Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices [1 ed.] 9781138184138, 9781138184145, 9781315645384

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HISTORIES OF PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION

How might we document, curate, collect, and exhibit performance?

Histories of Performance Documentation traces the many ways in which museums have approached performance works from the 1960s onwards. Considering the unique challenges of documenting live events, including hybrid and interactive arts, games, virtual and mixed reality performance, this collection investigates the burgeoning role of the performative in museum displays, and examines a number of interdisciplinary documentation practices that have influenced the field of performance documentation. Gabriella Giannachi and Jonah Westerman bring together interviews and essays by leading curators, conservators, artists and scholars from institutions including MoMA, Tate, SFMOMA and the Whitney. Developing from recent approaches that argue that discussions of performance should not be focused purely on the live event, and documentation should not be read solely as a process of retrospection, these chapters build a radical new framework for thinking about the relationship between performance and its documentation—and how documentation might shape ideas of what constitutes performance in the first place. Gabriella Giannachi is Professor in Performance and New Media at the University of Exeter, UK. Jonah Westerman is Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York. From 2014 to 2016, he was AHRC Postdoctoral Research Associate at Tate, and in 2016–2017 he was Chester Dale Senior Fellow in Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

HISTORIES OF PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices

Edited by Gabriella Giannachi and Jonah Westerman

First edition published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Gabriella Giannachi and Jonah Westerman individual chapters, the contributors The right of the Gabriella Giannachi and Jonah Westerman to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-18413-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-18414-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64538-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo Std by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of figures viii Acknowledgments x

Introduction: practical histories: how we do things with performance 1 Jonah Westerman

PART I

Interviews 13   1 Museum of Modern Art, New York Stuart Comer, Chief Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art; Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives; and Ana Janevski, Associate Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art, in conversation with Jonah Westerman, April 2015

15

  2 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Jay Sanders, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance, in conversation with Jonah Westerman, April 2015

21

  3 Tate, London Catherine Wood, Senior Curator International Art (Performance); and Pip Laurenson, Head of Collection Care Research, in conversation with Jonah Westerman, June 2016

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vi Contents

  4 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Jill Sterrett, Director of Collections and Conservation; Rudolf Frieling, Curator for Media Arts; and Frank Smigiel, Associate Curator for Performance and Film, in conversation with Gabriella Giannachi, August 2015

35

  5 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Christiane Berndes, Curator and Head of Collection; and Annie Fletcher, Chief Curator, in conversation with Jonah Westerman, February 2015

42

  6 The Kitchen, New York Tim Griffin, Executive Director and Chief Curator, in conversation with Jonah Westerman, April 2015

48

  7 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Philip Bither, William and Nadine McGuire Director and Senior Curator, Performing Arts; Eric Crosby, Associate Curator, Visual Arts; Robin Dowden, Director, New Media Initiatives; and Fionn Meade, Artistic Director, in conversation with Jonah Westerman, April 2015

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  8 Performa, New York RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Curator, in conversation with Jonah Westerman, May 2015

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  9 LIMA, Amsterdam Gaby Wijers, Director, in conversation with Jonah Westerman, February 2015

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10 Pics or it didn’t happen Text by Catherine Wood, including an interview with Amalia Ulman

72

PART II

Essays 91 11 Performing the archive and exhibiting the ephemeral Barbara Clausen 12 At the edge of the ‘living present’: re-enactments and re-interpretations as strategies for the preservation of performance and new media art Gabriella Giannachi

93

115

Contents  vii

13 Documenting interaction Katja Kwastek 14 Screen capture and replay: documenting gameplay as performance Henry Lowood, Eric Kaltman, and Joseph C. Osborn 15 Mixed reality performance through ethnography Peter Tolmie and Steve Benford

Afterword: the intention of the artist and the point of view of the audience: performance documentation revisited Gabriella Giannachi

132

149 165

182

Index 198

FIGURES

10.1 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 8 July 2014), (#itsjustdifferent), 2014 10.2 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 1 June 2014), 2014 10.3 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 5 September 2014), 2014 10.4 Amalia Ulman, Privilege 5/4/2016, 2016 10.5 Amalia Ulman, Privilege 5/15/2016, 2016 10.6 Amalia Ulman, Privilege 8/9/2016, 2016 11.1 Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll, Festival d’Automne, Musée Galleria, Paris, 1973 11.2 Babette Mangolte, still moment in the film The Camera Je, La Camera: I, 1977, for the Muybridge Sequence shot in a loft in Tribeca 11.3 Babette Mangolte, Rushes Revisited, P.S. One Dismantle, 2013, view of the exhibition Babette Mangolte, VOX (Montreal), from January 25 to April 20, 2013 11.4 Sarah Pierce, Future Exhibitions, 2010–2011, video still of the performance within the reinstallation of Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann, 1963, in the exhibition Push and Pull, 2010, at the Museum Moderner Kunst mumok, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna 11.5 Jimmy Robert, Draw the Line, 2013, performance at the Power Plant, Toronto, 2013

74 76 78 79 80 88 95

100

101

104 107

List of figures  ix

12.1 T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm, The Eternal Frame 1975, installation view, Long Beach Museum of Art, 1975, left to right: Jody Procter, Chip Lord, Doug Hall 121 12.2 T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm, The Eternal Frame 1975, production still, Dealey Plaza, Dallas 122 12.3 Lynn Hershman Leeson, Signature of Roberta in Gallery Book, 1974 124 12.4 Lynn Heshman Leeson, Roberta Psychiatric Chart, 1978 126 13.1 Taxonomy developed at Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research for winners of Prix Ars Electronica Interactive Art 138 13.2 Setup for VCR interviews at Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, 2009 140 13.3 David Rokeby, Very Nervous System (since 1983), visitor interactions at Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, 2009 141 13.4 David Rokeby, Very Nervous System (since 1983), documentary collection, 2009, available at: www.fondation-langlois.org/ html/e/page.php?NumPage=2186 142 14.1 Replay files on the NoSkill Memorial Site, Internet Archive, captured January 14, 2002 151 14.2 Ampex HS-100 Sports ‘Recorder/Reproducer’, product brochure, c.1967 152 14.3 A citation tool interface, with the running emulation top left 161 14.4 Linking from a researcher’s text to a running emulation illustrating the text with historical gameplay, which in turn could be played anew from the point cited 162 15.1 Some of the documentation relating to: (a) player interactions; and (b) locating a lost player (2004) 169 15.2 A sample of the ethnographic record for Rider Spoke (2009) 172 15.3 The additional record of the GPS trail (2009) 173 15.4 Records of contrasting kinds of engagement in the Tate (2015) 175 15.5 The audience of manger in bubble formation (2015) 177 15.6 Some of the documents generated by the Carolan guitar 178

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book rests on the support of a number of individuals and organizations. We would like to thank all the curators, archivists, and conservators who contributed not only their time, but also helped to shape this collection by encouraging us to look in a number of directions. Additionally, we would like to express our deep gratitude to all the artists who gave us time and contributed invaluable images for this collection. At a personal level, we would especially like to thank Jennifer Mundy and Catherine Wood at Tate, along with the other members of the Tate research team, particularly Acatia Finbow, Christopher Griffin and Susannah Worth. Finally, we would like to thank Annett Dekker, Lara Garcia, Doug Hall, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Chip Lord, Viv van Saaze, and Tanya Zimbardo, who helped with various sections in the book. We are happy to acknowledge that Katja Kwastek’s chapter builds on research for her Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (MIT Press, 2013), which offers an elaborate theory of interaction aesthetics. Some of the passages from this chapter are direct quotations from various passages of the book. The sub-chapter on taxonomies is based on her ‘Classification vs. Diversification: The Value of Taxonomies for New Media Art’, in Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla (eds.) (2010) Beyond the Screen, Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, pp. 503–20. Finally, research for this book was made possible through funding from the AHRC-funded Performance at Tate project (AH/M004228/1).

