PERFORMANCE / PERFORMATIVE / ENACTMENT

During the MFA my practice has become blurred in its distinction - is it performance, performative or enactment? The work has been described as all of these terms at some point and I don't necessarily see a problem in this. All three terms have ever-changing translations to different people, and a term like performative has now become far removed from that of J.L. Austin's original meaning, as speech acts, or even Judith Butler's reinterpretation, as performing gender identities. Despite what term is used the summation I find holds the most truth for me and sits alongside what my work is and what it sets out to achieve is the following:

 

“If we are always enacting and if these structures are always there, performance art — and art generally, as I understand it — aims, first of all, to occasion a recognition of and reflection on those structures in their enactment: structures that include not only what artists, performers or intellectuals do, but what audiences, readers, and other participants in any encounter also do. And this for me is how “performative”, if I used the word, would be defined: that is, as enactment that performs itself and in so doing structures a recognition of and reflection on the relations produced and reproduced in the activity and, above all, on the investments that orient them”.
(Fraser, A. 'Performance or Enactment', Performing the Sentence, 2014)