Text as pdf document:

Notes:

1. Pound, Ezra. Vortex. Essay appeared in BLAST review, edited by Lewis, Wyndham. London and New York: John Lane co.; Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914, p. 153. Retrieved 8-3-2011, from: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/pdfs/1143209523824858.pdf.

2. See: Abramović, Marina. The Life and Death of Marina Abramović. From: Petridis, Alex. From Yoko Ono to Lady Gaga: How Pop Embraced Performance Art. Retrieved from: http://www.guardian.co.uk, 7-7-2011.

3. Kristeva, Julia. Ellipsis on Dread and the Specular Seduction. Quoted in: Rose, Jacquelin. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London and New York: Verso, 1986, p. 141. From: Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked, The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 1.

4. Retrieved 7-30-2011, from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/owlprint/617/.

5. Ibid.

6. Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de la reverie (1960). English edition: On Poetic Imagination and Reverie: Selection from Gaston Bachelard. Translated from French by Colette Gaudin. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1987, p. 7.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Bierce, Ambrose. The Devil's Dictionary. New York: Dover, 1958.

12. See: World Book Dictionary, Chicago: World Book inc., 1963-present.

13. Bachelard, Gaston. La Poétique de l’Espace (1958). Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetic of Space. Translated from French by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. First published in 1969. Reprinted in 1994, p. xix.

14. Retrieved 7-30-2011, from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/owlprint/617/.

15. Pound, Ezra. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. (“Vorticism”). London: John Lane co., 1916, p.92; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1970. Retrieved 7-29-2011, from http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/metro.htm.

16. Pound, Ezra. A Retrospect, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Edited with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1935, p.3-14. A group of early essays and notes appeared under this title in Pavannes and Divagations. New York: Knopf, 1918.

17. Retrieved 8-2-2011, from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/owlprint/617/.

18.  Pound, Ezra. A Few Don'ts by an Imagist. First published in Poetry, I, 6. Chicago, March 1913, p. 198-206.

19.  Ibid.

20.  Pound wrote: "Three years ago in Paris I got out of a ‘metro’ train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening (…), I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation… not in speech, but in little splotches of color." Retrieved 8-2-2011, from http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/metro.htm

21. Retrieved 8-2-2011, from http://toomuch.us/blogs/BabelToEiffel/default.aspx. Essay by Prats-Paez, Rolando. In praise of the ear. Minimalia (1).

22. Ibid.

23. Pound, Ezra. In A Station of a Metro. First published in: Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Chicago: Harriet Monroe, April 1913. Then collected in: Pound, Ezra. Lustra, with Earlier Poems. New York: Knopf, 1917.

24. Retrieved 8-2-2011, from http://toomuch.us/blogs/BabelToEiffel/default.aspx. Essay by Prats-Paez, Rolando. In praise of the ear. Minimalia (1).

25. Michell, Jorge (University of Chile). Commentary on: VestAndPage performance Balada Corporal I. Held at the Theatre University of Santiago de Chile, October 2010. In occasion of the 5° Deformes Bienal.

26. Austin, John Langshaw. Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, 1979.

27. Felman, Shoshana. Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in two Languages. Stanford (Cal.): Meridian, 2002, p. 45-46.

28. Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex, Performing Public Memories. London and New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 17.

29. Hawkins, Kate. Browsing the Performative, A Search for Sincerity. Art  & Education Papers, April 2011. Retrieved 7-28-2011, from http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/browsing-the-performative-a-search-for-sincerity/.

30. Schechner, Richard. The Future of Ritual. London: Routledge, 1995.

31. Dewsbury, J.D. Performativity and the event: enacting a philosophy of difference. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18(4) 2000, p. 475.

32. See: Deleuze, Gilles. Différence et repetition (1968). English edition: Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated from French by P. Patton. London: Athlone Press, 1994, p. 10.

33. Dewsbury, J.D. Performativity and the event: enacting a philosophy of difference. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18(4) 2000, p. 473 – 496.

34. Retrieved 7-28-2011, from http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/browsing-the-performative-a-search-for-sincerity/.

35. Groys, Boris. Going Public. New York: Sternberg Press, 2010, pp.17-18.

36.  Retrieved 7-28-2011, from http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/browsing-the-performative-a-search-for-sincerity/. For a thorough analysis see: Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, (Confession). London: Penguin, 3 vol., 1976-92.

37. Goldar Sánchez, Soledad (Argentinean performer). Post by the artist on her Wall: 4-9-2011. Retrieved 5-9-2011, from https://www.facebook.com/soledad.goldar.