Introduction PRACTICAL HISTORIES How we do things with performance Jonah Westerman

‘Great performance art, created live before your eyes, with the added element of chance, can be remarkably intense. Documentation of these events is almost antithetical to that ideal’ (Burnham 1978: 1). This passage, penned in 1978 by Linda Frye Burnham in the first issue of High Performance, encapsulates the ambivalence that has characterized thinking about performance and its traces over the past four decades. Burnham’s solution, a quarterly magazine featuring images and descriptions of ephemeral performances, was a practical one: the goals of giving those works wider dissemination and a place in the historical record merited their reproduction on the printed page, any other misgivings notwithstanding. At the same time, those suspicions speak to us, 40 years on, of an historically situated sense of performance as a medium: liveness was all. Now, however, it is commonplace to question the equation of performance with immediacy, not least of all because that collection of forms and processes Burnham and others so assiduously promoted comprises an historical canon—their pursuit of presence is our inheritance of traces. It makes a kind of ironic, wincing sense, then, that the ambivalence Burnham shouldered as a matter of pragmatic expedience has become more and more the explicit, central subject of discussions about performance that circulate through a wide-ranging inter-discipline that involves artists, museum and theater professionals (including curators, conservators, artistic directors, dramaturgs, and archivists), as well as scholars operating in and between an array of fields (such as art history, theater and performance studies, anthropology, literature, dance, and new media). And this litany offers only a squinting glimpse at the tip of the iceberg. If performance itself is notoriously difficult to wrangle as a category, the corollary question of how to understand and handle its associated artifacts (both material and otherwise) is no less daunting and no less necessary. The goal of the present collection, however, is not to survey the field (such an undertaking could only fail, no matter how extended its asymptotic reach); nor is it to proffer a new and improved cutting edge that might make neat work of

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the complexity, imagining that the correct editorial selections could scythe this expanded (and expanding) field to size. The aim here, I would argue, is less ambitious, but perhaps more radical. In offering these assembled interviews and essays, the goal is to effect a subtle shift in emphasis: away from a primary focus on questions of ontology—what performance documentation is—toward historical accounts and granular analyses of how uses of documentation rooted in modes of museum, artistic, and scholarly practice in fact produce ideas about what constitutes performance in the first place. Re-centering our focus on practice—how we do things with performance—has two intrinsically related consequences. First, it becomes clear how indivisible are any given performance and its documentation. It might be ordinary now to question the seemingly straightforward temporal sequence whereby action necessarily precedes concerns about registration (especially when works are designed expressly for photographic and digital reception). A focus on practices, however, reveals the extent to which these complex interrelations are the effects (not the causes) of how performances construct and provoke particular kinds of relations between audiences and artworks in actual contexts of encounter and reception. The question of liveness, while it has occupied a central place in performance discourse, might only be one among many avenues for analyzing the larger order problematic of experience— the social relations questioned, authorized, or otherwise constructed by the work of art. Second, by reckoning with all the ways the arts institutions featured here have both promoted and responded to the advent of performance, it becomes readily apparent that what we sometimes consider the existential contest between experimental practice and ‘the museum’, or as the recent ‘institutionalization’ of performance, is largely fantastical. This is not to say that performance’s intermediality and multiple temporalities do not challenge more traditional museum structures and habits (indeed, this is a constant refrain among the curators and archivists featured), but it is to insist on how the histories related here show us that performance and ‘the institution’ are dynamically co-determining—in much the same way as are performance and documentation—and have been for quite some time. The first section of this book (Chapters 1–10) features nine interviews with curators, conservators, and archivists from some of the museums and other arts institutions that have been central to the development of a burgeoning performance canon. These institutions operate at disparate scales and are guided by distinct missions and priorities. And in every case, the unique institutional perspective (itself often refracted when passing between one person and another at the same place) casts the question of performance documentation in a new light, redefining its key terms, because it prioritizes different uses and strategies of presentation. This section also includes a conversation between Catherine Wood, Senior Curator of International Art (Performance) at Tate Modern, and artist Amalia Ulman, whose recent works exemplify the need to rethink not only performance’s temporality, but also the entrenched centrality of ephemerality as an analytic category. Despite their differences, then, these conversations cover a range of shared challenges that performance works, their display, and conservation pose to the bodies that collect and commission them: the

Practical histories  3

instability of traditional divisions between collection objects and archival materials, the contextual nature of meaning and the attendant difficulty in re-presenting pieces at times and places removed from their initial instantiations, the desire to preserve records of new works in ways that sensitively anticipate what will be needed to adequately project them into the future—to name only a few recurrent conundrums. As the respondents detail when and in what forms (as live actions, recorded images, scripts, scores, props, ‘relics’, and so on) performance has entered their institutions and moved through extant bureaucratic structures, what Stuart Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) calls the ‘promiscuity’ of performance, or its tendency to confound conventions of medium, comes to the fore. This practice-based picture of performance reveals both the limits of inherited models for defining and disseminating art and how the artworks themselves push the institutions to develop in new directions. It might be that the problem of medium and the ways it has traditionally governed much of twentieth-century museology is most keenly at issue for MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Each of these institutions has a departmental structure based at least partially on medium-driven concerns—now including dedicated curatorial staff for performance—and, at the same time, each has a long history of featuring performance in ways that tangentially glanced off the official departments into which it could not fit or outside them altogether (e.g. under the auspices of the education department). Each of these museums participated in the proliferation of performance during the 1960s and 1970s, including then-vanguard artists in their programming (MoMA even established a short-lived Department of Dance and Theater Design as early as 1944; SFMOMA Associate Curator of Performance and Film Frank Smigiel identifies the 1942 circus-themed exhibition Sawdust and Spangles as that museum’s first foray into the field). The desire to represent their own histories and make exhibitions—not to mention offer new art historical narratives that might involve works of painting, photography, film, video, and sculpture that involve performative aspects, but which entered their collections according to a medium-driven rubric—necessitates an historical revisionism capable of confronting entrenched modes of parsing, evaluating, and supporting artworks that inhere in every level of the museums’ functioning. To date, these revisions include not only the creation of the very posts our interlocutors occupy, but the alternative modes of display they have been attempting (and detail in their interviews). From adjustments to the conventional divide between archive and collection, to overtly theatricalized mises en scène, to collaborations with artists invited to reiterate (and continually adjust) their own works at different times, these experiments wrestle with how to account for and construct contexts, how to produce effects consistent with a given work’s stakes (rather than imagining these will be born from fidelity to form alone). At institutions with the deepest infrastructural roots in Modernist approaches, it would stand to reason that, as Jay Sanders, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance at the Whitney, puts it, ‘with performance you still at times feel like you are running the wrong way on the conveyor belt’.

