About

Philip Auslander is a professor at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech whose primary research interest lies in performance, particularly as it relates to art, music, media, and technology. He has explored a wide range of aesthetic and cultural performances including theatre, film acting, performance art, music, stand-up comedy, robotic performance, and courtroom procedures. Auslander is the author of ten books and has edited or co-edited two collections. His recent publications include Women Rock! Portraits in Popular Music (2023), a richly illustrated trade book profiling over 50 women musicians, and the third edition of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2023). Other notable works include In Concert: Performing Musical Persona (2021), Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation (2018), and Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (2006). In addition to his scholarly work on performance, Auslander has contributed art criticism to ArtForum and other publications, and has written catalogue essays for museums and galleries across Europe and the United States. He serves as the editor of The Art Section: An Online Journal of Art and Cultural Commentary. Beyond academia, Auslander is also a working screen actor with credits listed on the Internet Movie Database. He wrote, produced, and acted in the short film "Dr. Blues," which premiered at the 2019 Peachtree Village International Film Festival in Atlanta. He is married to visual artist Deanna Sirlin. His website offers an overview of his scholarly and teaching work, including downloadable essays and syllabi, as well as a section devoted to interviews he has given and conducted.

Research topics

• Art
• Humanities
• Aesthetics
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Programming language
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Visual arts
• Art history
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Performance Documentation

  2023-05-04 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter, Philip Auslander argues that the performance experienced through documentation is the performance, not a secondary reproduction of it. Performance events are reactivated—or restaged, so to speak—through documentation. While Auslander acknowledges that the experience obtained through documentation is not the same experience as the one to be had by participating in a live event, he still understands it as an experience of the performance. Even though we know these events occurred at another time and in another place, we experience them as performances in the here and now, with ourselves as audience. Ultimately, the ontological relationship between a performance and its documentation is far less interesting and significant than the phenomenological relationship between the document and the beholder who experiences the performance from it.

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• Norman Greenbaum, “Spirit in the Sky” (1969)

  2022-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Liveness and discourses of authenticity in music

  2022-10-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Live performance in a mediatized culture

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Art
  • Aesthetics
  PublisherDOI

• Liveness

  2022 · 60 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Programming language

  Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture addresses what may be the single most important question facing all kinds of performance today. What is the status of live performance in a culture dominated by mass media and digital technologies? Since its first appearance, Philip Auslander’s groundbreaking book has helped to reconfigure a new area of study. Looking at specific instances of live performance such as theatre, music, sport, and courtroom testimony, Liveness offers penetrating insights into media culture, suggesting that media technology has encroached on live events to the point where many are hardly live at all. In this new edition, the author thoroughly updates his provocative argument to take into account the impact of the internet, and cultural, social, and legal developments. He also addresses the situation of live performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In tackling some of the last great shibboleths surrounding the high cultural status of the live event, this classic book will continue to shape opinion and to provoke lively debate on a crucial artistic dilemma: what is live performance and what can it mean to us now? This extensively revised, new edition of Liveness is an essential read for all students and scholars of performance-based courses.

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• Conclusion

  2022-10-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Introduction

  2022-10-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Legally live: law, performance, memory

