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The Performativity of Performance Documentation
Abstract
onsider two familiar images from the history of performance and body art: one from the documentation of Chris Burden's Shoot (1971), the notori- ous piece for which the artist had a friend shoot him in a gallery, and Yves Klein's famous Leap into the Void (1960), which shows the artist jumping out of a second-story window into the street below. It is generally accepted that the first image is a piece of performance documentation, but what is the second? Burden really was shot in the arm during Shoot, but Klein did not really jump unprotected out the window, the ostensible performance documented in his equally iconic image. What difference does it make to our understanding of these images in relation to the concept of performance documentation that one documents a performance that "really" happened while the other does not? I shall return to this question below. As a point of departure for my analysis here, I propose that performance docu- mentation has been understood to encompass two categories, which I shall call the documentary and the theatrical. The documentary category represents the traditional way in which the relationship between performance art and its documentation is conceived. It is assumed that the documentation of the performance event provides both a record of it through which it can be reconstructed (though, as Kathy O'Dell points out, the reconstruction is bound to be fragmentary and incomplete1) and evidence that it actually occurred. The connection between performance and docu - ment is thus thought to be ontological, with the event preceding and authorizing its documentation. Burden's performance documentation, as well as most of the documentation of classic performance and body art from the 1960s and 1970s, belongs to this category. Although it is generally taken for granted, the presumption of an ontological relation- ship between performance and document in this first model is ideological. The idea of the documentary photograph as a means of accessing the reality of the performance derives from the general ideology of photography, as described by Helen Gilbert, glossing Roland Barthes and Don Slater: "Through its trivial realism, photography creates the illusion of such exact correspondence between the signifier and the signi - fied that it appears to be the perfect instance of Barthes's 'message without a code.' The 'sense of the photograph as not only representationally accurate but ontologically
... Performance scholar Philip Auslander (2006) addressed performance documentation from two perspectives: as documentary documentation and theatrical documentation. Documentary documentation is concerned with documenting the event itself by providing a document that can be used to reconstruct the performance in some way, while also providing evidence that the performance took place (Auslander, 2006). ...
... Performance scholar Philip Auslander (2006) addressed performance documentation from two perspectives: as documentary documentation and theatrical documentation. Documentary documentation is concerned with documenting the event itself by providing a document that can be used to reconstruct the performance in some way, while also providing evidence that the performance took place (Auslander, 2006). Theatrical documentation can be described as the creation of a narrative about the event itself or the construction of a fictionalised account of what happened. ...
... Viewing documentary and theatrical documentation (Auslander, 2006) through the lens of aesthetics and aestheticisation, we find that we can view performance documentation along an aesthetic continuum that always revolves around documentation. On the one hand, the documentation is deaestheticised of performativity in itself, that is factual. ...
... Podemos usar como exemplo a foto performance de Yves Klein, Leap into the Void (1960), que captura Klein de corpo inteiro se jogando de um prédio de dois andares (Figura 1). A ação foi executada com um grupo de pessoas segurando uma rede na rua para pegá-lo, posteriormente removida da imagem, o que significa, segundo Auslander (2006), que esta é uma imagem de uma ação que nunca ocorreu, exceto na fotografia, mas isso não diminui a potência da performance de Klein. A proposta conceitual do artista não poderia ser uma realidade de fato, ou seja, foi a fotografia que fez a performance, e ela é recriada toda vez que alguém olha para a imagem. ...
... Philip Auslander (2006), por sua vez, entende que a documentação atesta que a performance ocorreu e que ela foi algo significativo, digno de deixar sua marca no mundo. Auslander (2006) ISSN 2238-5436 a perda irrecuperável da performance, como também não distinguir entre ela e sua documentação. ...
... Philip Auslander (2006), por sua vez, entende que a documentação atesta que a performance ocorreu e que ela foi algo significativo, digno de deixar sua marca no mundo. Auslander (2006) ISSN 2238-5436 a perda irrecuperável da performance, como também não distinguir entre ela e sua documentação. A performance ocorre numa breve passagem de tempo e as fotografias amplificam essa efemeridade, apresentando-a de novo a novos públicos. ...
As performances são uma linguagem artística plural peculiar da arte contemporânea, que nas últimas décadas tem gradativamente encontrado espaço nos acervos dos museus especialmente por meio da documentação. Esse artigo tem por objetivo analisar a aquisição de performances, das fotos e vídeo performances por meio da documentação, da documentação histórica de performances, da rememoração e reapresentação de performances pela documentação histórica e da reperformance pela documentação histórica.
... Según Philip Auslander (2006), también puedo asumirlas como partes integrantes de actos performativos documentados en las grabaciones sonoras. En esta línea de pensamiento, dichas carátulas son tomadas como referentes visuales de la historia de vida y biografía sonora del cantautor, por lo que vale la pena desentrañar los posibles signifi cados que adquiere la corporalidad del sujeto-creador y su humor en las representaciones iconográfi cas estudiadas. ...
... Esto confi rma que sus bienes integrantes pueden ser asumidos como exponentes de la iconografía personal de Virulo. Además, en armonía con Auslander (2006), también se convierten en fuentes primarias de información para disímiles investigaciones relacionadas con sus performances músicohumorísticos. ...
Neste texto apresentamos discussão em caráter introdutório sobre as fotografias do Acervo Pe. Jaime Diniz, acervo musical recolhido à Biblioteca José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, no Recife. Espécies documentais relevantes como possíveis fontes e objetos de pesquisa, fotografias permitem a leitura de fragmentos da realidade e do cotidiano, das suas representações e das performances sociais – no caso específico do musicólogo Jaime Diniz, das suas performances musicais, religiosas e científicas. Testemunhos que podem ser estudados em seus aspectos históricos e simbólicos, essas fotografias possibilitam identificar, compreender e problematizar, na trajetória de Jaime Diniz, expressões e afirmações de seus papéis sociais e das relações dos espaços físicos com os lugares sociais e de representação cultural e intelectual próprios dessa trajetória. Todavia, esses documentos fotográficos não foram ainda objeto ou fonte para a pesquisa. Elas sequer têm sido consultadas pelos pesquisadores mais especificamente interessados nos documentos que provêm das atividades do padre Jaime Diniz, fi cando esse interesse mais frequentemente voltado para a consulta aos documentos musicográficos, principalmente às partituras e partes manuscritas de composições dos séculos XVIII e XIX. A razão para essa ausência de consulta às fotografias é que esses documentos ainda não receberam tratamento visando à representação da informação. Propomos, assim, a análise documentária de fotografias como procedimento com o fi m de produzir os instrumentos necessários à representação e recuperação das informações contidas nos documentos musicográficos do Acervo Pe. Jaime Diniz e, assim, promover as condições necessárias para a sua disseminação.
... En varias ocasiones, la propia artista ha negado la versión conocida de los hechos (EXPORT y otros, 2000). Philip Auslander (2006) propone dividir las imágenes en torno a la performance en dos categorías: la documental y la teatral. Explicado muy escuetamente, en la primera, entrarían aquellos documentos que describen la performance y sirven para testificar que realmente ocurrió, aportan una evidencia de su existencia. ...
