‘There is nothing to hold onto here’: complicity and vulnerability in Gavin Krastin’s On Seeing Red and Other Fantasies (2015)

Abstract

In this article, I analyse some of the ways in which Gavin Krastin’s On Seeing Red and Other Fantasies (2015) engages with outrage and protest in a self-reflexive way. The idea of art as means to question and institute change in society, is contentious and my discussion here focuses on how forms of resistance, are easily subsumed within a capitalist context. On Seeing Red comments on the failure or the limits of ‘fantasy’ as a means of resistance and yet uses the make-believe platform of performance to express a critique of capitalist inertia and escapism. Krastin frames anger by turning his attention to form, investigating his own medium, that of performance art/live art. Specifically, the failure or limits of performance as a means to protest social, political and artistic concerns. The analysis is centred around two points of interest: firstly, how the work can be analysed in relation to the notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987). The article then veers on to engage with the idea of the ‘actant’ via Susan Bennet (2010) as a way of exploring how the affective presence of inanimate performers (objects) in the work reveal a co-dependency between the human and the non-human. More specifically, how the use of props in the performance reveals the vulnerability of the performing body. The paper concludes with the idea that precarity offers the possibility of a mode of resistance through performance.