Performance studies in Canada

Author(s) Schweitzer, Marlis; Levin, Laura; Schweitzer,

Marlis; Levin, Laura

Imprint McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017

Extent 1 online resource (xv, 448 pages)

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 9

On Political Performance Art and

Rob Fordian Performatives

l au r a l ev i n

In This Great City, something terrible is happening. Daily, the news is filled with the
scandals, criminal associations and bigotry of the city’s right-wing Mayor. Not only
is there no way to remove him from office, but all signs point to his re-election
for another term. Within City Hall, all semblance of reasonable discourse and
progress has vanished … We meet a small group of left-wing activists who
decide to take matters into their own hands. They agree to play dirty in order to
rid the city of its problem Mayor once and for all. But will that cure the city?
–Studio 180 Theatre, description of Paul Dunn’s This Great City1

The epigraph above provides a brief but gripping description of a play

currently in development in Toronto. Presented as a staged reading in
November 2015, in a works-in-progress series organized by Toronto
theatre company Studio 180, the first iteration of This Great City pro-
mised a fantasy return to one of the most riveting periods in the history
of Canadian municipal politics: the “terrible” and “[un]reasonable”
reign of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (2010–14).2 While the “Mayor”
remains unnamed in Studio 180’s tantalizing marketing blurb, those
familiar with the allegations of criminality that swirled around Ford,
such as his association with known drug dealers and gang members,
will not find it hard to see the character’s resemblance.
Dunn’s work-in-progress presented the Mayor as an evil character in
a civic drama of epic proportions – a drama shaped by salacious jour-
nalism and duels between the “bigots” of the right and “activists” of the
left.3 In this respect, it epitomizes the fascination that Ford’s political
career has held for Canadians, and international bystanders, as a site of
political spectacle – a fascination expressed in thousands of news re-
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 237

ports and social media posts, and in dozens of artistic representations,

from plays to films to installations to musical compositions. At the same
time, it reveals how these treatments of Ford often rely on a particular
kind of dramaturgy, on oppositions of good guy and bad guy, moder-
ate and extremist, a city plagued and a city redeemed – even if this melo-
dramatic framing, as in Dunn’s play, sometimes unravels through more
rigorous critical reflection.
My chapter joins the formidable assemblage of puzzlings through,
meditations on, and critical responses to Ford that have followed his
rise to power as a brash-but-folksy conservative candidate, elected as
mayor in 2010 primarily by voters in Toronto’s suburbs.4 Journalistic re-
porting on Ford has unveiled every gory detail of the many scandals in
which he was embroiled during his time in office. These accounts take
up, on one end of the spectrum, the micro-blunders – like that time Ford
got a ticket for jaywalking in bc, or when he fearfully called 911 after
actor Mary Walsh, from the comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes,
visited him in character at his home. At the other end, they engage the
more politically devastating scandals: Ford’s temporary removal (and
later reinstatement) as mayor for allegedly violating city conflict of in-
terest laws, the transfer of several of his powers to the deputy mayor by
a demoralized and distrustful city council, and most shockingly, his un-
intentional performance in the now-infamous cellphone video, which
shows a very un-mayoral Ford smoking crack (the video was released
to the public in August 2016). This is not to be confused with the other
cellphone videos of Ford speaking in a Jamaican patois, shouting at an
imaginary opponent that he will “kill that fucking guy,”5 drunkenly
touring a St Patrick’s Day festival … The limited space in this chapter
doesn’t allow me to offer a full performance history, but a quick Google
search will produce a much longer and equally sensational list of scan-
dals, many appearing in “timelines” that present Ford’s political career
as a theatrical serial.6 Ford’s re-election campaign ended abruptly in
September 2014 following the unfortunate news of a cancer diagnosis,
a development that forced him to withdraw from the mayoral race at
the eleventh hour and send in his brother Doug to run in his place. Al-
though it seemed the saga would continue with Ford’s re-election as city
councillor representing Etobicoke North, and vows to run again in the
2018 mayoral election, Ford died on 22 March 2016. True to his spec-
tacle-filled career, he lay in repose in City Hall for public visitation for
two days prior to his funeral, with thousands of mourners pouring in for
a final viewing.
238 Laura Levin

By the end of his term as mayor, so much had been written about
Ford that it spawned a perpetually performed, some would say feigned,
moralistic exhaustion with the coverage. US monologist Mike Daisey
made this point in Dreaming of Rob Ford, a show presented by Toronto’s
Crow’s Theatre in its 2014 East End Crawl. In a quip Michel Foucault
might have appreciated,7 Daisey indicts the audience for showing up:
“You are the people who haven’t had enough. In fact you may have even
told yourselves that you have had enough. Most of your culture is doing
that; in fact that’s the new hot thing to do, to talk endlessly about how
we have heard quite enough about Rob Ford … I just think I’m going
to have to write another op-ed [about it].”8 Embracing the spirit of the
site-specific festival in which it was produced, Daisey implicates spec-
tators in this “We Other Torontonians” argument while glaring down
at them from the stage of Gerrard Street East’s Big Picture Cinema: for-
merly a porn theatre, later devoted to extravagant Bollywood films, and
recently rechristened an indie space for art and “schlock.”9
Ford’s reign was, much like this venue, characterized by the non-
stop spectacle of overexposure; more accurately, it attracted the kind of
voyeuristic interest communications consultant Gerry Nicholls describes
as “watching a train wreck take place aboard the Titanic.”10 Elsewhere,
I’ve talked about the lessons that performance theorists might learn
from the Rob Ford show – the timely questions it raised about the ero-
sion of boundaries between public and private and the demand for self-
exposure not only before a hungry press but also on the micro-stages of
social media.11
In this chapter, I shift gears and explore a different set of questions
that might interest performance studies scholars. Specifically, I want to
think through the public’s characterization of Ford as both witting and
unwitting “performance artist” – a label applied quite frequently to
Ford as one of Canada’s more eccentric politicians. As Sara Brady
claims, “We live in a mediatized era in which politicians are performers,
and the best one wins: the one who can raise the most money, and per-
suade enough voters where reality lies … Politicians are now only worth
their weight in performance.”12 Indeed some cultural theorists go so far
as to imply that performance is the bad thing that happened to politics
after 9/11. While sometimes situated within a longer history of spec-
tacles staged to justify US foreign policy after the Second World War,
the intensification of performance strategies after 9/11 is often closely
aligned with the era in which the Bush administration tightly controlled
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 239