... Explicado muy escuetamente, en la primera, entrarían aquellos documentos que describen la performance y sirven para testificar que realmente ocurrió, aportan una evidencia de su existencia. En la segunda categoría, la teatral, las performances se realizan exclusivamente con el objetivo de ser fotografiadas o filmadas, eliminando el evento presentado ante un público -como muchas piezas de Cindy Sherman o Matthew Barney- (Auslander, 2006). Aquí se incluirían lo que actualmente llamamos foto performance. ...
Marc Montijano cañellas | marcmontijano@uma.es Universidad de Málaga. España Recibido: 6/1/2021 | Aceptado: 11/4/2021 RESUMEN El presente estudio busca contextualizar y poner en valor el trabajo de la artista italiana Pippa Bacca, fallecida en Turquía en el año 2008 durante el desarrollo de la performance Sposa in Viaggio-Brides on Tour. Usando como hilo conductor del discurso el concepto de verdad u honestidad en la performance, analizamos esta obra junto al trabajo de conocidos artistas del arte de acción como Marina Abramović, Ana Mendieta, VALIE EXPORT, Chris Burden o Beth Moysés. El proyecto Sposa in Viaggio de Pippa Bacca supone un caso extremo y muy dramático en la historia de la performance de principios del siglo xxi.
ABSTRACT Study that seeks to contextualize and value the work of the Italian artist Pippa Bacca, who died in Turkey in 2008 during the development of the performance Sposa in Viaggio-Brides on Tour. Using the concept of truth in performance as the main thread of the discourse, we analyze the project, together with the work of famous artists of action art such as Marina Abramović, Ana Mendieta, VALIE EXPORT, Chris Burden or Beth Moysés. The Sposa in Viaggio project by Pippa Bacca is an extreme and very dramatic case in the performance history of the early 21st century.
... Even if embedded into a relational network as Wehren suggests, in the end, the body and performance as an archive (or as document) still pose the problem of a lack of medial difference, being a fundamental condition of distinction between an event and its (medial) representation -even if we follow the idea of the performativity of the document (AUSLANDER 2006). If, in the case of Nachbar, one reconstructs a dance of another choreographer (here Hoyer's Affectos Humanos), is the other body adapting the dance always already another 'medium' of representation? ...
... Lyotard (1987) realiza una distinción similar a la de Austin, determinando que existen: enunciados denotativos, en los que se informa y se espera una respuesta del interlocutor; enunciados performativos, en el mismo sentido en que Austin utiliza el término; y prescriptivos, como órdenes o súplicas. Auslander (2006) trasladaría la teoría de actos de habla hacia la documentación de performances artísticas, afirmando que, pese a poder entenderse dicha documentación como constatativa por describir un hecho [como una huella del acontecimiento (Berger, 2008)], se trata de un acto performativo, pues se produce una acción como performance. De este modo llegamos de nuevo a otra noción de performatividad como instauradora de realidad, dimensión inherente a la palabra, rasgo propio de la lengua que lo convoca (Benveniste, 1985;Lyotard 1987). ...
Desde el periodo de entreguerras del s. XX, la imagen sustituye a la palabra como medio dominante para retratar las apariencias, para mostrar lo real (Berger, 2008). Vivimos en un mundo eminentemente visual, en el que recibimos la mayoría de la información por medio de las imágenes. No obstante, avistamos un futuro de incertidumbre, donde la proliferación de imágenes fácilmente puede desembocar en un cansancio de la mirada que conduzca a la inacción. Por ello, se plantea un cambio de paradigma que desplace el foco desde la interpretación o lectura de imágenes hacia la transformación de las realidades desde el uso de las mismas. El siguiente estudio tiene como objetivo repensar las imágenes desde un enfoque performativo, así como explorar sus posibilidades educativas: nos acercamos a los conceptos y teorías fundamentales para entender el término performatividad, desde los estudios de performance y la filosofía del lenguaje. Igualmente, se abordan las teorías en torno a la imagen y sus posibilidades performativas, para valorar, por último, sus aplicaciones en el campo de la educación. Se concibe la imagen como un elemento vivo que genera experiencia al ser producido y percibido: que construye nuestra mirada y nuestros imaginarios, configurados de forma intersubjetiva. Frente a la hegemonía visual actual, se propone entender la creación de imágenes propias como potencias de transformación de las realidades. Esto conforma un objetivo fundamental en una educación que pretende mirar al futuro e incidir en él de manera activa. Se torna esencial generar las bases de un pensamiento crítico en torno a lo visual en el ámbito educativo para transformar realidades: para construir una sociedad más participativa y más justa.
... All these aspects were relevant when performing with trees for the duration of a year in Stockholm in 2017, 2018 and 2019. No audi-121 Philip Auslander calls this "theatrical documentation", using Yves Klein's constructed photo Leap into the Void as a classic example (Auslander 2006). ence was present, except for the various beings inhabiting the place and occasional passersby. ...
How to collaborate with other beings we share this planet with is a central task for artists today. The starting point for these texts was the realization that we must find ways of relating to the environment that are meaningful from the perspectives of the eco¬logical crisis and a new-materialist and post-humanist understand¬ing of our place in the world. They suggest that artistic research can contribute by allowing for and generating hybrid forms of performing and thinking.
Performing and Thinking with Trees summarises the various strategies of lens-based work used in two artistic research projects by Annette Arlander, namely Performing with Plants (2017-2019) and Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees (2020-2021). The focus of these essays is on artistic practices, enhanced by some philosophical discussions related to vegetal life. They seek to contribute to critical plant studies as well as to demonstrate what the outputs of artistic research beyond doctoral work might look like.
The book is available as a pdf online https://taju.uniarts.fi/handle/10024/7666
... Canlılık kavramına bakışımızın, sinirbilim ve tıptaki gelişmelerle dönüşmekte olduğu bir zamanda, canlı sanata bakışımızda da buna paralel bir dönüşümden bahsedebiliriz: Performansın-ya da canlı sanatın sonu konusuna bedenin canlılığının sonu üzerinden bakmak, bilimdeki güncel gelişmelerle ilişkilenme fırsatı sunarak düşünce alanımızı genişletirken, sanatta uzun süredir tartışılagelen maddesellikle ilişkimizi yeniden kurabilmemize de olanak sağlamaktadır. Deneye dayalı olmayan, gerçek hayattaki bir akut bakım klinik ortamında ölmekte olan insan beynine ilişkin ilk kanıtı sağlayan ve insan beyninin ölüm sürecinde koordineli aktivite üretme yeteneğine sahip olabileceğini savunan verileri (Vicente, Rizzuto, Sarica ve diğerleri, 2022), post-performans kavramıyla birlikte okumak, performansın dokümantasyonunun performatifliği (Auslander, 2006) konusuna taze bir bakış getirmenin yolunu açmaktadır. ...
... The photo-installations are another example of what the performance theorist Philip Auslander refers to as the conflation between the two categories of performance photography, namely documentary and theatrical images. 58 If you consider the photographs as documentary images merely for reconstruction purposes or evidence that a performance occurred, the document remains a staged document and gives you access to the event. That means that even if the UCP artists did not record the installations themselves, the location of the installations in their urban context further determined how the record was made. ...