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By contrast, since their inceptions, The Kitchen and Walker Art Center have had a more explicit focus on intermediality in art. Nevertheless, each of these still faces issues concerning how to steward given institutional structures in ways that also inform new programming and drive responsive working strategies. The Kitchen was established in 1971 primarily as a venue for showing and promoting video art, but its program soon encompassed performance and other forms of visual art. Executive Director and Chief Curator Tim Griffin details how facilitating artists to work between genres has been crucial to The Kitchen’s mission, and that having both black box and white cube spaces fosters reflection on the historical limits and possibilities of the two modes of exhibition. At Walker Art Center, where curatorial responsibilities are split along analogous lines (Film, Visual Art, Performing Arts), exhibitions that seek to represent the Walker’s long involvement across these categories, as well as new commissions that take such transgression as their explicit impetus, necessitate reckoning with the different protocols entailed by the physical spaces with which they are traditionally associated. How must one position documents stemming from the performing arts so they can be adequately rendered for gallery or online display? How can the institution serve works that transit between these modes? In this interview, multiple voices weigh in on how to navigate what Philip Bither, William and Nadine McGuire Director and Senior Curator, Performing Arts, pinpoints as the difference between performing art and performance art, and how documents play a central role in charting a course through the Walker’s hybrid history. At Tate Modern, performance is part of the museum’s DNA in a different fashion. A relative newcomer established in 2000, Tate Modern’s curatorial structure is primarily based along regional lines.1 Notable exceptions to this general rule, however, are dedicated senior curators for film, photography, and performance— arguably the least easily bounded, or most ‘promiscuous’, media. In this interview, Catherine Wood recounts the genesis of her position and department through the early stages of Tate Modern’s own development. Wood describes how this institutional priority emerged in tandem with its strategies for collecting and display. Permanent collection installations, for example, are based on themes—such as ‘Citizens and States’ or ‘Making Traces’—designed to illuminate affinities between different kinds of work while highlighting art’s relation to the wider world, rather than its supposedly autonomous qualities. The museum has also been able to evolve its own protocols for exhibiting new live commissions in its refurbished industrial spaces, the Turbine Hall and the Tanks—neither black box nor white cube, but some other hybrid form. The effects of such idiosyncrasies are a perennial focus of the museum’s own research priorities, both in terms of funded projects such as Performance at Tate2 and the ongoing work of the department of Collection Care Research, headed by Pip Laurenson, also featured in the interview published here. The Van Abbemuseum is unique in this group for having no medium-basis for its collecting activities whatever. Rather, as Christiane Berndes, Curator and Head of Collection, puts it, the museum consists in a single collection that used to be based more on the institution’s ‘interest in the artist himself or herself ’, but is

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increasingly rooted in ‘what the work communicates, or what it addresses’. Berndes states that while the Van Abbe only began collecting performance works designated as such in the early 2000s, when one examines older holdings dating from the 1960s and 1970s—e.g. works by Dan Graham or John Baldessari acquired in a mediated format—they could easily be described that way now. This, of course, is a situation in which all these museums now find themselves. These potential re-descriptions highlight the extent to which performance and documentation can collapse into one another. In addition, the relative lack of anxiety at Van Abbe (where medium is not a logistical and bureaucratic issue) signals how a primary emphasis on considerations of use, or ‘what the work communicates’ (as opposed to medium, what a work is), opens up new possibilities for collection and display. Annie Fletcher, Chief Curator, avers that use is of central importance to strategies at Van Abbe and adds that this does not arrive irrespective of formal considerations or at their expense. Rather, thinking the two together is a way to see how the ‘recontextualization’ that is part and parcel of curation can produce an ‘intimate interpretation of the world around us at a particular moment’ and even ‘construct a series of different subjectivities . . . a different imaginary in relation to art’. A similar sensitivity to the dynamic interrelationship between form and contextual meaning guides research at LIMA, an organization dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of media art. Based on decades of experience dealing with a wide range of art works from recorded performances to ‘born-digital’ net art, Director Gaby Wijers outlines how maintaining fidelity to the ‘time’ in time-based media art necessitates that one see the historicity in every material aspect of the works they treat. She explains that such preservation entails much more than storing digital information in workable and accessible formats—it also means having a comprehensive understanding of a work’s aims, how it uses its media to generate a particular type of experience, and seeking the best way to guarantee those qualities in perpetuity, thinking through the specificities of ‘presentation equipment’, or which monitors and projection technologies best render a work for audiences (even and especially when original platforms become outmoded or unavailable). For example, should a work originally shown on a 16 mm projector, but now migrated to a digital form, be supplemented by the recorded sound of an analog projector? Such decisions need to be made on a case-by-case basis after careful consideration of what constitutes the work’s essential characteristics. Issues such as this will of course be familiar to curators and conservators, and their lessons demonstrate how porous are the boundaries of all time-based artworks, how much our notions of what a work is depend on what we argue it is supposed to do. At what is perhaps the opposite end of the materiality spectrum, Performa is a biennial initiated in 2004 and dedicated to exhibiting new commissions and vanguard performance. And yet, as Founding Director and Curator RoseLee Goldberg makes plain, this ephemeral and peripatetic showcase for live artworks always has a historical and historicizing mission. For Goldberg, the condensed intensity of the biennial time frame is a way to announce that what is on offer is ‘the very best of what is going on’, but deciding whether to include or commission a work means

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asking: ‘how does it talk about culture . . . how does it talk about the medium, how does it talk about contemporary art, and how does it relate back to history?’ Contemporary works are positioned in relation to historical precedents—every iteration of the biennial has an historical anchor (e.g., Futurism, Surrealism, or the Renaissance) designed to offer a framework through which to understand continuing experimentation in and between media. Indeed, Goldberg sees mediation as essential to performance’s aims and, at the same time, as what can bring attention to the stakes of performance’s role in the past. For her, performance has always existed as a set of operations available to artists; the biennial’s contemporary clarion to a prior moment is a way to redress what she sees as an art historical ‘blind spot’. Not only, then, does it become crucial to document each new biennial, but also to re-evaluate historical documentation and how we see it in the present; new presents can illuminate new pasts. It is in this complex, dialectical sense that Goldberg intends the assertion: ‘the history of documentation is the history of performance’. Chapter 10, ‘Pics or It Didn’t Happen’, is a discussion between Tate Modern curator Catherine Wood and artist Amalia Ulman, whose work defies traditional models for separating a performance from its document by merging the two as a narrative stream doled out bit by bit on the social media platform, Instagram. As Ulman puts it, ‘As soon as a photograph is uploaded online, the performance and its archive are already the same thing’. Wood points out that this confounds the normal sequential understanding of performance and documentation, deploying a set of forms that mixes action and image, life and art, in ways that echo and possibly further extend the formal logic of works by some of Ulman’s forebears such as Cindy Sherman and Cosey Fanni Tutti, both of whom manipulated stereotypes in order to critique them and their cultural currency. Over the course of this conversation, Wood and Ulman consider the extent to which inevitable personalization of Ulman’s imagery—the fact that it is normally encountered, and designed to be experienced, as a kind of instant, individualized montage as her pictures insinuate themselves into the flow of a user’s Instagram feed— multiplies the performance itself across all those users and all the times anyone sees her work. Ulman herself believes that: when the audience look at the image and they react [. . .] that is when the performance really happens. When they realize it’s a ‘work’, and it’s older, that is the archive of the performance. But, materially it is the same image, it just functions on different levels. The performance and the document overlap entirely; the only difference has to do with the way an individual viewer experiences the image. Again, an emphasis on practice offers another way in which experience is primary and ontological designations follow a concern for reception and its effects. From my own perspective as an art historian, these various ‘practical’ perspectives and the premium they place on sensitive approaches to the interlaced nature of historical reflection, formal specificity, and audience experience of works of art

