Malgosia Butterwick:

www.malgosiab.net

Performance Art caught my fascination “at first sight“ as a totally unique form of expression. Its most magnetic aspect is this self-imposed duty to keep on looking for one’s own, individual way to deal with a “moment“ removed from common formulas of reality, to deal with one’s own presence/absence within it, to learn to be un/really and totally “with oneself“ for that moment... to submit to a constant process of action and cognition, that can be thrilling and maybe... terrifying.

This is probably why, even after seeing so many, I still like to witness the performances of other artists. It’s pure curiosity – to submit to a possibility of experiencing “the other“ that is not given by any other situation or relationship... and accepting, that it is only a fleeting touch, a fragment, a symptom that we cannot and should not attempt to interpret.

The symbolic function presents itself as a double movement within the subject:

man makes an object of his action, but only in order to restore to this action in due time its place as a grounding. In this equivocation, operating at every instant lies the whole process of a function in which action and knowledge alternate.

Jacques Lacan “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.”

I am inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis as precious, adequate and always surprising reference for talking about art honestly, as a human need, as a function. It was a gradual and intuitive discovery that appeared in the course of my own experience as performer. It is in this fundamentally transgressive process of creation where jouissance manifests itself as a unique symptom – a way the subject experiences the unconscious.

In my currently prepared doctoral thesis I am investigating the topology of the three orders as a matrix for placing art activity in relation to life, seeing art as “life’s laboratory”. If performance is in any way “for real” – it is to me precisely in the Lacanian sense of the Real – a dimension turning around what is impossible to signify...