sven ltticken

PERFORMANCE ART AFTER TV

elevision is video, video is television; they are part of the same technological dispositif. What is a video artist, if not a television producer without a channel at his disposal? The formal characteristics of much video art are hardly compatible with the dominant regime in tv programming; video art has developed its own modes of distribution, mostly based on tapes or dvds sold in limited editions. In the 1970s, Ren Berger distinguished between macro-tv (broadcast television), meso-tv (local cable) and micro-tv (video); at most, some artists managed to infiltrate and utilize the meso level of local cable tv, whose democratic potential was never fully realized.1 While in general it failed to penetrate even this level, video art at its best pushed the logic of television to a point where the mediums potential and its failings, its complexity and its contradictions, were illuminated. Television was the first medium that transmitted a potentially uninterrupted flow of images into peoples homes, penetrating daily life much more thoroughly than film had done. The formats developed to fill this flow also created new forms of performance. In the 1960s, Andy Warhols pop prophecy that everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes both articulated a fundamental transformation and belied its complexity. If it emphasized the element of accelerationfame becoming ephemeralit failed to note that time has also been dilated through the creation of what one might term general performance, a performance no longer bound by the conventional duration of plays or films. If Warhols menagerie of superstars was in many ways prophetic of the emergence of new forms of self-acting, of the reality tv of recent decades with its disposable celebrities, the role of performance in 1960s art was more complex than overly linear narratives of the co-optation or appropriation of the avant-garde suggest.

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During the 1960s, performance art was not yet a common term for denoting the new forms of live art. The new theatricality was conceptualized in different ways: as event, as happening or, in Germany, as Aktion. Nonetheless, at the beginningsin John Cages work, for example there was the question of performance: performance for television. The scores for Cages pieces Water Walk and Sounds of Venice, both dated 1959, are subtitled for solo television performer. In 1960, Water Walk was actually performed by Cage himself on a popular tv game show. But what are the specific properties of a television performer and of television performance? How has televisual performance infiltrated and shaped art since the early 1960s? And how do video and performance art intervene in the temporality of tv and the new, televisual modes of acting?

