ABSTRACT
Ian Hinchcliffe, in the catalogue celebrating/commemorating ten years of the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), outlines what he perceives to be some of the characteristics of performance art. In reaction to the ‘obmutescent blandness of the eighties’ when performance art ‘cleaned up its act’, Hinchcliffe asserts that performance art ‘should be about flesh and blood, a big lump of throbbing adrenaline, swishing there with and touching the beholder’s tripes’ (Hinchcliffe 1990:6). This invocation of a visceral reality which is situated in the body (of performer and spectator) is similarly expressed by Simon Jones on the next page of the catalogue. In ‘Thirteen fragments for a manifesto of performance’ he invokes a purity in the performance relation which, evading the operation of critique and signification, begins to assert its ontology: ‘This is its nature: oscillation between intensities: a pure effect, unique to performance: indeed an effect of purity in ambivalence, blurred vision, cacophony and confusion (say, confluence: flowing together/with)’ (Jones 1990:7). The statements by these writers repeat and (both in meaning and form) allude to Antonin Artaud’s clamour for a theatre which ‘is a passionate overflowing/a frightful transfer of forces/from body to body’. A transfer which Artaud claims ‘can never be
produced twice’ (Artaud 1989:99-200). What links these assertions is the possibility and necessity of a practice that appears to resist the operation of representation, of repetition, of illusion, while somehow being or presenting ‘the real’ itself.
