Face to face: relational aesthetic experience in performance art

1.Preamble

After a short contextualisation and introduction (Chapter 2), I depart from Arsem's definition of performance art and select my two guiding key words, experience and people. As I unfold possible meanings of the former, drawing concepts also from psychological aesthetics and positive psychology (Chapter 3), I prepare the ground for the latter. I widen the term audience to public, particularly with regard to performance art presented in open spaces (Chapter 4), which therefore offers two exciting dimensions: complete accessibility to the public and possibility of intervention by the public. These dimensions are manifestations of liveness, one of the several aspects of audience research in the performing arts. Recovering the initial word experience and drawing on the most recent research in performance studies, I discuss the prospect of liveness as experience, not as a monolithically ontological quality of performance art, but as a lively and contingent quality of the intersubjective relationship (Chapter 5). I then recover from an older article the metaphor of kōan for performance art (Chapter 6) to introduce application of the interesting kōan/satori cognitive schema from recent research, in order to explain the mechanisms of resistance to performance art or its potential overcoming (Chapter 7). I conclude with some intriguing suggestions for future research.

The perspective from which I have written this article is twofold: that of an artist who is also audience/spectator. Affect, senses, research, reflection, experimentation and the multifaceted path of (self) knowledge inform my praxis of -and my approach to -art. I am, therefore, well aware of my limits as contributor. Nevertheless, I believe it is important that willing artists partake in the discourse over their elected artform.

Writing this article has entailed not only an interdisciplinary research, but also a non-linear journey of discovery and reflection, looking inward, changing perspectives, asking questions -perhaps more than answering them -jumping back and forth as concepts keep on reappearing from different angles. It is my hope that the reader will enjoy the journey and make good use of any intriguing ideas, reflections or suggestions.

2.Introduction: performance art, an unbridled and uncontainable art-

form I make art ( Figure 1) therefore, by inference, I am an artist. When my interlocutor enquires further, about the genre of art I practice -whether I use an abundance or paucity of words in my reply -the result is often the same: bewilderment and confusion. This is the crucial moment I either recount what I consider my best received work (so far, Per speculum, 2011-2023) or invite my interlocutor to my next one, entrusting direct experience to allow them to independently formulate the most appropriate answer. Just as Callimachus writes in Epigram 28, I too "οὐδ' ἀπὸ κρήνης πίνω" (I do not drink at the fountain where everyone drinks from): I chose an unpopular artistic language, difficult to pin down with one word or to explain with reference only to more familiar art historical knowledge that travels back millennia of human history.

Figure 1

Daniela Beltrani, Per speculum #8 (2011. Photo: Anabelle Moghadam.

As a matter of fact, performance art -unlike other more established, favoured or marketable forms of visual arts, such as painting, sculpture, printmaking or photography -is of relatively more recent genesis. Art historian and founder director of Performa, RoseLee Goldberg -though admitting that artists have often resorted to live performances to express their ideas through the centuries -sees its preludes in the manifestos and avant-garde initiatives of the Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists (Goldberg, 1979). However, we will have to wait for the 1960s and 1970s for performance art to become not only a channel of frustrations, anger and criticism towards the establishment, but also an attempt at escaping from the ingrained belief that visual art is exclusively object-based.

As early as 1970, philosophy professor Hilde Hein was writing about the necessity to review aesthetic categories so as to include the then recent "focus upon change and process" (Hein, 1970) in line with the expansion of our aesthetic consciousness to create and apprehend perfor-mance art which is a doing and "experience in which the artist and the spectator meet" (Hein, 1970).

Psychologist Robert Keith Sawyer calls "product creativity all those activities that result in objective, ostensible products -paintings, sculptures, musical scores -which remain after the creative act is complete" (Sawyer, 2000). But the focus of his research is on what he terms improvisational performance, where "the creative process is the product" (Sawyer, 2000) and the audience witnesses the creative process as it unfolds in its presence.

Furthermore, performance art has neither flourished as successfully as other more favoured forms of visual arts, nor reached a popularity to the point that upon being merely mentioned, a layman could immediately visualise it or associate it with an idea. Some proffer association with an artist and inevitably mention Marina Abramović, often also recalling having read/heard about or seen on YouTube her compelling encounter with former partner and fellow artist Ulay during her over 700 hours durational performance The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010.

This undeniable unawareness or unpopularity of performance art is probably due also to the fact that this art form has thus far eluded a clear and precise definition capable of encompassing all the manifestations in the diverse practices of those who indicate themselves as performance artists. It certainly exists in the liminal, overlapping spaces between art and life. And like life, it is intrinsically ineffable and elusive.

According to some, there is an underlying consciousness that what we make falls -via negativa -in the "grab-bag category of works that do not fit neatly into theatre, dance, music, or visual art" (Schechner,158) and that we agreed to call it performance art. Goldberg, in the foreword to her book Performance: live art, 1909 to the present, attempted the prudent and almost tautological statement that it is "live art by artists" (Goldberg, 1979). Certainly the apparent elements of time, space and artist are three of the four essential components of the work of (performance) art, which includes also the audience.

