Ruin of bodies, bodies in ruin

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Content
RUIN
OF
BODIES

BODIES
IN
RUIN

By: Oscar David Alvarez

A Thesis Presented to the
Faculty of the Roski School of Art and Design
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Art
(FINE ART)

December 2019

ii

Abstract:
An Appraisal of the body in relation to power structures within spaces of appearance
& spaces of surveillance. An inquiry into Anne Imhof’s performance Faust, which by way of
mimesis incorporates dispositions affiliated with alienated classes. Then a comparison with
body language of estrangement and marginalization within my own performance work in the
JIMMY series. A call for reparative functions toward our social democracy, and the potential
of polis, and plurality, within a capitalist structure that would prefer to keep us atomized and
individuated.

Contents
Chant 1 ___________________________________________________________p.1
Section 1: Preface___________________________________________________ _p.2
Chant 2 ____________________________________________________________p.7
Section 2: The Body In A Space Of Appearances _____________________________p.7
Chant 3_____________________________________________________________p.39
Section 3: Interlude Of Mass Man, The Image Of A Man With Nothing To Lose_____p.39
Chant 4_____________________________________________________________p.45
Section 4: JIMMY, The Image of a Man Outside Of Society Looking In____________p.45
Chant 5 _____________________________________________________________p.54
Section 5: We’re All Clowns, We’re All JIMMIES, A Case For The New Subaltern____p.54

1

“In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task---a descent into the foundations
of the symbolic construct –amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest
to its dawn, to the bottomless “primacy” constituted by primal repression. Through that
experience, which is nevertheless managed by the Other, “subject” and “object” push each
other away, confront each other, collapse, and start again---inseparable, contaminated,
condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject.”
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection1

Chant 1
In the interior of an opulent building with a raised glass floor, two men fight and wrestle
each other. There are other spectators in the building standing on the raised glass. Underneath
them a young woman with blonde unruly mane over the eyes, lights strips of cotton on fire. Beside,
another young man looks up from the crawl space, the face is feral without shame. Back above
the raised glass where the spectator’s watch, the two men continue to overpower each other.
One grasps the others face with the wide palm of the hand and smashes it onto the glass floor,
then presses on with all his weight. The young man whose face is smothered against the glass floor
struggles to breathe. Drool seeps from the mouth onto the glass. A woman takes a selfie with the
phone. The man on top uses his other hand to smother his captive, sticks fingers into the mouth to
cause him to gag. The young man on top looks up, faces the crowd with phones up, the
expression is hard, vacant, and unresponsive to the gasps for air coming from the other struggling
beneath him.

2

1 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1980) p.17
2 Photograph by Nadine Fraczkowski, 2017 Venice Biennale, Faust, Retrieved from Venice Biennale site.

2

Section 1: Preface
I walked into 2019 with a distinct notion, a clear appraisal of what to expect from
imminent interactional dynamics on city streets. You see, the work I do as an artist is concerned
with the body and its relationship to architecture. To dynamics and encounters borne from
radical, and anarchic dispositions within cities. I engage the city, and architecture from an erotic
sensibility, and develop intimate relations with urban spaces. Through mindful observation and
writing, I have generated a body of work that mines video & performance material that deals
with agency and autonomy as they manifest within constructions & grids of urban existence.
How the privatization of public space neglects people of their sovereignty, of ownership, and
estranges them from commercial machinations. My artistic drives are certainly disruptive to
these constructions, as typified by the various institution's people reinforce everyday under
capitalism. My project has been an ethnographic inquiry into the manifold instances of alienation
in civic society, and on forming modalities of subversive action against rhythms of a world
concerned with buying and selling everything we have. Of identifying and perverting the social
3templates that habituate normal social encounters toward a transactional end.
A practice of walking the streets, without destination in mind, informs my work
immensely. My own application of Situationist Theory and practice has placed emphasis on how
to walk about cities, freely and unencumbered by entrapments of consumer capitalism. To defy
the prescriptive roles that privatized public life affords me. This practice of drifting through a
city is one that I’ve developed here in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Bogota, Mexico

3
City, Hanoi, Tokyo, Guatemala City, San Pedro De Sula, Managua, Paris, Berlin, and most
recently in Athens.5
My practice mines for instances of liminality in city life, the in between spaces of a
commercial contexts, infrastructures, and alleyways. These are areas where transgressions
rooted in play are possible. From here I developed my perceptive faculties through a generally
Marxist lens on how people move about, how they interact with each other, and how they enact
themselves in social arenas.
There’s a collective consciousness at play in all cities, historical context, language,
economies, beliefs, trauma, all inform the intersubjective dynamic of a city’s consciousness. The
ontological impact a city has on a person’s psychological and metaphysical aspects is immense.
In my work, observations are taken in through a Marxist lens, with thorough understanding of
how spectacle manifests via images, and how they are performed by people. When we are out in
public, we are presented with a mobilization of individuals pursuing self-interest. In rhythm with
personal desires, oscillating between harmony & dissonance, but rarely acting in concert. In
instances where we step outside of ourselves, outside needs for survival, we can find or generate
spaces where we recognize each other at our essence. These are candid moments, of
unconditional generosity, hospitality, sincerity, jubilance, reverie, of illuminating conversation,
and kindness. Although something has happened to the social organism, the cellular network
has developed malignancies as a result of individuated drives. The abilities, habits, or traditions
which shape and contour our interactions within social arenas have been eroding from civic
society. It’s not much to claim really, as I said before, my earlier appraisal of civic society finds

5 I was conducting research for this paper in Berlin & Athens summer of 2019. All other cities prior, I have
either traveled to, was born in, or have lived & worked in.

4
grotesque limitations in our collective understanding; a lot has been lost throughout the years.6
What’s more is that the whole of social reality is socially constructed and we reinforced its
scaffolds in our interactions. Took part in forming templates for social interaction that serve
expressive order, and the interests of power. The blueprints of Greek democracy watermarked
over the basic contours of sociality. Though these are now compromised, and run the risk of
erasure from our current templates, our social dimensions, and private boundaries. It all now
appears to placate another power, not of humans, but instead its aggregate of capitalism. The
space where we appear to each other as an essence, as a body, as a collaborator, as a friend, as
scholars, the inheritance of Greek social democracy is indeed in peril.
I have formed a visual & performative language from this nexus of imminent social
collapse & humanist degradation throughout the years. My practice mines for instances where
socially significant structural contours become blurred, vague, and entirely elusive. Where our
dependencies on thematic clarification and the reciprocal constitution of roles no longer succeed
as a result of a calamity, disaster, or economic turmoil. Where the essential nature of our
respective humanity is challenged, and dispositions toward survival are at odds with prescriptive
systems of spectacle in consumer capitalism. Like the scenes in the movie the The Purge, just
before the murder orgy is about to commence and the naïve protagonists realize that the people
they see out in the streets wearing masks intend to torture & kill them, it’s in that between state
of awareness that I find a wealth of information on the human condition under the spectacle of
capitalism.
Emille Durkheim began his sociological career from this particular frame of
understanding that he referred to as anomie. In anomie, the social bonds that typically reinforce a

6 The disavowal, negation, and misunderstanding of Paganism, Gnosticism, Mysticism in academia and
common discourse.
5
community or nation are no longer there, and there exists little to no guidance for individuals to
find their way back to a communal way of life. The context of a nation, culture, or society has
fallen apart as a result of economic collapse, or growing divisions of class or labor. 7 Where
social performative roles either did not have the capacity, or were too conflict ridden, to
reintegrate order. In my work, in my aesthetic, in my role as artist, I believe it is best to depart
from the assumption that the worst has already occurred, from the terrain of the shadow, of the
obscene because it stands at odds with typified forms of experience. In anomie, normlessness, a
collapse of social constructions designed after the spectacle fall away, and general identifications
with them become blurred. To me, this is where new freedoms exist. In the abject extremes of
what respectable society avoids because it poses inconvenience to the productivity of systems.8
I began to study the work of German artist Anne Imhof, who won the prestigious Golden
Lion in the 2017 Venice Biennale for her performance installation Faust. The piece is an
immersive installation that creates a liminal experience within the architecture of the German
Pavilion. The entire pavilion is transformed with a transparent raised glass floor for the public to
walk on. The piece is activated through a 4-5 hour day to day set of performances that makes use
of the raised glass floor, walls, partitions, and further demarcates the separation between the
public and Anne Imhof’s team of performers. Faust, as a gestalt performance, embodies various
ideas attributed to anomie, of clown vis a vis symbolic type9, vertical power relations enacted

7 Émile, Durkheim. Suicide, a Study in Sociology . New York: Free Press; 1967.
8 Furthermore, my work is also rooted in performance practice whereby the archetype of clown, fool, trickster,
affords me an ontological position that permits me to make this work safely, conscientiously, in a range of
immersive, and at times shamanic modalities.
9 Symbolic Type is a term attributed to people whose internal logic is so consistent and self contained that it
does not rely on the reactions, or exchange with others but rather is a universsinto its own. The term symbolic
type is from Richard Grathoff, and is further elaborated by Don Handelman in his work with clown. I will use
symbolic type in later sections to discuss Imhof and my own performance work.
6
within horizontal power dynamics, and it’s presentation at the German Pavilion in 2017 served to
display a most profound epilogue to subjectivity.
Hannah Arendt became an essential compendium toward formulating ideas and points of
departure for this paper, especially in relation to Imhof’s performance. Arendt’s The Human
Condition is an appraisal of the core of human society after WWII. Most importantly it is borne
from Arendt’s first-hand experience with fascism, totalitarianism, and the undercurrents that
precipitate it. These two figures, one in philosophy, and the other in contemporary performance
art will be the blueprint from which I form the architectural premises behind my own
performance work, the series I have developed under the moniker JIMMY, and the early
experiments I used to embody a self in society. Later I will focus on the importance, and need for
clandestine actions, hidden languages, and forms of embodiment that are not bereft of
authenticity, or practiced under the condition of transactional exchange, and under scrutiny of the
panopticon we carry within. A closer observation of the optics of estrangement and
dehumanization, which are inherent components of Anne Imhof’s performance FAUST,
underscores a new subaltern experience in modern society. Finally, these ideas will be aligned
with my own work in performance, sculpture, and installation, which seeks to engage liminal,
salient, and clown-like positions within the various systems of power entrenched into the fabric
of society. Finally, the fictive chants at the beginning of each section of this paper are interstices
that conjure unconscious shadows. They serve as allegorical forms of abjection as experienced
by another, they are extreme metaphors10 that must be given space in the discourse of this paper
to rear their ugly heads.

10 J. G Ballard, Sellars, Simon., O’Hara, Daniel Finbarr John. Extreme Metaphors . London: Fourth Estate;
2012.

7

Chant 2
A group of children eat food scraps from the waste container outside of a Trader Joe’s.
They are affronted with the look of disgust in your eyes and begin to mock you by pantomiming
gestures of sophistication, and daintiness; all directed toward you. A boy, laughing among the
group, drops his pants then underwear, and proceeds to take a shit near to where you are now
hurriedly loading groceries into the trunk of your car. The children all explode into a roar of
laughter, still pantomiming high class gestures in your direction. A girl from the group steps out to
join the boy taking a shit, she lifts up her skirt and squats. The children are decimated in hysterics,
the cackling, now roaring, is maddening. you try hold back the vomit as you catch a glimpse of
the feces the children left behind. They taunt, and scream obscenities, while frantically you search
for the fab key to your Mercedes Benz. Beep Beep.

