On Affective Objects: Martyro, Veronique Doisneau, and the Production of (im)Material Objects

Abstract

Differing perspectives on the ephemerality of performance have led to debates since the 1980s regarding its ontology. Sondra Fraleigh and Peggy Phelan, for example, believe that performance’s ‘only life is in the present’. Others have disagreed. For example, Rebecca Schneider believes that performance remains in the body of the spectator in a complicated manner and Miranda Joseph, drawing on Marxist theory, argues that performance is in fact material because it produces social relations which have material effects: they affect our thinking and behaviour. In alignment with Joseph, this text begins with the presupposition that performance, and, specific to this text, the object we might call dance performance—the dance performance event and its particular contours, in other words, the performance event as an entity which emerges in the space-time where/when the onlooker and the work meet—is material because it is social. I discuss two dance performance objects, my work Martyro (2011) and Jérôme Bel’s (2005) Veronique Doisneau, as (im)material affective objects. I examine each work individually, providing first a thick description of each in order to communicate how they used affect to connect to their spectators and to critique the contexts of their presentation, the worlds in which the Subject in each of these performances worked. Drawing on understandings and theories of affect (from Deleuze and Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, and Brian Massumi to Lauren Berlant) and political economy (including David Harvey, Cedric Robinson, Jeremy Gilbert, Ashok Kumar, and Katerina Paramana), I then argue that both works used affect to remind their audiences, their witnesses, of the power of revealing one own’s experience of ‘suffering’ as Subjects, whilst simultaneously critiquing the wider economies in which these works, these affective objects and their Subjects, are embedded. It is this production of affect, I suggest, that potentiated action for change, by affecting others’ perspectives and behaviours.

1. Introduction

Differing perspectives on the ephemerality of performance have led to debates since the 1980s regarding its ontology. Sondra Horton Fraleigh, for example, suggests that ‘the dance begins and ends in lived time and immediate perception’ and ‘leaves nothing concrete—as object—behind’ (Fraleigh 1987, p. 48). Similarly, Peggy Phelan, in a frequently cited passage,1 argues that performance’s ‘only life is in the present’ and that it is the ephemerality of performance, its disappearance, which allows it to become itself. It is due to this disappearance, an ontology which is antithetical to documentation, Phelan argues, that performance resists reproduction and the circulation of capital (Phelan 1993, pp. 146–48).

Phelan’s views have since been countered by cultural theorist Miranda Joseph and performance theorists André Lepecki and Rebecca Schneider, among others. For example, Rebecca Schneider argues that performance need not leave behind objects, documents, bones (playing with a death analogy) in order to remain. It remains in our memory and flesh in a much more complicated manner. Performance thus becomes an act of remaining, a means of reappearing. She explains that although in, for example, a museum context performance’s claimed disappearance can challenge the status of objects and, as a consequence, the hegemony of the visual, such a claim ignores different possibilities of knowing and ways of remembering; it ignores the body of the witness in which memory is stored threatening the much-valued original; it ignores the ability to transmit memory and knowledge from one body to another as with a ritual act (Schneider 2001, pp. 100–8). In the same vein, Lepecki (2004b) suggests that performance remains through its tracemaking and its ability to transmit through a different technology: through body-to-body transmission.

Cultural theorist Joseph (2002) counters Phelan’s arguments on both the performance’s disappearance and its resistance to the circulation of capital. She emphasises that, although performance is produced and deproduced in the same moment, it is, nevertheless, not unproductive:

[P]erformance is just as well able to bear value (use, exchange, surplus, status) and to produce subjects and social formations as any material commodity, arguably better able: ‘The commodification of images of the most ephemeral sort would seem to be a godsend from the standpoint of capital accumulation’.

