How Form Performs: Audience, Frame, and Autobiographical Reframing in Steven Cohen’s LONG LIFE
- Johannes Scott
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
—Johannes Scott, April 2026.
The poetic beauty or aesthetic value of an art performance is not a product of its creative staging, but the effect of the symbolic form that structures the performance event and positions the audience within a determinate mode of reception. Performance theorists such as Bennett, Elam, Herman, and States have long argued that the event’s signifying architecture—its spatial, discursive, and institutional frame—conditions what can be perceived as “performance” at all. In Lacanian terms, the Symbolic does not merely present content; it constitutes the field in which content becomes legible as such. Aesthetic value is therefore not an intrinsic property of the act but an effect of the form that inscribes it.
A well‑known example illustrates this dynamic. In 2007, The Washington Post conducted an experiment in which virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell performed incognito during the morning rush hour at L’Enfant Plaza, a busy Washington, D.C. Metro station. Ordinarily, Bell plays these same works on his multimillion‑dollar Stradivarius before sold‑out audiences who greet him with standing ovations in the world’s great concert halls. Yet in the Metro, dressed like an ordinary commuter and stripped of ceremonial stage, he played for forty‑three minutes while more than a thousand people hurried past. Only a handful of casual strollers paused to listen; most commuters did not even look at him, remaining absorbed in the transit mode that structured the Symbolic of their perceptual field.
The commuter experiment demonstrates that beauty is not an intrinsic property of the sonic object but an effect of the Symbolic context that frames it. Without the auditorium’s discursive architecture to position the listener as a subject of aesthetic reception, the violinist’s play goes unrecognised as significant musical performance. The same Real sound, inserted into an inadequate form, produces no aesthetic content. As Lacan would insist, the signifier’s structuring function precedes and produces the very possibility of aesthetic recognition.
This logic becomes even clearer in performance art, where the boundary between art and non‑art is often tested through interventions into public space. When Steven Cohen, without civic permit, staged an impromptu public ‘happening’ at the photogenic Eiffel Tower—camera framing accidental passers‑by as an improvised audience—he was arrested for indecent exhibitionism. His argument that the event was a live art performance was rejected by the court, and he was found guilty of transgressing public order. The controversy centered not on the content of the live occurrence but on its form: the limits of performance as public art, the legitimacy of the frame, and the authority to designate an event as aesthetic. While the casual witnesses at Place du Trocadéro failed to recognise the scene as art and the French High Court recognised it as illegal, Cohen’s edited filmic documentation, titled Coq/cock (2013), receives critical recognition for its political content and formal scenography. The same bodily act, differently framed, produced radically different regimes of meaning.
Critical theory consistently frames performance as a culturally constructed object whose aesthetic force depends on the symbolic form that mediates the relation between production and reception. Audience proxemics—how spectators are spatially, discursively, and institutionally positioned—determines the conditions under which an event can be apprehended as performance at all. As Susan Bennett asserts, “it is the audience which finally ascribes meaning and usefulness to any cultural product,” and, as Vimala Herman adds, “without audience participation in modes of perception, there is no performance.” Discursive limits established by artistic conventions shape perception and enable symbolic pleasure, allowing forms such as opera, theatre, drama, and ballet to be apprehended within their own regimes. The audience does not merely witness; it authenticates. Without an adequate spectator, or an audience positioned to be affected—as in rehearsal, surveillance footage, or raw documentation—there is no validated performer. In Lacanian terms, the Symbolic must precede the act: it is not the audience that must learn to understand the performance, but the performance that must already know its audience, inscribing them within a structure of reception that makes aesthetic recognition possible.
By convention, the aesthetic objective of performance is to estrange the ordinary—to render the familiar unfamiliar, to “make forms difficult,” thereby prolonging perception as an end in itself. As Victor Shklovsky famously argued, “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.” The performer, unlike a narrator, is not a transparent vehicle of meaning but a signifying rupture. As Derrida notes, the actor “is born out of the rift between the representer and the represented… He signifies nothing. He hardly lives.” In Lacanian terms, the performer functions as a signifier without fixed content, a bodily inscription that acquires meaning only through the Symbolic frame that positions the audience. The aesthetic image is therefore not produced by the performer alone but by the relational form that binds performer, spectator, and scene into a single structure of perception.
