Faycal Baghriche, SNOOZE (2004-2010), installation view, Paris. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Night, white night—such is the disaster...

—Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace litteraire (1953)1

The fatigue he felt was in his legs, hours and days of standing, the weight of the body standing.

Twenty-four hours. Who would survive, physically and otherwise? Would he be able to walk out into

the street after an unbroken day and night of living in this radically altered plane of time? Standing

in the dark, watching a screen.

—Don DeLillo, Point Omega (2010)2

CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY COMPELS a pressure to perform that seeps into nearly all

aspects of everyday life. Discussions of being “plugged in,” working remotely, or always being

wired, descend to cliché status. By the turn of a paradigm shift, social relations at almost every

level infuse the workings of the capitalist system. In fact it seems all the more apparent that the

workday never ends. Time off no longer exists. Or, as the documentary filmmaker and critic Hito

Steyerl explains it, “work has increasingly been turned into an occupation.”3 More than a

semantic shift, work as occupation does not inherently imply any kind of remuneration or ces-

sation but rather only busywork in the form of either distraction or absorption as an end in and

of itself. Within this “occupied” context, attention becomes a commodity. Considering this, what

are the implications of art projects that rely on the audience to be participants or, more aptly,

performers? These questions are not essentially new. Certainly thinking through the changing

role of the viewer dates back at least to the formative frameworks of postmodern thought, such

as Roland Barthes’s announcement of the “Death of the Author” (1968) and the birth of the

reader. A much earlier precedent is Walter Benjamin’s “Author as Producer” (1934) in which he

considers the political status of participation by referring to art of the 1920s, including Dada per-

formance and Soviet mass spectacles, as examples of how to politicize aesthetics rather than

9

HEATHER DIACK

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Performance

allowing for the aestheticization of politics. Such theoretical precursors remain useful to under-

standing the inheritance of the current context of art; however, they rely on a very specific con-

cept of the autonomy of the viewer, in order to believe such a viewer could indeed be

emboldened through the distance of critical thinking. Arguably, the possibility of such distance

and autonomy are increasingly threatened by the “occupation” and the “aestheticization” of

everyday life. As such, the very idea of autonomy needs to be interrogated in an attempt to

account for the strange coming together of spectacle and participation in contemporary life, and

by extension, in contemporary art.

Most famously characterized by Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998) and

Postproduction (2001), much writing on participatory art since the 1990s champions “active par-

ticipation” by imagining art as an ideal model for engagement and sociability. The problematic

assumption in such polemics, namely that the social is inherently discursive, has been taken to

task by a handful of intellectuals, including Claire Bishop, Hal Foster, and Jacques Rancière.4

Despite the prevalence and persuasiveness of such discussions, the debate wages on and partici-

patory art events, particularly civic ones, continue to be envisioned as a kind of activism.

Considering this context, it is curious to think how art projects dependent on inter-human rela-

tions have altered the terms of the experience of art, and to then ask whether there is an aspect

of such practices that is at literally at “work” rather than at “play,” or if the two modes have

indeed become elided. What are the limits to the “work-a-day” routine and what role does it per-

form in contemporary art?

Undoubtedly the very notion of participation has been central to discussions of contempo-

rary art for more than five decades (led by figures as wide ranging as Guy Debord and Allan

Kaprow, or Liam Gillick and Claire Bishop), and notably the idea of performance residing with

the artist has moved towards investigating the demands placed on the viewer as participant. In

some cases, the “demands” seem innocuous. Nevertheless, the question is raised as to whether,

and to what extent, the act of attention itself becomes a kind of performance, and as such a kind

of labour. In a culture characterized as suffering jointly from Attention Deficit Disorder and

Hyperactivity Disorder,5 these questions compound when art projects themselves are presented

as participants in large-scale civic art events. More than challenging the passive tradition of view-

ing art as laid-back pleasure (think of Henri Matisse’s aspirations for his art to be like a good arm-

chair for the viewer at the end of a long work day6), this query becomes increasingly poignant

when one considers the prevalent emphasis on performance and participation at art events that

are intended to exceed the general parameters of the workday, and ambitiously to last all night

long. As the potential for sleeplessness expands in this scenario, so do the indefinable limits of

labour. Wishing for more hours in a day in order to increase productivity comes only at the

expense of fewer hours in the night. Subjecting the night to the glare of the day and all of its

demands effectively eliminates “down time” or the time reserved for restorative sleep. A night

taken by the day and denied actual sleep is precisely what Maurice Blanchot ominously calls a

“White Night” and in other words, “the disaster.” As dramatic as this poetic evocation may sound,

taking seriously the idea of whiting out the night highlights the impasse between participation

and spectatorship ideologically, as well as how much they seem to have in common in terms of

practice. The tension between sleep and sleeplessness has important implications for a growing

phenomenon in public art internationally.