Much has been written in recent years about ruins and photography and especially so in the context of Detroit’s declining urban landscape. Numerous books present us with beautiful ruined buildings and landscapes; and further explanations why we might be drawn to images of decay. While some claim that ruin imagery triggers a form of resistance to the forces of capitalism; others stand critical to the beautification of ruins by arguing that such imagery removes viewers from any reflection on what causes ruins. Detroit’s new saviour Dan Gilbert is one of those ruin detractors who blames Detroit’s image as the poster child of ruin photography for all failed investments. This paper focusses on these image battles in the construction of a city’s place identity and argues for an understanding of ruin photographs as performance. Instead of offering a trace of an object once in front of the camera, I investigate how a collection of forgotten photo-installations curated by Detroit’s Urban Center for Photography gesture performatively to the ongoing event demolished by neglect whereby buildings are intentionally left to rot for profitable real estate development. Strategies of advertisement campaigns, it will be shown, are appropriated to make such live gestures. Investigating the doing aspect or force of ruin photographs contributes to cultural geography’s recent concerns around the potential ‘force of representations: their capacities to affect and effect’ and as such moves away from one of the central tasks of cultural geography, namely its focus on what representations mean. The spectre of Detroit’s image battle ultimately should provide us with questions about the construction of a city’s identity through visual documents and enable us to question the mechanism of neoliberal urban planning and governance.
... LGHBT focused music studies (Hawkins, 2017;Green, 1997;Morrison, 2019;Spohr, 2019;Thurman, 2019), and within other fine arts discourses (Auslander, 2006;Fischer-Lichte, 2008;Jalving, 2011;Kyndryp, 2006). It is my impression, however, that there is still a struggle to gain widespread general acceptance within some discourses, particularly those focusing on general Western classical music and early music (outside feminist and gender studies). ...
Early music performance in its broadest capacity presents a compelling case of being something in the present that is representing, presenting, enacting, re-enacting, living and re-living, concretising and fantasizing a historical past. It is both what it is and something entirely other. Inspiring countless efforts to come to terms with its nature, one way of approaching the act of conveying or “doing” history is through pedagogy. Pedagogy, here, is multifaceted, as it is placed and displaced in learning, acting, mediating, communicating, perceiving, conveying and persuading historically remote, cultural practices. As such, this anthology includes both explicitly pedagogical chapters and more implicit approaches situated within pedagogical settings. The driving force behind the project is: When maintaining and sustaining a certain European cultural heritage, how do we do so as artists and pedagogues and to what effect? To cast a fresh gaze on traditional Early music performance studies, the authors of this volume argue for the pedagogical potential of such a project. Not only as something functioning as an artefact used within an educational setting, but as something primarily pedagogical also in its formation and re-formation. The way Early music is construed and portrayed just to fulfil the official boundary of its terminology is also a pedagogical act performed in multiple ways. It is not a question of regarding Early music scholarship and artistry as binary presentism versus historicism, but rather as historicism in presentism and presentism in historicism – which is precisely what this volume is all about and to which it seeks to contribute. The anthology’s chapters highlight spectatorship, experience, theory, rhetoric, philosophy, representation, performance, performativity, literature, visual arts, pedagogy, education, pragmatism and also new materialism. They examine music that is readily categorised as Early music, as well as music that borders on, or is becoming, something else entirely, but with evident roots in the Early music repertoire.
... LGHBT focused music studies (Hawkins, 2017;Green, 1997;Morrison, 2019;Spohr, 2019;Thurman, 2019), and within other fine arts discourses (Auslander, 2006;Fischer-Lichte, 2008;Jalving, 2011;Kyndryp, 2006). It is my impression, however, that there is still a struggle to gain widespread general acceptance within some discourses, particularly those focusing on general Western classical music and early music (outside feminist and gender studies). ...
This chapter focuses on how contemporary music practice interacts with early modern1 aesthetics. Two projects, in which Georg Philip Telemann’s solo fantasias are interspersed with contemporary techniques and repertoire, serve as case studies. Firstly, the flutist Felix Renggli commissioned new pieces from 11 contemporary Swiss composers, to be inserted in between Telemann’s 12 Fantasias for Solo Flute. Secondly, violinist Aisha Orazbayeva performed a set of Telemann’s Solo Fantasias for Violin using extended techniques pioneered by Salvatore Sciarrino in his 6 caprices. In this text I use these two different approaches as case studies for how early modern music, exemplified by Telemann, can be communicated to a modern audience without relying upon the concept of historically informed performance, but instead communicates through the operation of semiotics in performance.
... LGHBT focused music studies (Hawkins, 2017;Green, 1997;Morrison, 2019;Spohr, 2019;Thurman, 2019), and within other fine arts discourses (Auslander, 2006;Fischer-Lichte, 2008;Jalving, 2011;Kyndryp, 2006). It is my impression, however, that there is still a struggle to gain widespread general acceptance within some discourses, particularly those focusing on general Western classical music and early music (outside feminist and gender studies). ...
In this chapter, I examine early music performance, musicology and music pedagogy in order to propose moving from what I argue to be an understanding of HIP (historically informed performance) as something analogous to a learning outcome, to the idea of utilising its potential as a pedagogical and rhetorical practice, providing a different context in which to develop its potential. First, I present a canvas on which HIP is delineated. Next, I engage in a logical exercise to unlock and explore HIP’s inner workings. Expanding on John Hillis Miller’s (2009) performativity sub one and sub two, I proceed to propose four different types of performativity (i.e., performativities0–3) centred on John Langshaw Austin, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler respectively. Providing some foundation for this exercise is a survey based on 132 music research journal articles published over the last five years in six representative, refereed journals. This leads me to a first attempt at proposing a dedicated performative musicology. Here, I introduce a rhetorical perspective on the past in the present based on the work of Antonis Liakos and Mitsos Bilalis (2017), Rivers and Weber (2011) and Rueger (2011). This ultimately leads to a final perspective of regarding HIP as a pedagogical activity providing a space for future ethical concerns. Or, more descriptively phrased: a pedagogy for the past in the present and future.
... Visitors see my struggle and wonder how they would move and draw the sounds if they were performing. Documentation, when not restricted to a definition of merely recording and remembering, can be seen as an experience to live: this is what I consider to be 'experiencing documentation', 41 instantiating performance studies theorist Philip Auslander's concept of the 'per-formativity of performance documentation'.42 Due to their nature as being both processual and archival, these performance-objectified traces could be as 'in-progress documentation'. ...
In this article, I discuss Mapping the Sound/Soundscape Portrait (206, 2018), an audience-participatory, synaesthetic sound/drawing live performance. I perform my synaesthesia: sitting on a large piece of paper, I draw the sounds that I hear as I “see” them with the eyes of my mind, and I move accordingly— if sound is a place (soundscape), what does it look like? Conceiving sound as a performative element with agency, Mapping invites those involved to pay attention to the liveness of the soundscape in which they are immersed and their relationship with it. This work questions the sight-hegemonic and purpose-oriented human experience of place by centralising the presence and presentness of sound as the key-element of narrative-making and knowledge production. The agency of the audience and of sound in the performance de-centralises the artist, who ceases to be the protagonist of the work and becomes a vehicle for its process to unfold. The performance offers a new sensorial perspective on the surrounding environment to those involved, contributing to the scholarship studying the role of live art and embodied practices as tools in investigating the world.
https://www.adsa.edu.au/dbpage.php?pg=view&dbase=newsletters&id=80#section_1208
... Ancorado nas pesquisas antropológicas de Victor Turner, passa a defender que o comportamento restaurado é a noção básica da performance. (Schechner, 1985, p.36 (Auslander, 1999, p.53-54;Auslander, 2012 performance como hail ou como gesto circula performativamente no encontro entre performers e espectadores (Schneider, 2017, p.77-79 (Hantelmann, 2010, p.137;Schneider, 2011, p.130-135 (Rothberg, 2013, p.44-46). epicentro do desastre que estamos prestes a viver a nível mundial" (Sourd, 2019, p.19 ...
