Philosophy of the Performing Arts

178 performance as art
Dancers, for example, perform whereas painters do not because, while
each is guided in their actions by expectations about the evaluations of an
intended audience, it is the product of the painter’s actions – the finished
canvas – that he expects the audience to evaluate, and not the actions them-
selves. But what about the musician? Is it not the product of her actions – an
acoustic manifold – that she expects her intended audience to assess? So
why is she a performer when the painter is not? Primarily, I think, because
the audible results of a musician’s playing are directly correlated with and
intimately linked to the actions she performs. It is therefore natural to think
of the instrument as an extension of the performer through which she acts
and of the sounds produced as her actions. Recall here Levinson’s claim that
expressive properties of musical works are partly dependent on the actions
needed to elicit particular sounds from given instruments. Furthermore, the
performing musician’s actions generate the music in real time, without the
possibility of revisions. The acoustic manifold we appreciate is contempora-
neous with the actions of the musician. It therefore can be, and usually is,
experienced and evaluated through one’s attentive engagement with those
actions. Only in the case of certain “action” painters might painters satisfy
these conditions, and it is only in such cases that we might classify painters
as performers.
Having clarified the account of performance sketched in Chapter 1,
we can return to Thom’s contrasting account of the role of the audience
in performance. In addition to his argument based on the kind of address
made by a performer, Thom offers a further argument in support of his
claim that we have a performance only where we have an actual audience.
This argument is based on the causal interaction between performers and
an audience. The act of performing, he maintains, “assumes the existence
of a gaze that is making a certain demand of it, and it supplies what that
demand seeks” (Thom 1993, 192). The suggestion here seems to be that the
performer must tailor her performance to an audience that makes particular
demands upon her. But why does this require that the audience be actual
rather than intended in the above sense? Of course, there are certain kinds
of artistic performances that do require an actual audience because the audi-
ence plays a role in realizing the work. Thom mentions the simple example
of a children’s pantomime, which relies on the audience saying such things as
“He’s behind you,” or responding “yes” to the question whether they believe
in fairies. He also mentions the more complex example of La Monte Young’s
Drift Study which requires certain movements on the part of the audience.
But these cases don’t justify the more general claim that all performances
need an actual audience.
A related argument starts from the fact that, where there is an actual audi-
ence, performers may respond to it, so that the performance may change when