10 NUIT BLANCHE DIACK

The spectacle of Nuit Blanche or “White Night” has emerged as a kind of searchlight over the

world of public art in the past decade. Nuit Blanche, as a civic event, was originally conceived and

implemented in Paris in 2002 in an attempt to bring contemporary art to the masses in (often

unexpected) social spaces with the ends of increasing the visibility of the creative city as well as

the shared sense of public art as a community and collective good. Now established in urban cen-

tres around the globe ranging from Brussels to Rome, Santa Monica to Madrid, and from

Copenhagen to Riga and beyond, the premise of providing an expedition into the art world from

sunset to sunrise for one night only remains the consistent parameter of the annual city-wide

event which showcases the work of both local and international artists who are invited to create

works engaging deliberately with specific sites throughout the city. Locations for Nuit Blanche

expand every year yet some elements remain remarkably consistent. Dominated by an extrava-

ganza of electronic and digital media (in Singapore the event takes the name “Digital Nights”),

Nuit Blanche popularly incites the idea of “spectacle.” Looking more closely at some of the prac-

tices that have been staged during Nuit Blanche offers a critique of such mass events as providing

space for an actively engaged and thoughtful viewer. Arguably, the overwhelming spectacle of

such a luminous night inevitably overwhelms any individual subjectivity and veritably eclipses

the viewer.7

In contrast to traditional Marxist critiques that discuss spectacle as an agent of pacification,

it is possible to analyze the spectacle along these lines as a mode of continual activation. Not activation

in the sense of “activism,” although this can indeed be one of its guises. Rather, this is activation

in the sense that work never ends and diurnal rest never comes. Such a contemporary revision

of the spectacle encompasses another way of understanding contemporary art’s increasing sleep-

lessness and its 24/7 program as a call to attention that while espousing “activation” nevertheless

works in the name of contemporary capitalism and its emphasis on immaterial rather than mate-

rial production. The globalization of Nuit Blanche offers a compelling example of this dynamic.

The unavoidable necessity to sleep acknowledges the built-in limits of humans to the nearly

inescapable exigencies of work and consumer culture. Art events such as Nuit Blanche present a

celebration of a resistance to this mortal “sleep” that potentially reifies the art viewer. Rather than

art posing a return to humanity, or allowing a space of escape from the daily grind, there is a pull

towards machine-like states of attention, objectification, and endurance. Much theorization on

sleep reveals what a contested state sleeplessness occupies. According to the recent writings of

Jonathan Crary, sleep, by virtue of its intrinsic passivity and its “profound uselessness,” “remains

one of the great human affronts to modern economic life.”8 The marked unproductiveness of

sleep frustrates the demands of global consumer society; it works against what Eric Schmidt, the

CEO and chairman of Google, excitedly described as the “attention economy,” a coming world in

which the “winners will be those who succeed in maximizing the number of ‘eyeballs’ they can

consistently control.”9 Starting from this premise, a number of the contradictory implications of

contemporary art projects that challenge the natural passivity of sleep with the demand for per-

formance can be understood in a new light, by calling attention to the “sleeplessness” of contem-

porary art particularly focusing on events staged for international instantiations of Nuit Blanche.

A number of artists’ projects challenge the aesthetic values of communication and sociability

found in the nocturnal spectacle of Nuit Blanche, values that may, in fact, affirm rather than resist

the global market. Each of these artists engages the praxis of public art with an awareness of the

11

conditions of the interaction of which they are a part. The writings of Maurice Blanchot, Paolo

Virno, and Sven Lutticken, among others, expand on how the spectacle’s insatiable desire for

attention requires the public to stay awake. A number of contemporary artists have attempted to

instigate the complexity of this situation while others conform to the workings of the white night

as a kind of triumph of consumer culture. In order to theorize sleeplessness in relation to recent

practices in contemporary art and, in particular, high-profile corporately-sponsored events such

as Nuit Blanche,10 the stakes of denying the body’s demands for sleep in favour of viewing art begs

the question: What is it that keeps so many eyeballs wide awake?

