SCHOOL OF DISOBEDIENCE
Performance & Object
Module 3
Day 1
§1 — Performance and object: time, sacrality, and an unresolved opposition
Performance and object are grounded in radically different relations to time, value, and sacrality. At an ontological level, they approach existence itself differently.
The art object is oriented toward duration. It carries a past — its making, its provenance — and it is projected into the future through conservation, transmission, and survival. It is meant to remain, to outlast the moment of its production, and to be encountered again.
Performance, by contrast, is oriented toward presence. It unfolds in the now, in a time that cannot be paused or stored. It is not meant to survive; it is meant to be experienced, felt, remembered. Its temporality is experiential rather than archival.
This difference produces a fundamental tension. Objects accumulate time; performances consume it. Objects stabilize; performances expose instability. One promises continuity, the other accepts disappearance. This is why performance has historically relied on memory, testimony, and documentation, while the object has relied on preservation, restoration, and display. Their relationship to time is not complementary but incompatible — and it is precisely this incompatibility that generates a productive friction for our Performance & Object Masterclass.
This tension is inseparable from questions of sacrality. The art object inherits a long lineage of the sacred. Long before museums, objects were set apart: relics, icons, ritual tools, offerings. They were not meant to be touched casually. Their power resided in distance, prohibition, and reverence. In biblical and iconoclastic traditions, objects were often sacred precisely because they were destined for destruction or withdrawal — their value intensified by restriction. This logic persists in the white cube: the plinth, the vitrine, the “do not touch” sign. The object is elevated, separated, protected. Its meaning is stabilized through distance.
Performance emerges on the other side of this structure. It is a form of regression and transgression. Performance crosses borders: between body and object, between public and private, between allowed and forbidden. It dares to touch what is set apart. It risks contamination, damage, failure. Where the object is sacralized through separation, performance desacralizes through contact. Hands replace vitrines. Use replaces contemplation. Risk replaces preservation.
Historically, this is why performance was experienced as threatening: it endangered objects, institutions, and the values attached to them. To touch an artwork was to violate its status. To alter it was to undo its authority. Performance insists on proximity, on exposure, on the collapse of distance. It brings the object back into the realm of handling, fragility, and contingency — closer to ritual than to monument.
This masterclass begins precisely at this fault line. It does not resolve the opposition between object and performance, nor does it attempt to merge them seamlessly. Instead, it treats their incompatibility as a working condition. What happens when an object meant to survive enters a practice meant to vanish? What happens when sacral distance is replaced by touch? When the future-oriented logic of the object collides with the present-tense intensity of performance?
The work begins here: in the tension between survival and disappearance, between reverence and use, between distance and contact. It is from this unstable ground — where time, value, and meaning are continuously renegotiated — that the masterclass operates.
The art object is oriented toward duration. It carries a past — its making, its provenance — and it is projected into the future through conservation, transmission, and survival. It is meant to remain, to outlast the moment of its production, and to be encountered again.
Performance, by contrast, is oriented toward presence. It unfolds in the now, in a time that cannot be paused or stored. It is not meant to survive; it is meant to be experienced, felt, remembered. Its temporality is experiential rather than archival.
This difference produces a fundamental tension. Objects accumulate time; performances consume it. Objects stabilize; performances expose instability. One promises continuity, the other accepts disappearance. This is why performance has historically relied on memory, testimony, and documentation, while the object has relied on preservation, restoration, and display. Their relationship to time is not complementary but incompatible — and it is precisely this incompatibility that generates a productive friction for our Performance & Object Masterclass.
This tension is inseparable from questions of sacrality. The art object inherits a long lineage of the sacred. Long before museums, objects were set apart: relics, icons, ritual tools, offerings. They were not meant to be touched casually. Their power resided in distance, prohibition, and reverence. In biblical and iconoclastic traditions, objects were often sacred precisely because they were destined for destruction or withdrawal — their value intensified by restriction. This logic persists in the white cube: the plinth, the vitrine, the “do not touch” sign. The object is elevated, separated, protected. Its meaning is stabilized through distance.
Performance emerges on the other side of this structure. It is a form of regression and transgression. Performance crosses borders: between body and object, between public and private, between allowed and forbidden. It dares to touch what is set apart. It risks contamination, damage, failure. Where the object is sacralized through separation, performance desacralizes through contact. Hands replace vitrines. Use replaces contemplation. Risk replaces preservation.
