‘To Burdened Writing’ [À l'écrit bâté]

This chapter highlights the importance of Jean-Francois Lyotard as provocateur, a thinker whose own experience of being challenged by the act of writing about art provoked him also to question and investigate the act itself. Lyotard wrote on a diverse range of art and artists, yet the idiosyncrasies of publishing and academic taste in the Anglophone world have placed an emphasis on particular texts. The chapter draws on the breadth of Lyotard's work on art in order to highlight its richness as a largely untapped source of provocation for art history and criticism, whilst also focusing on performance art, about which he wrote very little. Lyotard meditates on the desire for unity where there can be none, a relationship which is also mirrored in the relationship of performer and viewer; an irreconcilable difference which, according to performance theorist Philip Auslander, is 'predicated on the distinction between performer and spectators'.