Real-time image
In contrast to most of Warhols 1970s video projects, Water (1971) was not intended for television, but it shares an important characteristic with those other works: the role of the human voice, of conversation.2 When Warhol tv pilots such as Phoney or Fight show people on the phone or fighting, the dialogue is clearly audible; by contrast, the conversation in Water consists of mumbled small talk from off-screen; what one sees is a detail of the office water-cooler, around which the speakers have supposedly gathered, perhaps discussing last nights tv. The cooler fills the screen and becomes its doublea plastic surface with bubbles rising behind it, functioning as pure light waves, a kind of empty yet oddly pregnant televisual time. The voices articulate this time, albeit informally, through a gentle swelling and ebbing of conversation. But as video performance, the water-cooler conversation stops being a break and becomes a new form of labour. In his philosophy of video, Maurizio Lazzarato states that capitalism and its technologies introduce movement and time into images, and vice versa. But in contrast to Gilles Deleuze, he does not consider the
Ren Berger, Video and the Restructuring of Myth, in Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons, eds, The New Television: A Public/Private Art, Cambridge, ma 1977, pp. 20621. 2 Water was made for a show by Yoko Ono at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, ny. Collaborating with George Maciunas, Ono invited a number of artists to send in water-based works for A Water Event.
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cinema to be the primary agent of the technological liberation of the flow of becoming from traditional Western representation. Film and photography are both machines that crystallize time: photography does so by freezing it, while film creates an illusion of movement; only video captures movement itself by transmitting the vibrations of light. Film stays too close to a model of representation as impression on a medium, whereas video images are not representations or reproductions of reality, but oscillations of light, contractions and expansions of light waves and thus of time itself. For the Bergsonian philosophical lineage, matter already consists of light in time; it is not so much that the brain perceives matter and transforms it into representations; rather, the brain is an interface between received movements (excitations) and executed movements (responses). Like our brain/body, Lazzarato emphasizes, media technologies are interfaces that modulate time.3 The point is an important one for historical-cultural analysis. Like Deleuze, Lazzarato to some extent ontologizes and naturalizes history; yet the work still retains a potential for historical analysis. In fact, with its attempts to infuse history with becoming, opposing teleological and dialectical schematizations with paeans to unbound duration, neo-Bergsonian philosophy itself mirrors the increasing integration of history and subjective duration since the mid-20th century. As daily life is increasingly infiltrated by media that shape our time, the temporality of daily life is synchronized or syncopated with historical events in ever more complex ways. Lazzaratos video philosophy could be read as a montage of Henri Bergsons thought and the writings of the video artist Nam June Paik. Crucially, in the 1960s Paik came to realize that Cages reduction of music to one of its basic elements, timemost radically in 433made sense in televisual terms: what is tv but a potentially permanent flow of time-signals that needs to be articulated in some way, as Cage did with his compositions? Decades before his manifold appearances in Paiks work during the 1970s and 1980s, Cage had appeared on the popular tv quiz show, Ive Got a Secret, in 1960. Here, he performed his piece Water Walk, based on his earlier Water Music, with the overlaid sheets
Maurizio Lazzarato, Videophilosophie: Zeitwahrnehmung im Postfordismus, trans. Stephan Geene and Erik Stein, Berlin 2002, pp. 24, 48, 71, 47.
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from Fontana Mix used as compositional tool.4 Asked by the shows host if it was okay if the audience laughed, Cage responded that he preferred laughter to tearsand proceeded to drop items in a bathtub, boil water and push radios off tables (the latter a stand-in for turning them on and off, which was not possible due to a union dispute at the tv station)all with meticulous precision. Perhaps the greatest televisual Cagean moment is Cages own performance of 433 in Paiks A Tribute to John Cage (1973/76), made for the pbs stations wnet in New York and wghb in Boston: Cage sits behind a grand piano on Harvard Square, surrounded by a curious crowd that bursts into applause when, after four minutes and thirty-three seconds, Cage, with a pleased but somewhat exhausted look, finishes the piece and rises. In the 1960s, Al Hansen argued that 433 had announced happenings by activating audience members, whose sometimes-hostile reactions became part of the piece.5 Here, the reactions are much more cheerful, and the compatibility of this emancipated audience with the logic of television also becomes apparent. With Bergson and Deleuze, Lazzarato posits two different syntheses of time. The first is the material synthesis of the body, of the sensory-motor functions; this is the time of habit, of everyday perception. The second is the spiritual synthesis, that of memory proper: here virtual memoryimages are actualized, and time truly becomes a deep, non-chronological duration. Even at the first level, time is already modulated, contracted and extended; but, as in our daily lives, new images are generated in largely predetermined ways. Lazzarato argues that some video pieces imitate the second, spiritual rather than material synthesis: here, memory actualizes the past in the form of memory-imagescontraction and expansion no longer bear on time-matter, on image-matter, but on the past. It is electronic editing and image-manipulation that enable an imitation of the free play of memory: with Bergson, one could say that the electronic processing of images simulates memory and intellectual labour, rather than being the equivalent of the material syntheses of time.6
Dieter Daniels, Vom Readymade zum Cyberspace: Kunst/Medien Interferenzen, Ostfildern-Ruit 2003, p. 18. On this performance see also Ina Blom, Signal to Noise, Artforum, vol. 40, no. 6, February 2010, pp. 1704, 226. 5 Al Hansen, A Primer of Happenings and Time/Space Art, New York 1965, p. 35. 6 Lazzarato, Videophilosophie, pp. 73, 345, 48.
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Everyday temporalities
Such a schematic equation of electronic image manipulation and memory is clearly insufficient, however, since mainstream tv develops ever more subtle editing methods and uses digital graphics in ways that are compatible with its non-intrusive functioning in daily life, in accordance with the mental routines of its consumers. More and more, tv has come to combine various streams with pre-recorded material and graphics, modulating time with unprecedented flexibility, while the rigidity of its formats seamlessly reintegrates the results. Lazzarato faintly acknowledges this by arguing that commercial television betrays the ontological promise of video: it is a power structure that imprisons time.7 It is characteristic of tv that it often serves as a moving background to other activitieseating, housework, waitingwhich can themselves generate a dulling, monotonous temporality that television can infuse with different rhythms. The remote control, in turn, can modify the cadences created by tv programming itself. Sean Snyders 2007 video Schema (Television) is an intricate montage of seemingly disparate tv shows, from weather forecasts to cooking programmes and political documentaries, with some animals thrown in; none of the clips last more than a few seconds. While the work can be read as a critique of televisions relentless reduction of news to entertainment, this quite generic move only becomes effective because of a somewhat unsettling flattening of affect that seems to characterize the subject who is performing this improvised editbut is there even a subject behind these acts? In some parts of the video, the menu of a digital tv provider is visible; this is television that has already become part of a universal media machine, formed by computer technology. If in modernity to look and to be looked at become value-productive forms of labour, this did not become fully explicit in the cinematic regime of the pre-war period. It was only in the post-cinematic constellation shaped by tv during the 1950s and 1960s that viewing itself increasingly became an economic act. In the cinema, the immediately value-productive act was the buying of a ticket, whereas with televisionat first in the us, later elsewhere viewing numbers and ratings came to determine advertising revenue. Furthermore, television created a distorted capitalist realization of the
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Lazzarato, Videophilosophie, p. 75.