Historically, this is why performance was experienced as threatening: it endangered objects, institutions, and the values attached to them. To touch an artwork was to violate its status. To alter it was to undo its authority. Performance insists on proximity, on exposure, on the collapse of distance. It brings the object back into the realm of handling, fragility, and contingency — closer to ritual than to monument.
This masterclass begins precisely at this fault line. It does not resolve the opposition between object and performance, nor does it attempt to merge them seamlessly. Instead, it treats their incompatibility as a working condition. What happens when an object meant to survive enters a practice meant to vanish? What happens when sacral distance is replaced by touch? When the future-oriented logic of the object collides with the present-tense intensity of performance?
The work begins here: in the tension between survival and disappearance, between reverence and use, between distance and contact. It is from this unstable ground — where time, value, and meaning are continuously renegotiated — that the masterclass operates.
§2 — The mutable status of the object: from sacral distance to activated matter
This masterclass takes as a starting point the exhibition Ne pas jouer avec des choses mortes / Not Playing with Dead Things (Villa Arson, 2009), not as a historical reference but as a conceptual problem that remains unresolved. The exhibition addressed a situation that became increasingly visible in contemporary art: the circulation of objects between performance and exhibition, between action and display, between use and afterlife. Its central question was not whether performance leaves objects behind, but what kind of objects these are once performance has passed through them.
What becomes crucial here is the instability of the object’s status.
The same object can shift radically in role, value, and meaning depending on how and where it is encountered. When placed on a plinth, an object enters a regime of display that produces distance and authority. It is isolated, protected, and sacralized. Touch is forbidden. The object is approached visually and conceptually rather than physically. The plinth does not simply support the object; it assigns it a function and a value. Through framing, the object becomes “art,” stabilized in meaning and separated from use.
Once this same object is taken into the hands during a performance, its status is fundamentally altered. It becomes a prop, a tool, a partner, something carried, dropped, leaned on, resisted. Touch breaks sacrality. The object enters time, risk, and contingency. It can be damaged, transformed, exhausted. Its value is no longer guaranteed by display but tested through use. Meaning no longer resides in form alone; it unfolds through action, duration, and exposure. The object becomes vulnerable, implicated, and situational.
After performance, the object may shift again. It can return to exhibition, but it does not return unchanged. A vase that has been broken during a performance and later displayed again carries a different charge. For those who witnessed the action, the object functions as a trace — a condensed reminder of something that has happened and cannot be repeated. For those who did not, it produces something else: an imagined history, a gap filled by speculation, projection, and narrative. This gap is not a lack; it is productive. It generates secrecy. The object becomes a container of an absent action — a site where the performance exists only as rumor, residue, or tension held in matter.
Other trajectories are equally significant. An object may disappear entirely: destroyed, dissolved, consumed, or rendered unusable. In this case, what remains is not an object but a void. Absence itself becomes operative. Memory, documentation, and imagination must take the place of matter. Conversely, an object may change position, scale, or context: from stage to museum, from floor to wall, from hand-held to monumental. Each displacement redefines not only how the object is seen, but what kind of time it carries — whether it points backward to an event, forward to preservation, or sideways into speculation.
The key point is that the object does not possess a stable identity. What changes is not the object itself, but its mode of existence. It oscillates between artwork, prop, trace, relic, debris, or nothing at all. These shifts are not secondary effects; they are central to how meaning is produced. The masterclass situates itself precisely in this oscillation. Objects are approached as mutable structures whose value, agency, and symbolic charge are continuously renegotiated through context, use, and relation.
In this sense, performance is not something that simply happens to objects. Performance is one of the mechanisms through which objects change status: from sacral to usable, from usable to altered, from altered to remembered, from remembered to imagined. Understanding, composing, and activating these transitions — rather than fixing the object in one role — is one of the central concerns of the masterclass.
What becomes crucial here is the instability of the object’s status.
The same object can shift radically in role, value, and meaning depending on how and where it is encountered. When placed on a plinth, an object enters a regime of display that produces distance and authority. It is isolated, protected, and sacralized. Touch is forbidden. The object is approached visually and conceptually rather than physically. The plinth does not simply support the object; it assigns it a function and a value. Through framing, the object becomes “art,” stabilized in meaning and separated from use.
