BY CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK

Alicia Frankovich and the

force of failure

Preface: Flying Fox

For one hour on 24 January 2008, Alicia
Fran kovich's leg was seen jutting out of a first
floo r office window above the Fairy Shop on
Ponsonby Road, Auckland. While the invitation to the performance Flying Fox indicated
that the event would take place in her father's
first floor office, on arrival audiences were
confused to be left outside. Following a period
of d.iscussion we settled into looking at the
leg, clad as it was in jeans and Frankovich's
sign ature shoe: an Adidas hybrid between a
running and gymnast shoe. We wondered how
the work might 'develop'. With the exception
of a few foot movements, the performance
stayed the same for the hour and the audience stayed in the driveway milling about and
occasionally looking up for progress.
Frankovich describes this work as exploring n otions of being half-in-and-half-out,
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not allowing entry, of setting up an event

which will, by nature, fail expectations. She
also views the live performance as just one
occurrence, or part, of an ongoing process.1
Flying Fox was never videoed and lives on
as a photograph exhibited one week later
at Starkwhite Gallery, Auckland. Frankovich
is at some pains to outline her lameness:
lame leg and lame gymnast. She is a failed
gymnast and much of her work is in response
to the traumatic events of 1992 when, while
participating in the National New Zealand
Championships, she found herself unable to
execute her competition routine. She walked
out of the competition never to talk with her
coach again and never to continue as a gymnast.2 During our discussion she mentions
her gymnast colleague Zoe Bell, who also
presented at the 1992 National New Zealand
Champiooships, and how Bell's career has

leaped forward, in particular as Uma Thurman's body double in Tarantino's Kill Bill 2.
This exemplifies Frankovich's sense of failure
and lameness deeply entrenched in much of
her artwork: a steady deferring of anything
that might structurally function or represent
a whole.
A striking aspect of Frankovich's Flying Fox
was the conceit on the part of the artist in
inviting us to view her leg jutting from a first
floor office window for one hour. This gesture
was so slim and formless and yet so open
to interpretation, relying on us - her audience - to add value. In other words, Flying
Fox's success lies in its ability to fail expectations both formally (aesthetically) and as a
public event.
Frankovich invests a similar sense of
functional frustration in her work To veer: A
Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type
Of Behaviour (2007). 3 Between the walls of a
Romanesque chapel on Lake Como, Frankovich's body was wrapped and suspended in a
rope and foam structure resembling an 'acromat' support system used by gymnasts when
working on the trampoline. Held by two people to each side of the trampoline, the acromat can be suddenly pulled taut in the event
that the gymnast fails to correctly recover
from a somersault.4 Presented as a momentary photographic document the artist's body
is, in Frankovich's words, cocooned, defunct,
inactive and lacking.5 But most interesting is
her comment that, for the audience, the work
is about a desire to activate the structure. I
interpret this as a desire to undo undesired
outcomes; to undo the failure at the heart of
Frankovich's tangle.

Introduction
These works by Frankovich are significant
on several levels: her leg- or cocooned
body- as part subject, transformed into part
object as she is both the subject and object
of the work; the performances' unstable
sense of event and duration; their lameness
(or sense of functional frustration); and the
single photograph that self-consciously offers
us partial entry to the 'live' moment. These
combined factors contribute to the works'
sense of failure or deferral. And it is precisely
this quality of lack that 'draws out' audiences
in a desire for progress or closure. I argue
that this makes Frankovich's work powerfully
participatory. Taking these works as a queue I
extend the concept of the part object (staged
within uncertain durations) to incorporate
Frankovich's harnessed, lame and carried
body in her recent works A Plane for Behavers
(2009) and I Would Like To Be Attached To a
Random Entrant (2009).
From such a perspective, this essay references literature on the part object in conjunction with writing on the nature of the 'live'
moment in performance, where both fields
of enquiry have activated a legacy of structural linguistics that employs the operations
of metaphor and metonymy. On the one
hand, writers such as Rosalind Krauss and
Yve-Alain Bois- employing Roland Barthes'
critique of George Bataille's The Histor y of the
Eye - articulate a 'formlessness' characteristic
of the part object; erosion as a metonymic
part of a larger whole. On the other hand the
operations of metaphor and metonymy are
employed by writers such as Peggy Phelan
engaging with notions.bf performativity
and the problem of how the 'live' moment
is recorded, documented or archived. She
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has applied these terms-within the field

of performance studies- to articulate the
metonymic power of the live and unstable
'moment' in variance to the reproductive and
securing qualities of metaphor.

