Cara Tolmie's Postmodern Performance Art Examined in Afterall Essay

John Douglas Millar's essay 'Chinese Whispers' for Afterall analyzes Cara Tolmie's performance work as a case study for moving beyond ironic postmodern subjectivity. Tolmie's 2010 performance 'The End Is a Tumultuous Noise' responded to Meredith Monk's 16mm films, using a looping pedal and microphone to layer baroque vocal melodies while walking in a circle. Her 2011 Frieze Art Fair performance 'Myriad Mouth Line' consisted of five theatrical frames that sequentially layered meaning while resisting homogenous interpretation, performed at the edge of the fair in Regent's Park. Her solo show 'Read Thou Art, and Read Thou Shalt Remain' at Dundee Contemporary Arts in May 2011 featured a 21-minute mini-opera derived from Death Valley footage, exploring how knowledge changes through representation. Millar contextualizes Tolmie within debates on postmodernism, referencing philosophers Simon Critchley and Fredric Jameson, writers David Foster Wallace and Tom McCarthy, musicians John Maus and Ariel Pink, and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics and altermodernism. The essay argues Tolmie's work seeks a third space outside knowing/not knowing, a secular faith that structures the artwork itself.