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quality that Walter Benjamin had ascribed to film under socialism: Some of those taking part in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselvesand primarily in their own work process. In Western Europe today, the capitalistic exploitation of the film obstructs modern mans legitimate claim to be reproduced.8 Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miville seemingly honoured this claim with Numro deux (1975), a film essay in which the screen is constantly filled with tv images, with monitors. In Numro deux, the cinema becomes a site for reflection on the new media regime. We see Godard himself in an editing suite and video images of a working-class family, predominantly played by non-actors. The man works in a factory, the woman does work at home that is not really being recognized as work. The film centres on this domestic site, not on the factorya site that is being transformed by television. It is not for nothing that many tv formats have been built on some form or semblance of the home, from mtvs The Real World to Big Brother: here, what was once the sphere of private family life, following certain established rules, becomes a social factory in which roles are constantly reconfigured. In the televisual age, it is not that pre-existing labour is being reproduced, but that the act of being on tv becomes a model for labour as such. In that sense, Warhols water-cooler video is symptomatic: Warhol does not reproduce industrial or even post-industrial (office) work, but voices that tell us of daily, relaxed self-performance during leisure momentsthe kind of spontaneity that television strives to create. Post-televisual technology, represented by the rise of YouTube celebrities and bloggers, has exacerbated this development, which entails the production of new subjectivities. Contra Lazzarato, we could say that the temporal novelty of tv and video resides not in the supposed ontological superiority of light waves, but in their doubling and articulation of the time of life, the time of performance. What matters is precisely the interaction, the montage, between technological and subjective timeand this montage is not so much the breakthrough of immemorial Being, a realization of a timeless duration, but a historical change in and of being itself, a mutation in and of time and therefore, in Alain Badious words, an eruption of the ontologically un-founded and the transcendentally discontinuous.9
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version, Selected Writings, Vol. IV: 19381940, Cambridge, ma 2003, p. 262. 9 Alain Badiou, The Event in Deleuze, trans. Jon Roffe, Parrhesia, no. 2, 2007, p. 42.
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General performance
It is suggestive that Cages Water Walk was structured in part by turning radios on and off; Lazzarato argues that television is closer to radio and telephony than to film, which, since it does not consist of a continuous signal, necessarily presents delayed representations of temporal syntheses. Warhol titled one of his video-tv projects Phoney, bringing to mind Marshall McLuhans remark that the word phoney entered the English language after the advent of the telephone.10 Showing self-absorbed performers chatting away, the piece suggests that not only the talkers but the medium of television itself is phoney, a close relative of the telephonea live signal that flows into the house like water through pipes, in no need of cuts or editing. Even if not all projects consisted of one single take, like Water, editing in Warhols video-tv projects of the 1970s remained fairly minimal for years; only in the late 1970s and early 1980s would he adopt a more conformist type of montage, leading to his mtv shows. In the early versions of the score for Cages 433, the piece was presented as being for any instrument or combination of instruments, though the piano version would be the dominant one. In proportional notation, the score consists of vertical lines, indicating durationpure time. Already here one may wonder why there even has to be any instrument, and in 1962 Cage radicalized the piece as 000, also known as 433 no. 2: this was now a solo to be performed in any way by anyone, consisting of the performance of a disciplined action. The written score clarifies: No two performances to be of the same action, nor may that action be the performance of a musical composition. The work can be seen as Cages response to the development of a new kind of performance by a younger generation of artists, associated with Fluxus and with happenings; indeed, the score of 000 is dedicated to Yoko Ono and her then-husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi.11 If the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s mounted a prolonged critique of medium-specificity, resulting in the advent of generic art, or art-ingeneral, there were various routes to the post-specific. One, traced by Thierry de Duve, centred around the modernist painting that, when
Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, New York 1990, p. 141. See Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage, New York 2008, pp. 161 and 405 n.21.
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reduced to a bare canvas, to its physical medium, turned into an arbitrary object among othersthis, the triumph of the readymade at the heart of modernism, is the development that Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried desperately tried to stave off in the 1960s. By contrast, the impact of Cagewhich the young artists, especially Allan Kaprow, hybridized with their interpretation of action paintingplaced the emphasis on general performance as a form of intermedia.12 But while the new forms of post-disciplinary performance temporarily brought down the walls between music, theatre and the visual arts, general performance as an art form was in turn part of a wider redefinition of performance. The term performance is slippery even within relatively well-defined contexts. In todays culturalized economy, it not only refers to the productivity of ones labour but also to ones actual, quasi-theatrical selfpresentation in an economy in which work has become more dependent on immaterial factors. As an artist, writer or curator, you perform by doing your job; but your job includes giving talks, going to openings, being in the right place at the right time. General performance transcends the limits of the (still) specific domain of performance art; as self-performance that goes beyond the mere execution of tasks, it is the basis of the new regime of labour. As both exemplary and eccentric manifestations of this new regime, some artistic practices from the 1960s and beyond can help bring into focus the new performative regimeand its close ties to television formats that depend on non-professional actors. In his 1965 book on happenings, Hansenone of Cages New School students in the late 1950silluminates the pivotal role of 433. In not providing anything that resembled a traditional musical performance, Cage turned the tables on the listeners: the audience realizes that it is turned into the performer, and provides a performancebooing, scraping chair legs, chatting, moving about, visiting each other and going to the rest rooms.13 Not only does Cages mode of composition replace the musical what with the musical whenthat is to say, a pure temporalization, as Ina Blom puts itbut it is a when in which the traditional distinction between passive audience and active performer is under attack.14 The activated spectator of post-Cagean performance has his or her mass-media
12

For Thierry de Duves account of generic art, see Kant After Duchamp, Cambridge, Hansen, A Primer of Happenings, p. 35. Ina Blom, Signal to Noise.

ma 1996.
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counterpart in television, the medium which promises to elevate audience members to momentary, small-scale (small-screen) stardom. Cage in the quiz show is not a famous composer; he is a member of the public, albeit more eccentric than most, performing some strange tricks. Next week, there will be someone else.

