Encountering

The Conceptual Body, or a Theory of

When, Where, and How Art “Means”
Amelia Jones

Tehching Hsieh, Time Clock Piece, 1980: A man shaves his head and then punches a clock every
hour on the hour of every day for a year. He takes one frame of film for each clocking-in action.
Now, we watch the six-minute-long film, which presents his body in fast motion over the entire
year of actions. We notice his hair grow (by the end, his hair is long), and the jittery move-
ments of the sped-up body, marking its slightly different positions every hour (the jitteriness
pricks our sense of anxiety, linked also to the necessity of punching a clock on time, relentlessly,

Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor, Roski School of Art & Design, USC, and is a curator and
scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist/sexuality studies. Recent publications include
Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (Routledge, 2012);
Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, coedited with Erin Silver (Manchester University
Press, 2016); and the edited special issue “On Trans/Performance” of Performance Research (2016).
Jones is currently working on a retrospective of the work of Ron Athey and a book tentatively entitled
“In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance.” ameliaj@usc.edu

TDR: The Drama Review 62:3 (T239) Fall 2018.

12 ©2018 Amelia Jones
­without ­failing). The filmic form of the piece as we access it accentuates the emotional valence of
its content. We witness the collapsing of time into cinematic image (or more likely digital foot-
age watched via internet link on our laptops). The body enacts a conceptual concern with the
aging of the body, its instrumentalization both as clocking in/out and as agent of artistic motiva-
tions. As cinematic spectators, we participate in an encountering, engaging this stuttering body
in relation to our own modes of desiring and instrumentalized embodiment. His body is noth-
ing more than a laboring/making body (the labor is the production of “art”).1

Since the rise of conceptualism or idea art in the 1960s, artists and theorists have posited and
even insisted that art is not a “thing” but a process or relationship. The nature of the question
became not “What is art,” but
closer to: “When and where is
art?” or “How does art work?”
Hsieh’s project produces what
I call the “conceptual body,”
mobilizing the body in situa-
tions of encountering to examine
philosophical and political con-
cepts key to art and life — such
as time, labor, and the instru-
mentalization of the body in
capitalist and late-capitalist soci-
ety. Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece thus
“works” by addressing us via cin-
ematic imagery. It comments
on “work” (or labor) through
bodily action made represen-
tational. His activation of the
conceptual body takes on mean-
ing through its staging of art
as encountering.
As Hsieh’s piece makes clear,
the exploration of these ques-
tions of the when, where, and
how of art by artists in the
1960s, 1970s, and 1980s posed
fundamental questions about
representation versus presen- Figure 2. Tehching Hsieh, Time Clock Piece, 1980. (Photo
tation, inevitably involving the © Tehching Hsieh, courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery,
body, space, and time. Often this New York)

Figure 1. (facing page) VALIE EXPORT, photograph from Body Configurations series, 1972–82.
(© VALIE EXPORT, Bildrecht Wien, 2017; photo courtesy of VALIE EXPORT)

  1. In Lara Shalson’s powerful account of Hsieh’s work, her description of the piece is exemplary: “Throughout the
performance, he wore the same clothes, resembling a generic workman’s uniform: grey trousers and a shirt with
a badge sewn onto the left breast bearing his name and the numbers 41180 – 41181 (again, the dates of this per-
Encountering

formance). Each time he ‘clocked in,’ Hsieh shot a single frame of 16 mm film, producing a motion picture that
compresses the entire year of hourly punches into about six minutes” (forthcoming). On Hsieh’s work, embodi-
ment, and time, see also Heathfield and Hsieh (2009).

13
 move, however, resulted in the tendency among art critics, historians, and curators to oppose
“body” to “conceptual” art. Hsieh’s durational projects point to the mistake in this oppositional
categorizing. The concept of encountering helps to provide a new framework to understand these
questions surrounding when, where, and how art works.
Art historian Simon O’Sullivan draws on Deleuzian theory to argue that, in contrast to mod-
ernist regimes, art can be activated as an encounter that “operates as a rupture in our habitual
modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack [...] an affir-
mation of a new world” (2006:16, 1). I am extending this to propose encountering rather than
encounter as a more useful term because it insists upon the relationship between art and makers
or receivers as one of action rather than stasis.
Furthermore, this relational encountering is profoundly contextual — linking art to social
life, political movements, and intellectual debate. For example, it has long been my argu-
ment (since at least my 1998 Body Art/Performing the Subject) that body and performance art
become the active staging of conceptual issues surrounding the when, where, and how of
art — paralleling the inquiries of philosophers from the phenomenologists onward (the “influ-
ence” between the art and the philosophy, if we can call it that, is mutual) ( Jones 1998). At the
very moment when philosophers such as Jacques Derrida were in centers such as Paris theoriz-
ing meaning as reciprocal and contingent, for example, Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, first performed in
1964, forced an active encountering, where spectators became involved in an obvious and height-
ened way in the meaning of the work and thus became aware of their complicity in the determi-
nation of the meanings of bodies and subjects as such. The site of the piece (originally mounted
at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, Japan, and then at Carnegie Hall in New York City a
year later), the specific audiences at each site, and its unfolding as performance (at the time and
through history as a documented event) has everything to do with these meanings.
Viewed contextually (inasmuch as we can know or imagine these original sites and times of
the work), Cut Piece works as a critical commentary on the objectification of women’s/Japanese
people’s bodies precisely because of the structure through which it was/is presented as gesture,
as performative, as open to (and in fact counting on) its viewers and participants to engage with
it. (We need only imagine the difference between how Ono’s work was received in Kyoto ver-
sus how it read in New York, a mere 20 years after the end of the war in the Pacific and the US
dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan.) Cut Piece becomes event in its staging of an encoun-
ter, whereby spectators’ reactions serve to substantiate its rupture of expected theatrical (both
original venues were concert halls!) and art relations (not to forget Ono’s huge role in early
1960s Fluxus circles in New York and beyond, and her soon to be maligned position as musician-­
collaborator, activist-colleague, and wife of John Lennon).
There is a reason I look towards Hsieh’s and Ono’s pieces as my first examples. Hsieh’s
position as an undocumented immigrant living precariously in the US and Ono’s as a woman
of color entering into largely white, male worlds of music and art in the New York art cen-
ter at the time conditioned the relationship of each of them to creative work. It is no surprise
that many of the artists from this period who mobilized encountering as a key element of their
works’ address and valence had been excluded from the presumptively disinterested value sys-
tems of modern art in centers like New York: women, people of color, the formerly colonized
and enslaved, queers. In fact, the conceptual body, I insist, was developed and made possible
only through the parallel energies of the anticolonial and rights movements exploding across
Europe and North America from the 1950s onward. The developments in continental philos-
ophy, those of radical conceptually oriented body artists, and the energies of the activist move-
ments were all inextricably interrelated in their impulses and insights — as is explicitly clear in
Ono’s work, culminating in Bed In (1969), her sit-in performance with John Lennon against the
Vietnam war.
Amelia Jones

Furthermore, the conceptual body in art is profoundly linked to a number of other terms
developed in the rights and other social movements: participation, performance, situation, rela-

14
tionality, process, activation, social engagement. These terms of fluidity, embodiment, and inter-
activity — all combined through the term encountering — are linked to a particular moment
in history.
Suffice it to say here that, while many of these artists were not US-born, many (like Ono and
Hsieh) were producing work at least partly in the US context, or at minimum responding to the
rising hegemony of American politics and culture on the world scene. As such their works read
as comments on structures of political and cultural power at the very moment in which initial
structures of value supporting the modernist project in the visual arts were being challenged and
even overturned by artists and critics — one mode of critique cannot be separated from the other.
Attending to the specificity of these bodies and concepts through this notion of the “con-
ceptual body” in the situation of encountering allows a broader understanding of links to polit-
ical concerns, whether or not the artists themselves explicitly acknowledged them (Hsieh did
not).2 The framework of encountering suggests an inextricable immersion of the artist’s body
in action in social space, mobilizing interactions that defined personal, group, and larger social
identities and modes of empowerment.3