Section 2: The Body In A Space of Appearances
We must indeed assume that the worst has already happened and operate respective
social & professional arenas from that morose assumption. The interstitial spaces between
people, where things are not known, but rather sensed, are now spaces of policing and
judgement.11 Spontaneous encounters in the political forum, where the grace of shared humanity
or purpose driven citizenry, merits everyone as equals once in appearance. The promise of
spontaneity that comes with being human is weakened. Under auspices of efficiency our lives are
mapped, tracked, vetted, individuated, computational, and processed through algorithms.
Public discourse is corrupted, people do not disclose what they truly think, or how they really
feel about social, or political matters when they come up in conversation. It’s now dangerous to
disclose opinions which do not corroborate with the expressive orders13 of contemporary cultural

11 There are now enough songs, movies, comedy routines, which decry a same sentiment in the social
occurrences they experience, that I don’t feel that I have to link specific references. I feel this is a zeitgeist.
13 Erving Goffman, On Face Work: An Analyses of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction, (New York:
Doubleday, 1967)

8
& social politics. Especially when its influence now reaches into many professional fields, media
industries, and academic institutions. Making a mistake could mean losing a career, influence,
status, even respect. People become their own jailers, and actions are modified, prescriptively or
proscriptively, in accordance with the face that we have to present in public.14 This creates
social constraints to the degree that most encounters are mainly conservative. Our opinions and
preferences are falsified, we agree with the majority on various issues, even if we do not agree
with the values imposed by consensus. People then are split between public and private
preferences. This is, of course an evident attribute of the human condition, our private and public
selves. But I believe that the social political paradigm has changed dramatically. Freedoms of
expression are no longer tied to the representative consciousness of the American experiment,
freedom to express is contingent upon the will of forces outside of our own control. The ubiquity
of social media, along with the ethical disregard by tech companies has taken us into cognitive
territories where the reptile part of our brains tends to call the shots. People manage their
identities toward a looking glass self.15 The virtualization of social interaction is compromising
our ability to attend from a shared reality. The influence on our elections from entities in Russia
has shed light on how susceptible our critical faculties are to disinformation. Finally, how
uninformed, how unprepared, how vulnerable we really are to the impact machines and
algorithms will have on us. Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of the early internet, a computer scientist

14 Erving Goffman, On Face Work: An Analyses of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction, (New York:
Doubleday, 1967)

15 George Herbert Meade delineated this process of the looking glass self, where we imagine how we appear to
each other. Imagine judgements formed based on our appearance, imagine how a person feels about us based
on judgements they have made. Charles H. Cooley ,then expanded on Mead’s initial premise of the looking
glass self and added on the active role we play in interpreting the perceived responses of others. How we
depend on our imagination to infer thoughts on the feelings or ruminations of others. We control and
manipulate the responses & evaluations of others because we are aware that we are being looked at.

9
responsible for the advances in virtual reality, has been a vocal critic of social media companies,
warns of the decay it imparts on society. “Our society, our democracy, our very nation is slowly
becoming absurd, unbelievable, and bizarre because of deep flaws in our own tech companies.”16
I believe we are becoming boring, safe, and predictable in order to accommodate the will
of a majority set on only having a respectable society. 17 The threat of stigma keeps people silent
and upholds the righteous agendas that want to correct everything that was ever bad, unfair,
offensive, unjust, and wrong. The punitive cycle continues to ruin people for past transgressions,
and their sense of belonging to the world and society is torn from them. As a result, people are
very well behaved. In our respective public life, we have to then stand guard over the flow of
events within our interactions, conversations, or any social interface we conduct in public. To
ensure that the expressive orders we participate in remain consistent with our outward face. With
enough reinforcement, social structures built on false preferences burrow in deep enough to
achieve genuine acceptance. A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of
widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures
vulnerable to sudden collapse.18
The American experiment is a result of historical actors who were irreverent, crazy,
criminal, and at odds with the social order and status quo. They would have us believe that we
have no need for these problematic figures, who get conflated into pathological types. Jaron
Lanier and Douglas Rushkoff emphasize on the importance of our human experience as an
organism of unpredictable tendencies. For Jaron Lanier, “We must regain the characteristic that

16 Jaron Lanier, Global Addiction to Social Media is Ruining Democracy, Boston Globe, June 8th , 2018

18 Timur Kuran . Private Truths, Public Lies : the Social Consequences of Preference Falsification .
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press; 1995.

10
has always saved America in the past: individual identity, courage, and self-determination.”19
Human tendency by and large exceeds the bounds and limits of society, and culture institutes the
limits of balancing and directing a person’s natural impulses.20 I am a man, an assassin, a lover, a
degenerate, a friend, a criminal, and a good man. These and more inform me, but nothing should
contain me.
This social realm we inhabit, at its core, serves only toward some form of transactional
exchange. or to support the various posts of power locally. Together outside we are a political
body, and by that, I mean something quite close to Hannah Arendt’s use polis. Her assertion is
that wherever one goes, one becomes part of the polis. “The polis, properly speaking, is not the
city state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and
speaking together.”21 Hannah Arendt prescribes polis as a dynamic that is made available to
groups of individuals, who are of relatively equal means & status, within a realm she refers to as
the space of appearances.22 The space outside where we appear to each other, first it takes one to
notice the other, and from there we become a polis; “wherever you go, you will be a polis.”23
The interesting aspect of Hannah Arendt’s use of the term polis, is the imbued optimism
she places on the power within groups acting together. As a polis, there arises a realm for
potential political action, opportunities for collective actualization as demonstrated through
unique action and words.24 But then what constitutes as a viable action? For Arendt this has to
be extraordinary, and unique for it to be effective political action impacts the public realm:

19 Jaron Lanier, Global Addiction To Social Media is Ruining Democracy, Boston Globe, June 8th , 2018
20 Richard Grathoff. The Structure of Social Inconsistencies; a Contribution to a Unified Theory of Play,
Game, and Social Action. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; 1970.p. 117

21 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (United States, University of Chicago Press, 1958)

22 Arendt, The Human Condition
23 Arendt, The Human Condition
24 Arendt, The Human Condition
11
“Action is all that matters, its delivery and aesthetic through line aiming for impeccable
brilliance.”25
Let me attempt to describe space of appearances with a scene from a 2013 movie. In the
initial party scene of The Great Gatsby, the film directed by Baz Luhrman, starring Leonardo
DiCaprio, Tobey McGuire, and a host of other actors. The protagonist Nick Caraway (Tobey
Mcguire) attends the mansion party for Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). In that flash cut sequence,
narrated over by McGuire, he, omniscient in some manner, knows who everyone is, describes
their role, class, status, even intuits their motivations for being at the party. McGuire’s Nick
Carraway sets the stage for introductions in a space of relative equals where they appear to one
another. The subsequent bacchanal, pyrotechnics, can-cans, and all, is the unique action
informed by the political body of those in attendance at Gatsby’s. It’s an infamous event, and
that immortality gained through monumental action is what Hannah Arendt referred to when she
appropriated Polis from ancient Greece.
If the space of appearances is where I appear to you, and you appear to me and where we
are invited to form a union, and potentially do great things, then it should be assumed that we
would all know each other, and that we would already be on equal footing of some kind. That
there’s a symmetry to the social relations based on prior associations whether with political
party, race, or social clique. As Xavier Marquez remarks: “There are no blocked relationships in
a space of appearance. In principle, everyone is connected by mutually connected by
symmetrical relationships, and all can talk to the others (even if they do not necessarily do so)”26
As in Homer’s Odyssey, or within Plato’s Republic, in Hannah Arendt’s concept of polis
there is little recognition of the subjugated position of women, servants and slaves that also

25 Arendt, The Human Condition
26 Xavier Marquez, Spaces of appearance and Spaces of Surveillance.
12
populated ancient worlds. If we read Hannah Arendt’s statements on the space of appearances at
face-value, then it’s like being at high school prom night, the popular people are noticed and are
expected to perform, and others in attendance are there to observe them as loyal subjects, not
necessarily expected to perform themselves. As Arendt states: “The reality of the world, is
guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all. And whatever lacks this appearance
comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.”27
So here is where clarifications and even correctives are called into order of Hannah Arendt’s
political body in the space of appearances. For one, it should be stated that Hannah Arendt held
high standards for what constitutes a viable political action enacted as a polis, in the space of
appearances. The action then must be great, memorable, and in a way performative. Not
everyone is capable of achieving this status of historical agent in Hannah Arendt’s space of
appearances.28 Style in fashion is everything, and if incisive enough, it supplants categorical
evidences of one’s outsider status. It is a language in and of itself, it takes courage to be oneself
fully, to outwardly present internal negotiations confidence and humility. “Courage and even
boldness are already present in leaving one’s private hiding place and showing who one is, in
disclosing and exposing oneself.”29 To style and insert oneself explicitly into the space of
appearances is integral to the manifestation of a self. without the explicit and decisive action of
style then we fall away into oblivion, whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like
a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.30

27 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
28 “Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither
in its motivation nor its achievement.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
29 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.

30 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
13
There then arise at least three central issues with Hannah Arendt’s premise of polis, and
how it then becomes active within such spaces of appearance. These are Arendtian Correctives,
to term coined by Neve Gordon, that will create a broader perspective for later sections of this
paper, and influence my earlier statements on the erosion of unilateral social dynamics in our
cities. For one Hannah Arendt’s use of polis from the Greeks, fails to acknowledge that there
were subjects unable to become part of the polis in ancient Greece. Women and slaves were not
allowed to participate in these social arenas. Roy T. Tsao, and other critics he references in his
paper “Arendt Against Athens,” faults Hannah Arendt of “unabashed elitism, indifference to
moral constraints, and an aridly self-contained ideal of politics that excludes basic matters of
justice from public concern.”31 Tsao points out that Arendt’s nostalgia for a Hellenic era is
misplaced, and she holds no grounds to endorse it. In his paper we come to terms with Arendt’s
limiting standards for an effective political body in the space of appearances. That among peers
that recognize your abilities, and past accomplishments, that it is from that vantage point that one
can enact an effective action as polis. In order to be effective member of the polis, you have to
matter (possess some social or cultural capital), which is why Arendt gets called an elitist.
Through self-disclosure one has to demonstrate how one matters, and this is of course
problematic within our current political climate.32 Although, as it stands within our current
culture, viral personalities matter more, and being an influencer is the highest honor that can be
bestowed, so in a way it perpetuates the set of Arendtian standards that Roy T. Tsao admonishes.

31 Roy T. Tsao, Arendt Against Athens: Rereading the Human Condition (Washington D.C, Georgetown
University 2002) 1
32 This is where I have to insert my own particular bias as a performer on the issues that Roy T. Tsao raises,
which point toward a politically correct set of standards. I do think it takes courage and bravery to be fully
oneself in the space of appearances, and that if we are speaking in the scope of political action, then surely
monumental actions that are memorable are most effective. My position of course oscillates continually
between these two perspectives, small actions by those on the margins also make a great impact over time, and
I myself do not generally work in monumental action that goes viral.
14

The second issue with Hannah Arendt’s space of appearances, is that she neglected to account
for the work of her contemporary Michel Foucault in his study of carceral technologies of
control, Discipline & Punish. Both of their premises, while fairly different in their own regard,
are two sides of the same coin. Xavier Marquez delineates some of their complementary aspects
in his paper, “Spaces of Appearances and Spaces of Surveillance.” On one hand, a space of
appearance is where we appear to one another through what seems like explicit self-disclosure
for the sake of creating some legendary form of action. Here’s Marquez again, “The political
actor seeks to be visible before his or her fellows, and seeks to shine and even to acquire
glory.”33 On the other hand, he continues, spaces of surveillance “are a setting where an
individual’s identity is produced through specialized techniques of surveillance and
punishment.”34 So then what are some of these specialized techniques? Well normalizing
standards & behaviors are one form that they take which lead to a reign of conformity within the
social arena. This is part and parcel of what constitutes the panopticon as an effective
surveillance technology in Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish. The panopticon imposes self-
regulation and reinforces subordination to the normalized behaviors that are specific to a social
context. Essentially: how one should and not behave. The tendency is for merciless judgement is
passed and projected in the space of appearances. “The distinction between those who regularly
disclose and those who merely watch sharpens.” 35 There are some that do disclose, perform,
make an appearance. Then there are those that watch. Those that are the visible in spaces of

33 Xavier Marquez, “Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance”, Polity, Volume 44, Number , 2012
34 Xavier Marquez, “Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance”, Polity, Volume 44, Number , 2012
35 Xavier Marques, Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance”
15
appearance, are “in a certain sense controlled by a public to which he or she normally stands in a
hierarchical relationship.”
Aside from the space of surveillance, there are two additional spaces that are borne from
Hannah Arendt’s treatise as it becomes adapted to our current social landscape. There exists a
space of invisibility, or rather a private space that can exist in the public arena, and then spaces
of marginalization. Private spaces are not entirely new as a premise within Arendt’s initial
remarks on the Human Condition, in fact she does write about private spaces as areas where
people can step into contemplative activities and take respite from the gaze of others.36 But what
is important to then distinguish is the transformation of what constitutes private space in the
world today. I consider the new private space where one can become invisible to when people
are on their phones in public, seemingly unavailable for interaction. This is in fact a vast majority
of people. Out in in the space of appearances they take respite from having to disclose
themselves and take cover by placing a phone on their face. But while these choices to be visible
or not are available to some, there is the question of those that are perpetually invisible in the
space of appearances, those without an ability to disclose themselves. In ancient Greece these
would have been slaves, servants, and women. A factor that Hannah Arendt omits in her treatise
on the Human Condition. These marginalized figures that are rendered invisible are synonymous
with the subaltern.38 Those without agency and perceived humanity as it extends from the
epicenter of influence of power in society. It’s important for me to acknowledge Gayatri
Spivak’s warning on the subaltern, that not just anyone can claim the term or designate it as
such. Because to be subaltern is to not have a voice, according to Gayatri Spivak, the moment the