Liberations
Happenings, Allan Kaprow noted, should be unrehearsed and performed by non-professionals, once only:
A crowd is to eat its way through a roomful of food; a house is burned down; love letters are strewn over a field and beaten to pulp by a future rain; twenty rented cars are driven away in different directions until they run out of gas . . . Not only is it often impossible and impractical to rehearse and repeat situations like these, but it is also unnecessary. Unlike the repertory arts, the Happenings have a freedom that lies in their use of realms of action that cannot be repeated.15

After the early years, in which happenings still took place in indoor spaces, amidrather than in front ofan audience, Kaprow sought to demolish the distinction between performers and audience more radically, holding happenings without prior public announcement in urban public spaces or in the countryside. Kaprow termed this form the activity happening, in which there should not be (and usually cannot be) an audience that watches, as distinct from the participants and passersby. This kind of happening is directly involved in the everyday world, ignores theatres and audiences and partakes in the unconscious daily rituals of the supermarket, subway ride at rush hour, and tooth brushing every morning.16 Kaprows main model for the acting in happenings was the performance of everyday tasks, which can become newly visible and strange if they are performed with a greater degree of conscious attention. The distinction between performer and public having been eroded, the performer becomes his or her own double, his or her own audience. Cages Water Walk, of course, was also based on everyday actions such as
Allan Kaprow, The Happenings Are Dead: Long Live the Happenings!, in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1993, pp. 634. 16 Kaprow, Pinpointing Happenings, in Essays, p. 87.
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turning on the radio, but with a twist. Warhol, who was both well aware of the early happenings and a connoisseur of tv, staged his own nonstop speed-freak happening at the Factory, of which his films showed often supremely mundane extracts. The self-performance of Warhols superstars would appear to be early instances of a form that general performance would increasingly take. In 1970, when the German Fluxus/happening artist Wolf Vostell released a sequel to a 1965 publication in which he and Jrgen Becker had attempted to document the new general performance art, Vostell argued that after May 1968 such documentation could no longer be restricted to Fluxus and happenings. Echoing the rhetoric of his friend Jean-Jacques Lebel, Vostell claimed that the various protest movements of recent years had abolished any difference between life and art.17 Hence, the performers whose actions his new book documented include Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Rudi Dutschke and Abbie Hoffman as well as Kaprow and Higgins and the communards Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans, who in Kommune 1 lived the liberated life in public. The books cover image is in fact an infamous photograph of naked members of Kommune 1 seen from behind. If this photo was originally staged in 1967 as a protest against police arreststhe communards have their hands against the wallit quickly became an icon of the Kommune as the site of an authentic life, lived without bourgeois shame. The point is not, of course, that Vostell and Lebel were right in their grand claims about the complete fusion of art and life, but that for once the insufferable self-promoter Vostell put his finger on something when deciding that a 1970 anthology of actions could no longer be content with listing the works of a certain group of post-Cagean artists. Kommune 1 had its roots as much in the artistic neo-avant-garde as in the student movement and new left; the second half of the sixties saw the widespread adoption of happenings and events outside the art world in the strict sense, both for commercial and countercultural purposes. One of the communes founders was Dieter Kunzelmann, a former member of the Situationist-affiliated spur group, who practised a crypto-Situationist actionismprogressively trying to realize the avant-garde programme of the abolition of alienated and alienating art in favour of a liberated life by creating shocking events intended to rouse
Wolf Vostell, [Introduction], in Aktionen: Happenings und Demonstrationen seit 1965. Eine Dokumentation, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1970.
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the populace from their stupor. Kommune 1 was to be a radicalized form of general performance outside the confines of even the most extended definition of art: lived biopolitics. In its later stages, before disintegrating in 1969, Kommune 1 was courted by celebrities and was generally happy to provide titillating images of the liberated life for mainstream magazinesthe model Uschi Obermaier was a particular favourite. Recently Rainer Langhans, one of the co-creators of Kommune 1, dominated the national media for weeks when he participated in the German version of Im a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. While traditional tv formats of the 1950s and 60s such as I Have a Secret gave their contestants quite literally fifteen minutes of fame, after which they would go back to being ordinary citizens, the new formats of the 1990s and beyond operate very differently: their participants at least try to remain in the limelight, to live their lives in public. Langhanss media career can be seen as the model, in Germany, for this type of lifelong self-performance; there have been lulls, but he has never really been away. If Im a Celebrity as a tv programme follows a rigid format, Langhans obviously thought he could infuse the proceedings with his sponti performance, possibly taking for granted that this performance would be neutralized as eccentric authenticity in a format depending on characters. Such neutralization was at work even in Cages Water Walk performance, but he was able to control the conditions of his performance to a far greater extent, and did not have to crawl through maggots. Most crucially, after the opening interview with the host, Cage could follow his own score, even if this score was in turn integrated into the programme. By now television is no longer quite itself; as with practically all media, it has been integrated into the digital meta-medium, into a programmed culture in which social networks and the data mining that makes them potentially profitable constitute the new horizon of self-performance.18 Cage performing on I Have a Secret proved to be a crucial historical moment: giving fundamental impulses to the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s, Cagean performance in general can be seen as bridging two regimes of televisual performance. But if todays media self-performance is in many ways a debased form of the general performance instigated in the avant-garde around 1960, one should not create a linear narrative of co-optation. Rather, general performance for tv and general
On data mining, see Joe Scanlan, The Uses of Disorder, Artforum, vol. 48, no. 6, February 2010, p. 165.
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performance in art have co-existed and influenced each other for decades, mutually illuminating each other. Starting in the 1960s, Wim T. Schipperswho with Willem de Ridder and for a short period Stanley Brouwn made up the Dutch Fluxus contingent(co-)created a number of tv shows that brought Cagean lessons to a mainstream audience.19 The Situationists, not entirely without reason, attacked the famous appearance of the first nude woman on Dutch tv, Phil Bloom reading a newspaper on Hoepla, as advanced spectacle.20 But like Schipperss earlier Manifestation on the Beach at Petten, which involved the artist emptying a bottle of lemonade into the sea for the tv show Signalement, one can see this as pushing the televisual pseudo-event to a moment when its fundamental emptiness becomes explicit. Like the lemonade pouring, Phil Blooms naked newspaper reading was oddly understated and matter-of-fact, a non-event completely at odds with the media backlash it occasioned. Pressing the vaudeville side of Fluxus, Schippers explored a populist version of Cagean emptiness. The episode of the 1962 tv arts programme Signalement that was master minded entirely by Schippers and de Ridder began with the image of an announcer tilted at 45 degrees, talking without sound; a bit later, the same announcer appeared the right way up and with sound, performing an Emmett Williams piece by saying If La Monte Young is watching this programme, will he please phone Amsterdam 24087. George Maciunas apparently suggested these tv events.21 The programme, which also contained segments on Pop Art, Nouveau Ralisme and Zero, included completely scripted interviews in which the flow of words was interrupted by ringing phones, close-ups of cakes, and the elaborate lighting of cigarettes and pouring of drinks, accompanied by clanging spoons and cups, devices that anticipated Schipperss later tv work. In the 1970s, he was the co-creator of comedy shows such as De Fred Hach Show and Barend Is Weer Bezig, in which semi-professional performers who looked anything but glamorous had to deal with Schipperss highly precise and
See the early article on Fluxus and Schipperss tv work by Frans Haks, Over Fred Hach, Barend Servet, Fluxus en Wim T. Schippers, Museumjournaal, vol. 18, no. 6, December 1973, pp. 24651. 20 Le point culminant de loffensive du spectacle, Internationale Situationniste, no. 12, September 1969, p. 50. 21 Actie, werkelijkheid en fictie in de kunst van de jaren 60 in Nederland, Rotterdam 1980, pp. 6771.
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strangely stilted dialogues, as well as collapsing sets and seemingly incompetent crews who could forget to include the performers heads in the shot. The breakaway star of these programmes was Sjef van Oekel, played by Dolf Brouwersa melodramatic and absent-minded narcissist, spouting non sequiturs, whose programme Van Oekels Discohoek featured genuine international rock musicians coping with the chaos staged by Schippers and Co.