Once this same object is taken into the hands during a performance, its status is fundamentally altered. It becomes a prop, a tool, a partner, something carried, dropped, leaned on, resisted. Touch breaks sacrality. The object enters time, risk, and contingency. It can be damaged, transformed, exhausted. Its value is no longer guaranteed by display but tested through use. Meaning no longer resides in form alone; it unfolds through action, duration, and exposure. The object becomes vulnerable, implicated, and situational.
After performance, the object may shift again. It can return to exhibition, but it does not return unchanged. A vase that has been broken during a performance and later displayed again carries a different charge. For those who witnessed the action, the object functions as a trace — a condensed reminder of something that has happened and cannot be repeated. For those who did not, it produces something else: an imagined history, a gap filled by speculation, projection, and narrative. This gap is not a lack; it is productive. It generates secrecy. The object becomes a container of an absent action — a site where the performance exists only as rumor, residue, or tension held in matter.
Other trajectories are equally significant. An object may disappear entirely: destroyed, dissolved, consumed, or rendered unusable. In this case, what remains is not an object but a void. Absence itself becomes operative. Memory, documentation, and imagination must take the place of matter. Conversely, an object may change position, scale, or context: from stage to museum, from floor to wall, from hand-held to monumental. Each displacement redefines not only how the object is seen, but what kind of time it carries — whether it points backward to an event, forward to preservation, or sideways into speculation.
The key point is that the object does not possess a stable identity. What changes is not the object itself, but its mode of existence. It oscillates between artwork, prop, trace, relic, debris, or nothing at all. These shifts are not secondary effects; they are central to how meaning is produced. The masterclass situates itself precisely in this oscillation. Objects are approached as mutable structures whose value, agency, and symbolic charge are continuously renegotiated through context, use, and relation.
In this sense, performance is not something that simply happens to objects. Performance is one of the mechanisms through which objects change status: from sacral to usable, from usable to altered, from altered to remembered, from remembered to imagined. Understanding, composing, and activating these transitions — rather than fixing the object in one role — is one of the central concerns of the masterclass.
Day 2
§3 — Activation: on animation, power, and the ethics of making things act
What does it mean to activate something? What kind of gesture is this, historically, symbolically, and psychically? And why does activation matter so insistently in contemporary artistic practice?
To activate an object is not merely to use it. It is to intervene in its mode of existence. Activation implies a passage from latency to presence, from potential to effect. But this passage is never neutral. It is charged with power, authorship, responsibility, and risk.
1. Activation as inheritance: animating the inanimate
The idea that objects can be animated is ancient. Across religious, mythological, and ritual traditions, objects are not inert matter but vessels, thresholds, or mediators between worlds. Statues were animated through ritual breath; icons were kissed, clothed, feared; fetishes were believed to hold agency. In these contexts, animation was not metaphorical — it was ontological. To animate meant to give life, or at least to host it.
This heritage persists, often unconsciously, in contemporary art. When an artist “activates” an object, they step into a lineage of practices that once belonged to priests, shamans, or ritual specialists. The act of activating carries with it an implicit power: to awaken, to charge, to transform. It is not accidental that museums and galleries have inherited the architecture of temples, or that the plinth functions as a secular altar.
Yet contemporary artists rarely believe they are literally giving life. Instead, activation becomes ambiguous: half-believed, half-performed. This ambiguity is productive. It allows artists to work with the desire for animation while simultaneously questioning it. The activated object is not alive, yet it behaves as if it were — and this “as if” becomes the site of artistic tension.
2. Activation and authorship: who acts, who is acted upon?
Activation also destabilizes authorship. Traditionally, the artist is the active agent and the object the passive recipient of form. But once an object is activated, this hierarchy falters. The object begins to act back: it resists, demands care, imposes limits, or generates unexpected outcomes.
This is where activation becomes a redistribution of agency. The artist no longer fully controls meaning; instead, meaning emerges through negotiation with material, context, and time. In this sense, activation is not an assertion of mastery but a willingness to enter dependency.
This shift resonates strongly with post-minimal and post-conceptual practices. Think of Robert Morris’s felt pieces collapsing under gravity, or Lygia Clark’s relational objects that only exist through bodily engagement. In such works, the artist sets conditions, but cannot predict outcomes. Activation becomes an ethics of letting go.
3. Activation and trauma: from objectification to agency
Another crucial layer emerges when activation is read through psychoanalytic theory, particularly through trauma and object relations. Trauma, in its most basic formulation, involves a breakdown in agency: the subject is acted upon, overwhelmed, reduced to an object of another’s will. In such moments, experience cannot be symbolized and therefore returns belatedly, indirectly.
