In The Eros of it All, an essay from the forthcoming publication Somerset House Studios: A Reader, Philippa Snow looks at performance art in the age of Instagram, and what happens when a live encounter is made for the feed.
When I am asked about my phobia of appearing in front of a camera, I usually point to an experience I had in my first year of art school: an exercise in which we were tasked with photographing each other, before sitting down to analyse what made for a successful, lively portrait. “Philippa,” my tutor suggested, “is a perfect example of someone who isn’t photogenic, whereas Natalie looks better in pictures than in life.” I could not decide, frankly, whether it was worse to be me, or to be Natalie, but I nevertheless enjoyed the subtle implication that something about me evaded easy capture. If I did not necessarily possess, as they say, a beauty that moved, I possessed something which did, and this felt liberating, almost subversive. In interviews, the sorcerous Serbian artist Marina Abramović is fond of citing a well-known quote from Yves Klein: “My works are only the ashes of my art.” What she is trying to pin down is a phenomenon so esoteric it is difficult to quantify—namely, the spooky, chasmic distance between the measured archival evidence of her various actions typically enshrined in gallery archives, and the hotly adrenalized, ephemeral performances themselves. In other words: as with people, so with artworks, both of which at their best, present something deeper and more existential than beauty, the nature of which can be wonderfully mysterious, or at least wholly singular. (If we are to think of artworks as being like people, too, then surely performance art is the most human kind of all: bodily, three-dimensional, sensory, alive.) “It is not the window that is important, but the leap through it,” the late critic Thomas McEvilley argued in Artforum in 1982, writing about—again—Yves Klein, but also perfectly describing the power generated by great art. “Not the abyss, but the entering of the abyss. Not the Eros of Space/Spirit/Life, but the impregnation by it.”
The most vital medium in a great deal of performance art is, ultimately, mood: an atmosphere of extremity and unpredictability, so often impossible to capture with the lens of a camera, or to fully elucidate in formalised, bloodless academic language. At the 61st Venice Biennale this year , the biggest draw appeared to be the Austrian pavilion, as transformed by the transgressive artist and choreographer Florentina Holzinger. The installation-cum-performance, SEAWORLD VENICE, was explicit in nature: one nude woman roared through water on a jet-ski in circles; another was the clapper in a great hanging bell; a third was suspended in a tank that was filled with purified urine from a port-a-potty used by pavilion guests. Again and again, a particular video of the bare-breasted figure on the jet-ski surfaced on my Instagram feed, the number of likes rising steadily and the action replaying ceaselessly—a loop of a loop. Evidently, the scene’s viral-ready noisiness and nakedness had meant that it eventually reached a mainstream crowd, for whom a clip of nude performance art could still be deeply shocking. In the comments, opinion was divided as to whether SEAWORLD VENICE was a hip provocation, or an incisive, body-focused work of environmentalist satire. It seemed reasonable to guess it might be both. I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing one of Holzinger’s works in the flesh, and although I am moved and elated by recordings of her ballets and operas, I am also more than willing to admit that there is likely to be something irreplaceable in play when one is face-to-face with all that bloodletting, ritualised nudity and thundering noise, as opposed to viewing the mayhem on a laptop, or a phone.
“The essence of performance,” Abramovic also explained in her 2016 memoir Walk Through Walls, “is that the audience and the performer make the piece together.” Sometimes this is literal, as in the case of the piss helpfully utilised in SEAWORLD VENICE, but sometimes it is more about what we might refer to, perhaps a little lamely, as an energy exchange—a stoking of outrage, or anger, or tenderness, or passion, culminating in some kind of electrical force. If the audience and the performer do make the piece together by being in communion in the same room, then what role do those only receiving the work through footage and stills play, in its continued existence? In 2007, the first iPhone was invented; three years later, Instagram launched, and with every passing year after that, our way of looking at the world further mutated, life flattening itself into a series of images and reels, the aesthetic prized more than ever above substance. The app’s defining peak in the culture is usually estimated to have taken place between 2016 and 2019, ensuring that Instagram—along with the younger-skewing video app, TikTok—has ruled the last cultural decade. Regular, un-famous individuals have had to make peace with being photographed constantly, but also with the fact that those who happen to present a more compelling or aesthetically pleasing subject for the camera are likely to generate more interest, and thus achieve greater success. Once again, as with people, so with artworks: many accounts I follow belong to those working in the art world, and as such, each time a biennale or fair rolls around, I am guaranteed to see the same pieces over and over—always the most shocking, the most beautiful, the funniest, the brightest, the grossest, et cetera et cetera. A conundrum has presented itself for those artists whose work deals in performance, in particular: sexiness, weirdness and horror are all ideal ingredients for virality, and there is more chance than ever that even an audience who are physically present will nevertheless be viewing the action through their screens.
A terrible dilution occurs, vis-à-vis both message and impact; what was primal becomes commonplace, commercial, even cheap. “Performance artists, for whom live moments are at the core of their work, are being pushed to the top of this virtual atmosphere, which is an exciting sea-change. Yet, more and more, their content finds traction if it makes sense to us in under ten seconds,” ArtNet senior editor Kate Brown wrote in 2024. “Seen one way, we [in the art world] are witnessing (and participating in) our own version of what happened in the music industry, where new songs are reduced to the hook as they get picked up by TikTok users.” Brown recalls watching a Berlin-based performance by the artist Göksu Kunak, VENUS, at which it was necessary to “peek between…illuminated screens” to see the action, so devoted were the audience to their iPhones. Footage of the most aesthetically pleasing components of the piece—a glossy BMW; Kunak in red stiletto boots; a brawny, tanned bodybuilder—flooded social media, and yet nobody seemed to mention in their coverage that the artist had also delivered a bold climactic speech: a collage of “Islamophobic, racist, and xenophobic sentences” used by “public figures.” “If you went only by the edits on Instagram,” Brown suggests, VENUS “was an intentionally hyperbolic, cliche-loaded series of tableaux—as the artist called it, a soap opera. As the visual elements of the performance waned, Kunak’s political outro went unnoticed by many who hastened to stow their phones away. Was it cut from coverage also because there was ‘nothing’ to film?”
