Input

In recent years I have acknowledged my discomfort attending performances is mostly due to my inability to be at all comfortable in an audience. I am audience-phobic. It would be much easier to be on the stage. Note this is not a preference to be on stage, I have little desire to be on stage. Or perform for others. I would just be less discomforted up there.

I use to think this was due to having been stuck in the pews at Sunday mass, but I think this not accurate now. It just dates my dislike of being an audience member to way back when.

This desire to get the hell out of there applies to all performances: pub band nights, theatre, sports events, buskers on the street, graduations, civil awards and military ceremonies. Actually this would include being on parade, even if this is considered more a performance than an attendance to a performance. Curiously the exception to this are small scale family rites: christening, weddings and funerals. The feeling is still there but much much much reduced. I have no desire to run. It is also much reduced in street processions and parades passing by. I’ll get back to the street in a later piece on performance more generally.

To make it as clear as I can, while I may not like the-maddening-crowd, not all crowds are an audience, and while the mass of people is a factor, audience-phobia is what I am claiming to have, not enochlophobia per se.

Throughput

At the other end of the ‘scale’ the feelings go off-the-scale when I happen upon Performance Art. If you do not know what that is, then you are blessed.

Performance Art seems to contain a multiplier of whatever it is I dislike about being in an audience.

It is unpleasant. Unpleasant in the same way being spat on by a drunk passer-by who-is-looking-for-some-action is unpleasant. Your life is relatively unchanged, but your evening is ruined. The creativity displayed is low and the main actor un-aware of its ‘audience’. Performance Art often seems to consist of some sort of psychic spit, or shitty ectoplasm. Performance Art is dead inside, but still wants to eat your brains as some type of fuck-you.

I never got into zombie horror either.

Output

I hasten to add that this is not about whether Performance Art is good or bad: as art, as an art form or as a particular example of art, or of performance, nor about its assumed powers to be confrontational, disturbing, transgressive or exploratory or what-not.

I am not saying anything about anything being or not being art.

I am saying that Performance Art is bad when it is dead inside. I am saying the form seems to be stuck in a groove where being dead inside is the main event. Such that, looking back into its pre-1980s history, it does not seem to be like that. But then the past is often romanticized, and ruins even more so. Maybe it always was dead on the inside.  Maybe fuck-you doesn't mean what it used to mean.

Over-put

I don’t like being in an audience. Performance Art sticks me in an audience watching zombie priest spit in my eye.

Byput: Helen Garner has written book on the physicality of performance, and the person-building sociability of that world, in her grandson's Australian Rules Football experience, so go read The Season if you need an antidote to this perspective on performance art. 

(This post signifies a turn to look at performance more generally.)

Crossposted on substack.com