Performative problems

Abstract

This article investigates the ‘performative’ and how this concept is used in drawing today, particularly in using writing, performance and choreography to address relations between self and other as a gender. The investigation starts with the question ‘Who is it that draws and also writes?’ From this, a notion of the performative is investigated further in terms of how gender identities are claimed to be produced (Butler). This deals with deeper questions about who and what kind of subject engages in the drawing, writing and production of gender. The aim is to investigate an underlying problem that deals with where this gendered subject sits within global-market contexts of art and culture, where value is placed on doing, subjectivity and bodily action… when in fact these same relations produce pseudo-activity, alienation and abstraction; as Kunst (2015) asks, what does ‘performative’ mean today when art and capitalism are so closely related? The article concludes with comments about the role of the body in contradictory spaces, where relations between artists and spectators deal with a notion of ‘withdrawing’ and ‘doing less’.