Feedback
By the late 1960s, as artists were increasingly using video and reflecting on television, the eventual integration of tv into a post-televisual regime of information technology was already on the horizon. Critics and artists concocted a blend of cybernetics and systems theory, studying both natural and information systems, and emphasizing the cybernetic notion of feedback in both cases. The cybernetic study of communication as controlintimately connected to Second World War-era research into radar and early information technologywas de facto subsumed to systems theory, which originated in biology. In the words of Hans Haacke, who was introduced to systems analysis and cybernetics by the American critic and theorist Jack Burnham in 196566: A system is most generally defined as a grouping of elements subject to a common plan or purpose. He added that he thought the term system in art should be reserved for sculptures in which a transfer of energy, material or information occurs, and which do not depend on perceptual interpretation.22 In the late 1960s, Haacke moved from investigating natural systems in pieces dealing with wind or condensation, for exampleto social systems. He started presenting visitor polls as artworks in 1969 with Gallery-Goers Birthplace and Residence Profile at the Howard Wise Gallery, the viewers becoming cybernetic performers by answering questions. Within the broader economy, polls and profiles would go on to become ever more prominent, up to todays online profiles. Neither a technocratic affirmation nor an abstract rejection, Haackes pieces attempt to play the system, to intervene in it through strategic mimicry. In the 1970 Museum of Modern Art Information show, which was
Hans Haacke, quoted in an interview with Jeanne Siegel, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, ma 1999, p. 243.
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shaped by cybernetics, he presented a poll with a single political question, on Governor Rockefellers stance on Vietnam. That Rockefeller was also a moma trustee was not stated, but for those in the know it served to underscore the interrelations between the art world and other social systems.23 If the moma poll used relatively simple mechanical technologya counting device triggered by the ballotsHaackes contributions to Jack Burnhams 1970 Software show at the Jewish Museum were more technologically ambitious. News brought a live stream of news from various agencies being printed out as it came in. Haacke also prepared an automated version of Visitors Profile which allowed for a more complex array of questions than the mechanical moma version: a flow chart starts with some basic questions dividing the participants into social groups (age, gender), and proceeds with questions such as Do you like school? (for those who still attend school) or Would you mind bussing your child to integrate schools?24 The flow chart keeps refining the respondents social profiles, through questions on income and religious affiliation, while asking for opinions on a variety of social and political issues. Visitors were to answer the questions on a teletype hooked up to a picture scope, and the computer programme to be written on the basis of Haackes flow chart would allow for real-time data processing, with the permanently changing results of the poll projected on a wall via video.25 Unfortunately, technological problems prevented the work from being realized. In a polemical turn against idealist notions of art appreciationthink of Frieds presentnessBurnham stressed that these computer systems deal with real time events, events which are uncontrived and happen under normal circumstances. All of the data processing systems I have referred to are built into and become a part of the events they monitor.26 In the same sense, tv becomes integrated into a post-televisual dispositif; this is not the real time of live transmission, but of the nearinstant processing and display of data that functions as feedback in a
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era, Berkeley and Los Angeles 2009, pp. 1903. 24 Flow charts for the unrealized Software version of Vistors Poll, Hans Haacke archive. 25 Haacke, Visitors Profile 1969, in Software, New York 1970, p. 34. 26 Jack Burnham, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art, New York 1974, p. 30.
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communications system. In the world of cybernetics and systems theory, there is no outside, no beyond the system: there is only perpetual finetuning by responding to feedback and adjusting ones acts accordingly; what is possible though, as Haackes work and some of the responses to it show, is to provide undesirable feedbackmutant signals.

