Le Serment du Trinquet

Did you ever try to get someone’s attention through a window ? Frantically waving, mouthing off and not being seen or heard ? One becomes totally aware of, even alarmed by, being separate from the other.
When Joseph Beuys made the performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare in 1965, he was talking to the audience about the ineffability of art, the impossibility to explain to a dead subject while the audience looked on through a window, locked out like behind a vitrine, or (could this be replaced by another word, or why do I not get why it is here ?) the artist and his shamanistic objects were locked in-side a private reality, separate and incongruent to the viewing public.
In 1975 in Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror, the artist turns his back to the audience looking into a wall sized mirror. Graham voices his unrehearsed observations about those looking behind him. The audience sees itself reflected by the mirror live, instantly, while the performer’s comments are slightly delayed. We are looking at the gap between the audience and the action in time and space. It’s like an irruption of failure ; a failure of those attempting to be in-the-present. In that same year Pier Paolo Pasolini made Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, his final film. In an enclosed courtyard, victims of a failing regime are tortured and exploited, their leaders take turns watching the action from a second-story window, observing the violence through binoculars, far away with a lack of sound.

Don’t look ! We attempt to hide behind our hands or a window, trying to deny that we ourselves are the monster, yet we don’t want to miss a second. You take your head in your hands, hide your eyes behind your fingers, but the unbearable footage keeps streaming by, the images keep streaming by our unacceptable watching. We don’t want to miss a second. It exists whether you see it or not, through a window or a screen. Through a dispassionate distance, our watching is our consumption, our watching is our object. Someone is cheating me, someone is cheating for me ! This coprophagic tale was banned all over the world when it came out, no one could look ! Now it seems like the perfect narrative metaphor for these unconsumable times we share.

Ok, we have been told we are coming to look through a window, together in the space of contemporary art. With the first Oath of the Jeu de Paume, the three hundred attendees were not in fact the aristocracy, they were the mercantile class, those who made things and made things happen. This is the origin of the small group who watches our consumption with detachment now. We are perhaps here by accident, together, us citizens who have no particular privilege in contemporary art. We are watching ourselves looking in this oath of the court, Le Serment du Triquet, we get a second chance. We are watching ourselves looking :

This is just like performance art
Double
Twice
A second time
Watching yourself looking
[points to audience]