Author: FRANCESCO SCASCIAMACCHIA
Affiliation: POLIS University
In this paper I consider the performance What Struggle Do We Have in Common? (2010) by the Russian Collective Chto Delat? [What Is to Be Done?] as an artistic strategy that revises the Brechtian ‘learning play’. The play serves as a critical response to the theoretical and aesthetic at play when performance today takes place in gallery spaces, usually performing a resistance to the dialectical, calling for ‘radicality’ rather than ‘critique’. The ‘performative turn’ in the gallery space since the mid ’90s is a marker for differentiating the use of performance today as a strategy for incorporating contemporary economic procedures (different from performance artists of the ’60s and ’70s when the immateriality of this medium was used as a tool to critique the commodification of art as material object). The new modalities whereby ‘performance’ artists delegate to others the execution of an artistic task are indicators of the mirroring in the arts of the new taxonomies of work increasingly extending the performative capacity of the human body and brain to produce social cooperation, affections and creative values (Bishop, 2012). This trend, for some, including Bishop is ‘critical’ because these artists amplify and mirror the current system of exploitation that subjects our life to the new configuration of capital as an all ‘subsuming machine’.