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suggest the need for a reappraisal of the analytical categories that traditionally have been central to writing about performance. At the heart of our conventional ways of conducting scholarly debate is a contest between two fundamentally opposed models of understanding performance’s relation to mediation; these antipodes of our discursive situation are associated with two proper names: Peggy Phelan and Philip Auslander. In a ubiquitously cited chapter titled ‘The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction’, Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993) argued that performance is precisely that which exceeds mediation. As she put it, ‘Performance is the art form which most fully understands the generative possibilities of disappearance. Poised forever at the threshold of the present, performance enacts the productive appeal of the non-reproductive’ (Phelan 1993: 27). Performance flashes into existence, only to vanish—it is fleeting, ephemeral, and its power and possibilities reside in this inevitable evanescence. We could call this the ‘absence model’ of performance—it privileges what we no longer have when the show is over and posits that performance exists only there, in that void. Six years later, Philip Auslander—in an equally widely cited book titled Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999)—theorized a diametrically opposed model. Auslander argued that disappearance is not a quality or phenomenon unique to immediate action. He pointed out that successive appearances and disappearances of scan lines create television’s persistent image and that videotape degrades and loses fidelity on successive uses (a fact well known to the conservators mentioned above). As he put it, ‘In a very literal, material sense, televisual and other technical reproductions, like live performances, become themselves through disappearance’ (Auslander 1999: 45). For him, however, the point was not ‘that live performance and mediatization partake of a shared ontology’ (p. 51). Rather, the fact that disappearance could not belong solely to the live demonstrated that what we experience as liveness, the fleeting quality of our durational experience of an artwork, derives not from its autochthonous and proprietary ontology, but from elsewhere. Auslander asserted that ‘the live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around. It was the development of recording technologies that made it possible to perceive existing representations as “live”’ (p. 51). He summarized the newly configured relation between performance and documentation thus: ‘Far from being encroached upon, contaminated, or threatened by mediation, live performance is always already inscribed with traces of the possibility of technical mediation (i.e., mediatization) that defines it as live’ (p. 53). We will call this the ‘presence model’ of performance—materials used in making a performance and representing it ‘after the fact’ not only guarantee its continued existence (and our later access to the work), but are in fact responsible for its qualifying as performance in the first place. It is not the purpose of this introduction (or indeed this book) to adjudicate this decades-long dispute between the absence and presence models of performance. Suffice it to say for our purposes here that each model has its relative merits and shortfalls—Phelan’s absence model borders on the mystical in its insistence on the sovereignty of ephemerality; Auslander’s media-theoretical dialectics make

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this plain enough. And yet Auslander’s presence model takes a serious misstep in assuming that ‘liveness’ in art need be born of a perceived opposition to technologies of reproduction rather than, say, the relatively static, enduring qualities of traditional fine arts such as painting and sculpture. Surely, difference from these art forms is equally at stake in any claim that performance is unique in being a kind of art that disappears (and considering this avenue would change the terms of discussion in a way that would bring us back toward the absence model—for example, what would we get from a live version of a work that we would not get from its mediated translation, even if we consider both to be works of performance?). If we are to see the potential lessons of a focus on practices, however, it is crucial that we take note of what the absence and presence models of performance share—in order to appreciate how narrowly the continual oscillation from absence to presence and back again has constricted our discourse. Both models take ontology as foundational to analysis and, further, take some understanding of liveness to be the bedrock of that ontology. Phelan’s investment in defining performance’s medium-identity as exclusively and uniquely live is explicit. Auslander, on the other hand, seemed to think he was leaving ontology behind by refuting Phelan’s understanding of it. His careful dismantling of the absence model and the simple opposition between live action and mediatization on which it depends appears under the heading ‘Against Ontology’ (Auslander 1999: 38). What he proposes, however, is a more complex ontology—to be sure, one that demands historical awareness of the technological horizon that can produce liveness as a category, but Auslander nevertheless maintains that (this now more nuanced, situated) liveness is the primary vector along which to pursue an understanding of performance because it defines that intermedium’s identity. And of course, this persistent focus on liveness is not an accident; nor is it even something that can be ascribed entirely to the force of these two powerfully influential models. Let us recall that in 1978, where I began this introduction, it was already the case that liveness was all. This is a simple point, but one with profound consequences. For the result of this focus on ontology (even if we conceive it as purely negative or as intrinsically hybrid) is to always frame the question of performance in formal terms. Whether as sovereign, fleeting time or as dialectical technological object, the work is always conceived as contained and unitary unto itself. Absenceand presence-based approaches both bind a performance work to an originary moment. On the absence model, this is the irretrievable live moment that immediately recedes. For the presence model, the moment of creation bears authorial intentions invested in a work’s relation to mediatization. Auslander puts it this way: It may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity of these pieces derives not from treating the document as an indexical access point to a past event but from perceiving the document itself as a performance that directly reflects an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are now the present audience. (Auslander 2006: 9, original emphasis)

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Rather than vanishing, the moment of creation lasts forever, projected into the future secured by the form of the document. In fact, on both models, the work is eternal (either eternally absent or present) and exists unto itself immune to its transits through time and space. These transportations from one time and place of exhibition to another, of course, are precisely the realities the practicing professionals listed above have to navigate in the course of putting artworks together with actual people in physical spaces. In the course of their work, they are constantly confronted by the social dimension of art, how aesthetic experience and the production of meaning comprise a relationship between an artwork and its audience in a particular place and time. And, unfortunately, these are issues that our dominant conceptual models provide little support in working through, as they remove a performance from the sequence of experiential time (lived history) by insisting it is foreclosed in its pastness or, more improbably, is always the same because its physical form transparently declares eternal contents. Inadequate though it may be, it is difficult to overstate the extent to which the vexed question of liveness still defines the parameters of scholarly considerations. This is especially true when scholars have engaged recent live restagings of historical performances in the museum setting. Amelia Jones, for example, in an essay from 2011, describes such exhibitions as ‘frozen art’ for how they attempt to recover and put on display works that themselves regressed infinitely into pastness even in their initial stagings (Jones 2011: 26). And Hal Foster has echoed this sentiment, if indirectly, describing such ‘re-enactments’ as ‘not quite live, not quite dead [. . .] zombie’ (Foster 2015: 127). According to Jones, ‘The paradox here of course is that the re-enactment itself is durational and thus always already “over”, its meaning and history just as contingent and problematic as that of the “original” performance’ (Jones 2011: 31). Jones continues, ‘While often posed as confirming the truth of the past, paradoxically re-enactments activate the now as always already over, the present always already turning into the future—and both continually escaping human knowledge’ (p. 43). This situation only amounts to paradox, however, if one accepts the premise of liveness’s centrality to performance. Because Jones accepts that premise (in its absence model variant) and privileges ontology, not only is the past unavailable and unknowable, but so is the present (because it instantly becomes the past). A situation that could offer the opportunity to compare the stakes and situated significance of a performance on either side of a contextual migration instead results in a poeticizing paean to disappearance, which, ironically, bestows the ‘original’ work and its reiteration with the ‘same’ (eternal) meaning. If we begin from practices, however, we can develop historically, contextually responsible narratives about the past and the present, especially when an artwork’s transit across that time-space allows us to do the work of careful comparison. Works of art can only be accorded transcendental meaning, can only be imagined to resemble zombies—embodied and searching yet incapable of speech—if we imagine them to be self-regarding and consider the places we find them (museums, galleries, and so on) to be blank spaces closed to the outside world and dedicated

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to resisting its vicissitudes and urgencies. The stories relayed in the interviews published here demonstrate, case by case and example by example, that in reality, quite the opposite is true. Art’s social character and value drive the practical considerations on which the interviewees reflect, and the insights available here could help to shift our attentions from ontological to historical analyses. Centrally at issue in the practices detailed in this book are questions of reception: how art catalyzes (or inhibits) questions, interpretations, feelings, thoughts, and so on in those who see it based on choices made about modes of exhibition. Why show this work now? Why show it in photographic form? Why as a live action? Why in this gallery with those other works and that lighting? With or without an accompanying wall text that frames it discursively according to such and such a theme? These considerations are sometimes fascinating and promote meaningful experimentation; sometimes they’re simply de rigueur and have nowhere to go but ensuring compliance with health and safety standards. But they always affect what we experience as ‘the work’. Fleshing out our historical analyses informed by these questions and their effects, then, would mean learning to focus not on whether a photograph, video, text, or even a full-scale re-enactment is the ‘same’ work as the initial instantiation to which it refers, but on how it differs and what those differences signify—about the work, certainly, but also about ourselves, what we expect from art, and what that might tell us about where we’ve come from and where we’re going. The scholarly essays that compose this book’s latter section (Chapters 11–15), each in their own way and from their own disciplinary perspective, offer historical analyses of various types of performance, as well as methodological reflections on how their approach to documentation produces specific kinds of knowledge. Curator and art historian Barbara Clausen’s chapter examines the ‘exhibition as a medium and site of production’ in the oeuvres of four artists: Joan Jonas, Babette Mangolte, Sarah Pierce, and Jimmy Robert. Clausen pays close attention to how these artists stage and restage their own works as well as those by others, and argues that ‘exhibition-, curatorial-, and installation-based strategies play an integral part in how these artists use performance’ in order to ‘constitute and carry forth the political agency of both past and present instantiations’. A contribution by my co-editor, scholar and theorist of performance and new media Gabriella Giannachi, focuses closely on how we can understand connections between multiple iterations of a work across time. Working through a catalogue of modes of repetition exercised by artists such as VALIE EXPORT, T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, Francis Alÿs, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, Giannachi argues that ‘re-enactments and re-interpretations’, among other ‘such practices constitute fundamental strategies for preservation’. Repetition of a work in the present, she avers, multiplies a work and allows it to become a networked conductor that connects different moments, each one voicing a new facet of a work’s significance in a new situation, with a new audience. Art historian Katja Kwastek details the difficulties of documenting interactive artworks and offers a history of how investigators have approached those challenges. She describes how original taxonomies for classifying interactive artworks