Counting Sheep: Sleep and the Social

Central to the conception of Nuit Blanche is the ideal that the white cube of the modern gallery

expands to contain the public space of the city. The celebratory promotion of Nuit Blanche sug-

gests that the dimensions of corporate control and public complicity be left unexamined.11

Featuring mostly flashy projects that move between rock show status and light show displays, a

number of artists have nevertheless used their participation in Nuit Blanche as a means of staging

an act of critique, albeit predominately from an oblique angle. On the occasion of Toronto’s first

Nuit Blanche in 2006, for example, the dome of the former planetarium of the Royal Ontario

Museum became a cinematic screen for Michael Snow’s Counting Sheep (2006). The convex

expanse displayed a pastoral scene, a field of grass by the edge of the ocean. Three sheep enter,

nibbling grass as they meander from one side of the frame to the other in single file. This fifteen-

minute loop repeats itself interminably over the course of the night and it is difficult not to under-

stand the film as a circuitous criticism of the Nuit Blanche attendees, waiting in an orderly fashion,

willingly depriving themselves of sleep for the evening, with the hopes of not missing the action.

Ambling along there is indeed no “real” action, only “counting sheep” as the title of the piece

indicates. Like a beacon or an enormous nightlight, the piece alludes to the clichéd activity used

to lull oneself to sleep against obtrusive preoccupations with the stress of the day or the anxieties

of tomorrow’s to-do list. However, like the loop of Snow’s film, sleep never comes. Only waiting.

Not surprisingly, thematics of endurance and patience recur in a number of projects by Nuit

Blanche artists. In a reversal of Snow’s parody of sleeplessness, some have investigated the self-

discipline required in the act of staying awake and waiting. In one example, the Algerian-born,

Parisian-based artist Faycal Baghriche set the tension of programmed waking against the impulses

of sleep. Baghriche installed his vibrant and disquieting configuration SNOOZE (2004-2010) in a

single room within Paris’s Hotel d’Albret. Set in a pitch-black room, no less than three hundred

digital alarm clocks lined the walls. Each ominously flashed the time in sync with all of the other

clocks. This virtual rainbow of neon numbers induced a pulsing sense of anxiety akin to the toss-

ing and turning of a restless night without sleep, when one is all too aware of the responsibilities

that inevitably arrive with dawn and ringing of the alarm. The twist to the piece however is that

in this case the sounding of the alarm signaled the end of Nuit Blanche. The clocks were simulta-

neously set to go off in unison at seven in the morning, and therefore visitors waited in the space

for the impending sonic chorus. Perhaps one of the most reviled and yet most universal of devices,

the alarm clock powerfully signals the programmatic control individuals integrate into their sub-

jective lives. The titular “snooze” is nearly malicious, taunting even as the piece hypnotizes with

12 NUIT BLANCHE DIACK

its colourful and yet uniform array of displays. It seems to say that the snooze button is out of

reach, and even if it could be pressed there would be another inescapable alarm to follow thus

preventing any respite to slumber.

Auditory interventions are as prevalent at Nuit Blanche as the use of flashing lights and

screens. A whistling crescendo, for example, describes one of Erik Samakh’s Nuit Blanche inclu-

sions. Entitled Le Rossignol de Heinz (1991/2010), Samakh concealed an interactive mechanical

nightingale in a tree in Georges Cain Square located in the third arrondissement. It has since

remained as a permanent public installation. Rather than performing in the quintessential mode

of the species, however, and reserving its song for nightfall, this bird is activated by the breeze

and therefore liable to lament at all hours. This openness to the possibility of continual singing

overrides natural expectations. Moreover, the wavering sound of the nightingale’s strained voice

speaks of a kind of uncertainty. While at the whims of elements beyond itself, it nevertheless has

the possible effect of waking the neighbors. As in the contributions by Snow and Bagrhriche,

Samakh’s piece implies that Nuit Blanche and its impending sleeplessness exceed the twelve-hour

time slot carved out for it on the annual calendar. Rather, these artistic interventions are

reminders of the liabilities and anxieties of sleeplessness in contemporary life more broadly.