the media and used it to stage obfuscating spectacles of US heroism and

military might. This perspective appears not only in writing about the
political arena over the last two decades,13 but also in documentary film.
Take, for example, the imagery that composes the antitheatrical rhetoric
of US director Michael Moore’s scathing 2004 documentary Fahrenheit
9/11.14 Moore’s film presents us with shot after shot of corrupt govern-
ment officials having their hair and makeup done for press briefings,
drawing on the language of performance to equate the Bush adminis-
tration with two-faced politics and the criminal masking of capitalist,
often imperialist, motives.
In what follows, I join Brady and other performance studies schol-
ars who have examined the complex entanglements of performance and
politics, but also who, through their analysis of a variety of cultural and
historical contexts, reveal that the conjoining of theatre and politics is
hardly new. Of particular importance is Diana Taylor’s work on the self-
stagings of political leaders and counter-performances they have inspired
across the Americas (including in Indigenous communities preceding and
following colonial contact).15 This body of scholarship also includes
work on the performative tactics of specific political figures – by Timo-
thy Raphael (on Ronald Reagan), Jason L. Mast (on Bill Clinton),
Catherine Schuler (on Vladimir Putin), Tavia Nyong’o and Jeffrey
Alexander (on Barack Obama)16 – as well as detailed accounts of activist
tactics responding to political elections by Larry Bogad, Amber Day, and
E.J. Westlake.17 In a Canadian context, much of the work on perfor-
mance and political culture has explored the fashioning of national iden-
tity through the figure of the politician – from Anton Wagner’s work on
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s influence on arts and
cultural policy, to Alan Filewod’s writing on the “wannabe” aristocratic
theatricality of Governor General Vincent Massey, to the recent issue of
Canadian Theatre Review (co-edited by Barry Freeman and myself), in
which authors like Kimberley McLeod take up antics of parodic groups
like the Canada Party running for election in the United States.18
Building on these discussions, I want to ask what it might mean to
read politicians not simply as performers, but also, and more specifi-
cally, as “performance artists.” The performance art label no doubt still
converses with questions about the construction of self in everyday life;
nevertheless it pivots us in the direction of something rather more genre-
specific, something that allows us to think with more formal precision
about the collapse of distinctions between theatre and politics in an
240 Laura Levin

image-hungry and networked landscape, as well as the uses to which

performance may be put in politically divisive local contexts. I am par-
ticularly intrigued by the performance art designation, as I suspect fo-
cusing on that term might yield a different set of insights into how
“performance” circulates in contemporary Canadian political culture,
both as an image of politics-gone-wrong and as a form of cultural cap-
ital manipulated by public figures.
For the purpose of this chapter I refer to this circulation and cultural
inscription as the “Fordian performative.” Here I am influenced by
Amelia Jones’s19 reading of the performance artist’s actions (linguistic ut-
terances and bodily expressions) not as traces of the creative impulses,
intentions, or psychic life of a single individual. Rather, they are “per-
formative,” in J.L. Austin’s sense of the term, as they re-enact previous
political performances – operating within larger fields of citationality
and participating in the creation and maintenance of specific social re-
alities.20 So too, I emphasize the importance of audience reception in
the uptake of Ford’s performances, pointing to the ways in which per-
formative utterances derive their meaning from the various publics (cit-
izens, political commentators, art critics) who interpret them, who shape
their meaning and political force. In this sense, by using the term For-
dian performative I offer a different take on Ford as performance art
“genius.” While his actions may seem utterly distinctive and idiosyn-
cratic, they are not his alone.

The Politician as Performance Artist

So why do we care about performance? Because our political leaders do.

They are ever more radical performers.
–Diana Taylor21

Let me begin by offering some local context for this particular intertwin-
ing of the political and the performative. The Rob Ford-as-performance
artist trope has shown up in at least two places. Most directly, it appears
in images of Ford in journalistic media, depictions that generally invoke
the term performance artist to describe his audacious behaviour. In
reflecting on Ford’s ability to unnerve reporters with wacky retorts like
“I wasn’t lying. You didn’t ask the right questions” – a defence Ford
presented when he finally admitted that he did in fact smoke crack –
Michael Stewart of rabble.ca writes, “For the better part of Rob Ford’s
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 241

incredible tenure, I often joked that Toronto had secretly replaced its
Chief Executive with history’s greatest performance artist.”22 An even
spicier article in Vice begins, “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, performance
art genius and Canada’s greatest embarrassment, knows a lot of things.
He knows how to drink like a motherfucker, supposedly downing half
a 40-ounce bottle of vodka before 9 pm during a legendary bender last
Saint Patrick’s Day that ended with the 320-pound mayor charging a
dance floor with a bellyful of poutine and (allegedly) a nose full of
cocaine.”23 Other journalists frame Ford as performance artist by at-
tempting to situate him within performance art lineages. “Rob Ford
Has Entered Full Andy Kaufman Mode,” Doktor Zoom writes. “… If
Toronto can’t fire him, they may just install him in a permanent perfor-
mance space.”24
In many of these instances, the application of “artspeak” to politics
resembles what Julia Halperin sees as the trend of attaching the label
performance artist to “celebrities with outrageous public personas from
Lady Gaga to Charlie Sheen.”25 When used in relation to celebrity-
politicians like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Donald Trump, the
term is intended to ridicule public figures that make unseemly specta-
cles of themselves. New Republic writer Peter Lawler calls Palin a
“shameless” performance artist, in order to emphasize her attention-
seeking behaviour: “It’s become clearer and clearer, of course, that she’s
been going the really-rich-and-famous-performance-artist route. Who
could take either the Reality Show or all that shameless ‘look-at-me’
Twittering seriously? She’s narrowed the distance between herself
and Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher way too much
to be a credible presidential candidate … To be fair, compared to, say,
Charlie or Britney, she’s a very disciplined performance artist, and only
a fool couldn’t see how savvy she is at media manipulation.”26 In these
descriptions, politicians become performance artists when they exceed
expectations of their professional role, moving beyond the genre
boundaries of “mere political theatre.”27 There is, however, a crucial
difference between the appearance of the term performance artist in
the realm of pop culture celebrity and in the sphere of politics. As
Halperin notes, while celebrities are often elevated in their association
with the term into brilliant conceptual artists, “when applied to politi-
cians, it is little more than a dismissal.”28 This would seem to be the
case with Ford, for whom the label performance artist is typically only
one step away from other terms like embarrassment, circus, clown, or
sideshow act.29
242 Laura Levin

