Denis Beaubois - In the event of Amnesia the city will recall, 1996-1997

by Thomas Y. Levin


In June 1996 the Australian artist Denis Beaubois embarked on a series of performances which took place throughout the city of Sidney in public spaces marked by the more or less visible presence of the increasingly ubiquitous surveillance camera. Arriving on the scene three days in a row unannounced and without having solicited or received permission to do so, Beaubois simply positioned himself in direct view of the camera whose impassive gaze he returned in kind. Armed with an unusual capacity for willed immobility [thanks to training in Bodyweather performance technique a form Butoh], his ostentatious stasis and ocular fixity sooner or later provoked some sort of response. Sometimes it was so swift that Beaubois was »escorted« off the »public« premises only minutes after his arrival, the »explanation« being that he was disturbing the peace, or lacked a permit, or some equally inconsequential - and symptomatic - bureaucratic banality. On other occasions, where his stoic performances were graciously [even if often uncomprehendingly] tolerated by the authorities, it was the passersby who became engaged by his presence, interrupting their purposive passage to stare and inquire in an attempt to establish what exactly was going on.

From Book : T.Y. Levin, U. Frohne, P. Weibel, 2002, [CTRL] SPACE Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ZKM Center for the Art and Media, Karlshruhe, Germany; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, p.608-611.