36 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
38 These are specialized terms on post-colonial theory that began with the work of Gayatri Spivak & Antonio
Gramsci
16
subaltern has a voice it become altern, as in other.39 But this is of course within the context of
post-colonial theory attributed to India and other parts of Southeast Asia. I posit that there is a
new subaltern growing today in the West, people that are rendered invisible in exchange for the
empowerment of others that choose to be visible.40 Those who cannot participate in the new
sharing economy for lack of smart device or wireless payment methods, those who don’t readily
prescribe to ideological parameters for online social etiquette, and as consequence become
further marginalized from online discussions. 41
So, then we arrive at the final section of this Arrendtian corrective42 which looks at
visibility & power as forces that impact the formation and execution of a political body by actors
who hold some form of dominion upon the space of appearances. But power, as demonstrated
by willing actors who by the nature of coming together become a polis43 does not always extend
to everyone. Not everyone holds dominion over freedom to disclose oneself explicitly to the tune
of Diana Ross’s, “I’m Coming Out.” Not everyone can be an actor, some are just spectators, and
beyond that some are not even watching. This is not to say that these three groups in the, as
defined by Xavier Marquez, “There’s the fourfold distinction within this space of appearances
where visibility generates power by enabling actors to act in front of spectators. Spaces where
visibility subjugates by compelling people to act before spectators, spaces where invisibility
enable a person to escape observation, and spaces where invisibility marginalizes a person.”44

39 Gayatri Spivak, can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on The History of An Idea New York, Columbia
University Press, 2010
40 Very different from the subaltern of Gramsci and Spivak, but still a subaltern group in neglected American
communities.
41 Or worst yet, their transgressions follow them out into the real world, and they are no longer able to work, or
maintain relations within their communities as a result.
42 Neve Gordon, On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault, Human Studies, Vol 25, No. 2
(Springer, 2002)
43 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition,
44 Xavier Marquez, “Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance”, Polity, Volume 44, Number , 2012
17

The first group that Xavier Marquez distinguishes would be a kind of celebrity influencer
class that willingly discloses who they are, and act before spectators. Then there those who are
made to act for spectators through subjugation, a row of employees dressed as Subway
Employees, enunciate a collective allegiance to the franchise when they stand in the space of
appearances, and thus theirs is a subjugation to that particular power of Subway. Then there’s the
third group that somehow manage to escape observation by entering a space of invisibility, these
private spaces are also scarce in our own socio-political context, but a simulation of such an
escape would be the phone screen. If one holds up a phone screen, it creates a psychic barrier, it
allows one to hide, and I feel for the most part that people are a subset of spectators and
reinforcers of panoptic surveillance that tend to hide in plain sight.45 Finally there’s the spaces of
invisibility from which marginalized groups never emerge from, a subaltern set who work and
clean and maintain the space of appearance for the actor and spectator class.
Consequently, everyone maneuvers their privileged and underprivileged selves within
these social spaces where we appear to each other and acknowledge, spy, and pass judgement on
one another, while some university cleaning lady or outsourced contract labor clears the way for
everyone’s passage. In western cosmopolises, our social body is considered a private entity in
public. The identifying signifiers which correlate us to certain groups are harder to decipher,
unless they are truly explicit in their representations.46

45 “ The incessant visibility of the panopticon is a controlling visibility. One cannot escape the gaze of the
other, who is not similarly controlled or disabled. (although this watcher may be subjugated in other ways that
do not involve visibility.” Xavier Marques, Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance

46 By explicit I mean that it’s clear if they belong to trade groups, franchise corporations, or anything else by
way of a uniform.
18
The power that keeps such publics in existence, is the force of mutual promise or social
contract.47 It’s a social contract, of spoken and unspoken consent, where subjects adhere to a
subjective form of power, localized in the potential for people to act in concert, when they
disperse, that power disappears.48 All operating within a matrix of Non-subjective power, which
through Michel Foucault, “controls by constituting, naturalizing, essentializing relations, and by
creating a visibility that separates and homogenizes human beings.”49 Privatization of space is
power’s own form of subtle enunciation, and is tied to how we enunciate as individuals within
systemic power. Power rests in architecture. Police are in fact servants to the dominion of
privatization architecture has on our cities. Buildings are powerful in that they create portals
upon entry, where any laws that forbid criminal activity are protected on the inside of a building,
buildings are powerful enough to completely mute the screams of people as they are tortured.50
A grouping of cis white men in business suits hold power in coming together, and
through the visual significance of business suits affords a greater access to power in the space of
appearances. While three Starbucks employees on a smoke break manage to enunciate their
shared interest in smoking, their off-time still promotes allegiance to the Starbuck’s corporation.
Those in compliance to power, form efficient and stable relationships to its manifested
territories. Many times though, compliance as it appears, is a veil for something sinister roiling
underneath.51 Conversely, while the privilege of being in the fold of power affords greater
agency in the hegemony, the exposure and observation of inner operational machinations of

47 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958
48 Hence why divide & conquer is a true adage.
49 Neve Gordon, Arrendtian Corrective ,
50 The abduction, torture, and murder of Jamal Kashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, 2018.
51 Sometimes I have been around people that, when witnessing police officers pass by, greet them with a
“Hello” or “Good evening officer.” And when the cop is out of ear shot, they talk about how they would cut
up a pig. Or, from personal experience, I have observed that people do not like working in customer service
industries, whatever illusion or veneer of hospitality that was inherent to service jobs is, to me, most definitely
gone or eroding as the chasm between classes continues to grow.
19
power, and how these play out inter-relationally in context, is knowledge then suited for the
creation of counter-intuitive weapons, defense, surveillance, and art.
Enter Anne Imhof’s performance opera Faust, an explosive meditation on power, the
fascistic tendencies of people as a polis, and in ways that the artist may not be conscious of,
meditations on clandestine natures from a subaltern consciousness.52 Imhof’s Faust, brings forth
a compelling articulation of body language in relation to society, surveillance, architecture, and
power. Through the framing of Hannah Arendt, I posit that Anne Imhof’s Faust presents an
abjection in the capability of a polis, what it looks like when social contracts, humanity, and
goodwill disappear from spaces of appearance. Art historian and curator, Susanne Pfeffer, says
in relation to Anne Imhof’s work that selecting her was an imperative response to the way in
which we are expected to submit to the tyrannies of technological improvement and thus become
codified into the social schema it creates on behalf of humanity.53
The German Pavilion is a form of non-subjective power per Michel Foucault, meaning
that the power rests in the interrelation dynamics a group of people has with the building. The
context of Germany’s history and its history of fascism and the effects of oppression & evil on
the rest of the world. It seems nearly impossible to not feel required to meditate on the role of
Germany, and the role of the German Pavilion which was built in 1936 by Hitler’s favored
architect Albert Speer, the same year that Germany held the Nazi Olympics. The questions and

52 Anne Imhof does not speak of her work in reference to the subaltern, nor does she or anyone reference
marginalized groups. If there were assignations toward the work by the artist, they would then indicate that the
work is anti-fascist.
53 “A new subject arises that is both hormonal and extremely networked across media. Our perception and our
movements increasingly take place in virtual space. The effective mechanisms of power and control are
inscribed in the body. I find the extent to which we cede to capitalization of our bodies, while simultaneously
bridling at this process remarkable. This is a fundamental transformation requiring reactions and responses.
“Susanne Pfeffer interview w/ Noemi Smolik @ Mousse Magazine 2017.

20
themes pertaining to totalitarianism, fascism, genocide, alienation, evil, and war, all must plague
the creative processes of artists that have been invited to stage interventions in the German
Pavilion.
In the 2015 Venice Biennale, the German Pavilion hosted a group of artists54 in the show
“Fabrik,” which was a group endeavor to reflect on the issue and possibility of revolt,
As the press release positions the work, “Starting from their varied reflections on the notions of
‘work’, ‘migration’, and ‘revolt’, the four artistic positions transform the building into a factory,
into a vanished, virtual factory of the imagination, into a factory for political narratives and for
analyzing our visual culture.”55 Fabrik, appears as a set of disjointed interventions, similar to the
way social practice interventions can postulate on grand themes but can only present
documentation. Text panels for visitors to read if they manage to put their phones away, vague
and clandestine experiments on social power dynamics,56play oriented situations with migrants
who have been affected by the privatization of a factory, Instagram ready installations that
postulate on virtual landscapes and identity,57 and photographs of detritus from war, and refugees
in various states of diaspora.58 On a formal level these ideas are lost in linguistic processes
without the rupture that is undoubtedly connected to the notion of revolt. My indifference to the
way Fabrik appears to have been executed, and the missed opportunity to engage political action
in a charged space such as the German Pavilion is drawn from Claire Bishop’s observations of

54 Olaf Nicolai, Hito Steyerl, Tobias Zielony, and Jasmina Metwaly, Philip Rizk.
55 Enrico, Fabrik, German Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2015,Vernissage TV
56 Olaf Nicolai puts the roof on show as the setting for a seven-months-long action. His protagonists perform a
mysterious activity, a shadow economy enacted under a glistening sun. Enrico, Vernissage TV,
57 Hito Steyerl’s video installation Factory of the Sun shows a world in turmoil and a world of images on the
move. It involves the translation of real political figures into virtual figures and an innovative experience of
making and engaging with images, somewhere between a documentary approach and full-on virtual
experience. Enrico, Vernissage TV
58 Tobias Zielony’s documentary essay consists of photographs that he took of African refugees in Berlin and
Hamburg. Enrico, Vernissage TV

21
relational antagonism, , and observations by Grant Kester on how post structuralism nullifies all
sparks of revolt; words are the enemy.59 It’s not enough to me, these meditations on themes,
anger, disillusion, oppression, hate, that in a manner speaking, go beyond words.
Faust takes over the imposing neo-classical temple of the German Pavilion and strips it
down to basics. A raised glass floor meets thick glass panels with a grid of steel beams, visitors
can walk on the raised glass, and performers engage in a series choreographed actions on both
levels of the glass surface. Tied to its use in Modernist architecture, the glass acts as a surface to
look through, and to self-reflexively ruminate on ideas regarding transparency/opacity and
reflectivity. In the press release for Faust the curator for Germany’s participation in the 56th
Venice Biennale elaborates on these material connotations in Faust:
A room, a house, a pavilion, an institution, a state. Glass walls and glass ceilings,
fluid and crystalline, permeate the room as if it were one of the centers of
financial power. The boundaries of the space disclose everything, making it both
visible and subject to control. The heightened floor elevates bodies and modifies
spatial proportions. Next to us, below us, above us, there are the bodies of
individuals, the bodies of the many. The performers, elated and degraded, move
across, below, and atop the pavilion. They are stationed on freestanding glass
pedestals and perched against the walls, simultaneously body, sculpture, and
commodity. Suddenly, we find ourselves in the midst of various constructions of
power and powerlessness, capriciousness and violence, resistance and freedom.60

Glass is also an interesting material transposed from the historic sites of concentration
camps in Germany. As I conducted research for the final stretch of this paper, I traveled to
Germany where I visited concentration camps, and the Topography of Terror museum. The

59 Grant Kester, The One And The Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, (New York,
Duke University Press), 2010
60 Susanne Pfeffer, Faust Press Release, 2017
22
Sachsenhausen museum and memorial site is distinct in the way that it preserves the walkways
within its various buildings, visitors walk on raised glass for a considerable portion of the site.
This is especially evident in the infirmary section of the memorial site, where medical
experiments were conducted on the prisoners. I am not indicating direct correlations with the use
of raised glass at the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site with Anne Imhof’s use of raised glass in
Faust, but I am saying that it’s interesting when considering Anne Imhof’s statement at the
award’s ceremony when she won the Golden Lion, that Faust “gives a very transparent view of
the past, but to me it stands as an image against with what we associate with that past.”61 Also
bear in mind that entrance to the German Pavilion was sectioned-off with metal railing, not
unlike a prison complex, with two Doberman’s as guard dogs. The Doberman Pinchers indeed
served performative function in the totality of Faust. 62
It’s also important to note the influence of Rem Koolhaas as curator of the 2014 Venice
Biennale dedicated exclusively to architecture, Fundamentals of Architecture. Koolhaas draws
attention to various permutations of architectural artifice we come to expect from buildings,
which in the end are composed almost entirely of façade. Anne Imhof’s use of raised glass and
extended glass walls, draws more attention to the architectural façade of the German pavilion,
thus making that interrelation between surfaces of concrete and glass a liminal space. 63 This is a
space in between that creates possibilities for ritualized performances, or overall a suspension of
disbelief, it’s a form of creating magic with familiar spaces.