Further, the application of artspeak to politics may signal something

of a mini-crisis in journalistic writing, a crisis brought about, in part, by
Ford’s time in the mayor’s office. It was not uncommon to see journal-
ists writing metacritical articles or organizing professional discussions
about how to write about someone like Ford,30 a politician whose in-
terface with the media involved outlandish public stunts, highly defen-
sive (and therefore uncommonly dramatic) press conferences, and
recorded performances in the form of surreptitiously captured cellphone
videos. The term performance artist appears in the news at the moment
when an uncertainty arises about the boundaries between the staged
and the real. It also appears when journalists seem unsure about what
should be reported about a public figure. Should an objective recount-
ing of Ford’s actions be presented or a more subjective, aesthetic inter-
pretation? In this way, the appeal to “performance art” suggests an
awkward reskilling of the journalist, marking a tension the Ford con-
troversies opened up between traditional journalistic reporting and what
we might otherwise call “performance criticism” – a genre of writing in
which a cultural event is analyzed primarily as a theatrical staging and
requires specialized artistic language and technical know-how.31
A second area where the image of Ford-as-performance artist circu-
lates is in the world of arts and entertainment, where artists have embraced
Ford with a special kind of vigour, inviting him into the performance art
fold. Consider the adoption of Ford as comedy “act” on the US talk show
circuit, where hosts like Jimmy Kimmel invited Ford to perform his buf-
foonery before a tv audience, even treating Ford, on air, to video replays
of his own cloddish flubs (e.g., Ford walking face-first into a CityNews
camera). Consider also the appearance of Ford as performer in a grow-
ing canon of artistic works, a canon that has become so large that it has
spawned articles like Steve Kupferman’s “Eight Reasons Not to Write An-
other Play about Rob Ford” – another example of the moralistic ex-
haustion with Ford coverage.32 This popular performance genre includes
several satirical Rob Ford operas, musicals, and plays like (the appropri-
ately named) Rob Ford: The Musical by Brett McCaig, Adam Seelig’s Ubu
Mayor, Bob Dundas’s Macford, A Tragical Historie of York 2010–2014,
and Paul Dunn’s This Great City, among many others.33 They also include
numerous performance art works like Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Allega-
tions, a re-enactment of the Ford crack-smoking video by Darren O’Don-
nell and Toronto teens; and the site-specific RoFo Bus Tour by Cloven Path
Ministries, a mock-Satanist performance art troupe that toured specta-
tors to infamous sites in the Ford saga, like the alleged crack house. And,
Figure 9.1
Toronto mayor Rob Ford giving away his candy at the Toronto Santa Claus
Parade, 21 November 2010. Ford marched against the wishes of parade board
members concerned about protests, following his admission that he had smoked
crack cocaine.

again, we have Mike Daisey’s monologue on Ford, an extended medita-

tion on the pleasure that polite Canadians derive from what he calls Ford’s
“political performance art.”34
Intriguingly, many of these works participate in performance art’s
re-enactment subgenre, as they mimetically pay homage to (or, in Dunn’s
fantasy, put a stop to) Ford’s past performances. Daisey’s first act when
he arrives in Toronto, in the vein of, say, a re-performance of a classic
Vito Acconci or Marina Abramović piece, is to make pilgrimage to
Toronto’s west end to, well, smoke crack – to have the full Ford expe-
rience. It is also worth mentioning that Daisey’s re-enactment of Ford’s
actions, and working through of the media frenzy surrounding them,
implicitly functions as a re-enactment of his own public disgrace fol-
lowing the revelation in 2012 that he fabricated personal and factual
information in The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, his hit show about
globalization and its human costs. This tradition was invoked once again
when Toronto rapper Drake released his 2015 music video for “En-
ergy,” a song about how exhausting it is to manage several-million-
dollar mortgages, and how gruelling it is to be a superstar when, as
244 Laura Levin

media analyst Steve Tilly puts it (unsympathetically), “everyone want[s]

a piece of you – our hearts bleed for him.”35 In the video, Drake appears
briefly as Ford and recreates the much-circulated photo taken of the
mayor outside the Etobicoke home where the crack video was shot. Here,
as in Daisey’s performance, we see an artist identifying with, and thereby
solidifying the image of, Ford as a besieged and infamous performer.
Now it certainly can be argued that, in these journalistic and artis-
tic engagements with Ford, the language of performance art emerges as
metaphor, as funny but ultimately loose talk about a political figure who
has become a public curiosity. But many of these assignations have the
ring of truth; they resonate. So I want to go further and ask what it
might mean to take these claims seriously and read Rob Ford, and by
extension other politicians, as performance artists. What might an un-
derstanding of Ford as performance artist tell us about contemporary
political culture? And, conversely, what might it tell us about percep-
tions of performance art, a form that scholars often associate with the
resistant aesthetics of the political left?
The label performance art, to begin with, often allows the press to
transport Ford to the margins, to present him as an irrational pres-
ence in an otherwise rational political arena. Taking seriously Ford as
performance artist would reverse this gaze and turn it back on the
sphere of politics itself. The performance artist could then be viewed
as an insider, as someone who fully embodies the norms of a given
system – pushing them to their extremes to reveal something about
that system’s logic and form. If we try this experiment with Ford, what
does it reveal?
First, it exposes how politics often depends upon a studied antithe-
atricality, a disavowal of politics as performance. Evoking a long his-
tory of antitheatrical discourse, terms like performance art are roused
to signal political disorder. “Good riddance to the Ford circus,” re-
porter Tom Godfrey writes. “Hopefully, this year residents will get
more of the services we pay for and none of the theatre and grand-
standing we have had in the past.”36 This narrative of the post-Ford
era as a post-theatre era reinforces the belief that “real” politicians are
decidedly not performers, and it supports sociologist Jeffrey Alexan-
der’s claim that, “because political performance succeeds only when it
seems natural, it must not betray its own construction.”37 However
central to a politician’s life, performance must be carefully repressed for
politics to read as politics.
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 245

Not surprisingly, keeping performance at bay also requires its own

performance of antitheatrical normalcy. I think here immediately of
equally histrionic performances of “boringness” that Ford’s successor
and current Toronto mayor John Tory staged to assure the public that
he was restoring political civility to the city. Playing on the idea that ef-
fective politics is un-theatrical politics, he held up “boredom as an ideal”
of his administration – an ideal, it would seem, that required constant
staging in the press. “If anybody said city hall was boring but produc-
tive – better results, but boring – I would take that as a major compli-
ment … I don’t look at this as show business,” he boasted to the National
Post.38 The same sound bite appears in the Sun: “It will be more likely
under the ‘B’ for boring (category) than under the ‘B’ for bizarre in the
case of my office and even my administration.”39 When Jimmy Kimmel
invites Tory to appear on his show after getting elected, Tory politely
declines. Why? “Because I’m too boring,” he says. “I’m not in show busi-
ness. I’m in the business of getting results for people and trying to build
our reputation up.”40 Tory’s efforts at “workmanlike dullness”41 form
part of a larger campaign of hyper-efficiency and acceleration – his seiz-
ing of every opportunity to perform impatience at the pace at which
things proceed at city hall (as Marcus Gee puts it, Tory is constantly
“egging on” city officials to “move faster”),42 and his clever use of the
city streets as stages, putting in motion highly visible procedures to
speed up traffic for commuters. Upon taking office, he initiated a mas-
sive crackdown against vehicles parked illegally during rush hour, an ac-
tion designed to show a mayor at work, a mayor “getting results.” In
other words, Tory has actively performed a getting down to business as
a retort to the show business that preceded him.
Tory’s antitheatrical performances may, in a different sense, allow
him to exude the virtuosic authenticity that is normally demanded of
politicians – a naturalness and down-to-earth-ness established, Alexan-
der believes, through a convincing “fusing” of politician and public.43
This insight might help us, in turn, to fuse Tory’s performances of ev-
erydayness and normalcy with Ford’s attempts to inhabit the figure of
the everyman, a regular guy with whom the common folk can relate.
This has been something of a problem for Tory and Ford, who both
come from extremely wealthy backgrounds (children of millionaire cor-
porate executives), and who have, at various points in their careers,
staged performances aimed at narrowing the perceived gap between
their privilege and that of their (largely) less-privileged constituents.44
246 Laura Levin