More accurately, Lea Vergine writes that "the public is needed to complete the event; it must be involved in a collective experience that leads it to reconsider its quotidian existence and the rules of its ordinary behaviour" (Vergine, 2000). 1 However, I find preferable the statement proposed by fellow artist and educator Marilyn Arsem that "Performance art is experience -shared time and space and actions between people" in her manifesto THIS is performance art -originally published online on the performance art festival Infr'Action Venezia website in 2011.

Whilst Arsem was penning those words, 2011 marked the beginning of my vocation as performance artist -with an unscheduled performance presented during the Philippines International Performance Art Festival (PIPAF), curated by Yuan Mor'o Ocampo, in Santiago City -and of my research and writing in performance art.

Performance art as experience

Without involving intellectual activity, performance art is at the very least, "experience -shared time and space and actions between people" (Arsem, 2011) (Figure 2), humbly and unambitiously made up of the same mundane components as real life, but differing from this in qualitative terms. It is indeed qualified experience. Because it is art, it is in fact aesthetic experience, perhaps in different ways, but equally both for the artist I must also mention the one-year performances Cage Piece (1978)(1979) and Time Clock Piece (1980Piece ( -1981 by Tehching Hsieh which seemingly and for the public. Aesthetic situations are "specified as fundamentally different from everyday situations" (Marković, 2012), in the sense that only "when they lose their everyday pragmatic meaning and transcend into the new symbolic level of reality, does the aesthetic experience emerge" (ibid.). Thus, aesthetic experience can be defined as "a special state of mind that is qualitatively different from every day experience" (ibid.).

Figure 2

Daniela Beltrani, Sewn #1 (2014). Photo: Nel Lim.

Moreover, performance art is quintessentially relational aesthetic experience. Bourriaud qualifies his relational aesthetics not as a theory of art, but a theory of form, noting that "present-day art shows that form only exists in the encounter and in the dynamic relationship enjoyed by an artistic proposition with other formations, artistic or not" (Bourriaud, 2009). Inter-subjectivity "does not only represent the social setting for the reception of art," but becomes also the "quintessence of artistic practice" (ibid.), and a fortiori in performance art, where the relationship between at least two subjects implies an "active presence."

When an artist presents a performance, they may feel in the flow theorised by Csikszentmihalyi, completely absorbed by and in the autotelic activity, cocooned in time and space, wrapped by others, but not unaware of the external world. The mind is not wandering but is fully engaged in the here and now. "There are no boundaries between art and life. The time is only now. The place is only here" (Arsem, 2011): Arsem could not be more precise in her laconic statements.

Thus, I posit that the artist (and specularly, an attentive and receptive public) has two types of awareness: in primis, the underlying awareness that what they are doing is art and not life, which could also account for the silence, unhurried pace and hieratic quality of many performances; and secondly, the awareness of the moment, of oneself and others, what Jon Kabat-Zinn -who first theorised it in the 1970s -calls mindfulness, defined "operationally as the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally" (Kabat-Zinn, 2013).

Mindfulness is both an outcome and a process: more specifically, 1) "an abiding presence or awareness, a deep knowing that manifests as freedom of mind (e.g., freedom from reflexive conditioning and delusion)" (Shapiro, 2009) and 2) "the systematic practice of intentionally attending in an open, caring, and discerning way, which involves both knowing and shaping the mind" (ibid.).

The research on mindfulness abounds and mindfulness is certainly a popular topic in (positive) psychology. "A human mind is a wandering 2 mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost" (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). And yet, empirical studies propose that "art improves health and well-being" (Mastandrea, Fagioli and Biasi, 2019).

It is precisely this being present in the moment, that recently inspired me to make a change in the sequence of actions in my performance Per speculum ( Figure 3, 4 and 5), which I began conceptualising and presenting in 2011. As noted above (Phelan, 1986), each performance is intrinsi-In 2018 Van Dam et al. presented the data gathered from the research on scientific articles and news media articles with the topic mindfulness: cally different (for the artist) every time, even when repeated, because time is unrepeatable, space is subject to change and the individuals involved are caught in a specific flux of their own life. Nevertheless, in this particular instance, instead of ending by looking at each member of the audience from a discreet distance (usually, at least 20-30 cm), I penetrated the close space between us until our foreheads and/or noses touched ( Figure 5). In my performances I do not shock or force my public. I prefer to invite, to be gentle and respectful; it is important for me that my public keeps the choice to say no and/or leave. Yet in those moments, surrounded by art students, professors and practitioners, it felt right to reach them physically, to break down the barrier of empty space that was dividing us, one by one. Despite the awareness of the risks of power imbalance -as I was the artist and also the one collecting informally feedback from the audience -this feedback felt overall positive and encouraging, in the moments immediately following the performance, drenched in a sea of affects, sensations and emotions that the logical mind had not yet the time to give order to. Their experience was intense and ineffable; some even understood intuitively my intention, they felt it, they told me. "There is, of course, always the problem that such exclamations can be momentary outpourings, performances of excitement that fade quickly. But we cannot assume this to be always the case" (Barker, 2017). I myself was left with a pervasive sense of well-being. This is one of the reasons why I continue practising. As a matter of fact, the quality of the performance artist's experience must be so rewarding that they persevere in its practice, not only when there is no remuneration (to present their art at some performance art festivals, often artists are offered accommodation, meals and local transport, rarely a fee), but also to the point of investing one's own financial resources in its realisation (organisation and/or attendance of some festivals can be entirely at each artist's expense). It is certainly the case for me and many artists I know personally.