Situational Aesthetics, and “Where”

Art Becomes Art as Well as a Potential
(Minor) Event
A series of articles and artworks
from the 1960s through the early
1970s began to establish the
terms identified here — 
­particularly those of “situation”
and “relational.” It was Brazilian
conceptual body artist Lygia
Clark who developed the lat-
ter term in her Relational Objects
series of the 1960s, which literal-
ized the theory of art as encoun-
tering that I am exploring here
(two wearers would be physically
connected by the two-sided gog-
gles, their bodies materially con-
nected to the work but also by
extension to the artist, who set
up the relational situation). Figure 3. Lygia Clark, Relational Object (Goggles), 1968. (Photo © Associação
The “situation” concept Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark”)
was also developed early on by
a younger generation of art-
ists seeking to move out of the stalemate of modernist formalism gripping New York and
other Euro-American art world centers: in 1962 American artist Robert Morris already deter-
mined that “art is primarily a s­ ituation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to [...] one’s

  2. Hsieh tended to downplay his situation as one of personal alienation: “the loneliness in several of my works
reflects my situation as an illegal immigrant in the USA. [...] I didn’t have a work permit and didn’t know very
many people in New York, I was mostly killing time” (in Gedin 2002:67; see also Shalson forthcoming).
Encountering

  3. This point is confirmed by the rise, at the same time as this mode of art was just being developed (the 1950s and
1960s), of sociological theories of social encountering (or the self as “performance” in relation to others) as that
which defines both individuals and groups (see Goffman 1959).

15
 Figure 4. Niki de Saint Phalle, Shooting performance, 1962, Malibu, California. (Photo © 1962 NIKI
CHARITABLE ART FOUNDATION)

a­ wareness as art” (Morris 1962; see also Doherty 2009:25). As well, in a 1963 Art in America
article entitled “The Audience Is His Medium!” Dorothy Gees Seckler presciently described
what at the time was called “neo-Dada” art, including public performances of art-making by
Niki de Saint Phalle, as “audience participation art [...in which] the artist is for the audience and
not against it,” as per the original confrontational Dada impulse (1963:62). Seckler elaborates
by giving credit to predecessors of neo-Dada (or nouveau réalisme, as French art critic Pierre
Restany called the French arm of the movement) such as Duchamp, who, she argues, “antici-
pated nearly all the devices used by ‘participation’ artists” in his objects and exhibition designs.
She also credits Fluxus artist George Brecht, who staged his Play Incident at Martha Jackson
Gallery in New York in 1960, engaging visitors in a game with ping-pong balls (63). Niki de
Saint Phalle’s early 1960s “shooting” performances, in which she encouraged visitors to take up
a gun and shoot canvases or sculptures she had made in which she had embedded bags or cans
of paint, were paradigmatic examples of this move towards engaging spectators in encounter-
ings that activated them and the works through action.
In 1966, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, in his article “Violence in Art,” expanded on the idea that
artists were opening art to process and, specifically, to the status of event. Coutts-Smith sets
forth very early on the paradigm I am exploring of art’s efficacy and even identity as art relying
on its context and the encounters it solicits:

[A revolution in art, spurred by Marcel Duchamp, occurred in which the] environ-

ment, both inner and outer, was seen in a different way [...]. Reality was no longer seen
as a static “thing” that one attempted to understand, but was seen to be an extended net-
work of relationships, a juxtaposition of events. It was something that needed to be expe-
rienced. For the artist, the painting or sculpture had also to become something that was
experienced, become, in fact, an event. Aesthetic experience is now a matter of partici-
pation, a three-way dialogic situation actually taking place in space and time between
the artist, the spectator, and the object. It is something which happens, in which one is
actively and psychologically involved rather than something you look at and take on
subjectively. (1966:5)4
Amelia Jones

  4. Coutts-Smith ends this section by asserting: “Thus, if we must have father figures, they should be Duchamp, not
Picasso, Jarry, not Apollinaire,” returning the “evental” impulse of art from the 1960s to the example of Duchamp
(1966:5).

16
Using psychological language — as was common in essays about situational or participatory
art from this period — Coutts-Smith nonetheless stresses the “reciprocal” aspect of this kind
of “three-way dialogic situation” or “event” activated by contemporary artists such as those
grouped under the rubrics of neo-Dada, Happenings, or nouveau réalisme (including Niki de
Saint Phalle); Coutts-Smith cites John Cage and stresses the need for artists to activate “a recip-
rocal act of violence to free a person from his masks” (5).
In this way, we can interpret Saint Phalle’s 1966 massive interactive art installation at the
Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Hon: A Cathedral, as provoking highly charged moments of
encountering, defining it as an event in the sense evoked by philosopher Alain Badiou. In his
1988 book Being and Event, Badiou defines the event as the site where the “supplement of
what-is-not-being-qua-being originates,” i.e., the location of a moment in time and space that
ruptures “being-qua-being,” the modes of stability through which our dominant social insti-
tutions and ideologies make us feel stable and secure as “subjects” (Badiou [1988] 2005:15).5
Celebrating the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous line “un coup de dés jamais n’abolira
le hasard” (“a throw of the dice will never abolish chance”), Badiou exults in the paradox of the
event’s randomness combined with its way of calling forth a response or interpretive engagement
drawing out its future meanings (one could say its reliance on an encounter). Through Mallarmé’s
phrase, Badiou emphasizes the “undecidability” of the event, but also its call to action (“On the
basis that ‘a throw of the dice can [sic] never abolish chance,’ one must not conclude in nihil-
ism, in the uselessness of action [...T]here is no other vigilance than that of becoming” [198]).
It is this combination of recognizing the randomness of gesture and response, with an acknowl-
edgment of the importance of “vigilance” in the face of this undecidability, that I draw insight
from Badiou.
But, given the nuances of the work of Saint Phalle and others discussed here, deflating
Badiou’s grandiose claims of the evental producing revolution is important. For this, I turn to
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the “minor” in the case of literature ([1975] 1986).
Minor works are those that might (in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms) inspire a kind of interpre-
tive activism, deterritorializing habitual ways of thinking by articulating lines of flight (fluid
escapes) against the grain of normative art and broader cultures which are linked to the corpo-
rate and state power of the art market and other art institutions. As Erin Manning expands on
the idea of the “minor gesture,” writing itself (or “making” in general) can be understood as an
“encounter” with one’s own thinking, in relation to one’s readers (2016). And, in the words of
Deleuzean art history scholar Simon O’Sullivan, minor works are those that enact art as partici-
patory, producing new publics; the works choreograph art encounters (2006:18).
Saint Phalle’s Hon: A Cathedral did not then provoke a political revolution. But it was expe-
rienced as an event of note in the art centers of Sweden and beyond; partly because of its sta-
tus as evental (as soliciting encounterings) it created a firestorm of media reaction across the
Euro-American art world, arguably in the vein of minor literature.6 Hon — an approximately