Recent works
Frankovich's tendency to operate on the edge
of the 'event', and to work with concepts of
functional disintegration, is palpable in her
Performance 1 on the 2 May 2009 as part
of the installation A Plane for Behavers at
Artspace Auckland. Frankovich's harnessed
body (suspended from the ceiling on rope
and pulley) was intermittently hoisted up and
down by Artspace director Emma Bugden.
As the artist's body reached its highest
point, close to the ceiling, Bugden (visibly
struggling under her task) had enough rope
length to open and exit the main glass door
of Artspace and welcome the next queue of
visitors. Frankovich's harnessed and inactive
body, as I have argued above, can be read as
provocation, in some way inviting us to undo
her tangle. And as the gallery director literally
hoists the artist's limp body, Frankovich's
audience widens to encompass arenas of
institutional control that, in turn, struggle to
undo a functional failure embodied in, and
signified by, an artist's own body.
The ambit of Frankovich's audiences
becomes more and more unlocatable in
I Would Like To Be Attached To a Random
Entrant performed at PSi#l5 (Performance
Studies International) in Zagreb on 25 June
2009 as part of the project Random Entrant.6
For this work the artist enlisted the services
of an extended Croatian family (required
to be art 'amateurs') to transport her limp
body several kilometres from their home to
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the conference venue. On arrival they 'gatecrashed' various conference paper presentations. While Frankovich supplied a sort of
tool kit (wheels and rope, etc.) that the family could use to assist in carrying her body,
important to the how the performance developed was that she was performed by (and at
the mercy of) her participants. What I found
most arresting as a bystander (and curator) of
the event as it unfolded was how vulnerable
and at risk Frankovich's lame body became.
As she puts it in her project outline: 'The role
of the artist is handballed to the viewer'.
This was Frankovich's most ambitious performance to date vis avis her propensity to court
failure, in that it never had an audience as
such and never reall y reached a 'staged' conclusion. As spectacle in the streets of Zagreb,
and as an unannounced interruption to the
conference proceedings, this was a non-event
that both escapes and embraces failure and
misperformance.7 The work's dissemination,
as was the case with Flying Fox and To Veer: A
Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of
Behaviour, operates as one photograph. Like
her audiences standing around in a Ponsonby
driveway waiting for her leg to do something,
we are offered only partial entry.
To reiterate, I will argue that Frankovich's
leg- or harnessed and carried body- as part
object, combined with a sense of functional
frustration and unstable duration, operates
metonymically to frustrate a desire for
wholeness, functionality and reproduction
(all qualities upheld by the conventional
museum or gallery context). Moreover, the
partiality of the metonymic solicits (by virtue
of its inherent lack) a desire in the body/s of
the audience for completion. Frankovich's
one-hour 'scu lpture' Flying Fox - not unlike

Erwin wurn's one-minute sculptures such as

Open your trousers, put flowers in it and don't
think ... (2002)- is so forcefully reductive
of the 'whole' picture that it becomes a
transformative gesture that forces us, her
audience, into engagement. My overarching
argument is that these works are about what
is not 'present', all that her viewers miss and
all the parts of her body that are absent. This
goes some way to questioning categories of
live performance by never offering up the
'presence' of her body, by always facilitating
its loss.
An enduring historical video work that
stems from similar interests is Bruce
Nauman's Stamping in the Studio (1968)
for which he walks about his studio for 62
minutes, at various points in and out of
frame wh ile the soundtrack continues. This
simple action, continuously repeated and
spatially inverted, interrogates how his body
(as subject and object of the work) might
be represented as 'present', and how, in the
absences of his body, we might fi ll the frame.
As Paul Schimmel writes: 'For Nauman, the
repetition of such simple actions had the
potential to force the viewer into his loop.
Eschewing narrative, he opted for a type
of recognition that could ruthlessly wear
down the viewer, for an engaging tension
that would never be resolved'.8 Similarly, for
Frankovich, I argue for a co-opting of the
viewer, engaging us in an inherent fail ure that
we cannot resolve.

