After struggling for a while to think of something which can be considered a 'performative image', I thought about religion and the many symbols and signs used in each for different purposes.
In the Hindu religion, there are millions of murtis - beings that are aspects of the supreme Brahman or those that are supreme or spiritual in their own right - which are the embodiment of varying personalities and iconographies. Unlike the Christian religion which forbids the worship of an "idol... whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth" (Exodus 20:2-4), Hindus consider images and sculptures of murtis worthy of worship after they have been invoked with the divine, as it provides a point of focus for puja (worship) and meditation.
By becoming the actual embodiment of the the divine rather than a representation of it, images of murtis become performative in the sense that they have a purpose; the spiritual connection between worshipper and the worshipped.
In the same way that Bolt suggests a 'dynamic relation between artist and materials' and the 'art coming into being', in can be percieved that the Shilpa Shastra's (traditional texts that describe the standards of construction for religious sculptures) and the Prana Pratishta (or 'establishing of life' ceremony) are how the images make this transition from representational to performative. Furthermore, these ceremonies which turn images and statues from their once representationalmode of Hindu deitys to their actual being the divine spirit, can be an example of what Bolt describes as the 'transmutation' between 'imaging' and 'reality'. This can be highlighted more by Bantinaki who suggests that the
image 'becomes in some way the thing that it
(that is, the image) is about'.
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