Foram analisados no artigo os espetáculos Ítaca (2018) e O agora que demora (2019), criados pela encenadora Christiane Jatahy. Enquanto teatros performativos, híbridos e políticos transitam entre zonas artísticas, culturais e geográficas de fronteira. No uso de testemunhos de refugiados e na criação de arquivos documentais os dois trabalhos se relacionam a alguns pressupostos definidos por Rebecca Schneider como atos e modos incorporados de memória.
... The perception of this house as 'alive' and as a living system is best described as a digitally mediated relationship between several individuals rather than the performer/audience model. 16 In 1982, two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, described living systems capable of reproducing and maintaining themselves as units of interactions existing in an environment and closely linked to an observer. 17 The observer is therefore defined as an entity specified by their own domain of interactions. ...
The term chronotope is derived from two Greek words,
khrónos (time) and topos (space). In literary theory, chronotope
describes how different combinations of time and space are
represented in language and discourse. Applied to design, it
specifies the influence that a unique place and time can have
on architecture and its domain of relations and vice versa.
Chronotope, therefore, reinforces the idea of architecture as
an indissociable network, a unit of interactions. It challenges
the idea of architecture as a discrete and isolated object tuned
to maximum efficiency and makes space for an aesthetic of
interconnectedness, imperfection, and unpredictability
... Sebald's books are notable for their broadly idiosyncratic mixture of actual and seeming historical fact, recollection, and fiction interspersed with photographs that serve a suggestive or supplemental, as opposed to illustrative, function. Another comparable analogue for this approach is found in some of the work of British artist 19 Tacita Dean (who has acknowledged her debt to Sebald), who works primarily in analogue film, a medium now largely obsolete. However, in creating Event for a Stage at Carriageworks in Sydney in 2014, Dean worked with actor Stephen Dillane to produce a self-reflective work of live theater which she then meticulously cut into both a film version and an adaptation for radio. ...
Just as contemporary art absorbs objects and cultural phenomena that are not yet art into its orbit, so too has rock and pop music become increasingly omnivorous at its definitional borders. Core to these analogous developments is the mythologization of the figure of the "band" as a creative agent and "world-maker." These shared absorptive capacities in art and music bring us the question at the heart of this essay: What does a rock band have in common with a work of contemporary art? Although this might initially appear to be a rather odd line of enquiry, we found this question sufficiently intriguing to actually "form" a band-named the Ghosts of Nothing-to perform an artist function within the "artworld." 1 And it is with this particular collaborative mutation of the artistic function in mind that we will attempt to tease out the slippery notion of "bandness." Although the ontology of music-including popular and rock music-has, in general terms, been the focus of much scholarly activity in recent decades, the ontology of bandness as a specific topic within this expansive field has received surprisingly little attention. 2 As John Andrew Fisher observes, there is an ontological complexity to rock music-which he distinguishes from both popular and classical music-that arises from "whole domains of aesthetic interest" that are not necessarily as evident in other musical genres. 3 Fisher, Gracyk, and others have identified the centrality of recordings to any proper account of the ontology of rock music. 4 We suggest that the elusive quality of bandness also features prominently in this ontological landscape and is important for both rock and other forms of popular music. Our aim, in what follows, is not to develop a systematic account of all the relevant issues, but rather to offer a preliminary sketch of the implications of pursuing one particular line of thought in what turns out to be an intriguingly multi-faceted problem.
... Although it is assumed that the documentation of the performance event could serve as a record it could also be reconstructed. (Auslander, 2020) Performance art started as a rebellious form against the materiality and acquirability of physical art objects, a lot of canonized names of performance art were not very fond of the idea of re-staging or reenacting their performances. Artists of the 1960s and 1970s sought to make work that could not be commodified and reflected the idea of being bought by institutions and museums. ...
... André Lepecki (2010) put forward the notion of the body-archive as space of reinvention and rewriting of artworks. Finally, Philip Auslander (2006), following Jones's thought, proposed the idea of a performative document that establishes performance and makes it exist. ...
Desde meados dos anos 2000, assistimos ao surgimento de novas formas de instituições dedicadas à produção, disseminação, preservação e conhecimento de práticas de arte performativa. Embora o desenvolvimento de coleções seja apenas uma atividade periférica nessas organizações, a coleção constitui um território propício à experimentação. Os atores envolvidos interagem com os objetos coletados, materiais ou imateriais, em suas ações artísticas, ou mesmo inventam novas formas de "fazer uma coleção". Propomos a noção de "coleção de fronteira", inspirada na sociologia interativa, a fim de mostrar que a coleção, em regime performático, prossegue e gera formas de cooperação entre diferentes mundos sociais e renova as interações entre seres humanos e objetos. Direcionando nossa atenção na Fondation du doute, no Watermill Center, no Musée de la danse, analisamos as formas de colaboração entre os atores que interagem com estas coleções, as habilidades e referências que são mobilizadas, as ferramentas que são construídas e as formas de conhecimento que são produzidas.
... Esta inversão conceptual e metodológica, segue um princípio semelhante à problemática da documentação apresentada por Philip Auslander (2006) no seu artigo The Performativity of Performance Documentation, no qual o autor interpela a performatividade do processo de documentação enquanto registo de um processo intangível através de práticas como a fotografia ou o vídeo, evitando a perda do conhecimento e da memória dessa obra, mas por outro lado, a utilização da documentação enquanto plataforma para a performance de uma outra obra (nem sempre aquilo que ocorreu, mas a que se pretendia eternizar). Diferenciou-as da seguinte forma: ...
Na relação dialética entre o lugar do museu e da performance, o conceito de memória, as suas políticas e performatividades são elementos fulcrais para repensar os seus campos de ação na contemporaneidade. Este texto pretende constituir laços e afetividades entre estes conceitos e as suas práticas, não só no contexto institucional bem como no que à s práticas artísticas diz respeito. Estruturado entre a teoria e a prática, assume o desafio de procurar e interpelar outras perspectivas sobre os processos de institucionalização e das políticas institucionais relacionadas com a memória, através de uma metodologia de montage, presente, de distintas formas, nos casos de estudo apresentados.
... Ya en los años 80 la imagen en color toma protagonismo, perdiendo parte de su carácter documental para pasar a ser más una pieza con valor autónomo (Erickson, 1999). La segunda de las tipologías mencionadas es la theatrical, también denominada, bajo nuestro punto de vista más acertadamente, performed photography (Auslander, 2006). Esta tipología incluiría las performances realizadas para la cámara, frecuentemente sin público y, en ocasiones, con una naturaleza secuencial que ofrece una lectura temporal de la performance que se ejecuta. ...