  5. I am glossing a bit on Badiou here; he is clear that the rupture is at least in part linked to the break from the pure
truth of mathematics — “the foreclosure of thought by knowledge” ([1988] 2005:9). But elsewhere he connects
the rupture to the power of the state and of normative ideologies, as Andrew Robinson notes (2014). I am also
distancing myself from romanticizing elements of Badiou’s theory (not uncommon among French philosophers
when they write about visual art). For example, Badiou’s concept of the subject as a “militant of truth” whose her-
oism is evoked by his role as “artist-creator,” a “lover whose world is enchanted” ([1988] 2005:xiii) is not helpful
in its reactionary romanticism.
  6. Patrik Andersson’s dissertation, “Euro-Pop,” and particularly the chapter on Hon, makes clear the epic status
of the work not only in Swedish cultural and political history, but also in the history of Euro-American mod-
Encountering

ern and postmodern art. He also notes the important collaborative role of Jean Tinguely, Saint Phalle’s partner
at the time, and curator Pontus Hulten, as well as artist-friend Ulf Linde — and the participation of these men
gives the potentially feminist aspects of the piece even more of an evental status. The fact that some critics at the

17
 25-foot-high and 100-foot-long
supine female body with her legs
spread — staged sexually charged
encounterings by inviting vis-
itors to walk through a tunnel
between the female figure’s legs,
which functioned as the door
to the interior of the work. Hon
exemplifies the way in which
an artwork can become evental,
as images of visitors streaming
through this vaginal tunnel and
reviews of the experience of the
interior elements seem to con-
firm. Never before had an artist
addressed spectatorial relations
through such an aggressively
gendered and sexed — in this
case clearly interpreted as proto-
feminist — gesture; Hon went
many steps beyond, say, Gustave
Courbet’s painting of a bea-
ver in the now infamous 1866
painting, Origin of the World. If
Figure 5. Niki de Saint Phalle (with Jean Tinguely, Ulf Linde, and Pontus Courbet’s painting presented
Hulten), Hon: A Cathedral, 1966; visitors entering installation at the the viewer with the ultimate
Moderna Museet, Stockholm. (Photo © 1966 NIKI CHARITABLE “source” of heterosexual male
ART FOUNDATION) desire (and anxiety!), Hon inter-
rogated through activating spec-
tatorial bodies the structures of
viewing and desire that motivate all modernist art but which, until then, had remained veiled.7
The “art” status of Hon was in fact its activation of art as encountering: encountering with and
through a gargantuan supine woman’s body. For the typical male museum-goer, otherness had
to be engaged in order for the work to be experienced.
By the late 1960s, then, a concept of art as situational, p
­ erformative, and reciprocal — 
as activating a situation of encountering with potential political effects — was circulating widely
across Europe and North America, and beyond. Art writers were keen to theorize this shift.
In 1969, for example, expanding on the earlier writings and practices cited above, British art-
ist and theorist Victor Burgin published his important article “Situational Aesthetics” in
Studio International ([1969] 1992); in a 1974 article in Art in America, American originator of
Happenings Allan Kaprow elaborated his concept of “situational models” of contemporary art;
and in 1980 Artforum published a special issue on “Situation Esthetics: Impermanent Art and
the Seventies Audience,” edited by Nancy Foote and with contributions from numerous artists.

time viewed the piece as misogynistic does not controvert this but proves that Hon initiated debate that had not
existed before that time about gender, women’s bodies, and the art world (see Andersson 2001, esp. ch. 3).
  7. Courbet’s painting was literally placed under a green veil by its commissioning owner, the Turkish-Egyptian dip-
lomat, Kahil Bey. It is very unlikely that Saint Phalle would have been aware of the painting, which was unknown
Amelia Jones

during the 1960s by all but a few private parties who had access to Jacques Lacan’s collection, where most likely
it resided (this is where the painting finally resurfaced when the French government acquired it for the state
museum) (see Musée d’Orsay 2017).

18
From the 1960s through 1980, the language of opening art to situational action or a­ ctivity —
that is, opening art to process in specific and particular public sites — was clearly a crucial
thread of discussions about contemporary art in Euro-American centers.
While neither the body nor the concept of performance are elaborated to any extent in these
discussions, both take an implicitly central role in the shift to situation. In fact, the lack of any
explicit reference to embodiment in these early analyses of “situation” or “event” in contempo-
rary art locates in early form the tendency to separate performance or body art from conceptual
art. Furthermore, the use of psychological rather than phenomenological models and language
for understanding the opening of art to situation during the 1960s and 1970s exemplifies but
also discursively enacts the separation of mind from body that arguably leads to the separation
of body or performance art from conceptual art.
Among these writers and practitioners, Kaprow (who was both) was the least guilty of
dichotomizing body and mind, perhaps not surprisingly given his role as a Happenings artist
who was also an important teacher and theorist of performance art. In his description of “situ-
ational models,” Kaprow cites a number of key examples of this approach, including the femi-
nist body-art performance by Sandra Orgel, Ironing, performed in Los Angeles at Womanhouse
in 1972 (1974:85–89; see also Kaprow 1971, Kaprow 1972). All of Kaprow’s examples, in fact,
involve bodily actions that either directly engage the bodies of audience members or indi-
rectly activate the understanding of embodiment in future viewers — from dance works by Steve
Paxton and Merce Cunningham, to Joseph Beuys staging a sit-in for 100 days of Documenta
in 1973, to Joseph Kosuth’s staging of a series of tables with chairs for audience members to sit
and peruse extracts from texts discussing the use of models in science.8
Just before that, Burgin’s influential 1969 article had noted the new emphasis in art-­making
on “[a]ccepting the shifting and ephemeral nature of perceptual experience,” through the pro-
duction of “aesthetic objects” in everyday “real space,” implementing a “revised attitude towards
materials and a reversal of function between these materials and their context” such that
“process-oriented attitudes” are embraced and “art is justified as an activity” (Burgin [1969]
1992:883, 885). Usually identified as a conceptual artist, Burgin emphasizes process and action
but, not surprisingly, does not explicitly highlight the role of the body in his model of “situa-
tional aesthetics.” The body, however, is often explicit in his art, if representationally (as in his
1981 mise en abyme self-portrait photograph Sigmund Freud House, where he depicts himself
in a mirror at this site of the London home of the founder of psychoanalysis) and is implicit in
his descriptions of how “behavior” and “perception” determine the meaning and value of such
works (884 –85).
The contributors to a roundtable in the Artforum “Situation Esthetics” issue of 1980, too,
focus on “attitude” rather than embodiment, although the editor of the roundtable, Nancy
Foote, introduces the special section by noting the tendency of contemporary artists “to extend
the art audience,” linking this to “[t]he increase in the ’70s of ‘project,’ performance, film and
video art, all of which have their origins in the ’60s” (1980:22). Among the artists reporting
their thoughts on “Situation Esthetics,” Vito Acconci notes the structure of art as an “exchange

  8. Richard Schechner, like Kaprow both a theorist and a practitioner, also wrote about as well as produced work that
pushed forward conceptual issues through embodiment. The first performance he directed with The Performance
Group, Dionysus in 69 (1968), for example, and his article “Actuals: A Look into Performance Theory” ([1970]
2003) address this crossover. Dionysus in 69 (a staging of Euripides’s play The Bacchae) experimented with the-
atre as encountering, including the audience inside the action (see Schechner [1968] 1970). And “Actuals” uses
Kaprow’s work to explore conceptual issues through performance art as “actual” or “actualizing”: “Understanding
actualizing means understanding both the creative condition and the artwork, the actual” ([1970] 2003:33). The
Encountering

relationship between encountering and actualizing lies somewhere in this idea of the live act as “there” or (in
Kaprow’s terms) “happening.” Schechner’s arguments are, provocatively, indebted to anthropological theories and
non-Western modes of performance, which mine are not.