  2022-10-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

  PAJ A Journal of Performance and Art · 2022-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson's nine-channel video installation The Visitors, acclaimed by The Guardian as “the best artwork of the century so far,” was commissioned by the Migros Museum in Zürich in 2012 and has been traveling the world ever since.1 Kjartansson gathered a group of friends from the Reykjavik music scene and installed them for a week in the mansion at Rokeby, a nineteenth-century estate in upstate New York owned by descendants of the Astor family. At the end of the week, they filmed the videos that make up the installation simultaneously in a single take. Eight of the nine screens that make up the installation show a single room in the house containing, for most of the piece's sixty-four minute run time, a single musician, including three guitarists (two electric and one acoustic), two pianists (one of whom doubles on bass guitar), an accordionist, a cellist, and a drummer. Although these musicians are physically separate from one another, they wear headphones that enable them to hear each other playing. They are also guided by Kjartansson's graphic score, which breaks the music down into individual units and identifies the instrumentation of each segment as well as chord progressions and other sonic events.Some of the musicians switch instruments (one electric guitarist also plays banjo; the accordionist switches to an acoustic guitar), thus increasing the timbral and textural variety of the music. The ninth screen shows the porch on the outside of the house, where other occupants congregate. Above each screen is a speaker through which one can hear the sound being generated by the musician on that screen. As one moves among the screens in the installation, individual performers gain prominence then recede as one approaches a different screen, enabling viewers to construct their own mixes of the sound. Collectively, the musicians on the interior play a single song whose lyrics derive from the poem “Feminine Ways” written by Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, Kjartansson's ex-wife. At some points, the people on the porch engage in a sing-along led by a guitar player.The performance underlying The Visitors was site-specific, and Kjartansson's choice of site reflects a key aspect of his work: his engagement with Romanticism. This connection is manifest in Kjartansson's use of the music of such Romantic composers as Schubert and Schumann in some performance pieces as well as in the melancholy sentiments often expressed in his own songs and song fragments, but he also echoes the tropes of Romantic landscape painting. The five-channel video installation The End—Rocky Mountains (2008) is a precursor to The Visitors. In it, the same two musicians (one of whom is Kjartansson) appear on each screen playing various instruments against vistas of the Canadian Rockies. The five tracks coalesce into a single, country-flavored piece of music. The settings of the five videos recall the Rocky Mountain landscapes of the nineteenth-century painter Thomas Moran and echo the Romantic perception of the insignificance of the human figure when put up against the sublimity of nature. Moran was associated with the American Romanticism of the Hudson River School, an art-historical movement Kjartansson references explicitly. His first visit to Rokeby in 2008 yielded The Blossoming Trees Performance for which he spent two days painting plein air landscapes in direct emulation of the Hudson River painters.Kjartansson's appropriation of the trappings of Romanticism is both earnest and comic. It is seldom acknowledged that the second part of the expression “from the sublime to the ridiculous” is “there is but a single step” (this version of the expression is attributed to the eighteenth-century French thinker Fontenelle). Kjartansson seems well aware that there is only a small distance between the sublime and the ridiculous, and he walks the thin line between them in all of his work. The Romantic landscape, whether of the Rockies or the Hudson Valley, is surely sublime, yet two men playing musical instruments swathed in furs with instruments, amplifiers, and microphones set up outdoors in a wintry scene contains more than a hint of the ridiculous, as does the figure of Kjartansson, handkerchief on his head, re-enacting the plein air practices of the Hudson River painters, and Kjartansson's playing a plaintive and evocative song on his guitar while sitting naked and half-submerged in a bath tub and raising his arms in the gestures of a rock star in The Visitors. Kjartansson's self-portrait as an artist, from The End, a durational performance of painting at the 2009 Venice Biennale, encapsulates this delicate balance. In a photographic portrait associated with this work, he stands before us stoically, palette and brushes in his hands, gazing heavenward, the perfect image of the artist.Yet his outfit, especially the scarf around his neck and the blanket in which he is wrapped, seems makeshift, as if it were a costume scavenged from a thrift shop for a poorly funded theatrical production. He presents himself to us as both the artist and as someone playing at being the artist, just as he has played at being a hillbilly musician and a plein air painter. Perhaps ludicrous would be a better word to use than ridiculous when speaking of Kjartansson's various self-presentations. I am well aware of this word's perjorative connotations, but the etymology of ludicrous suggests origins in the ideas of play and theatricality, both of which are central to his work.Compared with others of Kjartansson's works, both the narrative of The Visitors and the musical composition at its heart are structured relatively conventionally. The narrative begins with the set-up before the musicians start performing, as a technician moves from room to room (and therefore from screen to screen) setting up the microphone and turning on the camera in each room, thus revealing the musician there. Once everything is in place, the musicians begin playing. The music ebbs and flows, rises and falls over the course of an hour. About three-quarters of the way through, following a delicate passage sung by sisters Gyða and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, the cellist and the accordionist respectively, the music builds toward a crescendo largely through the increasingly intense pianism of Davíð Þór Jónsson, the Icelandic jazz musician who is Kjartansson's primary collaborator in his music-themed performances. Just after he stops playing, seemingly exhausted, a cannon is fired outside the house. This moment marks the start of the music's final section, its coda, and what in narrative terms would be called the falling action following the climax. As the music resumes softly, the musicians start