I committed a happening
In 2012, art historian Claire Bishop wrote an essay for October about the 1990s-early 2000s phenomenon of what she calls "delegated performance": "the act of hiring nonprofessionals or specialists in other fields to undertake the job of being present and performing at a particular time and a particular place on behalf of the artist, and following his or her instructions." In other words, performance art through proxies.
Typically, as Bishop notes, the performers are chosen to "perform their own socioeconomic category, be this on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age, disability, or (more rarely) profession," usually with the idea of confronting audiences with how those characteristics are taken to authorize exploitation in the world at large. The titles alone of artist Santiago Sierra's 24 Blocks of Concrete Constantly Moved During a Day’s Work by Paid Workers and People Paid to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes give a good sense of what these kinds of works are often about.
There is an obvious link between such "delegated performance" pieces and the kinds of artworks that use Mechanical Turk to hire pieceworkers to assemble or contribute to a piece, as in this example by Guido Segni. In both, the proposition is that the artist can critique exploitation by indulging in it, a move that exponentially intensifies the audience's experience of complicity in general with the exploitation that proceeds everywhere under capitalist relations.
I don't know if I'm convinced by that or if it makes such works seem any less decadent. But I think "delegated performance" is useful for thinking about social media, and the kinds of performances that are undertaken and appropriated as a matter of course there. One can treat TikTok challenges, for instance, as a decentralized form of delegated performance, where the pressures and incentives of the network compel users to participate in semi-scripted routines that someone else has devised. In a sense, the platform itself has delegated its commanding intention to the performers: "generate engagement."
In the 2008 exhibition-catalog version of her essay, Bishop argues that with delegated performance, an "unease" for the audience may set in "from a sense that the participants are being requested to perform themselves: they are asked to signify a larger socio-economic demographic, for which they stand as an authentic metonymic fragment." But that unease seems to be absent when platform algorithms effectively do the same thing, turning people's content into metonyms for their personality, selecting material for redistribution according to how it falls into some social correlation that could be understood as an emerging demographic, if not an already actualized and recognized one. That is, algorithms delegate performance to certain items of content, for reasons that are no more or less obscure than the motives of performance artists.
Those performance artists' works could in turn be interpreted as critiques of the kind of delegated performances people happily consume and engage in on TikTok without much thought to the current of exploitation that runs through them. I have the sense that people are "performing themselves" constantly on social media: Who is making them do it? Am I, by simply being there?
Would we be uncomfortable on set for the filming of a reality show? Would we be uncomfortable watching people do a TikTok challenge on a stage? (I say "we" as if my being on TikTok at all doesn't make me extremely uncomfortable.) Bishop suggests that some of the "unease" stems from the artist's ambiguous sadism in compelling these performances. Social media platforms are sadistic in a similarly ambiguous way, though the sadism is distributed among users and counterbalanced by the masochism involved in participating and posting to them.
The ritualized sadism is part of Bishop's defense for this kind of art. With "delegated performance"
it becomes essential to view art not as part of a seamless continuum with contemporary labor but as offering a specific space of experience where those norms are suspended and put in service of pleasure in perverse ways (to return to Sade, a space not unlike that of BDSM sex). Rather than judging art as a model of social organization that can be evaluated according to pre-established moral criteria, it is more productive to view the conceptualization of these performances as properly artistic decisions.
Even if you accept that argument, it would be hard to claim that social media platforms are an art-space not continuous with contemporary labor: It seems like everybody is explicitly hustling almost all of the time. But I think people nonetheless approach social media as just this kind of space of exception, where social norms can be unilaterally subordinated to their pursuit of pleasure, where those who have shown up there have volunteered to be hurt and are being compensated (with attention) for their trouble. One can enjoy an aestheticized experience of power by tormenting Couch Guy or West Elm Caleb or whoever the lottery winner is on any given day.
In a sense, the platforms encourage users to become and know themselves as "artists" in the way they manipulate and restage and subtweet each other, and not just in how well they contrive their own posts in isolation. The "artistry" on social media then is not in self-performance but in delegating representativeness, in directing everyone else as though they are delegated performers of the drama you want to see, in a space designed not for ethical conduct but its repudiation.
This week at Real Life, I wrote about found images, using an internet archive of 1980s snapshots as the pretext. I was initially sparked to write it by a comment that writer Maël Renouard makes in Fragments of an Infinite Memory about being nostalgic for a scarcity of images. But it's not images that were scarce, as he notes. What was scarce was our ability to wield them. It was more difficult to mediate oneself then and the options for expressing oneself were limited in time, space, and form.
Before camera phones and internet connectivity, photographs were relatively difficult to take and recirculate; that made them appear more documentary and less rhetorical. You couldn't really use them to chat or to meme or to make a mental note; they conserved something that felt more like a slice of reality, at least in retrospect, as when I'm scrolling through old photos on this archive.
In looking at old photos, I think I grow oddly nostalgic for that absence of control, that sense that I was somehow "authentic" by default because I lacked the means to be more strategic in my self-presentation. Of course, that is false nostalgia — I have never lived a moment of my life without feeling intensely judged simply for existing, for being seen. But it's nice to pretend when I look at old photos that the people in them were somehow without self-consciousness.
I tend to assume the opposite about the images I see now, especially on broadcast social media platforms. I wonder what I am supposed to think about the person who strategically devised and fine-tuned them. In a 2002 essay, "The 'Eternal Return': Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment," Amelia Jones writes about the fine art selfies of Laura Aguilar, Cindy Sherman et al.:
Through an exaggerated performativity, which makes it clear that we can never 'know' the subject behind or in the image, these works expose the apparently seamless conflation of intentionality with meaningful visible appearance in the self-portrait as an illusion.
But in being inundated by selfies by nonartists, I find that my awareness of that "illusion" is fading. I take any images attached to a public profile as depicting intentionality over and above anything else they show. They have almost entirely lost their indexical quality. Nothing feels "real."
This condition of our image milieu (all images are presumed to have been manipulated in some way to make them more rhetorical, or are predominantly rhetorical in how they are used for communication) has changed the way I perceive older images from the pre-camera-phone period. Those snapshots seem more documentary and less intentional, more like a found "piece of reality" and not a particular performance. We may borrow specific details from bygone styles trying to reconstruct authenticity in images that way, but that mainly has the opposite effect of foregrounding intentionality as a falseness. The problem, as always, is to accept strategic behavior as "authentic" and not a phony show.