Scott Burton. Lecture on Self

Of the current group of young performance artists, only one has sought to go beyond such self-directed, if exemplary, activity. His major achievement in performance has been an introduction of representational style, of mimetic and figurative elements – both in mobile objects and in the form of living tableaux. Within non-illusionist contexts, he presents quasi fictional, even narrative content. His are the most theatrical of current performances, often actually taking place on proscenium stages in a manner suggesting their related visual art components: the pedestal and the frame. […] His living tableaux and his objects form two recent series of works in different materials but with overlapping preoccupations – with the human figure, with dream states, with social relationships, with sexuality, with art – both with the decorative or applied arts and with fine art. The object-pieces expose the roots of performance in earlier modern styles – assemblage, kinetic sculpture, environments, found object-pieces, temporality – that is to say, theatricalism – is often explicitly introduced.

A work called Behavior Tableaux, in which emotionally charged material (this time of social transaction rather than isolation) is also present and also distanced. This time there are not evenly spaced episodes. The episodes or tableaux are determined in length and in order by purely internal, narrative or thematic, demands. The displacement was accomplished in this performance by literally distancing the viewer 50 feet from the performers’ space and by the extremely slowed-down and simplified – always neutral, never expressive – style of movement used by all the performers. The performers also resembled each other in body type (tall and thin) and in style of dress. […] The initial theme of this performance piece is the behavior of concord – of equals existing in mutual acceptance. They group equidistantly and turn toward one another, or they slowly join together in an intimate group. A second theme, however, reverses the first and introduces tensions, divisions, and disharmonies among the group. The performers separate into sub-groups or become isolated from each other. Or, they turn away from each other, as in a sequence in which one turns his face slowly away from another who has just entered. He continues across the stage-room to be treated identically by two other previous occupants of the space and finally to settle alone in an unaccompanied spot. […] This theme includes confrontations between members of the group, which oppose similar tableaux of the earlier theme of the harmony of equals. A third theme of these Behavior Tableaux is that of authoritarianism. The group divides into a one-to-four relation, with the individual dominant over the group. Whether he stands before them or they before him, the psycho-social interpretation of their spatial relationship must reveal his dominance. The reverse of this theme is provided in a fourth theme that retains the one-to-four dispersal of the group but makes the individual into a sub-dominant class of one – very different from a sub-dominant class of four. Isolation, it is implied, depicts the position of low status as an intolerable and crushing one, in contrast to the self-assertiveness of the individual who is dominant. […] The Behavior Tableaux’s placement, posture, and gesture and its observations and violations of personal-space and body-surrounding territories reveal the unconscious attitudes literally shaping and deploying body language. […]