Alenka Perpar: From Fiction to Flesh
(Arena, journal of the Mladi levi Festival, no.3, Ljubljana 27. August 2009)
Boris Kadin’s declared performance, ‘What Joseph Beuys told me when I was lying dead in his lap’, serves a hefty portion of theoretical debate. Interestingly though, it does not turn an event into a typical event, for we could say, it kills what is fictional and thus rejects all excursions into the real. Except that this ‘rabbit’ fiction is the real. What a cataclysmic act this is, since the performer is not selling his own blood, or coaxing the spectator, or cutting himself, etc. Instead, he cuts up the rabbit. Destroys him. Kills the fiction. Which fiction? What is achieved by this? Is anything achieved? Fantastic action; rather than flesh it is fiction that gets killed. (…) The performer does not cut his own arm, he cuts a rabbit. The rabbit is no mere surrogate here; with the incision he becomes flesh. The event surrounding the rabbit is no longer fictional, the event becomes real. The real intrudes through the rabbit. Kadin avails himself of strategies which are not always clear, but have an impact that is no less direct. The success of the performance is precisely in that we are not made to fall for the typical differential resonating side where the symbolic logic allows us to attribute definitive meanings to everything. It is not about the subconscious or even the surreal. It is about how to turn fiction into flesh. What makes a performance? When does something become performance art and when is something merely a production? These are the questions cropping up with this performance, calling for a fresh appraisal and a reconsideration of the role of the most typical strategies used in performance art.