(Harvey [1989] 1991, Postmodernity, p. 288) (Joseph 2002, p. 66)

Performance is indeed productive because it is consumed by its witnesses. This act, Joseph holds, is a ‘performative production’ (Joseph 2002, p. 34): performance utilises signification, the spectator consumes these signs, and, consequently, this ‘productive consumption’ is an act of production (ibid., p. 66). Joseph argues that, for Marx, performances are therefore material products: ‘consciousness, culture, religion, language and politics are all social (and thus material products), products of people making their world together through their actions and interactions’ (Joseph 2002, p. 36). It is for this reason, Joseph argues, that performance does not resist the circulation of capital. Although performance might be considered to be unproductive because it perishes the moment that it is produced, it is on such vanishing products that capitalism flourishes (ibid., p. 61).

I agree with Joseph that performance, and, specific to this text, the object we might call dance performance—the dance performance event and its particular contours, in other words, the performance event as an entity which emerges in the space-time where/when the onlooker and the work meet—is material because it is social. It remains, as Schneider suggests, in the body of the spectator in a complicated manner. Spectators ‘ingest’ a performance’s ideas and affects, which are then metabolized and stored in spectators’ memories and affect thinking and future behaviour. Performance, consequently, has material (social) effects.

Here, I discuss two dance performance objects, my work Martyro (Paramana 2011) and Jérôme Bel’s Veronique Doisneau (Bel 2005), as immaterial—yet, as I have already suggested, very material due to their social effects—affective objects. Following a discussion on affect as an event itself, I look at each work, and the affects it produced, individually. I first provide a thick description of each work in order to communicate how they used affect to connect to their spectators and to critique the contexts of their presentation, the worlds in which the Subject in each of these performances worked. Drawing on thinking on affect and political economy, I then argue that both works, both affective objects, used affect to remind their audiences, their witnesses, of the power of revealing one own’s experience of ‘suffering’ as Subjects, whilst simultaneously critiquing the wider economies in which these works and their Subjects are embedded. It is these particular ways in which the two works produced affect, I will suggest, that potentiated action for change, by affecting others’ perspectives.

It is worth noting here, first, my different kinds of perspectives on these performances and how they affect my reading of them, and, second, these performances’ position in a larger work. My discussion of Martyro emerges from my dual position as creator and performer with a clear intention with regard to affect: to produce it. My analysis of Martyro, however, also takes into account the spectators’ perspectives, in particular as they relate to the production of affect and the work’s relation to the context of presentation, as spectators articulated them at the Q & A and my individual conversations with them following the work’s presentation. My consideration of Veronique Doisneau emerges from my position as a spectator being affected and interpreting the work, as well as a creator of performance work more generally that was preoccupied with the production and potential of affect. Although with both works it might be argued that it is the sharing of the Subjects’ experience with the audience that produces the affect, when I refer to affective objects potentiating change, I refer to the two specific works as entities, as events. Martyro and Veronique Doisneau are part of a larger project (of which Paramana 2025, 2026 are a part) that also examined very different (to those in this text) kinds of suffering and suffering Subjects within their economies: the homeless, asylum seekers, and immigrants in Santiago Sierra’s works, the Cuban citizens and immigrants in Tania Bruguera’s works, and the relation of both artists’ works to the Cuban, German, Mexican, UK, and US political economies. For the purposes of this text, situated within the specific journal issue, the analysis of Martyro and Veronique Doisneau is restricted to the cultural economies of their presentation, which are primarily western, White, and to a great extent of privilege (as are the ‘protagonists’ of these works). Veronique Doisneau was a work I was examining while in the process of creating Martyro, working on affect and interrogating the relationship between works and the cultural and political economies in which they are created and presented.

