“The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.”
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 3.
Like many of my peers, I received an invitation to serve as Teaching Fellow for an undergraduate class during my third year of graduate school. While most other members of my cohort were offered assignments leading sections for large lecture courses to fill out their teaching packages, however, the class for which my services were requested was of the less conventional variety. The instructor of record was to be David Levine, Professor of the Practice in Harvard’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Media—and a working artist. The course, in addition to serving as a forum for the instruction of students, would also function as a work of art.
Levine’s frequent medium is a kind of work known as “delegated performance,” which is more or less what you might imagine it to be. Rather than use his own body, Levine enlists other individuals to carry out his pieces. The Harvard class was to be a third iteration of a performance he called The Best New Work. The concept was simple: performers, in this case the ten students in the seminar, would learn seminal works of art criticism and perform them in the galleries of an institution. REDCAT, in downtown Los Angeles, and the Princeton University Art Museum had served as previous venues for Levine’s performances. This time, the student performers would roam the galleries of the Harvard Art Museums.
The texts from which students could choose were, for the most part, among the classics of twentieth-century criticism that reliably appear on the syllabi of Art History methods courses: Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility,” Linda Nochlin’s provocatively titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” The students workshopped and perfected their texts throughout the semester in the lead-up to a final performance that lasted four hours. They wandered the galleries, haunted the museum gift shop, paced the corridors of architect Renzo Piano’s recently remodeled building. Upon finishing one cycle of the essay, the student performer would pause, take a breath, and restart their performance from the top.
As I helped the students prepare for the day, attempting to teach them enough about twentieth-century art that they could understand the particular polemics of their texts’ authors, I found myself quietly skeptical of the enterprise. Having never seen the previous performances of The Best New Work, I was concerned that the exercise would seem contrived, pedantic even—I did everything I could to help the students succeed, but I had my reservations about the project’s endgame. I needn’t have worried. The students’ performances were, almost without exception, mesmerizing. Something ineffable and electric happened when the words of Marx or Baldwin enveloped the galleries’ paintings and sculptures: an activation of the environment that can only be described as magical.
Although each of the student performances surpassed my expectations, there is one that stands out to me, even now, six years after the final recitation ended. The performance I find myself thinking about time and time again is that of one student, who has graciously agreed to be identified by her first name, “Heidi.” Heidi chose as her text Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Against Interpretation.” No doubt the fact that Heidi was a seasoned performer whose YouTube presence had already made her something of an internet celebrity when she joined the class contributed to her success. She was as adept as most of the professional performers I have observed at inhabiting her space, at holding the audience’s attention, at enlisting her surroundings in the project of communication. A photograph to which I often return when considering this experience is an image of Heidi seated on the floor in the hallway of the museum, slumped against the wall, an almost doleful expression on her face. Opposite her in the frame is the torso and head of a Roman sculpture, once likely the hunter Meleager of Greek mythology. Now missing his limbs, nose, and attributes, and recruited into Heidi’s performance, the figure would seem to stand in for what Sontag frames as the original sin of the art classical art critic—that of forcing art to “justify itself”(3).
Some of the credit for the performance’s electricity must of course go to the author of its text—though if Sontag fully grasped the continued relevance of the magical, the ritualistic, the transcendent, for the kind of criticism her essay endorses, she does not show it. Her first sentence goes a long way toward contextualizing the kind of performance that took place on that day in May of 2018. “The earliest experience of art,” Sontag writes, “must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual” (3). It’s an important observation, but also a thread that Sontag neglects to pull any further, even when turning from critique to prescription in the final pages of her essay. She notes that “a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation. To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become (‘merely’) decorative or it may become non-art” (10). Perhaps. Or, it may harken back to those early experiences, when art’s own sacredness defended against interpretation.
The same year that Sontag wrote “Against Interpretation,” a performance took place at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto. Although the event happened halfway around the world, the artist, Yoko Ono, was part of a movement that was in the process of disrupting art internationally; indeed, Ono would soon perform “Cut Piece” in Sontag’s native New York City. The piece, now considered both seminal and formative for performance art, involves a single performer seated on a stage, a pair of scissors in front of them. Audience members are invited to remove pieces of the performer’s clothes, which they are then permitted to keep. In the version of Cut Piece filmed by David and Albert Maysles at Carnegie Hall, Ono sits silently as audience members remove larger and larger pieces from her clothing.
Ono’s piece is most frequently interpreted as either an anti-war commentary on the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or a feminist critique of patriarchal violence. Sontagian interpretive skepticism aside, these readings, arguably, account neither for the overwhelmingly Japanese audience of the first performances, nor the mixed-gender makeup of subsequent audiences and Ono’s specification in instructions for future iterations that the piece need not be performed by a woman.1 A graver issue is that such readings fail to address the almost sacred relational dynamic that emerges between performer and audience members during the event. A point of reference for Ono appears to have been one of the Jataka tales—stories from the Gautama Buddha’s previous lives—in which the then-prince Mahasattva sacrifices his body to feed a hungry family of tigers.2 The Buddhist notion of divine sacrifice, of a deity offering his body for the wellbeing of others, finds resonance in the Christian Jesus, whose worship includes the ritual consumption of what is believed to be his body and blood. The audience’s cutting and keeping of Ono’s clothing echoes the tradition of Christian relics, wherein pieces of saints’ bodies and associated objects are treasured and venerated, held up as vessels of mystical power of however small an amount.
My point is that the drive toward a transcendent form of sacrifice and consumption is ancient and deep—that it is an experience that requires no justification beyond itself, and that art in the second half of the twentieth century tends in this direction. It comes as no surprise that what would become some of the most discussed works of performance art—from Carolee Schneeman’s 1975 Interior Scroll, in which the artist extracted the eponymous document from her vagina; to Chris Burden’s 1974 Trans-Fixed, in which the artist had himself crucified to a car—involved what might be described as ritual mortification. It is in some ways a continuation of the ethos of the consequential Jackson Pollock, whose interest in the Jungian shaman—that figure whose suffering provides wisdom to others—no doubt extended from his symbolic works of the late 1930s and early 1940s to his first drip paintings of just a few years later.3 What Sontag proposes as an eschewal of content is differently understood as merely a shift to content of a different kind: from the encoded “x=b” of the cipher to the mystical trace of the relic.
The experiences of the student performers, thankfully, did not involve any pronounced suffering or mortification. Yet, the performances would have been of a different kind entirely had they lasted an hour instead of four, had the students not subjected themselves to the discomfort and exhaustion of such a relentless action, had museum goers not been invited to follow and observe them at will, exercising a freedom of movement and attention not accessible to the performers. What the students gave the visitors on that day in May of 2018 was exactly what the best art critic can offer audiences: the difficult, inexplicable work of conjuring art’s magic.
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Endnotes
- Julia Cooke, “Sharp Relief: Watching Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’ Post-Roe,” Guernica (July 25, 2022).
- Kevin Christopher Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’ (1964): A Reconsideration,” PhD dissertation (Virginia Commonwealth University, 1998), 39.
- Leonhard Emmerling and Jackson Pollock, eds., Jackson Pollock: 1912–1956 (Köln: Taschen, 2007), 23.
Davida Fernández-Barkan