19
 Figure 6. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 24 July 1979–26 June 1980.
Citywide performance with 8,500 sanitation workers across all 59 New York City sanitation districts.
(Photo by Marcia Bricker, courtesy of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York)

system,” and Dan Graham stresses the “inter-subjectivity of the observer(s) and the artwork,”
an argument that implicitly foregrounds embodiment. Of course both artists were produc-
ing conceptually driven body art works using video and spatial strategies in the 1970s (in Foote
1980:22, 25).
After the 1970s, the concept of situation aesthetics or situational art clearly shifted to new
terms — with Austrian artist and writer Peter Weibel characterizing very similar work as “con-
text art” in a 1994 article. Weibel provides a description that helps link the concerns of artists
in the 1960s and 1970s, oriented primarily towards opening art to everyday life or the harsh
concerns of political and social spheres (moving art into “situations” so as to engage viewers as
participants in a process of meaning making), to the developing interests of artists in the 1990s:

During the 1990s, discourses usually considered extrinsic to art [have been...] increasingly
incorporated into discussions about art. Artists are now becoming independent agents
of social processes, partisans of the real. The interaction between artist and social situa-
tion, between art and extra-artistic context has led to a new form of art, where both come
together: context art. The objective of the social structure of art is participation in the
social structures of reality. ([1994] 2009:51)

Weibel’s notion of context art and his emphasis on participation, as well as on art as fully
invested in “the social structures of reality,” in turn paralleled the “relational aesthetics” moment
spearheaded in the 1990s by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, and then developed into what
is now called “social practice” or “participatory” art — terms often viewed by art critics, cura-
tors, and artists as new, even though the concepts of “relational” and “participatory” had clearly
already been introduced in the 1960s, as I have noted (see Bourriaud 1998). For Weibel and
Amelia Jones

theorists of relational as well as social practices, the artist engages publics in spaces that allow
for a merging of art and activism. Weibel’s theory, however, as with the early social practice
work of artists such as Suzanne Lacy and Mierle Ukeles in the 1970s, is strongly differentiated

20
from the focus on the “convivial” in Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics. Weibel, Lacy,
and Ukeles, as artists and theorists, were not interested in making friends in the art world, per
Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics argument (which has been rightly criticized as such).9 Their
work was about engaging participants by creating public situations that were not primarily
aimed at being easy or “fun” (per Bourriaud’s emphasis on conviviality). While Weibel (espe-
cially his work with feminist VALIE EXPORT in the late 1960s) was known for antagonizing
audiences to political effect, Lacy and Ukeles worked through a common feminist strategy of
creating intimacies to solicit care and concern — for example, Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation project,
1979–80, for which (among other things) she made a point of meeting and shaking the hand of
every sanitation worker for the city of New York.
Whether or not the body is mentioned in the interrelated cases of context art, relational aes-
thetics, and social practice — and this is what I am stressing — the artist’s body (whether literally
“live” as part of the work or not) is in one way or another activating the bodies of audience mem-
bers, who become explicit participants in the construction of meaning and value. The idea here,
of course, is that through such activation of a situation of encountering the artist helps to pro-
duce new or extend previous modes of activism. The relational bond with viewer participants
gives them a chance to become attuned to the need for social change and even, in some cases,
share in developing strategies to effect it, through interpretation or otherwise. My argument
is to insist (against the grain of art discourse since the 1960s) that this happens conceptually and
corporeally, as well as psychologically and phenomenologically — bodily experiences, gestures, and of
course the glue of desire or the repelling force of anxiety, anger, or other negative feelings pro-
vide the intersubjective connectors/dividers that make artwork based on encountering function
the way it does.
It is key to my point that, whether these bodies of the artists and participants are mentioned
in the theory or by the artists or not, the kind of work I identify as conceptual body art most
often begins with a political urgency or conceptual concern (initially thought through the body,
of course), which is turned into aesthetic action through the embodied gesture of the artist in
the specific frameworks of art discourse, although very often not in official art institutions. Both
the bodies and the specific situation are necessary for this kind of practice to work aesthetically
and politically; the aesthetic working is defined in and through the political working, and vice
versa. Activism is made art, and art informs activism. This interrelation clearly energized later
activist-art and art-activist groups such as Gran Fury, WAC! (Women’s Action Coalition), and
Black Lives Matter.
All of these dynamics rely on a process of encountering that begins with the artist encounter-
ing discourses and modes of thinking about art and the political realm, as well as encountering
materials (including the body). This encountering stays in motion throughout successive pre-
sentations and displays of the work, in whatever forms, through time — from inception to all
subsequent viewings down the line. The term “encountering” allows me to point to the situa-
tional as well as temporal and embodied/conceptual/emotional nature of how this kind of prac-
tice suggests modes of evental change. We cannot plan or intend these moments (Badiou is
clear on this). But we can open up (and open ourselves to) the possibility of their occurrence,
experiencing this process with awareness. Encountering activates the where and when of art that
matters. Encountering is the situation in which art might become (minor) event.

  9. Claire Bishop’s critical analysis of Bourriaud’s stress on conviviality is influential (Bishop 2004). I critique the
ahistoricism of Bourriaud’s notion of “relational aesthetics” (see Jones 2013). In addition, philosopher Jacques
Rancière criticizes Bourriaud’s theory for its naïve belief that the artist “repairs the weaknesses in the social bond”
through simply convivially reaching out to viewers. Rancière on Bourriaud: “Yesterday’s distance towards [sic]
commodities is now inverted to propose a new proximity between entities, the institution of new forms of social
Encountering

relations. Art no longer wants to respond to the excess of commodities and signs, but to a lack of connections. As
the principle theorist of this school [Bourriaud] writes: ‘by offering small services, the artist repairs the weaknesses
in the social bond’” (Rancière 2006:90).

21
 Gesture as Art/Political Event: When and
Where Does Art Become (Activist) Event?
The members of the Situationist International (SI), active in Paris and beyond from 1957–1972,
understood well the power of art as an encountering — as they articulate in their important
manifesto of 1960, “The Theory of Moments and the Construction of Situations.” Here the
SI members define their strategic concept of the “constructed situation” in terms that Badiou
would echo in the same French intellectual context years later. The constructed situation,
according to Marxist urban theorist Henri Lefebvre’s “theory of moments” (1959) is “pitted
against the instant, but at an intermediary stage between instant and moment.” It can be repeated
“to a certain degree,” but never as that moment in which it first emerged (SI 1960).10
The SI situation is characterized by “its very praxis, its intentional formation” (SI 1960), and
this is where the SI deviates from Badiou’s later notion, which has nothing to do with plans or
intentions. For the SI, the constructed situation (or the “overturned” situation) is part of the
revolutionary praxis — the orienting of creative work towards effecting change through gestures
performed in sites to engage others in jolting processes of aesthetic and political awakening: it
is a hinge between the “structural” and the “conjectural” (notably, linked to later “concept” or
“idea” art). And, finally, the Situationists tie together Lefebvre’s theory of moments (as “articu-
lated along with” everydayness) and the art project by foregrounding explicitly “the problem of
the encounter in the theory of moments,” which is key to examining how situations can or should
be constructed. The goal, the SI suggests, is to produce “interactions between the flux” of the
“natural moment” Lefebvre identifies and “certain artificially constructed elements” that “per-
turb” this flux (SI 1960).
The Situationists sutured art to action. As SI leader Guy Debord put it polemically in 1952,
“the art of the future will be the overturning of situations or nothing” ([1952] 1994). By the
early 1960s, art as commodity or transferable object of any kind was anathema to the group: art
became evental in a Badiouian sense. Historically this is not a coincidence — theory has a con-
text. Badiou’s work follows the legacies of the SI: his ideas are shaped, at least indirectly, in rela-
tion to its practices, which informed French philosophy. Badiou argues that in our negotiation
of the object world (a void of inconsistent multiplicity in his terms), we attempt to give every
“thing” meaning, but in fact we only know objects as fragments or as an “index of a discur-
sive de-stratification, indeed as an evental occurrence of being” ([1988] 2005:14).11 Our attempt to
cohere the world around us fails at the point of the event — opening precisely the kind of rup-
ture the Situationists hoped to produce willfully in the increasingly commodified object-world
of post-WWII Paris. Badiou’s event cannot be intentionally produced, so I am signaling this
potential opening through the term “encountering,” which involves potential and relationality
rather than intended production of inherently radical situations. The “situation” is the “even-
tal” moment whereby our surroundings become other than “being-qua-being”; that is, we
experience them differently from ourselves for the first time and as such the potential for new
thought — or, the implication is, new action or activism — arises.
Treading a line between the Situationists’ uncomfortable, rather direct reliance on “inten-
tional” gestures and Badiou’s nonintentionally produced, and retroactively understood, events,
I am developing here a method of understanding that plays on the confluence between the