Brechtian performance insists on “honest fakery”: a deliberate exposure of the device as artifice and a refusal to let the signifier pass as the thing itself. Contemporary art, in this sense, requires a methodological formalism—a semiological handling of form that preserves the Saussurean arbitrariness of the sign and maintains a productive distance between signifier and signified. The setting ought not construct a fictional world; it ought to signify an idea, of which the performance is an exemplary artifice. In Cohen’s film Coq/cock, the French national symbols—the rooster, the phallus, the Eiffel Tower, the Folies‑Bergère‑like costume—function precisely in this way: not as naturalistic props, nor as pathological extensions of the artist, but as signifying elements whose constructedness is openly declared. It is through this ethical distancing that the artwork becomes aesthetically legible, not by virtue of its content but through the formal structure that frames its elements as signs and positions the viewer in a mode of critical recognition.
In Cohen’s exhibition Long Life at SANG, his performance elements (actor, character, props, audience) undergo a decisive shift in signifying function when displaced from performance to exhibition. The passage from sign (performance) to image (exhibition)—from a Symbolic to an Imaginary frame—reconfigures the content produced by forfeiting the arbitrariness of the sign and allowing the signifier to slide toward the signified in an Imaginary fusion that forecloses the Symbolic distance. In this transposition, the curatorial installation of what were once performance elements no longer produces the Symbolic significance typical of retrospective exhibitions; instead, it generates a fusion between artist and reception that is structurally appropriate to the autobiographical mode. Whereas performance art conventionally maintains a constitutive distance between artist and spectator—a distance that secures the performer’s status as signifier rather than subject—autobiographical exhibitionary form diminishes this separation, drawing the spectator into an Imaginary proximity that collapses the gap on which performance’s critical legibility depends.
Exhibited at the center of Cohen’s canon is the childhood portrait THE ARTIST AS MISS MARGATE, a photograph of the artist at age six posing in a girl’s bikini, with make‑up and a ponytail. Cohen repeatedly returns to this image as a key to reading his autobiographical practice: the performer stands in for himself, not as a character but as the subject of his own staging. Yet this autobiographical gesture—Imaginary in structure—does more than supply a point of origin. It dismantles the retrospective framing that ordinarily secures an exhibition within the Symbolic, and it subverts the Symbolic desire that underwrites performance practice itself. If metaphor is the conventional trope of performance, as Hayden White suggests—substituting parts for wholes to render the world legible—then irony, when attached to the performance convention, unsettles this logic by inserting skepticism into the very act of representation. In this metatropological turn, the portrait estranges the regime of performance art, exposing its devices while simultaneously folding the artist’s own image back into the field of reception.
What ultimately emerges across Cohen’s practice is a sustained interrogation of the very conditions under which performance becomes aesthetically thinkable. His work demonstrates that the aesthetic object is never secured by the gesture, the body, or the event itself, but by the Symbolic architecture that frames them. Coq/cock exposes this by showing how the same act oscillates between illegality and aesthetic legitimacy depending on its form; Long Life radicalises the insight by shifting performance remnants into an Imaginary autobiographical register that dissolves the distance on which performance’s critical legibility depends. By inserting his childhood portrait into the exhibitionary field, Cohen reveals how easily the Symbolic frame can be displaced by Imaginary identification, and how quickly the signifier can collapse into the signified when the arbitrariness of the sign is no longer upheld. In this sense, Long Life is not merely a retrospective but a reflexive demonstration of performance’s ontological fragility: a meditation on how form, frame, and audience co‑produce the aesthetic object, and how the collapse of Symbolic distance transforms performance into something else entirely. (Curated by Dr Anthea Buys, the exhibition is on view at Iziko South African National Gallery through June 2026)
Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.
Sources:
Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. Routledge, 1997.
Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. Routledge, 1980.
Herman, Vimala. Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. Routledge, 1995.
States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. University of California Press, 1985.