From this perspective, activation takes on a reparative dimension. To animate an object, to let it act, or to negotiate with it, can become a way of reconfiguring relations of agency. Objects that were once passive, mute, or instrumentalized begin to “speak back.” They no longer serve only as surfaces of projection but enter into dialogue.
This does not mean that the artwork expresses trauma. Rather, it enacts a structural reversal: what was once treated as inert becomes responsive; what was once controlling becomes receptive. In psychoanalytic terms, this can be understood as a movement from being-object to relating-with-objects — a subtle but profound shift.
Importantly, this process is not confessional. It does not require narrative disclosure. It operates at the level of form, rhythm, and relation. The activated object holds something without naming it, allowing complexity without exposure.
4. Activation as differentiation
Activation is also a process of differentiation. When an object is activated, it separates itself from the general field of things. It becomes this object, with a specific gravity, history, and orientation. But differentiation also happens on the side of the maker: through interaction with the object, one’s position shifts.
This is where activation intersects with individuation. Not as self-expression, but as the slow emergence of distinction through relation. The object pushes back, demands response, creates limits. Through this negotiation, both object and subject acquire contour.
In this sense, activation is not about intensifying expression but about sharpening difference. It allows the artist to recognize where something resists assimilation — where it refuses to become illustrative or decorative. That refusal is often where the work begins to think.
5. Activation as ethical and temporal practice
Finally, activation is inseparable from time. It unfolds, recedes, and sometimes exhausts itself. An activated object may eventually become inert again — but not neutral. It carries a memory of activation, a residue that can be reawakened under different conditions.
This temporal aspect introduces an ethics of care. To activate something is to take responsibility for its afterlife: where it ends up, how it is stored, whether it is allowed to rest or must perform again. Activation thus resists extractive logics of production. It asks not only what can this object do for me? but what does this object require?
In this sense, activation becomes a form of listening.
In this masterclass, activation is approached neither as technique nor metaphor, but as a mode of relation. It names the moment when an object begins to operate within a field of attention, memory, and time — and when the artist allows themselves to be changed by that operation.
Activation, here, is not about making things come alive.
It is about learning how to stay with what already lives — and to let it act.
To activate an object is not merely to use it. It is to intervene in its mode of existence. Activation implies a passage from latency to presence, from potential to effect. But this passage is never neutral. It is charged with power, authorship, responsibility, and risk.
1. Activation as inheritance: animating the inanimate
The idea that objects can be animated is ancient. Across religious, mythological, and ritual traditions, objects are not inert matter but vessels, thresholds, or mediators between worlds. Statues were animated through ritual breath; icons were kissed, clothed, feared; fetishes were believed to hold agency. In these contexts, animation was not metaphorical — it was ontological. To animate meant to give life, or at least to host it.
This heritage persists, often unconsciously, in contemporary art. When an artist “activates” an object, they step into a lineage of practices that once belonged to priests, shamans, or ritual specialists. The act of activating carries with it an implicit power: to awaken, to charge, to transform. It is not accidental that museums and galleries have inherited the architecture of temples, or that the plinth functions as a secular altar.
Yet contemporary artists rarely believe they are literally giving life. Instead, activation becomes ambiguous: half-believed, half-performed. This ambiguity is productive. It allows artists to work with the desire for animation while simultaneously questioning it. The activated object is not alive, yet it behaves as if it were — and this “as if” becomes the site of artistic tension.
2. Activation and authorship: who acts, who is acted upon?
Activation also destabilizes authorship. Traditionally, the artist is the active agent and the object the passive recipient of form. But once an object is activated, this hierarchy falters. The object begins to act back: it resists, demands care, imposes limits, or generates unexpected outcomes.
This is where activation becomes a redistribution of agency. The artist no longer fully controls meaning; instead, meaning emerges through negotiation with material, context, and time. In this sense, activation is not an assertion of mastery but a willingness to enter dependency.
This shift resonates strongly with post-minimal and post-conceptual practices. Think of Robert Morris’s felt pieces collapsing under gravity, or Lygia Clark’s relational objects that only exist through bodily engagement. In such works, the artist sets conditions, but cannot predict outcomes. Activation becomes an ethics of letting go.
3. Activation and trauma: from objectification to agency
Another crucial layer emerges when activation is read through psychoanalytic theory, particularly through trauma and object relations. Trauma, in its most basic formulation, involves a breakdown in agency: the subject is acted upon, overwhelmed, reduced to an object of another’s will. In such moments, experience cannot be symbolized and therefore returns belatedly, indirectly.
