'The Artist Will Be Present' explores objects as traces that stem from performed actions, and my body in performance. Part-sculptural objects, video and sound act as performance documents that expand on notions of the ‘live’ encounter. Interest lies in how we get to objects: process in variance to product or closure. And the question of how the body/s of the audience becomes participatory is at the forefront of these operations. From this viewpoint the exegesis aims to broaden existing scholarship on performativity, liveness and the part-sculptural object, exploring the manners in which various cultural practices act to animate objects. I reconsider the Euro-American genealogies of performance/body art (Bruce Nauman, Lygia Clark, Ann Hamilton et al.) in relationship to contemporary art practices in Australia and New Zealand (Alicia Frankvich, Carolyn Eskdale et al.) through the lens of late 19th-and early 20th-century writing on sympathetic magical action. A legacy of cultural anthropology dealing with magic (that was privileged in establishing grounding aspects of structural linguistics) circulates around the British anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah whose thinking on persuasive analogy in ritual performance draws a crucial link between J. L. Austin’s performative utterance and James George Frazer’s notion of sympathetic magic. From such a perspective the operations of sympathetic mimesis—involving ambivalent similitude and contagion—are discussed in terms of performative and persuasive illocutionary force. This offers another model for articulating an authentic performative document as an encounter with the ‘live.’ A phenomenological method of enquiry, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm,—along with notions of mimetic incongruence—crucially tease out relationships between the live and the performance document and aim at resisting subject/object dichotomies whereby concepts of embodiment and indeterminate play between artist, objects and audiences are activated. Applied to contemporary debates on performance and ‘objects out of action,’ part objects and images are transformed as partial ‘subjects’: metonymically part of larger wholes as trace (substitution) and contagious contact (liveness). What is lacking in the operations of sympathetic mimesis is precisely what ‘draws out’ the body/s of the audience as they desire closure in object and duration. As these questions turn on the body of the artist/self and the audience/participant in performative installation practice, I offer an analysis of bodies in ritual exchange (donor/donee); subjects and objects as transformers: relations of force over form—liminal, reversible and redolent of lack—that emphasise encounter in difference to recognition. This is to speak of, in the words of Lygia Clark: “Tactile shocks to liberate the body.”

'The Artist Will Be Present' explores objects as traces that stem from performed actions, and my body in performance. Part-sculptural objects, video and sound act as performance documents that expand on notions of the ‘live’ encounter. Interest lies in how we get to objects: process in variance to product or closure. And the question of how the body/s of the audience becomes participatory is at the forefront of these operations. From this viewpoint the exegesis aims to broaden existing scholarship on performativity, liveness and the part-sculptural object, exploring the manners in which various cultural practices act to animate objects. I reconsider the Euro-American genealogies of performance/body art (Bruce Nauman, Lygia Clark, Ann Hamilton et al.) in relationship to contemporary art practices in Australia and New Zealand (Alicia Frankvich, Carolyn Eskdale et al.) through the lens of late 19th-and early 20th-century writing on sympathetic magical action. A legacy of cultural anthropology dealing with magic (that was privileged in establishing grounding aspects of structural linguistics) circulates around the British anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah whose thinking on persuasive analogy in ritual performance draws a crucial link between J. L. Austin’s performative utterance and James George Frazer’s notion of sympathetic magic. From such a perspective the operations of sympathetic mimesis—involving ambivalent similitude and contagion—are discussed in terms of performative and persuasive illocutionary force. This offers another model for articulating an authentic performative document as an encounter with the ‘live.’ A phenomenological method of enquiry, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm,—along with notions of mimetic incongruence—crucially tease out relationships between the live and the performance document and aim at resisting subject/object dichotomies whereby concepts of embodiment and indeterminate play between artist, objects and audiences are activated. Applied to contemporary debates on performance and ‘objects out of action,’ part objects and images are transformed as partial ‘subjects’: metonymically part of larger wholes as trace (substitution) and contagious contact (liveness). What is lacking in the operations of sympathetic mimesis is precisely what ‘draws out’ the body/s of the audience as they desire closure in object and duration. As these questions turn on the body of the artist/self and the audience/participant in performative installation practice, I offer an analysis of bodies in ritual exchange (donor/donee); subjects and objects as transformers: relations of force over form—liminal, reversible and redolent of lack—that emphasise encounter in difference to recognition. This is to speak of, in the words of Lygia Clark: “Tactile shocks to liberate the body.”

L’achat d’occasion est un phénomène de consommation en plein essor. Alors que les motivations du consommateur à acheter d’occasion ont suscité de nombreuses recherches, les freins sont rarement étudiés, notamment dans le contexte de l’achat en ligne. Pourtant, une meilleure compréhension de ces freins présente des enjeux aussi bien économiques qu’environnementaux ou sociétaux. Dans ce travail, nous nous intéressons aux freins relatifs à la perception d’une contagion physique ou symbolique des produits d’occasion. En effet, ces freins – qui sont soulignés dans la littérature sur l’achat hors ligne – sont remis en question par le contexte spécifique de l’achat sur Internet. Nous mobilisons ainsi la théorie des lois de la magie sympathique pour étudier dans quelle mesure la loi de contagion et la loi de similitude peuvent influencer l’achat d’un produit d’occasion en ligne. Cette thèse repose sur un design expérimental comportant trois études empiriques. Les résultats obtenus permettent d’identifier des déterminants situationnels et individuels de la contagion physique ou symbolique des produits d’occasion vendus en ligne et d’étudier leur influence négative sur l’intention d’achat. Contrairement à l’achat hors ligne, nous montrons que la contagion physique repose alors sur un mécanisme cognitif. De plus, les résultats indiquent que la loi de similitude permet de limiter les effets de la contagion. En conclusion, cette recherche permet de proposer plusieurs solutions pour améliorer la vente des produits d’occasion en ligne. / Secondhand shopping is a growing phenomenon. While secondhand shopping motivations received a lot of attention in marketing literature, consumer reluctance to shop secondhand remains under-Researched, especially in an online context. Yet, the stakes in better understanding this reluctance are not only economic, but also environmental and societal. In this research, we focus on consumer reluctance that is related to the perception of a physical or symbolic contagion of secondhand products. Indeed, while this reluctance is highlighted in literature on secondhand shopping offline, its role is questioned in an online context. Hence, we use the theoretical framework of the laws of sympathetic magic to study to what extent the contagion or similarity laws influence the intention to shop secondhand online. We use an experimental design made of three empirical studies. Results enable us to identify several situational and individual antecedents of the physical or symbolic contagion associated to a secondhand product sold online, and to study how contagion negatively influences the intention to purchase. In opposite to offline shopping, we show that physical contagion relies on a cognitive mechanism. Moreover, results show that the similarity law can reduce the effects of contagion. To conclude with, this research suggests various solutions to improve the sales of secondhand products online.