Towards 'Economies of Generosity' in Contemporary Live Art Practice
Creators: name: Jeeves, Tim
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2017
Subjects: Gift
Generosity
Theatre
Live Art

description: Throughout this thesis, performance theory and the accompanying practice
      as research are utilised, along with anthropological and philosophical
      analysis, in order to examine how gift intersects with live art practice.
      The ways in which it is made and encountered in contemporary
      (predominantly UK) society are of particular focus. 
      
      The Horse’s Teeth, a 2012 project that saw the authorship of six new
      performance works gifted to six artists, is used, along with Bourdieusian
      notions of cultural capital and Sara Ahmed’s theory around the
      ‘stickiness’ of emotions to explore how authorship is both subjective
      lived experience and a means of accumulating capital. By then analysing
      the affective dimensions of gift giving within The Horse’s Teeth, a model
      is developed to show how gift can effect subject-formation.
      
      Building on this model, organ transplantation is proposed as an exemplary
      instance of the ‘successful gift’, a gift that both bridges identities and
      affirmatively increases the capacities of the recipient(s). The Kindness
      of Strangers, a solo performance in which I investigate the relationship
      between the work’s audience, my anonymous bone marrow donor and Blanche
      Dubois, is then used to consider the potential of performance to be such a
      gift. In the proposed understanding, what the audience and performer give
      to the performance and each other is presented using Jean-Luc Marion’s
      work on anamorphosis and Jacques Rancière’s emancipated spectator. 
      
      Referencing the autobiographical element of The Kindness of Strangers, the
      transformative potential of Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics is used to
      explain how the excess of trauma can sometimes be transformed into the
      excess of gift; a gift to both the traumatised self and, potentially,
      another. This develops the proposal made by thinkers such as Lyotard,
      Marion and Derrida that the gift cannot be fully comprehended at the time
      in which it is given. Inferring from this that the successful performance
      gift also resists being known by either audience or performer in its
      totality, the problem of how to make such unknowable performance is
      explored using Richard Sennett’s writing on craft. The second chapter
      concludes by considering reciprocity, in particular applause as a
      reciprocal gift from the audience, as an expression of thanks for what the
      performer has given.
      
      Having established a clear sense of how performance can be understood as
      gift, the final chapter examines how such gifts sit within capitalism. A
      variety of funding systems are considered, as well as the manner by which
      gift and performance, as Illichian blessings, defy capitalist valuation.
      Capital’s attempts to gain propriety by developing authorial relationships
      to the blessing is presented through analysis of corporate patronage,
      before an overview of current activist work to undermine this in the
      context of oil sponsorship is provided. The work of Liberate Tate, a group
      formed to break the relationship between BP and the Tate, is considered in
      particular depth here. The thesis concludes by proposing a reconsideration
      of how the arts are valued within funding systems, particularly in
      relation to waste and the way in which funders undermine the gift within
      performance by demanding quantified outcomes in advance.