Sleep Walking

Nuit Blanche’s demand for sleeplessness in the name of participation and art highlights the deeply

held belief that sleep is anti-social. Though in many ways it is true that sleep is the province of

the individual, the trouble with such a binary conception of sleep (for example, sleep as useless

and autonomous versus wakefulness as productive and social) is that it does not account for other

dimensions and indeed the social bonds that sleep puts to the test. Maurice Blanchot carefully

considers many of the unique issues that sleep raises for any theory of consciousness and articu-

lates the ways in which the nocturnal matter of sleep is the space of the irreducible self. Only this

irreducibility allows for the possibility of “real” living and action post-slumber. For Blanchot,

dreaming remains a vestige of the day, belonging still to the world:

[S]leeping is the clearest action that promises us the day… Deep sleep is the only thing

that lets us escape what is at the base of sleep. Where is the night? There is no longer

night… One must sleep, that is the order conscience gives, and this commandment to

renounce the day is one of the first orders of the day. Sleep transforms the night into

possibility.12

In this passage, Blanchot marks possibility as the special effect of sleep. Without sleep there

is no longer room for the subjective individual outside the rigours of the day. Autonomy and

reprieve are increasing rarities and this is exceptionally true in the restless nexus of sleep and

community.

A particularly striking Nuit Blanche work resonates with these ideas. For Jon Sasaki’s I

Promise It Will Always Be This Way (2008), the artist assembled several dozen costumed team

mascots to occupy the field at Lamport Stadium in Toronto’s west end for a performance that

struck numerous chords in terms of public participation. As expected in such a sports arena, the

13

14 NUIT BLANCHE AUTHORJon Sasaki, I Promise It Will Always Be This Way (2008), Toronto, performance stills. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

mascots exerted themselves in order to rally the crowd, to keep up the energy, and to encourage

onlookers to feel implicated and involved in an abundance of team spirit. In a variation to the

typical scenario one would expect to find however, Sasaki subtracted the central feature of a

match or game with obvious teams to cheer for. Without the mediation of teams on which to

project the “spirit” of the crowd and the exigencies of the mascot-cheerleaders, the mascots and

the spectators, in effect the traditional members of the sidelines, took centre stage as the crux of

the event. The relationship between the crowd and the mascots, whether a clown or a bumble-

bee, a tiger or a snowman, formed the heart of the piece. Their shifting negotiations of reciproc-

ity lynch-pinned the project. Working to keep up the frenzied momentum, a selection of

all-too-recognizable jock-rock anthems blared over the loudspeakers, including popular stand-

by sports songs such as Tag Team’s Whoomp! (There It Is!), Queen’s We Will Rock You!, Snap’s (I Got)

The Power!, and Salt ‘n Pepa’s Push It! Not coincidentally, these seemingly innocuous songs all

spoke elliptically about power and control, aggression, and confrontation. Each chorus filled

with repetitive loops of imperatives, verging on threats, in essence articulated catchy discourses

on power dynamics.

The symbolic subjectivities of the various mascots became a jumble. Together they blurred

into an absurdly familiar and yet unidentifiable mass of colour. At the beginning of the evening,

fun seemed to be the only factor. However, not long into the all-night performance their energy

waned and a contagious lethargy replaced the fervent momentum. Mascots started to drop like

flies, some tumbling onto cots and others simply flopping on the ground. Another interesting

thing occurred as the mascots, one by one, gave in to their bodily demands. They removed their

masks, seeming to suggest a return to and an exposure of their irreducible selves. In anticipation

of such a turn to fatigue, Sasaki provided cots, water, energy bars, cigarettes and bathroom breaks

for the mascots. The reality presented itself: maintaining elevated levels of positive energy, crowd

participation and staying awake demanded an exhausting amount of work.

More surprising was the reaction of the crowd to this energetic downturn. The crowd sub-

sumed the role of the mascots, cheering the bizarre characters out of their lassitude. Passed-out

mascots were re-invigorated as the tables were turned and the spectators enlivened the stadium

experience. This empathetic reversal challenged what Sasaki predicted would be “a monument to

depleted enthusiasm.” The artist expressed his delight in reaction to this unexpected reciprocity:

There was a surprising back-and-forth of goodwill that created a sort of virtuous

circle that I didn’t foresee, and the piece became something I didn’t intend.

