The following is a post I wrote recently for my “Understanding New Media” class blog in response to Shannon Jackson’s book Social Works. I’m personally tickled by, and not entirely unserious about, planking as body-based performance art:
A group of eleven people roam the highways and dumpsters of Chicago, “placing their bodies in different arrangements to find alternate modes of encounter” with the city around them. Shannon Jackson opens her chapter on “Performance, Aesthetics, and Support” with this and other descriptions of “social practices,” performance art that defies both the theater and the gallery while turning its gaze on societal infrastructures.
In the case of the eleven bodies dotting the unlikely corners of Chicago, this infrastructure is the urban environments through the which we move every day. As Jackson narrates the piece (notice how the phrase “placing their bodies” renders these artists body agents and objects), it not only provides new viewpoints for “the differently arranged,” it also makes of those bodies awkward, ill-fit, and therefore strikingly sculptural figures silhouetted against the now queered cityscape.
Planking, a practice in which participants lie flat and stiff in unusual public places (more photos here), strikingly mirrors Jackson’s language of “placed bodies.” Indeed, planking appeals to both practitioners and spectators alike because it carries the charge of “arranging” the self “differently” — of breaking social customs and finding “alternate modes of encounter.” The escalator, a marker of infrastructure, becomes strange and incomprehensible when a body lays rigid, facedown, and unperturbed on its moving steps.
Like the artists Jackson considers in Social Works, plankers walk the line between performance and production; the act of planking is, in true meme fashion, not complete until a photo is published the internet. The importance of visual record is in the image we see here. All the men’s shirts match. The angle and location have been carefully selected. The plankers have done this not just for the experience of encountering the normally abnormally, but for the sake of what could be a Santiago Sierra piece — the photograph. These too are images that use the awkwardness of bodies to make us ourselves feel uncomfortable with the normal… whether or not they intend to do so.
