In the earliest drafts, scribbles, drawings and notes for what would later become his first happening (and the first happening to be named as such), Allan Kaprow filled some pages of his notebooks with a careful, studious dissection of the human face during the act of laughing. Drawing side-by-side sketches of faces of indeterminate gender, Kaprow superimposed a grid over them, splitting each face into six distinct zones. Next to each expression (grinning, laughing, smirking, etc.) Kaprow noted how each related to different kinds of laughter (Ah-Ah!; or Ha-Ha!; or Ho-Ho!; etc.). This meticulous exercise indicates more than an artist’s curiosity about the expression of emotions. It reveals a close relationship between the genesis of performance art and a kind of ethological approach to the human. Such parascientific drive was fueled by an insight with enormous consequences for the future of performance art as a political-aesthetic endeavor. The realization that even the most visceral human behavior is but the expression of a paradox: what are deemed to be forms of spontaneous individual expression (an outburst of laughter, for instance) are inextricably inscribed in, and prescribed by, a social grid. At the very moment one believes to be expressing oneself most freely, one may find oneself being nothing more than a mere puppet, moved by insidious mechanisms of social control. In many ways, this paradox became performance art’s model for understanding expression, and consequently the role of the individual performer as sovereign and agent. But, if social machines are already operating the individual’s individuality; reversibly, this operated individuality is also always escaping, bypassing, subduing and subverting sociality itself even as it expresses it, even as it reproduces it. Kaprow’s exploration of the mechanisms of laughter, thanks to the drafting and activation of meticulous scores, reveal the economy of these forces informing, forming and deforming every face-to-face interaction – whether we call such interaction ethics (with Levinas) or politics (with Agamben and Arendt). Binding every face to face, an impersonal third element is constantly operating. We may call it, along with Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, José Muñoz and others “performativity.” Paradoxically, as Butler shows in the introduction of her classic Bodies that Matter (1993), it is thanks to this permanently re-citable score, with all its imperative impositions of conformity, that transformations and the formation of resistances (to use Foucault’s expression) are, after all, possible. This was Judith Butler’s radical proposition when she identified (thanks to Derrida) in performativity not only the mechanism for the reiteration of normative social scores, particularly normative social scores for gender roles in their relation to sexual desire, but saw in performativity also the potential for implementing a transformation of these daily performances of subjection. We are never totally outside of power and its grid. We always fight it from within, drawing from it our capacity to act.
Antonia Baehr’s direct equivalent to Kaprow’s meticulous investigation of expression is, of course, her masterpiece Rire/Laugh/Lachen (2008) – where the most “organic” and “spontaneous” forms of laughter are performed by Baehr after scores created for her by friends and family. However, we can also say that all of Antonia Baehr’s prolific body of work navigates the paradoxical lines binding performance art and the politics of expression. Baehr’s works are detailed cartographies of forces of normativization and of forces of invention. In them, two main elements are always present: cross-dressing or drag, and the explicit foregrounding of an underlining score. Recently (Merci, 2006; My Dog is My Piano, 2012; Abecedarium Bestiarium, 2013) a third element has emerged: the animal. This emergence reminds us of Butler’s affirmation (also in the opening pages of Bodies that Matter) that gender distribution precedes the foundation of what is understood by the “human.” Thus, it is not unsurprising that Baehr's work is pursuing this realm of the animal, in its dubious alliance with normative notions of “man” as still the hegemonic compass for subjectivity. Thus, a kind of scientific, indeed ethological rigor must mediate and orientate the bridge between (impersonal, social) score and (embodied, individual) performance. In the case of Baehr, this rigor is found in her extreme virtuosity. Let’s remember here that the science concerned with the logic of how society choreographs agency and subjection Henri Lefebvre called “rhythmanalysis.” Significantly, the most important word in this science binds, once again, performance and politics via the paradox of expression: “dressage” (taming). As Lefebvre writes: “Humans break themselves in [se dressent] like animals. They learn to hold themselves. Dressage can go a long way: as far as breathing, movement, sex. It bases itself on repetition. One breaks-in another human living being by making them repeat a certain act, a certain gesture or movement.” Quite depressing this inevitable self-taming of humans, where in the end, “something passes as natural precisely when it conforms perfectly and without apparent effort to accepted models” (Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, London: 2004, 38-9). In this regard, we can see how Baehr’s works (Laugh, 2008; For Ida, 2011; the Beckettian Over the Shoulder, 2009; or For Faces, 2010) explore this realm of rhythmic expressiveness, in order to perform a deep critique of what it means to “pass as natural.” Particularly important in all of her work has been the issue of passing as male, passing as female. And now, we can even say, passing as human and passing as animal. The operation Baehr so masterfully performs in her works is the demonstration of how, in the midst of conformity, even as we reiterate the social score in all its normative power, there is always the possibility for an active, subversive, combustive opening of a crack; there is always the potential to identify a fissure through which alternative modes of living desire, living corporeality, perhaps even away from gender, away from humanity, may express themselves, outside the grid.
