Performance Art and the Novel

In The Red and the Black (1830), Stendhal employed to great effect the painting St. William of Aquitaine (1620) by the Italian painter Guercino; in The Idiot (1868), Fyodor Dostoevsky used Holbein’s Christ in the Tomb (1521) to address the idea of kenosis, or the divine emptying, as one of the central themes of his novel; and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) can be seen as an art catalogue dotted by the works of painters that range from Rembrandt and Velázquez to Gustave Moreau and James Whistler. The integration of painting into the novel did not only update the literary device of ekphrasis that goes back to Homer but produced a sub-genre that used painting to question and transform the novel’s literary procedures. Even a cursory overview of the entrance of painting into the modernist novel shows that this encounter coincided with the rise of the modern art museum and its positioning, together with art history, as one of the foundational institutions of art. During the nineteenth century, the novel emerges as an alternative to the physical space of the museum and the critical discourse of art history.By the second half of the twentieth century and the emergence of performance art, both painting and the novel became much more open to experimentation than they were a century earlier. The intersections between performance art and literature came from two directions. The first tendency emerged in the 1970s, as artists started moving from the conceptualist uses of text towards narrativity. In his introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition Narrative Art, James Collins observed that in creating “story art” the artists use text, photography, and other media, which leads to a “pluralism of possibilities within individual artists’ approach.”1 This plurality is recognizable in Frederick Barthelme’s and Mayo Thomson’s conceptual novel Rangoon (1970) that features both text and images, as well as in Lucy Lippard’s I See/You Mean (1979); and in the works of Laurie Anderson and Eleanor Antin, it contributed to the creation of live performances that combined different media and narrative strategies.The second tendency emerged among novelists who began incorporating performance art into their works in a similar fashion in which painting entered the novel in the previous century. An early adopter of performance art as a literary device was Paul Auster, who appropriated several performances by French artist Sophie Calle as works of Maria Turner, one of the protagonists of his 1991 novel Leviathan (in her 1999 project Double Game, Calle reversed this relationship between the novelist and the artist, and between art and fiction). Unlike Auster, in his novel Body Artist (2001) Don DeLillo does not weave existing performance art pieces into his fiction, but he nevertheless alludes to a whole series of representatives of performance and body art, such as Ron Athey, Chris Burden, Shigeko Kubota, and Abramović and Ulay. The incorporation of performance art into the novel bends towards the purely fictional in Remainder (2005) by the British author Tom McCarthy, who uses the concept of reenactment to construct a complex literary narrative.The publication of Remainder can be said to mark an important point of intersection, both historically and conceptually, between performance art and the novel. As Amelia Jones observed, the early 2000s saw a “massive resurgence of interest in performance art and its histories,” which has been tied with variations “on a newly developed re-enactment format.”2 While not new, reperformance answered perfectly the needs of retrospective exhibitions of artists who over the previous decades mainly worked in ephemeral media, such as Allan Kaprow, whose 18 Happenings in Six Parts were restaged by André Lepecki for Kaprow’s exhibits in Germany and the U.S. (2008), and Marina Abramović, who reperformed her own and other artists’ works in her Guggenheim exhibit Seven Easy Pieces (2005). The resurgence of interest in performance art by art institutions and its entrance into the mainstream of the art industry crested with Abramović’s MoMA retrospective The Artist is Present in 2011. Already the following year, Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most esteemed contemporary American sci-fi authors, included Abramović’s work in his novel 2312 (2012).3 In Europe, the general upsurge of interest in performance art was further escalated by the broad media attention dedicated to the tragically interrupted performance by Italian artists Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro Brides on Tour (2008), which the French author Nathalie Léger placed at the center of her 2018 novel The White Dress [La Robe blanche].4 Finally, the European version of Abramović’s retrospective (sans the title performance from MoMA) The Cleaner, which toured the continent 2017-2019, found its literary response in the novel titled, simply, Marina A (2021) by another French author, Éric Fottorino.5As different as they are between themselves, Léger’s The White Dress and Fottorino’s Marina A belong, broadly speaking, to the genre