Entendemos el suceder y el efímero tiempo compartido como elementos indisolubles de la performance, vindicando la presencia como uno de los pilares esenciales de esta práctica. Estas afirmaciones -que podrían resultar limitadoras- no desestiman la importancia de otros soportes como la fotografía o el video que, en ocasiones, interactúan con la performance a una estrecha distancia. Sensibles a estas aproximaciones, prestaremos especial atención a la colaboración que se establece entre performance y fotografía repasando conceptos como presencialidad, subjetividad, veracidad, documento o performatividad. Dada la amplitud del tema, hemos establecido una acotación temporal centrada en el contexto español de las fecundas décadas de 1960 y 1970. Estos años trajeron consigo la aparición de una simbiosis internacional entre el medio fotográfico y la performance; un despertar que impulsó significativos cambios de valor de la fotografía y -en el caso español- la conservación de una performance escasamente investigada.
... Según Auslander, se supone una relación ontológica de subordinación de la documentación respecto de la performance, en la que la performance precede y autoriza la documentación. La mayoría de la documentación que conocemos de la performance clásica de las décadas de 1960 y 1970, pertenece a esta categoría (Auslander, 2006:1). ...
La performance es una disciplina en la que la obra y la documentación se dan la mano, existe una gran vinculación, se entrelazan y confunden en numerosas ocasiones. En este breve estudio sobre la documentación de la performance, planteamos una ampliación y actualización de conceptos, en base a las nuevas necesidades surgidas en el arte de acción actual. Proponiendo cuatro nuevas categorías o tipologías, atendiendo a sus cualidades intrínsecas (esenciales): la imagen documental, la imagen teatral, la imagen trofeo y la imagen posproducida. Esta última se divide, a su vez, en imagen publicitaria o propagandística e imagen expositiva o de mercado.
Performance is a discipline in which work and documentation go hand in hand, there is a great deal of connection, they are intertwined and confused on many occasions. In this brief study on the documentation of performance, we propose an expansion and updating of concepts, based on the new needs that have arisen in today's art of action. We propose four new categories or typologies, according to their intrinsic (essential) qualities: the documentary image, the theatrical image, the trophy image and the post-produced image. The latter is divided, in turn, into publicity or propaganda image and exhibition or market image.
... Ambos aspectos los revisaremos a continuación. Auslander (2006) plantea que existen dos tipos de registro en la performance. El primero lo denomina como documental, y es aquel en el cual el (los) medio(s) utilizado(s) para registrar la pieza se limita(n) solo a documentarla y a servir de evidencia de la realización de dicha pieza, asumiéndose que la performance precede al registro y es independiente de él. ...
Este trabajo aborda el diálogo entre texto escrito y creación artística en performance, básicamente a partir de la praxis de esta última, centrándonos en las formas por medio de las cuales la performance se nutre del texto escrito. Se analiza al texto escrito como elemento en la construcción de las piezas; como registro; como paratexto; a la escritura sobre performance; a las peculiaridades de la relación entre texto escrito literario y performance, y las posibilidades que se presentan bajo el alero de las nuevas tecnologías. Se utiliza una metodología exploratoria, que además considera las experiencias del autor en el área. Todo, desde una perspectiva latinoamericana[1], por la que se intenta contribuir a la construcción de un cuerpo teórico desde y hacia nuestros territorios.
Cover Story: Presentazione della copertina del numero 4
Rok Vevar is a dance historian and archivist who founded the Temporary Slovene Dance Archive (TSDA) in 2011. TSDA is a platform for documenting and historicizing modern and contemporary dance in Slovenia. He first opened the archive to the public in his private apartment in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and then in March 2018, he transferred it into the premises of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana. The material is now more accessible to its users who are at the same time witnesses of the development of this peculiar archive. TSDA has thus become a performative, time-specific and site-specific installation presenting the archive as a structure evolving over time and without end. It seems that by entering the institutional framework as an individual, the archivist has found material support and space while retaining his relative independence. In the introduction of his article, Aldo Milohnic presents the genealogy and the structure of TSDA and then, in the main part of the article, he analyses a specific complexity of the relation artist–activist–archivist, represented by TSDA’s founder Rok Vevar.
availableThis article was originally published by Parallel Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, as part of The International Journal of Screendance, Volume 2 (2012), Parallel Press. It is made available here with the kind permission of Parallel Press.
Journal: Performance Paradigm. In this paper, I explore how performative strategies of gathering can trouble the imaginative frames through which we habitually separate histories, communities and environments from ourselves. In particular, I look at performative gatherings that acknowledge the policing, segregating and extractive uses of image-making technologies in contemporary societies. I discuss how contemporary artists Tejal Shah and Autumn Knight combine performance and moving image practices to create space for shared forms of presence across hierarchies of gender, class or race.
Questioning forms of kindness defined by recognition or inclusion, I argue that specific gatherings of bodies and images allow the audience to reorient themselves to others. Drawing on Haraway’s proposal for a kindness that involves ‘making kin’ (2008, 19) by stretching the imagination beyond familial, cultural and species borders, I argue that these performances work to heal the wounds of violent and isolating (self-)images. By embracing in weaponized spaces and dancing on landfills, informal collectives might redistribute the weight of inequality. By welcoming the strangers, outcasts and refuse that inhabit the margins of our sense of self, they can extend into kinder communities.
In positing that memories acquired through visual media can impact subjectivity and alter worldview, prosthetic memory relies on an individual’s ability to build connections with the experiences of another. As an art form that foregrounds the body and relies on visuality to develop spectatorship as an affective, relational process, performance art lends itself to being analysed as a means of prosthetic memory. This article engages with three performances by the Sri Lankan performance artist Bandu Manamperi to address the interpretive intersection of the two fields, drawing on Memory Studies, Performance Studies and the Kristevan abject. Analysing interview data and photographic documentation of the performances, I explore how the affective links built through performance contribute to the creation of empathetic, relational understandings of the performing body, especially when the body presents as a violated or abject entity, and how space and cultural memory frame performance and guide viewing. I conclude that as a visceral signifier and carrier of personal memory in performance art, the body interacts with audiences’ experiential archives to impact subjectivity and influence worldview, thereby suggesting that analysing performance art reinforces and extends the tenets of Landsberg’s theories and that prosthetic memory merits further scholarship in relation to the visual arts.
The categories of ‘art’ and ‘life’ play a central role in the critical reception of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, which have predominantly been read as a generalized, “blithely affirmative” and even “faintly embarrassing” attempt to fuse the two. This paper attempts to rethink the definition and relation of these two categories in Kaprow’s work. Rather than an uncritical attempt to fuse art and life, I suggest, Kaprow’s Happenings developed an increasingly complex, branching and networked structure, capable of staging a plurality of different modes of interaction between work and world. This paper explores both the modes and the contexts of these interactions in three of Kaprow’s Happenings of the 1960s.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach to information-led exhibitions focused on performance can be considered practice-as-research historiography if curation is engaged with as praxis. Approaching exhibition curation as research praxis is a knowledge-making process, reconfiguring exhibitions as far more than a ‘pathway to impact’ designed at securing a grant. In the curation of two linked exhibitions on nineteenth-century popular entertainments at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum and University of Bristol Theatre Collection, which were stunted due to COVID-19, I developed an argument for the shared ground of exhibitions and performance. If archival objects can perform, the exhibition space itself is a stage through which they communicate embodied meanings to audiences. I explore how exhibition curation generates different epistemologies to written research by putting museum studies, performance history, audience studies and performance practice-as-research in conversation. I demonstrate how museum studies could benefit from performance in developing epistemological arguments, and how performance studies can more significantly privilege the audience in the knowledge production process. I conclude my findings by discussing how planned activities and lessons learnt from these exhibitions could provide a blueprint for practitioners interested in using the exhibition form and format to conduct historically relational practice-research inquiries in conversation with audiences.
