Furnishing the Unhome:
Domestic Performance, the Latent Body, and Disruptions to a Fabricated Modern-American “Home”

“The bomb which destroys my house also damages my body insofar as the house was already an indication of my body.”



Paramount to the viscerality of a performative work of art is a direct recognition and address of the artist’s physical being. Situating the historical rise of performance as a dominant mode of artistic practice in conversation with preceding modernist rejections of domestic or ‘homely’ aesthetic signifiers, an intersection with the functional designation of furniture might be located in the body of an implicated viewer or user. Tracing shifts in the contemporary connotations of the private, domestic realm, I will offer the unhome as a space for considering how performative interactions with furniture, sculptural interventions in architectural structure, and otherwise conceptual reckonings with the uncanny dimensions of an unsettled ‘home’ elicit highly-individual, bodily reactions in the split subject of a contemporary viewer.

Attempting to bridge aesthetic manifestations of domesticity and the latent body across a broad range of artistic and creative production – spanning mediums of furniture, architecture, sculpture, and performance – I will begin by establishing an ontological foundation for my subsequent theoretical investigations. In his 1966 article “The Ontological Status of Art Objects,” originally published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Eddy M. Zemach begins with a fundamental antimetabole: “(a) all material things are art objects, and… (b) all art objects are material things.” He continues, “Thus, it will become unnecessary to suppose that there are some things (e.g., chairs and tables) which fail to qualify as art objects,” (145). Through this broadly unifying ontological move, Zemach’s elucidation of the art object being “rather a regular material thing as referred to by one of its aspects–i.e., qua beautiful,” opens up space for the unrestrained application of an aesthetics-based theoretical approach across the entirety of material culture. In borrowing this specific definition of the art object, my primary interest in clarifying the historical emergence and contemporary subversion of a ubiquitously-domestic aesthetic and its associated psychoanalytic implications in the evocation of embodied trauma will illuminate the role of objects conventionally recognized as furniture in connecting the body/ sensorial investment of a viewer to an established notion of ‘the home’ within a work of art.

Furthering the significance of aesthetics in this construction of a shared visual culture, I would like to underscore Zemach’s equivocation of art and beauty. Fundamental to a contemporary art-historical application of aesthetic theory is a recognition of the imperious structures which have enabled the qualification of ‘objective’ beauty and the ascription of aesthetic (and subsequent economic, historical) value. In invoking this problematically-detached philosophical field, I hope to use the distinction that, “Art objects, we said, are things which are beautiful to some degree. All things are beautiful to some degree. Everything is, thus, an art object,” (147) as a liberating approach towards disqualifying the role of connotative hierarchical value and, instead, neutralizing implied requirements for the achievement of a ‘domestic effect’ through this ontological leveling. Salvaging the role of the human body in the sensorial experience and appreciation of beauty, performance art serves as a useful point of departure for relocating this theoretical investigation in the realm of embodiment.

In his seminal 1998 exploration of Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud’s emphasis on the immediacy of relational dynamics encouraged and cultivated by contemporary practices as being situated within a broader culture of globalization “recall[s] the premium placed by performance art on the authenticity of our first-hand encounter with the artist’s body,” (Bishop, 54). With the dawn of 1960s performance, the location of artistic value is transcribed from the material art object onto the body of the performer. Discussing the importance of “Performing with Objects,” artist André Galeano observes that “with a performance work you change the paradigm of art; you are no longer dealing with a ‘subject-object’ relationship but more with a situation. You create a certain situation – a certain atmosphere – which is also immaterial,” (102). Here, a relational situation and immaterial atmosphere allude to the structures which enable the aesthetic construction and recognition of domesticity. Recounting his methodology for teaching performative engagement with objects, Galeano “first… explore[s] presence. We start with the simplest thing– standing in front of the audience and being present, breathing your presence. When you gaze at somebody you are a subject; when you are watched, you become an object.” Recognizing, here, an essential, empathetic link elicited by a visual identification between the literal bodies of performer and audience, he continues: “An object has presence. Objects are bodies. At the moment when you are standing in the space and there is a chair nearby you have to deal with the fact that you and the chair are two bodies in this space,” (103). Returning to Bourriaud’s explication of relational art’s privileging function over opticality in the activation of participatory works, the role of function in the ontological distinction of the furniture object further  nuances a developing object-body link. As Galeano’s chair itself becomes a body, furniture’s functional designation itself produces another implied body, that of the user. Within these parallel dynamics of; performance-audience, art-viewer, furniture-user; the collapse of an object-body relation as, rather, a relation between two bodies enhances the relevance in a continued exploration of the performed body.