“Loved ones who are separated ‘stay in touch’ on [phones] that allow for immediacy, but not for being intimate,” the brilliant Canadian critic and technophobe Sarah Nicole Prickett wrote in Bookforum, in 2017. “The device is what we touch and what responds to touch first, and so usurps for itself the very fondness we use it to express.” Our love affairs with our phones, one might argue, risk getting in the way of our relationship with art, short-circuiting the aforementioned shock of electricity that typically passes between artist and viewer in favour of making the phone itself the object of our tender, rapt attention. Marina Abramovic’s most recent performance, 2025’s Balkan Erotic Epic, was a large-scale, highly Instagrammable theatrical experience themed around fucking, fertility and death, at which, crucially, the use of all cameras was banned. “Romantic love…comes with a truly crazy risk of personal injury,” Prickett also writes. “Technology seeks a world where everything, even knowing people, is painless.” There is a kind of communion with art which resembles true love, as opposed to the quick and dirty lust of aesthetic online satisfaction, and this communion takes patience, and is not without pain. I circled the Epic’s various stages for the full four hours of its runtime, and my joints were tired, and my legs hurt, and I felt I might go mad, until finally something truly unbelievable happened: it began to rain indoors. A great wave of relief swept through the audience, as if we had achieved something meaningful together. For once—rare these days—we could say that you simply had to be there. What exactly did this mean, however, for those who were not present, and for whom such a space was inaccessible? If we cannot all “be there,” what is the next best thing to be?
The performance artists of the Instagram decade and beyond are tasked with finding an answer to this question, as well as with finding new ways of achieving intimacy, as opposed to just immediacy, with audiences. The artist Candela Capitan uses the iPhone as a medium in all of her performances, embracing and subverting what might otherwise be seen as an enemy of in-person, in-the-moment art. A 2025 performance for Somerset House Studios’ biannual programming series Hyper Functional Ultra Healthy—dedicated to examining the intersections of well-being and societal shifts, particularly in the face of technological and ecological change—saw her on all fours, with a cattle-bell swinging from her neck. Capitan crawled through the space with an animal grace, live-streaming with an iPhone she held in her hand, or sometimes straddled on the floor. I remember seeing documentation of this all over Instagram, too, and yet none of what proliferated came from the perspective of the artist, whose own feed was running simultaneously on Instagram Live, uninterrupted and continuous. By broadcasting a real-time recording, often utilising close-ups which reduced her to a series of abstractions, she successfully countered the devouring, politically neutralising eye of the grid by taking back her image. Were her collar and posture supposed to suggest misogynistic subjugation? S&M? Livestock? A bitch-dog? Seen in snatches on her feed, it was not entirely clear, and this ambiguity only made the exercise more thrilling. Capitan’s body—slender and traditionally feminine, made to be photographed, filmed, surveilled, and sold—was clad in a skin-tight, almost transparent bodysuit: a visual metaphor for seeming to give almost everything away. Such items, in dancewear and pageant wear, are sometimes called “illusion garments,” and here the illusion was one of complete self-exposure. Perhaps if those bystanders documenting work are selective about what they decide to disseminate online, then it is the prerogative of the performer to withhold information as means of regaining a modicum of power, just as an unphotogenic face hides something of itself from the lens.
Or else: perhaps another mode of attack would be to give the audience too much of what they want—a swirling, sickly mass of information, spanning dimensions and media—until they can no longer be discerning at all, and must simply let themselves be impregnated by the Eros of it all. The Canadian-British choreographer and mixed-media artist Nina Davies, a resident artist of Somerset House Studios, is concerned with the online dissemination of dance, and with the body’s capacity, specifically, to serve as its own kind of three-dimensional meme. Few forms of self-expression have enjoyed such enduring popularity on social media platforms as dance crazes, and Davies suggests that these short-form pieces of choreographed movement may yet prove to be the enshrined and traditional dances of the future. The phone becomes, in this context, a cipher for the audience, an extension of the body, and a charged object at once; when Davies dancers’ make a synchronised movement with the iPhones in their hands, the gesture takes on an almost ritualised grandeur. They hold phones, and they dance for phones; they wear phones strapped to their torsos. The resulting feedback loop—between movement and screen, artist and audience, technology and flesh—is both overwhelming, and thrillingly contemporary. “It is not often,” the critic Antonia Blocker wrote in Art Monthly, after watching a performance of Davies 2024 piece, Editers, “that scrolling through Instagram stories after a live performance adds to the experience. In the case of Editers…it felt apropos.” In performance art and in the online realm—and in matters of love and those of beauty, incidentally—the question of what is or is not “real” is paramount, and Davies further complicates the matter by asking whether something being edited makes it automatically unreal. One cannot jump through the slammed-shut window of a screen, however desperately one tries to do so. The trick that canny artists like Capitan and Davies have landed on is knowingly using this technology as something like a springboard, audience and performer both coming together to leap into an uncertain, angular, un-flattenable future, instead.
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