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Scenes of Shrinking Sovereignty. Alternative Images of Masculinity in Performance Photography

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Abstract

The intriguing etymology of the term “scene,” simultaneously suggesting a hermetically closed hut on the edge of the orchestra and opening up a public theater space, is applied by the Hungarian performance artist Tibor Hajas in his portrait photograph Lou Reed Total (1979, Fig. 1) dialectically, as he correlates a profoundly private figuration with a rebellion based on politics of representation: in front of a white wall in a room, with a Pioneer scarf on his throat, he poses with the notorious props of a nursery—the ball, the teddy bear, and the toy car—as if he were depicting an adult who was still stuck in childhood.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Above all through cross-dressing or through the stylization, accumulation and superimposition of attributes that are coded as female or male, a whole range of performance artists from the West (Urs Lüthi, Jürgen Klauke) and East (Ion Grigorescu, Zbigniew Libera, El Kazovszkij) devoted themselves to a ludic and subversive attempt, from a masculine position, to undermine the binary sexual matrix through opening up an intermediate position.

  2. 2.

    The music and media scholar Philip Auslander has pointed out that the appreciation of the live event as compared to its photographic documentation is ideologically defined: the status of the image, and its substitution, is inherent in the medium of photography, that is, it is assigned a documentary function. Citing the photo campaigns of Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman, and Nikki S. Lee, Auslander however insists that numerous performance artists have staged their campaigns solely for the camera: “The space of the document,” as Auslander says, “(whether visual or audiovisual) thus becomes the only space in which the performance occurs.” (Auslander 2012, p. 49).

  3. 3.

    Freud insists that the narcissistic drive does not become superfluous in self-referential, autoerotic withdrawal, but rather represents the modernistic basis “of every intellectual as well as artistic production” (Dahlke 2008, p. 79). Freud is relevant here for the liberation of narcissism from its presumably pathological connotations, such as neurasthenia, effeminacy and homosexuality, which have together provoked and taunted the construct of the self-empowered creative subject. The narcissistic masculinity which Freud theorizes as a psychological stage in the course of childhood socialization, in his view, only reaches a pathological form when the so-called secondary narcissism is consolidated beyond the childhood phase (Freud 1995, pp. 545–562).

  4. 4.

    This assessment can be traced back to the action Art and Revolution (1968), which has been given particular attention in research. As part of this series of performances that took place at the University of Vienna, the Viennese Actionists actually confronted an attending audience “with all kinds of bodily processes, inclusive of socially marginalized ones such as urination, defecation, sexuality or birth, while also addressing homosexuality or transgenderism” (Badura-Triska and Klocker 2012, p. 11).

  5. 5.

    Amelia Jones (1994) also refers to the aporia of politics of representation, which dominates the critical stagings of masculinity that are nevertheless articulated however from a masculine position.

  6. 6.

    The French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, using the concept of “relational aesthetics,” indicates the effort of primarily European visual artists from the 1990s to make the direct relationalities in art exhibitions something that visitors to the gallery could experience. Bourriaud recognizes that such artists as Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija or Maurizio Cattelan perceive a potential for artistic artifacts in eliciting encounters between people, and instead of configuring autonomous symbolic spaces, seek to cause bodily interactions in their installations.

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Illustrations

  • Fig. 1: Tibor Hajas. 1978. Lou Reed Total. In Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. Ed. B. Pejić. Cologne: Walther König 2010, 205.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Adam Czirak

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  1. Adam Czirak
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  1. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Lars Friedrich

  2. Kunstuniversität Linz, Linz, Austria

    Karin Harrasser

  3. University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Ottersberg, Germany

    Céline Kaiser

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Czirak, A. (2019). Scenes of Shrinking Sovereignty. Alternative Images of Masculinity in Performance Photography. In: Friedrich, L., Harrasser, K., Kaiser, C. (eds) Scenographies of the Subject. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-12906-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-12906-4_9

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