How does the production of performance engage with the fundamental issues of our advanced neo-capitalist age? Andre Lepecki surveys a decade of visual art and experimental choreography to uncover the dual meaning of performance in the twenty first century not just as an aesthetic category but also as a mode of political power. He argues that this power is not only autonomous from the artistic practices that we now associate with the term performance, but also runs entirely contrary to them. Through the works of Ron Athey, Yvonne Rainer, Ralph Lemon, Jerome Bel and others, Lepecki uses the concept of singularity the resistance of categorisation and aesthetic identification to examine the function of performance in political and artistic debate.
