Philosophy of the Performing Arts

144 performance as art
when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon
a table,” he is not merely quoting the opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He is also using them to express his own desire
that he and Magda set out on an excursion. In the same way, Mark maintains,
the performer of a performable work doesn’t merely “quote” in accordance
with the musical directives of the composer, but also uses what is “quoted”
to make an artistic statement of her own. In so doing, the performer con-
fers upon the resulting performance aesthetically important qualities dis-
tinct from those of the quoted work. If then, as Kivy suggests, we identify a
work of art with “an artifactual collection of aesthetically important proper-
ties” (1995, 118), the performance qua artistic statement by the performer
is itself an artwork distinct from the work being performed. Since we are
assuming that realizations of performable works require the interpretive con-
tribution of performers, and thus that all performers confer upon their per-
formances aesthetically significant properties distinct from those required
by the work performed, we seem to have a general argument for viewing
all work- performances as themselves artworks – performance-works as we
have termed them. Mark summarizes his argument as follows:
When we have a performance of a work of music we have ... two assertions:
there is the work of music itself, which is a statement or assertion by the
composer, and there is the additional assertion which is the performance ...
The performance is not simply an interpretation (though it requires or
involves one) or a presentation (though it requires that too since it involves
producing an instance of the work): it is another work of art. (Mark 1981,
320; cited in Kivy 1995, 119)
There seems to be something right but also something wrong with this
argument. On the one hand, we should surely agree that, when a performer
does indeed use the prescriptions of a performable work to make a distinctive
artistic statement of her own, this is properly regarded as a distinct work, if,
as argued in the previous section, performances can be artworks. Indeed, the
prevalence of this phenomenon in theatrical and dance performance is one
of the considerations that lends credibility to the ingredients model. We are
not surprised to discover, in attending a performance of a traditional play,
that the director and company are to some extent making use of the play to
comment on issues of interest to them. This is why we think of Brook’s “exis-
tentialist” production of King Lear , for example, as a work to be assessed in
its own right. When we turn to music, we also find striking examples of the
same kind of phenomenon. Accomplished performers like Glenn Gould are
celebrated for the independent vision that they bring to their performances