From this perspective, activation takes on a reparative dimension. To animate an object, to let it act, or to negotiate with it, can become a way of reconfiguring relations of agency. Objects that were once passive, mute, or instrumentalized begin to “speak back.” They no longer serve only as surfaces of projection but enter into dialogue.
This does not mean that the artwork expresses trauma. Rather, it enacts a structural reversal: what was once treated as inert becomes responsive; what was once controlling becomes receptive. In psychoanalytic terms, this can be understood as a movement from being-object to relating-with-objects — a subtle but profound shift.
Importantly, this process is not confessional. It does not require narrative disclosure. It operates at the level of form, rhythm, and relation. The activated object holds something without naming it, allowing complexity without exposure.
4. Activation as differentiation
Activation is also a process of differentiation. When an object is activated, it separates itself from the general field of things. It becomes this object, with a specific gravity, history, and orientation. But differentiation also happens on the side of the maker: through interaction with the object, one’s position shifts.
This is where activation intersects with individuation. Not as self-expression, but as the slow emergence of distinction through relation. The object pushes back, demands response, creates limits. Through this negotiation, both object and subject acquire contour.
In this sense, activation is not about intensifying expression but about sharpening difference. It allows the artist to recognize where something resists assimilation — where it refuses to become illustrative or decorative. That refusal is often where the work begins to think.
5. Activation as ethical and temporal practice
Finally, activation is inseparable from time. It unfolds, recedes, and sometimes exhausts itself. An activated object may eventually become inert again — but not neutral. It carries a memory of activation, a residue that can be reawakened under different conditions.
This temporal aspect introduces an ethics of care. To activate something is to take responsibility for its afterlife: where it ends up, how it is stored, whether it is allowed to rest or must perform again. Activation thus resists extractive logics of production. It asks not only what can this object do for me? but what does this object require?
In this sense, activation becomes a form of listening.
In this masterclass, activation is approached neither as technique nor metaphor, but as a mode of relation. It names the moment when an object begins to operate within a field of attention, memory, and time — and when the artist allows themselves to be changed by that operation.
Activation, here, is not about making things come alive.
It is about learning how to stay with what already lives — and to let it act.
Day 3
§4 — Objects that think: three lineages for Performance & Object
This masterclass situates itself inside a specific artistic lineage: one in which objects, language, and performance cannot be separated. In these practices, objects are not accessories to action, nor are they static artworks waiting to be interpreted. They are active structures that organize time, speech, and attention. They do not represent meaning; they produce it through use, delay, repetition, and friction.
To understand this terrain, we look closely at three artists whose work consistently destabilizes the boundaries between sculpture, performance, text, and exhibition: Guy de Cointet, Emily Mast, and Ragnar Kjartansson. Each of them proposes a different way for objects to think, speak, and endure.
To understand this terrain, we look closely at three artists whose work consistently destabilizes the boundaries between sculpture, performance, text, and exhibition: Guy de Cointet, Emily Mast, and Ragnar Kjartansson. Each of them proposes a different way for objects to think, speak, and endure.
Guy de Cointet — objects as coded language
Guy de Cointet’s work occupies a precise and unsettling position between visual art and theatre. His drawings, colored panels, books, and geometric sculptures are not meant to be read or looked at in isolation. They are coded devices — objects that hold information without giving it up easily.
In de Cointet’s performances and lecture-performances, these objects are activated through speech. Performers handle them, point to them, misread them, explain them, contradict themselves. Language circles around the object without ever fully unlocking it. Meaning is always almost there, always just beyond reach.
What matters here is not what the objects signify, but how they structure attention and delay understanding. The object becomes a machine for postponement. It forces the audience to stay with uncertainty, to watch how speech, gesture, and matter struggle to align. De Cointet turns objects into sites where interpretation is constantly attempted and constantly frustrated — and it is this tension that generates the work.
For this masterclass, de Cointet teaches us that an object needs to be precisely positioned inside system(s) (in our vocabulary: worlds, containers, miscrocosmos).
Guy de Cointet’s work occupies a precise and unsettling position between visual art and theatre. His drawings, colored panels, books, and geometric sculptures are not meant to be read or looked at in isolation. They are coded devices — objects that hold information without giving it up easily.