The category of ‘transmedia story’ is generally assumed to be static. That is, once a multi-platform story world has been classified as transmedia, it is assumed that this classification applies on an ongoing basis. However, these classifications may in fact need to be revisited, particularly when a story is told in ‘real time’ across social platforms that privilege immediacy. In this paper, we examine the relationship between diegetic social media paratexts and the core text they connect to, using the example of in online transmedia story The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. We argue that once the narrative has concluded, the transmedia status of the story becomes problematic, given the effort required to stitch together the different transmedial components. Utilising qualitative and quantitative content analysis, the show is analysed to determine the relationship between the different elements of the text as presented on YouTube and Twitter. The diegetic paratexts distributed through social media site Twitter contribute to the narrative by expanding upon the events of the core text conveyed on YouTube, and providing context – but never resolution – to the plot. The Twitter paratexts are inherently dependent on the core text but are also directional in that audience members must move from one platform to another in order to engage with the full story. Additionally, the temporal model of release for the core text changes the impact of the diegetic paratexts, while limiting the longevity of the transmedia aspects to the text as a result of dispersed narrative and dependency created by the relationship between textual elements. This analysis helps to extend understandings of transmedia storytelling as we propose the concept of ‘transmedia artefacts’, a category for narratives that transform once they are no longer able to be engaged with as live online objects.
How can one construct spatial histories and architectural theories from gestures, words and voices, bodies and minor threads?
This research delves into oral and embodied architectural and spatial knowledge as modes of producing buildings, spaces and spatialities. This knowledge is transmitted body-to-body through the temporalities of performance, its acts of remaining and means of reappearance, and relies on the repertoire as an infrastructure of transmission and conservation, an organic counterpart to the archives.
While hylomorphism—dividing matter/form, thinking/making, architects/crafts. wo.men—has been a dominant paradigm threading the architectural discipline and its history, oral and embodied knowledge, practices and histories have remained neglected. Gilbert Simondon’s theory of operations helps one understand how hylomorphism came from social and labor stratification, perpetuated by the separation of the crafts.wo.man and her operatory knowledge and theories from abstract thought, decisionmaking and infrastructures of institutionalized knowledge production. In architecture, his critique reveals how the dominant discourse has remained blind to myriad spatial practices and especially to organic knowledge.
(from) the repertoire introduces an architectural theory of operations, opening up the potentialities of oral and embodied modes of architectural production. Epistemological thresholds enable to make contact with the repertoire’s forms of imagination and invention, transmission and migration, historical regimes and potential histories, remainders and agencies. Architectural historiography and image—figurations—are renegotiated in order to consider the ontology of operations, gestures and words. The research engages with operatory dimensions of architectural instruments by looking at how they operate. The versant opératoire of forms leads us to the concept of protofigurations—embodied techniques of spatial design.
The core of this thesis revolves around discussions with older generations of the Sahrawi people, in the refugee camps near Tindouf, South Algeria, within an oral memory preservation program. This manuscript explores how their architectural histories, knowledge and theories, while entirely undrawn and unwritten, are crafted, preserved and transmitted. A discussion with Gorba M.L., a Sahrawi woman who participated in the construction of the camps and the Sahrawi State in exile, unfolds the architectural agency of gestures on plural temporalities and materialities. By sharing her repertoire, she introduces a spatial practice of repair, giving agency to preempted futurities as present corporeality.
The immobilization of the Sahrawi people, a product of colonial violence, short-circuits the repertoire. In this context, the ethics and paradoxes of preserving and archiving the repertoire are examined, and, at the same time, strategic relationships are proposed that escape the toxicity of historical discourses by supporting the re-enactment of knowledge. Furthermore, this research investigates practices that momentarily stabilize the ontology of operations and enable the repertoire to circulate. Coined as architectural reenactments, and together with a theory of operations, these practices open a field, a zone of peaceful reconciliation with knowledge from the repertoire, granting access to its scales and temporalities from within the discipline and in view of integrating it in curricula and research.
I argue performance studies’ modernist ontological assumptions of fleeting are antithetical to contemporary performance art which relies on digital technology for mediated viewing processes. In this essay, I argue for a hybrid postmodern performance studies that allow for varying modes of experiencing performance art. I situate Allan Kaprow and Fluxus as the genealogical beginning of performance and argue that Peggy Phelan’s ontological assumptions of performance are inherently modernist. I then pose a postmodern approach to performance studies that embrace an embodiment of hybrid viewing methodologies of performance. Lastly, I use three examples as embodiments and symptomatic representations of this embodiment of a hybrid postmodern performance ontology.
David Bowie is…, the recently ended exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, stands in stark contrast to a similar exhibit mounted by Marina Abramovic at the MOMA entitled The Artist is Present. Unlike Marina Abramovic’s insistent, troubling presence, David Bowie’s body is absent. The exhibit offers the performative figure of “Bowie” as simulacrum, a “real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1994, 1). The simulacral “Bowie” is presented as a de-centered, dis-oriented subject, transecting gender and performance boundaries as he effortlessly moves through physical and artistic geographies. This paper argues that the exhibit merely performs the subversive, “demonic” (Deleuze 1990, 258) character of the simulacrum, and by doing so closes it off from its radical potential to challenge the neo-liberalized space of the museum.
Das Verhältnis zwischen Performancekunst und Fotografie wird in der Regel anhand einer Gegenüberstellung von fotografischen Dokumenten und fotografierten Ereignissen definiert. Die Frage, wie Performance-Fotos jeweils aufgenommen werden, spielt im Rahmen der theoretischen Reflexion dieses Verhältnisses kaum eine Rolle, wobei es hier einige wenige signifikante Ausnahmen gibt. Der vorliegende Beitrag behandelt künstlerische Positionen – im Fokus steht Vito Acconcis Performance Twelve Pictures aus dem Jahr 1969 –, die den Akt des Fotografierens als (Teil einer) Performance konzipieren und somit dessen Stellung innerhalb des Aufführungsgefüges in einem neuen, drängenden Licht erscheinen lassen.
Mittels fotografischer Aufnahmen wurde Jean Tinguelys 1960 im Skulpturengarten des Museum of Modern Art, New York einmalig vollzogene Zerstörungsaktion Homage to New York dokumentiert, so dass sich das ephemere Ereignis der Vergänglichkeit entzog. Die Bilder von Tinguelys Homage to New York halten jedoch nicht allein die Zerstörungsaktion für die Nachwelt fest, sondern das fotografische Bildgebungsverfahren kehrt überdies die Bildhaftigkeit der Installation hervor. Bereits in der Skulptur sind bildkonstituierende Elemente angelegt, die in den Schwarz- Weiß-Fotografien der Aktion verstärkt hervortreten. Die mit der Überführung vom Dreidimensionalen ins Zweidimensionale einhergehenden Modifikationen werden anhand eines der ersten fotografisch dokumentierten Kunst-Ereignisse untersucht.