Barring an air of crude generalization, Galleano’s proclamation that “[i]f you are a painter you paint with colors[; i]f you are a performance artist you usually work with everyday objects,” (109) introduces a notion of ubiquity in its designation of certain objects as belonging to the ‘everyday.’ Suggesting a shared experience or perception of some fundamental humanity, the everyday object’s evocation of the human (body) exists alongside furniture’s ontology in the generation of a commonly-identifiable atmosphere of domesticity. As the structure of a relational artwork “relies on its presence within a gallery to differentiate it from entertainment,” (Bishop, 69) the implicit quality of furniture as being ‘of the home’, or inherently domestic, returns the categorical significance of space to the development of an object-body relationship (here, the ‘space’ of the home maintains a historically-deterministic lens of furniture as developing from architecture following the advent of civilization). Before locating the origins of an aesthetically-ubiquitous domicile, I will extend Galeano’s everyday object and combined object-body towards demonstrating the enhanced viscerality of performative encounters which invoke domesticity in the object-body-space of the performance.

Naturally proceeding from the performative privileging of proximity to the artist’s body, Claire Bishop observes that criticism of relational artist Rikrit Tiravanija’s work “is extremely subjective, reflecting the importance of the viewer’s first-hand experience in the work.” She continues to pose the question: “how can we judge… any work that relies for its meaning on the direct participation of the viewer – if we didn’t experience it for ourselves?” (33). Calling upon her own experience as an art critic in the introduction to her book Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, Jennifer Doyle begins by recounting her own (non-)experience of a “one-on-one performance encounter with the English artist Adrian Howells,” (1). Citing Howells’s interest in the possibilities of ‘accelerated intimacy,’ Doyle continues to describe an influx of complicated emotions associated with the content of the performance that ultimately prevented her from making it to her scheduled timeslot. “In Held, Howells invites his audience into three twenty-minute scenes. First, they sit at a table, drink tea, and chat. Then they sit together on a couch in front of the television and hold hands. Last, they go up to a bedroom, lie down together, and spoon,” (2). Searching for the role of emotion in broader contemporary art’s reception as being ‘difficult’ or challenging, she highlights the specifically-unexpected difficulty of Held’s ‘domestic normalcy’ as contrasting her familiarity and comfortability with more ‘extreme’ performances of bodily violence and sexualized display, noting: “I seem to have a lower tolerance for work engaged with more ordinary forms of relational intimacy, for the things that ‘feel’ like life and therefore cut too close,” (4).


Adrian Howells, Held. Fierce Festival, Glasgow. 2006.

Central to my reading of Howells’s work is the role of furniture in the calculated invocation of the domicile’s normalcy and its demonstrated evocation of a visceral psychoanalytic response. Echoing Galeano’s specification of everyday objects and the historical resonance of their performative engagement, the visceral response elicited by Held seems indebted to the described setting of the various encounters and the presumed legibility of their spatial referents; successive movements from table, to couch, to bed, become synonymous with stages of deepening intimacy in the development of a romantic relationship (also at play, here, are varying degrees of privacy throughout the home itself in this movement from dining room (public, formal), to living room (casual), to bedroom (private, intimate)) . My interest in tracing domesticity’s historical construction and contemporary resituation within the gallery space was inspired by Doyle’s account, which goes on to explain that “the ‘unthreatening realm of the domestic’ offers the viewer-participant ‘a direct conduit to our own childhoods’... this very slight shift in the most banal scene of intimacy (from that of a romantic couple to that of an artist and his audience; from that of straight romance to queer domesticity) exposes just how loaded, how overdetermined that scene of domestic intimacy is for many of us,” (6). Suggesting a queer-theoretical model of analysis, this mention of a ‘queer domesticity’ will prove useful in further nuancing a contemporary shift away from an unquestioning nostalgic preservation of the domicile’s fabricated facade as stable reprieve from the outside world.