Take, for example, the public weigh-ins Ford staged with his brother
(and fellow city politician) Doug as part of the “Cut the Waist Chal-
lenge,” where he invited the public to share his prosaic struggles with
losing weight. Here, the Ford brothers weighed themselves each week on
a giant scale located outside the mayor’s office, an action initially ac-
companied by invitations to the public to join them in weekend exercise
walks. (By some cosmically weird coincidence, and surely one that re-
veals more continuity between Tory and Ford than they would admit,
Ford launched this campaign with Tory – then a popular talk radio per-
sonality “recovering” from crushing failure in provincial politics – pre-
siding as mc).45 What set the weigh-ins apart from Tory’s staging of dull
daily routine is Ford’s use of his own body as stage, an act that exposes
politics, more overtly, as “symbolic action.”46 Recalling traditions of
body art, Ford presents his body in what Rebecca Schneider calls an
“explicit” way, an explicitness designed to “explicate” a larger set of
social ideas.47 Cutting his own waist visualizes the waste to be cut from
the city budget: the “gravy train” would stop and end with his own
body.48 Interestingly, Ford’s body is also a site he manipulated to down-
play his class status, routinely wearing rumpled jackets and tracksuits
to council to promote his image as a “man-of-the-people.”49
To call Ford’s actions political performance art is to view public acts
like the weigh-ins not as transgressions of Canadian political conven-
tions but as actualizations of their hidden theatrical norms. Are Ford’s
stunts really all that different from some of the over-the-top stagings that
politicians like Stephen Harper have treated us to in recent years? I’m
thinking here, for instance, of Harper’s rather awkward insistence that
a 2011 interview with cbc’s Peter Mansbridge be staged in a patriotic,
masculinizing empty hockey rink.50 Much like the weigh-ins that used
the bodies of the Fords to make cost-cutting seem both healthy and
manly (and ultimately obscure the larger effects of cutting social ser-
vices), so too the use of the hockey arena – along with Harper’s Canada-
emblazoned jacket – endowed the prime minister with the aura of
masculine competitiveness and nationalist strength immediately prior to
the 2011 election. Political performance art, in this sense, outs what is
always already present in the scenography of politics: the careful stag-
ing of the politician’s body in relation to an identity-shaping backdrop
– a large scale, an empty hockey area, or in Tory’s case, an empty curb
lane at rush hour. It literalizes, often through overdoing the conventional
rituals of political camouflage, the rhetorical gymnastics, visual and lin-
guistic, on which the twin genre of political “theatre” depends.
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 247

Alex Halperin of Salon.com makes a similar observation, albeit in

passing, when reporting on Ford’s charming defence to the accusation
that he asked a female staffer to “eat [her] pussy”; actually, he pro-
claimed publicly, “I have more than enough to eat at home.” In response,
Halperin’s byline reads, “The Toronto mayor’s behaviour suggests a per-
formance artist exploring the limits of political discourse.”51 If, in ef-
fect, politicians regularly ward off tabloids by cloaking themselves in the
rhetoric of family bliss, Ford invokes the same speech convention with-
out the elision of sexuality that we would normally expect to accom-
pany this nod to the supportive wife. His performance art emerges from
what J.L. Austin calls an “unhappy” performative: an utterance that fails
to “do something” as the requisite linguistic or social conditions have
not been met.52
These performative misfires are nowhere more evident than in the
speech act Ford most frequently performed: the apology. Ford said “I’m
sorry” again and again and again from 2010 to 2014 – a speech act that,
through its many iterations, illuminated a larger repertoire of political
apologies. These range from the contrite acceptance of responsibility
apology (“I used unforgivable language, and I apologize”),53 to the half-
assed, vaguely racist apology (“Asian people do work very hard, and
are very, very aggressive. If I have offended anyone in the Asian com-
munity, I will proudly retract my statements”),54 to the everyman apol-
ogy (“Friends – I’m the first one to admit: I am not perfect. I have made
mistakes”).55 And let’s not forget the many times Ford interrupted him-
self – channelling the Brechtian style of performance artist Karen Fin-
ley – and asked for direction on how to make his performatives more
or less “happy”: “How about, ‘I am so sorry.’ Is that as good as ‘I apol-
ogize’? Or, ‘So sorry?’ Which one do you want, Madam Speaker? Like,
‘Super, super, super, super, super, super, super sorry?’”56
In this last instance, an apology delivered at the request of city coun-
cil, Ford intimates a keen, if exasperated understanding of the context
of the speech act’s reception: an audience that had, by 2013, already
turned on their mayor, an audience poised to reject the truthfulness of
his words and predisposed to hearing them as boorish and ill-fitting
(cancelling out their performative force). To treat this apology and other
Fordian performatives as political performance art is thus to read them
as instances in which the speaker shows a hyper-awareness of the the-
atrical conventions that govern political speech, in this case the implicit
contract between Canadian politicians that they will speak profession-
ally and behave courteously (the facile stereotype of the polite, always
248 Laura Levin

apologizing Canadian comes to mind). At the same, it would seem to de-

mand some element of “infelicity” in the carrying out expected politi-
cal procedure – as Austin wryly puts it, some “muff” in the “execution
of the ritual with more or less dire consequences.”57

Locating Ford within Genealogies of Performance Art

Hilary Clinton reminisces about being “dead broke,” but never feared the home-
lessness that dead broke entails. Rob Ford hates elites at city hall, but is one.
Sarah Palin is a maverick who ran for vice president of the most powerful
bureaucracy on earth … [We] must know which way those who give us our
performance cues tilt, never more so when the performances we bear witness
to are so skillfully enacted that we forget we’re watching insiders masquerading
as outsiders, or vice versa.
–Shannon Gormley58

I don’t know about Andy Kaufman, but I think Chris Farley is alive … and he’s
masquerading as an over-the-top mayor character named “Rob Ford.”
–Curt Anderson59

Of course, an objection one could raise to the reading of Ford as per-

formance artist is that he is not always aware of the conceptual bril-
liance of his actions. Wouldn’t it be better to view him as an involuntary
performance artist? If we say yes, the next step might be to distinguish
him from a long line of self-professed performance artists who have run
for public office. Bogad has called this “electoral guerrilla theatre,”
which he defines as the act of “running for public office as a creative
prank – not to win the election, but to get attention for a radical critique
of policy or to sabotage the campaign of a particularly heinous candi-
date.”60 In Canada, this guerrilla practice has a rich history, one that
includes artists like Vincent Trasov, aka Mr Peanut, who ran an absurd
campaign for mayor of Vancouver in 1974, appearing as a tap-dancing
peanut to show that politics is art: “P for Performance, E for Elegance,
A for Art, N for Nonsense, U for Uniqueness and T for Talent.”61 And
then there are the Hummer Sisters, the trio of Janet Burke, Jennifer
Dean, and Deanne Taylor who jointly ran for mayor of Toronto in
1982, adopting strategies of video art and political cabaret, along with
the slogan “This is no job for politicians.” Hilariously, both Mr Peanut
and the Hummer Sisters ran against “real” politicians named Art (Art
 Figure 9.2
Campaign poster Hummer for Mayor, 1982.
Left to right: Jenny Dean, Deanne Taylor,
and Janet Burke.