2. On Affect, Events and Objects

My discussion of the two performance events, the two entities, as affective objects will be complicated by the consideration of affect itself as a dimension of an event. Brian Massumi, drawing on Spinoza, understands affect as an ‘ability to affect or be affected’ (Massumi cited in Loktev and Massumi 2009, p. 1). Crucially, he considers these two abilities as facets of the same event or a dimension of it (ibid.). Massumi points out that the second aspect of affect, for Spinoza, is that the ‘power to affect and be affected governs a transition, where a body passes from one state of capacitation to a diminished or aumented state of capacitation’ (ibid., pp. 1–2). This moment of transition—from being affected to an activation or capacitation (which leaves a trace and creates a memory, a lived past)—is also a moment of ‘relation’, and more specifically of an ‘occurrent relation’, because it is bound up to the specific time and space of the event (ibid., pp. 2–3). Or we might think of it as the ‘space-time’ between the onlooker and the work looked at, where/when performance (understood as an event co-produced by performers and spectators) emerges and does something to both.

Understanding what precedes the event, what gives rise to it, is also important. Massumi, following Peirce, suggests that shock, an imperceptible shift of attention or focus to something, where only effects are felt and registered, is what gives rise to it:

Before you can even consciously recognize what you’re afraid of, or even feel that it is yourself that is the subject of the feeling, you are catapulted into a feeling of the frightfulness of the situation. It only dawns on you in the next instant that you’d better figure out what might have done the catapulting, and what you should do about it. It is only then that you own the feeling as your own, and recognize it as a content of your life, an episode in your personal history. But in the instant of the affective hit, there is no content yet. All there is is the affective quality, coinciding with the feeling of the interruption, with the kind of felt transition…That affective quality is all there is to the world in that instant. It takes over life, fills the world, for an immeasurable instant of shock. Microperception is this purely affective rebeginning of the world.

(Massumi cited in Loktev and Massumi 2009, pp. 4–5, my emphasis)

In addition to shedding light onto the emergence of the affective event, this passage by Massumi also affords us the opportunity to see the relation/distinction between affect and emotion. Here, affect is understood to precede emotion, for the latter presupposes that what we are feeling in the moment can be identified and named. This moment of the ‘affective hit’ makes, gives birth to, the moment but it also reveals that ‘affect is not in time’; affect ‘makes time, it makes time present, it makes the present moment, it’s a creative factor in the emergence of time as we effectively experience it; it’s constitutive of lived time’ (Massumi cited in Loktev and Massumi 2009, p. 9). It is the instance when our mind-bodies have to pause to digest the moment experienced in order to acknowledge and identify its impact and what emotion arises as a result. Both Martyro and Veronique Doisneau, in producing affect, functioned as affective (dance) objects. Martyro, in particular, was preoccupied with suspending the moment of ‘the affective hit’ and attempted to do so by remaining ambiguous, by retaining its status as an affective object/event.

3. Martyro (2011), Court Room, Toynbee Studios, London, UK

3.1. ‘Martyro’

The audience enters the room. In the left corner they see an installation. It consists of a ‘girly’, fabric and wood wardrobe that appears fragile and has no doors. Within the wardrobe, they see a pair of men’s black shoes sitting on the wardrobe’s shelf and a men’s black dress shirt hanging on its rack. A text by Pablo Neruda hangs on the inside, back, fabric wall of the wardrobe:

If I die, survive me with such sheer force

that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold;

from south to south lift your indelible eyes,

from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.

I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver;

I don’t want my heritage of joy to die;

don’t call up my person. I am absent.

Live in my absence as if in a house.

Absence is a house so vast

that inside you will pass through its walls

and hang pictures on the air.

Absence is a house so transparent

that I, lifeless, will see you, living,

and if you suffer, I will die again.

A text that offers the definition and noun form of the verb ‘martyro’—the work’s title—and a quote by Gay Hawkins hangs on the wall beside the wardrobe:

Martyro
by Katerina Paramana
μαρτυρώ (v.) (martyro)
	1. to betray, denounce, give away, grass, grass on (colloquial; British),
	to inform against, rat, report, sell down the river, shit, shop, sneak on,
	snitch, snitch on (colloquial), squeal (colloquial), stag, tell on (colloquial)
	2. to attest, bear witness, certify, communicate, demonstrate, denote,
	depose, evidence, give, give-away, manifest, prove, reveal, show,
	suffer, testify
μάρτυρας (n.) (martyras) [plural: martyres]
	deponent, deposer, informant, informer, martyr, sufferer, testifier,
	witness, witnesser
‘[W] hat we want to get rid of tells as who we are…but what we
want to get rid of also makes us who we are’ (Hawkins 2006,
Ethics of waste: How we relate to rubbish, p. 2).