38. Ocampo, Yuan Mor’O. UGNAYAN ’05 Statement. The 4th PIPAF.

39. Piotrowski, Zygmunt. Theory of performance, [d8 / 1987]. Limited edition published by the author.

40. “Vitalogy” is a word composed by the Latin term ‘vita’ (which in English means ‘life’) and the Greek term ‘logos’, which, from Heraclitus will be used as the word for ‘knowledge”. The term ‘Vitalogy’ also appears as title of the third studio album of Pearl Jam.

41. The analysis about the encounter of two subjects and the question of different temporalities has been inspired from the report of a talk of Luisa Passarini at the History, Memory, Identity workshop, organised by Sarai CSDS, New Delhi, on the 14^th -16^th of January 2005. It has been re-addressed for this specific purpose, and licensed to artists’ use by Sarai CSDS Editorial Collective.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Sillada, Danny. Imagery of Reality and the Revelation of Truth in Performance Art. 8-16-2005.Retrieved 3/25/2011, from http://ugnayan.us.splinder.com/archive/2005-08.

46. Zin, Min. Truth in Action, interview with Padungsak Kochsomrong. The Irrawady Magazine, Vol. 9, n° 2, February 2001. Chiang Mai: IPG.

47. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. La Monadologie. 1714, §33. Translated from French by Bennett, Jonathan. The Principles of Philosophy known as Monadology. Leibmon.pdf online, 2004. From: http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/leibmona.pdf. Leibnitz also wrote: “When a truth is necessary, the reason can be found by analysis in resolving it into simple ideas and into simpler truths until we reach those that are primary.”

48. Heidegger, Martin. Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959). English edition: Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated from German by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Raw, 1971.

49. Sillada, Danny. Imagery of Reality and the Revelation of Truth in Performance Art. 8-16-2005.Retrieved 3/25/2011, from http://ugnayan.us.splinder.com/archive/2005-08.

50. Heidegger, Martin. Die Frage nach der Technik (1949). English edition: Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated from German by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977, p.11. Also in: in Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.

51. Retrieved 7-28-2011, from http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/browsing-the-performative-a-search-for-sincerity/. See also: Heidegger, Martin. Vom Wesen der Warheit. Conference (1930). First published in 1943. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1961. On the Essence of Truth, translated from German by John Sallis. P.136-154, in: Heidegger, Martin. Basic writings. Edited by Farrell Krell (2^nd revised and expanded ed.). New York: HarperCollins, 1993, p.115-138.

52. Heidegger, Martin. Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935, published 1953, Gesamtausgabe vol. 40). English edition: Heidegger, Martin. An introduction to Metaphysics. Translated from German by Ralph Manheim. New York: Doubleday, 1961, p. 59.

53. Retrieved 7-28-2011, from http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/browsing-the-performative-a-search-for-sincerity/.

54. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Preface). Philadelphia: Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 1890. Amended version by the author: London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1891.

55. Camus, Albert. Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942). English edition: Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated from French by Justin O'Brien. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd. 1955, p.73.

Acknowledgments:

My sincere gratitude goes to Dana Altman for the text final editing, and her inspirational book of art essay: Art in Multiplicity. New York: Amadeo press, 2008.

Andrea Pagnes (VestAndPage)

Considering the Nature of The Poetic Image and its Performativity

“Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form.” (Ezra Pound)¹

It is more or less accepted that in the moment of the performance, the performer steps to his/her higher self. S/he tends to create another type of reality for the audience to enter², and, of course, for him/her as well, becoming a mediator and carrier of signs. When signs converge into something visible/perceptible (thus uncommon) through an art action, they may liquefy the conventional dimensions of time and space. Thus, they are blurred into an unusual sensorial kaleidoscope, where lively images in constant motion operate like a magnifying glass, unveiling the unknown, as if it was something that has always been there. This is also why the performer may feel his/her performance as so emotional. Due to interlacing a (new) silent dialogical relation with the audience, s/he uses this situation to discover, meet and experience further possibilities of mutuality, reciprocity and encounter on a multiplicity of different meta-levels, which the images s/he produces while performing can provide.

“Belief is in itself the image: both arise out of the same procedures and through the same terms: memory, sight, and love”, said Julia Kristeva.³ But what is an image? Where does it come from? How does it function? Once created, what is it really? These are questions that philosophers, poets, and artists have always asked themselves, without ever finding fully satisfactory answers.⁴ So then, what is image in Performance art?