Figure 3

Daniela Beltrani, Per speculum (2011. Photo: Anabelle Moghadam.

Figure 5

Daniela Beltrani, Per speculum (2011. Photo: Anabelle Moghadam.

At the opposite spectrum: what can be said about the public's aesthetic experience of performance art?

I am a performance artist now, but I was -and still am also -audience. As a matter of fact, in performance art being audience is the other side of being a performance artist, it is absolutely essential: being a performance artist is like that Roman god who gave his name to the first month of the year: Janus bifrons. He has two sides. Or maybe, Rubin's vase ( Figure 6), where the two figures converge and are face to face with art being the ground, the vase emerging from them.

Figure 6

Rubin's vase (Rubin, 1915).

The second performance I ever attended, in August 2009, by fellow artist Lynn Lu ( Figure 7) -a year and a half before I began my practiceleft me completely speechless and I can describe it as an utter epiphany:

Figure 7

Lynn Lu's performance on 9 August 2009, at

"Lynn poured large amounts of sea salt on top of a block of ice, until it formed a sort of pyramid. She proceeded to slowly show the audience a sheet of paper on which she had written: "Think of a moment when the ground vanished from beneath your feet." She then folded the sheet into a paper boat and placed it on top of the pyramid of salt, which, meanwhile, was silently eroding the block of ice. This is how my memory recalls that performance, quite likely inaccurately, but with a vivid imagery and strong emotional connection that almost makes me tear even today, because at the time I was unexpectedly made to recall the forgotten and painful moment in my life, when the ground did indeed vanish from beneath my feet" (Beltrani, 2016). Performance art can pierce through built-up layers of defence mechanisms. It can shock. It can wound. It can be bad before it is good. It can offer respite and validation. Or a glimpse of the sublime. It can communicate concepts without words. It can heal. It can offer novel ways of approaching life or dealing with our pains, our fears. It can break down barriers and bring us closer to one another, as mere human beings. "Empathy is an innate human capacity to pre-reflexively relate to others by projecting onto them our recollection of similar experiences. This spontaneous faculty is a vital element in the genre of performance art which uses the body in a real (versus stage/fictional) contact to create meaning that is both cerebral and somatic" (Lu, 2007).

The possibilities are endless, or at least as many as those who experience the performance of an artist, fully present. Though, in my travels so far, those who I have noticed attending performance art tend to be mostly artists themselves, enthusiasts, researchers, writers, individuals who are already familiar with -and appreciative of -performance art. In 2017, for example, I attended a festival in Iran, where the audience was composed only of artists and the photographers documenting the performances. And again in 2017, in Norogachi, Mexico, it was only artists attending the performances on a particular day when we climbed atop a flat hill.

So, what about the others? When I was living in Singapore, I remember Lee Weng Choy writing about Amanda Heng's performance Walk with Amanda, which she presented at a hawker centre near the theatre space. Upon arriving Lee immediately becomes aware of two groups of people: the art audience, of which he was part, and a crowd. He writes, "an audience has a specific intention to look at art. But a crowd may just be wondering, what is this crazy woman doing?" (Lee, 2013).

I continue to present my performances and conduct workshops in the international circuit, and to nurture the dream of organising a regular festival in Rome to invite the tremendous artists I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with, in order to show Rome, regularly, the endless possibilities of performance art. Concomitantly, I present my performances in the streets of Rome, because I consider necessary to bring art outside of the institutional art spaces to those others, the crowd -to speak in Lee's words -to promote this art form, to offer an opportunity of encounter and of meaningfully slowing down the fast pace our time to a more humane pace, to be aesthetically struck by the power of pure action, to show that art is not an object that can be traded within an elitist group but a free expression of the human spirit manifested in different ways, "an innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument" (Jung, 1933), an experience open to all regardless of age, gender, class or any other difference … But without a support system, or a way to acknowledge the feedback and process it, the response is poor and insufficient and remains unresearched.

So -whilst those who enter the galleries or art spaces or engage with an artwork already have a bias towards art and have "a specific intention to look at art" -as Lee writes -what about the others?

Is there a way people unfamiliar with performance art can open up to it? Is there a way people can move beyond the "religione della levigatezza, del banale, una religione del consumo" (religion of smoothness, of the mundane, a religion of consumerism) (Byung-Chul, 2019)? Byung-Chul recalls Gadamer for whom negativity is an essential moment in art: it is its wound that is opposed to the positivity of the smoothness, which only requires a mere like. Now, I ask my patient reader to take a step back with me and look again at Arsem's words: "Performance art is experience -shared time and space and actions between people" (Arsem, 2011).

People in performance art

Arsem's definition of performance art ends with a reference to its indispensable subjects engaged: simply people, not artist and audience.

I venture that the indistinguishability of the subjects involved in performance art is linked to its two potential aspects: the complete openness of this artform which could be presented also in public spaces, therefore free and accessible to everyone whose interest is piqued; and the implicit, unspoken knowledge that, truly, anyone can intervene in the performance of an artist.