A speech from one of the organizers of the performance platform turns the attention of the audience to the opposite side of the room. At the end of his speech, the organiser introduces the performance, Martyro, and directs their gaze back towards the installation.

A naked figure is now lying still, in foetal position, on the floor inside the wardrobe. An excerpt of Rezso Seress’ original version of ‘Gloomy Sunday’ starts playing. It is a haunting song, sung a Capela in Hungarian by a young female (Szomorú Vasárnap 2010). It is repeated three times. The figure in the wardrobe, extremely slowly, begins to turn her upper body towards the audience by initiating movement from her shoulder. Her arm eventually begins to extend outwards, revealing live aloe vera plants emerging from each of her armpits (Figure 1). She then begins slowly, almost imperceptibly, to come to a standing position. Her field of vision begins to slowly expand. She begins to take in and make eye contact with the audience. Then, very slowly, she exits the room.

Figure 1. Photo of Katerina Paramana performing her work Martyro, Toynbee Studios 2011 (Paramana 2011). First presented at P o P, as part of Performance Matters, a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Roehampton, London and the Live Art Development Agency. Financially assisted by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Photo by Christa Holka, 2011.

This performance of approximately 20 min was based on an idea for a work I had never created, having ‘wasted’ /‘trashed’/ ‘rejected’ it for several years as too personal/private. The images created within it—the aloe vera under my arms—were from a dream I had months before my previous partner even felt ill. That same year, 2005, following a less than three-month period of illness, he died, only a few weeks after diagnosis. In the dream, I was sitting on the sofa reading, when the plants suddenly began sprouting down and out from my armpits pushing my arms outwards, producing at the same time a foul smell. The image created in Martyro both draws from this dream and at the same time considers the healing property of aloe vera. Despite the fact that this loss was for quite some time catastrophic for me and has changed me in many ways, I did not want the work to be ‘emotional’; emotion was kept at bay. I intentionally created a minimalist work that was affective to critically engage with the work’s contexts.

3.2. The Contexts of ‘Martyro’

The work was created and presented as a response to the value and ideological systems of its contexts of presentation, and on which contexts the work depended for its reading. I considered these contexts—the economies of the work’s presentation—to be composed of three concentric circles: the Performance Matters research project (the outer circle); the Performance Matters’ second year symposium theme, ‘Trashing Performance’ (the second circle); and the performance platform in which Martyro was to be presented within this symposium, the ‘Trash Salon: How to do things with waste?’ (the inner circle).

Performance Matters, in which I worked as Associate Researcher, was an AHRC-funded creative research project and collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Roehampton, London and the Live Art Development Agency. It was directed by Professor Adrian Heathfield, Professor Gavin Butt, and Lois Keidan. It investigated ‘the contemporary values associated with performance’ in the contemporary moment and set out to ‘explore the interface between performance theory and practice, as well as differing approaches to performance within higher education institutions and the public sector’ (Performance Matters 2009–2012). The Performance Matters project itself, then, was concerned with questioning the construction of value in relation to performance and its potential to affect what matters and how it matters. In the yearly symposia, lectures, dialogues, and performances, theorists and artists addressed these concerns by commenting on them explicitly or implicitly through their choice of words, images, and actions whether on a page or a stage, and through the ways they situated them within specific existing discourses and economies. The symposia revealed what sorts of things people talk about and consider important in the economy of the academy: what ideas and values they hold and privilege, and for what kind of academy they hope.