In de Cointet’s performances and lecture-performances, these objects are activated through speech. Performers handle them, point to them, misread them, explain them, contradict themselves. Language circles around the object without ever fully unlocking it. Meaning is always almost there, always just beyond reach.
What matters here is not what the objects signify, but how they structure attention and delay understanding. The object becomes a machine for postponement. It forces the audience to stay with uncertainty, to watch how speech, gesture, and matter struggle to align. De Cointet turns objects into sites where interpretation is constantly attempted and constantly frustrated — and it is this tension that generates the work.
For this masterclass, de Cointet teaches us that an object needs to be precisely positioned inside system(s) (in our vocabulary: worlds, containers, miscrocosmos).
Emily Mast — objects inside living systems
Emily Mast’s work is built from what she calls dispositifs: systems where voice, bodies, text, movement, and objects are interdependent. In her performances and installations, nothing functions alone. A prop is also a speaker. A performer is also a narrator. A script is also a spatial score.
Objects in Mast’s work are not symbols. They are participants. They are moved, addressed, waited for, resisted. Meaning emerges not from what an object “is,” but from how it operates inside time: how long it is held, when it is dropped, how it interrupts speech, how it demands attention.
Mast replaces explanation with duration and choreography. Language does not describe the object; it collides with it. Bodies do not illustrate ideas; they negotiate with material. This creates a space where meaning is generated through interaction, not delivered.
For this masterclass, Mast shows how to think of performance as orchestration of relations — where objects are part of a living grammar.
Emily Mast’s work is built from what she calls dispositifs: systems where voice, bodies, text, movement, and objects are interdependent. In her performances and installations, nothing functions alone. A prop is also a speaker. A performer is also a narrator. A script is also a spatial score.
Objects in Mast’s work are not symbols. They are participants. They are moved, addressed, waited for, resisted. Meaning emerges not from what an object “is,” but from how it operates inside time: how long it is held, when it is dropped, how it interrupts speech, how it demands attention.
Mast replaces explanation with duration and choreography. Language does not describe the object; it collides with it. Bodies do not illustrate ideas; they negotiate with material. This creates a space where meaning is generated through interaction, not delivered.
For this masterclass, Mast shows how to think of performance as orchestration of relations — where objects are part of a living grammar.
Ragnar Kjartansson — objects as temporal containers
Ragnar Kjartansson works with repetition, endurance, and installation to turn objects and environments into vessels of time. A song is played again and again. A scene is repeated for hours. A space becomes saturated with the same gesture, the same sound, the same emotional tone.
Objects in Kjartansson’s work — furniture, instruments, architectural elements — are not decorative. They are anchors that allow affect to accumulate. Through repetition, something shifts: what was once expressive becomes mechanical, what was once ironic becomes sincere, what was once light becomes unbearable.
Kjartansson shows that meaning is not produced by novelty, but by staying. Objects become powerful when they remain present long enough for viewers to project, remember, and feel.
For Performance & Object, this teaches a crucial lesson: an object does not need to change in order to become active. Sometimes its power lies in endurance.
What these three artists share
What unites de Cointet, Mast, and Kjartansson is a shared understanding of the object as an engine rather than an image.
Their objects:
In this masterclass, we do not treat objects as props, nor as sculptures waiting to be admired. We treat them as structures that generate multiple thought, sensation, and relation.
Ragnar Kjartansson works with repetition, endurance, and installation to turn objects and environments into vessels of time. A song is played again and again. A scene is repeated for hours. A space becomes saturated with the same gesture, the same sound, the same emotional tone.
Objects in Kjartansson’s work — furniture, instruments, architectural elements — are not decorative. They are anchors that allow affect to accumulate. Through repetition, something shifts: what was once expressive becomes mechanical, what was once ironic becomes sincere, what was once light becomes unbearable.
Kjartansson shows that meaning is not produced by novelty, but by staying. Objects become powerful when they remain present long enough for viewers to project, remember, and feel.
For Performance & Object, this teaches a crucial lesson: an object does not need to change in order to become active. Sometimes its power lies in endurance.
What these three artists share
What unites de Cointet, Mast, and Kjartansson is a shared understanding of the object as an engine rather than an image.
Their objects:
- delay meaning rather than clarify it
- hold ambivalence rather than resolve it
- produce time rather than decorate space
- invite projection rather than interpretation
In this masterclass, we do not treat objects as props, nor as sculptures waiting to be admired. We treat them as structures that generate multiple thought, sensation, and relation.
Day 4