61 Anne Imhof, Golden Lion Acceptance Speech, May 2013.
62 It’s also important to note the influence of Michael Asher’s work on the material of glass, and
architectural artifice that draws attention to institutional criticisms. Whether these are conscious
or not within discourses that surround Anne Imhof’s performance Faust.
63 The reference to liminality, a term attributed to Victor Hugo, is to bring to awareness the space in between that is
activated within Anne Imhof’s Faust. The Space in between glass and the walls of the German Pavilion is a liminal
space, a kind of magic space.
23
Furthermore, Imhof talks about the act of excavating permutations of sound and silence
within the walls of the German pavilion, “We’ve worked not only on the space but within it in a
concrete way, actually trying out what it’s like when you whisper in it and how long the voice is
sustained when you sing a note, how long it’s sustained when you scream that note. What kinds
of screams are there, are they audible from outside or not?”64
The artist reasons that there exist variations of a scream available in the pavilion, ones
you can hear from outside and some that you can’t.65 The soundtrack for Faust was just recently
released and is available for streaming, there are two prominent tracks, “Faust’s Last Song” and
“Blue Scape,” which sample screams from the performers as they rehearsed in the months
leading up to the Venice Biennale. This is important when considering a building’s potential to
house or stifle the sound of screaming—a key component of her performance, and another
example of the management of what is considered inside/outside in the realm of performance and
everyday relations.
If the German Pavilion is a form of Foucauldian Power, non-subjective in that it produces
its subject and shapes its interest and identity.66 Then Anne Imhof’s is a power lifted from the
dictum of Hannah Arendt, power that resides in the interrelations of coming together to form a
polis, and thus perform in such a space as the German Pavilion. Power as an attribute of the
entire group rather than of an individual, that rests in the abilities of subjects to see each other,
and activate relationships, and thus act in concert.67 Not because they all work in some form of
franchised form labor, but through mutual identification with core values of contemporary

64 Anne Imhof, Anne Imhof and Susanne Pfeffer in Conversation, (Faust Press Folder, Koenig Books),(2017)
65 A reminder of the abduction, torture, and murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Turkey. His
screams could not be heard from outside of the Saudi consulate.
66 Neve Gordon, On Visibility & Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault.
67 Xavier Marquez, Spaces of Appearance & Surveillance
24
discourse in art, society, and politics, and the larger roles it can play even if it is turned to
spectacle through subsequent processes of media.
A power of the ensemble, that is what drives Anne Imhof’s Faust, therein is the spirit that
makes the work successful in disclosing a world of alienation and indeterminacy, a sense of not
being at home in the world. The performers in Faust display mannerisms and a lack of agency
similar to characters in a Samuel Beckett play. While the horror of waiting for something to
happen is reminiscent of Waiting for Godot, Juliane Rebentisch argues that in fact it’s more
aligned with the characters of Beckett’s Endgame, “The figures in Endgame live in a sphere
beyond possible agency, and so they are also no longer characters in the traditional sense: they
are sufferers who go through “something” clown whose every act, every initiative goes absurdly
awry.”68 Rebentisch’s assimilation of clowns to the performers in Faust is conducive to the
argument of alienation, & marginalization which I think is intrinsic to the performance gestures
in the live tableaus of Faust. Anthropologist Don Handelman describes the etymology of clown
as a clump, or a clod, “a formation shaped or coagulated out of mud and ash.”69 Similar in
retrospect to the myth of the golem, a non-human effigy. The clown is a symbolic type, “a figure
that is somehow unfinished or incomplete in the logic of its internal organization; an entity that
hangs together in a loose and clumsy way,” like performers in Faust, an abstraction of alienation
into performance art.
Similarly, I find affinities between the Beckett clowns that Juliane Rebentisch references,
the clown symbolic type in Handelman, and a new notion of the subaltern that I feel is surging in

68 Juliane Rebentisch, Dark Play: Anne Imhof Abstractions, (Faust Catalog Press Folder), (2017)
69 Don Handelman, Models & Mirrors: towards an anthropology of public events (New York : Berghain
Books, 1998)( p. 240)
25
the west .70 The subaltern, like the clown, lacks agency and a voice. According to Antonio
Gramsci, the subaltern specifies to a person of low rank, in a society that suffers under cultural
hegemony of elites and bourgeois classes that denies them basic rights, or excludes them from
participating in democratic processes or of acting as visible individuals as part of a shared
nation.71
If I’m going to reference the subaltern, then it’s important that I also consider what
abjection means in today’s context. In Julia Kristeva’s treatise on abjection,73she describes
abjection as a twisted braid of affects & thoughts, that do not have a definable object. It is a non-
object, an otherness that is in direct confrontation with the ‘I’ The I is that which seeks to
understand by pursuing desire, by pursuing self-propagation, by seeking to understand, the I is a
border. The abject is a non-object outside of that border, devoid adjacent meaning to supplant
the desire of I, which repulsed, rejects that which is, “ejected beyond the scope of the possible,
the tolerable, the thinkable.” 75
In conjuring the abject, I allude to my opening statements of this section, that we must
assume that the worst has already happened and operate our respective lives from that
advantageous perspective in regard to the space of appearances. Assume that the collapse of
society is already underway and embark upon various reparative processes. What’s required
though is that we peer without shame into our own abjection as a society, and recognize it as
“immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: {as a terror} that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a

70 What will happen to truck drivers, and others in the workforce when they are replaced in automation? What
will happen to those that can’t participate in the new world model?
71 Antonio Gramsci, Notes on Italian History, Prison Notebooks,
73 It is imperative that I also consider the work of Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak dispelled a
broad manner of allusions toward the subaltern and specified what it is and what it’s not according to post-
colonial inquiries in India.
75 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941)

26
passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend
who stabs you.” 76
I feel that Anne Imhof explores these performative gestures in realm of the uncanny,
where “determinate fear and indeterminate anxiety fuse into a new dread.” which represent an
existential precariousness that tries to operate in an everchanging world seemingly indifferent to
one’s humanity and sense of collective sovereignty.77 Imhof describes [?] “The darkness they
explore has seized their audience long before the performance.” Anne Imhof’s Faust is not so a
much set of live tableaus with a vague depressive air, but rather pieces intended to be performed
in front of depressives. This is true, it became apparent to me why Faust speaks to me on so
many levels, and visually magnifies the erosion of social democracy, of sovereign subjectivity,
and egalitarianism in the west. The song, Suicide is Painless, was performed by the entire cast of
Faust with wireless mics. It’s brought me to tears on multiple occasions, “And suicide is
painless. It brings on many changes. And I can take or leave it, If I please. The Game of life is
hard to play, I’m going to lose it anyway.” 78 It’s not so much the lyrics, it’s more that it’s
performed by the entire cast of performers, and in their attempt to harmonize the chorus, there’s
a rough grain of melancholy that rubs me on a deep level. It’s sad, and despondent, it reminds me
of instances of hopelessness in the face of capitalism and its spectacle.79
The cast of performers in Faust embody a performativity behind and under the glass—
dejected, vulgar, clandestine, violent, and feral like a group of animals. There are moments
where one gets a fleeting impression of being at a type of zoo, observing a lineage of sub-human

76 Julia Krysteva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941) p.4
77 Juliane Rebentisch, Dark Play: Anne Imhof Abstractions, (Faust Catalog Press Folder), (2017)
78 Suicide is Painless, Cast of Faust, FAUST soundtrack, (Cologne/New York: PAN, 2019)
79 I have held these beliefs from a very young age.
27
species.80 If you’ve ever seen a person just recently released from prison after years of
incarceration, the mannerisms they present are similar to the ones that Anne Imhof’s performers
embody.
This abject presentation of a self is similar to the way in which recently traumatized
children from detainment camps cannot seem to return to a childhood they once knew, they stare
out into space, cry uncontrollably, can’t withstand the affection of their parents, and inflict
violence on other children. This subaltern-like abjection also is similar to that of opioid addicts
across America, the image of three men sharing a single needle to shoot up in the light of day in
some major intersection in Boston across from Harvard University.
Anne Imhof’s performance team articulates their bodies through a range of sequences
that depict violence, abjection from civil society, and the push/pull of aversion/longing toward
affirming a coherent subjectivity: “A precariousness of identity that entails not only a sense of
inferiority but also an apathetic disposition and indifference in acting.”81 Imhof’s performances
are real time confrontations with improvisational depictions of subjects otherwise denied their
humanity within the contemporary polis. Each performer’s individuality is championed
throughout Faust, but only as it exists within a system of bodies in relation to each other.
The performers are all playing themselves. As Imhof relates in an interview with Elizabeth
Fullerton for Artnews, “It’s not a role or character, it’s really their energy and power that makes
the [performances] so strong.”82 She addresses the dynamic from which she choreographs

80 Remember Guillermo Gomez Pena and Coco Fusco’s Couple in The Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians
Visit the West, in discussing implementations of zoological experience in a museum or art setting.
81 Juliane Rebentisch, Dark Play: Anne Imhof Abstractions, (Faust Catalog Press Folder), (2017)
82 Elizabeth Fullerton, “In London, Anne Imhof Talks About Her Kicking, Screaming Venice Beiennale Hit
‘Faust’”, Artnews.com, http://www.artnews.com/2017/05/30/in-london-anne-imhof-talks-about-her-kicking-
screaming-venice-biennale-hit-faust/, 5/30/2017

28
movement, how the autonomy and individuality of each performer is essential to the
development of everyone’s own motion sequence. Generally, Imhof titles pieces from the very
beginning so as to delimit a shared point of understanding.
Imhof is a painter first and foremost, as she often makes clear in interviews and
communicates the gestures she would like to express in real time via drawings. These drawings
are incredibly loose in their formation of line, and they evoke a sense of constant becoming. This
state of constant becoming is central to the way Imhof and her collaborators choreograph
movement, as the artist describes, “It’s about accidents that happen, the ability to trust. The more
that is accidental, the more precise the whole thing gets. It’s happening out of impulse.”83
This is reminiscent of anthropologist Don Handelman’s study on clown & the ritual frame.
Handelman describes the etymology of clown with that of a clump of clay, a clot, an entity
torn out of context, it’s outline is blurry.It has a quality of ‘frozen movement’ or of congealed
liquidity that is strongly reminiscent of a condition of ‘in process’84
The clown combines, subsumes, and decomposes unlike attributes in its composition, and
remains perpetually in between. The clown is self- contradictory, it oscillates between
conditions, soft & hard, benevolent & malevolent, kind & dangerous. Head banging,
masturbating, lighting strips of cotton on fire under the glass floor. Wrestling and then
embracing, these are some of the contradictory visual motifs in the live tableaus of Faust.
Gestural & performative material that the performers excavate in each other through hours of
rehearsal, whereby they discover each other’s limits and drives, and frame the S&M flavored
dynamic that exists throughout the opera. Juliane Rebentisch uses incorporates the clowns from

83 Elizabeth Fullerton, “In London,”
84 Don Handelman, Models & Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events, (New York: Berghan
Books, 1998) pp. 236- 256

