Safe Passage - a potent case of peformativity

Actor Charlize Theron sits wrapped in an emergency blanket alongside Nadya Tolokonnikova, left, at the Cinema for Peace event. Image: Gisela Schober/Getty Images.

The term Performativity was first introduced by the theorist J. L. Austin in his 1955 book ‘How to Do Things with Words’. Austin used the word performative to describe a sentence that was also an action; like uttering the words “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” while smashing a bottle against the boat. 

Professor Peggy Phelan said “live art performance remains an interesting art form because it contains the possibility of both the actor and the spectator becoming transformed during the event’s unfolding.”

In The Experiential Turn, Dorothea von Hantelmann states “what the notion of the performative in relation to art actually points to, is a shift from what an artwork depicts and represents to the effects and experiences that it produces - or, to follow Austin, from what it says to what it does.”

Andrew Bennett defines the adjective as referring to the capacity that statements have for doing as well as saying things. Here, cloaking the Berlin Konzerthaus pillars in luminous life jackets is the statement by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. 

Performativity infusing a ‘creation’ by Ai Weiwei, is the extent to which the creation makes people ‘do’. Not just their reading of the piece, but their emotional and physical response. Whether it stopped the traffic in central Berlin or the ‘obscene’ behaviour of celebrities wearing emergency blankets. Whether the reactions and outcomes were predicted or desirable, is irrelevant.

During the annual Cinema for Peace Gala in Berlin, Ai encouraged fundraiser guests, among whom were celebrities, to wear emergency thermal blankets and and pose for photographs. ’Distasteful’, ‘obscene’, ‘vain’ and ‘callous’ were some of the words used to describe the act, but this is not the first time Ai has been urged to find other ways of taking a political stand.

Tim Renner, Berlin's culture secretary, complained about the event on Facebook: “when Ai Weiwei illustrates the dimensions of terror outside with 14,000 life jackets from Lesbos, it is perhaps not subtle but effective and justified; but to don emergency blankets for a group photo, even if understood as an act of solidarity, it has a clearly obscene element.” He added: “not sure why but this image makes me very uneasy, not in the way the artist #aiweiwei wanted.”

Ai Weiwei wraops 14,000 life jackets around the Berlin Konzerthaus in protest collected from Syrian refugees entering Europe via the Greek island of Lesbos.

In the spectacle of these blankets becoming ‘celeb-bling’ and the ghastly site of pure indifference, conceit, and inappropriate behaviour, they became the performance art in number of dimensions. Media and social media enabled Ai Weiwei to reach millions of people, reinforcing the message. A potent Performativity.

Ai Weiwei’s art makes people uncomfortable and in the eyes of critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer this is exactly what critical art should do. Safe Passage was jarring because it exhibited a semblance of truth (actual life vests; people actually wearing emergency blankets).

Perhaps, it made you think that under each blanket there is a human all of equal value. If it is the purpose of art to engage with and challenge current ideology, according to psychoanalysis critic Slavok Žižek, in his film A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, this is going to ‘hurt’. The human resistance to free oneself of ideology might have something to do with why the performance art repelled many; it may have ’hurt’ because we saw ourselves within that murky tribe.

If Ai Weiwei foresaw and engineered such a response, or should that be reflection, of decadence and folly, then this ‘stunt’ was an act of genius. If he did not foresee the outcome, then he is more of a genius.

First debuting in 2016 in Berlin, the Safe Passage installation has now been in numerous European cities including the Minneapolis Institute of Art in February 2020.