Kiff Bamford

Lyotard’s references to film and video are so limited, it should be relatively easy to expand his repertoire and consider his thoughts in relation to those of my own. But I have struggled, and skirted round my chosen topic for too long; how can his ideas be brought to play productively to my own ends – to consider the relationship of performance art to film? Perhaps that is the problem: I have sought a productive return on my investment, rather than light that match simply to watch it burn. Listen to me, then, as I set fire to the skin of the film and confront the tangled mess of melted celluloid: after the performance. This article considers aspects of Marina Abramović in The Artist is Present (dir. Akers, 2012), Stuart Brisley’s performance in Ghost Dance (dir. McMullen, 1983) and a short video and dance by Kiff Bamford.

The challenge I address in this chapter is a fear of repetition, as I turn to a performance by an artist whose work has already provoked my own thought and writing—the Chinese-born artist based in Germany, Yingmei Duan. At a performance in a London gallery, in spite of my personal acquaintance with the artist and despite my own fears, misgivings, and hesitancy, I found space-time-matter transformed by her presence. Or perhaps it is because of this hesitancy and the unanticipated power of the gesture that I was prompted to respond in kind, mouthing manacled words to camera in the making of a video piece that attempted to link on to that gesture. The art is in the gesture, not the artist or the work, and it is the presence of the remainder that is the concern of this chapter. In what follows, I attempt to evoke the complexity of the gesture, which resists and rejects expected articulations, prompting a transference of affect. Accepted forms of communication are broken down and the codified body dismembered, as Lyotard writes: “The body doesn’t belong to you.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His impact has been felt across many disciplines: sociology; cultural studies; art theory and politics. This volume presents a diverse selection of interviews, conversations and debates which relate to the five decades of his working life, both as a political militant, experimental philosopher and teacher. Including hard-to-find interviews and previously untranslated material, this is the first time that interviews with Lyotard have been presented as a collection. Key concepts from Lyotard's thought – the differend, the postmodern, the immaterial – are debated and discussed across different time periods, prompted by specific contexts and provocations. In addition there are debates with other thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, which may be less familiar to an Anglophone audience. These debates and interviews help to contextualise Lyotard, highlighting the importance of Marx, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein, in addition to the Jewish thought which accompanies the questions of silence, justice and presence that pervades Lyotard's thinking.

Jean-François Lyotard is one of the most important, and complex, French thinkers of the twentieth century. Best known in the English-speaking world for his book The Postmodern Condition, the multi-faceted nature of Lyotard’s work has often been obscured by its sometimes problematic association with the postmodern. His life refuses to follow the clear trajectory common to academics in France: it stalls and hesitates, with Lyotard’s first ‘career’ consisting of fifteen years of militant Marxist political engagement. Kiff Bamford traces this circuitous journey, unravelling the thrust of Lyotard’s main philosophical arguments, his struggle with thinking and his confrontation with the task of writing and thinking philosophy in a different way. These all take place within a series of very particular contexts: the Algerian war, the experimental university at Vincennes and a sustained engagement with the visual arts. Lyotard’s own tentative reflections on his intellectual life help to frame his suspicions of easy narratives and highlight his rejection of ‘the delusion that we are able to programme our life’. It is by following these cautions that Kiff Bamford is able to present a compelling portrait of a challenging subject.

This original study offers a timely reconsideration of the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in relation to art, performance and writing. How can we write about art, whilst acknowledging the transformation that inevitably accompanies translations of both media and temporality? That is the question that persistently dogs Lyotard's own writings on art, and to which this book responds through reference to artists from the recently-formed canon of performance art history, including the myths of seminal figures Marina Abramovic and Vito Acconci, and the controlled documentation of Gina Pane's actions. Through the unstable, untranslatable element that Lyotard calls the figural, his thought is brought to bear on attempts to write a history of performance art and to question the paradoxically prescriptive demand for rules to govern 're-performance'. Kiff Bamford contextualises Lyotard's writings and approach with reference to both his contemporaries, including Deleuze and Kristeva, and the contemporary art about which they wrote, whilst arguing for the pertinence of Lyotard's provocations today.