The subversive power in Doyle’s return to the relational dynamics of artist and audience not only recalls Bourriaud’s text but points towards a further complication of the object-body-space situation in Marina Abromavic’s ‘transitional sculptures’. These “superficially minimal sculptural works” are described as “vessels of potential; ripe with latent possibility, not in terms of what they as objects will do, but what the participant will experience or become, as a result of their interaction.” Viewers are connected with their unconscious as “you are asked to commune with yourself. There is… only the latent incorporeal energy of the self, left intestate by the passing of metaphysical realities,” (Dawes 28). Similar to relational art’s completion through participation, these sculptural objects find their material identity in the immaterial context of their reception and activation. Later locating “common sources of power… [in] everyday existence,” Abromavic’s work, which has since come to define the medium of performance, affects audiences “not only because of the shock value of what we are witnessing, but because we are connecting with a common, shared expression of what it is like to explore the potential of the human animal,” (29). As this model for contemporary modes of performance, alongside practices of relational art, invite viewers to complete the work and find meaning through a movement inwards – drawing on memory and embodied experience within these orchestrated situations and enacting an abstraction of Freudian trauma; a broader “collective turn to memory” has been observed across the contemporary moment of cultural production (late 1990s - present), birthing the arts and humanities neologistic identification as the ‘memory industry’ (Lauzon 26). Breaking from Abromavic’s ‘transitional sculptures’, we might engage a separate classification of object-making in the ‘memory sculpture’, said to “convey memory as a lived, corporeal experience that ‘activates body, space, and temporality, matter and imagination, presence and absence in a complex relationship with their beholder.’” Accompanying a concurrent malleability in the domicile’s ideological stability, these contemporary practices signal that “the post-9/11 cultural landscape in the West [has] witnessed the emergence of a new aesthetic strategy that treats home as a haunted archive of longing and belonging,” (28).

In order to understand the significance of domesticity’s changing connotations, it is important to first locate the origins of this social construction. Continuing a previous historical gloss which situated the furniture object as subsidiary to civilization’s advent of architecture, the physical structure of the home was first conceived of as a social space distinctly separate from the realm of the public during the late Middle Ages. It is not until the 19th century that the home became “a site of social contestation,” this connotative domestic sphere infiltrated by the ideological restructuring of “free-market capitalism, technological advances, and post- Enlightenment ideas of the (gendered, racialized, and classed) subject.” Simultaneously, the aesthetic introduction of avant-gardism in visual culture “was conceived as an escape from the confines of home towards the landscapes of the great city,’” (Lauzon, 30). These early-modern conditions foreshadow a phenomenon of ‘modernist homelessness’ which – with the exception of the arts and crafts movement’s unapologetic engagement with ‘homely’ aesthetics (the ‘hand’ of the maker, here, suggesting a latent body projected onto the aesthetic object or space) – came to define the art world’s complex estrangement from the domestic sphere (as illustrated in Le Corbusier’s ‘machines for living’ and the many failed modernist housing complexes). In tracing modern art’s movement away from the home, Rosalind Krauss points towards formal markers of this ‘nomadism’ in Brancusi’s “fetishization of the pedestal (insofar as the sculpture either becomes the base or enters into a symbiotic relationship with it)... and whose fragmentation of body parts also signals ‘a loss of site,’” as a way of conceptualizing a newly-destabilized orientation towards domesticity. Adding to Klaus’s emphasis on the aesthetic sensibility of the avant-garde in coining a ‘modernist homelessness,’ Claudette Lauzon reintroduces the geopolitical situation of mass-displacement between and during the world wars as informing this impulse towards an ‘aesthetics of exile’ (32). As might be gleaned from my paper’s focus thus far on conceptual and performative work from the second half of the 20th century onward – though the surrealist movement’s theoretical rejection of a modernist rationalism afforded their investigation of the uncanny, illuminating the social and psychological complexity of ‘home’ in the work of female surrealist artists like Louise Bourgeouis – it was not until the 1960s that the broader art world began to contend once more with the domestic realm.

Resituating the Freudian uncanny in embodied contemporary encounters with an artwork, I would like to ‘shine light’ on its formal reflection in the monumental building cuts of Gordon Matta-Clark. Perhaps most emblematic of his practice’s unsettling of the suburban-American domicile is Splitting (1974), in which he employed chainsaws to completely bisect a two-story house in Englewood, New Jersey. Prefiguring contemporary artistic practices invoking “Homi Bhabha’s formulation of the unhomely as that interstitial space in which ‘intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions,’” Matta-Clark’s cuts laid a formal foundation for further aesthetic engagement with the uncanny “by literally bringing to light the unheimlich (repressed) dimensions of the heimlich (intimate, concealed) domestic sphere,” (46-47). Here, Lauzon draws a formal connection between the physical opening of the violent cut, or wound (recalling trauma’s etymological origin as a wound to the body), and its psychoanalytic parallel in Freud; but is careful to maintain the political materiality and temporal specificity of their visceral effect as documenting and physicalizing 1970s urban life’s unhomely conditions of dislocation and alienation.Compiling various first-hand accounts of Splitting, Matta-Clark’s architectural interventions “provoke a ‘destabilizing experience of place’ that ‘throws into relief the perspectivism of the building as it sees, and is seen, by the viewer coursing throughout it; and that implicates the communicative and sensorial function of the body in that body’s destabilization, vertigo, and even ascension.’” In describing the sensation of traversing the house’s bisected staircase, “Alice Aycock recalls: ‘You really had to jump. You sensed the abyss in a kinesthetic and psychological way.’” Resembling Doyle’s experience of Held in its emphasis on the simulteneity of a (visceral) bodily and (difficult) emotional response, the physical precarity in Splitting is compounded by its subversive sociopolitical criticality and the literal upsetting of “a myth of the domestic sphere as one of (feminine) security and stability” through the unquestionably masculine violence of the enacted ‘architectural rape’ (Lauzon 47-49). Although a comprehensive account of how these specifically-gendered social connotations of domesticity came into being falls beyond the scope of this paper (see American-Cold War advertising campaigns’ “expertly designed images of domestic bliss” (40)), the complex variation in experiences and readings demonstrated here highlights the deeply personal, individual, psychological resonance of an established symbolic and aesthetic realm of the domicile, inviting a return to memory in linking the sensing body with the space of a contemporary unhome.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Documentation of Splitting (1974) in Englewood, New Jersey.