In Merci (2006, a duet with Valérie Castan), modes of taming, dressage, breaking in a subject, breaking in a woman, breaking in a man, are explored in the most minute ways – with explicit references to three kinds of bodies most visibly subjected to social taming: women, dancers and dogs. In this hour-long piece, the stage is occupied by a white parallelepiped – an empty pedestal where Baehr climbs on, and remains, for most of the performance, on all fours. Right from the start the audience is lured into the piece by a disembodied voice, a kind of “Her Master’s Voice,” who instruct us all to “be aware of our feet; be aware of our sits bones; be aware of our breathing” etc. The notion of awareness here, despite the calmness of the voice, and a supposed concern for everyone’s physical well-being, cannot be received without a certain shudder, given its inescapable disciplining tones, and the implicit message that even to be relaxed, we must first undergo a training, if not a certain taming, a domestication of body and attention. This is what Baehr does so well in many of her pieces: at the level of repetition, of citationality, she demonstrates the dubious lines between (social and artistic) scoring and (social and artistic) conformity. This is ruthlessly expressed at the end of Merci, when after the Master’s Voice commands Baehr to say “Thank you” to everyone (which she does, obediently on all fours). Then, the same voice tells her: “Maintenant, fais le chien.” On all fours, on top of the white pedestal, dressed in men’s clothes, Baehr barks, huffs, growls, and howls. She runs around her tail, she sticks her tongue out, breathing quickly. Ridiculous, loving, pathetic, funny, but above all: obedient. But isn’t obedience also the task of the performer, of the dancer, the musician, the actor before a score or a director’s command? Isn’t obedience also not the heteronormative expectation before women’s labor? To carry on the score, to fulfill the instructions, to obey the commands, no matter what, so that a work (even a work of art) may come into the world? There is no becoming-animal here, in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense – it all remains deeply and sadly human, way too human, which is to say: abusive. (Think of Michel Serres, in The Parasite affirming there is only “abuse value” in “human” relations.) Towards the end of the piece, on all fours, yelping like a puppy, Baehr’s body is enveloped by a voice-over in French reading from a manual for training dogs. Baehr shows us how taming is the submission of the animal to a particular perverse project called humanity. By taming a dog we break in humans and animals into an unbearable dialectics of power, immediately reified as the order of nature and as the order of the social (master/animal). With cruel lucidity, the voice tells us: “Le chien, comme vous, fait parti d’une société; de la société.” Capturing the animal to become a part of society as strategy to the taming of beasts (human beasts, non-human beasts, all regimented, recruited by the human-dispositif) is the succumbing to the dark side of social scoring. As Baehr says in Nom d'une pipe (2007, by and with Lindy Annis and Antonia Baehr): “the flowers that you put in a vase on your table have an absurd existence.” Absurd because they are no longer flowers, but objects for domestic delight… They indeed are essential to domesticity.
And yet… if making a cartography of the grid of power were enough, then we would remain only at the level of ethology, of diagnosis – when what matters is the invention and the activation of a politics. Baehr’s activation of a politics through her performance work is where repetition (as machine of differentiation) beats iteration (as machine of performative conformity). Baehr’s uses of repetition makes us see, paradoxically, not only the grid which already breaks us into subjectivity and its assigned roles (man/woman; human/animal; choreographer/dancer) but also how one can always make for oneself a territory, a location, an atmosphere, a dwelling for singularities and the unexpected to be expressed and experienced. Here, we must go back to one of Baehr’s earlier works, the 16 mm black and white short film Erika in Amerika (1999). In this extraordinary film Baehr creates a fantastic creature, a woman-cow, or a cow-woman, with four breasts. The film follows the many adventures (artistic, sexual, familial) of this unnatural beast. At a certain moment, we hear Baehr’s voice invoking, ironically, how the performativity of gender, in its most Butlerian version, is necessary for her to “pass” as an American performance artist. Baehr sees even in the most transgressive political discourses, the potential for ossification. Thus, the film ends with a most amazing, most transgressive, and most beautiful shot. The depiction of what Deleuze and Guattari would call an “unnatural” nuptial. In a close-up, a woman’s face is framed in joyous (sexual? parasexual?) bliss – mouth open, tongue out, she receives and swallows jets of cow’s milk. What would seem the reiteration of a formulaic porn film rhetoric (the cum shot which so boringly ends every hetero sex scene, breaking in hetero-sexuality to be reduced to the big spectacle of male ejaculation) becomes transformed by Baehr’s lens as the actualization of another expression for an altogether different relation to pleasure, to sexuality, to animality, to femininity and implicitly to masculinity; in other words, to the human. Nothing is being tamed here, and yet, the image only works because it somehow repeats (as Butler indicated) a social score of conformity, while having nothing to do with it. It repeats, only to affirm, joyfully, even orgastically, that there is life outside the grid. That life is always living “unnatural” love affairs, always making love. And therefore it is always in love with wild worlds.