One of the most comprehensive, philosophical investigation relating to the image (and that seemed to create considerable rift with classical philosophy) was that of Gaston Bachelard.⁵ 

He wrote, “The image originates straight out of human consciousness, from the very heart of being.”6 For him the image is therefore an animated, autonomous object in itself, independent and non-programmatic, not scheduled a priori by any rational will or intention, but with a life of its own. Whereas before the image was seen by many merely as a representation of an object in the world, Bachelard operated under the assumption that the image could be experienced as an individual “act out”, once the fruitier allowed him/herself the possibility to “dream” the image  (coining the sentence: the reverie of reading poetry). “The image then could not be intellectualized so much as experienced”⁷, as it undergoes a continuous process of semantic deconstructing and rebuilding. Under these premises, one could argue that the image seems to belong to a pure act of lucid dreaming, hence to an oneiric experience in a state of semi-awareness. 

Nevertheless, Bachelard, claiming that the “Intellectual criticism of poetry will never lead to the centre of where poetic images are formed”⁸, takes distance from any rebuttable definition that could classify the concept into any rigid theoretical grid, considerably reducing its own speculative value. In fact, for the French philosopher the image is even more than an intuition: is “that which” sparkles and bursts out from the mind of the poet, then stirs to surface and burgeons, finally taking form from itself. 

What Bachelard concerned the most, is the phenomenology of the image:  its metamorphic livelihood, how it affects the being by touching the spirit, taking roots into it and sets it free: something that has to do also with a respectful sense of mystery.

Bachelard concludes his argumentation by saying that “the poet is not entirely in control of the image, therefore can’t be seen as “causing” the image to come into being. Since the image has no “cause”, the image has no past, and, subsequently, is an object in itself, separated from its maker and separated from the object it describes.”⁹ In this case it is like saying that also the “imagination” is an autonomous mental laboratory, a free space where the creation of new images and ideas happens independently, with a time and energy on its own, and where human rational will and intention can do very little, if anything at all. According to this, imagination is not, as its etymology would suggest, the faculty of forming images of reality, it is rather the faculty (autonomous) of forming images which go beyond reality¹⁰, despite all of the concrete details that the images contain, and that can have a basis in something “real” or tangible, not abstract or intellectual (then based more in things than in thoughts), as well as the articulation of sensory details that occur to activate any of the five human senses to read and feel those same images. It could sound contradictory, of course, somehow a paradox, even allowing Ambrose Bierce’s definition, which insists on the fact that the word “imagination” means "a warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership"¹¹; and with it, also John Ciardi’s statement which indicates that the consequent resulting term “imagery” is “best defined as the total sensory suggestion of poetry”¹², therefore not an abstract category in which all images, as varied and lively as they are, fall into, but the storage where the magmatic fabric of the images dwells as dream matter, to merge transmuted in recognizable forms.

Avoiding the danger of any endemic definition, Bachelard goes even further. Disserting on how an image that comes to life transforms into “a new being in our language” – and here, it could be added, in each of our forms of expression, hence communication - “expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being.”¹³

Bachelard’s opinion is, of course, a scholar's theoretical one on the subject of the “image”, but it’s undeniable to convene that “his philosophy does hold true to the somewhat enigmatic and difficult-to-pin-down nature of the image. Where the image comes from is an issue that will probably never be solved, but suffice to say that if you approach its making as a mystery (and allow it to simply happen without too much intellectualizing) you will at least keep in line with one major aspect of its origin, that of the unknown”¹⁴, or better, the ineffable.

Still remaining in the realm of pure poetic images, but starting to think of them while being translated concretely into real life, specifically throughout art actions, will further the thorough understanding of the core of the issue.

So then, in which way does a poet see images?

For Ezra Pound “the image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a ‘Vortex’, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”¹⁵ Images are “fused ideas in movements, endowed with energy”, and more, " an image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,"¹⁶ and “it is the presentation of this complex instantaneously which gives that sense of immediate liberation and release, of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth which we experience in the presence of a great work of art.”¹⁷ For Pound it’s better to present one intense/dense image within a single lifetime, rather than produce amounts of “voluminous work.”¹⁸ This account (where there were already all the premises that led to the concept of synthesis in modern poetry) was also due to the need to draw up a list of “don'ts” about "what not to do" in poetry: advices intended mainly to those who wished to begin writing verses. By his own admission, however, Pound didn’t want these “don't-s” indicated by him (some of which apply even today for contemporary and communicative strength) end up encased in a “mosaic of all the negative”, didn’t consider them at all dogmas, rather than “the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else's contemplation, may be worth consideration.”¹⁹ 

