IV

Somehow the length of time of most performances, which could vary from a couple of minutes to half an hour to several hours (even 24 hours in the case of some of Robert Wilson’s theater pieces), was the first conceptual stumbling block that prevented the use of film for recording performance, not even with the much cheaper Super 8 film. It was not only the cost but also the manipulation of film rolls packaged as three minutes long or ten minutes long and the necessity to edit between all the rolls. Photography was immediate and reactive. Film had to be pre-conceptualized before shooting. The task was even more complicated if what you wanted to film was improvised. How could you plan the filming, in order to make those improvised variations perceptible to the film spectator? To film improvised material you would have needed collaborative effort between the maker of the performance piece and the filmmaker, but the time to do so was not there. Most performance works were conceptualized quickly and performed only once or twice. If collaboration was necessary you needed to distinguish between the “performance”, the part of inventing the event, and executing it as a “performer”. Only the “inventor” could collaborate with a filmmaker, not the “performer”. To film you need distance, to be a performer you don’t. Distance can make the performer self-conscious. It is a lot easier to collaborate if you are detached from the event itself so filming something that is restaged after the act is a lot easier. As a filmmaker, I didn’t feel tempted to film what I was seeing in performance.. The exception was the making of my first dance film, choreographed and performed by Trisha Brown Water Motor (1978). A series of photographs could provide a chronology of the iconography of the piece, some sense of the maker’s intentions and aesthetics, and therefore be informative and worthwhile. Film was almost doomed to fail if you couldn’t restage the action for the film camera, and that was needed to make an interesting film work. Therefore a choreographer like Yvonne Rainer, who turned to film making in 1972, called herself a filmmaker. What she was doing was a film, not a documentation of her performance work.[16]

You have to examine the similarity and differences between live performance versus the document of the performance to understand why filming it isn’t obvious and also why I, as a filmmaker, didn’t do it. The way we see a live event is not fixed or stable. In live performance the viewer watches with all the distractions of peripheral vision and has enormous choices of what to look at. He can turn his head away, he can look at the audience behind him instead of at the performing area and he can even close his eyes and not look at anything. This is the moment when you shift focus, relax your eyes and come back to the performance space with renewed interest and acuity. But when we look at a document like photography, film or video the first element we see is the frame of the document. We have no reason to drift elsewhere outside the frame. Actually not looking at the document would seem ludicrous. To maintain undivided attention on a video or film taken from a fixed camera position, even if that image is well shot, is not a given. In a live performance, the viewer’s mind is active, analytical, and sensorial. The static document always appears to deliver less and doesn’t encourage sensorial connections or emotional participation. Furthermore a static camera filming a live performance isn’t using the two key characteristics of film, the power of ubiquity via montage, and the possibility of multiple points of views via variable camera positions. If I had to summarize the essential differences between film and photography in documenting performance, I would say that, for better or worse, the motion picture camera can mislead while the still camera can be mute.

When I try to understand the performance work of artists I have never seen or met, I intuitively feel that the multiplicity of sources, photographs, videos, films, and texts, like artist statements and critical commentary, are absolutely necessary. From the documentation I need to be able to reinvent what the performance artist was doing. Multiple sources permit me to reconstruct via my own sensibility and imagination the social and artistic context within which the work was invented. I recently discovered that fact in the work of two artists, namely, Lygia Clark and Gina Pane, who were very active in Paris in the early 1970s, while I was in New York. I discovered their work solely through documentation. Although they had worked in the same city (Paris) for several years, they have nothing in common. They both came from an art background but Lygia Clark was all about sensorial experimentation and flexible forms, while Gina Pane was all about control of the self and of her self-image. Looking at the documents you notice that they interacted very differently with their photographers and comparing their archives shows clearly the limits of documentation. You have to fight the documentation in order to rethink the performance and imagine what they did and why.

In my task as an archivist I now value the written text as a more detailed and diversified source for the context and the concepts that explain the artist’s intent as well as the performance impact on others. Writing had to be added to the photo or film documents from the periods that represent the work. But as a maker of those still image and film documents, I testify to their shortcomings. The two categories of visual documentation are the still image that can be iconic or just anecdotal, and the moving image that accounts or at least alludes to time and duration. Both are needed as one shows an immediate access to the iconography while the other shows process. But we are left with an important question. Can such visual documents mislead the archivist of the future? In a photograph, the background can impose itself on the performer’s body and somehow make it disappear. But it can also strengthen the body’s presence with the right framing and it can expose the body in an amplified context that is part of the work. But the more the performer controls his/her image, the more the background is made to disappear. The photos that Gina Pane staged of many of her works are a good example. These photographs neither convey any sense of the space where the event occurred, nor of the audience and its investment into looking at the event. Her staged photos show the end result of the process and evacuate the performance that was the process. In opposition, Gina Pane’s video documentation shows some of the process but misleads as to the impact or even duration of the process since the video is made of disconnected fragments of the performance and doesn’t represent the time of the performance.