'"What to Perform?" The figural possibilities of performance art history' translated by Roger McKeon as "Que performer?' Les possibilités figures de l'histoire de l'art-performance.

I admit that the title of this article is a bit flirtatious, even bamboozling. What follows does not explicitly address the figural, nor does it offer a history of performance art. What is examined, however, are examples of Lyotard's work informed by a trace of the figural: What to Paint? Adami, Arakawa, Buren; Karel Appel, A Gesture of Color, and the exhibition Les Immatériaux. Lyotard's response to artworks and the questions they raise, however, bears no shortage of affinities with performance and the provocations of the practice of performance art. This proximity emerges from a style of writing and a curatorial approach that shifts chronology and calls attention to the possibilities of presence. The questions posed are never more than beginnings. What to Paint? questions the possibilities offered by painting, as that which other forms of expression seem incapable of producing. In the narrator's unusually autobiographical account "You," the event of presence is illustrated by an experience of a bicycle ride under the blue skies of a childhood in Vendée. This little story is continued throughout the first dialogical section "The Presence" to evoke the inarticulable. The interlocutor, "He," asks: "But confess that something, I do not say a thing, an object, but that an event, which is not a thing, but at least a caesura in space-time, takes place, and that it is this that must be "rendered…"