A proposta básica desta pesquisa foi esboçar uma definição possível de reperformance, cotejando-a com a problemática geral da relação entre presença e arquivo no campo das atividades performáticas. Para tanto, considerou-se a eclosão histórica das reperformances, típica dos anos 2000, a partir da exposição Seven Easy Pieces, de Marina Abramović, com ênfase na análise de um caso-exemplar – a obra Seedbed – e nas eventuais aproximações e diferenças que esta manteve com a performance de “origem”, de Vito Acconci. Como resultado, propôs-se a noção de “redução arquival” como uma categoria central para a definição de reperformance, considerando-se suas potencialidades dialógicas, de ordem trans-histórica.
The objective of the study is to facilitate and understand how design thinking is used to develop creative thinking skills and understand how the students apply these skills to make meaning. Collaborative activities which are integrated into the existing curriculum and daily-life activities and interactions with in the class setup serves as the perfect precedent for students to move out of their comfort zones, work together solving problems and engage themselves in the process of meaning making. It examines the effect on student learning in small work groups, and multidisciplinary group dynamics.
The integrated curriculum will offer an experience and culture of empowerment in a unique setup intended for self-organized learning, in order to apply and use the process of design thinking to solve problems and practice the idea of working in various group dynamics. It also provides a unique space for the students to build networks that will enable opportunities for future collaborations as well. The integrated curriculum is divided into two parts; consisting of the personal growth module and the second catering to developing skills for a professional environment. The students learn to expand their ideas of what they believed could be possible and learn to move out of their comfort zones. They are to find solutions to design problems within their environments and are taken through the steps of design thinking; exploration, ideation, prototyping or testing, and implementation of their projects.
The aim of the study is to offer insights into Design Thinking as a tool to develop creative thinking skills and students application of skills to meaning-making through the doing of design, integrated in an undergraduate visual arts education. The educational perspective and aim of this study is to provide analysis of student collaborations and how they can be employed to the existing art and design curricula. Moreover, this study may not be cliché; it provides teaching strategies and new interventions for fostering dialogue, empathy building and collaboration within the scope of design education study programs in undergraduate visual arts education.
Over the last twenty years, reenactment has been appropriated by both contemporary artistic production and art-theoretical discourse, becoming a distinctive strategy to engage with history and memory. As a critical act of repetition, which is never neutral in reactualizing the past, it has established unconventional modes of historicization and narration. Collecting work by artists, scholars, curators, and museum administrators, the volume investigates reenactment's potential for a (re)activation of layered temporal experiences, and its value as an ongoing interpretative and political gesture performed in the present with an eye to the future. Its contributions discuss the mobilization of archives in the struggle for inclusiveness and cultural revisionism; the role of the body in the presentification and rehabilitation of past events and (impermanent) objects; the question of authenticity and originality in artistic practice, art history, as well as in museum collections and conservation practices.
Imagine this. Parting a heavy curtain, you enter a vast space. Ceiling high and pitched, austere columns down two long sides—it’s a kind of post-industrial basilica painted black. Sound is a resounding murmur. Light flickers across video monitors and projection screens. You pause for your senses to adjust. First scanning the room and then moving within it, your perception sharpens to your surroundings… Figures, mostly women: in landscapes, with animals, mirrors, and masks; cones of white paper or galvanized tin nearly twice your height; line drawings in sand or chalk, on paper or in video; sounds of wind, foghorns, whistling, footsteps; images in facets, shadows, reflections, prisms… You walk through the space, gathering perceptions. Eventually, your experiences of aural and visual echoes cohere to form an internal syntax, a meaningful order, in which no external references pertain. Like a dream or a foreign place, the environment is immersive and so impossible, later, to fully recall or describe. What remains with you is an impression, an image that dwells in your mind.
Esta pesquisa explora os conflitos que surgem ao serem aplicadas práticas documentais a arte performática. Embora a efemeridade das ações seja percebida como essencial para esse gênero artístico, profissionais e artistas, frequentemente, não são favoráveis ao desaparecimento de todos os aspectos dessas obras de arte. Os estudos de caso neste artigo demonstram que a efemeridade da obra de arte da performance original torna-se ainda mais considerada quando a performatividade da ação é preservada por meio de formas específicas de documentações fragmentadas. Proporcionando com isso, a sobrevivência e continualidade do caráter ativador, do encorporamento da experiência evocada, dos significados contingentes e das contínuas reinterpretações, como por meio de reencenações, de uma obra de arte performática.
La relación entre performance y redes sociales es un tema poco explorado, transformándolo no solo en un espacio potente para la experimentación y la creación, sino también en un asunto a analizar desde el punto de vista teórico. Uno de los aspectos menos discutidos en dicha relación es el de las piezas de performance cuyo registro teatral son las redes sociales, considerando además que dichas herramientas pueden expandir las perspectivas de los creadores en el área, más aún pensando en el creciente uso de ellas por parte de la población en general. Ante este panorama, el presente trabajo desarrolla un marco analítico tentativo para aproximarnos a dichas piezas, apoyado en conceptos provenientes de la cibercultura y de la teoría literaria como el avatar, el pacto referencial, y el pacto autobiográfico. Aplicaremos dicho marco a algunas piezas de interés, esbozando cómo pueden utilizarse esos conceptos en los ámbitos teórico y creativo.
In this paper, a performance artist aims to present reflexive narrative-building as autoethnography through the photographic documentation of decolonization-themed Lithuanian performance art. The question within this paper is how the narratives of Lithuanian performance art deal with decolonization through a reflexive study of the photo documentation of performance art. This question is answered through a reflexive investigation into the photo documentation of three cases from Lithuania. The performance art projects attempt to rein-scribe the erased (hi)stories, which use sites of performance as loaded narratives. Photo documentation allows us to look into these performances from the distance of time and following political or socio-cultural changes. The memory here is the embodied remembrance of the history of the Soviet beliefs and past governmental structures forced on Lithuanian society during the Soviet regime (colonization). Decolonizing Lithuanian post-Soviet memories means using an arts-based method, creating space for a dialogue that understands the impact of the traumatic past on the present culture. The purpose of this research is, through the reflections of a performance artist, using autoethnog-raphy and performance as activism, to narrate performance art dealing with photo images of the three studied cases to include the historical memories and decolonization of Lithuania.
En El ojo de Orfeo desde puntos dispares y con estrategias escópicas
diversas, los autores han asumido el compromiso de analizar la
situación de prácticas artísticas y culturales de nuestros días, que
dan lugar a las siguientes cuestiones.: ¿Cómo se reconfigura el arte hoy
en un campo que incorpora la experiencia digital?; ¿Qué implicaciones
tiene la redefinición digital de la experiencia socio-cultural sobre las
concepciones y procesos de creación artística? ¿Cuáles son los limites de
la técnica en las prácticas artísticas actuales?
In most classrooms outside of major metropolitan centers where performance art is discussed both historically and as a contemporary practice, performances of note are not directly experienced live. Documentation of past performances is introduced in the form of didactic texts, photographs, or even more rarely, video. If live performance is witnessed, it is typically the work of students or local/regional artists where the importance or quality of the performance is typically derivative or not emblematic of the genre. If primary sources of performance are photographic and video documents (both documentary and theatrical), educational texts, or minor live work, then what is the actual subject of discussions of performance art? It is not the actual art, but the signifiers of the art act. Identifying these signifiers and their contexts inform discussions around performance, defining the negative space rather than the positive. Looking specifically at Marina Abramović and Ulay's Imponderabilia (1977), Pippin Barr's The Artist is Present (2011), and William Pope.L's Pull! (2013), this paper addresses the synchronic and diachronic nature of performance art that exists both as an action that unfolds over time, and the concept of the action that lives outside of time. It addresses the articulations of performances and how various mediums and language shape discussions of performances to impart knowledge and experience and form art history's canon.
