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Current Considerations for (Future) Performance Archives

 

 

 

What points do curators consider when presenting their view of a fragment of performance history in an exhibition? Some relevant questions can be gleaned from the six chapters of the catalogue of the 2003 Liverpool exhibition Art, Lies and Videotape. Exposing Performance [George 2003]. This centres on visual strategies for representing performances and related issues addressed by the author.

Under the heading Lost Histories, the catalogue begins by asking a fundamental question: Is the history of performance art one of systematic withdrawal; of the denial of traces and documents? And is this the source of its subversive energy and current appeal? Carrie Lambert-Beatty draws attention to a category of ‘lost works of art’ to which performance art also belongs:

To understand performance art of the past is to grapple with the fact that this art was designed to be lost. That is to say, it purposefully aspired to the condition of the lost work of art. […] Their traces in literature, drawing, or photographs describe a negative space. Documents bracket off a place for the work; its traces hold open a site which is both empty and full of meaning. Indeed, it is the traces of a work in text and image that make it a ‘lost work of art’. Without them the art-work would only be lost. [Lambert-Beatty 2007/2000: 95]

Image as Icon refers primarily to the emblematic function of individual photographs for the history of performance art. The public reception of performance and its historiography has been profoundly influenced by the selection and publication strategies of artists and journalists. Perceived as pars pro toto portrayals, photographs play a significant role in the construction and visualisation of historical accounts. They also contain an abundance of evidence relating to cultural, aesthetic and social contexts of a certain point in time. Lambert-Beatty has frequently re-visited photos and films of the 1960s with this in mind [Lambert 1999; Lambert 2004; Lambert-Beatty 2006]. Looking at past events and their visual representation from a contemporary perspective reveals hitherto disregarded layers of meaning and order in the images. Lambert-Beatty finds, for example, on renewed inspection of a photo [photographer: Robert McElroy] of Jim Dine’s 1960 performance Car Crash, that the combination of perspectives contain a universal meaning: “(…) the erased signs of viewing suggest something about the impossibility of maintaining, even at the event itself, the kind of unmediated contact with the performer’s presence that is so often stressed in discussions of performance.” [Lambert-Beatty 2007: 99]  

The question of the relationship between image and event and the resultant strategies of authentication is also raised in connection with the emblematic function of single photographs: Did the event really take place (fact or fiction), did it simply take place in front of the camera or is it the pre-arranged illusion of a real action? Are these questions relevant at all for today’s viewer of past or supposed events? American performance theorist Philip Auslander has propounded the theory that for the observer of visual artefacts which in some way refer to performance history, it is unimportant in which form the event took place historically. They see something separate, different. [Auslander 2006: 30-31]       

In the same text, Auslander raises the question of where the public’s share in the performances has gone in the pictures of these events. Both this question and the aspect stressed by Aaron Williamson in the catalogue can be subsumed under the heading Unconscious Performance:

One strategy (…) is for an artist to incorporate literally unconscious participation into a performance; that is, to make unwitting members of the public ‘perform’ in some way, or even to make them and their responses the subject of the work. [Williamson 2003: 57]

Me and My Camera/Person addresses another set of issues, placing the focus on the dual-authorship relation and the question of controlling re-presentation (and archiving). The section titled Artist as Director takes this aspect further and highlights the fact that parallel to their actual performances, performance artists today produce and provide media transformations of them on film or video themselves.    

Alice Maude-Roxby took up this line of debate with regard to photographic practices in another exhibition which was shown in Southampton in 2007 under the title Live Art on Camera. Performance and Photography.

All in all, these fields of inquiry make it clear that it can no longer be the re-calling (or irrevocable loss) of performative authenticity that is the focus of discussion. The programmatic lack of traces, which for a long time was regarded as a defining feature of performance and its subversive qualities, is being called into question in and through the artists’ own archives. Eyewitness accounts can (now) not be regarded as the only source of future knowledge of past events. The relationship between performance and its remains can not be perceived as that of original and replicable document but as a medial transformation.

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance. (…) To attempt to write about the undocumentable event of performance is to invoke the rules of the written document and thereby alter the event itself. Just as quantum physics discovered that macro-instruments cannot measure microscopic particles without transforming those particles, so too must performance critics realize that the labor to write about performance (and thus to ‘preserve’ it ) is also a labor that fundamentally alters the event. It does no good, however, to simply refuse to write about performance because of this inescapable transformation. The challenge raised by ontological claims of performance for writing is to remark again the performative possibilities of writing itself. The act of writing toward disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself. (…) Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward. Writing about it necessarily cancels the ‘tracelessness’ inaugurated within this performative promise. [Phelan 1996: 147-149]


The work of the performance (art) archive transforms this process of disappearance into manifest media artefacts of varying provenance. Writing about performance as a way of preventing its traceless disappearance gives rise to transformations, says Peggy Phelan, in which the subjective experience can be read by third parties. But what about the images – photographs and films? And other material traces – relics and objects? [3]

 

 

 

 

[3] The investigation of this should follow the question of which artefacts diverse exhibitions rely on (notations, storyboards, sketches, photos, videos and films) and how they are arranged and presented.

 

Artikelaktionen
Pfeil nach links Zurück: Performative Work on the Performance Archive Weiter: Archive Discourse and Mediality Pfeil nach rechts