to leave their individual rooms and congregate in various combinations on different screens before coming together, popping open a bottle of champagne, then leaving the house, cavorting arm-in-arm through an open field of green grass, receding into the distance, some still holding instruments and all still singing. At the very end, the action returns to the house where a technician, moving from room to room and switching off the cameras that were turned on at the start, brings about narrative closure as each screen goes to black.Whereas the narrative of The Visitors has a beginning, middle, and end, Kjartansson has often isolated one or another of these moments in his performances and repeated it. Bliss, originally commissioned for the Performa festival in 2011, consists of the final three-minute reconciliation scene of Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro, performed in full eighteenth-century costume on a theatrical set by professional singers joined by Kjartansson himself, and repeated for twelve hours. It is an ending that seemingly won't end—until it does. In The End, of which the Rocky Mountains video was a part, Kjartansson painted portraits of a mostly nude male model for the entire six months of the 2009 Venice Biennale, immediately starting a new painting each time he finished one. As Markus Thor Andresson and Dorothee Kirch suggest in their essay for the catalogue, “The title, The End, appears at odds with what seems like a never-ending story. … The End has no end. …”2 For God, a single-channel video work of 2007, Kjartansson, dressed in a tuxedo and fronting an orchestra against a backdrop of cheesy pink curtains, sings the line “Sorrow conquers happiness” repeatedly for thirty minutes. If Bliss is a repeated ending which is therefore no longer an ending, God can be understood as a repeated beginning that leads to nothing.All of these performances do not so much end as simply stop at a predetermined but essentially arbitrary point thirty minutes or twelve hours or six months after they begin. From another perspective, they do not necessarily end at all, since in 2019, Kjartansson restaged Bliss at REDCAT in Los Angeles and shot the performance for a single-channel video work in 2020. Bliss now has a history that spans a decade; the possibility of further iterations of these pieces as live performances and video installations leaves open the question of whether they can ever be said to be finished.The Visitors is different from Kjartansson's earlier works in that it offers musical resolution and is structured as a tidy, self-contained narrative, giving the work a satisfying feeling of completion and making the ending seem like a denouement more than just a stopping point. Nevertheless, The Visitors shares some features with these earlier works. The most obvious is the obsessive repetition of two lines from the lyrics: “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways” and “The stars are exploding around you and there's nothing you can do,” sentences that echo the Romantic melancholia of “Sorrow conquers happiness.” This is a melancholia that is both reinforced and undermined by the commitment and enthusiasm with which the musicians sing and perform these lines. The other, perhaps more subtle, connection has to do with the absence of finality despite the appearance of narrative closure. Watching the merry band of musicians venturing out into nature at the end, their voices receding gradually into the distance, evokes Alan Cross's discussion of the fade-out across myriad genres of Western music: “fading the song out left the impression that the song never ended. Somewhere in the universe, the song played forever, never being subjected to the indignity of a conclusion.”3 The idea that the music goes on forever is also implicit in the opening and closing of The Visitors, the switching on and off of the camera in each room. The successive blackouts of the screens at the end seem to mark the end of the story pretty definitively, yet the narrative is actually cyclical—the ending mirrors the beginning in reverse (turning on becomes turning off), and one need only turn the cameras and microphones back on to start the whole thing up again. This is exactly what occurs in the gallery as the installation restarts for the next group of visitors.As an installation that takes a recorded musical performance as its primary material, The Visitors is in dialogue with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's celebrated installation The Forty Part Motet (2001), which also has traveled extensively. Cardiff and Miller separately recorded forty singers performing “Spem in alium nun quam,” a sacred choral composition for forty voices divided into eight choirs by Thomas Tallis, an important sixteenth-century English composer. It is believed that Tallis intended for the singers to be distributed in an oval with the audience at its center, which is the way the forty speakers that constitute Cardiff and Miller's installation are arranged. Standing at the center of the oval, you can hear the whole ensemble, but it is also possible to move among the speakers, singling out individual voices and creating one's own mix of the recorded sound, an idea Kjartansson embraces in The Visitors. Cardiff has said, “I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.”4 The concept of defining space through sound, musical sound in particular, is also at work in The Visitors, as is the idea of this space as sculptural.As Kjartansson puts it, “I often look at my performances as sculptures and the videos as paintings.”5 In both his and Cardiff and Miller's respective works, the sculptural effect is achieved through the way the partakers’ perception of the piece changes as they move around in it—hearing how the different mixes of sounds as instruments or voices moving from foreground to background are overtaken by others (as one's proximity to individual musicians changes) is akin to walking around a sculpture and seeing it from different angles. Just as one cannot see all sides of a sculpture simultaneously, there is no single position from which one can either see or hear The Visitors in its entirety. You are always close enough to a particular screen to see and hear that particular musician's performance as dominant for that moment.Both works also create a sense of intimacy between the musicians and their audience, albeit intimacy mediated by technology. For Cardiff, this technological mediation allows the viewer to experience “the connection of the human voice” but also “the safety of not having to stand right next to that person.”6 The same is true of The Visitors, but to an even greater degree because of its visual dimension. Since the video images are close to life-size, you can have the feeling of standing right in front of a musician, in their own private space, while they are performing without