Embodied making and viewing are framed as somatic extensions—via tools, materials, and perceptual experiments—where touch, anticipation, and mirror-neuronal empathy dissolve the boundary between self and world, producing a “rheologic” subjectivity that is molten, relational, and temporally unstable. Against this sensorium, the text critiques the visual art institution’s class-coded jargon and extractive treatment of live bodies, arguing for dance’s epistemic autonomy and a language adequate to performance’s liveness, labor, and eroticized power dynamics rather than museum-sanctioned “performative” abstraction.

Tracks a passage from institutionally framed “socially engaged art” (participation, dialogue, prefiguration) to Occupy Wall Street as an evental rupture where those aesthetic-political desires are realized in lived occupation, thereby both fulfilling and terminating art’s compensatory role as a surrogate for absent movements. Stages a theoretical contest—Bishop’s autonomy/agonism and suspicion of instrumentalized participation versus Holmes’s movement-embedded art—through concepts of spectacle vs direct democracy, camp/exception vs communization, and the refunctioning of public-space iconography into infrastructures of collective life and antagonism.