Whitney Independent Study Studio Program Exhibition

Jeremy Hutchison will be joined by Aliza Shvarts and Barbara Browning to discuss fiction and performance as techniques for conjuring new realities.

Pascal says more or less: Kneel, move your lips in prayer and you will believe.  

He thus scandalously inverts the order of things […] 

—  Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” (1971), 167.

What is produced in performance? Can we understand performance as a method of manufacture, a technique by which to make things? Though often unacknowledged, performance—be it the utterance of speech, the enactment of ritual, the inhabitation of narrative—is making things all the time.  Within the legal system, speech not only communicates testimony, but animates and authorizes juridical force. Within financial markets, speculation produces real economic consequences. Within pharmaceutical trials, placebos have physical effect on the body. If we acknowledge the endemic operation of performance within these entrenched structures of power, can we maintain a separation between the performative and the real? Thinking more broadly about which narratives invoke the full force of social consequence, and which operate as “mere fictions,” we ask: How can fiction and performance be used as techniques for critique? How can these modes of manufacture be used within art practice to conjure new realities?