“The Mystory: The Garage d’Or of Ereignis.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses. (RAEI). 2013 volume on "Performing Culture, Performing Identity." (original) (raw)

The Mystory: The Garage D'Or of Ereignis

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 2014

The performance of identity involves impression management, social skills, and self-reflexivity. To perform identity in media environments involves writing our identities into being. Media environments have facilitated a new kind of selfhood-brand-in which we model our identities on celebrities. However, because brand identity has no ethical grounding, it raises legitimate concerns. To incorporate ethics, I perform my identity through mystory, Gregory Ulmer's genre of reflexive writing. By composing a mystory, I consult with an avatar-which in Hindu tradition was a god descended into earthly form-that reveals my ethical condition and a pathway through it. This consultation functions as pharmakon , revealing truths to me which both wound and heal. I use mystory to address a personal question, "How do I lead an ethical life?" and a policy problem: water pollution in Florida. The conclusion of this essay presents a response to this problem: a performance art piece designed to teach manatees about mortality.

Recommencing reality : the intersection of public and private identity in performative contexts

Recommencing Reality: the intersection of public and private identity in performative contexts , 2009

This paper explores the convergence and cusp of colliding realities in private and public identities in performative contexts. It draws heavily on a Socio-Anthropological system of the self and fictive personas within these constructs – as well as the person/persona/personality trichotomy inherent in self-presentation and preservation. It is written in subservience and supplication to the practical component of the University of Cape Town’s MA in Theatre and Performance (Theatre Making) which is also documented and archived with supplementary photographs as part of the research. The paper addresses notions of collective identity (such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, socio-economic and socio-political group clusters) with a peripheral focus on the South African, middle-class, Caucasian identity and a particular focus on a female, hetero-normative orientation (as it forms the premise of many concerns presented in the practice of the inquiry: the artist as still life, the subject as object). It suggests a methodology towards aligning the research and its actualisation in performance through a series of installation-based works presented on and around Hiddingh Campus, Cape Town between May 2008 and September 2009. At the time of publication, the culminating project of the degree was in its pre-production phase.

A transfictive tale: life of the artist as a self-brand

2017

The body serves as a critical site of identity performance particularly when considering the implications of technology on construction of the self. This thesis investigates the growing interest in the development of transfictive artists as art practice and how through the use of multimedia platforms it is possible to create and establish a fictional identity through transmedia storytelling. Each of the fictional artists selected for this research, namely Susan Fielder, Donelle Woolford, Cherry Lazar, Ona Artist and Seren Sancler, function to draw the audience into exploring issues of identity, performance, in particular, the artist persona as exemplifying selfebrity. This original contribution to knowledge explores the ideas, concerns and ways of creating a transfictive heteronymic persona in relation to gender politics, the ways in which media convergence is utilised to develop identity, performance and the importance of self-branding. The case studies are discussed in relation to...

Dissertation Defense. An Arts of Existence in the Post-Media Era: A Theory of Subjectivation

Toward the end of their lives, both Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari sought to develop a mode of the production of subjectivity that unbinds itself from hegemonic norms thereby launching what Foucault called an arts of existence and Guattari called existential self-fashioning. This dissertation attempts to update this form of subjectivity curation and creation and bring it into the present-day by taking into account the way that subjectivity has become mediatized and interlinked with various gadgets, beings, and other-than-human entities. The analysis relies on the procedure of metamodeling, derived from schizoanlaysis, in order to construct traversally a system of reference that would slice open the normal sense and gloss that is intrinsic to normative semiologies. This methodology undergirds and guides the theoretical findings of this project, which argue that the now networked nature of being human calls for a neoanimist cosmology that not only decenters the anthropos from its privileged place in the most epistemologically shared sense of the word world, but, even stronger, horizontalizes its privilege on power, obviating its move to raise itself above other beings that it finds in the environment it inhabits. By undercutting the propositional nature of human exceptionalism, it follows that the production of subjectivity can be pushed into channels that are not caught in subjection, policing and homogenization, but into modes that induce processes of subjectivation, the creative self-fashioning of one’s life. Figures like the cosmopolitan idiot, the clown from the carnivalesque, and the performance artist are submitted as prototypical models that help subjectivity mold its being away from subjection and towards a reclaiming of beinghood in the contemporary, mediatized milieu. The way that these embodied tropes and existential scripts are arranged and ordered exposes an encrypted system of reference that deploys the same logic as emblems found in the aesthetic of the baroque. Subjectivity is, paradoxically, a kind of artifice that is more real than the predicates that would make it fake.

