PERFORMING WRITING 59 by Jean-Yves Jouannais to define individual artists who did not produce cultural objects but nevertheless profoundly influenced their generation.** If what Sapeck and his Hydropathe friends called “Fumism’ had an impact on satirical journals as different as Le Chat Noir, Gil Blas, Le Courrier Frangais, and Les Quatearts, it did so precisely in relation to their more or less explicit tendency to ‘perform writing’ and abolish the distance between writers and readers, ‘The art forms they created questioned the conventions and the boundaties on which ‘the everyday life of the community was based. Experimental forms of writing and performance alienated self-evident norms, rendered them odd and unfamiliar, or even attempted to lucidly reinvent them. In that sense, they anticipated the twentieth-century avant-gardes, which proclaimed the end of art and aimed at identifying artistic practices with the activities ‘that build, pace or decorate the spaces and the times of common life’ (‘qui édifient, rythment ou décorent les espaces et les temps de la vie commune).>° ® Jean-Yves Jouannais, Artistes sans cewores: I ivnuld prefer not to (Paris: Hazan, 1997, repr. Galli marc, 2009). * Jacques Rancitre, Le Partage du sensible. Exhétique et politique (Paris: La fabrique-éditions, 2000), 36. On the avant-gardes’ refusal of the institution of art, see also Peter Biirges, Zheory of the Awent-Garde, tans, Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).