Something far more hopeful. I’m thrilled that it got out of my hands. I think there

should always be the potential in a participatory work for the audience/participants

to significantly redirect it.13

The shared energy of this piece demonstrated a peculiar dynamic between social and bodily

demands. On the one hand, being tired presented an optimal wearing down of will, an ideal state

through which power could operate with the least political resistance. On the other hand, sleep-

lessness also provided a vulnerability that when shared, as in Sasaki’s I promise it will always be this

way, introduces yet another ambiguous dimension of sleep. Namely sleep is, on the one hand,

the space in which an individual is at their most private and autonomous, but also, in a public

15

context, it is a reminder of what is common to all. The situation of public sleep relies on trust and

care and establishes the reciprocity between the remarkable vulnerability of the sleeper and their

intimate connection to the social. In Crary’s words, such a situation demonstrates how “sleep can

stand for the durability of what constitutes the social.”14 As such, Sasaki’s playful project exceeds

the spectacle by calling attention to the irrepressible particularities of not only what it means to

be human but moreover what it means to experience being-in-common.15

Nessun Dorma

Let us work without theorizing... ‘’tis the only way to make life endurable.

—Voltaire, Candide (1759)16

There is a world of difference between waking life as thoughtful awareness and the ways in which

some forms of staying awake can function in opposition to protecting individual subjectivity.

“Restless vigilance” (as opposed to the repose of knowledge sought in “totalizing” systematic

thinking) became perhaps the central ethical attitude of the generation of Jacques Derrida, Gilles

Deleuze and Michel Foucault, in what Herschel Farber describes as “its struggle to wake from a

thousand metaphysical slumbers.”17 Notably working against sleep in a literal sense does not con-

tribute to this mindful ethic of “restless vigilance” however. Particularly in the context of Nuit

16 NUIT BLANCHE DIACK

Chris Shepherd, The Task (2010), performance still, Toronto. Photo: Joe Le.

Blanche, the art practices as they are staged rarely form an attempt to shake awake a numbed

society. Rather, one of the central elisions in Nuit Blanche’s sleepless imperative is the way in

which work and performance have become inextricably enmeshed both within and without the

art world and in fact contribute to a continuously distracted and unfocused subject position. The

distinction between the spheres of art and waking life as working life has been obliterated by a

particular conception and appropriation of avant-garde resistance as well as by the regime of the

post-Fordist everyday. The early avant-garde call to arms in the name of reassessing or even

destroying the differential boundaries between art and life through modes such as performance

art and participation has shifted paradoxically towards threatening not only the autonomy but

moreover the viability of both art and life: each is replaced by labour in the name of capitalism

or, in other words, by an “activation” without ends. The irony is that the practices of perform-

ance and participation in art emerged precisely as a means of reviving art through engagement

with everyday life, in order to offer resistance to the commodified world of capitalism. Here, life

is considered a social fact (as opposed to a biological fact) and correspondingly, the reality that art

is a social negotiation has been an accepted position since at least the early twentieth century.

Referring to the special capabilities of a performing artist, Paolo Virno stresses that virtuos-

ity is “[a]n activity without an end product: the performance of a pianist or of a dancer does not

leave us with a defined object distinguishable from the performance itself, capable of continu-

ing after the performance has ended.”18 Such a notion of performance, in Virno’s sense,

“becomes labor for the masses with the onset of the culture industry. It is here that the virtuoso

begins to punch a time card.”19 Perhaps more aptly in the present, individuals are set to become

freelancers performing all the time and producing immaterial products that nevertheless are

unable to escape capital. Sven Lütticken reinforces this version of the labour of performance

when he declares, “We live in a culture of performance,” and further, “to perform is to extend

the now, to prolong the present.”20 Such a definition of performance resonates with the etymo-

logical roots of the concept “attention,” by elucidating a central aspect of what performance and

attention necessarily have in common. Derived from the Latin attendere, on a fundamental level

“attention” means to stretch towards something or someone. Close to the French attendre mean-

ing to wait, patience and attention go hand in hand. Chris Shepherd’s contribution of The Task

(2010) at Nuit Blanche in Toronto very literally carried out this idea of the extension of time

through performance while also highlighting the integrity of patience to both concepts, and per-

haps also suggesting the ways in which this meaning has become repressed in a contemporary

culture of performance.

The Task was an artistic act that played the idea of art as freedom off against a concrete exam-

ple of contemporary labour in a manner that slowly, painstakingly, exposed the performance of

the excessive and prolonged present. Mimicking a machine-like test of efficiency against the

process of repetition, the artist spent the duration of the night moving by hand, and neatly stack-

ing, approximately fifteen tons of concrete cinder blocks from one location to another and back

again. By the end of the twelve-hour performance, things appeared much as they had at the

outset: a neat stack of concrete. Despite the artist’s time-consuming and exhausting efforts,

Shepherd admits that “performing the piece was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever

done.”21 Taking pleasure in manual work in this way is reminiscent of Voltaire’s Enlightenment-

era novel Candide and its ideological tale of how work is the gateway to satisfaction in life.