Aesthetic Negotiations of Identity ‒ Between Embodied and Disembodied Performance

Ekphrasis , 1/2015, 2015

The study focuses on the aesthetic and ethical relevance of the hybrid nature of a few multimedia artworks, taking Klaus Obermaier’s performances as significant self-reflexive and also trans-artistic processes. The visual, musical, choreographic, and simultaneously digital and corporeal “stories” displayed by these artworks contain an ongoing deconstruction and reconstruction of performer’s own artistic identity in-between fictional worlds, media, bodies. At the same time, by equally exposing a radical ‒ sometimes trans-human ‒ alterity, the performances call for a critical rethinking of a few aesthetic categories and of rigid theoretical dichotomies. Plus, the embodied and alternatively disembodied performances could be analyzed as an enactment of a “chaosmic” production of subjectivity (to use a formula of Guattari’s) and thus they reveal a live matrix of artistic creativity. Finally, such hybrid artworks are revealing for the ontological condition of non-captive spectators, namely those challenged to have an agency when confronted with the artistic process. The ethical value of the intermedia performance sometimes resides in the spectator’s possibility to opt, to express choices regarding the different layers of meaning, as these are embodied on stage. This is not a matter of effectively performing an option through some actual physical intervention in the stage area. It is instead an aesthetic and critical option and one pertaining to the ontology of art and to the spectator’s own paradoxical, “hypermediated” status.

Bare your self naked for creation. Notes on impersonality, the encounter and a body for a life

In works previous to Thousand Plateaus (2005), such as Logic of Sense (1990), Gilles Deleuze stresses the importance of the impersonal as the dimension one must reach in order to counter-effectuate the Event. Impersonal, or neutrality, is a characteristic of singularities and of the Event. Although Deleuze never relates the Event to an experience, regarding experience as an event is our answer to such a question as the becoming-imperceptible or the radical affirmation of any body as a haecceity. Impersonality is a way of allowing the becoming. However, there seems to be a misuse of the notion of becoming as a process of deconstruction or transformation, underlining or enforcing the self instead of dismantling it. Patricia MacCormack's (2011) defense of the lizard-man, and the cat-man, as both bodies in-between and becoming, is such a misuse. Their and Body Art practitioners attempt of overcoming the Self and a subjectivity through the excess and extreme emphasis of turning all bodies “as aesthetic events which can experience and are experienced through zones or folds of proximity” (198) not only falls on the field of mimesis and representation, as they inflate subjectivity and a fixed Self. Turning the body into an event calls for a re-questioning of an ethical-aesthetic êthos, one which seeks to free life (DELEUZE, 1996) through the creation of encounters, and a much radical de-personalization of the self. This de-personalization or impersonality understood as an elimination process of subjectivities and selves determined by the socius follows Deleuze's Bartleby (1993) three characteristics, plus one: a trait of expression, a zone of indeterminacy, a fraternal function and a subjective-significative nudity. This is a fundamental dismantlement through a «leap of the will», as to achieve that composition in which we are a life in the same immanent plane as everything that composes Nature (DELEUZE, 2005). This is an impersonality towards life and creation (close to asceticism), one could argue, opposed to an imposed depersonalization of death and destruction (close to death camps' bare life). Nevertheless, for a body to become the event that it is, i.e., a body for a life, one must also address art's territory. First as an encounter (an ethic-aesthetic realm), which can produce what we call the space of the Event, following the idea of taking extra-daily practices and techniques into daily life. Art is too mediated/mediatic and mediates too much (perceptions and experiences). It is most of the time a stance for the production of the monolithic​ Self. To release both Life and Art, affects and percepts, from their shackles, one must avoid and produce actions and situations evading the alienation and fetishism of forces, close the gap of mediation between subject and object of experience. Hence, we propose to rethink Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones (1994), as a possibility of how to deterritorialize and produce encounters in daily life. A practice of immediatism: creation happening outside Art.

Performing Autoethnography: An Embodied Methodological Praxis

Qualitative Inquiry, 2001

This article argues the personal/professional/political emancipatory potential of autoethnographic performance as a method of inquiry. Autoethnographic performance is the convergence of the "autobiographic impulse" and the "ethnographic moment" represented through movement and critical self-reflexive discourse in performance, articulating the intersections of peoples and culture through the innersanctions of the always migratory identity. The article offers evaluative standards for the autoethnographic performance methodology, calling on the body as a site of scholarly awareness and corporeal literacy. Autoethnographic performance makes us acutely conscious of how we "Iwitness" our own reality constructions. Interpreting culture through the self-reflections and cultural refractions of identity is a defining feature of autoethnographic performance.