Regarding the first aspect, photographic/video documentation and first hand accounts evidence that performance art is presented also in contexts which are more akin to real life, such as the street (I think, for example, of Betsy Damon in the striking The 7,000 Year Old Woman in 1977, New York City) ( Figure 8), besides the conventionally artistic ones, such as galleries, museums, etc. The crucial implications of this dimension are that people: 1) are widely more heterogeneous than an audience; 2) comprise also those who may not (yet) be positively biased towards -or may be even averse to -the arts; and 3) may relate to the performance because of what Marković calls interestingness -which could contribute to establish a future bias. In fact, "appraisal of interestingness opens a 'mental space' for further aesthetic appraisals and continuous aesthetic fascination" (Marković, 2012). Furthermore, the performance artist who performs in public spaces is close to people in terms of physical proximity and same plane, and also may not always be so easily identifiable and distinguished from them ( Figure 9). On the other hand, typically and despite the most recent trends to empower and engage them, audiences in the traditional performing arts often need a ticket to access the artistic/cultural experience; are often kept in the dark and far away from the artists; and must follow an etiquette which restricts the liberty of their behaviour: the so-called pacification of audiences, heritage of a time when "the arts became sacralised in the Nineteenth Century during the class wars" (Walmsley, 2019). So, perhaps the public is a more fitting, wider term to denominate people present at performance art presentations in spaces open to all. In fact, it could be argued that in private spaces, where at the very least prior knowledge of the event, if not invites, are necessary, the access is de facto restricted to those in the know or interested. To all effects, a will needs to be manifested and a selection takes place: thus we can more comfortably use the terms audience, spectators or visitors.

Figure 8

Betsy Damon, The 7,000 Year Old Woman, 1977. Photo: Su Friedrich.

Figure 9

Daniela Beltrani, Per speculum (2011. Photo: Lilyana Karadjova.

Intriguingly, Vergine too uses a term akin to people in meaning and etymology, the public, instead of audience -literally translated from the Italian il pubblico -to denote a group of people actually or potentially participant or present to something, artistic or other. The Latin adjective publĭcus -originating from the second declension masculine noun popŭlus, people, and often found associated to the fifth declension feminine noun res, thing, from which comes the word republic -has, in fact, the beautiful meaning of common, shared, without distinctions of any sort.

Regarding the second aspect (the tacit possibility of intervention by the public), I will recall one particular instance, when, for the meeting of 9 October 2011 at King Albert Park railway bridge, I had proposed to my peers -with whom I had established a platform for the practice of performance art in the outdoors of Singapore, S.P.A.M. (Self Performance Art Meetings) -the challenge of sabotage, intended as an intervention along, or even against, the artist's original intention.

We had agreed that, during each individual performance, the other artists could intervene in any way they wished. The artist presenting would then not only learn how s/he would feel facing the sabotage to his/ her original intention, but also how s/he would, hopefully not react, instead respond to it, aesthetically. In my case, I had planned to write a series of unpleasant or heavy words people would often refer to me, on yellow post-its, and to stick them on my back. Then, I would have ended my presentation in a series of acts of cathartic rebellion: removing all the post-its, tearing them in pieces and blowing them away with my breath. But, alas, as Arsem writes also in her manifesto, and despite the artist's original intention, "Performance art's manifestation and outcome cannot be known in advance." I proceeded as planned, and after a while the others began inserting inside my black strappy top the rough, sharp-edged stones they had picked from the railway tracks. The stones, accumulating on my back, felt progressively heavier. The wind was blowing with great force on the bridge over Bukit Timah/Dunearn Road to the extent that I was forced to continue walking with my spine parallel to the ground to avoid all the postits flying away. I remember frustration and anger mounting inside of me, as I was feeling more and more trapped and uncomfortable under the weight of the stones. I traversed those emotions and did nothing with them until I reached the end of the bridge. Then, when I could no longer resist the pressure of the stones, I stood up; all the stones pushed down inside the camisole which was tucked into the skirt; I felt a ghastly unbearable sensation of heaviness on my lower spine; so, intuitively, without even thinking about it, I lifted my arms, slid up and off the top: all the stones and most of the post-its fell to the ground, whilst I began running away.

At that very moment, an amateur photographer who had come across our group a little while earlier and had asked to follow us, took the shot (Figure 10).

Figure 10

The intervention of my peers, which was done with a pinch of healthy wickedness and the pedagogical intention of testing me and allowing me to learn through difficulty and discomfort, had truly helped my sensibility and stimulated my capacity for openness as an artist. The memory of the performance's concluding moments will stay with me, I hope, until I die. I Figure 10. Daniela Beltrani, Heavy weight lifting (2011). Photo: Attilio Rapisarda had, unintentionally, unknowingly, used the overwhelming emotions as a springboard for an artistic, liberating action. As I ran bare-breasted, I felt the invisible, impalpable, poetical beauty of that pure gesture, unspoiled by karmic implications. My peers did too, I found out later. But, alas, it only lasted until I finally stopped my running and, almost simultaneously, covered my breasts: like Eve sent out of the garden of Eden, I suddenly became painfully aware of my upper body nakedness. The magical moment had gone: I was no longer nude; I was, suddenly, naked.