Phillips and Art Eggleton), in what the Hummers dubbed an “art ver-
sus Art” campaign.62 In fact, the Hummer Sisters’ bid for the mayor’s of-
fice was so compelling that they placed second in the election, winning
12,000 votes.
This history of campaigning performance artists can be traced to the
present and includes more recent interventions by people like Chris Lloyd,
a man who ran as the Conservative candidate in Justin Trudeau’s riding
of Papineau. He would have faced off against the Liberal leader in fall
2015 had he not been exposed, just a few months before the election,
as a performance artist who had infiltrated the party. In enthusiastically
parroting party talking points on social media and staging selfies with
bigwig politicians at Tory events (e.g., beaming proudly in a thumbs-up
shot with Harper), Lloyd exposed the rites of blending in through which
electoral candidates gain political capital, along with the inner workings
of “the Conservatives’ public relations machine.”63
250 Laura Levin

Given this history of creative campaigning – and the antics of artists

like Lloyd, which seem at once parodic and utterly serious – it is not
hard to see why commentators joked that Ford might actually be a per-
formance art prankster or genius comedian masquerading as a politi-
cian (see epigraph above).64 While it is important to mark the differences
between Ford and his guerrilla doppelgängers, I still think it is much
more useful to place Ford within a performance art lineage, for at least
three reasons. First, performance art might in fact be understood as the
dominant mode of performance demanded by municipal politics.65 It is
not unusual to see a wide range of performance strategies deployed in
mayoral races in Canada. Unlike would-be mps, mayoral candidates can-
not cloak themselves in the recognizable branding of larger political par-
ties (New Democrat, Liberal, Conservative, etc.). As a result, they must
deploy exceptionally memorable and creative techniques to build their
own political brands and stand out from a larger throng of candidates;
indeed one thing that distinguishes mayoral races is that the playing field
is much more expansive and open to independent candidates from all
areas of civic life. It is not surprising, then, that in the 2010 and 2014
elections, we find Rob Ford running against several card-carrying pro-
fessional performance artists (e.g., queer performance artist Keith Cole
and Sketchy the Clown [David McKay]), “obscure” candidates running
on highly performative platforms (e.g., dominatrix Carlie Ritch, aka
Mizz Barbie Bitch, who promised to whip city hall into shape),66 and
mock candidates campaigning through satirical tweets (e.g., the Rebel
Mayor by Spacing Magazine editor Shawn Micallef).
Second, placing Ford within a performance art lineage reminds us that
performance art is a form especially sensitive to performance’s inherent
contingency, aware that its intelligibility as art is reliant upon context and
audience. Chris Lloyd, for example, may be an artist commenting on the
political system, but he would presumably take up a position in the gov-
ernment if he were elected. His campaign thus becomes legible as art only
if one is encountering it in the context of the gallery. Relatedly, a politi-
cian will not always be able to control when his actions are perceived as
performance and when as reality. It would seem that Ford himself has
had some inkling of this life versus art tension, which might account for
the identity panic that defined his final days in office, leading him to re-
place most of his communications staff and even, as many suspect, to pose
as a fake caller on a radio show trying to resuscitate the mayor’s tarnished
public image (though some speculate it was his brother Randy). Caller
“Ian from Etobicoke” presciently asks, “How do you know when you
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 251

are being videotaped? Do you know? How do you know what you do
exactly? There’s cameras everywhere.”67
This tension around performance’s intelligibility is also found in the
journalistic performance criticism that I described earlier. Pop culture
columnist Michael Murray writes, “Like Andy Kaufman before him,
Ford has the ability to create and live in the Venn Diagram overlap be-
tween the fiction circle and reality circle. Ford seems happy there, with
the rest of us staring on in bewilderment, uncertain if what we’re wit-
nessing is self-aware performance art or the Frankenstein id of some
moron bully unleashed upon the world.”68 Murray’s stumbling reminds
us that the retraining of journalists as performance critics required a re-
flection on their performative role in constructing reality. As Lee Mar-
shall and Kim Magi show in their analysis of the Ford crack scandal, the
fact that journalists were forced to report on a cellphone video virtually
none of them had seen led to a more active foregrounding of investiga-
tive process, which involved stitching together eyewitness accounts, per-
forming speculative readings of photos, mimicking stories from other
news outlets, and engaging in various kinds of linguistic hedging (i.e.,
“it appeared to show the Mayor smoking crack”).69 Journalists were, in
this way, complicit in defining the boundaries between art and non-art
when interpreting Ford’s moves.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, many of Ford’s actions suggest
a strategic and overtly political use of performance art to appeal to a
right-wing populism, to suburban voters who feel condescended to by
the downtown, latte-drinking, liberal “elites.” Take, for example, the
performance art-by-proxy campaign that Ford pursued in which he
called upon certain types of celebrities to shore up his image as a politi-
cian of and for the people. This starts from the moment of his inaugu-
ration when he asks ostentatious hockey commentator Don Cherry to
deliver a speech as special guest. Cherry showed up in a pink silk jacket
and attacked the left-wing “pinko” newspapers, elites, and artsy people
for dominating city politics – in his telling words, for “running the
show.”70 The speech prompted several counter-performances, most no-
tably the creation of pink “pinko” buttons worn by city activists on the
left, and an intervention by several councillors who showed up to work
the next day donning pink in protest.
Another noteworthy example is Ford’s arm-wrestling match with re-
tired professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, a spectacle staged as part of the
2013 Fan Expo Convention. Here, Ford fully embodied the pro-wrestler
persona, entering the room to dramatic strains of “Eye of the Tiger,”
252 Laura Levin