10. In terms of this intellectual lineage, it is important to note that the Situationist International thus drew on the
theory of Henri Lefebvre, who was in turn inspired by Guy Debord, one of the SI’s major theorists and practi-
tioners; this relationship epitomizes the shuttle between theory and practice that has defined the relational move-
ments of the post-WWII period.
Amelia Jones

11. The “void of ‘inconsistent multiplicity’” is from Robinson (2014). On the activation of objects, interestingly
Asger Jorn used found paintings and “détourned” them in Situationist shows in the late 1950s.

22
two theories. I want to link the Situationists’ evocative insistence on perturbance of the flux of
moment-to-moment experience through creative embodied interventions into urban life (put-
ting aside for now the question of agency in this activity) to Badiou’s interest in the even-
tal as that which violently introduces subjects who have formerly been excluded into the
realm of legibility on the stage of the political (and possibly of the aesthetic). I draw as well
in part on Simon O’Sullivan’s observation via Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizom-
atic (a theory of creative interpretive engagement that parallels my concept of encountering):
“Understanding art practice rhizomatically [...] entails attending to what we might call its per-
formative aspect, what it does and what it makes us do, as well as to its ‘knowledge producing’
aspects” (O’Sullivan 2006:20).
Through Situationism, Badiou, and O’Sullivan’s version of Deleuze and Guattari, I am
exploring how concept and body can be understood to be inextricably intertwined in art relat-
ing to the activism as well as to the art discourse of the 1950s through the 1970s. With this tra-
jectory of thought and action moving art from objectal to evental status, I want now to look at
several artists’ practices from the 1960s and 1970s, concluding with a consideration of more
recent work by Mónica Mayer. Performative works by the Central European artists VALIE
EXPORT (born 1940 in Austria as Waltraud Lehner) and Ulay (born Frank Uwe Laysiepen in
1943 in Germany during the war, the son of a Nazi soldier) activate encountering via the concep-
tual body towards political ends. Attending to the specific bodies and sites through which these
activations (these encountering actions) are or were staged is crucial to examining how they
worked and continue to work today.
My goal is to extend the genealogy of concepts articulated in the 1960s, as I have traced
above — including situation, relationality, context art, participatory art, conceptual art, and body
or performance art as well as performativity — in order to come to a better understanding of the
how, where, when of art as a politically and conceptually motivated encountering situation: of how
(artistic) gesture becomes event, of what the site of the encountering (where) has to do with how
we engage the work, and of when it comes to mean politically and aesthetically.

Art as Action/Representation as Event,

or the Sites of Performance
As Peter Weibel’s notion of context art suggests, the effects and values of art depend on the
materialities and modes of embodiment presented by the artist but also on the when and where
and how of the moment of encountering, on the bodies involved, and on the spaces engaged.
Most of the works I explore here take place either outside the gallery or introduce labor or
actions into the gallery in ways that activate and trouble the usual relationships we have with
these spaces. If, as Badiou argues, “[s]ituations are nothing more, in their being, than pure
indifferent multiplicities,” these works introduce a “rupturing with the order that supports”
the very action and space they enact ([1988] 2005:xii–xiii). This thought is not entirely new,
of course — as I’ve made clear by outlining the development over the past 50 years of con-
cepts of situation, participation, and social engagement. What is useful and innovative about
the work of EXPORT and Ulay is that they (like Hsieh in the example above) activate embod-
ied and conceptual encounterings specifically in relation to representational media, highlighting the
futural aspect of how these performative acts come to mean in time: the event, they teach us, is
not necessarily limited to the moment of live interaction. The documentation is not incidental
to their performances: it defines how they stage their encounterings in the live moment and for
the future.
Produced in the same European moment as the May 1968 uprisings across the conti-
nent, and at the beginnings of what would become Viennese Actionism, EXPORT performed
Encountering

a number of works mostly in the streets of Vienna in the late 1960s — often with the collabo-
ration of the very Peter Weibel who would come 30 years later to define the notion of “con-
text art.” EXPORT defined her practice as a form of “Feminist Actionism,” playing on the name

23
 of the male-dominant group of Viennese Actionists (EXPORT 1989:71). With these works, as
art historian Roswitha Mueller notes, EXPORT “releases the body into the mobility of signi-
fying interrelations,” making use of her body, performance, urban space, and what she devel-
oped as “expanded cinema” tactics to promote political interventions into conventions of
fetishism, wherein the female body is objectified in representation and women’s freedoms dis-
allowed. Mueller notes that by “[t]aking the body out of the static realm of objectification,
Export releases the body into the mobility of signifying interrelations” (1994:xx). In her titles
and ­statements, EXPORT explicitly linked these radically experimental forays to the activism
of the time, such as feminism (noted above) and the youth movements, as here: “[they were part
of] the revolts of the student movement that waged an attack against dominant oppressive state
power” (1991:7).12
As an artwork, EXPORT’s well-known collaboration with Weibel, the 1968 Tap and Touch
Cinema performance — like Ono’s Cut Piece — existed and continues to exist in and through the
process of encountering as it takes place in public spaces and, simultaneously, in and through
photographic media (specifically cinema, video, and still photography). The performative action
by a person self-identifying as an artist is the “art” of the work (which otherwise would simply
not exist as art); the art is ratified both by the action and by the structure of photographic media
(cinema and later the video and photographic documentations). The participants are instructed
by Weibel’s barking commands through the megaphone to reach through a box EXPORT
wears on her torso to touch her breasts.
It is key that EXPORT choreographs and directs this entire situation, as well as having
it documented (EXPORT 1968). Through this constructed situation EXPORT’s work pro-
duces a cut in the circuits of fetishism through which women’s bodies had long been objectified
in Western visual culture — cinema in particular. With the male barker demanding that par-
ticipants actively touch rather than simply ogle the idealized white female body, Tap and Touch
Cinema choreographs a radical encountering with the very endpoint that the heteronormative
male gaze desires, overturning the desired (but tantalizingly deferred) consummation by making
it profoundly actual and openly public. Forcing a touch reduces the distance required for fetish-
ism to function. Even viewing the piece through its documents evokes the titillation and disrup-
tion of this embodied and conceptually driven intervention.
In a related 1969 piece, From the Portfolio of Doggedness, EXPORT pulls Weibel around
the streets of the city on a dog leash, soliciting reactions and creating a force field of feminist
empowerment by dramatizing the subordinated male body of her collaborator. As the existing
documentation makes clear ( Josef Tandl was commissioned to photograph the performance),
bystanders on the streets stare, either laughing or appearing confused. As Weibel put it in 1970,
in gendered terms, “Portfolio of Doggedness constructs reality, it reconstructs it from the sewing
kit of ideologies” (in Widrich 2014:61).13
EXPORT’s 1972–82 Body Configurations series pushes these points even further. In this
series, she performs her body in Vienna’s urban landscape and has herself photographed (see
fig 1; and see EXPORT 2017). With the Body Configuration performative images, EXPORT
continues to examine the hinge between body and representation, staging situations of encoun-
tering between a live body and urban space (including potential viewers then and now), a per-