Practical histories  11

developed by artists and other experts have been supplemented over the years by interviews with those who experience the works in actual contexts of display. Observing that ‘the specific design of such documentations largely depends [. . .] on the work’, she argues that ‘multi-perspectival, dialogical approaches are highly valuable’ insofar as they ‘allow for a comparison of artistic intentions and actual performative realizations’ and can even lead to ‘a new set of terms based on those other perspectives’. Historian and curator Henry Lowood and computer scientists Eric Kaltman and Joseph C. Osborn have co-authored an essay that similarly explores issues involved in documenting interactions between humans and automated systems. They explore gameplay as a liminal collaboration along an interface that ‘takes neither the player nor the game system to be primary, but instead considers game performance as a production of their interaction’. This depiction of agency as a feedback loop is particularly provocative for the historical reckoning with performance undertaken here. Ultimately, the authors propose a ‘performance capture tool’ that can be not only viewed, but played, and that can ‘produce a meaningful dialogue between the gameplay (and players) of the past and future’. Finally, the chapter by ethnographer Peter Tolmie and computer scientist Steve Benford details ethnographies undertaken in relation to four different performance works: two immersive participatory projects designed by the media-arts collective Blast Theory, a weekend-long ‘takeover’ of Tate Modern by the conceptual dance group Musée de la danse (led by choreographer and dancer Boris Charmatz), and the Carolan Guitar, a guitar designed as a ‘cultural probe’ to record the ways in which it is used by its owners and handlers. While each of these projects requires a specifically tailored approach to documenting with exacting precision what are perceived to be the significant aspects of its conduct, the authors seek to ‘illustrate how the ethnographic work is in no sense limited to the acquisition of a detailed record. Rather, it has been driven by a wish to understand how particular phenomena are socially organized’. The authors use an ethnographic approach to consider how people experience their world (and how the artwork in question fosters or frustrates that) to in turn generate an understanding of the artwork’s composition and value. Histories of Performance Documentation offers a selection of practical histories— institutional and disciplinary—that focus on how curators, conservators, artists, and scholars do things with performance. In shifting emphasis from what performance is to how it operates, appears, and moves through physical and digital spaces, as well as bureaucratic structures and conceptual schema, the aim is to account for how situated histories have both shaped and been shaped by all the forms we have come to call by the name ‘performance’. In doing so, I would suggest, it becomes possible to appreciate in vivid and granular detail how notions about performance and documentation have changed over time, demonstrating not only how mutually constitutive they are, but also how uses of documents often lead our definitions and expectations of performance. In the same way that beginning from practices can dislodge entrenched notions about performance’s singular ontology, it also points up how inadequate it is to consider ‘the museum’

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as a unitary force or construct. These places, too, are historical—each has an inherited way of doing things that can make working with experimental practice difficult, but each of those featured here has also responded to the challenge. This is not to say that the dynamic interrelation between ‘the institution’ and the art it collects and exhibits is always harmonious. Friction and failure are certainly part of the story when it comes to performance in the museum. My point, rather, is that those stories belong in our histories and historical thinking because they have consequences for what art gets seen and how. Performance, then, is not some definable object (or anti-object), some discreet entity that fits or cannot fit within art’s institutions and canons, but an entire network of provocations and fundamental questions about what art is for and how it relates to its audiences, a complex that demands we continually examine why art is worth making, showing, and discussing. This book displays that network of questions in action and, in so doing, offers a point of departure for reimagining our answers.

Notes 1 It is worth noting, however, that the performance program at Tate Modern does count as part of its institutional legacy performances dating back to at least 1968 conducted at what is now Tate Britain. These were usually initiated by the Education Department. While this situation does result occasionally in some issues (around classification, uses of archival materials, and so on) similar to those faced by MoMA, the Whitney, and SFMOMA, the practical differences between a performance department coeval with a museum’s mission (itself always understood irrespective of medium) and one that joins an already long extant structure of divisions should not be ignored. 2 Performance at Tate was a two-year (2014–2016) Arts and Humanities Research Councilfunded project, on which both myself and my co-editor worked along with curators, archivists, and other researchers to study the place of performance in that institution. The project funding resulted in this book, a number of articles and book chapters, an online scholarly publication, Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art (www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/performance-at-tate), as well as a set of new strategies for collection displays and performance documentation.

Works cited Auslander, P. (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Auslander, P. (2006) ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 28: 1–10. Burnham, L. F. (1978) ‘Editor’s Note’, High Performance: The Performance Art Quarterly, 1(1): 1. Foster, H. (2015) Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, New York: Verso. Jones, A. (2011) ‘“The Artist Is Present”: Artistic Re-Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence’, TDR: The Drama Review, 55: 16–45. Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge.

PART I

Interviews

1 MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK Stuart Comer, Chief Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art; Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives; and Ana Janevski, Associate Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art In conversation with Jonah Westerman, April 2015 What is the earliest presence of performance at MoMA? Michelle Elligott: At the museum’s inception, Alfred Barr, the founding director, wanted to include not just painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, but also film, typography, design, theater arts, etc. The museum’s first brochure, which he wrote, was basically a mission statement. To me, this is the DNA of the institution. So, as he annotated by hand in his copy of the brochure, we had drawings and prints in 1929; architecture came along in 1932; photography in 1932; industrial design in 1934; film in 1935; and last but not least, theater and dance in 1940. In 1939, Lincoln Kirstein donated his personal archive, mostly about the history of dance, to MoMA, and that created our dance archive. By 1944, the dance archive was promoted, and it was given the status of a full curatorial department. That only lasted for four years, until 1948, but MoMA had a curatorial department called the Department of Dance and Theater Design even at that time. They were collecting items such as photographs of Isadora Duncan; watercolors of her dancing; photographs of Martha Graham; even a whole collection of American Minstrel performances. Additionally, in the 1940s, the museum did all sorts of radical programming with what we might now call performative elements. As early as 1941, we mounted an exhibition of American Indian Art. Native Americans were invited to create a sand painting in the galleries while museum visitors looked on. During World War II, the museum undertook programming in support of the war effort, and we held an exhibition of a diorama of battle troops, on the floor, and there was a ramp that people would ascend to gaze down upon the museum staff repositioning the ships to reflect the current progress of the battle. Because of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, this participatory activation of the museum space was very much in the air.

