On Performance, Performativity, Women Artists and Their Critics

My critical writings take the form of essays on a range of contemporary issues in art including performativity as it has been expounded by Amelia Jones and Peggy Phelan. My paper asked, in what ways does the experience of live art counter the ideological readings of place, context and significantly, gendered codification? My findings, particularly in relation to performance by women substantially challenged the reductivism of Jones’ and Phelan’s notions of performativity and the pre-eminence of documentation over individual experience of live work that they advocate. I related their position to the tautological theories of language propounded by structural linguistics in the 1970s and used the early writings of Sally Potter to reinvest ‘liveness’ with radical potential especially when appropriated by women artists.