Invoking Freudian ‘screen memories’, Lauzon cites these “memories that facilitate the repression of trauma by displacing more painful recollections” in order to address contemporary cultural memory production through fabricated representations of idyllic domestic bliss (42). Applied to an investigation of the ‘living-room war’ and the mediated coexistence of brutality and a distorted reflection of the 1960s American family, the television screen is revealed as effecting a psychological screen – suppressing confrontation with the chaos of the ‘outside’ world – and, in parallel, fabricating the domicile as a screen confining (protecting, reflexively generating) the private safety ‘inside’. Bringing memory ‘home’, a return to aforementioned memory sculptures or the increasingly metonymic contemporary signification of the home as a site of loss and unbelonging necessitates an address of nostalgia’s etymological longing to return home. A near-literal translation of its Greek roots, nostalgia attaches itself to the lost object of the home/land, enacting “a fantasy rooted in personal memories, family lore, cultural narratives, and, frequently, political exigencies” which afford its extrapolation towards a nationalist ‘right of return’(27). This conflation of a literal site with conceptions of absolute belonging mirrors unnuanced assumptions of a psychoanalytically-intact subject or self and signals a requisite relocation of sentimental confrontations with belonging and estrangement to the site of a contemporary unhome.

Guarding against a nostalgic privileging of individual memory, Matta-Clark’s direct, violent address of ‘the home’ reignites an object-body relation defined by an unbalanced directionality of power. Rejecting Bourriaud’s aesthetic equation of the ‘microtopian’ situations enabled by canonical 90s relational artworks with an ethico-political effect of ‘intrinsic democracy,’ Claire Bishop introduces an understanding of antagonism based in Lacan’s theory of a split, incomplete subjectivity defined by a constant process of identification. Complicating a reading of relational art as structurally requiring an ideal, whole subject to complete the work, she introduces relational antagonism as a mode of artistic encounter which contends with contemporary art’s ability to productively engage “unease and discomfort rather than belonging” and sustain “tension between viewers, participants, and context,” (34). In refusing essentialist notions of a whole, locatable identity, the incomplete subject’s confrontation with the Other is mirrored in an established relation of antagonism, exposing “that which is repressed in contriving the semblance of [social] harmony,” (35). This theoretical ‘unearthing’ enabled by dismantling a constructed facade finds an illustrative parallel in Matta-Clark’s physical cleaving. Bishop’s foregrounding of antagonism affords more fruitful sociopolitical engagement with and through contemporary art and reflects contemporaneous disruptions to an uncritical perception of domestic neutrality and stability.

Returning to “the wounded domestic space of Splitting;” the wound, scar, or cut – as theorized by Petra Kuppers – transcends essentialization as a tragic site of loss, illuminating “sites of fleshy (and skinly) productivity” and forming a spatiotemporal link between life and its disruption. Nuancing the wound and its viscerality, Matta-Clark’s intervention reveals “the house and the body [as] deeply imbricated modalities of inhabitation,” maintaining a productive symbolic heft of the home even through this subversive reckoning with its repressed depths (Lauzon 59). As the 21st-century domicile has come to evoke invariable sentiments of traumatic loss, placelessness, and uncanny misrecognitions of self which characterize our contemporary geopolitical condition of globalization, a complete severance from the 20th-century myth of ‘the home’ suggests its apt contemporary redefinition as ‘the unhome.’ Locating, here, an aesthetic precedent in Splitting, this simultaneous physical and conceptual rupture is engrained in contemporary embodiments of domesticity. In a contemporary world of biennials and the globalizing immediacy of instant communication technologies, the artists’ role is increasingly perceived as belonging to a “globetrotting cosmopolitanism,” wherein they “form part of an increasingly mobile international citizenry that must learn to be at home everywhere,” (10). As viewers of contemporary works that reference the ubiquitous, idyllic aesthetics of the 20th-century domicile, “we are implicitly interpellated to recognize… a nostalgic invocation of postwar suburban comfort.” Our presumed visual deftness in a hypermediated digital age have resulted in our identification “less with the woman inside the house than with the chaos outside,” the omnipresent screen dissolving the mythical partition which once held the threat of displacement and loss at bay (67-68). Logically evolving from historical engagements with loss and memory situated within the architectural space of the home, Matta-Clark’s work serves as a prototypical indication of the unhome and its contents’ aesthetic invocation as “memorial[s] to absent human presence,” (50).