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Ana Janevski: The founding idea of the museum was that MoMA should encompass all arts, e.g. film, architecture, photography, painting, sculpture, including theater and dance. This inclusive definition of modern included for a short period a dedicated department for Theater and Dance. Afterwards, artists were invited to participate in different events or even exhibitions. In 1960, Jean Tinguely designed a self-destroying assemblage Homage to New York, with help from Bell Labs scientist Billy Kluver, which performed in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden. In 1969–1970, Franz Erhard Walther’s First Work Set (1963–1969) was activated in the museum’s lobby as part of the revolutionary exhibition Spaces. Performance and dance as live artworks in the museum happened later. Artists like Yayoi Kusama or Guerrilla Art Action Group used performance as a subversive element in the 1960s and 1970s. This ran concurrently to what was happening within the Summer Garden program, almost peripherally, and included different kinds of events—music, dance, and performance by artists like Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, John Cage, and Marta Minujin. MoMA photographers documented some of these, and the documentations are in MoMA’s archives. Peter Moore also documented them. You start to wonder: What belongs in the archive? What’s the documentation? Does this kind of documentation have a market value? Where should it sit? We are still discussing what this documentation is in relation to the subjects’ practice and to the status of photographers as producers. How do you begin to work through those issues? Is it just that every case is different? Ana Janevski: Yes, every case is definitely different, there is not one protocol or template, and sometimes it goes beyond documentation. Take the Simone Forti Dance Constructions that MoMA has recently acquired. Dance Constructions are set dances based around ordinary movement, chance, and simple objects like rope and plywood boards. MoMA acquired the rights to perform the dances and a set of instructions, which we developed over the course of two years. The resulting constellation of materials—ranging from teaching videos to sketches, historical photos, notebooks, and recorded interviews—extensively document previously performed versions and, crucially, offer precise instructions for future dancers. In addition, we would like to organize workshops with groups of dancers and teachers to communicate the dances to new generations of performers and participants. So far there are only a few dancers, Sarah Swenson and Claire Filmon among them, who can teach the Dance Constructions. It is about a kind of preservation carried through person-to-person, a set of instructions, a network of conversations and relationships. Another example in terms of presentation of the work is James Lee Byar’s 1001 Mile Paper, which is a performable sculpture that Lucinda Childs performed in 1965 at the Carnegie. There are written instructions and James Lee Byars instructed her one afternoon. The work had never been shown, never been performed again. As it is part of the MoMA collection, we invited Lucinda to look at an exhibition

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copy of the work. It was not possible to manipulate the work, and we did not want her to redo the same work. In the end, she instructed her dancer and followed James Lee Byars’s instructions, which just said: make a square, make a circle, make whatever you want, so just interpret the score itself in order to do it. We have many examples of works like this, and there is some kind of institutional responsibility to display them, which is challenging and opens a space for creativity in terms of documentation, preservation, conservation, and transmission. How has the institution understood that responsibility over the years? The word ‘performance’ was only added to your department’s title in 2009—before that it was the Department of Media, right? Ana Janevski: Right. The Department of Media was established in 2006, by Klaus Biesenbach, and it changed its name to Media and Performance Art Department in 2009, to better reflect the department’s exhibition and acquisition strategy in collecting, displaying, and preserving time-based art. Together with Sabine Breitweiser, who succeeded Biesenbach as a chief curator in 2010 until 2012, and now with Stuart Comer, we have been paying close attention to artists working across media, from performance to moving image, and all of the many permutations in between, and the way they reshape artistic practices, both contemporary and historical. As I mentioned before, historical performances, they often pose important questions in terms of their legacy, permanence, or assimilation into the existing institutional context. There are differences in how artists deal with history, and the institution should remain pliable to accept that for an ‘intellectual gift’. As much as the term performance is often under discussion and it encompasses many diverse art forms, it is sure that live art has an impact on the institution. It alters the time-space coordinates of the exhibition apparatus, it shifts the relationship with the public, it brings another idea of authorship, it challenges the established economy, and it exposes the museum’s human infrastructure and relationships. Working in a Department of Media and Performance Art, and in a relatively young department compared to the others within the museum, my colleagues and I are facing those issues on a daily basis. Stuart Comer: For a long time, I have not seen a hierarchy between a work and the archival document, particularly in performance-related work. Is a photograph an archival index or an artwork? I would prefer to keep that rule totally indeterminate and let it be free and circulate throughout all kinds of platforms, exhibitions, publications, websites, films. Photography is very promiscuous, and so is performance, and so is film. I would not want to ring-fence them too much. We do, however, need to identify what value they have in terms of constructing narratives that are useful to positioning time-based arts centrally in the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I do not actually see a radical difference in terms of the indexicality of a photograph of a dance or a performance, versus a Jackson Pollock painting or any other number of ways that movements are traced and

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recorded. But we ascribe a very different set of values to all of those different kinds of images, even though they all bear a direct relationship to direct action. I think the performativity of images now, particularly photographic and filmic images, is so rampant, and so fluid and exciting, and I think that will also change, particularly for museums, for publishers, for magazines, etc., as we go further and further into an online world. People like Charles Atlas or Babette Mangolte, who were conventionally seen as documentarians, are now seen emphatically as artists. Those films and videos and photographs now have a very different status and function in the art world. And so that raises a whole other set of issues, like, can they be accessioned or made part of a Collection with a capital C? Should they be? Would that give them more gravitas or would it inhibit their use? Because the moment something like that becomes part of a collection, it becomes subject to nine-month loan request deadlines, and that arguably inhibits its ability to enter the world. Whereas if it is part of the archive, anybody can see or hire it. So, I am very interested about just how the museological structures that have always regulated these things can be questioned and changed, and just create more and different kinds of access. Very practically, then, in terms of the museum’s own bureaucratic structures, what is the difference between an object’s being a document of an artwork or being an artwork in its own right? Stuart Comer: Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing is as much a performance as is a Dada cabaret. That moment in conceptual art was a watershed moment for performance, especially in New York. It shows how an image can be an archival thought, it can be an action, it can occupy different registers of time. The same work takes multiple forms throughout its history. A Babette Mangolte photograph can be very fluid in terms of whether it stands on its own as an image, or as a document of a particular moment in time—whether it is seen as a means of illustrating, for lack of a better word, a dance. It is going to have different kinds of use value, depending on the context of presentation. She and Charles Atlas were particularly visually articulate about how to shoot performance and dance. It does transcend mere documentation. It was a very heavily researched, very thought-through dialogue with the artists who were performing, particularly around the Judson period. It went beyond intermedial, it was just a really fluid moment when the boundaries were totally being dissolved. So why would you want to fix one value on any of those images? At the Tate, Catherine [Wood] and I were working separately as the curator of film and the curator of performance, but we were working together on a number of projects, and we saw a lot of value in thinking about performance through its mediation, because we work in a museum. I think the infrastructure of every single museum is still entirely based on paintings and objects. In terms of how the registers are constructed, in terms of how art handling is organized, in terms of how exhibition schedules are organized—generally in three- and fourmonth blocks, rather than like a two-week festival, marketing as well, just all of the different systems in museums are still largely organized around things that

