Introduction

The ability to access the Internet and keep up to date on news and events around the world is a key component of today’s globalization. We can talk with a roomful of Japanese Noh artists halfway around the globe, read developing Twitter feeds on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and go to YouTube to watch “World of Warcraft: Leroy Jenkins” for a deconstruction of the Role-Playing video Game genre. For theatre artists perhaps, it is this latter, inherently communicative (and, we will argue, inherently performance-based) off-shoot of the Internet- YouTube- that presents the most exciting opportunities and challenges. Academia has hardly ignored the site, acknowledging it as the source of over ten percent of total Internet traffic at any one time (Cheng 1). Scholarship on YouTube has tended, though, to focus on the site as purely a phenomenon of information transmission. A paper like “I Tube, You Tube, Everybody Tubes: Analyzing the World’s Largest User-Generated Content System,” written by a team of researchers at The Internet Measurement Conference, is representative of the field in its stress on issues such as “…the popularity life-cycle of videos, the intrinsic statistical properties of requests and their relationship with video age, and the level of content aliasing or of illegal content in the system.” While other writings cover aspects of YouTube as diverse as its role as a social network (Lange) and its potential to influence politics (Turkheimer), comparatively little has been said about the videos themselves, as art or cultural artifact.

In this paper we will focus on the performances in a particular type of YouTube video, the video blog. Ostensibly a cinematically-mediated version of the personal journal (or, more accurately, of the public/personal web-journals of the Internet), we examine the “vlog,” as it’s called, not as simply a digitally-transmitted version of reality but as a distinct performance undertaken by actors who may or may not acknowledge themselves as such. Some blogs and vlogs exist to deliberately blur the line between journaling and performance. Even in more traditional, journalistic vlogs, though, there are elements of rehearsal, spectacle, improvisation- in short, of performance.

If video blogs are performance, though, the subject and character being performed is, without fail, the very filmmaker/writer/performer creating the video. This paper will chart the emergence of the self as a viable subject for artistic creation, examining ways in which modern vlogs blur and interrogate the lines between performance and daily existence. We will focus on a number of important developments in the way of conceiving of the relationship between real life and performance: the emergence, since the 1950s, of performance studies as an academic field and the accompanying shift in thinking it brought about; ideas from avant-garde artists such as AndyWarhol about the artist turning his focus to real life; and, finally, a close reading of the videoblogs of a single, fairly representative YouTube video-blogger, Lemonette. We hope to examine the ways in which video blogs are simultaneously staged and “real,” and the ways in which they want their audiences to view them.

Performance Studies

Performance Studies refuses to submit itself to fixed categories or labels. It demands the right to co-opt whatever it finds useful in other disciplines, incorporating anthropology, semiotics, and other disparate fields of inquiry into its studies and performances. It strives to be, in the words of Amanda Kemp, “a way of knowing and a way of showing” (Conquergood 152, emphasis added).

As a scholarly pursuit, its origins are steeped in theatrical innovation, semiotics, and other “new” theories of theater, as well as in anthropology. One of the “Creation Myths” surrounding Performance Studies involves the collaboration of anthropologist Victor Turner and theatre theorist Richard Schechner, particularly their collaboration on Between Theater and Anthropology. Elin Diamond finds early hints of it in the Sixties’ experimentation with, and rejection of, standard Western models of theater (Jackson). The “theaterwrights” of the Sixties embraced “…poststructuralist theorizing (Barnes on Brecht, Derrida on Artaud)” to create a theater that sought to de-centralize the notion of textual authority without completely debunking it (Worthen 1093).

One of the core problems with traditional theatrical studies, as elucidated by Dwight Conquergood, is a virtual line of demarcation between study and performance.  He notes that this line amounts to a virtual “academic apartheid,” under which both branches suffer. The “division of labor between theory and practice, abstraction and embodiment is an arbitrary and rigged choice, and like all binarisms, it is booby-trapped” (153). Text and author, for Conquergood, should never be elevated above performance. Neither should performance seek a coup d’état against text and author. The solution is to unite them, to explore the intrinsic value of all.