29
Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, to describe their apparent lack of agency, Rebentsich equates
their appearance of runway models to that of clowns.85
But invoking the clown is not enough to describe what Anne Imhof’s performers go
through, not just only in Faust, but in a greater majority of her performance works.86 It is here
that we must turn to Richard Grathoff’s Symbolic Type, who Don Handelman uses toward his
own analyses of clown. The symbolic type is a term for a being whose presentation of self is of
such extreme self-consistency that they impact on and mold the contexts of the social order,
rather than being determined by it. 87 In Faust, the power of the art is not only predicated on the
encounter with the glass elevated floors that Anne Imhof has installed, as interventions with the
Fascist imposition of the German Pavilion. The collective performance is so unique, so outside
of normal interpersonal relations, that they impact and mold the encounter with the German
Pavilion in its entirety. 88 The symbolic type is one that totally embodies a particular set of
consistencies, they are a tautological figure that is cause and effect of themselves. The symbolic
type does not modify their behaviors or attitude according to or in response to the reaction of
others, therefore there is no give and take common to interpersonal dynamics. Unlike a person
that enacts roles in relation to others outside themselves, the symbolic type becomes a world unto
himself, a totalistic being. They embody themselves, the totality of themselves as Other, since
others outside themselves no longer partake of nor participate in its being. The performers in
Faust, are in fact symbolic types, they subsume an experience of themselves into one event,
whereby the closure to negotiations with the public takes place. The public stares, and takes

85 Julianne Rebentisch, Anne Imhof :Faust Press Catalogue, (Venice: Koenig Books, 2017)
86 Angst, Angst II, Faust, and Sex performances all use the same performers, who evoke a consistent set of
mannerisms.
87 Don Handelman, SRB Insights: Symbolic Type, The Semiotic Review of Books, Vol. 5, No. 1 1994 pp.
88 Faust, along with other of Imhof’s performances are described as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total piece of
artwork in that it combines a multitude of mediums.
30
pictures of the performers throughout Faust, projecting their own needs to categorize and
quantify, even to desire89, but the performers remain impervious through perfect praxis of
performance. Let’s take for example one of the image tableaus in Faust, whereby performers
stand atop slanted glass pedestals that are attached to the walls of the German Pavilion. The
performers stand on these displays as if they were some specimen to be observed. The turn their
backs to the audience and drag their torsos along the wall, or stare out into the audience. Their
bodies are the medium and material through which the opera Faust functions, as symbolic types
they are engaged in the destruction, negation, and reification of the world through the medium of
the body. 90 This is a microcosm of the social order Imhof’s Faust, embodied in each performer.
This dynamic unfolds by way of contexture, the social organism of the performers is the
contexture of Faust. Contexture is the extension of the symbolic type, where it becomes a
dynamic part of a tightly integrated, aesthetic composition. The installation and performance in
Faust is a reflection of this, all moving parts, up to and including the phones that each performer
uses to receive directions from Imhof throughout the 4-5-hour long performance, informs the
work as a synecdoche. Faust, is a ‘void’ within which situations can be constructed in the best
conditions possible for their efficient decoding. The void is to be filled, through the contexture of
the performers acting in concert. The performers are perceived by others, expected by normal
relations to perform and to reify their real selves. But ‘Themselves’ have become non-
communicative objects, communicating in fact a sense of destruction of communication, being
out of social time, and relations. They are impervious to negotiations with the public, to give and

89 After some time the performers of Faust had to be escorted back to their hotels by Venice Biennale security,
the general public had become entranced, or obsessed with them, that they began to follow them home after the
performances.
90 Don Handelman, Don Handelman, SRB Insights: Symbolic Type, The Semiotic Review of Books, Vol. 5, No.
1 1994 pp
31
take, the faces are distant, cold, melancholy, mask-like, and impenetrable. They, by way of
gestalt, synthesize the context and terrifying macrocosm of Faust. 91

Finally, there are distinctions to be made toward the symbolic type in respects to
embodiment. On many occasions Anne Imhof makes the distinction on her performers, that they
are playing themselves, that it is not some form of allegory that is being performed, but rather
that it is their intensity, their energy, their struggle, their spirit that is on display during Faust,
and other performances like Angst and Sex. To me these distinctions that Imhof draws on are
emblematic of the symbolic type, most specifically because they are worlds unto themselves.
The performers in Faust annihilate metaphor, there is no separation between what occurs in Faust
within the walls of the German Pavilion, and some allegorical premise outside.
“The theory of the symbolic is the only one that makes the living body the essential template of
symbolic form.”92 Through their perfect praxis of embodiment the performers destroy illusion,
fantasy, the fictive, the imaginary, and insist on their own reality as the totality of being. This
especially makes sense when we consider how Anne Imhof forms these visual tableaus, by way
of drawing and real time figurative exploration that allows for accidents to take place which only
enrich the work. Anne Imhof refers to Faust as a piece that functions not unlike a painting, where
in which in which she describes the process of “becoming a picture” to be the actual work.93 The

91 There are two ways in which symbolic types synthesize context by projecting its own design, thereby
generating this as the context within which others find their place.
Symbolic type as the catalyst of a gestalt, that creates contexture.
Gestalt is akin to synecdoche
Internal integration is highly self-referential Contexture includes both the signifier & the signified

92 92 Don Handelman, Don Handelman, SRB Insights: Symbolic Type, The Semiotic Review of Books, Vol. 5,
No. 1 1994
93 Susanne Pfeffer, Anne Imhof :Faust Press Catalogue, (Venice: Koenig Books, 2017)

32
symbolic type is not only figurative but must be a living embodiment. It lives its own time, its
own rhythms and pulsations, that from an external perspective may even seem timeless.94
As the performers are observed by visitors to the German Pavilion, visitors are thus
implicated in an act of looking and being looked at. Performers are trained to slice diagonals
through space with their eyes.95 The performers are also in opposition to invisible power
structures lurking in the background, and those encoded within their social bodies, “Bodies are
always also products of our environments, of the technologies and forms of power imprinted
upon them.”96 There’s a resistance that persists in gestures of these performers, however small
and large or slow or fast .97 There is no reciprocal exchange, between the audience and
performer, the spectators seek to codify and capture the action for their Instagram feeds, but like
Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, there is no identifiable object. There is a risk that all of this
could mean nothing in the end.
There’s also another way to consider and think about power within the social dynamic of
groups, and in the dynamic between performers in Faust, and it stems from western mysticism.
It’s the concept of the Egregore, which is occult concept that describes thoughtforms or
collective group think as having physical proportions on the astral or metaphysical plane.

94 These distinctions I draw from Faust and its performers are my own, and specific to my research, on
alienation, disenfranchisement, and the subaltern. It could very well be that if I happened to present this paper
to anyone in Anne Imhof’s circle ,they could easily laugh at me and say that I have it all wrong.

95 Anne Imhof in conversation with Hans Ulbrecht Obrist
96 Susanne Pfeffer, Anne Imhof :Faust Press Catalogue, (Venice: Koenig Books, 2017)
97 They seem forever on the verge of transformation into pictures ready for consumption, and yet their
subjectivity is waging an endless war against its own commodification and objectification.---Susanne Pfeffer,
interview with Noemi Smolik
33
The concept of the egregore has been elaborated on through accounts in the Hermetic
order, in the Kabalistic studies, and most prominently in Mark Stavish’s recent book. 98 Mark
Stavish lays down the concept & figure of the egregore as “More than ‘autonomous entity
composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people’ it is also the home or conduit for
a specific psychic intelligence of a nonhuman nature connecting the invisible dimensions with
the material world in which we live.” 99Plainly stated, an Egregore is the proverbial elephant in
the room, but it is in effect a thought form that emanates from the collective consciousness, or
intersubjectivity of individuals, and manifests on a metaphysical level of experience. Consider a
crowd of people mutually enthralled while singing the The Star-Spangled Banner at a baseball
game. The frequency they share, if given a form, could be described as an egregore. How about
say, a mass of people marching down a street, all saluting a swastika embroidered on multiple
banners. What if that energy between people takes on a form in metaphysical plane of reality,
invisible, yet very much guiding hands and decisions as their swept up in the current of
excitement.
The Egregore, as a thought form, is also power within a group of shared minds, and I find
it beneficial to address that when addressing the power that emanates from the performers in
Faust. Let’s say the fashion industry, in its totality it can be said that it is comprised of elitism,
apathy, exploitation, sex, even social malaise. It’s an ideological undercurrent that is reinforced
by people who participate in its industry. The fashion in Faust informs the contexture of the
performance dynamic shared by the various symbolic types, they do look really cool, and carry
airs of exclusivity. The air of exclusivity afforded through fashion genres such as health goth, are

98 Mark Stavish. Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny, (Vermont Inner Traditions)
2018
99 Mark Stavish. Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny, (Vermont Inner Traditions)
2018
34
indeed conscious elements that Anne Imhof has incorporated in past performances such as Angst
II at Hamburger Bahnhoff in Berlin.
In Faust, power within the collective of Anne Imhof’s performers relies in an outward
disposition, of apathy, discontent, and malaise; theses interpersonal attributes inform the gestalt
of the performance. David Velasco writes a review of Faust in Artforum September 2017:
“There's Imhof's beautiful Douglas, the steely Franziska Aigner, the arrogantly handsome Billy
Bultheel, the mesmerizing Mickey Mahar. Faust testifies to the power of setting a scene, then
giving things over to great performers in hip clothes.”101 It’s true the performers in Faust, and
subsequently in all of Anne Imhof’s works, are very attractive people. Eliza Douglas is Anne
Imhof’s partner, they met while attending art school in Frankfurt. Eliza Douglas is also a model
for fashion houses like Balenciaga and Vetements. Velasco notes that Anne Imhof wore a
Balenciaga ball cap throughout Faust.102 I visited Germany this summer, as part of the research
for this paper, most hip German youth that go to clubs like Berghain, Tresor, or the Water Front
wear fashion trends not unlike that of the performers in Faust. German ‘trendsetters’ also carry
an air dispossession not unlike that observed in Faust. So, I think while the criticisms of Faust
being a spectacle of exclusivity by health goths is not entirely wrong, I also think it’s
circumstantial source material that the artist and her collaborators mine in Europe.
Normcore is the norm in Berlin, for the most part everyone seems to adopt the same style that the
performers in Faust have. I saw a lot of triple sole sneakers, and athletic leisure wear, with a

101 David Velasco, Personal touch: David Velasco on Anne Imhof's Faust at the German Pavilion, Venice.."
Artforum International, Retrieved Nov 13 2019
from https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Personal+touch%3a+David+Velasco+on+Anne+Imhof%27s+Faust+at+t
he+German...-a0505840298

102 I need to affirm that I have no issue with the health goth look, and simply acknowledge its presence as
another material in the totality of work. I like Balenciaga, would also wear their clothes if I could afford it.
35
fanny pack strapped across the chest. 103 But what is interesting to remember about the normcore
aesthetic is that it was heralded as an abdication from propagating a tiresome performance of
self, in exchange for a pluralistic view of social communities.104 Plurality is a notion of oneness
in Hannah Arendt, a social contract based on Egalitarianism that goes relatively uncontested in a
realm of appearances where people’s subjectivity and sense of self emanates from a common
space. It’s where I think Roy T. Tsao’s issues with Hannah Arendt’s elitism come to the fore. It’s
an issue of assumption, that subjects entering a space of appearances to form a parliament for
collective action, could all necessarily relate on a common ground, say for example nationalism.
By the mere fact that we are all American, or German, or whatever, we collectively understand
that we enter this space from that shared sovereignty.105 The social arenas of the western world
are much different than the one Hannah Arendt thought of when invoking the space of
appearances. The ideas and the spirit of the text stem from direct encounter with the atrocities of
WWII. After the war Germany was again decimated and fell into another existential rock bottom.
Climbing out of desolation & ruin, Germany was at a new starting point. and I think Hannah
Arendt’s treatise on the human condition is emblematic of the consciousness of a social political
body taking inventory of what had happened to them, of what they had allowed to happen. The
possibility for combined mutual reciprocity and conscious presence where a polis can be formed
was much more likely in a society that had already lost everything. In essence a perfect space of
appearances. This is the plurality of people aware of what the other may have lost, and with
newfound appraisal of what constitutes a new shared humanity.

