17th May Sunday 2-4pm

Lee Campbell and Simon Bowes
The Welcome Committee
Be My Guest: Art, Performance and Hospitality

...the word for ‘hospitality’ is a Latin word, (Hospitalität, a word of Latin origin, of a troubled and troubling origin, a word which carries its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, “hostility,” the undesirable guest [hôte] which it harbors as the self-contradiction in its own body...) (Derrida, 2000:3) [1]

Lee Campbell and Simon Bowes have each completed doctoral research concerning participation in performance. Participation might be considered central to many artistic and performative practices; the terms are redrawn from work to work, event to event. In this redrawing, we (explicitly and implicitly) include, exclude, make welcome or unwelcome, offer permissions and issue refusals (but - to what or to whom…)

Against the ephemeral ontology of the live event, its finite temporality, the call to ethics makes a demand ‘as impossible to satisfy as it is to refuse’ (Bernasconi in Sallis 1987: 135) [2]: obligation to the other, welcome, hospitality - without end. In a philosophical tradition that extends from Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida to Alphonso Lingis and Simon Critchley, the other becomes an ethical question, or: meeting with the other is always a matter of ethics. Through the proposed reading group, we are concerned to ask in what circumstances, under what conditions, and to what extent the practice of performance can respond to this call.

The event of performance - from theatre to live art - might be considered as an event of welcome, as much as an event of illusion, allusion and representation. In whatever ways we are present, in whatever ways we participate, performance makes presence itself affective. In the proposed reading group, Campbell and Bowes will draw upon aspects of their practices and use Derridean and Levinasian theories on invitations, welcomes and hospitality to interrogate how hospitality is construed in from within and outside performance and performance studies. Exploring turns towards-and-away-from participation modelled as hospitality, we can note that self-proclaimed ‘purveyor of discomfort’ Michael Rakowitz has spoken [3] about his practice as a ‘failure of manners’, whilst Dieter Roelstraate has explored the intersection between art and hospitality, announcing a ‘distrust at courtesy’ and that we should remind ourselves of ‘art’s long interest in the inhospitable’, citing terms such as dissent, disgust, discomfort, dismantle, dissatisfaction etc. [4]

As conveners - hosts! - Campbell and Bowes invite readers to explore contractual agency through Derridean concept of hostipitality (Derrida, 2000), wherein a host may be as hostile as hospitable. Readings will unfold through contemporary discourses on participation within an artistic context, from Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics, to Claire Bishop’s ‘relational antagonism’.
The proposed group will consider on the following key themes:

  • How is the event of performance construed as an event of hospitality?

  • Who hosts? Can the relationship between performer and audience be drawn and redrawn as host and guest?

  • When and how are these roles reinforced, reversed, blurred, or surpassed?

  • How does the encounter with the other relate to practice, a process of preparing, responding, and how might it bring about the disruption, suspension of our usual tactics and strategies.

  • What might it mean to be a good - or bad - host.


  1. Derrida. J (2000) ‘Hostipitality’ trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock, Angelaki -Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Vol. 5, Issue 3, 3-18
  2. Bernasconi, R., ‘Deconstruction and the Politics of Ethics’, in Sallis, J (Ed): (1987) ’Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida’, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
  3. Panel session, Being Bad, as part of Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago (2015). Presenters (including Michael Rakowitz and Dieter Roelstraate),were asked to reflect upon situations where it could useful to be a ‘bad host’.
  4. For further information, see http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/symposium-of-hospitality/

 

Provisional Reading List:
Blanchot, M: (1993) The Infinite Conversation, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Levinas, E: (1999) Entre Nous, London, Athlone Press.
Derrida, J: (1997) Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Derrida. J (2000) ‘Hostipitality’ trans by Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock, Angelaki -Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Vol. 5, Issue 3, 3-18

 

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