When he describes how (and why) he wrote his short poem “In a Station of a Metro” (1913), the most famous influenced by haiku²⁰, Pound was concerned mainly to understand fully what the poetic image is: “the poetic device of juxtaposing or super-imposing two ideas one of top of another.”²¹ Pound sees writing as the purest form not only for/of remembering, but also for/of apprehending what is remembered. In this sense it is implied that the experience of space takes over the experience of time, precisely through the act of seeing, because of its immediacy and in “a continuum and a series of discrete units.”22

“The image is itself the speech - writes Pound - is the word that is beyond formulated language.”²³ The image is for him what we see, what we remember, what we hear, we can say and experience, “What, or whose light is able to sing, because a nature that is created is always an artifice.”²⁴ 

From his words, it is clear how the poet primarily cared to address his attention on the direct treatment of the thing, focussing it both in terms of subjective and objective: a concept, which in large part informs Performance art too since its early stage. A clear example, which seems to embrace the precepts outlined by Pound, is Yoko Ono’s “Grapefruit”, a book of instruction for art and life, published by the author in 1964.

Towards Performative Images

On Performance art matters, Jorge Michell recently said: “The artistic representation on a support is out-dated, now the image comes to life and leaves for the world. Now it is directly inscribed on the bodies of those who watch over the living flesh.”²⁵ With this sentence, the Chilean architect and philosopher explains that the artistic image abandons the conventional to transform into life itself by becoming performative, as now it has to do with a statement that functions as an action, and also that, according to the theory of speech developed by John Langshaw Austin²⁶, is neither true nor false, as it doesn’t portray, represent, nor describe a certain state of things, or expose any fact. 

Actually, a performative act is always accomplished through what the performer is actually doing; therefore, while producing an actual fact, readable through the images that substantiate the fact as it is, the criterion of truth is hard to apply, and though performative acts are often abused, they never cease to be performative, as they are always examples of performative utterance, where also accidents and failures are inherent part, if not essential.²⁷ Similarly as it happens for performative writings that flow freely as a surrogate of stream of consciousness, so radical in challenging literary conventions and traditions, and where the form is important as the content. Such form of writing is, in itself, already a form of performance, because it accurately reflects its fleeting, ephemeral nature, as well as it happens in the spectator’s mind and memory during and after having witnessed a performance, where a complexity of new approaches and relations are set in motion. 

Peggy Phelan defines performative writing as “a statement of allegiance to the radicality of unknowing we are becoming.”²⁸ Also from this sentence, it’s evident how the liminal sphere of the “unknown” encapsulates all these speculative dissertations. The unknown becoming a space “explorable”, where the word “performative” that used to counter the referential dimension of linguistic utterance, finds its raison d’être.

Today, Performance art could be considered a paradigm of contemporary culture, since the position of the performer – as faber of actions and images - moves the idea of the world from something already given, which exists as itself, to something, which is perpetually to be deciphered. 

The liminal space in which the ephemeral and performative images, produced by the performer, are continuously deconstructed and rebuilt, is by its very nature, a dynamic performative dimension of cultural, poetic, political, and therefore civil negotiation. In this way Performance art becomes also a kind of meta-commentary on the world and on cultural emancipations, reflecting the essentially transitional alternation of possible meanings and (inter) subjectivity, and where the performer’s human body becomes a device to open new systems of exchange.

According to this, the idea of experience itself becomes performative, since the moment of a performance is established as a mode of acquiring knowledge, a methodology of critical research, or a way of communication, without the need of a preliminary phase of work in terms of artistic production. It is like saying that research and product are the same thing, as in the image form and content fuse together and become one, for the form is here the substance lying behind its same qualities. In this liminal space of uncertain boundaries, the knowledge that can offer Performance art is still without a name, and has no canon, but an unstable structure not planned or expected. But because of this, it can open itself to a new field of investigation, where the philosophical discourse can flourish freely, using an infinite number of associations given not just by knowledge as it is, but from life itself, where the confluence of different experiences help to define the framework of our evolution.

Kate Hawkins, in her essay “Browsing the Performative: A Search for Sincerity”²⁹, indicates however that the term performativity is still somehow ambiguous, citing instances from Richard Schechner, who states that the performative “is a slippery term indubitably linked to the idea of a performance, but, regardless of the multiple instances by which a performance might come to be defined”³⁰, and J.D. Dewsbury’s: “the performative slips across, beyond, and through such actual renditions. In this sense, whilst constituting a discrete act – the performance – the performative is not itself a concept signifying such an act. The performative is the gap, the rupture, the spacing that unfolds the next moment allowing change to happen.”³¹ Again here the performative is combined with something ungraspable, risky, but evident as a break through the wall. 