103 I saw a lot of fanny packs strapped across the chest.
104 Sean Monahan, Emily Segal, Chris Sherron, Dena Yago, Youth Mode, K-Hole,( New York)(2013)
105 A romantic notion of course, and one with inroads toward Fascism.
36
This is common for societies after calamitous events, an earthquake, a mass shooting,
mass ICE raid, et al. By which people as a community or society, are brought down to their
knees, humbled before each other, or brought together by the promise of revolution. Marquez
states, “Only in revolutionary situations can the influence of everyday inequalities be almost
completely neutralized.”106 This is a form of egalitarianism that stays relatively pure within
revolutionary councils, because their power as a polis depends almost solely on temporary
agreements and persuasion rather than on differentially held resources and statuses.107 This was
the ideal space of appearances for Hannah Arendt.
Before arriving in Germany, and throughout my early stages of research for this paper, I
had convinced myself of a certain delusion in regard to German consciousness. That surely,
Germans could never allow themselves to go back to the condition of subjectivity that
precipitated the ascension and rule of fascism. 108 I was woefully wrong, fascism is now a global
threat, and Germans are not necessarily completely immune to going down that road again. Sure,
it could never happen, at least not on the surface, but racism is indeed still there in German
society. Surely, I can’t make generalizations, at least not ones from reference other than my own
observations. But racism is alike everywhere, and it troubles me to think that I ever thought
otherwise, part & parcel of my naïve nature I guess.
In Germany I observed what actually happens in a space of appearances, and it’s a matter
of mutual negotiation and acclimation to the otherness in each subject. Choosing to tolerate
differences or acclimate to shared values is a conscious choice. But plurality and the sovereignty

106 Xavier Marquez, Spaces of Appearance & Surveillance.
107 Xavier Marquez, Spaces of Appearance & Surveillance
108 German’s were indeed punished severely after their role in WWI, and existential malaise, and alienation of
German consciousness made the influence of Fascism and Totalitarian rule attractive, and necessary for
survival.
37
of natality, in essence that one is worthy by the mere fact that one is human, should not be
assumptions that can be so easily assumed. I observed these negotiations taking place a great
deal in Germany, and to a great deal they probably also exist here in the states. Identity politics
and intersectionality are partly to blame, a shared sense of patriotism, that we are all American is
all but gone within this divisive political climate. An unmasking took place after Trump’s
election, people’s racism came out of the shadows, and some still shirk away from the task of
looking at racism head on by virtue signaling white guilt among liberal groups.109
What’s great about Germany is that they are not good at hiding or masking the disdain or
contempt for foreigners. In America we’ve allowed our shadows to become largely sublimated,
and theses xenophobic tendencies surface in more damaging and insidious ways.
In brief, we are growing exponentially divorced from the political body in the realm of
appearances110, and losing our potential for spontaneity in egalitarian collaboration as a polis.
There exists a failure on Hannah Arendt’s part to not constitute the work of Foucault with
Discipline & Punish. Consequently this failure also rests in in Foucault in failing to acknowledge
Arendt’s The Human Condition. They both in effect are largely complementary within their
research on ontologies of power. A power that is non-subjective, Foucault, which localizes its
power in buildings, infrastructure, and surveillance. And conversely, a subjective power, which
is localized in the potential of people of coming together into a cohesive unit of a polis.
I posit an imperative to concede that the worst has already happened in civil society, and
that our social democracy is in a state of erosion. That we must go beyond the border of ‘I’, and
behold the breaking down of a world, that it is now already here, beckoning, threatening to

109 Own your darkness, or the darkness will own you, is what I say.
110 Currently a space where people walk with their phones on their face, walking into walls, falling into
fountains, getting hit by cars.
38
engulf us.111 Anne Imhof’s installation for Faust underscores the power of the architecture of the
German pavilion, as a form of Foucauldian power, and brings to the forefront its history as
instrument of German Fascism. Faust as a performance is a form of Arendtian power, in how it
stages processional rituals along the halls of the pavilion, and presents depictions of
impassiveness, indifference, and non-human gestures which frame a contemporary epilogue to
subjectivity. In a sense, a taste of what’s to come in a space of appearances where subjects are
estranged from one another. The notion of a new subaltern in relation to theories of clown also
surfaces within this research of body language excavated in the Faust performance. Like clown,
the subaltern does not appear to be human. Like the subaltern, the clown is without meaning and
their existence is precarious.
The drives that coordinate our gestures, mannerisms, or gait manifest according to sex,
nationality, tribes or other categories. There’s of course hardly a comprehensive enough Rosetta
Stone to translate meanings behind unconscious gestures. Yet even when we think we appear
explicitly as ourselves, especially on social media, our persona(e) are often created within the
boundaries of corporate enterprise as it defines us day to day.112 The self thus then becomes
commodifiable because it is mapped out to meet tastefully curated aesthetics like YouTube
algorithms that favor likability and safe topics for advertisers.

111 Julia Krysteva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941)
p.4
112 The Instagram influencers class, which depend on image creation that informs the structure of the robust
spectacle. Based on their perfect smiles, they appear to be having the most fun.
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Chant 3
On the 3rd occasion he is left alone by his surrogate family in the US, an 8-year-old boy from
Honduras begins an unrelenting torment on his 3-month-old cousin. The young boy spits on his
cousin as he sleeps in the crib. Watches the foaming spit trickle down the infant’s face.
The boy from Honduras bides time before going to extremes that could wake the infant.
Blasts the air conditioning in the room, covers infants head with a plastic bag, watches as the
baby breathes in own recycled oxygen. Finally, the boy picks up the baby’s head and lets it drop
onto the foam mattress of the crib several times. In discomfort, the infant screams, the boy
overpowers the infant’s sounds by screaming as well. The boy from Honduras slams doors and
makes ‘ha-ha’ sounds like the bully Nelson from the Simpsons. Turns the volume of the TV all the
way up, overpowers the infant’s screams. The house drowns in the rap stylings of the Notorious
B.I.G

SECTION 3:
Interlude Of Mass Man: The Image Of A Man With Nothing To Lose
Institutional criticism is part and parcel of Anne Imhof’s presentation of Faust at the
German Pavilion in the Venice Biennale. It’s proposition as an immersive installation reveals a
history of subjugation to imperialist power, and to the complicit dispositions to that very
enterprise of power. The crowds of visitors at the German Pavilion walking on glass, while
underneath their expensive shoes the cast of performers engage in simulations of human
abjection. The frontier the visitors encounter at Anne Imhof’s Faust is one they see as different
permutations throughout a privileged life, whether it’s in their encounter with valet services or
restaurant services. Sometimes these frontiers between themselves and the other seems repulsive,
and they wish they didn’t have to see the working conditions unto which the other is reduced to.
“[the abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops
40
so that the "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited
existence.” 113
This desecration of personhood, albeit in distinct variation, is within a lineage of literary
auteurs willing to go to the depths of abjection & degradation.114 Through their contributions
within the vein of subversion, we form understanding of symptoms that befall consciousness
within this system through embracing its perversions. George Bataille in a distinct analysis on
cruelty and art, emphasizes that, “we only like to destroy covertly, we impugn terrible and
ruinous destructions, at least those that appear to us as such. We are content to be
little aware of destroying.” 115
Sacrifice, destruction, disorder and chaos offers us respite from the trap that
this system is. If we retain our inner child in this life, then we can act on absurd
impulses to obtain information beyond the social grid that constitutes the space of
appearances. This is a longing to ease the discomfort & alienation of separation
through ravishment. To call on or allow for the destruction of objects/subjects that
reinforce the world of appearances. “If the subject is not truly destroyed, everything
remains in ambiguity. And if it is destroyed the ambiguity is resolved, but o nly in a
nothingness that abolishes everything.” This is an unconscious longing, that permeates
throughout the polis today. As I stated before, our sensibilities are still tied to
primitive nature regardless of how evolved we think we might be according to
technology or adopted ideology of justice, morality, & truth. I posit, that at least in

113 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, an Essay on Abjection.
114 My list of influence includes George Bataille, Dennis Cooper, Antonin Artaud, Marquis De Sade.
115 George Bataille, The Cruel Practice of Art. 1949 Bataille, Georges, Stoekl, Allan. Visions of excess : selected
writings, 1927-1939 . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 1985.

41
the realm of performance art, there’s a yearning for that authentic moment. A
revelation through an artist’s conceptual premise that simulates orgasm, death, cruelty
and sacrifice; an Instagram able moment.116
Holding Command is a quality that I seek when creating my own performances, even if I
suffer the misfortune of being a clown and self-sabotage my attempts at these qualities, much to
the benefit of the overall work. Clown is in a state of constant oscillation, clown is dangerous,
clown is flammable, clown is contemporary. Abjection, sacrifice, degradation is not an element I
considered when I began working with JIMMY, rather I was concerned with existential
postulations on the nature of agency in relation to the system, and how to totally subvert them.
There was no answer other than through a further degradation, through a willful traversing of
boundaries of the social order in order to attain knowledge. The ritual clown is a vehicle that aids
in this exploration to a deeper network of understanding of the abject and degraded. It’s an
endemic aspect to my psychology, and artistic sensibility.
JIMMY is a series of works that was informed indirectly by clown, but as the years
progressed, it was impossible to deny correlations with an archetypal predicament that besets the
consciousness of men that are estranged from a shared common world. JIMMY, is a
performance persona that I created in order to understand and heal my own estrangement,
marginalization, and alienation from the world of capitalism as it manifests in the urban
environment. There are variations to the name JIMMY and they constitute different class
structures like construction workers, day laborers, or war veterans, but through & through, in
each permutation JIMMY remains an archetypal image of man unable to participate with society

42
or partake in it’s economic prosperity.117 JIMMY is not a man, he’s the image of a man. He’s
the vessel onto which projections are made as people pass him, or it, by.
In Arendt’s Space of appearances, and Foucault’s space of surveillance, when one is not
always able to enact a freedom to disclose oneself for loss of voice or agency, then the public can
impose an identity on them. The judgmental gaze of others, normalizes conformism that
excludes those from the space of appearances and relegates to low ranking positions. “Arendt is
aware of this possibility, and claims that the phenomenon of ‘all against one’ where the members
of a group gang up on those who are otherwise different—is the pre-eminent pathology of
power.”118 Retracing my steps through my work with JIMMY, brings me to Arendt’s notion of a
man with nothing to lose. There are parallels, or uncanny similarities between our own
circumstance as a society that wants to erase the past, and the psychic imprint of others attributed
to that same past, along with carriers of the subjectivity that precipitated it.119 Contrasted and
compared with a past in a country like Germany after WWI, that was alienated from the rest of
the world to such a degree that, in the case of Arendt, “A man, is faced between a meaningless
existence, and an existence whose meaning is guaranteed only through total submission to the
ideology of a movement.”120 Let me be clear on what my intentions are with this interlude
passage, my work with JIMMY, and the sensitivities I have gained from studying the
consciousness of a male experience as one unable to take part in a common world of capitalism,
is tantamount to sensitivity that Arendt has for the man who has no self-interest, nor ability to
form concrete social relations, or act in concert within a polis. If we keep pushing out certain

117 JAMES, JAMESON, JIMBO, JAIME, JAIMEY, JIM, JUMBO, and JIMMIE.
118 Xavier Marquez, “Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance”, Polity, Volume 44, Number , 2012
119 Cancel culture, erasing the status of a man, and subsequently his ability to earn a living in the space of
appearances because of mistakes they once committed
120 David Zinn, Hannah Arendt: Ideology & Terror in Totalitarian Movements, The Reason for Terror:
Philosophical Response to Terrorism, Kem Crimmins, Herbert De Vriese,
43
people that don’t align with whatever ideology is proclaimed by some cultural hegemony, then I
have to state that the outcome is not very good. This is part & parcel of what I state in earlier
sections, to assume the worst is already happening. If we continue to form coalitions against the
agency of cis white males, thus cutting off common relations with a common world, and
relegating them to a mere private existence, without social outlet, will only lead to the same
circumstances that precipitated the rise of totalitarianism.121
This is the creation of the mass man, one who is swept up into mob frenzies, and
movements with a deviant world view with a grotesque and unrestricted behavior, and strange
disregard for factuality where everything becomes possible.122 Mass man is easy to sweep up
into a mass of people who have lost their place in the world. This cancel culture that champions
disregard of inalienable rights and of a persons’ natality will only inspire more mass shootings
from the mass man. “Violence is attractive to the mass man, but it does not originate with them,
Vast terror was carried out for the sole purpose of creating atomized individuals.”123
Consider please how white men are losing their shit at the changing paradigm of culture, and the
majority of society isn’t making such an overdue transition easy. It’s not just JIMMY figures,
those already outside of society. In Fascist Germany the elite sought forms of transcendence by
losing themselves to the wave of mass mobilization toward totalitarianism. The elites in
Germany, much like elites today, were more isolated, sensed no escape, from the pervasive fake
culture and daily routine. They crave to see respectable society exposed, and immerse

