Performative Democracy

Mary Jane Jacobs is an international key figure in the socially engaged art scene, and with this book she analyses the figure of John Dewey and the influence of his work on thinking about art as a way to influence society. By discussing the practices of artists such as Tania Bruguera, Trampoline House, Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, to name a few, she is able to retrace the seeds that Dewey disseminated in his work. The man that, by the 1960s, famously affirmed that ‘art is not the thing but the experience’ is praised for his ability to see in the artistic practices the possibility to enact progressive democratic values through the participation of citizens and the idea that democracy is alive only when daily creative acts breathe new life into it. 

What does it take for societal hope to emerge and be sustained? What are the necessary conditions for the enacting of democracy by citizens in hopeless circumstances—that is, under and despite autocratic regimes, but also in the old, well-consolidated democracies that began to reveal their illiberal temptations? What I call performative democracy is exactly this kind of phenomenon that constitutes the early stages of a democratic project or that supplies strategies to keep a well-established democracy vibrant.

Trampoline House is a community house guided by communitarian principles and participatory practices, providing a space for learning, exchange, organization, struggle and (legal, psychological, social, educational) assistance to its users. The house was founded in 2010 as a result of the common work among asylum seekers, refugees, artists, scholars and journalists in their efforts to break the social segregationist tendencies dominating the Danish asylum system.

Dark Matter is a brilliant exploration of the genealogies of critical art and the political economy of the art world. The author addresses the dependency that exists between marginalised artists and art practices – what he calls the ‘dark matter’– and the mainstream elite art, highlighting the possibilities of alternative and non-commercial creative work to intervene in the public and introduce other ways of think and discussing collectivism, ethics, the market, communication and technology. 

What affective economies are triggered by social artistic practices? What structures of support do they give rise to? What politics of care govern any aesthetic and political form of organisation or institutionality? Written in the heat of the debate around the so-called ‘new institutionalisms’, this collection of interviews and exchanges with artists, curators, political activists and neighbourhood associations tackles the role and place of affect and care — of a body, of a community, of a memory — in their work.

Elements of Vogue — both the exhibition and this accompanying publication — approaches voguing as a case study of radical performance: that is as a political choreography in which blackness, queerness and cultural gestures are put to dance together, undoing normative identities and inventing novel ways of living together, one pose at a time. Taking LGTBQI+ practices of reading and shading as the articulating forces, this reader-cum-shader enacts a cross-reading of seminal texts and artworks, punctuated by a myriad of quotes authored by anyone from Cornel West to Whitney Houston. Altogether, it aims to trace a possible and always unstable genealogy of the black queer social and political body, and its aesthetic-social potential; literally throwing shade on any authoritative interpretation. 

The present study undertakes a selective exploration of what (Jon) Mckenzie would call the paradigm of ‘cultural performance’, whereby he marks how performance became an object of study with the formation of Performance Studies as a discipline….While engaging with the globality of performance regime, here I depart from McKenzi’s general theory of performance which categorically marks the substitution of the disciplinary regime by the performance regime. Instead I open up the category of cultural performance as one that has an ontology which is conceptualised in the region, thereby foregrounding how performance offers a distinct lens to understand the political in the contemporary. Organised under five distinct modes of presentation - vision, voice, gesture, machinic and the animal - I analyse a series of mainstream cultural performances in Kerala across different genres, like theatre, poetry recitals, kathaprasangam ( a popular form of storytelling that emerged in the 1920’s in kerala) and mimics parade. I highlight how performance is at the heart of the workings of the new modality of power, and following different strategies, how these cultural performances foreground what it is to perform, and therefore what it is to live in the contemporary. This book posits performance as a critical site of enquiry to unravel the sensory and affective contours in the transformation of the region into a neoliberal regime.