VE-Gossett-x-inwating

The Performance of Nonperformance

David Yu’s app x-in-waiting is all about a reinhabitation of the x, the interval, the gap, stasis, the being-stationary that is a transitional phasing wherein one awaits life to come. “To come”—l’avenir, to bring Derrida into the fold, the future that cannot be predicted. Both contrary to and in alignment with Derrida on the “to-come,” one can feel either hopeful or, in a way that transgresses the sanguine hope with which he imbued the horizon of the future, filled with dread about the potentially catastrophic situation. In the temporal torsion of the pandemic, which twisted up collective expectations and betrayed global schemas of life with a shutdown, COVID and its temporality became uneven. Uneven in ways that were systemic, such as premature death following well-etched colonial, bio- and necropolitical axes that were antiblack, ableist, and racial-capitalist. There was an upsurge in resistance to state violence, accompanied by the hope of watching people be released from prison due to COVID and the critical efforts of abolitionists, showing that another world was possible. Yet it was also impossible given the machinations of the state, following the racial calculus of carceral logic, as new studies¹ show that incarcerated white people were predominantly those let out, while Black incarcerated people were held captive. The need for abolition—of the antiblackness and racial capitalism that propel the prison-industrial complex—remains imperative.  

The overwhelming affect circulating through and saturating the quarantine and prevaccinated period (and the vaccine had its own uneven distribution, following capitalism’s path) was one of terror. Where I live in New York City, there were days where it felt like all you heard were ambulances, or else police instructing people to “stay safe.” There was the eerie, loud silence of the city, the uncanniness of a deserted Times Square, like a scene from Vanilla Sky, and Central Park turning into a morgue. x-in-waiting, in its recalibration of the x, relies on different emotions than apprehension and dread, and instead is interested in irony and humour and, ultimately, a kind of companionship and accompaniment that cuts across and through the disjunctive temporality of the pandemic in order to provide care and a version of small-scale solidarity through the quotidian.  

On the one hand, x-in-waiting could be seen as working with an assumptive logic that presumes a certain domestic pandemic subject. On the other hand, the app can be used anywhere, such that one would not need to “mirror” or have a mimetic relation to it but instead can inhabit an open social relation. At first glance, there’s a kind of latent claim to what a universal version of quarantined domestic life might look like, such that we could all be presumed to relate to the activities Yu displays in x-in-waiting, and this would then be the shared ground that substantiates the appeal of the app. Yet the activities are also quotidian, and in that small-scale drama of life there’s a latent tenderness. We watch the artist sit atop his bike, or rather, recline on it in a leisurely way that belies the activity of biking, reminding us that during the pandemic quarantine period the stoppage and bracketing of life sometimes allowed for moments of pause and respite not ordinarily permitted during the accelerated hyperdrive of capitalist hustle. One of the most profound interventions of the performance is troubling the dualism between the many and the one by playing with the personal function of what Sherri Turkle terms “subjective technology” and “evocative objects.”² The artist is seemingly alone and yet everyone is participating; a solitary act is part of a social ensemble facilitated by the app.

David Yu writes:

The work also echoes the reality of isolation and humorously creates moments of performance from everyday common items and situations, which may mirror the audience’s experience through this pandemic. In a way, this work plays with the idea of an individual’s experience of witnessing a performance created for one.³

“A performance created for one” and yet experienced by many, the feeling of an intimate relation and connection to a performance, that sensation while watching that the performance has been made just for you, which is then undermined by the reality that it was made for many and not just the one. We get to spend time and be with the artist through a duration of eight minutes, which is technically not very long, but which creates a kind of sociotemporal link, given the experience of quarantine that undergirds sociality (or at least the social sphere that such an app appeals to). Yet this time, which feels so interpersonal, is always already socially distributed and anonymous. The app hinges on a certain form of cruising (for social connection). It also subverts the attention economy, wherein the demands placed on us by the connectivity of the internet and social media often result in attention being fractured and fragmented, splayed, chaotic, contingent, and zigzagging. What does it mean to concentrate? How can concentration be a healing form of meditation? What does watching someone do their laundry and scroll through their phone and perform other mundane activities do in terms of collective resonance and relaxation during incredibly stressful moments? These are all modes of quiet solidarity that reverberate through Yu’s work.

I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood—it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of an­ticipation which these books arouse in a genuine collector.’

—Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”4 

Jacob Wren’s 2023 performance My apartment is just piles of books opens with a rumination on and politicization of failure. Wren speaks of an affirmative sabotage of catastrophe and mishap, wherein what has gone wrong might be reoriented towards use and productive affirmation, rather than foreclosed as futility. The condition of possibility for Wren’s performance is the very “x-in-waiting” temporal interval of nonperformance as usual (given that he couldn’t tour anymore during the pandemic) that he activates and radically reorients. As in Yu, this work is all about the performance of nonperformance. Rather than seen only as lack—with the sense of financial hardship and grief that might attend it—instead nonperformance is retheorized as material for new forms of performativity. The performance is also all about aesthetic and political inheritances and more so disinheritance, given that the texts chosen out of this archive came from boxes that never made it home (from the office, because Wren ran out of bookshelves) and were left for around a decade, disavowed or displaced as less important in the economy of belonging that constitutes the selection of the home library. There’s a certain homelessness and exile of the collection, and yet this is remedied through the process of remembrance. Wren gives each book a kind of biography. Additionally, he narrates an intellectual itinerary for the texts, discussing how his own cognitive maps were altered by them. From the nonperformativity of these books and this library, to their performance.

Notes

¹Grace Hauk, “​​White people were kept out of prison during COVID. Blacks, Latinos were left behind bars,” USA Today, April 19, 2023, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/04/19/black-latino-prison-population-rose-covid-19-study/11687851002.
²Sherry Turkle, “Subjective Technology,” MIT Research Portfolio, accessed July 20, 2023,  https://shass.mit.edu/research/sts.
³x-in-waiting, v. 2.7.0 (David Yu, 2023), iPhone iOS 13.0 or later, iPadOS 13.0 or later, iPod touch iOS 13.0 or later, macOS 11.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later, developed by Tory Shoreman.
4
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 59.

Che Gossett is a Black nonbinary femme writer and critical theorist specializing in queer/trans studies, aesthetic theory, abolitionist thought, and blackness studies. They are presently a postdoctoral fellow at the Initiative for a Just Society, Columbia Law School, and a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, in the Animal Law and Policy Program. They are an alum of the Helena Rubenstein Fellows in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Che recently served as a visiting art critic at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. As of spring 2023 they will be a visiting fellow in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. They are finalizing two books, both with Duke University Press, one on blackness, abolition, and art, the other being a political biography of AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya (1943–2000).