| dc.description.abstract | This thesis focuses on contemporary participatory performance in which
participation is facilitated awkwardly, and in which awkward modes of
participation are welcomed and encouraged. My use of the term ‘awkward’
here is not so much in reference to embarrassment, uneasiness, or social
faux-par, though I do observe and critically respond to such phenomena
throughout. Instead, the term ‘awkward’ is predominantly employed as an
adjective in line with the dictionary definition ‘causing difficulty; hard to do or
deal with’ or ‘not smooth or graceful; ungainly’. Such awkwardness is framed
as productive because of its disruptive relation with the smooth running of
inter-relational encounters. These disruptions, I argue, in turn encourage
critical reflection on our co-presence with others without removing us from that
co-presence. Thus it allows for necessary affective and critical work to occur
within the participatory performance itself as opposed to being delegated to
those not involved and encountering the performances through secondary
sources.
This focus on awkwardness in contemporary participatory performance occurs
in response to what art critic Claire Bishop and others have defined as the
‘Social Turn’ in art and performance. This ‘turn’ refers to the increased critical,
curatorial and cultural attention given to socially engaged, participatory and
relational art practices since the late 1990s. The key aim of this project is to
refocus this attention onto practitioners that, in my reading, have a
productively awkward relation with its rhetoric, ideologies and socio-politics.
My approach to these practices is often supported by the writings of Slavoj
Žižek, especially his employment and supplement of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. His theories of the ‘big Other’ and its ‘super-egoic
injunctions’, of over-identification, of the ‘real’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘imaginary’
registers that structure our reality are worked-through as I develop my own
theories of agency, reality and fantasy, desire, and socio-political efficacy
through critical engagement with awkward participatory performance | |