Inside cybertime
Burnhams and Haackes real-time systems depend on the combination of computer and video technology. Already in the 1940s, the cathode ray tube had become an integral element of the computer; if information technology would end up transforming television, tv had already enabled the spread of the computer. Paik was not wrong when he evocatively characterized the birth of cybernetics from the spirit of television:
Newtons physics is the mechanics of power and the unconciliatory twoparty system, in which the strong win over the weak. But in the 1920s a German genius put a tiny third-party between these two mighty poles (cathode and anode) in a vacuum tube, thus enabling the weak to win over the strong for the first time in human history. It might be a Buddhistic third way, but anyway this German invention led to cybernetics, which came into the world in the last war to shoot down German planes from the English sky.27

In this Paikean culture we have, paradoxically, moved far beyond the confines of a video philosophy that wants to base itself upon a privileged ontological status; we are entering a post-video regime in which a different real-time performance dominates. Harun Farockis double video projection, Eye/Machine iii (2003), and the related single-channel film Erkennen und Verfolgen, investigate the use of tv cameras in self-guiding missiles, combining footage from recent wars with images from Vietnam, and Nazi experiments with a television bomb, integrating the tv screen into a cybernetic system of real-time feedback. Farocki charts a different real-time feedback system in his multi-channel video installation Deep Play (2007). This shows the 2006 World Cup final in Berlin, in real time, with the other channels showing moving digital diagrams intended to give trainers, players or
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Nam June Paik, Cybernated Art, in Manifestos, New York 1966, p. 24.

