Reflections on the First Draft of Chapter 3- The Spectacle and the Mundane

I have just finished going over the video blog that Wafaa Bilal used to document but also to communicate his performance. One issue that I will now grapple with is how do we consider the video blog. Is it peripheral to the performance, or is it intrinsic? How do we consider the role of documentation, especially when we can simultaneously record and transmit events?

the amusement that other felt as they watched a brief clip from the last day, belies the level of endurance required for this piece. My sense of Bilal is that he must be a natural humorous and optimistic man. this perhaps masks the duress that he was under for the thirty one days he lived and performed domestic tension. That is another question, and has broader implications for aesthetics in a virtualised world.

At what point can we say Bilal was living and at what pints was he performing? can we suggest the long term effecxts on him- depression, PTSD and physical symptoms- become a way of defining a performance slipping into the mundane? The mundane, as I use it here, is to differentiate from the spectacle. Rather than a pejorative implying boredom, I use "mundane" to denote the activities of life that are not conducted simply as a means of conscious self expression. Thus when Bilal scratches his beard, it is not necessarily performative as when he addresses the camera.This is not a strict binary, but rather I see it as a plenum, with "spectacle" being the extreme of expression, where the action only exists as a concious act of self expression meant for others to see and react to and the mundane, that which is lived without regard(perhaps, making a cup of tea while home alone).

My definition of spectacle is perhaps the hardest one to make because it ruptures if we consider that spectacle is part of life, especially for socially constructed classes of professional performers. At what point does the performance artist, the politician or the prostitute go outside their lives?These performances on a social level at least partly define the person doing them.