I felt comfortably firm and rooted in a decision to not perform that — at the risk of sounding ostentatious — was political. I had stopped making anything resembling performance a while before I’d left New York, but after my move to Berlin, requests to perform surpassed any other invitation. Could people not read my signals? I truly wasn’t interested in presenting my performing self, and by extension the entertaining othered body, to be arranged on a stage — I’d rather be doing something in the dark.

But shifting that aside for now, another reluctance creeps in.

I had been invited to take part in a ‘performance festival’ that would be organized around a schedule of performances, but seemingly without any other underpinning structure or premise beyond the medium itself. Meanwhile, the global art world’s expansive reach had been increasingly subsuming performance, from gallery programming to art fairs to museum departments. The ‘live act’, the experience in ‘real time’: affirmed and promoted, a desire created and then fulfilled.

This manipulation of desire seemed to stand in direct contrast with the arguably oppositional position performance had historically held against the backdrop of Western visual art history. These initially marginalized practices that had averted commercialization and easy consumption, moving counter to a hype-saturated and consumer driven world, were now being employed as adept PR machines for image-conscious art world institutions as they scrambled to tap into the lucrative market around populist event culture. While on one hand serving to correct a historical neglect, this canonizing embrace was, and is, undergirded by an intense and constant drive for more asses in the seats — The Artist James Franco is seemingly always Present — all the while attempting to invoke previous avant-gardist movements and/or capitalizing on contemporary radical social currents. The image is one of a rapacious and opportunistic validating move.

And what of the way ‘liveness’ was being sold? Certain critical thinking around the visual arts would place significance in the idea that it is necessarily difficult for a static, discrete object to directly engage with an audience. Some would further claim that empathy was created in collective experiences of ‘liveness’. Certainly while studying, part of the appeal driving my interest in performance and other alternative artistic practices — these coinciding with similarly-motivated movements for social and political change in the second half of the 20^th century — was in their calling for a different sort of audience engagement, one that Modernist ideas of the singular, autonomous artwork generally failed to provide for. For the work to be politically meaningful — and contemporary — a viewer could not be a passive observer. A certain conscientious presence was required for the completion of the work itself. The art experience is real time.

Growing beyond this initial, perhaps naïve, reading, it’s not a leap to claim that ideally the experience of any artwork could potentially occur in real-time: one’s subjective reflection and confrontation with the work’s affects doesn’t necessitate being in the work’s immediate proximity. You don’t have to see it to know it or feel it. Memories cling to form. With this realization comes a few challenges: how to conceive a perception of performance unravelling in a different sense of ‘live’ time, left unmarked by a singularly determined entry and exit? How could efforts situated between form and formlessness dislodge representation and acts of re-presenting that are embedded within articulations of power? What makes the invisible hypervisible?

The invitation image, of a conservator peering into the depths of the surface of an Ad Reinhardt painting, is a wink to the spectacle implicated in rarity and diagnoses of genius.