Performing the Trojan Horse: Laurie Anderson’s strategies of resistance and the “postmedia era”
By Fernando do Nascimento Gonçalves[FNG1]
Abstract:
Laurie Anderson’s uses of technology in performance art suggest a possibility of smart subversions in a culture based on technology and mediatic systems. Anderson negotiates with such a cultural configuration and questions the notions of body, language and mediation, through her electronic tales, to resist to the “words of order” of the present and to product passwords towards its resingularization.
“Resist to the present!” This is the last shot repeated mechanically in Richard Foreman’s last piece, Maria del Bosco.[1] Presenting human consciousness through “sex and racing cars” metaphors, Foreman basically discusses human obsession for competition and probably goes further: he takes “competition” as a socially accepted and stimulated practice internalized by individuals as fashionably desirable. From this context, I would like to highlight two aspects which seem to me to be directly connected to Laurie Anderson’s work and which also will guide my arguments all over this text: the first is the idea of a consciousness and of a subjectivity[2] that is “socially produced” and the second is the need of resisting to certain kinds of modelization of the subjectivity, as metaphorically stressed by Foreman at the end of his piece.
As the intention of this article is less to describe Anderson’s work than to emphazise the subversions of her explorations of Art and Technology, I would like to suggest that Anderson’s work is an example of contemporary strategies of resistance to dominant patterns of the “present”.
Through her eletronic body, Laurie Anderson activates “absence” and “presence”, “avant-garde” and “pop culture” as tools in order to step off definitions, to be in and out of the art world and the mainstream, as well. In so doing, Anderson tries to escape from control systems and to create singularities as often as possible. She does not refuse the “present” in order to resist it. Rather, she questions the naturalized premises of the present by producing a perennial break and rearrengement of its codes.
Like Anderson’s, many means of resistance have been created to respond to “power”. They may vary in format or in strategy, but they always have a strong disposition for changes in commom, a disposition which keeps pushing the emergence of new forms of resistance in the present.
In these terms, analyzing the task of political art, Hal Foster observes two modes of “opposition” to “power”, considering the period from late 19th century: the transgression, adopted by early 20th century European artist avant-garde and also by 1960’s art activists, and the resistance, the deconstructive perspective developed from 1980’s, mostly influenced by french poststructuralism.
Foster sees “transgression” as belonging to typical modernist traditions of rupture (dadaists, futurists and surrealists) and characterizes it as a “passive parody” or “puritanical refusal” (Foster, 1985: 150) because transgression would have posited a limit for the cultural experience - the present as “morrased” in a sort of endgame.
Operating differently, “resistance” is claimed as a distinct form of opposition in a new social order of heterogeneous elements and as “an immanent struggle from within or behind them” (Foster, 1985: 149). This is to say: a movement which does not deny the cultural strata, as trangression supposedly did, but which works through it and against it. From this comes Philip Auslander’s proposition of the resistance strategies of postmodern performance, a resistance produced “from within”, through the appropriation and recodification of cultural signs.
Auslander argues that the resistance “from within” implies taking cultural production under an industrialized economy into account “in order to make such production viable and significant” (Auslander, 1992: 29). By this procedure, resistance may be given the same tools of such environment to go against it. But, differently of trangression, which uses the immediate physical presence of the artist to protest, Auslander also affirms that, in this context, a resistant political/aesthetical practice is always “representational”, but yet in a particular sense. In order to clarify this idea, Auslander uses Anderson’s work as an example of a product of a kind of representation “that imitates the structure of hegemony from within it, while seeking simultaneoulsy to open space for criticism of it” (Auslander, 1992: 25).
Herman Rapaport uses the term “miming” for better describing this kind of representation and sees, for instance, Anderson’s “male” voice as an example of a way Anderson found to ironically address her critique towards male domination and authority. In this sense, Anderson’s manipulation of mediation through media and technology to critique television[3] and its banalization of information and of life can also be considered as “miming”. According to Rapaport,
in performing the hegemony, Anderson is also miming it, and, in so, she is releasing or activating resonances...which undermine that hegemony’s efficacy as a stable equilibrium... In miming power, Anderson is subtly revealing “its dissonances jand discrepancies, but without necessarily enacting a critical stance of her own, a stance which would be recovered merely as another ideological or theoretical formation intended to dominate a field of relationships (Rapaport in Auslander, 1992: 25).
This is why this kind of resistance produced by Anderson can be considered “from within”, because it attends “an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house” (Auslander, 1992: 25).
But this conception of resistance has not emerged by chance, at least in performance art. It seems to have come out from a combination of different elements which affected performance itself, such as the “exhaustion” of the 1960’s spirit of transgression, the influence of french poststructuralism in the artistic scene, the “tiredness” of the 1970’s conceptual agenda, the expansion of mass culture and the raising use of media and technology by artists. These combined elements seem to have strengthened the claim for a different perspective for performance, especially in the late 1970’s and the 1980’s.
