Performance Art and Passivity

Performance has been celebrated since the 1970s as an art form modeled on action, activating bodies, collectivities, and audiences often in the service of direct action or political activism. For decades, both makers and theorists of performance have centered the question: What can art, language, or the body do? This session seeks to explore and to emphasize an alternative perspective: What would it look like to think performance art from positions passivity? And to regard performance art with attention to gestures of hesitation and uncertainty? Adding “Performance” to the second edition of Critical Terms for Art History in 2003, Kristine Stiles asserted eloquently, “Through its emphasis on action, performance recovers the social force of art.” Observing the long-standing methodological commitment in the field to affiliating performance art with action, this session invites consideration of performances that refuse—or fail to rise to—the call to action. We aim to cultivate critical vocabularies that account for passivity as a key-term for the art history of performance, especially as we consider its capacities in the present. We welcome papers on performance art from any geographical region that examine the relationship between action and passivity (e.g. with regard to gender, sexuality, ability, race, and language); foreground diminished critical vocabularies for performance including reproduction, representation, figuration, and creativity; explore affiliations of performance with “good” politics and morals; expand conceptions of the speech act’s “minimum physical action”; and revisit the historiography of performance art to surface artistic strategies that center durational, vibrational, or otherwise dispersed energies.