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commentators better insight into the game: players become moving dots, or arrows. This aspect of the piece recalls a phrase by Vilm Flusser, in whose work Farocki has had a longstanding interest. Writing about the city of Cologne, Flusser stated that its inhabitants are densely scattered swarms of points, moving data in a real-time system: The human being can no longer be seen as an individual but rather as the opposite, a dense scattering of parts; he is calculable.28 In simultaneously broadcasting live video footage and morphing diagrams of the game in progress, Deep Play shows feedback in action: the use of data for improving performance; not for nothing is cybernetics intimately associated with the rise of the diagrammatic flow chart in the postwar era. In the late 1960s, with films such as Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki had participated in the rediscovery of the politicized montage of Soviet cinema; Eisensteins dialectical montage, joined with Brechtian strategies, seemed to hold the promise of social intervention. In the post-cinematic world of Auge/Maschine and Deep Play, a revolutionary transformation is hard to conceive. Indeed, with his parallel montages on multiple channels, Farocki intervenes in the diagrammatic relations that constitute actually existing cybernetics, offering and stimulating like Haackes systems piecesa rather different kind of feedback. However, such mutant feedback obviously constitutes a relatively weak signal in what Franco Berardi calls our cybertime. In Precarious Rhapsody, Berardi notes that cyberspace is endless, but cybertimethe organisms capacity for processing information from cyberspaceis not.29 Increasing flexibility has led to an increase in psychopathologies. A commercial by an internet company showing a manager happily absconding from the office and enjoying the park on a beautiful summers day puts a positive spin on the fact that the office, for many people, is now everywhere and all the time. The burnout syndrome, that new mass disease, is a temporal pathologya time-ache. We may be swarming dots, but we are pathological dots, sick from the real-time results of our inscription in social media. Under the working conditions of Fordist capitalism, with the archetypal conveyor belt, the time of work could still be experienced as an imposition on life; in post-Fordism, when the time of work increasingly coincides with the time of life, we are entering a regime that I
Vilm Flusser, The City as Wave-Trough in the Image-Flood, Critical Inquiry, vol. 31, no. 2, Winter 2005, pp. 327, 324. 29 Franco Bifo Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody, London 2009, pp. 6971.
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have elsewhere called that of concrete abstraction; financially as well as technologicallyand in financial technologyabstraction has become concretized.30 This is Berardis cybertime, with its pressures and pathologies. Perpetually alert for the next message notification, workers are perennially concerned with their futures; it is a time of generalized suspense. Every act or non-act can have repercussions on ones career; one is forever following and trying to boost the market rate of ones future, or ones futures. The realm of concrete abstraction is thus marked by feedback. Television has been integrated into this real-time system as one app among others. In 2009, Haacke paid homage to Silvio Berlusconi in a church in Como with Once Upon a Time. On the empty, damaged parts of the Baroque frescos, Haacke projected live streams of three Berlusconicontrolled tv channels. The piece can be seen as an update of News, perhaps most of all because of an additional element: projected tickers with the latest quotes from the Milan stock exchangeincluding the rates for Berlusconis Mediaset. If Haackes early experiment with realtime systems presupposed that feedback mechanisms could be used for progressive purposes, Once Upon a Time shows a stream of images that viewers cannot act upon and a parade of financial data on which only a small group of investors could have an effect, even while it affected millions of lives.31 In late 2011, Berlusconi was finally (though perhaps just temporarily) deposed not by a popular movement, but by pressure from the financial markets to which he had become a liability rather than an asset; the Italian version of neo-liberalism needed to be normalized, divested of its grotesque sub-Mussolinian operetta traits. What remains is a (post-)televisual state shaped by the perpetual feedback of exchange rates and financial news, in which the only chance of participation that most viewers have is to self-perform in one of the many game and quiz shows on which Berlusconi built his media empire. The subject of Harun Farockis single-channel video Worte und Spiele (1997) is the production of three German afternoon talk shows and game shows. Perhaps the most striking section is the first, on the talk show Vera am Nachmittag, which in this case is dedicated to the topic
Ltticken, Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle, New York and Berlin 2009. 31 On Once Upon A Time, see also Alexander Alberro and Nora M. Alter, System, Dialectics and Castles in the Sky, in Hans Haacke: Castles in the Sky, Madrid 2012, pp. 209.
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of long-distance relationships. Farocki re-cuts the show and its preparations, focusing on briefings of the guests, rehearsals, and people waiting behind the scenes, as well as on the actual showin the latter case, however, breaks in the recording session are as important as the moments when the cameras are rolling. The shows rigorously regulated temporal flow is modulated, morphed into a different rhythm in which moments of waiting and preparation are important. These programmes have since disappeared, in part because of the rise of reality formats that are cheaper to produce than studio-based shows; but this does not mean that Worte und Spiele is now only of archaeological significance. Much is to be gleaned from the way in which Farocki shows self-performers rehearsing or biding their time, waiting to spring into action. During a discussion between guests, his camera catches the talk-show host alternating between attentive and supportive focus on these people, with lots of nodding and sideways glances at members of her team. Everybody plays their part, yet in these moments of suspension, of potentiality, different actions and improvised scripts can be imagined. In a related work, Interview (1996), Farocki shows scenes from a number of seminars or training sessions in which people are taught how to present and sell themselves during job interviews. They are given lessons in self-performance. Some of the sessions are aimed at the unemployed or at youngsters who have just left school, while othersmuch more expensive, obviouslycater to highly paid managers. In several cases, video playback is used to give a trainee insight into the image he or she projects, and its possible divergence from their self-image; the use of video for feedback has moved from psychotherapy to training for semiotic capitalism. Recording this video playback, Farocki offers another form of feedback, one thatfrom the vantage point of the systemis superfluous and excessive. In creating this constellation of the various types of actors, from managerial self-performers to people who just want to get a job and who, in some cases, have to learn the basics of re-presenting themselves, Farocki momentarily (though only virtually) sets his subjects free from the feedback loops of their respective seminars.

De-programming?
If we are highly potential creatures, as Paolo Virno argues, under the conditions of industrial capitalism this potential takes the form of labour powerthat is, it is redefined in quantitative terms, as the expected

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average performance.32 Post-Fordist ideology and, to some extent, practice go beyond the classic industrial use of the human potential as generic, abstract labour powera power reduced to a statistical average, to a number of repetitive actions performed in accordance with carefully calculated standards. Post-Fordism wants to mine not just the workers potential for repetitive acts, but also for more personalized touches, for creative self-performance. Television, with its more accessible formats demanding more and more spontaneous performers, was the medium that allowed this self-performance to develop and mature. Now that we are labouring inside this regime, the question arises of how we can mine that part of our potential which is not part of the programme. In his installations, radio pieces and videos (the latter often made together with Eva Meyer), Eran Schaerf focuses on situations that are to some extent programmed in more ways than one; they may be programmed by software, by digital codes, yet these are usually shaped in turn by cultural, economic and political constraints that determine among other thingswhich types of performance are allowed. In much talk radio, the apparently unmediated and spontaneous contributions of listeners are largely determined by the shows format, which in general necessitates going from one person venting his spleen or telling us about personal problems to the next. In Schaerfs audio play Listeners Voice (19992001), various voices talk about the conflicts and taboos surrounding both Arab music and Wagner in Israela loaded subject that would quickly become a shouting match in real talk radio, but which is here represented in a carefully crafted, ambiguous montage. Schaerfs exercise in de-programming is, of course, completely scripted, though the artist is planning an online platform on which users can make their own edit of the constituent elements, actually functioning as the moderator. In the installation version of Listeners Voice, the viewer can listen to the play on wireless headphones while a large tv test pattern is projected from the ceiling. The Listeners Voices listener is thus caught in a tv signal that signals the absence of programming, of images. Schaerfs work with the phoney medium of radio, then, can also be seen as a displaced televisual practice, focusing on the interplay of voice and programme, of actor and structure. For Cage, programmed chance
Sonja Lavaert and Pascal Gielen, The Dismeasure of Art: An Interview with Paolo Virno, in Pascal Gielen and Paul De Bruyne, eds, Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times, Rotterdam 2009, p. 25.
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operations had a liberating effect, lifting a weight from the shoulders of both the composer and the performer. Schaerf, by contrast, focuses precisely on the role of the performer in the arena of programmed chance, on acting as a form of planned feedback. In doing so, he homes in on an element of neo-avant-garde practice that has not been sufficiently addressed and understood: the development of modes of performance that might be termed liminal, in that they situate themselves in the interstices between the performer and his or her part, even when that part is ostensibly the self.