What had happened, despite my original intention, could not have been known or predicted in advance. It is one of the confounding and exhilarating peculiarities of performance art: a complete openness to the infinite realm of potentialities, which in traditional performing arts is not only not contemplated, but also unthinkable.

From the artist's perspective, this notion is beautifully expressed in Bhagavad Gita 2,47: I have a right to perform my intended actions, but I am not entitled to their fruits, which -in conjunction with BG 2,48 "Be steadfast in the performance of your duty, o Arjun, abandoning attachment success and failure" -could be explained as follows: the intention can only guide my actions; in the course of these actions, I should not be stifled by the intention, so that I can open myself up to all possibilities because of additional impromptu elements completely outside of my control (including intervention by the public), which could not necessarily preclude a "successful" outcome, simply because my original intention was not met.

The roles of artist and public/audience have lost the fixity, immutability and airtightness of old times, to breathe the same air and become fluid in the practice of many contemporary (and performance, particularly) artists. Beyond Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics -defined as "set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space" (Bourriaud, 2009) -the artist may be described also as a facilitator, instigator, catalyst, activist, and the public may be seen as active participant, collaborator, or even -for example through interventions, invited or spontaneous -co-creator. Writes artist Lynn Lu, "In the one-to-one performance, the spectator is no longer part of the 'invisible mass,' but the same individual proactive agent she is in her daily life. She joins the artist -on equal terms, as collaborator and discoverer -in an intense psychological conversation, from which an understanding emerges that is not only conceptual, but also perceptual and affective" (Lu, 2008).

The two aspects of performance art briefly discussed above (the accessibility of this artform in public settings, and the possibility of intervention by the public) are manifestations of the dimension of liveness, typical of the performing arts "as opposed to the arts in general" (Walmsley, 2019). Thus, just like in a Venn diagram, performance art could be said 3 to occupy the overlapping area between the two (Figure 11).

Figure 11

Venn diagram of performance art.

For an extensive and critical literature review of audience research in the performing arts, I refer the reader to chapter 2 of Ben Some characteristics, or rather manifestations of liveness are seemingly intuitive, and may appear uncomplicated, finding an even easier application to the context of performance art presented in open spaces: copresence (understandably, condition "sine qua not for theatre and performance studies," according to Martin Barker) in time and space between artist and public, simultaneity, spontaneity, eventness, immediacy, improvisation, authenticity, uncertainty, sense of precariousness and danger, … Nevertheless, Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof -in the introduction to their edited book Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2017) -refreshingly suggest that "what is important about liveness resides not in some essential or ontological characteristic of the performance itself, but precisely in the relationship between performance and audience."

From liveness to experiencing live

Reason and Lindelof, therefore, shift their attention from liveness as an a priori incontrovertible, indisputable and monolithic aspect of performance to experiencing live, which, thus, could also account for the not unthinkable possibility of deadliness, that is, a failed relationship between performance and audience.

Martin Barker dismisses the concept of uniqueness of each performance, since -whilst this may be so from the perspective of the artist who proposes it 'again' in different occasions -for the public who experiences it once only, they would not know in what ways it might have been different or unique in their presence. Though one could argue that it is precisely their actual presence, or rather co-presence, to make it unique, alongside the potentiality of risk, mistakes, change. And again, co-presence is not an implicit aspect of liveness, intended as mere proximity in time and space; it is, rather, "a quality that describes particular kinds of experiences" (Reason and Lindelof, 2017). Reason and Lindelof emphatically use the expression liveness-es to refer to these. From Martin Buber's notion of 'mutual surprises' -whereby "both parties within the encounter allow themselves to be caught out, to be affected, to be relocated and transported" (ibid.) -to Vivian Sobchack's "irreducible ensemble" made of subjectivity and objectivity, body and consciousness, Reason and Lindelof see a phenomenology of experiencing live as a "set of dynamic and particular relationships-the most crucial of these being the ac- tive or interactive relationship between the art work and the spectator" (ibid.). To this, I proffer a further shift: in the interactive relationship between subjects, people (artist and public/audience/spectator) in/through the performance artwork that comes to be created/comes to life/becomes alive, because of their active co-presence and experience. Thus, we have that mutuality whereby the public is seen as co-creator.

"The live experience is a real embrace. It is something that escapes from mere habit and, instead of routine consumption within an experience economy, becomes creative co-production" (ibid.). Paddy Scannell -one of the book's contributors -beautifully weaves the term experience: it is "the immediate encounter with existence (with being alive and living in the world) that is common to every individual human being-it is the term that captures how we (human beings) encounter life, our own life and the life of the world (the living world) as a whole" (Scannell, 2017). And as such, this encounter is always "fresh and as if for the first (and last) time" (ibid.): it is unique. It is worth reminding ourselves, at this point, that experiencedespite being shared and shareable -might not always be articulated in words, and because of this, it is not necessarily less impactful. "To acknowledge the ineffable is to acknowledge not only that some things escape language, but also that some things are outside of language. These are not so much experiences that we have, but experiences that have us" (Reason, 2017).

