Even if something is always lost on the way, performance offers the possibility of repeating the ‘physical act of drawing words,’ the opportunity of an endless rewriting with one’s voice and one’s body.

Yet, in the case of Patti Smith, the importance and relevance of the voice was not obvious from the start, and appears as an object of personal discovery rather than as a natural gift she would always have been aware of

The body becomes the meeting ground of language and expression.

Because performance is neither writing nor reading, rhythm and words seem to be no longer determined by those material limits Patti Smith had always been so eager to transgress. (‘rhythms that ran off the page into the plaster’).

‘I wanted to infuse the written word with the immediacy and frontal attack of rock and roll’ (Smith,

Just Kids

, 180).

‘Find[ing] [her] beat’ implied this necessary displacement from the sheet of paper and the drawing, meaning spatial limitation and immobility, to linguistic composition producing ‘rhythms’ themselves calling for performance.

When the artist is performing a song, the text as visible object disappears and the singer tries to retain his/her own work of art within his/her body, while offering it to the audience at the same time. The body is no longer drawing something which falls out of itself or reading from an external material. In performance, the body becomes... See more