The part object

This emphasis on avoiding narrative in favour
of unresolved tensions lies at the heart of
Bois and Krauss's use of Barthes's structuralist
analysis of Bataille's History of the Eye. They

emphasise an interpretation of a storyline,

not as a series of characters and events, but
as a part object- an eye - that mutates across
metaphoric axes, one globular and one liquid:
For the grid this object produces is constructed
from the axis of shapes (the chain of globular
forms that links eye to sun to egg to testicles)
and an axis of fluids (a series of liquids that
mutates from tears to yolk to semen). It is t he
crossing of these two axes at their multiple
points, Barthes argues, that produces the precise images with which Bataille operates- such
as when the sun, metamorphorized as eye and
yolk, is described as 'flaccid luminosity' -and
gives rise to the phrase 'the urinary liquefaction of the sky.'9

This is to stress a disturban ce (Krauss

calls it an erosion) in wh ich a naming and
transfer of parts constitutes an 'exchange'
that undertakes to 'abol ish' or 'vacillate'
meaning. 10 And it is in the crossing of these
two chains of metaphoric association, 'a
tran.sfer of meaning from one chain to the
other,' that Barthes posits the metonymic:
'eye sucked like a breast. my eye sipped by
her lips'. And Barthes employs the term 'contagion' of qualities and actions that is to pu ll
out the eyeball and play with it erotically or
'to bite into the bull's testicle as if it were an
egg or to insert it in one's own body'.11
Such a contagious crossing of the metaphoric chains results in a potentially productive
poetic ambivalence and erosion of meaning,
alluding to the axis of metonymy as the axis
of desire. That Frankovich did not appear for
Flying Fox, other than her leg jutting from an
upstairs window, indicates the power of the
metonymic action crucial to her part object.
Her leg metaphorically stands in for a whole
episode in her life as (failed) gymnast-the
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11

substitutions of ballet/sports shoe and the

leg 'frozen' in aerial cartwheel-while the
rest of her (unseen body) operates as a
redundancy charged with potential. Or, put
another way, Flying Fox brings into play two
axes of metaphoric substitution, the artist
and gymnast, where the crossing of these
metaphoric chains forms the metonymy of a
forced syntagm. This disturbance or vacillation
of meaning might be understood as the 'noise'
of that which is extraneous or excessive to
a message. It draws us out of ourselves: we
are caught in our desire to move upstairs in
order to view the 'whole' object; or for the leg
to 'do something'; or for the performance to
'finish' in some manner or other. In this light
think how Frankovich's audience at the 1992
National New Zealand Championships, in
seeing her unable to perform to competition
standards, yearned for her body to move
fluently. Likewise, for Performance 1 of A
Plane of Behavers we are caught in our desire
to assist Sugden in her struggle, to prevent an
accident, or to make Frankovich 'perform.'12
It is in this sense that these works are about
what is not functional and present for us.
In this context the very special status of
performance art as an altered communicative
means enables the possibilities of what
Barthes calls contagion to be activated. It
complicates the metaphorical associations
of the apparent body by compellingly
'exhibiting' the intimacy of the juncture where
subject meets object. Frankovich is precisely
more corporeal and tangible (and of the
moment) as part of the whole: a// leg. And
the redundancy (formlessness) that lies at
the heart of this vacillation is all those parts
of her that are left out. In this sense the metonymical axis of contagion is a highly useful
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mechanism for discussing the axis of desire

constituting all the parts of the whole that
we will never attain. In this light, modes of
engagement and participation are activated
through an analysis of the viewing subject: a
form of encounter that draws out our desires.

The live moment

The operations of metaphor and metonymy,
as stated above, are employed by writers
such as Phelan in discussing a metonymic
force of the live and unstable 'moment' of
performance in difference to its reproduction.
In this context, as much as Frankovich's work
perturbs binary distinctions between part
and whole, subject and object or figure and
ground, it also critiques distinctions between
'live' performance and its iteration. My aim
here is to ask how a so-called dilemma in
the failure of the operations of metaphor
and metonymy might performatively engage
audiences in profound ways. 13
In precis, Phelan points to metaphor's
role as securing value and reproduction. In
this sense, metaphor 'documents' the live
(substitutions and repetitions). Metonymy is
viewed as additive and associative; it works to
displace the 'document' in the moment of the
'live.' And in the 'plenitude' of that moment
'the performer actually disappears and represents something else-dance, movement,
sound, character, "art'". 14 When Phelan positions the body of the performer as metonymic
she suggests that this body fails to reproduce
the referent, indicating an 'inability to secure
the relation between subjectivity and the
body per se [and in this sense] performance
uses the body to frame the lack of Being
promised by and through the body - that
which cannot appear without a supplement'. 15