Liminal performance
The contrast between Rainer Langhanss self-performance and Schipperss use of non-professional or marginal actors stands for a fundamental division within general performance. If Langhans and others spoke the language of exhibitionist authenticity, Schipperss comic personae used the quirks and imperfections of the actors, creating caricatures whose wooden delivery of highly artificial dialogues and monologuesfull of clichs, non sequiturs and odd turns of phrase sabotaged the rhetoric of authentic self-performance. And yet in 1989 Dolf Brouwers, who increasingly performed a less funny version of the Van Oekel persona under his own name, sued Schippers over the use of his likeness in the Sjef van Oekel comic strip. A staged photo from a few years previous, in which Brouwers as Van Oekel is given a thought bubble which shows him to be vexed about all the stuff that Schippers and artist Theo van den Boogaard had made up, seems to announce this bizarre turn of events.33 As grotesque as the Van Oekel persona was, and as consciously artificial as Schipperss writing strove to be, actor and role had become hopelessly entangled. What we see here is something that might be termed liminal performance, creating confusion about the borders between role-play and self-acting. If the general performance instigated by Cage and his followers has often taken the form of post-Fordist self-performance, liminal performance is a different branch of performance in general. Rather than taking it for granted that there is a self-evident self to perform, liminal performance pries open this self, investigates the cracks in the montage of actor
This staged photograph was published in a number of Schippers and Van den Boogardss Sjef van Oekel comic books in the 1980s.
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and (social or fictional) role. Godards ambiguous interviews with his characters/actors are one early instance of such performance. Godard staged interruptions of the documentary in films such as Une Femme Marie by asking his actors questions (from off-screen) for which they were unprepared. It is not always clear to what extent the actors answer them in character or as themselves; they are in between. In Numro deux, Godard and Miville likewise created ambiguity by having amateurs play roles that may or may not be close to those they inhabit on a daily basis. The title of the video essay Flashforward (2004) by Eran Schaerf and Eva Meyer can be related to the films rejection of the conventional cinematic flashback as representing a Flucht in die Innerlichkeit, a flight into subjective interiority. The flashback, of course, stands for a Hollywood convention in which a character remembers a past moment, often indicated by a close-up of the face and a dissolve to the scene in question. Such flashbacks generally remain integrated in a linear narrative. As if to emphasize a break with such linearity, Flashforward contains numerous circlescircular forms as well as circular camera movements. The voice-over proposes a possibilistic logic in which repetition comes with a difference, in which potentials are not allowed to lay dormant forever, in which actors become extras of timeStatisten der Zeit. Such extras of time could take on many roles, but fleetingly, without becoming identified with them. Consequently, the speakers of the voice-over regularly change in mid-sentence. This voice-over mentions a programme that converts flashbacks into flashforwards: We demand: exteriority! Cross-fade from yourself to roles which are familiar from dreams, cinema and the news!34 At one point, the voice(s) tell a tale about two actors who regularly have to dub love scenes in foreign films together, and end up falling in love. Most of the people seen sitting, walking, reading in Flashforward are indeed more like extras than like actors in the conventional sense; they are filmed while doing something, or nothing much at all, but they dont perform a dramatic role. In this sense, much avant-garde performance since Fluxus and Kaprows happenings also resembles the bit parts traditionally performed by extras rather than the roles played by film stars. The new breed of television self-performers are even more so: after all,
Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf, Flashforward (2004), dvd release by Intermedium, Munich 2006. English translation adapted from subtitles.
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the most frequently voiced complaint against such neo-celebrities is that they have no discernible talents. They just become a televisual image, creating value. But they are hardly extras of time, in the sense suggested by Flashforward: they fill time, spend it, but they do not make it. They dont have the passion of possibility invoked by the soundtrack: You have time. That is your invaluable potential, which takes you out of nowhere and positions you inside the image.35 Not that the extra of time would be a heroic revolutionary leader; he or she is just an extra, after all, but perhaps there is a certain freedom in that. The extras may be less caught in the script than the actor; they have to move or stand in accordance with instructions, but do not have to carry the narrative. They are, literally, something extra, supplements. To be a supplement of time would mean to remain open to potentialities that are not part of the programme, options not foreseen by the software that makes our present history; to keep dissolving into different roles, or rather acts that never become congealed into roles. The practice of Schaerf and Meyer thus reflects on modes of avant-garde performance in the light of their ambiguous relation with more mainstream modes of self-performance in the post-televisual age. It does not provide any handy scenarios, any instant solutions for navigating a performative economy whose crisis grows deeper every day; but at the very least it poses a challenge. How to be an extra of time, to enact a potential that is not on the programme?

Meyer and Schaerf, Flashforward. In the English subtitles, the German ins Bild is translated as in the middle of things.
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