of autofiction, a literary form in which the self of the author coincides, and is often concealed behind, the protag­onist of the narrative. While both Léger and Fottorino adopt the ambiguous authorial position characteristic for autofiction, which has been prominent in French literature since the 1970s and came to international prominence in the early 2000s with Karl Ove Knausgård’s novelistic cycle My Struggle, they also challenge the basic premises of this sub-genre. Writing in the first-person singular, Fottorino leads the reader to believe that he is presenting an autobiographical narrative, only to reveal two thirds into the novel that the protagonist is not the French novelist and journalist whose name is printed on the book cover, but a pediatric surgeon named Paul Gachet. On the other hand, Léger’s The White Dress belongs to the triptych of novels in which she interweaves the story of her mother with reflections about three women who cast unusual authorial figures: the socialite and, arguably, the most photographed woman of the nineteenth century Virginia Oldoïni of Castiglone, in Exposition (2008); Barbara Loden, the American actress and the director of a single film Wanda (1970), in Suite for Barbara Loden (2012); and the Italian performance artist Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, also known as Pippa Bacca in the last installment of the trilogy, The White Dress. The question that asserts itself most immediately is: Why performance and autofiction? What does it have to offer to this narrative form?The most immediate—and superficial—answer might be that performance art brings with it a sense of the real that can productively counterbalance this mode of writing that thrives on destabilizing the position of the autobiographical narrator. But Léger and Fottorino seem to suggest that there is much more in their attempts to enfold the art form invested in the non-discursive and the experiential into the novelistic discourse. Fottorino sets his story within the contemporary variation of the classical trope of European art tour: on his trip to Florence in the winter of 2017, the narrator stumbles into Abramović’s exhibit The Cleaner, which has a profound and lasting impact on him. Fottorino doesn’t fail to bring up the “Florentine syndrome” or “Stendhal syndrome,” an overwhelming experience of confusion, fainting, and hallucinations in one’s encounter with art that the French novelist described on his visit to Florence exactly two centuries earlier (1817). Léger, on the other hand, does not need to travel to Renaissance cities or enter a museum to be smitten by an artist. It can happen on a visit to a dusty bookshop, a cinema, or while reading a newspaper. In Exposition, she writes about her realization that “the subject is precisely what masters you.”6 Going against every writing workshop basic rule that one should write about what one knows best, she talks about the experience of being swallowed whole by the “ferocious subject that makes you spit out whatever you thought you knew; the enormous, hidden subject, incomprehensible, powerful, more powerful than you […].” In short, Léger is irresistibly drawn to subjects she knows nothing about, and which resist any rational explanation.In The White Dress, this formidable subject is Bacca’s Brides on Tour. The conceit of the piece was courageous and utopian: dressed in elaborate white wedding dresses, Bacca and her friend, the artist Silvia Moro, would hitchhike, from Milan to Jerusalem, with the goal of no less than promoting world peace. The plan was to traverse regions scarred by war and atrocities, from the Balkans to the Middle East. They hitchhiked in their wedding dresses, never taking them off, with the intention of exhibiting their worn and dirty gowns after the completion of their journey, alongside of photographs and videos Bacca recorded on her handheld camera during the journey. On the way, they made stops, during which Bacca performed actions of washing feet of midwives in local art galleries and cultural centers. They chose for the starting date of their performance March 8, International Women’s Day, and they traveled through Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey. The two performance artists separated in Istanbul, and soon thereafter Bacca went incommunicado. Her family and friends alerted the Turkish police. On April 11, her body was discovered in a shallow grave in Gebze, just outside of Istanbul. As it turned out, she was raped and killed by a driver who picked her up at the outskirts of the city on the Bosporus.The protagonist of Fottorino’s Marina A visits Florence with his wife Maud, a literature teacher, and their teenage daughter Lisa. The trip is a routine bourgeois family affair in neoliberal Europe, filled with shopping for objects and experiences, which is suddenly derailed in the encounter of the protagonist with an art form that, decades earlier, set itself to undermine precisely this consumerist approach to art. In his late fifties, the narrator slips into a full-fledged mid-life crisis. Previously unfamiliar with Abramović’s work and with performance art, he first glimpses