Autorka krytycznie analizuje seminarium badawczo-artystyczne poświęcone zagadnieniu gestu wobec obrazu fotograficznego. W centrum jej rozważań znajdują się fotografie Pawła Bownika.
From: Textual Studies in Canada -
The paper examines the interaction of photography and theatre performance as two forms of visual spectacle with particular possibilities for fringe interference.
Conceptual art's factions have frequently been at odds, usually over definitions and often after the fact. For the purposes of further argument, Conceptual art might be considered as work that emphasized the underlying conditions of aesthetic experience: Language was seen as foremost among these conditions. Material form and sensory perception were made secondary to analyses of their discursive and institutional frames. Performance art, on the other hand, seems relatively straightforward to define, “as a form of art that happens at a particular time in a particular place where the artist engages in some sort of activity, usually before an audience. The main difference between performance art and other modes of visual art practice, such as painting, photography, and sculpture, is that it is a temporal event or action.” ² .
. World of Others' Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Richard Bauman. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. ix. 184pp.
I was not yet three years old, living in central North Carolina, when Carolee Schneemann performed Meat Joy at the Festival of Free Expression in Paris in 1964; three when Yoko Ono performed Cut Piece in Kyoto; eight when Vito Acconci did his Push Ups in the sand at Jones Beach and Barbara T. Smith began her exploration of bodily experiences with her Ritual Meal performance in Los Angeles; nine when Adrian Piper paraded through the streets of New York making herself repulsive in the Catalysis series; ten when Valie Export rolled over glass in Eros/Ion in Frankfurt; twelve in 1973 when, in Milan, Gina Pane cut her arm to make blood roses flow (Sentimental Action); fifteen (still in North Carolina, completely unaware of any art world doings) when Marina Abramovic and Ulay collided against each other in Relation in Space at the Venice Biennale in 1976 (fig. 1). I was thirty years old—then 1991—when I began to study performance or body art ¹ from this explosive and important period, entirely through its documentation.
Conceptual art's factions have frequently been at odds, usually over definitions and often after the fact. For the purposes of further argument, Conceptual art might be considered as work that emphasized the underlying conditions of aesthetic experience: Language was seen as foremost among these conditions. Material form and sensory perception were made secondary to analyses of their discursive and institutional frames. Performance art, on the other hand, seems relatively straightforward to define, “as a form of art that happens at a particular time in a particular place where the artist engages in some sort of activity, usually before an audience. The main difference between performance art and other modes of visual art practice, such as painting, photography, and sculpture, is that it is a temporal event or action.”2
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 21.3 (1999) 98-104
Book Review
Goldberg Variations
Books & Company
Performance: Live Art Since 1960. RoseLee Goldberg.
Foreword by Laurie Anderson. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
1998.
In the early eighties, I and a group of friends -- musicians,
dancers, performance artists, theatre artists -- got together to
try to define "performance art" in contradistinction to the other
arts, in particular theatre. This discussion went on for hours, got
more and more frustrating, and came to no conclusion. We all sort
of "knew" what made performance art what it was and not something
else; but when it came to defining it in terms of its elements, it
was clear that the wide purview of various traditions that
constitute theatre, especially in its twentieth-century avant-garde
forms, made it impossible to definitively distinguish performance
art from theatre as a "live art." Most attempts can only do so by
reducing all theatre to fourth-wall naturalism, which, for all its
cultural impact, is a small moment in the long history and varied
cultural locations of theatre. (The only exception I could think of
would be the literal and experiential character of endurance and
body art, but even they become theatricalized in their mode of
presentation. Think of the Grand Guignol of Ron Athey.) In the long
run, however, genre distinctions are always more of a concern for
critics, theorists, and historians than they are for artists.
Nonetheless, our instincts told us that performance art did seem
like something new and different, and its difference largely
consisted of disrupting the very categories we were trying to
distinguish over against it, instead of distinguishing itself as a
new category complete in itself. "Performance" as a larger concept
to be argued about only emerged once "performance art" became
recognized as a provocative and genre-destabilizing force. Its
role, as Josette Féral once put it, was to make each specific art
form aware of, and draw attention to, the modes of its own
production (which to my mind also overlaps significantly with
conceptual art). But as Féral had also remarked in a later essay,
performance lost this interrogative power when it began to be seen
as a genre in itself.
What we see in RoseLee Goldberg's big new coffee-table book
Performance: Live Art Since 1960 seems to reflect this
trajectory described by Féral. Insofar as she constructs the book
thematically, Goldberg includes a variety of disciplines --
including dance, theatre, video, and visual art -- whose limits are
probed by this self-conscious thing called "performance." While
Goldberg wants to claim that performance art is really operating in
resistance to commodity culture, especially as it was articulated
in the seventies, it's clear as we follow the chronology of the
documentation that such an ideal was assuredly abandoned by the
eighties, and performance as a highly polished commodity is clearly
prominent in the nineties (and this book is an example). This shift
in attitude can be read in the almost historical shift from
black-and-white photos to color. There is a sense of mere utility
in black-and-white, which points to the idea that documentation is
really only a supplement to a performance having to do with
context, space, action, ideas, of which the photograph is primarily
a reminder. Moving into color photography, especially as gorgeously
displayed in a book like this one, it's clear that the photograph
becomes less a record of a conceptually interesting event than a
visual work to be appreciated for itself. For example, the cover
photograph, from Lou Reed and Robert Wilson's Time Rocker,
is an onstage performance view no audience member could possibly
have; however good or bad the performance itself may have been, for
the person who never saw it, the photograph takes on a different
life to stimulate other unrelated fantasies.
"Live Art" is indeed a category that is accepted at face value,
and I wonder what Philip Auslander's response to this would be,
given his critique of the concept in his new book Liveness,
and given Goldberg's self-admitted irony of creating a book of
photographs to capture the spirit...
Phonography In Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts
- Lee B Brown
Lee B. Brown, " Phonography. " In Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, 2nd Edition, edited by David Goldblatt and Lee B. Brown. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Prentice Hall, 2005, 214, 216.
Lecture I in How to Do Things with Words In Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, volume I
- J L Austin
J. L. Austin, " Lecture I in How to Do Things with Words. " In Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, volume I, edited by Philip Auslander. London: Routledge, 2003, 93.
Dis/playing the Phallus
- Jones
Jones, " Dis/playing the Phallus, " 568.
Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform their Masculinities Jones points out that Klein actually exposed the theatricality of his image by publishing two different versions of it, one with a bicyclist on the street and one without, thus tacitly revealing its constructed nature
- Amelia Jones
Amelia Jones, " Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform their Masculinities, " Art
History 17, 4 (1994): 554. Jones points out that Klein actually exposed the theatricality of
his image by publishing two different versions of it, one with a bicyclist on the street and
one without, thus tacitly revealing its constructed nature.
6. Erickson, 99.