17

Something more complex is at stake in Shepherd’s Nuit Blanche contribution however,

because by morning it appeared as if nothing had happened, no act had taken place. The immov-

ability of the scene at the end of the “work” functioned as a poignant commentary on the one-

off all-night art extravaganza by pointing to its so often invisible and unproductive waste.

Beneath the veneer of a celebratory white night is the promise of a clean-up day. There is always

more work to be done, even if it remains invisible. The artist’s engagement in challenging phys-

ical labour and mental determination without an obviously transformative point offered a per-

formative engagement with the aesthetico-political economy of sleeplessness that Nuit Blanche

encourages. To see this feat as only a physical task would be greatly underestimate the thought-

fulness of the gesture. The very tediousness of the work, particularly as a work of art, demythol-

ogizes virtuosity with a highly meditative anti-spectacle. Drawing only a small crowd of

onlookers, Shepherd’s The Task worked in opposition to the thoughtless and aleatory attention

that characterizes much of the sleeplessness of Nuit Blanche.

In Waking Dreams

The figure of an imposing light, the kind of dominant visibility a “white night” construes, pres-

ents the possibility of imagining a 24/7 world in which the shadows and obscurity of the night

are eradicated. More than controlling nature, this kind of hyperexposed reality would be the can-

cellation of diurnal time. A number of perceptive artists have addressed this aspect of Nuit Blanche

18 NUIT BLANCHE DIACK

Nicolas Milhé, Respublica (2009), steel, aluminum, cables, bulbs, 370 x 1240 x 150 cm. Photo: Damien Lafargue / Get ThePicture, collection FRAC Aquitaine, courtesy of the artist and galerie Samy Abraham.

by summoning its dark side and an awareness of what Jonathan Crary calls “the fraudulence of

a bright, homogenous world with no mysteries.”22 Not by chance, one of the key methods of offi-

cial interrogation and torture is indeed sleep deprivation. The consistent practice of denying a

detainee of sleep, “leading to an abject state of helplessness and compliance” is a torture tech-

nique that can be traced back hundreds of years, and is the titular logic behind code-naming

American prison camps such things as “Camp Bright Lights.”23 Cells lit continuously with high-

intensity lamps and its opposite confinements of absolute, interminable darkness, intend to

remake and control the sensory and perceptual existence of another. Nuit Blanche can be similarly

accused of such an objectification of subjectivity. The viewer is worn down by the spectacle,

threadbare on attention and nearly hypnotized by the light displays. This kind of exhaustion

uncannily resonates with Guy Debord’s evocative description of the spectacle: “The spectacle is

by definition immune from human activity… It is the opposite of dialogue … It is the sun that

never sets on the empire of modern passivity.”24 Glaring lights intent on creating the illusion that

the sun indeed never sets form the essential conditions of viewership during Nuit Blanche.

In reaction to the proliferation of Nuit Blanche installations that monopolize illuminated

screens, technical interfaces, flashing lights or music to provide a sensory experience during this

art-all-nighter, the Paris-based critic and curator Eva Svennung has talked about the “serious con-

fusion” in contemporary art, which she writes “in order to be capitalized on, must necessarily

take the form of proliferating consensual events.”25 Svennung graphically describes Nuit Blanche

as a kind of debauch indulgence, which she says “showed us how to consume most of the city’s

annual budget in an orgiastic one-night stand of art in the streets—a populist intercourse ready-

made for live broadcast on public television.”26 For the 2003 Parisian edition of Nuit Blanche,

Veronique Joumard, an artist known for her interest in light and in immaterial flux constructed

four large sculptural installations. These consisted of internally lit massive helium-filled balloons

attached to the four corners of the Sully-Morland metro. Entitled 4 ballons pour 1 immeuble (2003)

the piece was simultaneously portrayed by one writer as “conceived for a futuristic park,” and yet

revealing an “antisensationalist sensibility.”27 Such comments seems to both summon and deny

the amusement park accusations that are frequently leveled at Nuit Blanches internationally.

