, inspired by Brecht’s Der Jasager and Der Neinsager.  The audience must decide intuitively between absolute submission to technology and its rejection. The Turing Dames discuss the different political and aesthetic aspects of the new technology, and suggest that in the 1930, Brecht had already prophesied our contemporary society, in which technology facilitates – and perhaps even enforces – automatic obedience to the norms.

Also in this issue, Daniel Landau writes about the exhibition HeLa – Forms of Human Existence, held in HaMidrasha gallery in Tel Aviv in May 2014 as part of the OH-MAN, O-MACHINE project, dealing with the politics and esthetics of post-humanism. Landau offers three reflections, claiming that technological development and progress require a process of disembodiment. This process, he says, is currently led by high-tech corporations with very little ethical motivations to examine its varied ramifications. Artists, on the other hand, open new and subversive ways of thinking for the technological mainstream.

Anat Katz and Erez Maayan eavesdrop to three artists whose performers are robots: Peter-William Holden, Louis-Philippe Demers and Wade Marynowsky. The three of them reexamine the ideas of liveness, performativity and embodiment, as they discuss their work and the various ways it redefines “live performance”.

Shirel Horovitz talks to Daniel Blanga-Gubbay, an Italian artist working with non-human performers, about viewing habits and the way his work paradoxically reinforces our understanding of humanity through the absence of a human body.

Dror Harari reviews different attitudes towards the performer’ body. “Since the late 19th century,” he claims, “performing arts have acted as a sensitive seismograph, reflecting the dynamics of man’s relationship with the machine, and exposing modern society’s hopes and fears regarding the technological age and its post-evolutional possibilities.” Harari presents four positions towards the performing body: dehumanization (eliminating the body), re-humanization (a return to the body) anti-humanism (showing the body as fragile, dismantled, supervised) and post-humanism (challenging the concept of a body by multiplicity, mobility and hybridity).
In our “Borrowed" section, Liav Mizrahi refers to a series of images in the work of Yonatan Ben Simhon, in which man and machine are in head-on confrontation. Positioned thus, the human nature is exposed and accentuated, in its better and its worse.

The works discussed in this issue formulate their statements by the way of contradiction: they use the machine to comment on human nature, the absent body to discuss presence, lifeless objects to talk about liveness. And so by examining the machine (and technology in general) we return to look at the human and at unmediated contact.