Hawkins analyzes how Dewsbury “sets out to encounter this question by intimating the directions we are forced to consider when thinking through the performative. In centring his arguments within the corpus of Deleuze’s philosophy of difference³², he advocates academic production as creative of thought. This is to suggest a performative thinking and doing that unfolds our way of looking at our social, corporeal, human dramas and the technologies by which we feel able to analyze something, and in so doing, enact its constitution.”³³ 

The discourse becomes crucial, also in terms of a distinguished necessity: it is Man’s same attitude that must become performative, the way of relating the being to the world and the others, and its approach to the configuration of things that inform the world, to fulfil not just material needs, but more to give credit to the process of understanding what Man needs really. 

Hawkins continues enhancing how Dewsbury seeks to demonstrate that “Performativity is an interdisciplinary term and doesn’t just describe a performance, but helps frame it. Its meaning is not tied up with the content of a performance, but with the act of performing itself, where a transition of states occurs.”³⁴ It is in the space where the transition occurs, in this “virtual” void, which exists between the very moment (now) and the immediate after (in other words, in between the actual action and the one that immediately follows) that the image comes to life, and leaves for the world, hence becoming performative. Metaphorically, it is as if the performer whispers his/her own secrets to that void, to set them free, so that they can take autonomous forms to be somehow efficiently recognizable. 

Out of this perspective, any artificiality (as Pound already noted in poetry) becomes a waste, a narcissistic self-absorption, and indeed, a meaningless self referential gratuitousness, even destructive if one thinks in terms of art action, because here the best climax is given when a large part of the performer’s creative effort is addressed to try and produce an atmosphere of intimate empathy between performer and spectator to favour an unconventional flow of energy and information which is from both sides.

In the literature of the early twentieth century, Pound undermines already what were, in his days, the usual conventions of writing. He opens the way and lays the foundation for modern poetry, offering the possibility therefore to think differently about Man and surrounding things. 

Performance art, more recently, did similarly. Originating from visual art, it freed from it, by not incurring the danger of producing permanent static results. Re-discussing the conventions of theatre, it clearly takes distance from it too, sensing that theatre (whatever kind of theatre it is) is not life, but it only provides representations of it: it is a mirror, therefore, an aberration of life itself. 

Finally, Performance art headed to explore methods that can make sense for the transformation of the being, exploring historical and cultural changes, assumes the task of reconsidering and dissecting the meaning of social roles and their relationships in the public and private spheres. Probably this is to be matched with the fact that “the political dimension of Performance art (and art in general) always precedes its production. The politics of art has less to do with its impact on the spectator than with the decisions that led to its emergence in the first place. This means that contemporary art should be analysed not in terms of aesthetics, but rather in terms of poetics. Not from the perspective of the art consumer, but from that of the art producer.”³⁵

Ezra Pound already sensed this urgency in poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century, by being more interested in analysing the mechanisms that lead to the production of images (artistic and poetic) than to their mere contemplation. The true object of his speculation was also the energy of the idea, and of the pure lively thought, which is constantly in motion and of which we are similarly aware through the image, but not only. In a sense, this may also be seen as an anticipation of the idea of “performative image”, also a discourse on the precedent identity of the image through the interpretation of the active forces, which are constitutive of the self: qualities residing even in the smallest movement of the thoughts, though they don’t provide any basis for understanding oneself, for the self is formed by action and act explicitly, and not by what they imply.³⁶ 

What is the evidence in this word "Performative"?

“... If you like, I’ll make a performance in your house that will paint your blankets with blood, your own blood, because you’ll want to cut your veins for all the things I’ll have to tell you.”37

Or elsewhere: “Performance art is an infinitely varying, enormously wide-ranging and yet an enigmatic activity. It may be read as an endless permutation of an individual action, a subtle equivalent of the spoken and written word. Performance art is one of the most potent, intuitive and yet highly evolved strategy that can be used to comprehend the unknown. Performance art is an expressed desire and a declared action with a singular intent of heightening the consciousness of its audience. With our every action making, every artistic understanding must be subverted. With our very action making, conventional Aesthetics must be exploded.”38

We may search for several explanations to describe/define the word “Performance art”, which would surely be all valid and profoundly heartfelt, though always partial, as well as finding appropriate words and sentences to give the idea of what is a “performative image”. We may also analyze the terms “performative image” and “Performance art” etymologically, to find out a variety of theoretical relations they have in common, and see what they imply.³⁹ 