121 I’m not an apologist for men, or the errors they commit. But I can certainly understand that if there is no
room for redemption, and men feel cornered, then we should not be so surprised when there’s retaliation.
122 David Zinn, Hannah Arendt: Ideology & Terror in Totalitarian Movements, The Reason for Terror:
Philosophical Response to Terrorism, Kem Crimmins, Herbert De Vriese,
123 David Zinn, Hannah Arendt: Ideology & Terror in Totalitarian Movements, Kem Crimmins ed. Herbert De
Vriese ed. The Reason of Terror: Philosophical Responses to Terror, (New York, Peeters Publishers) 2006

44
themselves into supra human forces of destruction as a way to seek salvation from the automatic
identification with pre-establishment functions in society. Mass mobs, mass shooters, and elite
shared a vague but mutual hatred of liberalism and society. It’s like a whimsical care-free vote
for Trump with an unconscious interest in laying waste to the American political system.
I do not propose to have a solution, I’m knee deep in my own processes of forgiveness, healing,
acceptance, and hopefully compassion. Before I traveled to Germany to conduct research for this
paper, I had developed a tendency to pass by white people on the streets and treat them as if they
did not exist, as if they were not human and undeserving of any further consideration. I did this a
lot while walking around Los Angeles, and when I arrived in Germany, I felt the same reaction
was directed towards me. An ambivalence to my presence, which really bruised my ego. I was
not seen as an equal in their space of appearances, and instead I felt reduced to an other , or seen
as a refugee, because of my brown skin.124 I again humbly propose, for myself at least, to assume
that the worst has already happened, and conduct my exchanges in the best manner I can to
preemptively ameliorate and assuage the isolation, fear, & hate that can befall us if we do not
heed warnings.

124 I had to bleach my hair as an experiment performance, and as a way to disclose myself as a
westerner, equal & worthy of consideration within their space of appearances. My attempt to be
relevant worked out in the long run I feel.
45
Chant 4
A white woman of about 60 on a train in Berlin, cannot contain the look of disgust on her face as
you step on board. She wears a bronchial tube, and just as you are about to sit down, removes it
from the orifice of her throat that is darkened and encrusted by a form of advanced cancer.
The tube that once connected to her esophagus is now resting in her hand, and with her thumb
and forefinger she pushes through the length of the tube to produce bile, pus, and throat
excrement towards the tip. She aims the tube to your general area, fluid falls and makes a splat
sound near the tips of your shoes. The sound produces a gagging sensation in you, to which she
responds in gleefully in a deafening cackle.

Section 4:
JIMMY, The Image Of A Man On The Outside Of Society Looking In
Around 2010 I began writing a screenplay based loosely on the final days of Guy Debord.
I attempted to depict a character of a man in his twilight, submerged in alcoholism and
resentment. I imagined a man, in his early sixties, at odds with a modern world from which he
had purposefully alienated himself from; a modern world which had catapulted itself into a
calculable futurity of biometrics, sweeping surveillance, and artificial intelligence all developed
under the auspices of convenience, safety, and progress. Instead of ceding to power, my
character, the Debordian fellow, chose to hide in the mountains near the city with his partner.125
They spent time playing war games, like Kriegspiel, reading about Gypsies, and lambasting the
society below held prisoner by its own hall of mirrors.126 The opening structure of this script
resembled the initial descent of Nietzsche’s version of Zarathustra from his mountain in Thus

125 In real life, Guy Debord did live out his final years in the rural area of Champot France with his wife Alice
Becker Ho. Guy Debord. Panegyric . London ;: Verso; 1991.
126 This aspect of the screenplay was based on kriegspiel, a war game invented by Guy Debord, it’s
a chess variant played by two opposing players. Guy Debord. Panegyric . London ;: Verso; 1991.

46
Spoke Zarathustra. In similar fashion, I wrote the screenplay in a cabin out in Manizales,
Colombia, largely secluded from the rest of the world.
In early drafts, I was interested in my character’s initial encounter with a city of the future. The
character in my script, who had no name but fashioned after Debord, is forced out of hiding upon
receiving the news of a friend’s death.127 In my script, Debord encounters a futurity of object
oriented ontologies within buildings, objects, devices, animals, food products, transportation,
sociality, and transactions. Everything imaginable within the city is smart and connected and
personalized to one’s needs, surveillance, biometric scans, and erosion of privacy are the only
tradeoff for such conveniences. Quantum computing has surpassed all previous capabilities,
advanced generation computing, wearable technology, and body mapping that can identify one’s
gait, all excesses of a technophile culture.
My subject in the screenplay, the “Debordian” fellow without a name, preferred to drink
while walking the streets, bearing witness to a world he has no access to. Realistic, multicolored
ads with personalized immersive narratives would play out in the vicinity of other citizens as
they pass-through retinal scans at variant intersections of city life. My character who I fashioned
to carry qualities of an old world, fussy, chauvinistic, skeptical, weary, and problematic in his
views. By nature of his politics, ethics, and sense of freedom he could not accept a world that
could capitulate to such intrusion on the lives of individuals as an obligation in order to exist
within a city. In this choice to not participate with the rampant progress of technology, his
position is forever relegated to that of a ghost; a figure outside the glass partition, looking in.

127 Guy Debord’s benefactor Gérard Lebovici was murdered in a parking lot, and after his death Debord was
no longer able to publish any works. This is part of why Debord then moved away from Paris.
47
I wanted this story to be immersive within the realm of virtual reality, and yet nuanced in
a way that could evade trappings of an ideological position.128 The script was outlined, but the
technology to create immersive cinema was not equipped with the tools and software, and even
imaginative potential that I sought to create. I was also much younger, and naïve about what
virtual reality could be.
While writing this script, I was also beginning to make work and think about ideas that
reflected my own alienation from the status quo of the world. To make conscious attempts to
understand why I felt marginalized from ideologies propagated within capitalism. From this
position of estrangement, and as consequence, I formulated strategies, sensibilities, modes of
thinking inspired from the situationists. In effect these were clandestine sensibilities for
operating in the flow city life. From this rumination, and inquiry into my own feeling of
marginalization I developed the JIMMY as a way to understand from other fragments of
experience I witnessed amongst other males in the city.
I began to develop the idea of a JIMMY, a configuration of a man that stands outside
looking in. Like my character in the script, JIMMY was a man outside time, looking into a
society from a marginal position.129 Plainly stated, JIMMY is the image of a man standing
outside, or loitering, with a backpack on. But there isn’t just one version of this image, there are
a few, especially looking in Los Angeles where I began the project. There is of course war
veteran JIM. There’s JAMES the construction worker who cannot access any of the buildings
that he helped build. There’s also tweaker JIMMI, always just hanging outside parks and

128 I have a strong, polemic voice, and my intention for this story would have been to sublimate my artistic
force in exchange to tell a subtle story of a drunk man forgotten in accelerated time. Jim Jarmusch aesthetic if
you will,
129 JIMMY has always been a tool for me to understand how I don’t fit into society. This is no longer the case
unfortunately, JIMMY as a project ended with my thesis show.
48
alleyways. There’s gutter punk JIMBO, a hitchhiker JAMESON who has just arrived from
Kansa, mental health needs JIMI, corporate affiliate JIMM, and a few others. I began with just a
few JIMMYs, collecting outfits, and placing them in individual backpacks. The backpack was
the universe from which a JIMMY could emanate from, especially since all JIMMIES with
nowhere to go have to carry a backpack. From there I developed the myth of a constellation of
JIMMIES, represented by a constellation of a Jansport backpack, this was a way to supplant my
explorations, and to organize the JIMMIES in relation to each other.

Figure 1: Jansport Constellation Diagram for JIMMY characters.
The large circles in the constellation are representations of the most prominent JIMMIES in the series:
Construction, Veteran, Tweaker, Street Urchin, and Corporate Affiliate. The smaller circles in the
configuration of a triangle are part of the zipper triad. The zipper triad JIMMIES are franchise employee and
Prison Release JIMMIEs,

During this time I did not drive, nor own a car, so each JIMMY came in a backpack,
changing from normal clothes into JIMMY was part of a process. There were special parameters
I had set for myself when working with these figures of JIMMY. The act of stepping into each of
these was a transformation of will within the space of life, one that required courage, to come out
49
and disclose oneself as a self of an other.130 The space of life, that which appears in the public
realm, along with its rhythms and cycles according to capitalist hegemony. I would never wear a
backpack while in normal clothes, and I had to change into one within the infrastructure of
commercial architecture. These spaces were parking lots, janitor closets, emergency stairwells,
alleyways, and public bathrooms without affiliation to a commercial brand.131 When Clark Kent
transformed into Superman, he would use phone booths, elevators, closets, and other industrial
spaces within city infrastructure.
There are existential questions that arise within such a transformation, specifically in
relation to each of the JIMMY configurations. I personally do not know how a construction
worker feels or operates within reality. Of days and nights commandeered by labor, scarcity, and
need. I was in fact never concerned with how each JIMMY’s demographic was represented in
my outfits, I had not considered their interiority to a level where I could say I was honoring their
experience with respect. I am a clown after all. Maybe I put on airs of altruist intentions at first,
when discussing JIMMY, but it was hardly done with any integrity. I had constructed caricatures
out of a range of male archetypes found across cities to understand my own sense of inferiority
and marginalization from since I was younger.132 I think of them like the costume selections
available during Halloween, each one carries specific signifiers which I wear in various
simulated performances of alienation when I loitered in public areas as a form of derive.
While the JIMMY construction worker, or the JIM veteran soldier were a form of drag,
their appearance on city streets were still a form of interruption. A man dressed in full US Army

130 Space Of Appearances, Hannah Arendt
131 I would never use retail dressing rooms or public bathrooms because…. Instead hotels, museums, train
stations and public outdoor areas suited the project because they represented a liminality outside of
transactional exchange, no need to buy anything, no consumer representation.

50
fatigues, with superficial observation by passerby appears likely to be a US soldier recently out
from service. Imagine him just standing there. Same with a construction worker, or Starbucks
employee, just standing there while everyone around is subsumed by the rhythm of consumer
capital on Los Angeles streets.
This image, or rather the description of the image changes in variation every so often. But
the archetype stays fixed in its elemental form in consciousness, thus the inadequate
effectiveness of stereotypes. I entered the JIMMY project as a way to exercise images of a
disenfranchised figure on the streets of Los Angeles, because I myself felt like this figure. I
imagine that my own emotional programming created concern for how I appeared to the world
according to a status quo. Due to feelings of inferiority, I could not effectively disclose the full
nature of my being in the space of appearances at this age; I was too young and not mature to
process these things. “The significance of our existence and activity is confirmed by others who
are watching us from multiple perspectives. In a sense, others define who we are on the basis of
how we appear to them.”133 I was just brown, Latino, well-spoken, but with a chip on his soldier.
So, I fragmented my personal emotions into this JIMMY vehicle, and inhabited images 134 of
men estranged from the rhythms of society. 135
In the beginning I would not associate my body language with what I was wearing during
a JIMMY session. In fact, I pushed to be further estranged from the outfit itself and contend
consciously with the reality of the act of being a JIMMY. The reality, of myself, a young artist

133 Xavier Marquez, “Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance”, (Polity, Volume 44, Number 1 ,
2012) p. 18
134 Stereotypes
135 “But if our identity emerges from how others see us and how we appear to them, can others impose an
identity on us?” Xavier Marquez, “Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance”, (Polity, Volume 44,
Number 1, 2012) p. 19