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are not actions or events, but things that are circulated. So the more that these images that may be part of the archive become part of that system, the more museums need to challenge them, but also be responsible to them. So there is a kind of paradox, I guess. The other thing I’ve been interested in for a while, and I have not really had time yet, is to really focus on the audience as an archive. I think the encounter with the work and how that is articulated and documented through an audience experience is really important, and, certainly in the area of social media, it takes on different possibilities. I know Rhizome recently started a project on how to archive social media as well, and I think this is something a lot of museums will start to take seriously. There has been a lot of academic writing about the importance of gossip as an alternative historical record, and I think social media is critically important. Its intentions may be diametrically opposed to the artist’s intentions, or to the curatorial intentions of a project, but I think it’s still a pretty accurate capture of how people encounter something. Capitalism is about movement, it’s about circulation. Our museums are beginning to reflect that logic much more. I remember when I first started at Tate and the head of the collection said if it was on a wall, and it moved, then it wasn’t art. Now, we’re defining so many art forms by their ability to change over time. Michelle Elligott: For me as an archivist and art historian, everything is about context, it is about the package. A single item might be important and compelling, but it is really meaningless when you rip it outside of that sort of wrapper. It is really about the systems that these documents communicate and travel within. To me, that is where the history is made and where it resides. And so, in response to requests to transfer items out of the archives into the MoMA collection, I reiterate: let’s be careful we don’t miss the point here, because then we’re going to lose all of this really important context. Think of the Van Abbemuseum documentation center, or the Reina Sofía—Manolo BorjaVillel’s conceptualization of the museum space as the archives of the commons, the idea of reclassifying the museum collection when possible, erasing the classification of ‘work of art’, and reclassifying everything as archival. From what I understand, Whitechapel Gallery, Van Abbe, and Reina Sofía are really using the archives to think about how objects mean different things over time, and how this affects their mission. I am interested in the life of objects, and the life of ideas, and I think the archives, the documents held there, can help stimulate those dialogues. As far as the archives of the future, over the last couple of years, I have been investigating and attempting to establish an electronic records archive. We just selected a platform, and we will transfer all the letters, the emails, the checklists—all of those documents that are now being born and managed digitally. First, we need to aggregate these materials, because no one is taking care of that yet, and they are at risk of just disappearing if a staff member leaves the museum or they get misplaced. Once we get that under control, then I would like to start accessioning certain materials, such as audio, video, and photographic documentation of museum events and performances, from

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the digital asset management system, or DAM. The DAM is an internal access vehicle, but it is not a preservation tool. The electronic archive system that we are using helps us automate the preservation. So, going forward, that will be a repository for permanent records. Incidentally, it is the same system employed by the UK National Archives. With our mission, research and education go hand in hand, and the archive plays into both of those. MoMA was integral to creation of the historiography of twentieth-century art. The archive is key for that understanding, as well as for tracing the future evolution of art and society.

2 WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK Jay Sanders, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance In conversation with Jonah Westerman, April 2015

How did performance come into view for you at the Whitney Museum? I was first invited to be a part of the Whitney by curator Elisabeth Sussman who asked me to co-organize the 2012 Whitney Biennial. In our initial research, which involved intensely interrogating how the museum’s spaces could be used, we saw the Whitney’s largest gallery floor as a potential site for performance. In 2011, a large Paul Thek exhibition had just come down and we were looking at the gallery with all its temporary walls gone, just prior to the next show being constructed. It was an epiphany for us, and a few of the artists who also saw it, to consider working with that entire open space. Our decision to use the gallery for performance was less about the apparatus of the museum, or even the structure of the biennial, than about the intrinsic qualities of the space itself. As it turns out, the history of staging performances on the Whitney’s open gallery floors in between exhibitions of painting and sculpture goes back to the 1960s, during the first years of the Whitney in the Marcel Breuer-designed building uptown. Breuer’s architecture allowed for loft-like, non-dressed up spaces—the kind that artists such as Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Richard Foreman, and Steve Paxton, who did projects there, were already using downtown. Curators Marcia Tucker and James Monte were aware of what was happening in alternative spaces and lofts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and realized that they could offer comparable conditions for performance by clearing the museum’s galleries of their objects and walls. At that same time, the Whitney was also staging live arts in the direct vicinity of plastic arts. There was a series called the Composers’ Showcase, which began in 1968 and was organized by independent curator Charles Schwartz. Schwartz invited Ornette Coleman, John Cage, Meredith Monk, and countless others to

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present concerts in the galleries. So you could see Mary Lou Williams and the Cecil Taylor Unit or Sun Ra’s Arkestra amidst contemporary visual art on the walls. There was also an exhibition of Harry Partch’s invented instruments that included a concert of them being played. Poets too, such as John Ashbery, Diane Wakoski, Allen Ginsburg, Anne Waldman, David Antin, and others presented new work within the galleries at the Whitney. On a very different note, in 1970, artist Robert Morris turned the museum into a massive active construction site. The Whitney invited him to mount a mid-career survey, but instead he loaded in literally tons of wooden beams, concrete, and steel. The show opened the day the first truck started to unload, and continued from there. The choreographer Yvonne Rainer had seen another of Morris’s large-scale process pieces, Continuous Project Altered Daily, the year before. She appropriated that title for her own work, presenting a performance at the museum the week before Morris’s show opened. In this important durational dance piece, she expanded the frame of a dance by including learning, rehearsal, and an unfolding structural form as part of the visible experience, and emulated what she saw happening within contemporary sculpture, looking, for example, at how gravity was working between objects and people. One year earlier, in 1969, the Whitney presented the intermedia exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, a watershed show that introduced the public to work that was fundamentally about process. Steve Reich performed Pendulum Music in the gallery, Philip Glass’s ensemble gave a concert, Michael Snow screened his structuralist films, and installations such as Bruce Nauman’s interactive Performance Corridor (1969) were on view. Some of the artworks were site-specifically created and others changed forms over the course of the exhibition. In 1974, curator John Hanhardt joined the Whitney and developed a film and video cinematheque on the second floor of the Breuer. Hanhardt presented a wide range of experimental and expanded cinema, and his highly responsive program championed multicultural and feminist work. He also organized live performances: at the time of Nam June Paik’s retrospective, Hanhardt presented a concurrent Fluxus performance series. With regard to downtown performance art, it was Marcia Tucker and a few others at the Whitney who tracked emerging practices in the 1970s in real time. Tucker organized a festival called Four Evenings, Four Days (1976), which featured artists like Julia Heyward, Laurie Anderson, Adrian Piper, Jared Bark, Stuart Sherman, and Michael Smith, most making their museum debuts. As performance art was burgeoning in New York, through these kinds of efforts, it entered into the museum. How did you work with the documentation of these histories for Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970–1980 (2013–2014)? My colleague Greta Hartenstein and I had to do a great deal of primary research because many of those artists did not have a clear written history. You would see

In conversation with Jonah Westerman  23

one photo somewhere, or read a review, or hear a recollection from someone from that era, and then try to work out what this stratum of documentation constituted. We started by generating an artist list, delineating in part a social network, but also tracing artistic tenets. We were committed to presenting artists like Julia Heyward and Jill Kroesen even if we had no idea whether any traces of their work—videotapes, props, ephemera—still existed. No matter how fleeting the actual performances were, I wanted to really understand the intrinsic vision of the artist and the character of the work, and then conjure a means of displaying it with whatever we could find, in collaboration with the artist whenever possible. That was the ground rule of that show, but the particularities were different for each case. For example, with Stuart Sherman, I had heard of his work many years earlier from playwright Richard Foreman and LA artist Mike Kelley. In books that document the history of experimental theater or performance art, he was only occasionally mentioned in passing. In going back and systematically reading old issues of The Drama Review, Art-Rite, Soho Weekly News, Avalanche, PAJ, and other publications, we began to chart the course of his work and how it was received. In this way, you could start to see who performed where—for example, who was included in Four Evenings, Four Days—and build a history of these appearances in an archival way. In the case of artist Ralston Farina, he was willfully cryptic and did not leave traces of his work. Nearly everything one might learn about him was word of mouth via a wide range of artists who saw him first-hand. A few months before the exhibition opened, thanks to J. Hoberman, we got in touch with two of Farina’s close high school friends who actually had all his stuff. We had already closed our checklist, and these guys basically FedExed everything he had saved surrounding his live performances. With artist Jack Smith, too, there was no primary document of his performances. What we had was the gloss that he himself created: hand-drawn flyers, promotional headshots, scripts and sketches, notes for staging, props, and photos. I thought that one could find core qualities in these remaining materials he so carefully designed. In the 1970s, many artists were performatively embodying media systems and modes of entertainment, and we can read into what they were doing, even though we were not there. I think, somehow, you still get a lot of information and beauty from the residue of that work. In thinking about earlier museum exhibitions, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998) was an incredibly important, broadly inclusive survey that drew a global map of so many important practices. In its manifestation, it privileged visual artists and the art object, whether that be a painting made through action, a sculpture that acted as a performance prop, or a film of a live event. Alternatively, with Rituals of Rented Island, the artists included came not only from visual art backgrounds but also via dance, theater, music, and poetry. There was often no durable artifact from their performances. I had questions about the value of the documentation, and wondered how, and in what forms, it could be read, and how our reading of the material changes over time. What can we ascertain from displaying these

