Performing for the theorist: contemporary performance and the absent post-socialist public

What is the use of contemporary performance in the post-socialist world if no interested public exists? This question is a central, unaddressed problematic of the discipline of contemporary performance as it has developed in the wake of socialism’s collapse. Without an audience, the temporal exceptionalism of contemporary performance criticism excludes not only those forms of performance seen as beholden to the past (e.g. traditional, classical, folk), but also the post-socialist public at large from being seen as belonging to the present, because they are judged as failing to express the modern/colonial values of autonomy, individualism, critique and universality. This shrinking contemporaneity occurs in tandem with the mass liquidation of state assets during the 1990s and 2000s in the post-socialist world. Using the former Yugoslavia as a case study, this paper exposes the participation of contemporary performance in the neoliberal shock therapy imposed on post-socialist countries. Expanding on Sotirios Bahtsetzis’ (2012) notion of “eikonomia,” I argue that by displacing the relationship between the audience and the performer in favor of the relationship between the artist, curator and art historian, contemporary performance generates surplus value through the misrecognition of the private sphere as an autonomous zone. Rather than calling for a condemnation of contemporary performance as a mode of artistic production and field of criticism, I propose that the subjectivity of the audience must be retrieved. In so doing, contemporary performance, traditional dance, pop music and many other diverse performance practices come into focus as strategies for re-politicizing an enclosed post-socialist public.