Much of the power of intervention art lies in its unexpectedness. When an artist inserts themselves or their art somewhere that they don’t belong, there must be an element of surprise in their work in order to disrupt the situation, which can dictate how impactful the work is. While mass communication through the internet and social media has greatly increased the scale and possibilities of intervention art, it has also made interventions more commonplace and known to the public. While artists can still find new ways to surprise their audience through creative disruptions, the bar for the unexpectedness of intervention art is higher than ever.
I propose the concept of “outerventions” as a strategy that retains the unexpectedness of intervention art. Rather than inserting their work into a situation where they aren’t expected, artists performing an outervention remove themselves or their art from a situation where their presence is expected, subverting the audience’s expectations with a surprise exit. This strategy is particularly well-suited for conveying themes such as loss, abandonment, isolation, and alienation. While some artists have performed works that could be considered outerventions, this form of intervention is less utilized than the typical “additive” format, making this “subtractive” performance more novel to an audience aware of typical intervention art. I came up with three examples of outerventions to display how they can be put in action with various performer group sizes: Classroom Outervention, Prudential Outervention (which can be performed as a game), and Protest Outervention. More information about these outerventions can be found in the linked presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1b6y70QwyS0RQESU1uMkB95zJwJ84RiC2OYfBow8tWmE/edit?usp=sharing
I wasn’t inspired by any specific art piece, but instead the common threads that I find in a lot of intervention-like viral videos that appear on my social media feed, where creators interrupt situations for laughs. So much of modern life is influenced by an algorithm-driven media ecosystem that incentivizes acts that draw attention to its subject. Because of this, I believe that artists attempting to remove attention from themselves while they already hold the attention of an audience can result in performances with greater potential for staying in that audience’s minds. This creates a sort of paradox where the outervention artist’s grasp of their audience’s attention is at its peak during and after the performance’s end and the subsequent disestablishment of the performer-audience relationship: in other words, outervention art grabs attention when the art is no longer perceptible.