Audiencing -neologism coined by John Fiske in 1992 -describes "the active pursuit of being an audience member" (Walmsley, 2019), a being derived from an intentional doing, which Reason and Lindelof permeate in terms of "acts of attention, of affect, of meaning-making, of memory, of community" (Reason and Lindelof, 2017). In this list, what catches my attention is the term affect. To explain the notion of affect, Reason turns to the words of Brian Massumi, who described it as a non-conscious "prepersonal intensity, irreducibly bodily and automatic" (Reason, 2017). I suspect that what we now call affect -an intensity that "circumvents the head (thought) and even the heart (emotion) and hits the spectator in the gut (affect)" (Reason, 2017) -has been often dismissed and unresearched until recent years, precisely because it is unintelligible, unconscious and, by being so close to the experience that generated it, too contaminated to be managed, comprehended, processed by the rational mind. Tears, piloerection, knots in the gut, intense sensations of inexplicable intimacy with another human being, a stranger, all these intense, transient and elusive experiences occurring during a live encounter did not seem to count. By the time the mind is ready to apprehend them, they are only a vague and indistinct memory. I do wonder whether this has a neurological explanation: perhaps it has to do with the shutting down of the prefrontal cortex -which regulates our thoughts, actions and emotions -during the triggered amygdala's activity.

I conclude this excursus with the above suggestion and invite the reader, now, to turn their attention, once again, to performance art.

Performance art as kōan

In my first essay on performance art, on the topic of collaborationsfor the catalogue of Future Of Imagination 7 International Performance Art Event in Singapore 2011 -I intuitively associated spontaneous collabora-tive artistic performances to kōan (Beltrani, 2011). Kōan is defined, in the tradition of the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism of Japan, as a succinct paradoxical anecdote "used as a meditation discipline for novices" and "intended to exhaust the analytic intellect and the egoistic will, readying the mind to entertain an appropriate response on the intuitive level" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2023).

The most illustrative kōan, in my opinion, is the one attributed to the monk Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1768): "When both hands are clapped a sound is produced; listen to the sound of one hand clapping." The mind will be unable to grasp the imperative and, after some attempts compelled by the arrogance of its own delusional supremacy and omnipotence, will simply have to concede defeat. Only then, satori can ensue.

Many books have been written about Zen Buddhism, which is, nevertheless, highly pragmatic and rooted in life. Writes Suzuki: "Whatever else Zen may be, it is practical and commonplace and at the same time most living" (Suzuki, 1964). And again "For Zen reveals itself in the most uninteresting and uneventful life of a plain man of the street, recognising the fact of living in the midst of life as it is lived" (ibid.). It is thus unsurprising to find that art is a field of praxis for Zen.

Within the context of the six-hour collaborative performance presented -for Future Of Imagination 6 International Performance Art Event, held at Sculpture Square in Singapore on Sunday 11 April 2010 from 2pm to 8pm -by the then members of renowned collective Black Market International BMI (Jürgen Fritz, Myriam Laplante, Alastair MacLennan, Helge Mayer and Marco Teubner, Boris Nieslony, Elvira Santamaría, Julie Andrée T., Jacques Van Poppel, Roi Vaara, the late Lee Wen and the late Norbert Klassen) ( Figure 12) which I personally attended, I could not help but notice an intrinsically spontaneous quality in the artists' unpremeditated actions which -to the rational mind -could appear illogical, nonsensical and even paradoxical.

Figure 12

Norbert Klassen, Alastair MacLennan, Helge Meyer. Photo: Daniela Beltrani.

Postulating that in many performance artists' practice -including mine -"as in life, there is nor script nor rehearsal" (Beltrani, 2011), two paradigms may emerge: in a solo performance the artist -does not necessarily, but -may give their actions an approximate intention, connected for example to an idea, concept or image, whilst retaining the prospect of deviation at any moment; in a collective performance this is highly improbable because of the inherent unpredictability of the participants' actions.

And so, one by one, BMI's members and their guest artists (Melati Suryodarmo, Amanda Heng, Jason Lim and Kai Lam) entered the space and time, at their own individual pace, with or without material. They mostly began working solo, assisted by the familiarity of certain materials or actions, until they opened up to the other artists and the discovery of new possibilities. They worked with the same immediacy of life at crucial junctures, where from the realm of infinite possibilities one action is carried out, neither weighed nor chosen, and therefore unaccompanied by the contribution of reason or will. And just as in a phantasmagorical infinite domino show, each action generates a new realm of possibilities and from these the artist will give his/her contribution so that those will multiply further or renew.

In chapter Four, entitled Zen in the Arts, of one of his bestselling books, The Way of Zen, Alan Watts writes:

"Western science has made nature intelligible in terms of its symmetries and regularities, analyzing its most wayward forms into components of a regular and measurable shape. As a result we tend to see nature and to deal with it as an "order" from which the element of spontaneity has been "screened out." But this order is maya [from Sanskrit, illusion], and the "true suchness" of things has nothing in common with the purely conceptual aridities of perfect squares, circles, or triangles-except by spontaneous accident. Yet this is why the Western mind is dismayed when ordered conceptions of the universe break down, and when the basic behavior of the physical world is found to be a principle of uncertainty." And again, "Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world" (Watts, 1989).

