The notion of an "idiot savant" is someone who is simultaneously above and below normative standards of competence, imbuing them with a sublime uselessness. Their virtuoso (savant) cannot be instrumentalized by the rest of society for productive ends, because it is not socialized into an accepted pattern of behaviors, but instead exists as a disruption, a rupture, an anomaly, a non sequitur surrounded by an oasis of incompetence. Conversely, their "idiot" aspect, or lack of a basic set of skills that "average" people in society take for granted, rather than render them a run-of-the mill dolt, is complicated and foregrounded by an extreme virtuoso or aptitude. The phenomenon of the idiot savant therefore de-sublimates normative frameworks and codes of competence, behavior, and social hierarchization.

How can we utilize the paradox of the idiot savant to look at how visual and performing artists creatively and artfully "under-perform," mis-perform, or "elementarize" performance (purposefully make their performance elementary), in order to comment on the social structure undergirding the politics of performance? The idiot savant strategically uses tactics of de-skilling, de-sublimation, de-authorization and mis-readibility to destabilize the race to "competence," lucidity, success or a coherent narrative, thereby creating a “caesura;” or what Frederic Jameson refers to in the Political Unconscious as the “flaws” in the narrative that expose the fictionality, the constructedness, of a narrative or social situation.

Part 1: Andrea Fraser: Artfully Performing Failure

In both her Jane Castleton persona and her video "May I Help You?," Fraser's verbose gallerist persona consistently performs both her attempt to strive for and her failure to attain social standing through refinement and the knowledge of an elite class. Her failure comes about by excess, malaproprisms, misplaced or mis-timed signifiers, thereby exploding the role of the highly cultured gallerist that has successfully assimilated and internalized his/her class socialization.

Part 2: Michael Smith: Performing the Role of a Loser

Smith's ubiquitous persona "Mike," a pro-sumer (professional who is primarily a consumer), watches infomercials late at night about how to succeed, sends out invitations to important artists who never comes to his events, eats copious junk food, and seems to have no social or cultural capital to speak of. By submerging his own persona into this abjectly infantile persona, Smith downgrades his social stock, playing the "Fool" who is out of the game as a sardonic commentary on the fashionable tropes, personas, and pretensions of the “game.”

Part 3: Koosil-ja Hwang: Live Processing

Koosil-Ja Hwang's choreographic method "live processing," whereby dancers replicate movement they see on a TV screen, asks dancers to "unlearn" the formalist building blocks of dance, to disembowel their dance of any element of agency, subjectivity, psychologism, narrative, or aesthetics, and to merely "process" in real time whatever movement they see on screen with the plainness of the “un-skilled,” in an effort to rupture the semantic glibness and codification of the “skilled” dancer.

Part 4: Loud Objects: Anti-Technophilia

Rather than using technology to render more elaborate, disembodied, and abstracted their own agency, Loud Objects chooses to instead go the other direction and “primitivize” by creating electronic noise music with minimal components: microchips, a power jack, an audio jack, and wire. They solder custom audio circuits live, creating audible fluctuations of electricity with bare elements, scavenging along the garage sale subterranean terrain of noise music with inserted audio jacks, improvisational wiring, the unearthing of unintended sound, and the detritus of capitalist consumer electronics.

BIO: http://replaceandrea.blogspot.com Andrea Liu is a visual art and dance critic who writes with the juncture between modernism and postmodernism, dematerialized post-studio art, and the de-historicization of minimalism into a formalist aesthetic. She has been awarded writing residencies residencies at Museum of Fine Arts at Houston CORE Critical Studies Program (’07-8), Atlantic Center for the Arts (’07), Ox-Bow/Art Institute of Chicago (’10), Millay Colony (’10), Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild (’11), Jacob’s Pillow Fellow (’06), Wildacres (‘07), Chez Bushwick Commissioned Writer (‘07), Corniolo Art Platform (Florence, Italy ‘12), Homesession, Barcelona (forthcoming, ’12) and was a core participant in New Museum’s Nightschool (organized by Anton Vidokle, ‘08-9). She has given talks at the Sculpture Center, Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center, Triangle Arts Workshop, Ox-Bow Artist Residency, Banff Centre (SDHS Society of Dance History Scholars Conference), Movement Research Studies Project, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Archetime Conference and NYU Performance Studies Conference (The Affect Factory). Her writings have been published in ArtUS, Movement Research Journal, Postmodern Culture, galeria perdida, Pastelegram, Social Text, and Arrow Maker (8fold press). She has book chapter contributions to Infinite Instances: Studies and Images of Time (Mark Batty Publishers, 2011), The Swedish Dance History (Inpex, 2010) and The Sarai Reader 09 (forthcoming, Spring 2013, curated by Raqs Media Collective). She is founder of the temporary gallery the Naxal Belt in Bushwick.