Floating above the modern city of lights, such a piece combines modesty with the grandiose, and

lights and reflective surfaces with commuter architecture. Billed as accessible and avant-garde, 4

ballons pour 1 immeuble deflected light into the night sky and yet seemed diminutive against the

backdrop of the city itself.

Numerous other works use light in a manner that must be read in relation to commercial sig-

nage and advertising rhetoric. Nicolas Milhe’s blinding Respublica (2010) stood in the darkness of

a Parisian parking lot enunciating the Latin word “Respublica” in blinding white LED lights. The

tautological sign returned the viewer’s attention to the “public” that forms the basis of the

“Republic.” Problematically, however, Milhe’s use of such a marquee strategy ran the risk of pre-

cluding any serious consideration of political meaning simply by virtue of the obscuring glare of

the monotonous, neutral lights, the look of the corporate sign, and thus the invisibility of the

message. Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Aimer les differences (2010) suffers from a similar plight,

although in this case it reinforced the fact that his techno-humanist display on the façade of the

Hotel-de-Ville truly reads as multi-lingual melee of colourful neon signs that do nothing to

address issues of difference and communality.

19

Among the most progressive of recent Nuit Blanche works was a thoughtful proposal by the

Basurama collective in Madrid. For the Spanish “Noche en blanco,” Basurama issued an invitation

to viewers to witness “the best show in Madrid,”28 namely its sunset. Resisting Debord’s naming

of the spectacle as “the sun that never sets,” this project was emphatically titled The Sun Sets for

Everyone (2010), eloquently highlighting the distinctly non-consumer product of the sun, while

offering the possibility of restful escapism. This gesture may in part be symbolic; however, it

importantly subverted contemporary capitalism and emphasized a temporality that existed in

passing rather than as a preoccupation with duration. Much less a feat, this proposal was a

denial of the demands of performance. Participation in this event moreover did not preclude

sleep. In fact, watching the sunset engaged an appreciation for the necessity of such a natural

and diurnal rhythm.

Insomniac Vigilance

There are many arguments that link exhaustion to creativity, expounding the belief that when

the mind is tired it goes into an altered state of consciousness and opens up to new ideas and per-

spectives. Another school of thought points out that not simply efficiency and productivity, but

also creativity, are heightened with regular restful sleep. The dimensions of this debate oscillate

in many of the projects featured in the international network that composes Nuit Blanche.

20 NUIT BLANCHE DIACK

Basurama, The Sun Sets for Everyone (2010), Madrid. Photo: Courtesy of the artists, basurama.org CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

In every case, as Crary summarizes, “sleep is an unreasonable, unacceptable affirmation that

there might be limits and thresholds posed by living beings to the allegedly irresistible forces of

modernization.”29 Sleep needs to be thought through as a gauge of autonomy, being-in-common,

and power. Perhaps insight can be garnered regarding the coming together of sleeplessness and

contemporary art by looking back to Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Sleep, consisting only of a long-

take of John Giorno sleeping for five hours and twenty minutes. Warhol claimed to have made

the film out of a fascination with erratic sleeplessness in the 1960s:

I could never finally figure out if more things happened in the 60s because there was

more awake time for them to happen in (since so many people were on ampheta-

mine), or if people started taking amphetamine because there were so many things to

do that they needed to have more awake time to do them in... Seeing everybody so up

all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided I’d

better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping.30

Notably, this experimental film preceded Warhol’s eight-hour long portrait of New York, the city

that never sleeps, entitled Empire (1964), and served as yet another reminder that “sleep,”

“empire,” and art have always been intimate yet strange bedfellows. Nuit Blanche demonstrates

enough restlessness in a single annual all-nighter to reinforce the need to reconsider the tension

between spectatorship and participation particularly in the civic arena. Such a thoughtful

rethinking of the contemporary status of the autonomous subject would indeed place necessary

pressure on the sleepless bind between the social and the irreducible self.

21

NOTES

1 Originally “Nuit, nuit blanche—ainsi le désastre.”Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace litteraire (Paris: Gallimard,1953), 8. All translations from French to English in thistext are my own.