51
spending his free time loitering, just standing there, in public areas dressed as male stereotypes,
not properly interacting with the transactional hubs of privatized space. The body language was
in a manner that was divorced and somewhat offkilter, the gestures were not emblematic of a
normal man that belonged to the JIMMI costume, but rather similar to the uncanny nature of the
performers from Anne Imhof’s Faust. In the sense that they perform the mimesis of an alienated
life as a way to assimilate to an objective reality that is based on pre-existing normalized
behaviors that exist in the collective unconscious.136 Anne Imhof, and her collaborators take
elements out from their lived contexts in which they are embedded and preserved in quotations,
elements that mime estrangement and alienation from social arenas, and places them in
performance situations where in their repetition they confront the spectator with the shocking
absence of living abundance.137 The precariousness of identity became central when constructing
the mannerisms attributed to the discomfort of being a JIMMY in public spaces. Also, because
JIMMY is alone, he’s not part of a polis, and therefore his identity is subject to Foucauldian
power in the privatized spaces of Los Angeles.
There’s a really interesting film by Leos Carax, called Holy Motors, whose plot runs
strange and compelling parallels to the work I began with JIMMY. The main character,
Monsieur Oscar, played by Denis Lavant, is an enigmatic character who propels the plot forward
by riding around in a limousine from location to location in Paris. Monsieur Oscar, played by
Denis Lavant, receives dossiers from the back of his stretch limo, with assignments. Each
assignment is a scene that he must enact by becoming a very specific character. Monsieur Oscar

136 “Stated differently, in spaces of surveillance, a norm exists prior to the action and provides a standard with
which to judge the action, whereas in spaces of appearance, action is primarily exemplary and either precedes
the norm or puts the norm into question.” Xavier Marquez, Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance,
(Polity, Volume 44, Number 1, 2012) p. 23
137 Juliane Rebentisch, Dark Play: Anne Imhof Abstractions, (Faust Catalog Press Folder), (2017)

52
immerses himself with conviction and through use of prosthetics, wigs, and wardrobe. In an
early scene, Mr. Oscar steps out into a busy Parisian street as an old beggar lady with a
hunchback. In the scene, Mr. Oscar as old lady shakes a tin can to receive catch coins from
people walking along an ornate bridge in the center of Paris. Under his breath he comments on
how he’s so old, that he wishes to die soon, that all he has ever known is the sight of stone and
passing feet. There are no on-screen production cameras in Holy Motors, Mr. Oscar does each
performance despite that there is no audience, save for the viewer of the film.138
In one scene, he’s asked by a handler who I think doubles as his limo driver, why he goes
on doing this. Mr. Oscar says he does it for the act, for the act of transformation.139 This is
something I share within the JIMMY series, transforming into each JIMMY within secluded
pockets of urban exteriors is a concern that I make sure to integrate in most of my JIMMY
videos. Taking a backpack with an outfit that one wouldn’t normally wear and finding a safe
private space to change outfits. To go from an outfit one chooses to represent oneself in the space
of appearances, then into another outfit that represents a relegated and undesired position in the
same public space.140 This fixation on documenting and displaying the transparency of
transformation stems from a childhood memory. At my holy communion, when I was 11, my
mom hired a clown in order to entertain guests and family in Colombia. I was deathly afraid of
clowns at the time, and my parents knew it. They had to pay for therapy sessions on the issue on
separate occasions. The man who would be the clown during the reception of my holy
communion was also informed of my coulrophobia, and so in order to assuage my fears, he

138 When I first began working out a ritual of JIMMY out in public area, I didn’t document any image , video,
or sound.
139 Leo Carax puts Oscar through nine immersive transformations that question the validity, or, at the very
least, the stability, of a singular performative identity.
140 The Human Condition
53
broke down his transformation by putting the make-up and clothes in front of me and the other
children. He spoke to me, soothingly in Spanish, and guided me throughout his transformation
into clown: “See I’m only putting blush on my face, now I’m adding the smile, don’t scared, I’m
only using a little bit of white grease paint. And finally, the nose.”141
I share the transformation into JIMMY often with others, bringing a set of back packs
along, so that friends and I can change into a JIMMY together. Years ago, on one occasion I
invited two girls two wear day laborer outfits and spend time inside of Home Depot in
Hollywood making videos. In early footage we are hanging out as a collective JAIME’s,
cavorting, laughing, and mocking the patrons inside the store. The two girls I performed with
kept commenting on how gross they felt in their outfits, but then they were operating from a
shifted perspective of self, which emancipated them from normalized behaviors. In the costume
vehicle of a JAIME we were able to clown about with each other in a form indeterminate play.
Whereas JIMMY began as a vehicle to form understanding of my sense of alienation from the
incessant flows of consumer capitalism, and the status quo of white centrism that I felt rendered
me invisible in the space of public life. The vehicle is now more in line with the ontological
symbolisms attributed to clown. Clown as an unfinished formation, of congealed potential,
always oscillating between contradictory natures. Most importantly though as a figure of
transgressive volatility, that transcends boundaries, norms, and confronts the formulas of self-
commodification, by laying bare the processes performativity & transformation through the
public rituals of JIMMY. My JIMMY now more directly confronts the ideological operations of
Foucauldian power, by observing the various architectural enterprises of privatized spaces.

141 Dramatization of what the clown said to me during my holy communion.
54
Chant 5
After a night out drinking in Downtown Los Angeles, you enter your fabulous building
elevator, and then encounter a man naked from the waist-down, lying on his back, high out of
his mind on GHB, attempting to insert his prolapsed anus back into the cavity of his rectum. He
sees you, and with a look of desperation he exclaims, “Please. It won’t go back in, it won’t go
back in!”

Section 5:
We’re All Clowns. We’re All JIMMIES. A Case For The New Subaltern.
Who do we portend to be in the system of appearances? And who do we neglect to be in
comforts of our surroundings? What are we called on to embody when the distinctions between
the spaces private & public become nebulous and amorphous in their apparent distinctions?
These are observations that evade specific categorization, in the same manner that a woman’s
hair flip evokes so many distinctions in relation to class, gender, race, status,
My disposition has been much more nihilist, this outlook is indeed a political one, which
I buttress with my study of the integrated spectacle via Guy Debord’s writings. This is a social
relationship mediated by images, and these images are now vast data sets, forming rhizomes that
point to ideological programming that reinforces patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist thought. It’s
entrenched in body language, in the manner in which relate to systems of power according to
Foucault’s non subjective version that is localized in the privatized landscape. The privatized
realm of appearances, where we appear to each other as unequal, because at the onset we feel
superiority or inferiority in relation to each other. All of it based on self-judgement, or better yet,
as Cardi B relates, “If I see you, and I don’t speak, that means I don’t fuck with you. I’m a boss,
you’re a worker bee. I make bloody moves.”142

142 Bodak Yellow, lyrics, Cardi B, 2017
55
This collective estrangement through self-aggrandizement, and ego driven perpetuation
of self is hard to maintain in a system of scarcity and division, where we are slaves to money and
necessity. It is therefore imperative that we defer to each other’s humanity as opposed to the
transactional disposition that are aligned in protocol to the desires of corporations and brands. If
at Starbuck’s, or anywhere where service is exchanged for money. If my work with JIMMY
addresses the alienation I felt in relation to commerce, architecture, and a white centrist
modernity, then I argue that, for the sake of our freedoms of expression and sovereignty as
humans, we need to evoke strategies of covert communication and oblique expressions utilized
by queer subcultures since at least the beginning of the 20th century
My performances touch on the liminal states of being in the city, and the role appearances
play in our relationship with the inside & outside realms of human life. To me inside denotes a
sense of inner space, both as architectural edifice for home or industry, and as a metaphysical
space where the construction of self is exercised by the analytical mind. Outside, denotes the
realm in which we appear to others along the designated areas of capitalism, law, & power.143
Systems of organization predicated on race, moral and class subjectivity play themselves in the
outside; outside I am the conflation they see me as144, inside I am the spectrum essence of an
infinite nature.145
To Susanne Pfeffer, Anne Imhof, “Confronts the brutality of our time,” and upsets
expectations of the body intended to objectify itself, “even as they are irresistibly drawn towards

143 Space of Appearances.
144 The Spectacle
145 Quantum Universe
56
their own objectification.”146 Anne Imhof’s articulation of the body, is thought of as “mediations
on contemporary power structures.” The body, inadvertently transforms into a vehicle for these
power structures. and as their reach grows exponentially, it becomes essential that we imagine
new ways to be in our bodies in urban space, in order to develop new political language and plan
for action. Arendt again: “Action is all that matters, it’s delivery and aesthetic through line
should be aiming for impeccable brilliance, and balance.”147
In Anne Imhof’s work with her opera Faust, and my work with the series JIMMY the essence
of a subaltern consciousness emanates from performative quotations based on dispositions of clown
characters similar to that of a Samuel Beckett play. Marginalized and alienated figures, and
dispossessed fashion models become the If an economic collapse is imminent, by way of recession,
then we will all soon be JIMMIE’s. Or if automation truly renders our humanity obsolete, then we
will all soon be clowns. In the face of such surveillance systems within public, it’s important that we
form new ways of being amongst each other that are not codified into a self that is pre-packaged for
viral sensation. The ontology of Clown oscillates between contradictions, traverses unknown terrains
to bring back information, and is symbolic of a type in our collective imagination; that which stands
outside of society and threatens the order. This drive toward rupture, toward liminality, produces
inquiry more productive than any streamline toward easy comforting answers. The ‘inter-ness’
quality of Clown, its traditions in ritual149, makes complex, fluid, and untethered explorations
possible. Clown is impermanent, unreliable, contradictory, ineffable, anarchic, in a sense truly free.

146 Susanne Pfeffer interviewed by Noemi Smolik, Mousse Magazine, CONVERSATIONS
Anne Imhof “Faust” at German Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017

147 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
149 Handelman, Don. The Ritual-Clown: Attributes and Affinities. Anthropos. 1981
57
Reference List
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George Bataille, The Cruel Practice of Art. 1949 Bataille, Georges, Stoekl, Allan. Visions of
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Guy Debord. Panegyric . London ;: Verso; 1991.

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Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of The Prison, New York: Vintage Books,
1977, pp. 135- 195

Baum, J., Font, Lourdes M., Montegut, Denyse. Normcore: A 2014 trend and the end of
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Neve Gordon, On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault, Human Studies,
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Richard Grathoff, The Structure of Social Inconsistencies; a Contribution to a Unified Theory of
Play, Game, and Social Action. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; 1970.

Don Handelman, Models & Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events, (New York:
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Don Handelman, Symbolic Types, the Body, and Circus, (Semiotica, Vol 85, Issue 3-4, 2009) pp.
205-226

Don Handelman, SRB Insights: Symbolic Type, The Semiotic Review of Books, Vol. 5, No. 1
1994 pp.

Grant Kester, The One & The Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in A Global Context.
(New York, Duke University Press,) 2010

58
Timur Kuran . Private Truths, Public Lies : the Social Consequences of Preference
Falsification . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press; 1995.

Julia Krysteva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University
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Jaron Lanier, Global Addiction to Social Media is Ruining Democracy, Boston Globe, June 8th ,
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pp. 6-31

Sean Monahan, Emily Segal, Chris Sherron, Dena Yago, Youth Mode, K-Hole,( New
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Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty:A reckoning. (New York: W. W Norton & Company, 2011)

Susanne Pfeffer, Anne Imhof :Faust Press Catalogue, (Venice: Koenig Books, 2017)

Juliane Rebentisch, Dark Play: Anne Imhof Abstractions, (Faust Catalog Press Folder), (2017)

Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on The History of An Idea New York,
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Video Reference
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract An Appraisal of the body in relation to power structures within spaces of appearance & spaces of surveillance. An inquiry into Anne Imhof’s performance Faust, which by way of mimesis incorporates dispositions affiliated with alienated classes. Then a comparison with body language of estrangement and marginalization within my own performance work in the JIMMY series. A call for reparative functions toward our social democracy, and the potential of polis, and plurality, within a capitalist structure that would prefer to keep us atomized and individuated.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Dancing about architecture: performative interrogations of the body in the built environment

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Creator Alvarez, Oscar David (author)

Core Title Ruin of bodies, bodies in ruin

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 12/16/2019

Defense Date 01/12/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag active shooters,alienation,American anomie,American domestic policy,anarchism,Anne Imhof,anomie,Architecture,automation,Capitalism,class inequality,clown,consumer capitalism,Don Handelman,Emille Durkheim,estrangement,Fascism,Germany,Greece,Hannah Arendt,Isolation,Jimmy,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,Oscar David Alvarez,performance art,Performance Practice,polis,political body,Power,ritual clown,situation theory,social dynamics,social fabric,social inconsistencies,space of appearances,space of surveillance,subaltern studies,symbolic type,Technology,terrorism,Venice Biennale,wage labor,World War Two

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Campbell, Andy (committee chair), Bustamante, Nao (committee member), Prakash, Archie (committee member)

Creator Email odalvare@usc.edu,scarofdavid@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-253579

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