In this sense, from the perspective of the performance artist, their art could be likened to an autotelic (from ancient Greek αὐτός, self and τέλος, end) activity, one that is an end in itself and therefore done "not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward" (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008). This type of activity can generate flow, theorised by positive psychologist Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi who defined it as "the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it" (ibid.).

Ultimately, there is no necessity for any meaning to be unveiled, interpretation to be proposed, symbolism to be deciphered in the performance that is being created by the artists and witnessed by the public; in the performance that simultaneously appears and disappears with the same velocity of life. In this regard Peggy Phelan, scholar and co-founder of Performance Studies International, states that "performance's only life is in the present" (Phelan, 1996) and that "performance's being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance" (ibid.) and indeed the performance can be repeated, "but this repetition itself marks it as different" (ibid.).

The searches for meaning, interpretation, symbolism are, as it were, posthumous activities, that is, intellectual exercises that can be carried out after the performance has disappeared, not during its appearing and disappearing, or else the risk is missing it entirely, both as an experience and as a possible subsequent value that can be added to our life. This is evidently due to the fact that we can never, as it were, return to it, like we can with an object-based artwork. I would even go as far as suggesting that our future memories of it may be more imprecise, as we were not fully "present" engaging actively in the experience but indulging in premature, reactive mental activities.

Ultimately, just as in mindful meditation, the mind can pause, for a short while, its innate yet incessant activity, find solace and rest: the mind of both the artist creating and the member of the public witnessing. "Both parties let go of reasoning and can connect at a deeper, intuitive level" (Beltrani, 2011). States the 9th Black Market International principle:

"Performance is an investigation of forms of attention, from the reflective or meditative attention to a purely instinctive attention. This instinct enables us to recognize instantly "what must be," what corresponds to the right unwinding of the event, to the natural traveling of time. But we are not familiar with the logic of the event, we cannot narrate its course -it stems from an inner knowledge that is like the analogon of the structural unity of the world. Or it stems from the world that knows itself through us."

Introducing satori as a cognitive model

I will now discuss an interesting research on the mechanism underlying satori and its application to the field of visual arts.

The practice of kōan is set within the context of a composite pedagogical relationship between master and disciple -including also a socalled "direct method" embodied in a nonsensical gesture, physical blow or abrupt remark by the master -which should ultimately lead the student to satori. This is commonly known as a "aha" moment of insight and enlightenment and defined by Alan Watts as the "sudden awakening" and "intuitive way of seeing into anything" (Watts, 1989), and by Carl Gustav Jung -in the foreword to Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki's book An Introduction to Zen Buddhism -as "mysterium ineffabile" (Suzuki, 1964).

The structure of the process that leads to satori could be constructed as quadripartite and comprised of 1) an initial situation of expectation by the disciple for the master's enlightened answer which could present the former with the coveted wisdom; 2) an incomprehensible response of the master followed by; 3) a state of utter disorientation, anxiety and frustration of the disciple which the master exacerbates until a sufficient climax is reached, which then; 4) the master can resolve by means of a trigger "shocking the student into self-awareness and realisation" (Pelowski, Akiba and Palacios, 2012).

To relate the above described structure within the field of contemporary art, Pelowski, Akiba and Palacios resort to performance art and cite one of the most famous -and certainly shocking -examples of performance, Shoot (1971) by Chris Burden.

On 19 November 1971 at F-Space Gallery in Santa Ana, California, the artist ( Figure 13) had himself shot by a friend with a .22 rifle from a distance of 5 meters in front of an audience. The example is unquestionably admissible, if somewhat partisan, insofar as it ventures the proposition that all performance art is extreme, or shocking, to a similar extent. It is therefore indispensable to clarify that the essence of the "shocking" quality of the trigger (no pun intended) is not the action per se (in this case, the pulling of the trigger followed by the injury of Burden by the bullet), but the fact that the action and the result are not the embodiment of one's expectations (given the context, reasonably, to see art or rather what one was accustomed to consider such, and at the time the consideration of action framed as art must have been indeed shocking). Though considering that at the time Burden was either still a student or may have just received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and the space was not a commercial gallery, but an off-campus warehouse converted into a "site to host performances and exhibitions by the students and their friends," one could not help but wonder whether the audience's expectations were for something experimental or radical and were actually met, to a certain extent.

Figure 13

Christ Burden, Shoot (1971). Photo: Chris Burden.

Furthermore, it is important to remind ourselves that we can never truly apprehend such an artwork, as we cannot say we are able to fully apprehend the Mona Lisa by simply looking at a picture of it. There is evidently no aesthetic experience as such. We can only attempt a sort of reconstruction behind the veil of a few black and white photographs, a handed-down narrative and -consciously or unconsciously -leaving our imagination to fill in the gaps, only to provide us with a sketch of what it could have been, as none of us was actually there to experience it. And, incidentally, this is both the power and limit of performance art.

Pelowski, Akiba and Palacios then go onto shaping the cognitive model proposed in 2011 for satori in art/kōan interaction. The resulting five-stage cognitive schema-change process considers three possible outcomes "in the processing of information, kōan or art" (Pelowski, Akiba and Palacios, 2012).