‘Trashing Performance’, the second year of the project and the second concentric circle of the context of Martyro’s creation and presentation, was specifically concerned with an exploration of ‘marginal and degraded performance practices…in order to produce critical and cultural innovations through non-institutional manifestations and informal disseminations’ (Performance Matters 2010–2011). In a text that contextualised and elaborated on the year’s theme, the research project’s curators observed that:

Performance has long suffered a history of critical trashings. As Jonas Barish argues in his magisterial study from 1981 The Antitheatrical Prejudice, ‘theatre’ has long been approached in various world cultures as a sign of value-less activity, whilst performance art in the west has, up until very recently, suffered critical and institutional neglect as ‘the runt of the litter of contemporary art’ (Phelan, Unmarked). But to what degree have things changed with the recent embrace of performance in the institutions of contemporary culture?

(Performance Matters 2010–2011)

‘Trashing Performance’, observing that certain forms of performance and Live Art had recently been embraced by institutions of contemporary culture, was interested in four questions: (a) whether and which performance forms are still neglected, are still ‘trashed’ critically and therefore institutionally; (b) how artists today engage with trashing strategies by working in modes or genres considered unworthy of critical acclaim and/or outside the mainstream; (c) what the ‘gendered, racialised, sexualised and classed’ associations, and ethical and political implications, of the term ‘trashy’ itself are; and (d) what potential might emerge from engaging with trashy strategies for the ‘production of the democratic public sphere’ (Performance Matters 2010–2011).

Finally, ‘Trash Salon: How to do things with waste?’, a performance platform within the ‘Trashing Performance’ symposium and the inner concentric circle of Martyro’s context, invited the sharing of ‘wasted works’.

At the Trash Salon, presentations, papers and performances and various show-and-tell formats explored and put to question those ideas, works, and projects that for various reasons were unfinished, refused, rejected, thrown out, and interrupted: the sketch in the notebook, the unsuccessful project proposal, the unaccomplished element, the event that was cancelled. What happens to these wasted works and ideas, and what are their potentials, if any? Does showing wasted work imply salvaging it from the trash heap? Is recuperating and transforming waste enough? Or might we think about the ways we reflect upon, present and perform these wasted works?

(Performance Matters 2010–2011)

The ‘Trash Salon’, although reflecting the concerns of the symposium’s theme, articulated them in more ecological terms, with evaluation of the reasons for a ‘wasted’ or ‘trashed’ work only coming at the end of this articulation.

3.3. On Nuancing and Affects

A response to the call of the symposium and to that of the Trash Salon necessitated an understanding of ‘trash’ culture and what it itself rejects. Bourdieu argues that ‘tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the tastes of others’ (Bourdieu 1984, p. 57). He believes that ‘[i]t is no accident that when they have to be justified, they are asserted negatively, by the refusal of other tastes’ (ibid.). The ‘trash’ culture is a response to the general understanding of what is ‘tasteful’ and ‘appropriate’, what is valued as ‘good’ or ‘worthy’. As with paracinema, ‘trash’ performance is overall characterised by ‘an aesthetic of excess’, which ‘represents an explicitly political challenge to reigning aesthete discourses in the academy’ (Sconce 1995, p. 380). Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke consider the aesthetisation of waste also as something else: ‘an economic move, an attempt to invert value, to recuperate the negative’ (Hawkins and Muecke 2003, p. xi). They argue that waste has a generative dynamic in the formation and destruction and of value. ’Loss, waste and the unproductive are antieconomic. They disturb the logic of “general positivity” that… is what defines an economy: the production of positive value, gain, or benefit’ (Hawkins and Muecke 2003, pp. xi–xii). Hawkins and Muecke also believe that ‘changing relations to waste mean changing relations to self’ (Hawkins and Muecke 2003, p. xiv). In fact, Hawkins argues, ‘what we want to get rid of tells us who we are…but what we want to get rid of also makes us who we are’ (Hawkins 2006, p. 2).