As a result, we observe a decisive shift in performance art history, which consisted in changes in its own essence. For Josette Féral, “the shift is that in the mid-1980’s, performance art will be no longer a function, but a genre, which can, as such, perform several functions” (Féral, 1992: 148). For Féral, performance art lose its clear defined function, that of contesting the values traditionally attached to art and of rejecting the artistic work as commodity, that means, it loses its spirit of transgression. Consequently, this shift seems to have affected two important premises of performance: first, “whereas the earlier generation was concerned with the body’s raw, physical presence, the later generation is often more concerned with the word than the body” (Auslander, 1992: 57). Secondly, this new generation of artists rejects theoretically and practically the premises of political artists of 1960’s, which “basically claimed for an immediate presence of the performer as a means for political action. Rather, these artists seek to escape identification as the “charismatic Other” and the power relations implied by that identification”. (Auslander, 1992: 43).
Auslander observes that these artists – claimed to belong to postmodern performance” - “have embraced the commodified world of mass entertainment”, as they take part into “a culture in which the economy of mass communication has a decisive impact on artistic production. This is a culture in which the distinction between “high” or even “vanguard” art and “mass culture” is no longer at all clear, for either the producers’ or the consumers’ point of view”. Thus, if under postmodernism, performance art becomes a genre which Auslander claims to be “already being between vanguard and mass culture”, it seems crucial to think about the implications of this shift for the concepts of body, presence and resistance (Auslander, 1992: 65).
To respond to this issue, Auslander basically suggests two things: first, that both “body” and “presence” must now be understood as already “mediatized” or, at least, as already contaminated by mediation. In this sense, it is important to emphasize that Auslander does not suggest that there is no more difference between “live” and “mediated” performance[4]. Rather, he claims that by this “mediatic interface” the body acquires new possibilities of negotiation with the configurations of postmodern culture, in relation to which different strategies of resistance can be conceived. Secondly, that even “embracing” commodification, performance art does not necessarily loses its political concerns: it is the very concept of the “political” which changes. From such a perspective, one might deduce that the body does not disappear through mediation, it just starts to find ways to deal with it, as it becomes “mediately present” (Auslander, 1992: 65).
In a sense, Auslander’s approach resonates in Johannes Birringer’s vision of the “postmodern body in performance”. Birringer will pay close attention to “the encroaching impact of image and reproductive media technologies on the visual structure of recent performance art that has begun to reconstruct the images of the body” (Birringer,1991: 223). For Birringer, the question is not what is left of performance art and the body but, instead, how the body and the subject can negotiate their places within formal structures of postmodern performance.
Birringer points out that the role of the body in performance art has changed and that this change has emerged with the increasingly globalizing technology of the electronic media and the promotional industries’ commodification of all spheres of culture[5]. As a form of cultural production, the textlessness of performance art generally shifts critical attention toward the visual or toward the relationship between body, space, sound, light and objects, which opens the possibility of experiments with new technologies. At this point, Birringer affirms that;
the initial, reductive focus on the physical body-in-performance was gradually superceded both by a more critically reflexive formalist exploration and a more commercially oriented, popular embrace of the multiple, artistically challenging crossovers between the visual media and the new possibilities of technological intervention (Birringer, 1991: 221).
It is exactly this challenge which brings us back to Laurie Anderson’s work.
Laurie Anderson and the new possibilites of resistance
For almost 30 years, performance artist Laurie Anderson has been building to herself an uncanny artistic trajectory. Starting from conceptual art in the 1970’s, raising as a respected “avant-garde” artist in downtown scene of New York, till “crossing over” pop culture in the 1980’s, Anderson seems to have forged a multiple or a cumulative self-identity.
Establishing visual imagery as an important part of her performances, Anderson has become famous for her “gadgetry” and thus, known as a multimedia performer. Slides projections, holograms, computer design and also sound resources create animating visual formations which sometimes are themselves symbolic narratives and sometimes simply iconographic features which help to produce a fancy ambience to her stories. Anderson’s creations are, fundamentally, means of thinking the possible relations between culture and mediation, as well as of making experiments with language through mass communication and technology. In this case, these experimentations lead the use of such elements beyond commodification - even if they occur under a commodified context –, because the images are appropriated and become another thing but simple representations.
Juxtapositing, cuting across artistic genres, desemboding herself through mediation: Anderson’s resistance strategies are based on dislocation mechanisms, which deterritorialize and create fractures in power discourses and practices. Mainly, we can identify three of such mechanisms: storytelling (the performance of self-identity production, the desimbodiement of artist’s authority in performance, creation of a multiple body to which converge different voices - cultural, political, genre, economical); technology (the amplification of self figure and speech, dislocation of presence through mediation) and the hybrid body (the cut across genres, the “switching on and off” tact, the mediatic disguise). These three mechanisms are actually very intricated and inseparable, but let us try to present them briefly in order to have an overview of her performative strategies.