2 Don DeLillo, Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010),12. This passage by DeLillo relates the perspective ofthe main protagonist of the novel, as he obsessivelywatches the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s 24 HourPsycho (1993) installed at the Museum of Modern Artin New York. The piece is a painstakingly slowed ver-sion of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960), which isstretched out to screen in its entirety over the courseof twenty-four hours. The duration demanded by sucha work of art is mesmerizing to DeLillo’s character,and he contemplates what it means to suggest thatthe institution of art would need to remain open allnight long for any viewer to experience the entirety ofthe piece. Like Gordon’s film, DeLillo’s character con-fronts the disorientation produced by the enduranceof cinematic darkness, wondering what would it meanto have such a spectacle seep past the daylight andliterally take over night for day.

3 Hito Steyerl, “Art as Occupation: Claims for anAutonomy of Life,” e-flux journal 30 (December2011), ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, AntonVidokle.

4 See Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and RelationalAesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51-79; Hal Foster,“Arty Party,” London Review of Books (4 December2004), 21-22; Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2004).

5 See, for example, Maggie Jackson, Distracted: TheErosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age(Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008).

6 The full quote is: “What I dream of, is an art of bal-ance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling ordepressing subject matter, an art that could be forevery mental worker, for the businessman as well asthe man of letters, for example, a soothing, calminginfluence on the mind, something like a good arm-chair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter” (1908), in Art inTheory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas,ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA:Blackwell, 2002), 73.

22 NUIT BLANCHE DIACK

7 See James Meyer, “No More Scale: The Experienceof Size in Contemporary Sculpture,” Artforum(Summer 2004): 220-228, for a convincing discussion ofhow spectacle has been embodied in contemporary art.

8 Jonathan Crary, On the Ends of Sleep: Shadows in theGlare of a 24/7 World (Barcelona: MACBA, 2007), 7.

9 Crary, 11. Not by chance, “attention economy” is alsothe title of a successful 2001 book from the HarvardSchool of Business Press. See Thomas H. Davenport,John C. Beck, The Attention Economy:Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston:Harvard Business School Press, 2001).

10 In her insightful introduction to her edited volumeParticipation, Claire Bishop criticizes the ways inwhich “collective presence” and/or “participation”have been mobilized for commercial purposes bypointing to the ways in which “participation is usedby business as a tool for improving efficiency andworkforce morale, as well as being all-pervasive in themass-media in the form of reality television,” ClaireBishop, Participation (London and Cambridge, MA:Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2006), 11-12.

11 For example, Toronto’s Nuit Blanche is sponsored byScotiabank. In addition, almost exclusively, every citysetting for Nuit Blanche is deeply integrated with thetourism industry and billed as such by the municipality.

12 Originally, “dormir est l’action claire que nous prometau jour... Dormir profondément nous fait seul échapperà ce qu’il y a au fond du sommeil. Où est la nuit? Il n’y a plus de nuit... Il faut dormir, c’est là le motd’ordre que la conscience se donne, et ce comman-dement de renoncer au jour est l’une des premièresrègles du jour. Le sommeil transforme la nuit en pos-sibilité” Maurice Blanchot, 358.

13 Jon Sasaki in correspondence with the author, 20 September 2011.

14 Crary, 13.

15 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2000) and The InoperativeCommunity (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1991).

16 Voltaire, Candide (1759), in The Portable Voltaire, ed.Ben Ray Redman (New York: Viking Press, 1949), 327.

17 Herschel Farbman refers to the groundwork of thesetheorists in his “Blanchot on Dreams and Writing,”SubStance 107, 34. 2 (2005): 118-140.

18 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For anAnalysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York:Semiotext[e], 2004), 52.

19 Virno, 56.

20 Sven Lütticken, “Acts in the Age of VirtuosoPerformance,” Texte zur Kunst 79, available athttp://svenlutticken.blogspot.com/.

21 Chris Shepherd in written correspondence withauthor, 1 July 2011.

22 Crary, 11.

23 Ibid., 6.

24 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967) (NewYork: Zone Books, 1997), 17.

25 Eva Svennung, “Paris,” Artforum 44.4 (2005): 230-231, 300, http://search.proquest.com/docview/214360948?accountid=14771, accessed 25 August2011.

26 Ibid.

27 Jeff Rian, “Ivry-sur-Seine, France, Veronique Joumard,Le Credac,” Artforum 45.4 (December 2006): 319.

28 Basurama Collective, “La Noche en blanco, Madrid,11 September 2010,” http://www.esmadrid.com/lneb10/en/evento/569.htm, accessed 25 August 2011.

29 Crary, 8.

30 Andy Warhol quoted in Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett,Popism: The Warhol Sixties (Orlando: Harcourt Books,1980), 41-42.