throwing off his suit and tie, and struggling to overpower Hogan. “Oh
big man, that’s all you got, huh?” Hogan taunted, “You know some-
thing, not only am I going to rip this arm off, I’m going to take your job
while I’m at it, brother. They’re going to call me Mayor Hogan!” Play-
fully matching his opponent’s macho intensity, Ford responded, “I own
this town, man!,” smacking down Hogan’s arm and jumping up in vic-
tory.71 A bit of fun, maybe, but the act also promoted Ford’s self-styling
as a trash-talking, scrappy mayor, the kind of guy who would dare
Police Chief Bill Blair to arrest him and surface in a cellphone video fan-
tasizing about pounding another person in the ring. Michael Romandel
picks out phrases like “No Holds Barred” and “I’ll call it,” arguing that
many journalists missed that “the video is clearly about Rob Ford en-
visioning himself in a pro wrestling match against an unnamed oppo-
nent (Professional wrestling of course, being a fake performance art with
amateur wrestling being a real Olympic sport).”72
Taking a cue from Romandel, who speculates that Ford’s pro-
wrestling persona may explain “some of his continued popularity in the
inner suburbs with [working-class] men of a certain age,”73 I want to
suggest that this is but one example of Ford invoking a hyper-masculine
tradition of performance art: a performance art for the populist right.74
This form caters to the theatrical cravings of right-wing populism in its
allegiance to anti-elitist forms of popular entertainment – wwe and
hockey – but also things like magic shows, a form Ford embraced when
inviting world-famous magician David Blaine to city hall. It appeals to
a masculinist agonism that Frank Cunningham views as central to right-
wing populism: a political doctrine premised on declaring “an enemy of
‘the people,’ which the populist leader promises to combat.”75 It is pre-
cisely this performed anger and antagonism that links Ford to the strate-
gies of modern right-wing politicians such as Donald Trump, leading
many Canadians to view the American billionaire, reality tv star, and
now, incredibly, US president as Ford reincarnate. Hays explains, “The
Ford-Trump axis rests on the notion that each candidate is a take-no-
prisoners, Dirty Harry–style crusader, intent on destroying the estab-
lished order.”76
By focusing on the aggressive histrionics of populist politicians and
treating them as strategic performance, I follow Taylor’s lead in view-
ing political leaders as “the new radical performance artists,”77 As Brady
puts it, “To consider politicians as radical performers is to understand
their actions in a context that fuses aesthetics with efficacy.”78 Clearly
this fusion is not new in the realm of politics; rather, Taylor’s phrasing
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 253

Figure 9.3
Toronto mayor Rob Ford (left) takes on professional wrestler Hulk Hogan in an
arm-wrestling match to promote Fan Expo in Toronto on 23 August 2013.

points to shifts in the style of politics seen across the Americas in the
twenty-first century. Ford’s performances could be read as an intensifi-
cation of the theatrics found in right-wing politics of the past (to riff on
Taylor’s point, our political leaders are “ever more radical perform-
ers”).79 Surely Ford’s brash, rough-around-the-edges, and seemingly off-
the-cuff actions appear as “radical” performance art precisely because
they are ghosted by the polished, highly scripted, and “somber” actions
of earlier conservative leaders like Hollywood actor turned politician
Ronald Reagan, a model of political performance that now appears sus-
picious and inauthentic to the populist right.80 The bodily control of
Reagan as trained actor – in Timothy Raphael’s words, Reagan knew
“how to suck in his breath and stomach, straighten his shoulders, and
puff himself up till his body grew to its film shape”81 – throws Ford’s
lack of bodily control into high relief. Reagan’s studied presidential
poise is nearly the opposite of the physical bearing of a confrontational
pro-wrestler, though these performances both rely on acting skills to
exude masculine strength.
Beyond pro-wrestling, reading right-wing populism as a combative
art returns us to the Fords’ public weigh-ins, a performance ghosted by
254 Laura Levin

the chest-pounding battles of reality shows like Survivor and The Big-
gest Loser, as well as the manly weigh-ins of boxing and ufc. Appro-
priately, one of the people who came out to support Ford in his bid for
re-election was former boxing champion and convicted criminal Mike
Tyson. In a show of mutual admiration staged for the press, Tyson de-
scribed Ford as “the best mayor in Toronto’s history,” a champion who,
like him, has fought hard to “overcome adversity.” “We’re cut from the
same cloth,” Ford agreed – a controversial but rather apt statement,
given Tyson and Ford’s hostile relationship with police and shared his-
tories of drug use, sexual harassment, and domestic violence.82
Going further, this reading casts in a new light the Ford brothers’
weekly radio call-in show, The City, initially presented on Newstalk
1010, and later continued on YouTube after its cancellation in 2013.
The City, described by critics as a “bully pulpit,”83 was modelled after
the conservative talk radio format made famous by personalities like
Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, where a brash, right-wing or libertar-
ian man rails very loudly and melodramatically against the liberal
media. Comedy Central’s Colbert Report satirized this populist form
when actor John Lithgow re-enacted a press release issued by Newt Gin-
grich’s press secretary in which the liberal “literati” are compared to a
firing squad. Listening to Lithgow’s dramatic reading, it is easy to see
why Salon.com and Huffington Post describe the Gingrich camp’s Tea
Party–style manoeuvre as “performance art”: “The literati sent out their
minions to do their bidding … They fired timidly at first, then the sheep
not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party in-
vite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their dis-
tortions and falsehoods.”84 Conjuring this combative performance art
tradition, the Fords used their radio show to bash reporters, most of
whom they dismissed as “a bunch of maggots”85 and feminized as
“sucky kids” who “whine and cry and moan.”86 To return to my ear-
lier claim that political performances require specific scenographic and
linguistic supports, it is worth noting too that the Ford brothers’ affin-
ity for the improvisational, reality-oriented spaces of talk radio and
YouTube exemplify the ways in which low-tech, interactive, and easily
accessible performance venues have been used by populist politicians
to position themselves against a technologically slick, scripted liberal
media. These tactics align with Raphael’s contention that exploiting the
“techne of performance and the networks of electronic media” has been
essential to politics since Reagan, even if the goal is now to produce de-
cidedly ungroomed politicians.87
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 255

Fittingly, talk radio, and related forms like hardball-styled tv talk

and reality shows, also turn up in performance artist Guillermo Gómez-
Peña’s writing about the “mainstream bizarre.”88 Here, Gómez-Peña re-
flects on the late capitalist blurring of boundaries between performance
artists and “performative polemicists” like Howard Stern and Chris
Matthews, celebrity provocateurs who attempt to occupy the unpre-
dictable qualities of performance artists while simultaneously staging
cultural dialogue and difference as crass public spectacle. He laments,
“Traditionally known for our ‘transgressive’ behavior and our willing-
ness to defy dogmas, cultural borders, and moral conventions, perfor-
mance artists must now compete in outrageousness with sleazebags
Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, and mtv’s ‘Jack Ass’ [sic] … Public in-
tellectuals (what does ‘public’ mean in this context?) must now attempt
to speak to students or write for readers who may regard Bill Maher
and the performative polemicists of msnbc as actual public intellectu-
als.”89 What radical terrain is left for performance artists, Gómez-Peña
asks, in a culture where mainstream figures now present themselves as
outsiders and traffic in extremes? Following this train of thought, what
could be more “extreme” than Ford’s undying commitment to his job
as mayor, a form of macho endurance art that he performed through
scandal after scandal, refusing to quit, and one that elicited an awfully
empathetic reaction from the other outsiders of Ford Nation. Were it
not for Ford’s sudden illness and withdrawal from the 2014 race, this
performance could easily have delivered him another stunning victory.
I realize that much of what I’ve said here may sound equally extreme
and may fly in the face of current scholarship about performance art. In-
deed many of us who practise and research this form usually align it with
feminist, queer, and anti-racist activisms, or with the critically sophisti-
cated conceptual art we would now find at the moma. What then do we
make of the incursion of Ford’s brand of performance art into the space
once thought to be occupied by these superheroes of the avant-garde and
valiant activists of the political left? The most common response is to
frame Ford’s brand of political performance art as an “appropriation,”
or as Gómez-Peña’s puts it, a co-opting of performance art’s radicality
and interactivity by “the new global culture.”90 Similarly Julia Halperin
believes that the use of the “lofty” label performance art to describe the
antics of Tea Party activists like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain is merely
the latest misguided attempt to appropriate “artspeak” within main-
stream culture. She adds, “It also suggests a pronounced lack of under-
standing of what a performance artist actually is.”91 Like Gómez-Peña,
256 Laura Levin