being troubled by your presence. It is an opportunity to experience another person as an object of pure contemplation free of social obligations. This distinctive combination of personal intimacy and aesthetic distance relates to Kjartansson's non- confrontational stance as a performance artist. Unlike those artists who their or them in or Kjartansson the physical distance between performers and audience in the “I like the the he has “I when I like to do performance where the viewer is in a In Kjartansson's live the begins at the of the space, which is often a or in his video the of the screen, a for the the Cardiff and Miller the voices that make up The Forty Part they are not since even in recorded in the of “the is very much in the particular gestures and in the first by or are human after through his or in such a way that they with the of those the speakers and stands in the oval are in appearance and they are for human each standing in for a the piece is the voices may be but the are the effect of Cardiff and Miller's installation is as this does not Kjartansson's work. The Visitors is very much of this world in its of the physical of each musician as a individual and of the Rokeby the distinctive they are Kjartansson artists and as the for his in durational the and of his the and associated with such work. In The with the in a of three rooms on the of the in New York for twelve and performing a set of repeated by the of a put it one in a Kjartansson the and are In a performance in which of dressed singers and pianists perform song of that simultaneously and of and of the The in on a performance Kjartansson for the Performance in in to work, is as a group of people in eighteenth-century to those in Bliss, with the sound of their the live performances of Bliss, was to both singers and who also breaks as the performance in their Although the that make up Kjartansson's performances are just as and in their own way as the in work, they are performed not with and of the but in that than the physical and their Miller this aspect of the performance of Bliss at The were in minutes an dressed in the of Mozart's would the with a of or a of … was more The his to the playing the and … to of the down on back in while another down and They all and when an out same of in The Visitors, albeit on a and the same seemingly toward the of performance The musicians and At one the a bottle of across his to like and are called as the of and this to it is only to of his pieces of time and on the part of performers who as the singers and musicians in the Kjartansson through his work does not on and This is a but performances are about Kjartansson's are about the of and pieces end in and Kjartansson's end in like the musicians in The Visitors have finished playing and in a single room, they up and open a bottle of As in his the that Bliss the for who to was is a of both and Kjartansson's work, but on of and Kjartansson's of is much of a much for or much to the point of as the of the in his performance The Schumann (2008) their was an of and the word to Kjartansson's and I can of no better is manifest both in the way Kjartansson works and in the of his work to not of the most and durational performances were performed by artists like and individual Kjartansson his work by such as himself and his model in The End, the opera for Bliss, or the group of musicians he gathered for The Visitors. from the of these are in which artists can to making and each the Romantic of are around a nineteenth-century of an that now as a for a world again, is on the between sublimity and the of Kjartansson's work to his use of which can on the In The Visitors, hear the line “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways” sung so often to a but that it is not to to sing it as does the group on the ninth screen gathered on the porch for a of for which Kjartansson the rock band The to perform their song repeatedly for six hours at in the audience at the end of each of the the musicians and As the of the final of the song the audience with a sense of At Performa in 2011, Bliss to a as the singers on their way through the scene of The Marriage of for the time, the the musicians in the all the audience and to a connection with audience on a personal The with the with individual to the the of performers and audience in a of all in this different from stance of this for It may be said, that these two artists at by very different intended The with the to be a for New by the of it by “the space the gallery a from the and of the of the a music for the Los Angeles the REDCAT performance of Bliss in very a hours REDCAT a house. The longer you the greater the to the outside world The same can be said for the world of The Visitors, a where is to making music with your friends that the world outside the installation seem by in of The Visitors, there is a particular in seeing this piece now in this time of social all of us the musicians in The Visitors are physically isolated yet by an that them to to make they play out the ending all the end of social the to again, hands, and the of the musicians in The Visitors is actually the of They engage in social by choice than by and they are free to move among the They are all in the same house but appear on individual are all in different but appear on the same Visitors is for the to their by the band in The for the was at the of the painter a nineteenth-century interior that more than a to was a group around two by the time of their final one of the and the other was The music on this is much and more than Although the group was as two like on the image for their of the for The Visitors shows the as the same space but from one another to the of their at the In the final scene of The Marriage of Figaro, his for his which to that the repetition of this scene in Kjartansson's Bliss can us that is the only way of the the of who make music despite their into the band of musicians in The Visitors, whose from one another in separate rooms of the same house the that them in their of playing music in being together, Kjartansson his own of and us all to the

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• That Show Was Epic! Phil Lesh and The Terrapin Family Band, 3/16/18 by Phil Lesh

  Theatre Journal · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Tracy C. Davis

  Northwestern University

  500 shared

• Kim Marra

  University of Iowa

  500 shared

• Harry J. Elam

  400 shared

• Laurence Senelick

  Tufts University

  400 shared

• Gary M. Williams

  400 shared

• Russ Vince

  300 shared

• Jason Garrett

  Stanford University

  200 shared

• Ellen Hause

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  200 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Theater and Film

  Cornell University

  1984

Awards & honors

• Callaway Prize for the Best Book in Theatre or Drama for Liv…