12. Connecting her activism directly to her aesthetic strategies, she continues in this same quote: “and [...] the artistic
developments of this period that sought a new definition of the concept of art. Its aesthetic was aimed at making
people aware of refinements and shifts of sensibility, the structures and conditions of visual and emotional com-
munication, so as to render our amputated sense of perception capable of perception again” (EXPORT 1991:7).
Amelia Jones

13. Originally from Weibel and EXPORT (1970:260). Widrich points out, “[t]he word I rendered as ‘sew-
ing kit,’ Flickzeug, can also mean ‘repair kit’ (as for a bicycle), but the feminine connotation is central here”
(2014:93n23). She also notes that Hundlichkeit could be translated as “dog-like-ness” rather than the more com-
mon English translation of the title.

24
formative body that, through
photographic documentation,
becomes a representational body
offering itself to future encoun-
terings. As art historian Mechtild
Widrich aptly puts it, the Body
Configurations “address [...] at
once live and reading audiences.
[They...] relocate the perfor-
mance entirely to the document”
(2014:74).14 The works hover on
the edge of evental status, ques-
tioning the relationship between
art as presentation — the encoun-
tering effect of performance (as
one can see in some of the doc-
umentary images, which show Figure 7. Ulay, Fototot I (Photo death), 1976; photograph documenting action at
spectators reacting to her body De Appel Gallery, Amsterdam. (Photo courtesy of Ulay)
contortions) — and art as rep-
resentation, existing through
time to create reverberations in
future viewers.
Similarly, Ulay — who began
his career as a photographer
and started working with the
Polaroid company in the late
1960s, producing performa-
tive self-imaging works using
the Polaroid technique by about
1970 — also engages audiences
in moments where the hinge
between the live bodies encoun-
tering a temporally extended
performative work in the space
of the exhibition and the “eter-
nity” of representation is nego-
tiated. Some of his works make
Figure 8. Ulay, Fototot II (Photo death), 1976; photograph documenting action
this explicit: in his Fototot (photo
in Wuppertal. (Photo courtesy of Ulay)
death) works, originally pro-
duced in 1976, Ulay variously
staged moments of encountering with visitors who determined the status of his photographic
images — images already labeled to imply they assure the “death” of the image as well as of
the subject (death by photography, we might say).15 In Fototot I, entering the pitch black gal-
lery, visitors to the De Appel Gallery in Amsterdam triggered the illumination of a flood of

14. Widrich’s chapter 2, “Audiences,” where she extensively explores this project in relation to performance documen-
tation, public space, and EXPORT’s feminism, also puts it in the important context of Viennese Actionism and
the “charged atmosphere of Cold War Vienna” (2014:53).
Encountering

15. I am grateful to Richard Schechner and Mariellen Sandford for pointing out to me that Claes Oldenburg had
done a Happening-type performance piece called Fotodeath, in the early 1960s in New York. Other than the title,
however, this multiscened theatrical piece (itself part of a larger project originally called Circus), has little to do
with Ulay’s much more conceptual gallery-based Fototot (see Oldenburg 1965).

25
 light, which destroyed the images on the photographs, processed but not fixed by Ulay.16 In
Fototot II, performed in Wuppertal, Ulay faced the visitors wearing a chromed mask and hel-
met and holding a mirror over his body. Reflecting the audience members back at them, he fell
f­orward to smash the glass — as if also to shatter the illusion of intersubjectivity the work had
elaborately performed.
In both versions of Fototot, visitors became active participants in determining the “image” —
whether of the photograph or that of Ulay himself. This activation of relationality (the rela-
tional determination of meaning but also of selfhood) has been consistently explored throughout
Ulay’s career: see for example his performative Polaroid series, Exchange of Identity, from 1975,
and his numerous works performed with female partners, such as the famous “Relation” works
with Marina Abramović during their decade-long collaboration in the 1970s to 1980s (see Jones
2017). Through these complex staged relations within the works, which also become encoun-
terings with present and future spectators, Ulay questions modes of relationality presupposed
by the structures of art-­making
and viewing. In this case, the
photograph or the live body
of the artist takes its mean-
ing through multiple — highly
charged — encounterings. The
very concept of meaning as
transparently conveyed through
an unmediated art experience (an
object delivering its truth to a
trained interpreter), common in
high modernism, is definitively
denied.
With both EXPORT and
Ulay we have performative
works hinging on the photo-
graphic (whether cinema, video,
Polaroid, or other analogue pho-
tographs). Not only is the visitor
or spectator of the live version
of the work engaged in a rela-
tional moment of encounter-
ing, with all of the unpredictable
vicissitudes that such a moment
might involve; in addition, as
later viewers engaging the doc-
uments of these nuanced rela-
tional works, we think about
the complexities of the relation-
ship between bodies and social
spaces, in the art situation and
Figure 9. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Hartford Wash: Washing, beyond. How artistic meaning
Tracks, Maintenance: Outside, 1973; performance at the occurs — how we make value of
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. (Photo courtesy of or exclude art practices from our
Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York) discourses and institutions — is
Amelia Jones

16. Fototot I also included a second element. At the De Appel, Ulay provided a table with prints of the previously vis-
ible images from the performance. On turning on the reading light provided, the images gradually disappeared
and turned into black rectangles (see Bojan and Cassin 2014:196).

26
in this way shown to be inti-
mately related to how various
bodies are given value (or not) in
social spaces more broadly con-
strued. The connections between
this conceptual body work and
the rights movements could not
be clearer in this regard.
Other artists from the period
produced politically motivated
projects highlighting the rela-
tionship between body and
site, and the values accruing to
both. American feminist artist
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (born
1939) is at the forefront of the
more explicitly political ver-
sion of this type of work. Guided
by a 1969 manifesto in which
she forcefully states her femi- Figure 10. Mierle Laderman Ukeles leading “Artists In/Of the City: A National
nist desire to revalue the labor of Convening Around the Peace Table.” 25 September 2016. The first of six public
women and other marginalized programs for the exhibition Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, this
­workers, Ukeles early on articu- “Convening” explored the current wave of artist residency programs in municipal
lated her feminist stand through agencies throughout the USA, inspired by Ukeles’s four-decade residency with the
this assertive speech act and NYC Department of Sanitation. From left: Laura Raicovich, president of the
by actively inserting her body Queens Museum; Ukeles; two NYC Sanitation Commissioners, Norman Steisel
in social space (Ukeles 1969). and Brendan Sexton; and Tom Finkelpearl, NYC Commissioner of Culture.
Ukeles’s various “maintenance” (Photo courtesy of the Queens Museum)
projects stage politically pointed
modes of encountering: from her 1973 Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside
(cleaning the steps of the museum during visitor hours, making the labor of its maintenance
public and visible), to her 1978–80 Touch Sanitation Performance (shaking the hands of all 8,500
sanitation workers in New York City to thank them, documenting the encounters) and beyond
(see fig. 6; and see Phillips 2016).17
Ukeles’s projects from this period exemplify the strong potential of conceptual body art to
activate visitors or participants from the time (literally, as in Touch Sanitation) but also in future
unfoldings through documentation and scholarship. Due to the rise of interest in social practice
and issues of labor (the investigation of which Ukeles and fellow feminist Suzanne Lacy pio-
neered in the 1970s), Ukeles’s work became more and more influential and visible — culminat-
ing in a major 2016 retrospective at the Queens Museum, where Ukeles was a steady presence
running workshops, continuing to engage museum visitors directly even as the documentation
of past projects lured us into a greater understanding of how art can provoke social engagement
(see fig. 10).
Encounterings can be contemporaneous or in relation to future participants, and in this way
Ukeles’s work has become important for recent theories of social practice. I witnessed Ukeles
running a discussion group while I was viewing this excellent show. On inquiry, the museum
staff made it clear that she was continually there, using the opportunity to expand her activist/
art project.
Encountering

17. The Touch Sanitation Performance is extensive and multi-part; Ukeles also marked each encounter on a map,
recorded her conversations with the workers, and documented their experiences to change their stereotyped and
often maligned image in the public sphere.

27
 Shannon Jackson wrote of Ukeles’s work in her 2011 Social Works: “[Ukeles’s m]aintenance
is a structure that exposed the disavowed durational activity behind a static object as well as the
materialist activity that supported [so called] ‘dematerialized’ creativity, a realization that called
the bluff of the art experimentation of the era” (2011:88). Jackson rightly uses Ukeles’s work
to challenge the simplistic view of art from the period as completely dematerialized, noting
the artist’s foregrounding of laboring bodies. Jackson goes on to quote Ukeles from her 1969
Maintenance proposal: “Conceptual and Process Art especially claim pure development and
change, yet employ almost purely maintenance processes” (in Jackson 2011:88).18
Ukeles directly counters in this statement the strong tendency from 1970 to the present to
privilege art practices defined as “conceptual” by opposing them to (often feminist or queer
or raced) body or performance practices — as she notes the interrelatedness of these modes
of making in relation to their dependence on artistic labor or “purely maintenance processes”
(Ukeles 1969). And Jackson’s point highlights as well this interrelatedness, noting also the way
in which Ukeles’s project explicitly narrates the labor behind art, both the making of art and its
“maintenance” in institutions such as museums, as well as (I would add) enacting the encounter-
ing element that performance opens up.
Even in apprehending Ukeles’s Wadsworth Atheneum performance or her Touch Sanitation
Performance through photographs and her statements and manifesto 40 years later (not the least
if she is present in the museum while we apprehend these documents!) we arguably experience
an encountering that is potentially evental in Badiou’s sense, if in a minor way. As witnesses,
we become bound into the circuits of labor that underlie determinations of value — in the art
world and in any institution that needs such “maintenance,” whether an art museum or a city.
Jackson’s interpretations of Ukeles’s works as “social practice” (2011) point to the durational
meaning of works as they are engaged forward in history — not through the live bodies that
enacted them, but through tactile and visual and cognitive encounterings that reframe them in
contemporary terms.

Archival Encounterings
Examining two projects by Mexican artists Ulises Carrión (1941–1989) and Mónica Mayer
(born 1954) allows me to bring to a close these thoughts on conceptual embodiment and the
encountering potential of contemporary art — not the least due to Carrión’s and Mayer’s partic-
ular modes of humor, political engagement, and attention to the archive as a site of this encoun-
tering that bridges the temporality of live performance and future interpretive engagements. I
focus in particular on Carrión’s Gossip, Scandal, and Good Manners (1981) and Mónica Mayer’s
1978 and ongoing El Tendedero (The Clothesline) project, reiterating the power of art practices
that act as an invitation to a situation of embodied engagement through explicit attention to the
role of communication and archiving in establishing conceptual and bodily meaning as always
already political and always already moving into future encounterings.
In the video art work documenting a performative series of acts, both labeled Gossip, Scandal,
and Good Manners, Carrión and people appearing to be social science experts explain the defi-
nition and meanings of gossip in relation to slander and rumor, including handmade diagrams
and examples from televised versions of operas and films. In the last part of the video Carrión

18. Jackson is citing Ukeles from “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for exhibition ‘Care,’” published
in Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 ([1973] 1997:220–21). In
interrogating the simplistic view of dematerialization, Jackson asks “to whom Ukeles’s crouching, squeezing, and
scrubbing appears ‘de-materialized,’” and adds: “[b]y what logic are this ‘gesture’ and its institutional critique ‘im-
material’?” (2011:92). The reigning idea of conceptualism as “dematerializing” art — which I would stress is not
Amelia Jones

Lippard’s fault, but an oversimplification of Lippard’s work and the art of the time — fails to encompass the spec-
ificity of Ukeles’s (and I would add EXPORT’s and Ulay’s) complex engagements of forms of labor in the making
and interpreting of art.

28
explains that the larger performance consisted of him producing a “live project about gossip,”
asking a group of volunteers to spread bits of gossip about him. Other volunteers documented
the effects. The video ends with clips of the gossiping volunteers recalling their experiences
with spreading gossip about Carrión. Gossip is at once all about Carrión (literally, beginning
with him soliciting gossip about himself, which is then relayed on the video) and yet at the same
time renders his identity as an individual creative subject irrelevant — or at least deeply ques-
tions the possibility of ever “knowing” what this identity might be.
Carrión’s piece enacts the poststructuralist theory of différance, whereby (as Derrida argued)
meaning is endlessly deferred through those who engage the text, image, performance; mean-
ing (including that of the artistic subject or the self in general) is thus an ongoing process and
relationally determined in a never-fixed way, something artists such as Carrión deeply under-
stood and activated in their work (Derrida [1968] 1982). As such, Carrión’s Gossip exemplifies
the rigor of what I am calling conceptual body works, which theorize meaning and value as they
activate bodies/subjects in encounterings. Carrión’s project produces art as an ongoing circu-
lation of information and concepts taking place through bodies in social space — his obsession
was with structures of exchange in and beyond the structures of “art” per se, including commu-
nicational exchanges and archival repositories of subjective meaning.
For example, at one point in
the Gossip video Carrión asserts
with the deadpan voice of a pro-
fessional sociologist that not
only the structure of gossip but
also the wide range of emotions
it elicits “make it excellent artis-
tic terrain.” Carrión essentially
insists upon the ways in which
everyday speech can be turned
into art by situating it within
frameworks that constitute it
as such (this exposes the where
but also the when and how of
art, since physical/material con-
texts shift in meaning accord-
ing to the time in which they Figure 11. Ulises Carrión, Gossip, Scandal, and Good Manners,
are or were engaged). Simply 1981; video still. (Photo courtesy of Gaby Wijers, Director, LIMA,
by choreographing the genera- The Netherlands)
tion of gossip and monitoring it,
Carrión produces “himself ” as a
social subject defined by others’ discursive articulations. He simultaneously produces artifice —
or art — out of social relations and encounterings. Rather than the banal everydayness of gos-
sip, which we revel in or ignore without examining its structures of belief and seduction, these
moments of encountering — precisely because they are staged artificially as art (by someone
positioning himself and speaking/producing as an artist) — in turn can become evental, sparking
a rupture for those of us engaging them.19
This gesture has ongoing effects. Hypothetically, even after Carrión’s untimely death in
1989 of AIDS-related causes, the gossip piece could continue — and in a sense the ideas about
Carrión’s work and the professional behavior he asked his volunteers to circulate serve to
remind us that any subject continues to resonate through such channels after her/his death. Is
Encountering

19. The relationship to European avantgardism, and specifically Marcel Duchamp’s readymade gesture, is quite clear
here, but Carrión expands the strategy exponentially.