she implies that the populist political performance art of Ford and
Palin is but a pale imitation of the original, a bastardization of “true
radical behaviour.”92
But I would like to suggest, in closing, that the Fordian performa-
tive offers us instead an opportunity to look back at the assumptions
we bring to bear when we define “what a performance artist actually
is” and when we historicize performance art as a political form. Here I
am influenced by performance theorist John Fletcher’s counterintuitive
reading of evangelical, pro-life, homophobic Hell Houses in the United
States as a form of community-based activism. Fletcher acknowledges
that Christian fundamentalist Hell Houses – haunted houses that stage
the gruesome afterlife that awaits sinners – do not exactly line up with
the “radical” politics of performance studies, particularly when “ac-
tivism” is claimed as the exclusive terrain of the socially progressive
political left.93 Similarly, approaching the Fordian performative as per-
formance art allows us to think more deeply about the mechanisms of
distinction that scholars enact in trying to define its highbrow and/or
politically superior counterpart (i.e., the “true” performance art) – a
form of elitism to which Ford Nation’s “counter-taste”94 so often and so
effectively reacts.
As Fletcher warns, by dismissing behaviours performed by right-wing
“radicals” as tasteless, cultural theorists on the left can sometimes end up
in inadvertent alignment with the very “market mentality of late capi-
talism” that they view as eroding the sharp edges of enlightened, liberal
humanist performance. I’m thinking here of activist performances of
“good taste” staged at the height of the Ford scandals in an effort to re-
habilitate Toronto’s image and elevate it to its former status as a refined,
world-class city. Consider, for instance, the “More Than Ford” cam-
paign, initiated by art directors Marie Richer and Hannah Smit, which
invited Torontonians to counteract “the drama at city hall”95 by sharing
thoughts, via #MoreThanFord, on why “Toronto is still the best.” This
approach draws on the language of Richard Florida’s neo-liberal creative
city policy, its promotion of a privileged, gentrifying cosmopolitanism
and interurban competition. The neo-liberal undertones also appear in
a YouTube video compilation created by the More Than Ford team,
which emphasizes Toronto’s greatness through images of a happy, latte-
drinking, creative arts–enjoying city constantly engaged in healthy (ap-
parently non-dramatic) play: a barista making espresso on Queen West,
diverse bodies in carnival dress at Caribana, and street buskers playing
in front of trendy clothing shops.96 The use of creative, healthy, mostly
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 257

thin bodies to divert attention from the Ford show recalls other actions
promoted by anti-Ford activists, such as the Steel Bananas Collective’s
online instructions for staging “an Anti-Rob Ford Parody Performance
Piece,” which include “Rent[ing] a Fat Suit” and “Smearing your face
with ketchup or mustard” to “portray Rob Ford in his grotesque real-
ity.”97 In many ways, these interventions chime not only with the classism
of Ford’s neo-liberal policies but also the casually discriminatory be-
haviour these activists found so distasteful in the mayor (i.e., body sham-
ing here strangely doubles as political activism). Accordingly, and to loop
back to the theatrical fantasy with which this chapter began, these counter-
performance strategies ultimately hint at the dangers of a left activism
mirroring the extremism of the right.
Treating the Fordian performative as performance art, finally, allows
us to think more critically about the “other histories” of performance
art that are repressed in purist and avant-garde narratives of aesthetic
origin. For performance artist Coco Fusco, in her important genealog-
ical provocation “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” this
involves retrieving the very politically incorrect histories of bodily dis-
play found in forms of popular entertainment like world exhibitions,
circuses, and sideshows. “Performance Art in the West did not begin
with Dadist ‘events,’” Fusco insists. “Since the early days of European
‘conquest,’ ‘aboriginal samples’ of people from Africa, Asia, and the
Americas were brought to Europe for aesthetic contemplation, scien-
tific analysis, and entertainment.”98 Reminiscent of the popular enter-
tainment staged by Ford during his tenure as mayor, a number of the
examples identified by Fusco are spectacles commissioned for the
amusement of political figures. She offers an example from the 1550s:
“Native Americans are brought to France to build a Brazilian village in
Rouen. The King of France orders his soldiers to burn the village as a
performance. He likes the spectacle so much that he orders it restaged
the next day.”99
Charting an alternative genealogy of performance art that leads to
Ford might include these racist, sexist, classist, and ableist performance
forms. It might also take a detour into the hyper-masculinist physical
culture of boxing, wrestling, and bodybuilding, an arena of popular per-
formance that centres on the explicit display of male bodies and dramatic
spectacles of masculine competition. Indeed, these gendered and highly
physical forms of performance have much longer histories of inclusion,
alongside trapeze acts and juggling, within avant-garde traditions of
Dada and Futurist cabaret – a tradition often identified by formalist art
258 Laura Levin

historians as the early twentieth-century precursor to performance

art.100 It might even, horror of horrors, directly intersect with “official”
performance art histories, linking Ford’s macho endurance art to the
inter-gender wrestling of Andy Kaufman or, less directly, to the masculin-
ist martyrdom of ordeal artists like Chris Burden – an interdisciplinary
mapping that productively erodes distinctions between a performance
art of the right and of the left.
Rob Ford attracted one the most powerful political followings in re-
cent Toronto history. He built this support, as municipal politics demands,
not through reliance on party platform, but rather through astute rhe-
torical construction, by experimenting with attention-grabbing reper-
toires of popular and political display. This, at the very least, makes his
performance art hard to forget, and even harder to dismiss.