While I respect Phelan's analysis, there are

points where she runs the risk of simplifying the operations of the supplement. 16 Her
argument aligns metaphor with representation and substitution and to a possibility
of 'complete' presence, while metonymy is
employed as that which violates its presence
in the moment of the 'live'. Phelan nails this
viewpoint when she writes that: 'In employing the body metonymically, performance is
capable of resisting the reproduction of metaphor'-17 A problem I perceive with this discussion is that it risks reinforcing the binary that
the supplement deconstructs, reinstating
an artifice of representation. The point to
be made is that performance cannot resist
reproduction. It highlights an impossi~ility of
being in the present moment other than by its
iteration. Frankovich's practice plays on the
operations of the supplement as she iterates
one performance's 'liveness' in another. For .
example, the four-channel 'documentation' of
Performance 2 for A Plane for Behavers on the
exhibition's opening night of 15 May 2009 is
played during the three-week duration of the
installation on four TV monitors. This performance was a precursor to Frankovich's PSi#15
work discussed above in that her prone body
was carried into the opening event and then
passed around the audience. These TVs are
held (uncomfortably) on the laps of four participants rostered at periodic 'sitting' times.
Audiences therefore look at the performance
documentation while confronting other
audiences as participants whose bodies, in
turn, become implicated in an ongoing performance. And all this action surrounds the
relic-like harness from Performance 1 hanging
centre-stage. A Plane for Behavers puts forward a case for performance as an incessant

adaptation of presence incapable of resisting

its metaphors.
The challenging aspect of these operations is that Frankovich's art - her re-iterative
performances, post-performance installations
and documentation - marks out a necessary
and forceful failure to contain herself and
ourselves. These are the bodies of artist and
audience as trace of their own presence,
marking out the impossibility of the supplement: that every event is made possible on
the grounds of disappearance and that something must be preserved for disappearance to
happen. Or, as Jacques Derrida would frame
it, 'the indefinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence,
always already inscribed there the space
of repetition and the splitting of the self'. 18
Frankovich's art operates as an ongoing process of calculated traces and deferrals; the
'noise' of the part object I referred to above
that can seem (like the viewer we encounter
holding a TV while we witness the 'event')
extraneous to a message. Furthermore, as
Frankovich experiments with relinquishing
modes of documentation, such as offering
one still image for Flying Fox, To Veer: A Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type Of
Behaviour and I Would Like To Be Attached To
a Random Entrant, she critiques the rituals
and traces of performance art not as structurally determined but rather as a possible
occurrence among many. 19 This metonymy
of form and duration dislocates meaning in
an enumeration of the parts of an object or
image. We experience the artist's body, and
each others' bodies, as more of the moment;
as an unremitting variation of presence. once
again, as Derrida writes, 'this operation of
supplementation is not exhibited as a break
'

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13

in presence but rather as a continuous and

homogeneous reparation and modification
of presence in the representation'. 20 It is this
violation of representation that constitutes
Frankovich's body as metonymic, and positions the body/s of the audience (including, as
I have argued above, the institutional body) in
participatory engagement.
In conclusion, Frankovich deploys her
body in an ambiguous vacillation between
part subject and part object of her works.
Correspondingly, this positions us half-in-andhalf-out. Her lame leg- and lame harnessed
or bundled body-creates a disturbing erosion
of meaning: in formal aesthetic terms; in its
unstable temporal unfolding; and-entwined
in this iteration- in its performance
documentation. Her work helps to clarify the
operations of the part subject/object, and a
correlation of the live performing body to its
supplement, that have been contextualised in
terms of the linguistic operations of metaphor
and metonymy. This erosion of meaning can
be aligned with a metonymic shortfall or
redundancy common to the part object, and
with the metonymic force of each continuous
reparation of the live body in representation.
And it is in her risk of representational
failure- in only offering up part subjects and
objects in unstable durations-that these
works contagiously draw-out the desires of
their audiences for completion. This is why
Frankovich presents her body in lame parts
and will not always record her works in live
duration. Our yearning for more underscores
our desire for that which we cannot have. In
this way the force of failure constitutes a profound form of engagement and participation.

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NOTES
This essay draws on various sections of my recent PhD
thesis, The Artist Will Be Present: Performing Partial
Objects and Subjects, PhD thesis, Auckland University of
Technology, Auckland, 2008, available at http://hdl.handle.
net/10292/441. Thanks to Mark Jackson who I am indebted
to for many of the critical re-workings of my manuscript. A
previous shorter version of this essay entitled 'The Force
of the Moment' was delivered at the One-Day-Sculpture
symposium, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in
association with Massey University, 26-28 March 2009.
1. Alicia Frankovich, unpublished conversation with the
author, Auckland, 2008.
2. ibid., as well as Rob McKenzie, 'Alicia Frankovich', Emerging Writers Catalogue, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces,
Melbourne, 2006.
3. To Veer: A Sudden Change Of Opinion, Subject Or Type
Of Behaviour (2007) was shown at Corso Aperto during
the Advanced Course in Visual Arts, a workshop with the
artist Joan Jonas held by Fondazione Ratti and curated by
Anna Daneri, Roberto Pinto and Cesare Pietroiusti, on Lake
Como, Italy, 2-21 July 2007.

