When the eyes no longer listen

a closer to post-formance

Abstract

This article discusses the fragility of the gaze, specifically from the perspective of performance documentation. The same legitimacy that archives can be used to simulate an action that never happened. To materialize this hypothesis, the concept of pós-formance is presented, a new branch of visual arts that diverges from traditional performance. In recognizing pós-formance, the need to categorize certain types of actions that present a simulated execution is argued, and yet, over the decades, they have managed to solidify themselves until they obtain an equivalence to the archival principle of performance provenance. Although these are actions that were never actually performed, they have obtained legitimacy, validation, commercialization and insertion by the art system itself, reaching privileged places in Western performance. Pós-formance identifies the deconstruction of the condition of presence, since it is assumed that, in order to create an action of artistic content, the physicality of the bodies, the effective execution of the action and even less the temporal construction are no longer necessary, conditions that were previously inalienable in performance. In this case, the perceptive visual aspect of the performance is relegated to the discursive development (graphemes and phonemes). To confirm this hypothesis, the following works are taken as case studies: Action 2. Aktion Sommer (1965), by Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Fantasia de Compensação (2004), by Rodrigo Braga. Keywords: Body; Documentation; Gaze; Performance; Pós-formance.