With these three concentric circles in mind (the Performance Matters research project, the ‘Trashing Performance’ Symposium and the ‘Trash Salon’) in creating and presenting Martyro, I was interested in two things: First, addressing the three contexts critically, whilst critiquing my own ideas and values; and doing so by resuscitating a work that I had rejected (according to the ‘Trash Salon’), which also comments on the idea of ‘trash’ (the symposium’s theme), and considers the cultural value of performance in the contemporary world (the concern of the Performance Matters project). Second, I was interested in interrogating how the work, while remaining outside the mainstream, is not characterized by what is conventionally understood as ‘trash aesthetics’ (an aesthetic of visual or emotional excess), therefore creating a tension with the symposium’s theme by using queer strategies: by turning on its head and critically engaging with the context of the symposium’s theme, ‘Trashing Performance’, enabling an act of nuancing of what ‘trash’ might include and therefore of the different ways by which a ‘democratic public sphere’ might be thought to be constituted.2

With this work, I also wanted to nuance and press on terms and their considered significance and efficacy: ‘affect’ versus ‘emotion’ and ‘identity politics’ versus ‘macro politics’. I wanted to evoke affect, for I considered affect more open than emotion, which can be immobilising. Affect hands agency over to the spectator. It encourages an act of deciphering, an effort to identify the situation, what causes the affect, how they experience it, and what emotion emerges as a result.

‘Affect’ is understood…as a dimension of experience which is at once physical and psychological, a domain of varying intensities which are not fully articulated, individuated and represented in consciousness; ‘emotion’ might be understood as what we experience once we have identified an affective shift and represented it to ourselves as something which can be named and which can be understood as happening to us internally as individuals.

(Gilbert 2014, pp. 144–45, my emphasis)

In this way, spectators were afforded the opportunity to attach their emotions to the affect produced by the work and to the work itself.

In addition, by presenting the work as something I had rejected, I wanted to suggest a rethinking of what is most urgent in the contemporary moment: that although identity politics is a crucial issue and the personal is political, what I considered pressing in a moment (and to this day), when democracies across the world are failing, is the making of work that deals with macro politics; because critical to imagining but also materialising a different world is the action of bodies in concert, solidarity amongst oppressed groups—for identity-oppression is rooted in capitalist dynamics (Kumar et al. 2018) and capitalism is predicated on racism (Robinson [1983] 2000)—and a robust anticapitalist movement (Paramana 2021). I suggested, in other words, a shifting of emphasis to what I thought needs to be more urgently addressed through performance in the contemporary moment for—what the year’s theme referred to as—‘the production of a democratic public sphere’ (Performance Matters 2010–2011).

Lauren Berlant, in her talk at the symposium, also urged for an act of nuancing of terms important to it such as ‘trash’, ‘emotion’, ‘excess’ and ‘popular’. They argued that we should not presume a relationship between trashing something and knowing that it is trash or feeling something and knowing what it is, that popular is not always loud and tough, and that we do not have one emotion at a time. As I attempted to gesture towards with Martyro, it is important that the perceived radicality of an act of trashing be questioned, not so that it is rejected, but in order to make it specific and therefore an act that can potentiate change. Berlant proposed that we know that we are in a historical moment when time feels out of joint, because we feel that the conditions of the reproduction of life are threatened (Berlant 2011). It seems that we were, and continue to be, in a historical moment, which requires a rethinking of our strategies for change.

Martyro, as an (im)material affective object/event, attempted to make clear how a dance object’s context—the economy in which a work is presented and its relation to it—can crucially affect a work’s reception and perceived efficacy, and how a work can comment, be complicit with or create tension with that economy. It attempted to potentiate change by affecting those with whom the work engaged. My writing on Bel’s Veronique Doisneau—a dance object which was also affective, but aimed at critiquing the ballet economy instead—reflects on and addresses the questions that arose from the making and experience of presenting Martyro: questions about the production of (im)material objects, specifically of affect and its effects, about the potency of the context of a work’s presentation, and about the politics of the body and its ‘suffering’ in the view of others.