4. The acromat was more literally referenced by Frankovich

in her work I'll Teach You about Parametres: 9 Overhead
Safety Belt Systems, Acromat & Net (2007).
5. Frankovich, op. cit.
6. See my essay 'Random Entrant and the Force of Failure' published in the PSi#15 special edition of Frakcija
Performing Arts Journal where I discuss three works by
Frankovich: Sempre Meno, Sempre Peggio, Sempre PiiJ
(2008), screened at Artspace Sydney in June 2009; The
Opposite of Backwards (2008), performed outside Galleria
Annarumma404~ Naples; and Lungeing Chambon, performed in January 2009 in Melbourne with curator Hannah
Mathews (2009).
7. Misperformance was the theme of PSi#l5, Zagreb.
8. Paul Schimmel, 'Leap into the void: performance and
the object', Out of Actions: Between Performance and the
Object, 1949-1979, exhibition catalogue, The Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, 1998, p. 91.
9. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's
Guide, Zone Books, New York, 1997, pp. 154-55. I discuss
Bois and Krauss's notion of formlessness further in my PhD
thesis, pp. 164-77. The grid that Bois and Krauss describe
stems from the (vertical) paradigmatic axis and the (hori-

zontal) syntagmatic axis. In this context metaphor plays a

field of possible substitutions or repetitions constitutive
of the paradigmatic axis. Metonymy's temporality, on the
other hand, operates the additive and dislocative syntagmatic axis as it establishes the possible concrete adjacencies
of signifiers in syntactical units of meaning. To site another
example, the ritual of the Catholic Eucharist constitutes
a number of metaphoric substitutions, two of which are
eating a shared meal together and the eating of another's
flesh. The crossing of these metaphoric chains becomes
what earthes refers to as a metonymic forced syntagm.
10. Roland Barthes, 'The metaphor of the eye' (1963) in

Critical Essays, Northwestern University Press, Evanston,

p. 245. In a footnote Barthes notes that his analysis refers
to Roman Jakobson's opposition 'between metaphor, a
figure of similarity, and metonymy, a figure of contiguit(
(p. 245, fn. 2). see Roman Jakobson, Language in literatu'l:e,
eds Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, Belknap Press.
Cambridge, Mass., 1987, p.113, quoted in Michael Taussig,
Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses,
Routledge, New York, 1993, p. 262, In. 10.

after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself', ibid., p. 148.

17. ibid, p. 151. Phelan goes on to say that the metaphor

that concerns her is the metaphor of gender, that 'the

metaphor of gender presupposes unified bodies which are
biologically different' (ibid.).
18. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, The John Hopkins
University Pres, Baltimore, 1976, p. 163.
19. See Derrida who does not want ritual to be viewed as

a structural determinate of every mark but rather, as a

possible occurrence, in Jacques Derrida, 'Signature Event
Context' in Gerald Graff, ed., Limited Inc, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1988, p. 15.
20. ibid. p. 5.

11. ibid.
12. There was always a risk that Sugden would let go of

the rope in her exhaustion with Frankovich unable to

react quickly due to her body's numbness from prolonged
suspension, unpublished email with the author, 11 October,
2009.

13. See my PhD thesis where I discuss similar approaches

by other writers such as Kristine Stiles and Jane Blocker
(pp. 54-58, 86, 141-43, 159-60, 199, 216-19).
14. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance,
Routledge, London, 1993, p. 150.
15. ibid., 150-51. On Phelan's reference to Jacques Derrida's
notion of the supplement, see my PhD thesis, pp. 205-19.
16. I also do not want to oversimplify Phelan's analysis. On

the one hand, she stresses an unconditional uniqueness

of live art that, if saved in any reproductive technology,
is at odds with performance's fundamental ontology of
disappearance. On the other, her overarching concern with
performative writing underscores her quest to see a way
through to finding a form of documentation/reproduction
that is itself performative. On this notion of performative writing, Phelan notes: 'The challenge raised by the
ontological claims of performance for writing is to re-mark
again the performative possibilities of writing itself. The
act of writing towards disappearance, rather than the act
of writing toward preservation, must remember that the
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