Foregrounding Deconstruction: A handbook for a critical methodology of artwork

• Published in: Performance research Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 89 - 113
• Main Author: Cassens Stoian, Linda
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis 01.04.2006
• ISSN: 1352-8165; 1469-9990
• DOI: 10.1080/13528160600807786

Let us consider artwork in which its essence is neither anchored in an object nor created by a knowing subject. Rather assume artwork is constituted through an anachronistic cycle, a relational network of discontinuous sites of production and representation entailing a polyphonic chorus of participants. These artworkers, i.e., artists, theorists, curators, historians, public, etc., work on and in artwork in different ways. Thereby artwork is conceived as a multisite of individual and collective commitments and relations grounded in specific atmospheres, infrastructures and discourses, as well as in human emotion, action and understanding. Here the work of art unfolds as the question of its own being - being art - which always needs to remain an open one (Benjamin 1994). In this article my aim is to present and demonstrate a way of addressing performance, the performative and performativity in artwork that is not an ordering or other kind of system. Rather it is a critical methodology that uses 'sensitizing concepts' as opening, extending instruments for reflection as well as production (Clark 2005: 28). This approach is post-modern in that it follows upon the limits or ruins of modernist pursuits of valuative and formal theories about the essence of art. Especially it avoids a basis or striving towards universal definitions and categories. Instead the intention is to establish springboards, demarcated nodes in a network of paths of empirical feeling, doing and thinking. This methodology, this way of proceeding, will not provide prescriptions of what to see but will rather suggest directions along which to travel (Blumer 1969: 147-8).