Theorizing from a very different place, anthropologist/sociologist Erving Goffman, in his seminal work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, finds a useful analogy in the vocabulary of theatre to describe the performances enacted by any person when he or she steps into the great stage that is the world.  Performance studies, then, is a field formed on these two distinct yet interrelated projects. On the one hand theoreticians like Turner and Schecner were expanding the notion of what theatre was, constrained by the limiting definitions with which earlier theatrical theory had provided them; Goffman, recognizing something decidedly performance-like in the way people were going about real life, shifted the way of thinking about real life, in fact questioning the very authenticity suggested by a loaded word like “real.” Together they formed a movement in which daily life can, and is, naturally interrogated as a performance, whether it’s an off-hand remark at someone’s “phoniness” or a media-driven investigation into the wardrobe of vice-presidential candidates. Goffman identifies three facets of day-to-day performance that will be particularly relevant to our discussion of video blogs. “…[W]hen an individual offers a performance he typically conceals something”(43); “…individuals often foster the impression that the routine they are presently performing is their only routine or at least their most essential one” (48); finally, “the routine character of the performance is obscured…and the spontaneous aspects of the situation are stressed”(49). We will chart the considerations identified by Goffman in the videos of Lemonette, hoping to determine whether, as Steve Dixon says, espousing an essentially undifferentiated view towards performances of self in real life and online, “Cyberspace merely offers an alternative space in which to re-rehearse the always-already divided, fragmented and plural self (http://www.robat.scl.net/content/PaiPres/presencesite/html/dixon00.html).”

Famous to Fifteen People

In many ways, the history of art has been a steady progression towards this irresistible moment in time, which has witnessed the lines formerly separating performance and life become increasingly blurred. At the forefront of this phenomenon are videoblogs, which refuse to make any distinction between the two, seemingly signaling the inevitable destiny of performance art as the complete fusion of these two formerly separate spheres.

"Really?"

One of the central paradigms governing the history of Western Art since the Classical Period has been the division between the Real and the Ideal, as generally expressed by the ancient Greek Philosophers Aristotle and Plato, respectively. Whereas Platonism, in its various and sundry manifestations throughout the centuries, sees the sensual world as a paltry reflection of an Ideal world of Forms, Aristotelians maintain that the physical world is the only one in existence and, thus, the only one worth contemplating. For over two millennia, Realism and Idealism were the dominant manners in European aesthetics, passing through several seemingly disparate but ultimately related incarnations: the former in both the Greek and Roman Decadence, the Baroque Period and the Naturalism of the mid-19th Century, and the latter in Greek and Roman Classicism, Byzantine and Medieval Christian Art, the Renaissance, Neoclassicism and again, though barely recognizable in philosophy and form, in Romanticism and the Decadence of the fin de siecle. But with the advent of photography and film, Realism in art seemed to lose its raison d’être, as these new representational mediums could render the visible world more accurately than any painter or sculptor ever dreamed.

In Hegelian terms, it would seem that these technological innovations would enable Platonic Idealism to finally assert itself as the victorious antithesis to Aristotelian Realism’s deposed thesis. But then Modernism appeared in the 20^th Century to overturn this binary model, which had governed Western Art throughout its recorded history, by proposing a “pure plastic art” that aspired toward a new kind of Realism that would produce “a total integration of art and life” (Kleiner 780). As expressed by Piet Mondrian, a representative of De Stijl Movement (one of several manifestations of this aesthetic paradigm shift), life and art were no longer separate domains and, therefore, “the idea of art as an illusion separate from real life must disappear” (Kleiner 780). Building on the efforts made by Impressionists (who painted light instead of form) and Cubists (who depicted natural forms with geometrical shapes seen from multiple angles) to move beyond traditional modes of representation, many Abstract artists begin to look at life itself as art, not merely as its inspiration. From Marcel Duchamp’s found art to Man Ray’s avant-garde collages and conceptual photography, man and art were quickly dissolving into one another like never before. These theoretical developments also inspired a new kind of radically political photojournalism, which in turn led many filmmakers to combine a documentary aesthetic with the acute social consciousness of 19^th Century Naturalism to produce films about the daily struggles of ordinary people (e.g. Italian Neorealism and Cinéma Vérité).

Art.