The first stage is more accurately a pre-state, whereby the person holds "a set of postulates directing behaviour, perception, expectations for interaction" and "a likely response to the outcomes of action" (ibid.), which collectively combine to form "an individual's self-image" (ibid.).

The second stage entails cognitive mastery: the person, upon encountering a stimulus, attempts to control the interaction by applying the best response so as "to reinforce existing schema and the self-image" (ibid.) and to minimise any discrepancies. The first possible outcome 4 appears here and corresponds to a "self-protectionary act of facile interpretation," (ibid.) an assimilation that art, through discrepancy, intends to overcome.

The third stage is termed secondary control, because the personunable to assimilate the discrepancy -switches response from attempting self-reinforcement to activating self-protection. This materialises in 1) reclassification ("the artist is stupid" or "this is not art"); 2) physical escape (leaving the art space); 3) mental withdrawal (psychological impasse, feelings of confusion, anxiety, negative hedonic assessment) offering the second possible outcome, escape. At the opposite spectrum, if at this stage the person with a reasonably strong respect for the master or the situation is able to hold the unbearable weight of the discrepancy, they can journey through it to the next stage.

The fourth stage is the meta-cognitive re-assessment, whereby the person reassesses actions, motives and expectations linked to satori or aesthetic experience. The trigger may appear at this point with the purpose of inducing an awakening, a self-awareness, which in turn may open the horizon to one's own expectations, failures, schema and attempts at preserving them.

The fifth and last stage is the aesthetic insight or satori and it is here that appears the third possible, in fact desirable, outcome with schemachange and self-transformation occurring: the person is now able to reengage from the beginning with the stimulus for a "more harmonious in-In his book The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli presents -amongst the many cognitive errors human beings make -the so teraction, improved or deepened engagement" and be equipped with the new "ability to attend to or process previously overlooked or discrepant ideas" (ibid.). Interestingly, this phase does not imply the gain of something, but "the loss of something that had previously been hindering one's processing or development" (ibid.).

This model can be applied to the unfamiliar eye as follows: First stage. A person has a conception of art as object-based. Second stage. A person is faced with performance art. First possible outcome: to reinforce the belief in the concept-based art, the person ignores the discrepancy and offers facile interpretation, whilst staying.

Third stage. A person can reclassify negatively what they witness and leave; or remain but experience feelings of confusion and anxiety; and leave or remain and sustain an uncomfortable psychological impasse. Second possible outcome is to leave.

Fourth stage. A particular action/situation in the performance prods the person, captures their attention and leads them to give up control, change expectations and experience fully what is unfolding before them.

Fifth stage. The person sustains a potent physiological state, the efficacy of satori or aesthetic insight, and opens up to the third possible, and preferable, outcome, a schema-change that would allow them to re-assess their views, re-engage with future similar stimuli. This in turn could generate "relief as well as pleasure and potentially crying" (Pelowski, Akiba and Palacios, 2012).

This last stage results in both sympathetic and parasympathetic responses which include piloerection, "increased heart rate and electrodermal activity"(ibid.), "decreased respiration, feelings of enlightening and epiphany" (ibid.). This is exactly what happened to me when I experienced the performance by Lynn Lu in 2009: literally, tears, relief, epiphany. In a way, being forced to unexpectedly recall and re-live the temporarily forgotten memory of the extremely painful experience of having the ground pulled away from under my feet -which to this day I can pin point -within the safe context of art, offered me a sort of catharsis from its pestilent shadow and the possibility of bringing it to light and turning it into a painless part of my story, unable to hurt me further.

Epilogue

Finally, I would like to offer possible directions of future research: first and foremost I would like to invite scholars who research and write about art from the fields of psychology and philosophy, not to bundle visual arts as if it were a homogeneous conglomerate, and to open up to consider the unique and neglected language of performance art.

Secondly, the great absent in my article -present in my narrations (felt) but not expressly considered -is emotion. "Aesthetic perception and judgment are not merely cognitive processes, but also involve feeling" (Schindler et al., 2017). The conceptualisation and measurement of aesthetic emotions brought some researchers to develop AESTHEMOS, the Aesthetic Emotions Scale, which could be a useful tool in the approach to visual arts, and performance art in particular. Perhaps the scale could be utilised in the research of the affective impact of well selected performances to the willing public.

Thirdly, and to balance the difficulty in dealing with emotions, such volatile and subjective matters, I can see the applicability of precious contributions from neuroaesthetics, which is "a relatively recent research field within cognitive neuroscience and refers to the study of the neural correlates of aesthetic experience of beauty, particularly in visual art" (Mastandrea, Fagioli and Biasi, 2019) Writing this paper has been for me like travelling: visiting again familiar places -but with the new eyes of the person I am today -and discovering new ones. I feel enriched and better equipped to continue my journey. I sincerely hope that my contribution could offer my reader some inspiration for a new journey too, or maybe even only a little detour.

"Nothing is more hallowing than the union of kindred spirits in art. At the moment of meeting, the art lover transcends himself. At once he is and is not. He catches a glimpse of Infinity, but words cannot voice his delight, for the eye has no tongue. Freed from the fetters of matter, his spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art becomes akin to religion and ennobles mankind." (Okakura, 1906)