the image of the artist on the promotional posters: a woman clad in white, holding her open palm over a burning candle. With his wife and daughter, he visits the exhibit in the Palazzo Strozzi. The narrator wanders, stunned, through the museum galleries: Rhythm 0, Rhythm 5, Breathing In/Breathing Out, Imponderabilia, Balkan Baroque, The Artist is Present. He confesses that Abramović “released” in him “some unknown, and even unforeseen dimensions.” The encounter has the force of a spiritual transformation: “I have been asleep almost sixty years. Marina Abramović woke me up.” He begins to refer to the artist as “Marina A,” where the “capital A marks every beginning and adds significance […] An artist of whose existence I was unaware for decades, now shook me deeply, like no one else since, without me understanding why.” This personal crisis acquires broad social proportions two years later, with the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic accompanied by lockdowns, social distancing, and public health controversies. Coincidentally (or not) the protagonist of the novel comes down with vestibular neuritis, a mysterious condition that causes vertigo, nausea, loss of appetite, and the inability to walk. The narrator confesses that this was the most difficult period of his life, and comes to the realization of its spiritual, if not somatic, cause, which is also the true reason for the profound impact that the discovery of performance art had on him: “as I was nearing my 60th year,” he writes, “it became obvious to me that I spent my days as an egoist.”The protagonist of Marina A is an ordinary middle-class art consumer. Unlike art objects he is used to, art performances offer a different vantage point on his entire existence. What almost imperceptibly seeps into the narrative are the thoroughly bourgeois values, habits, and instincts that undergird his existence. In the encounter with the documentation of performance works of Abramović and Ulay, his innate instinct for possession is replaced by a strong scopic desire: “if I can’t own them, at least I can go and see them.” More than youth, nudity, or sense of adventure, what attracts this bourgeois beholder to the documentation of the performance art couple’s long-gone actions is precisely the opposite of his sheltered life: “The two of them blew up even the very idea of exposition. They exposed themselves to danger in the same way they exposed themselves as artworks.”This consumer of performance art buys wholesale performance histories that the art industry carefully packages and serves to the public: the encounter of two young artists, their bohemian life in a Citroën van, their separation on the Chinese wall, their brief reunion during the MoMA exhibit. These stories are recycled from Abramović’s numerous autobiographies, from her 1994 theatre performance Biography, to her 2012 collaboration with the director Robert Wilson The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, to her 2016 memoir Walk Through Walls, to name some. Neither purely fictional nor real, these performances are autofictions that offer a middle-class individual an escape from the anxieties that permeate neoliberal societies. So, how did it come to pass that, from its initial position as a critique of bourgeois society, performance art became the shelter from reality that this art form claims to embrace?The narrator of Léger’s novel(s) lectures her mother “about the yoke of archetypal bourgeois daddy-mummy that as Deleuze put it so well, “subjugates European humanity.” It is the sense of danger as the promise of the release from this yoke that exerts immense gravitational pull on Fottorino’s stand-in in Marina A. He is fascinated by the very fact that in her performances anything can happen, and decides to ignore the fact that it never does: she could have been seriously injured by audience members in Rhythm 0, but she wasn’t; she could suffocate in Rhythm 5, but she was saved; she could cut off her finger in Rhythm 10, but she escaped with minor scratches. All of that is because her actions were carefully staged within the framework of art institutions (galleries, museums, festivals). That is what removed them from reality and made them performance art. Perhaps naively, perhaps recklessly, Bacca eliminated all these institutional protections from her Brides on Tour. She took her performance outside the gallery and away from the regulated and regulating gaze of the public, to deserted roads and into confined spaces of truck cabins and passenger cars. In Joël Curtz’s 2012 documentary The Bride (La Mariée), her co-performer confesses to the camera that Bacca never refused a ride out of her fidelity to the principles she set for Brides on Tour. 7 She did not scrub cow bones, but washed midwives’ feet, querying them about their delivery room experiences; when Moro decided to fly from Istanbul to Beirut as a security precaution, Bacca continued hitchhiking solo. That is what tipped the potential into the actual danger, which ended with her murder.Bacca’s tragic story enters Marina A, via The White Dress. 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