Key Principle
Delegated performance hires non-professionals or specialists "to be present and perform at a particular time and place on behalf of the artist" (p. 219). Unlike theatre casting, performers are hired to perform their own socio-economic category -- gender, class, ethnicity, age, disability. The best examples "reify precisely in order to discuss reification" (p. 111), turning economic exploitation into artistic material rather than concealing it.
Why This Matters
Delegated performance makes visible the labour conditions underlying all art production. It parallels economic outsourcing but inverts its logic: business outsourcing decreases risk; artists deploy it to increase unpredictability (p. 231). Performance has entered "gallery time" -- eight-hour shifts, unionised pay, large casts -- industrialising what was once anti-spectacular immediacy (p. 231).
Good Examples
Three-Part Typology (p. 220)
- Non-professionals performing identity: Bodies function as "metonymic shorthand for politicised identity" with "cool irony, wit and distance" (p. 222). Althamer's Observator (1992, homeless men); Elmgreen & Dragset's Try (1997, gay men).
- Professional delegation: Specialists whose skills become "a ready-made" (p. 224). Sehgal's This Objective of That Object (2004, philosophy students); Garcia's The Messenger (2002). Less controversy because performers are recruited for elective professional identity.
- Docu-drama: Constructed situations for video/film. Collins's They Shoot Horses (2004, Ramallah teenagers in eight-hour disco marathon); Zmijewski's Them (2007, four Warsaw groups whose painting workshops escalate from modification to destruction).
Sierra's Economic Exposure
Financial details become part of the work's description, "turning the economic context into one of his primary materials" (p. 223). 1999 escalation: 24 Blocks of Concrete -> People Paid to Remain inside Cardboard Boxes -> 450 Paid People -> 250cm Line Tattooed on 6 Paid People (p. 222).
Counterpoints
- Klossowski's Living Currency (La Monnaie Vivante, 1970): Rejects separation of economy and pleasure, arguing for their "troubling mutual imbrication" (p. 233). The human body is "living currency" mediating between libidinal pleasure and institutional imposition (p. 234). Art is not non-functional excess but a tool creating new experience.
- Dematerialisation no longer opposes the market: "Today dematerialisation and rumour have become one of the most effective forms of hype" (p. 229). The Frieze Art Fair is "a significant incubator" for delegated performance (p. 229).
- Presence as precarious labour: "Arguably less a matter of anti-spectacular immediacy than evidence of precarious labour, but artists are more likely to sustain this economy than to challenge it" (p. 231).
Key Quotes
"Contemporary performance art does not necessarily privilege the live moment or the artist's own body, but instead engages in numerous strategies of mediation that include delegation and repetition" -- Claire Bishop, p. 229
"a poignant meditation on collective identification, the role of images in forging these identifications, as well as a harsh parable about social antagonisms" -- Claire Bishop on Zmijewski's Them, p. 228
Rules of Thumb
- When people are hired to perform their own social category, ask whether the work exposes or reproduces exploitation
- Financial transparency within the work (Sierra, Masotta, Bony) transforms economic context into material
- Sehgal's inverse economy: unlike sculpture which gets cheaper over time, performance accrues costs -- this shapes institutional politics
- Distinguish performers hired for elective professional identity (less controversial) from those performing ascribed social identity (ethically charged)
Related References
- Social Sadism and Strategic Reification - The Argentine genealogy of exhibiting people
- Core Framework: Participation, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Spectatorship - Double ontological status of art using people as medium
- The Project as Post-1989 Art Form - How "project" mirrors neoliberal labour conditions