29
 my writing of his work today an
extension of the gossip he initi-
ated in 1981? We become aware
that discourse determines the
social and public meanings of a
subject, especially one known as
an “artist” or purveyor of cul-
ture, as such subjects already
linger in the circuits of lan-
guage and image that define cul-
ture as such. As Carrión put
it: the archive “has no limit in
time [...and] can survive indef-
initely. It [...] has no limit, it
grows steadily, it is still alive” (in
Schraenen 2016:1920).
It is perhaps Mexican fem-
inist artist Mónica Mayer’s El
Tendedero (The Clothesline), an
ongoing feminist activist proj-
ect begun in 1978, that best
sums up for me this capac-
ity of the art of encountering to
function across time, coalition-
ally and relationally, through
the merging of conceptual and
embodied strategies that pro-
duce activist effects. El Tendedero
epitomizes the powerful work
of the conceptual body oriented
towards activism and social
engagement. Having grown up
in Mexico City, in 1978 Mayer
Figure 12. Mónica Mayer, El Tendedero (The Clothesline) project, 2016 version had just completed her MFA
at Muséo Universitario Arte Contemporánea, Mexico City; documentation of in art at Goddard College in
installation. (Photo courtesy of Mónica P. Mayer) Vermont and her study with the
Feminist Studio Workshop at
the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, where she was mentored by Suzanne Lacy and met other
activist artists. First produced at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in response to
political events of the time — specifically the ongoing violence and harassment against women
in American and Mexican cultures — El Tendedero was produced again in Los Angeles in 1979
as part of Lacy’s Making It Safe event, in 2015 in Medellín, Colombia, as part of the Encuentro
Internacional de Arte de Medellín, then again in Mexico City at UNAM (Mexico’s national
university) for her 2016 retrospective exhibition at Muséo Universitario Arte Contemporánea
(MUAC, which she preferred to call a “retrocollective” show), and finally a reprise in Los
Angeles, in 2017, as a signature event in the Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960–1985 exhi-
bition at UCLA’s Hammer Museum (Mayer 2016; Mayer and Jones 2016); the project contin-
ues to circulate online and materially at different venues around the world (Mayer n.d.). In each
case, Mayer expands and modifies the piece appropriately to address the audience and concerns
Amelia Jones

20. Schraenen does not indicate the source of the quote.

30
of the specific moment and site — the encountering addresses and responds to, and at the same
time informs, the where and when of the artwork.
In the 2016 Mexico City manifestation, for example, Mayer began with an initial event
introducing the work, provided a framework with (clothes)lines on which to attach commen-
tary by the audience written on pink cards, produced a real-time archive as cards were attached
to the frame, conducted a workshop, established a social networking component for expanded
commentary, hosted a closing event, and continued with the documentation and blogging (see
fig. 12). As with the earlier versions of El Tendedero, the cards included questions, in this case one
of the following four: When was the first time you were sexually harassed? Have you been sexu-
ally harassed at school or university? What is your most recent experience of sexual harassment?
What have you done or would you do against sexual harassment? The piece was such a huge
success that the hundreds of answers demanded the construction of additional frames, result-
ing in what Mayer called “the mega-clothesline” (Mayer 2016). Spontaneous performances in
and beyond the museum constituted what Mayer terms its “activations,” and a website afforded
the opportunity for other virtual participants (or the online submission by visitors to the actual
piece; Mayer 2016).
An online archive produces the possibility of ongoing encounterings around the world for
anyone with access to the internet — albeit of a vastly different emotional valence and phenom-
enological experience from actually seeing the clothesline and/or submitting texts on index
cards. Mayer’s sophisticated
understanding of the impor-
tance of archiving for the ongo-
ing relevance of a work that
continues to engage visitors
and online participants in ques-
tions of sexual violence parallels
Carrión’s obsessive relation-
ship to archiving as a mode of
expanding the networks of his
conceptually driven projects
over time and space. In both
cases, the artists deeply under-
stand the importance of attend-
ing to the where, when, and
how of art, as well as expand-
ing its impact by activating the
situation of encountering in an
ongoing way. As a related exam-
ple, I “encountered” the work
Figure 13. Mónica Mayer, image from Mayer’s Powerpoint for the Roski Talk she
through Mayer’s slide presen-
gave at USC in November, 2016, showing archive online and Twitter account
tation at USC (where she was
expanding audience for El Tendedero. (Image courtesy of Mónica P. Mayer)
invited by me and my colleagues
as resident artist in September
2016; see fig. 13). Here she explained the trajectory of the piece in relation to feminist activ-
ism, and projected illustrations of MUAC visitors engaging with it, as well as documentation
from various extended responses to her Tendedero project, wherein feminists took her lead and
denounced sexual harassment against women in public spaces including the university and on
public transportation.
Mayer also explicitly points out in her public presentations of the El Tendedero project the
Encountering

importance of encountering in the process of merging art and activism. She argues that the
piece activates “encounters between the academy and activism. Exposure as means, not as end”

31
 (Mayer 2016). With Mayer’s El Tendedero project, the ultimate power of art as encountering
is laid bare. Through her staging and restaging in multiple media of this activist art project as
an encountering, Mayer has produced a feminist activist event with nodes creatively engag-
ing spectators/participants in a range of international settings. Expanding the where and when
of art far beyond the representational economy of conventional early modern and modern as
well as much contemporary art, Mayer propels us into coalitional networks of participants who
can choose to expand the dialogue about harassment and violence against women in ways that
change us and potentially the structures of power that call for strategies of resistance.
Encountering El Tendedero through Mayer’s presentation and in person prompted me to
think about harassment in a way I never had. As well, the timeliness of the 2017 version (par-
alleling the exposure of public figures from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to
Roy Moore and following, in the #MeToo movement) could not be more obvious: providing
a public forum for (mostly) women to comment on their experiences of sexual harassment had
explicit value in 2017. While I have been a feminist supporting feminist rhetoric around harass-
ment and assault for decades, in encountering this work first in publications on Mayer in 2016
I realized that I had never thought clearly about the myriad times I was harassed as a young
woman. The topic had always remained abstract to me — even though I had been sexually
harassed or assaulted innumerable times in public (by strangers on the subway, even a dentist),
in the classroom, at office hours (with both professors and students), and beyond. Before engag-
ing with Mayer’s project, I myself did not have a language to formulate an embodied and cog-
nitive sense of resistance to this aspect of living in public space as a woman, queer, or otherwise
sexually vulnerable person: Mayer’s piece of course allows all people who have been aggressed
upon in the public or private spheres to engage with her means of opening of dialogue about
harassment. It also creates coalitional communities, removing the isolation we might feel (in
my case which I experienced as a young woman in dealing with these continual violations of my
privacy and bodily integrity).
In the age of Trump and Brexit I cling to this minor moment of recognition that the
encountering with Mayer’s work makes possible: the dream of collective understanding and
action that is not fascist, racist, misogynistic, or xenophobic. This evental moment of acknowl-
edgment of my own relationship to these modes of social, personal, and sexual aggression is a
small but crucial life-sustaining thing — not the least in that it connects me to Mayer and to all
the women, queers, and other vulnerable people who have chosen to speak out by filling out
index cards or otherwise engaging with this performative and activist work. Such can be the role
of an art that puts in motion encounterings as potentially evental moments that save us from
the despair of ideological violence. Encountering as a mode of understanding and making art
has a potential we need to mine and expand to its full extent: especially now.
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