no te s
1 Studio 180 Theatre, “Studio 180 in development.”
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 For votes by ward, see Topping, “How Toronto Voted.”
5 Rob Ford qtd. in LeakSourceCanada, “Rob Ford ‘Inebriated’ Rant.”
6 See, e.g., ctv News, “Timeline: Rob Ford Crack Video Scandal.”
7 Foucault, “We ‘Other Victorians,’” 12.
8 Daisey, “Dreaming of Rob Ford.”
9 Big Picture Cinemas, “Homepage.”
10 Nicholls, “Mayor Rob Ford.”
11 Levin, “It’s Time to Profess,” 167–72.
12 Brady, Performance, Politics, xii–xiii.
13 See, e.g., Kellner, “Media,” 21.
14 Moore, Fahrenheit 9-11.
15 See Taylor, The Archive, 30–3, 161–89; Taylor, Disappearing Acts.
16 Raphael, President Electric; Mast, Performative Presidency; Schuler, “Pria-
maia liniia”; Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 1–32; Alexander, Performance
of Politics.
17 Bogad, “Electoral Guerrilla Theatre”; Day, Satire and Dissent; Westlake,
“Güegüence Effect.”
18 Wagner, “Habitus of Mackenzie King”; Filewod, Performing Canada, 35–58;
Freeman and Levin, “Performing Politicians.”
19 Jones uses “Pollockian performative” to refer to the “author function” that
Jackson Pollock played for body artists of the 1960s and 1970s. She is inter-
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 259

ested in how Pollock, as action painter, has been used both to support tropes
of masculine genius, through images of bodily transcendence, and to chal-
lenge them via embodiment of dislocated postmodern subjectivity. Jones,
Body Art, 53–102.
20 Austin, How to Do Things.
21 Taylor, “New Radical.”
22 Stewart, “On Lying.”
23 Henderson, “Rob Ford Doesn’t Know.”
24 Doktor Zoom, “Rob Ford Has Entered.”
25 Halperin, “Is Politics the New Performance Art?” Also see T. Nikki Cesare
Schotzko’s work on celebrities turned performance artists like Shia LaBeouf.
Cesare, “#nihilism.”
26 Lawler, “Sarah (Palin).”
27 Halperin, “Is Politics the New Performance Art?”
28 Ibid.
29 Henderson, “Rob Ford Doesn’t Know”; Hepburn, “Rob Ford”; Blatchford,
“City Hall’s Clown Prince”; “Evening Brief.”
30 See, e.g., Marshall and Magi, “That ‘Alleged’ Video”; McClelland, “Rob
Ford: Professor of Journalism.”
31 Thanks to Kathleen Gallagher for assisting me in making this connection.
32 Kupferman, “Eight Reasons.”
33 See Levin’s “Course Syllabus” for a discussion of more than twenty Ford-in-
spired plays, including Rob Ford: The Opera, libretto by Michael Patrick Al-
bano; One Wild Night, David Ferry’s adaptation of a Toronto Star article; and
Jason Hall’s 21 Things You Should Know about Toronto’s Crack-Smoking
Mayor.
34 Crow’s Theatre, “Dreaming.”
35 Tilley, “Drake’s Next Role.”
36 Godfrey, “Good Riddance.”
37 Alexander, Performance of Politics, 12.
38 Alcoba, “‘I Don’t Look at This as Show Business.’”
39 Peat, “John Tory Hopes.”
40 Jeffords, “Jimmy Kimmel Wants Him” (my emphasis).
41 Preville, “Try as We Might.”
42 Gee, “John Tory Wants to Get Things Moving.”
43 Alexander, Performance of Politics, 38, 166.
44 Ford Fest, an annual barbecue thrown by Rob and Doug Ford for the general
public, is a great example of an event staged with the express goal of making
the Ford brothers seem more accessible. (Thanks to Nicholas Hanson for this
insight about class in politicians’ performances.)
260 Laura Levin

45 Tory lost the 2003 mayoral election to David Miller and resigned as Ontario
pc Leader in 2009 after a by-election loss. He thus appeared at the Cut the
Waist Challenge as both a “recovering politician,” and, in his words, a “re-
covering fattie,” having lost forty pounds in a weight-loss program (Alcoba,
“At 330”). Tory sought the Fords’ support when running for mayor in 2003,
and previously praised Doug Ford as a “smart, button-down, no-nonsense
businessperson.” See Huffington Post, “John Tory Was for Doug Ford.”
46 Alexander, Performance of Politics, 12.
47 Schneider, Explicit Body, 2.
48 Ford’s 2010 campaign slogan was “Stop the gravy train” – i.e., reduce ex-
cessive spending at City Hall.
49 Dale, “Millionaire Doug Ford.”
50 Harper, interview, 21 April 2011.
51 Halperin, “Rob Ford Is Even More Offensive.”
52 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 13–14.
53 Alcoba, “Toronto Councillors.”
54 Vincent, “After Prodding.”
55 Clarke, “Rob Ford’s Litany of Apologies.”
56 Canadian Press, “Rob Ford.”
57 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 17.
58 Gormley, “Politics as Performance Art.”
59 Anderson, “I don’t know about.”
60 Bogad, “Electoral Guerrilla Theater.”
61 “Mr. Peanut Campaign.”
62 VideoCabaret, “Hummer for Mayor.”
63 Hamilton, “Conservative Opponent.”
64 The joke that Ford might actually be the late actor Chris Farley led to the
creation of the fake trailer for “Rob Ford: The Movie,” which narrates Ford’s
rise to power through clips from Farley’s movies.
65 Thanks to Ric Knowles for helping me articulate this point.
66 Dale, “Meet the Longshots.”
67 Coutts, “Did Mayor Rob Ford Call.”
68 Murray, “Rob Ford’s Fashion Blog.”
69 Marshall and Magi, “That ‘Alleged’ Video.”
70 Cherry, qtd. in Rider, “Why Don Cherry.” For an analysis of Cherry’s per-
formance, see Levin, “Performing Toronto.”
71 Hogan and Ford, qtd. in Rider, “Mayor Rob Ford Bests Hulk Hogan.”
72 Romandel, “Rob Ford, a Pro Wrestler.”
73 Ibid.
74 At a 2011 event honouring Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty,
On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives 261

hosted at Ford’s home, Ford helped present Flaherty with a “World Champi-
onship Finance Minister Belt” – evidence of how central wrestling imagery is
to the Fords and the Conservative party. See Peat, “Ford, Harper Love-In.”
75 Cunningham, “What Rob Ford Can Teach Us.”
76 Hays, “When Canada Looks at Donald Trump.”
77 Taylor, “New Radical.”
78 Brady, Performance, Politics, 4.
79 Taylor, “New Radical” (my emphasis).
80 Raphael, President Electric, 14.
81 Ibid, 15.
82 Tyson and Ford, qtd. in Dale, “Mike Tyson.”
83 Powell, “Ford Brothers’ Weekly Show.”
84 Huffington Post, “10 Celebrity Performance Artists”; Mustich, “Newt’s ‘Sheep’
Statement.”
85 Visser and Alcoba, “‘Bunch of Maggots.’”
86 ctv News Toronto, “Ford Brothers Call Media ‘Liars.’”
87 Raphael, President Electric, 13.
88 Gómez-Peña, “Performance against the Cultural Backdrop.”
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Halperin, “Is Politics the New Performance Art?”
92 Gómez-Peña, “Performance against the Cultural Backdrop.”
93 Fletcher, “Tasteless as Hell.”
94 Ibid., 324.
95 Skedline, “More Than Ford Campaign.”
96 Ibid.
97 Correia Da Silva, “How to Stage.”
98 Fusco, “Other History,” 148.
99 Ibid., 146.
100 See Boddy, Boxing, 247–50, on boxing’s inclusion in avant-garde cabaret;
and Mazer, Professional Wrestling, on wrestling as performance.