Art as a Performative Act/ The Fantasy Beyond Control Response (Sean Strelow)

The part that really stuck out to me in The Fantasy Beyond Control reading is when Lynn Herchann mentions how “because viewer/participants use a nearly identical unit to direct action, a metaphoric link or point of identification is established between the viewer and the referent” (269). I feel like this really connects to the act of Play, something that Klemm purports in his piece Art as a Performative Act. It makes me think of developments in video games such as the Wii, or arcade racing games. The objects used to input are meant to resemble the things the characters in the game are using. So in the arcade racing game example, the person playing the game presses a pedal for gas and turns a wheel for direction, much like a regular car that can be seen and controlled in the game. This provides the “metaphoric link” that Herchann references, “between the viewer and the referent” (269). This begs the question: Are video games, then, performance art? It seems to me like they are.

This section also reminded me of films where we see the character on screen watching someone, sometimes through a camera but even without, perhaps through a window or from afar. Often, filmmakers will give us point-of-view shots to align us with the person observing, which distance us from the person being observed. It makes us voyeurs, much as the characters in the film are. These POV shots give us that same metaphoric link with the character that the filmmakers want us to be aligned with, an affect that helps shape our emotional connections within the film. It also makes the characters more like us, the viewers; the entire movie, we enjoy an entirely voyeuristic experience of observing people who cannot see us. When the character does this, they enter our role. And when we take their POV, we feel a resonance based on assuming our role as voyeur in a more pointed sense. For example, take this clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ez6dw3ywcc. The majority of the shots are from main character L.B. Jeffries’ point-of-view, and when he takes out his camera to zoom in, we see the blackness surrounding the circle of his view. When the villain, Thorwald, sees Jeffries, he looks directly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall, and thus confronting us for our voyeurism as well as Jeffries for his. The audience and Jeffries are aligned in their embarrassment at being caught and subsequent nervousness for Lisa, Jeffries’ lady friend.