According to Samuel McBride, rather than a “person”, Laurie Anderson is an “ambient identity... an accumulation”, a “persona”, which is “the focal point” of the diverses activities (music, art, texts and so on) recognized as “Anderson’s work” (McBride, 1997: 2). McBride suggests that Anderson is “a group project centering around what appears to be an individual ..., a polyvalent figure, multi-faceted, multi-gendered (though female), multi-disciplinary (though an artist)”. And yet, “continually under construction” (McBride, 1997: 2).
McBride’s portrait of Anderson matches Birringer’s, which suggests that Anderson’s identity is forever displaced and delayed: “like the vocal “delays” and electronic distortions of her voice, her own body and gender identity are set afloat in the multitrack audiovisual “choreography” to which she (ironically) refers as the “Language of the Future” in Part I of United States” (Birringer, 1991: 222). What we see on stage is a kind of “always displaced figure” – Anderson’s persona – in which resides the force and the singularity of her performative strategies.
This outlook at Anderson’s work provide an interesting shift of perspective, which allows us to escape from the “artist” authority to switch to the notion of art and the artist as a “collective enunciation”, as part of the subjectivity production process. I am trying to suggest that with this shift, it is possible to enter into the very creative dimension of art, the work of art being here already considered itself as a “desiring machine”, as Deleuze and Guattari put it (in Caiafa, 2000: 73). According to Janice Caiafa, the art or “the aesthetic machines” might open fissures in pattern subjectivities through their creative work with the forms of expression. As certain “semiotic segments become autonomous and start to produce ‘new fileds of reference’, they may create ruptures in a dominant meaning domain and then, a singularization process may get started” (Caiafa, 2000: 64).
Following this idea of “aesthetic machine”, I would also like to suggest that Anderson’s work is a kind of communication tact and also a resistance strategy which may produces “fissures in pattern subjectivities”. Laurie Anderson will be seen here as a “collective voice”. She articulates different discourses and different practices within her work, which, at the same time, embodies and spread out all of these forces, as a potent vortex. Anderson affirms the “presence” and produce “new fields of reference” exactly through the dislocations of her identity in performance and of her manipulation of mediation. And the mechanism she mainly uses for it is storytelling.
Anderson uses her stories for activating certain elements she seeks to point out or to discuss. What Anderson does while telling her autobiographical tales is not autobiography, but the performance of a persona which is actually in charge of the show without being, however, “immediately present”. Anderson’s childhood, for instance, is a “collection of memories which serve to undermine the notion of an authentic self.... As such, the narratives do not provide an unified picture of Anderson: they are autobiographical, but not autobiography” (McBride, 1997: 26). This also happens to her trips and everyday life experiences: they are all sources of the discourses she will embody and reprocess in order to create her stories. All Anderson’s tales work like this. The autobiographical component is just a means of “identity production”, of self-construction (a persona) rather than self-revelation. For example: telling how she used to behave as a child among her relatives can be used to talk about freedom, creativity and to explain some of the aspects of herself as an artist:
When I would ride my bike up and down the streets of Glen Ellyn (Illinois), I’d stop once in a while and pick a scab or pick my nose, then I’d get back my bike and ride around, I was always very aware that there was an imposter who lived in my family’s house and looked exactly like me and would do civilized things like go to school and learn things and be good family member and so on, but I myself was free to ride around and to see the real stuff .… [As an artist] I have to be the person on the bike to create and then I have to be the person responsible for ordering the equipment and organising the schedule, all that stuff (Anderson in Howell, 1992:80).
While listening to Anderson’s autobiographical stories, one must have in mind that storytelling is always a possibility of pointing out certain issues starting from elements she gathers from her life experiences and which are to be spread out into other constallations of meaning. Therefore, as Anderson is “less interested in establishing fact than in achieving an effect”, as McBrides affirms, one can even not take for granted that will know Anderson’s life through her autobiographical tales, since she uses it to produce different versions of the stories she tells or even assumes that, as she learned “from home”, “not all narratives are equally exciting and that the factuality of the story does not assure audience interest” (McBride, 1997: 27).
As the “subject” is considered here as a discoursive construction, a “complex assemblage of powers, itself embedded within power networks (Paul Patton in McBride, 1997: 4), McBride affirms that Anderson’s persona is forged under the recombination of several elements from cultural context as technology, performance art, everyday life, mass culture and so on. By this, I am trying to suggest that the construction of Anderson’s persona is an example of an identity production which actually belongs to a “collective enunciation” rather than an individual perspective. Constructing a persona is the way by which Anderson, as an artist, neutralizes her own presence and identity and desingage herself of the contraints of the artist authority. This is what enables her to privilege her stories and her art and to produce some strangeness into dominant values. Paradoxically, the more her identity becomes “delayed” and her presence is “desimbodied”, the more they seem to be multiplied and amplified, due to the potent effect of the reverberation that such dislocation may produce in our perceptions and in our “reference fields”.