• Spoken words performance
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COMING TO SPEECH - Philip Monk (in: performance art - Parachutte/Canada
1980/1981)
Coming to Speech raises the unspoken problematic of the audience in performance,
as a specific occasion of the role of the viewer in art arid interpretation
in generell. lt develops the conjecture that the specific entry of body and
language in minimal, conceptual and body art during the '60s culminates in the
position and 'speech' of the viewer in performance art. Performance is this
possibility of coming to speech and a rupture with he normal structural position
of the viewer/receiver in art. Performance must account for this excessive role
of the viewer in the doubling space of speech and body, es a reception on the
surface of the body and a coming to speech: the role of the viewer is performative.
While performance may question languages and codes, it potentially constructs
itself as a conventional act. As such, a theory of performance must be able
to account for effects within a conventional, even representational, act, which
includes an audience. The notion of the performative, or speech acts, is adapted
since performative utterances can "create or define new forms of behaviour"
within the conventional. What the performative entails must be thought through
- including its necessity of a conventional procedure and a receiver of the
act. While effects may be produced by the performance, they are carried out
and away by the viewer. This is no secure discourse between performer and viewer:
the subject is brought to crisis; 'infelicities' work through the viewer as
a delay, difficulty or resistance, and serve to let the particular analysis
of a performance come to completion in the 'speech' of the viewer.