Nevertheless, Performance art cannot be reduced to some singular definition only. It would be too reductive, and more for “contemporary” Performance art, with its many different codes and languages of expression, and yet centred on the human body, as indispensable tool to vehicle communication. However, at least three primary fundaments need to be put in evidence: 1) Performance art is an open territory of investigation to research for authenticity and freedom of expression; 2) by relating to here and now, Performance art explores constantly a variety of possible changing (human/private/public/social); 3) consequently (as being based on mutual exchange), Performance art has an undeniable quality of flexibility as one of its constituent pars, therefore emphasizing the concept of “human scale” also as necessary/needed existential value; for it, Performance art  is vital. Hence, if we say that something is vital, we mean that it is necessary, very important, lively, vigorous, critical, necessary, urgent, if not crucial; and describing something as vital, we mean that is very energetic and full of life, as well as anything that is inherent to it. Hence, we may talk about performative actions and images also in terms of vitalogy⁴⁰, as a means to acquire knowledge and experience about our life. This by assuming that today contemporary Performance art seems more and more focused on understanding how we survive and flourish as humans, despite our daily challenges; it combines, in a wide range of proposals, different cultural backgrounds with multifaceted, inter-cross disciplinary, even scientific approaches, and with an intuitive ability to cut to the chase regarding our life. It can display unique methods to help us navigate our way towards a more robust, dynamic, and realistic life, maybe not a “perfect” life, but a well-adjusted one. At the same time it can indicate different keys to comprehend, though partially, what is life in itself, and the world we live in. 

It is probably for this main reason that the core of many performance art works centres around ways of living and lifestyle questions, dealing with social, private and technology’s spheres impact on the mind, the spirit and the body of the individuals. So far performance artists seem actually all to be connected - more or less - by a similar beginning: by listening intuitively to the human stories that they carry within, watching carefully over present situations, history, environments, and sensing how that impacts their own same mind, body, and overall life, to enhance and manifest through Performance art’s and the performative images produced (powerful though ephemeral) different theories and praxis, an understanding (thus partial) to life and daily care, harnessing the forces of the mind and the body towards creative and productive endeavours. 

Performance art brings an all-in-one opportunity for guiding our understanding of what we are experiencing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and of/for what we are living for. Because performative images are ephemeral, by being ephemeral they tell us that we are dynamic individuals: creative, alive, passionate, and that, though impermanent beings, we can operate collectively for good, qualitative common aims, positively confronting and matching thoughts, feelings, solutions, and everything that is related to life.

It is a surely a challenge, but also a privilege to work with Performance art today, because a performance artist receives wisdom and acceptance for what s/he can offer, also through failure, a human unavoidable condition to grow more consciously, if taken and comprehended in the right way, with open heart and readiness of mind. Beyond any intellectualization, performative images consequently are to tell us, as a matter of fact, that “to be present” is much more determinant than merely offering a representation about something. This is because Performance art loves to speak about sincerity: it says that we must feel accepted, as being special and equal to one each other and valued for what we are. That is so important.

Personally, being a performance artist, I am very grateful for the profound and rich contribution that Performance art gives to my journey through this life, and, as far as I see, to the ones of many others too. This is what I want to tell. It is actually undeniable to notice how much today performance artists, at whatever latitude, wish to say and express how to form, transfer, conceive and build long and short distance conversations, transmitting their way to the others, is needed, thus sometimes critically, but always reciprocally, by using the body as tool to produce and transfer of performative images.

The map of Performance art will be never complete, as things still (and will) continue to flow, and this incompleteness is deeply enrooted in the awareness that this discipline, or better, practice, that takes “instability” as one of its fundament. For now, the urgency in Performance art increases on focusing on giving a look at accounts of historical and social processes, as history may help us ask necessary questions about assumptions, axioms, propositions or principles that are taken as true because they are considered obvious or because they provide the starting point of a theoretical framework, to understand what does it mean “the presence of Man in this world”, which is always more than a condition, by trying to see through things with a higher concentrated responsibility. 

If contemporary Performance art aims to communicate those issues, it becomes valuable as practice when it becomes a flashing vector of meanings and specific messages which performative images carry within, hence not just a mere medium or auxiliary tool. Why this? Because the first major source of Performance art is the encounter between two subjects: for an efficient live art action, this is a fundamental prerogative. “But by saying two subjects, it is meant not only the agency, the capacity to act. It is meant also the world of ideas, imagination, thoughts, emotions, which inhabits the subjects. And the source here is to be understood in the literal sense, like water, which vivifies.”⁴¹ One source of Performance art is the meeting between human beings, the recognition between them, and then the actual emotion of meeting. So this is a first source we encounter specifically not just in Performance art, but that animates our life. The emotion of the meeting is a “place” where verbal and nonverbal communications are decisive, and where the performative images produced, intervene as a sort of imprinting inside memory. Something will always be remembered; as well something will surely be forgotten. Of course, this is the first source, and it also becomes evidence of determined human qualities (beyond moral judgments of positive/negative), such as fragility, shyness, aggressiveness, and so on. 

There are other similar sources, as it is in history and all the different kinds of arts as well, one of them is called empathy, which means the encounter of feelings. We actually feel (and awaken sentiments) when we encounter something, when we meet someone, when we start listening profoundly to our own Self. In that precise moment many of our faculties are challenged and faced to the limit, but in order to cope with them, it will be enough just to start listening at them.

To take fragility as an example, as one of the human soul pars constituents: in this case, fragility becomes a resource, not a (negative) prerogative, not a weakness, being also an aspect of a universal beauty, the same as strength. As many other factors, fragility is an indispensable quality which permeates our being and the world. Fragility constitutes all of us, as human beings, and the whole world we’re living. Fragility is inspiring. 

Another example is Freud’s reference to the question of emotion, when he says that the erotic drive is actually extremely flexible, that is, much more flexible than the drive to eat, because you cannot eat just anything, but you can become attached to anything, you can love anything.⁴² This mean a flexibility of feelings, another first source of Performance art, consequently another first source which vivifies and emphasizes what fragility actually means, and that, at the same time, functions as an open invitation to investigate what it is and what it represents for us as individuals.

Obviously, this encounter between two subjects is expressed through actions, and therefore it gives rise to an inter-subjectivity of dialogue where performative images are inevitable. Again, this inter-subjectivity of dialogue (verbal, nonverbal) will be recorded and taped into memory, dissected in sensations and images to then be metabolized. But what is recorded into memory could be also a very strong censorship. It is the censorship of everything that is not an already known word, or better, a known image (produced/left), and that operates also through forms, requiring that we work through. By doing so, what a performance art action determines is actually a shortcut: a shortcut for analysis, a shortcut that allows us to explore the Self, while transferred into some unknown territories (because they are not ordinary). The shortcut is already the transcription of what has happened into something else, so the whole action that has happened has undergone a huge transformation. Hence, Performance art is transformation: first of images, and therefore of beings. Then there is another kind of transformation, which is interpretation. Here one uses all sort of disciplinary tools, from folklore, anthropology, philosophy, sciences, humanities, media studies, semiotics, hermeneutics, political views, economics, ecology, music, and their many aspects deriving from various and different cultural backgrounds, private beliefs, personal experiences, ideals, dreams, assembling, filtering, squeezing them, to order a sense. Therefore, Performance art is also alchemy.

Each artwork produced along the artistic path of an artist (but let’s say each work produces along the life journey of a man or a woman) will become a sort of summary of one step of the process (the life process): a process, which is always progressive: a part, although minimal, of the becoming. Metaphorically, it is like a piece of a mosaic which portrayed a splinter of time/experience of the life of someone (or something), which then transforms into memory and indicates identity, though only when capable of giving out evidence of it. To give out evidence is not only a matter of intensity and energy, it is mostly of honesty, sincerity, responsibility and consciousness: both in action and purpose, without forgetting that anything we do is subjected to time and timing. Consequently, from this perspective, it can’t be neglected that in Performance art there is another important question: the question of temporalities, constitutional to the nature of the performative image itself.⁴³

During a live art action there are at least four temporalities that operate for the image. One is the time in which the performance artist concentrates to conceive the actual action, which leads to the time when the performer acts: the present, or when the artist elaborates to create and express. Another is the time period of the whole action, from its beginning to its end. And the fourth is the time of the recollection, when the memory is activated. Operating through these temporalities, the inter-subjectivity of encounter produces something that can constitute very different (re-) collections. It can constitute an archive of images, it can become the basis of another individual or community/people project, or it can undergo further artistic treatments, encoding further inspiration for few, if not for many.⁴⁴

There are ways in which performance art actions become a source too, but in order to be transformed into a source, art actions must undergo specific procedures and taken for what they are: transitory but revelatory. When we notice that a performance art action is intense, poetic (though also speaking of political/social/civil issues), and effective in its process of making, it is because it unveils or discloses to our eyes something that is hidden into the intimate texture of the fabric of life, “something concealed or being kept secret until an appropriate time is ripened for its public disclosure… not yet been revealed before, but that has already been happening as factual realities within the context of human experience… Something that has never been presented before or yet to be proven because the very work or act itself, as an exclusive reality, refutes the precedence, it also becomes the precedent of what is yet to happen… Series of performative acts integrated within framing device of form and content become a shared aesthetic encounter and experience between the performer and the audience.”⁴⁵

Due to that, performative images produced during a performative act are a very strong from of expression: they demand spontaneous creativity, they don’t rely on anything outlined a priori, and seek to make the audience think, counting only on very short periods of time. It is impossible to correct an action in its process, as well as the images pertaining to the action, because they rise genuine and spontaneously from the depths of the spirit and the consciousness of the performer, speaking of a sincerity that addresses concrete realities of human existence, as if to say that performative images (and acts) are always sincere, whatever they are. Sincerity is an aspect of our most profound being, and mustn’t be mixed with truth, thus there are outstanding and experienced performance artists who consider that “nothing that was ever said or recorded is truth, only the act.”⁴⁶

According to Gottfried Leibniz “there are also two kinds of Truths, those of Reasoning and those of Fact. The Truths of Reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; and the Truths of Fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.”⁴⁷ But it is also worthwhile to remember that the very nature of the imagery of reality is poetry, and poetry, according to Martin Heidegger, is the founding of truth.⁴⁸ Therefore, if we turn the words of Heidegger into the performative, is sincerity a keynote to find possible truths?

Danny Sillada writes “Performance art presents the imagery of reality as a woven imagery of symbols in the same manner as poetry uses symbols to present realities through the structural form and content of words. The very act of performing in front of witnesses to the art performance becomes the poetic revelation of truth. (…) Similarly to poetry, performance art uses metaphors and allegories to unveil the tangible realities for the audience to decipher and form an aesthetic judgment based on the message or content of the performance.”49 Actually the need to seek the truth was already a decisive trait of Greek philosophy, which first raised the problem of being, which is what it really is. The Greek word used to define the term truth was άλήθεια, aletheia, whose etymology, as Heidegger has pointed out, means "not hidden" or “revealed”. Truth wasn’t understood simply as a de facto reality, but a dynamic act, never concluded, through which is the refutation of error and false recognition: non-static and defined a thought once and for all, but motion detection In his text being. Heidegger then considered some of the linguistic implications that underlie the origins of the term: the "bringing forth" of the speech and its relationship to technology⁵⁰, which also encouraged the critical argumentations of John L. Austin.

Since Aristotle the word techné (the etymological origin of the word “technology”) has been always intimately tied to the word poiesis (the etymological origin of the word “poetry”), which means “the actual process of making”; thus, the “bringing forth” that Heidegger put in evidence, is "to move forward and go towards", which is so essential in the search of the truth.

Hawkins concludes her dissertation by stating that the essence of the performance even becomes “the search for truth, through the very essence of his medium”⁵¹, where the word “essence” is the traditional translation of the German noun Wesen. Heidegger writes that this word means also “enduring presence”⁵², opening to the idea of “a prolonged duration of time”, so dear to Peter Handke and Wim Wenders, but also significant for Performance art, as it perfectly sums up its nature, the difficulty of re-producing, documenting, and obviously its ephemeral characteristic. If the concept of performativity becomes an essential tool in the pursuit of truth, the sincerity of act and image are its fundament, without which it would be impossible to move forward and towards⁵³; while, on the other hand, it would be worthwhile to remember also that “no artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proven”⁵⁴.

 “If the world were clear, art would not exist.”⁵⁵ For this, performative images are always non-fixed, but allow the Self to be temporarily no longer split and arise renewed, giving experience a face, a trajectory, a luminous trail, taking new chances, scoring the aces, caressing, embarrassing, stimulating. They become part of the reality for the performer’s body activity (physical, intellectual, spiritual), which, by set forth a framing device, attracts the essential to transform it in a given space and time, touching the ineffable in some intelligible ways. This is because Performance art, finally, is also a place where form and content can find their way to become one; where common experiences encountered by everyone are outlined and arouse to appeal and reconcile the Self of the performer also with the spectator’s personal experience. Performance art actions and images offer at the same time unusual and unexpected series of symbols, which transform into carriers of meanings to form, when successful, a powerful imagery of reality by using the performer’s human body as a tool, which, by set forth a framing device, encapsulates the form and content within a specific dimension of “transformed space and time”, in order to try to address concrete solutions, possibly in a way comprehensible, thus mysterious, manifesting a truth to the eyes of the spectator/witness, as s/he is always fully part of the performance itself.