But the apotheosis of this kind of artistic subjectivity came into being in the 1960’s with the arrival of Andy Warhol’s unique creative vision and the rise of Pop Art. Though his artistic philosophy manifested itself in numerous ways, we will focus here on Warhol’s prediction that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” (Kaplan 758), which he saw as the unavoidable result of modern advances in media dissemination and forms and the rise of popular culture that his work helped to enshrine, and how this idea paved the way for today’s videoblogs. Warhol’s work and lifestyle, which were inseparable, proved the truth of this statement in a variety of ways, two of which we will demonstrate here. The Factory (the name of his successive multidisciplinary studios) was always filled with Warhol’s “Superstars,” the often untalented hangers-on that compromised much of his social and creative circle, who became famous simply for being at The Factory and associating with the artist. This phenomenon was captured and confirmed by Warhol’s literary expression of the Pop Art aesthetic, a, A Novel, an exact transcription of several conversations between the “superstars” and a response to James Joyce’s Modernist masterpiece Ulysses that further cemented the fame of the Factory milieu. Though some critics bewailed Warhol’s alleged superficiality and commerciality, most have come to see him as “the most brilliant mirror of our times,” an artist that “captured something irresistible about the zeitgeist of [modern] American culture” (Lando 1).

lucky guess.

Reflecting on the media-saturated pop culture of 1970’s America, Warhol could already say “my prediction from the sixties finally came true” (Kaplan 758). Although the intellectual restlessness of the notoriously protean artist would later cause him to change his famous statement to “in the future 15 people will be famous” and “in fifteen minutes everybody will be famous” in order to confuse and mystify people, his prediction retains its prescience to this day (Murphy 1). Just as his own MTV television program Any Warhol’s 15 minutes led to videoblog precursors like the Real world and the explosion of reality television in the last decade, his enduring legacy continues to be reflected in New Media forms like “youtube” and other websites that solicit and present user-generated material. These venues have made it easier than ever for regular people to get their 15 minutes of fame, causing some contemporary artists like the Scottish singer-songwriter Momus to joke that “on the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people” (Momus 1). As the epitome of aesthetic, if not necessarily artistic, Realism, the ascendance of the videoblog can be seen as the ultimate victory of the Aristotelian worldview in the realm of performance art.

Lemonette

The title of this paper is borrowed from a videoblog done by Lemonette. Lemonette, in her 50s and living in Rome, Georgia, is notable as a typical YouTube vlogger who has achieved minor celebrity status (her YouTube “channel” now boasts over 7,000 subscribers), largely on the appeal of her Southern charm and authenticity. In this video, Lemonette argues that, given the truly funny things to be found in the real world, there hardly seems any reason for writers at all. She calls for a radical overhaul of the system of producing entertainment. Drawing on “the truth is funnier than fiction” logic, she calls for an entirely new profession, in place of the writer:

Later, rehashing the idea in another video, she goes a step further:

Lemonette’s arguments here are particularly compelling given the staged context in which she delivers them. With the outer conventions of a performance (drawing, specifically, more on cinematic conventions than those of the theatre), Lemonette’s videos feature title music, opening and closing credits, and even her own personal (dare we say writerly?) touches, like this joke told in the relaying of a “true life” story:

We might think, then, that online performance simply mirrors the behaviors outlined by Goffman, that perhaps Lemonette is only privileging the spontaneous aspects of her performance and ignoring the staged elements to conceal the “untrue” aspects of performance. This would be an oversimplification, though. In fact, Lemonette displays a tension between the artistically planned and the extemporaneous. This tension between self-aware performance and a gesture towards real-life authenticity is, we believe, the dominant emerging dialectical in this new mode of performance. In the following video Lemonette describes, an artist might, the capricious nature of inspiration:

Continuing the narrative of how she came up with the idea for the video we are currently watching, she takes us to the moment of artistic clarity:

Then, in a development offering exciting possibilities to artists feeling disconnected from their audiences, she invites her viewer to create meaning in her artistic creation:

Finally, as she self-referentially alludes to her own filmic tropes, she leaves the audience with the image that has inspired her video, an image that would be as enthusiastically looked on as art by Duchamp. Resisting meaning but embracing the inherent narrativity of images, Lemonette presents us with an unstaged performance through the lens of her hand-held video camera: