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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
References
András, Edit. 2009. Träume ich frei oder auf Befehl? Imaginierte Männlichkeit im sozialistischen Ungarn. In Gender Check. Rollenbilder in der Kunst Osteuropas. Ed. B. Pejić, 58–62. Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig.
Auslander, Philip. 2012. The Performativity of Performance Documentation. In Perform, Repeat, Record. Eds. A. Jones and A. Heathfield, 47–58. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect.
Badura-Triska, Eva and H. Klocker. 2012. Wiener Aktionismus und sein Kontext. Einleitung und thematischer Überblick. In Wiener Aktionismus. Ed. E. Badura-Triska und H. Klocker, 9–14. Vienna: Walther König.
Bal, Mieke. 2006. Kulturanalyse. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Böhme, Hartmut. 2006. Kritik der Melancholie und Melancholie der Kritik. In Kunst der Schatten. Zur melancholischen Grundstimmung des Kinos. Ed. M. Frölich, K. Gronenborn and K. Visarius, 11–27. Marburg: Schüren.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon-Quetigny: les presses du réel.
Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bishop, Claire. 2004. Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. OCTOBER 110: 51–79.
Dahlke, Karin. 2008. Äußerste Freiheit. Wahnsinn/Sublimierung/Poetik des Tragischen der Moderne. Lektüren zu Hölderlins Grund zum Empedokles und zu den Anmerkungen zum Oedipus und zur Antigonä. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann.
Diers, Michael and M. Wagner. Ed. 2010. Topos Atelier. Berlin: Akademie.
Dimitrakaki, Angela. 2013. Gender, artWork and the global imperative. A materialist feminist critique. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press.
Erhart, Walter. 2003. Mann ohne Maske? Der Mythos des Narziss und die Theorie der Männlichkeit. In Männlichkeit als Maskerade. Kulturelle Inszenierungen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. C. Benthien and I. Stephan, 60–80. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau.
Ferguson, Russel. 1990. Introduction: Invisible Center. In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture. Ed. R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. T. Minh-ha and C. West, 9–14. Cambridge, London: MIT Press.
Ficino, Marsilio. 1997. Melancholie und Saturn. In Melancholie oder Vom Glück, unglücklich zu sein. Ed. P. Sillem, 39–53. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.
Forster, Edgar. 1995. Melancholie und Männlichkeit. Über männliche Leidensgeschichten. In The Body of Gender. Körper/Geschlechter/Identitäten. Ed. M. –L. Angerer, 69–90. Vienna: Passagen.
Freud, Sigmund. 1995. On Narcissism: An Introduction. In The Freud Reader. Ed. P. Gay, 545–562. New York/London: Norton.
Freud, Sigmund. 1953–74. The Ego and the Id. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. J. Strachey, vol. 19, 12–59. London: Hogarth.
Hajas, Tibor. 2005. Performance: A halál szekszepilje 1. /Akárhozat esztétikája/[Performance: Der Sexappeal des Todes/Ästhetik der Verdammnis/]. In Szövegek [Texte]. Ed. Éva F. Almási, 329–330. Budapest: Enciklopédia Kiadó.
Jones, Amelia. 1994. Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform Their Masculinities. In: Art History 17/4: 546–584.
Lepecki, André. 2008. Option Tanz. Performance und die Politik der Bewegung. Berlin: Theater der Zeit.
Lepenies Wolf. 1998. Melancholie und Gesellschaft. Mit einer neuen Einleitung: Das Ende der Utopie und die Wiederkehr der Melancholie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Manning, Susan. 2004. Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Menninghaus, Winfried. 2007. Das Versprechen der Schönheit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Reckitt, Helena. 2012. Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics. In Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions. Ed. A. Dimitrakaki and L. Perry, 131–152. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Schings, Hans-Jürgen. 1977. Melancholie und Aufklärung. Melancholiker und ihre Kritiker in Erfahrungsseelenkunde und Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Schneider, Rebecca. 2005. Solo Solo Solo. In After Criticism. New Responses to Art and Performance. Ed. G. Butt, 23–47. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell.
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.
Fig. 2: Günter Brus. 1965. Selbstbemalung II. In Günter Brus. Störungszonen. Ed. B. Schmitz. Cologne: Walther König 2016, 60.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-12906-4_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-12905-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-12906-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)