The antagonistic collision between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ in the unsettled contemporary site of the unhome has imbued domestic architecture and furnishings with a latent body, connecting the object of traumatic loss to a material surrogate through an enacted return to these functional ontologies of (bodily) inhabitance. As furniture and other indications of the ‘everyday’ are resituated within the space of the gallery, the delocalized, geographically indeterminate unhome transforms the implied body (of a furniture-user, art-viewer) into a specifically-absent body. In discussing the choice of objects interacted with in his performances, Andrés Galeano “use[s] a known object as a quote, as a redoing of something, or as homage… they are not only objects; they are combined with actions, and then an interaction with these objects often tries to transform them poetically,” (109). Recalling the “ghost chairs” of Matt Austin’s New Americana in the temporal-specificity of a post-9/11 domestic landscape’s pervasive recasting of the home as a site of longing and (un)belonging, I would like to end my investigation into changing aesthetics of domesticity by looking at the conceptual operation of chairs in the work of Doris Salcedo.

In her most famous piece, an untitled 2003 installation at the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, Salcedo evocatively erects an architectural facade of 1,150 wooden kitchen chairs stacked between two buildings. Citing her intention to reproduce a “topography of war,” Salcedo appropriates the fundamental indexicality of the material chair and effects an aesthetic actualization of precarity within the unhome; the chairs coming to resemble more closely a pile of corpses than a mere “garbage heap of abandoned furnishings,” (Lauzon, 108). Here and throughout her practice, Salcedo’s chairs “occupy a threefold purpose of rendering the absent body a palpable presence – as metonym, indexical trace, and symbolic reference,” generating a space of mournful commemoration which surpasses the uncanny, or even unhomely, and renders the domicile completely uninhabitable (114).

Doris Salcedo, Untitled, 2008.

This negative subversion of the unhome, sharing aesthetic profundity with Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts several decades earlier, is distilled in Salcedo’s succinct, 2008 sculptural interruption of a single repurposed chair. Impaled with rebar – visually suggesting medicalized interventions of a physical body – the weight of the absent body is materialized as the impaled chair and the void of surrounding space is cast in concrete. Eerily effective in its resolute monumentality, Salcedo’s immobilized chair reveals negative space as a metaphoric parallel for “subjects whose presence is ignored, denied, or contested – the immigrant, the exile, the displaced, the imprisoned, the disappeared,” (116).

Challenging relational art’s ‘microtopic’ claims to promoting community and togetherness through orchestrated situations of audience engagement and interaction, an adoption of the critical theoretical mode of encounter set forth as relational antagonism recenters the significance of space in constructing dynamics of relational power, enabling our contemplation of “the precariousness of home, the politics of belonging, and the artist’s capacity to register the pain of others in ways that will generate empathetically unsettling practices of ethical witnessing,” (Lauzon 106). As contemporary artists continue to nuance and destabilize myths of domestic bliss – effecting what Doyle instinctively identified as a ‘queer domesticity’ – our encounter with these (un)familiar aesthetics in the space of the gallery and elsewhere might be productively reframed as collaboratively furnishing a shared unhome.






Works Cited

Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October, vol. 110, 2004, pp. 51–79. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397557.

Dawes, Mark. “Performance Art: Spectacle of the Body.” Circa, no. 74, 1995, pp. 26–29. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/25562887.

Doyle, Jennifer. “Introducing Difficulty.” Hold It Against Me : Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, Duke University Press, 2013, pp. 1-27.

Galeano, Andrés, and Joanna Matuszak. “Performing with Objects.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 36, no. 3, 2014, pp. 102–11. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26386709.

Lauzon, Claudette. The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art, University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Zemach, Eddy M. “The Ontological Status of Art Objects.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 25, no. 2, 1966, pp. 145–53. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/429385.