24  Jay Sanders

ephemeral, time-based, highly contingent art practices within the confines of an art museum and a curatorial precept? Any looking back at live work, by the artist or even more so by curators and scholars, changes its meaning in some way. How has the curation of performance at the Whitney changed over time? I am really interested in this ongoing question of how museums produce and exhibit live work, and I think, in some ways, that history can reflect how different art forms were interacting at different times. As we’ve been discussing, there was an important point beginning in the 1960s when—though still hierarchical in terms of relative opportunity and support—performance, dance, and music became integral to the identity and program of the Whitney through the presentation of new work. But then there is also this parallel history of how a museum with a permanent collection and the ability to craft art historical narratives defines and configures objects and artistic practices in retrospect. I am interested in these tensions—how museums embrace the responsibility to produce and reflect the contemporary, and then how other systems and value judgments shape what is deemed valuable, holdable, and legible within exhibitions and collections. Rituals of Rented Island was a way to put forth this group of artists, many of whom were marginalized because their work did not have the ability to live on beyond its own live manifestation, or it was actively conceived in opposition to that sense of value. Through showing this untold art history, it was also for me very much about bringing it to the present. I began seeing that current artists were increasingly setting aside concerns over clear definitions of object versus action, solidity or timelessness, and were instead couching work within interactive, contingent, and theatrical frames. So these artists of the 1970s felt like very urgent exemplars that could inform and articulate the present. The ways we approached displaying this work in museum galleries straddled a fundamental tension: if the show appeared museological, it should simultaneously reveal itself to be a series of fantasies and approximations reflecting vanished realities. To get back to the Whitney’s history, as performance moved into the 1980s and 1990s, it reflected the artistic currents of the time. The radical convergence of performance and visual art of the 1960s and 1970s was less prevalent during this period. As the Whitney forged temporary corporate partnerships to create branch museums in New York City and its surrounding area, much of the Whitney’s performance programming began to migrate to these new spaces. With the opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris (subsequently Altria), located on Park Avenue and 42nd Street in a large glass-walled lobby atrium, the Whitney found a major long-term collaborator and supporter for its live art program. From 1984 to the mid-2000s, there was a rich and diverse performance program, where artists were interacting both with the context of the Whitney Museum and notably with the bustle of street-level midtown Manhattan. Adjunct curators such as Jeanette Vuocolo and Boo Froebel programmed hundreds of performances of music, theater, and dance by artists such as Butch Morris, Joan Jonas,

In conversation with Jonah Westerman  25

John Zorn, Olu Dara, Wendy Perron, the Wooster Group, Christian Marclay, Savion Glover, DJ Olive, Stephen Vitiello, Dean Moss, Cynthia Hopkins, Phil Kline, Liza Jessie Peterson, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and many others. Whitney Biennials, curatorial snapshots of their time, have also been increasingly important to this history. In the 1993 Biennial, for example, Dancenoise, Marga Gomez, John Kelly, James Luna, Robbie McCauley, and Mac Wellman were showcased at Philip Morris. Before Altria closed in 2008, the Whitney had started to reintegrate its performance program uptown to create a more direct dialogue between performance and the visual arts within the core of the institution. In 2006, Limor Tomer, the then-adjunct curator for performing arts, launched Whitney Live, an ongoing series of free Friday night music, dance, and performance events in the museum’s lower gallery, sculpture court, and film and video gallery. The inaugural event, Steve Reich @ the Whitney, celebrated the composer’s 70th birthday with a wide array of activities that were given substantial museum space and blurred the lines between installation and performance. Whitney Live presented both emerging performers and key restagings of historical work. As part of the exhibition Off the Wall (2010), choreographer Trisha Brown was invited to restage her infamous Walking on the Walls, first performed at the Whitney in 1971, as well as Man Walking Down the Side of a Building on the exterior of the museum’s façade. So too, composer, singer, and multidisciplinary artist Meredith Monk presented a day-long marathon of performances from her influential career. As we open the Whitney’s new building downtown, one central discussion is how artists will inevitably inscribe new histories into its blank slate. We were eager to see this start as soon as possible. One artist in the 2014 Biennial, Yve Laris Cohen, conceived his choreographic project to directly play between the exhibition space in the Breuer, where the biennial was on view, and the theater in the new building as it was still under construction. And last winter (2014), before we had our Certificate of Occupancy, we organized a series of performances, ‘rumors’ we called them, for small invited audiences. Everyone still had to wear hard hats. The composer and saxophonist Matana Roberts improvised throughout the building, percussionist Glenn Kotche gave a concert on the Whitney’s vast open 5th floor gallery, and Carolee Schneemann created a holiday environment with thousands of Christmas lights in which she performed. As we plan our numerous opening events to inaugurate the Whitney’s new home, performance artists are playing a central role. Tomorrow night at our opening for artists, John Cale and Tony Conrad will collaborate for the first time in 50 years, presenting a large-scale outdoor live music and film event that addresses the legacy of minimalism. We commissioned the Wooster Group to stage a ‘ribbon-cutting ceremony’ next week, and there will be a large day-long block party with performance artists both designing booths and performing on an outdoor stage. Artist Andrea Geyer is working with our Education Department to reflect on the founding of the museum by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney through a series of performative engagements in the permanent collection galleries.

26  Jay Sanders

With the new building, we have a dedicated theater for the first time in the museum’s history. There is also infrastructure that accommodates a wide range of activities within the galleries themselves—wooden floors with neoprene padding beneath them, power and data running throughout the exhibition spaces. We also have numerous outdoor terraces that have been conceived of with live art in mind. Building on the Whitney’s own history, we are still interested in upturning the expected use of spaces. We want to give artists exciting spaces to work in. Given how important the Whitney’s own history has been to your own practice, how do you think about self-historicizing, about creating an archive of the current moment? That’s a timely question. In a very literal way, I can mention a new project by Yuji Agematsu, a Japanese-American artist who, for decades, has collected the detritus that constitutes New York City. Over the past year, he has been photographing the Meatpacking District—documenting the Whitney’s construction, the High Line, and the vast changes that have been occurring in the neighborhood in his own highly particular and idiosyncratic manner. The first project in our new theater will be an environment of looping slide projections that he is creating. And our first year of performance programming has a strong dialogue with the museum’s inaugural collection exhibition, America Is Hard to See. There will be retrospectives of the composer Conlon Nancarrow, downtown performance legends Dancenoise, and musician and performance pioneer Takehisa Kosugi. In looking back at projects here, one realizes that so much happens logistically in the dynamic between the artist and curator, and then in how the curator navigates the project through the institution. Those machinations are difficult to archive, and the gaps in knowledge that inevitably occur have given me ideas about how to leave more of a trace. Performances will have more prominence on our website, more like exhibitions, so their centrality and importance to what we do as a whole can be more clearly manifested. And of course, for each new performance, we photograph and videorecord the work, and take into consideration the artists’ input and methodology toward the afterlife of their work, which at times suggests other forms of documentation. That’s all uniquely specific project by project. It is interesting how museum systems are still strongly tied to the exhibition model. I am working on a project with Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who’s most known for her movie about Edward Snowden, Citizenfour. Before Snowden had contacted her, she had been talking about trying to experiment outside of single-channel filmmaking to allow for different kinds of experiences. She is going to have an exhibition in February 2016 on the Whitney’s top floor that reveals this new approach. We are going to black out the skylights and she will make a series of new media installations. We do not know what she is making; we do not know if she is doing performance, because everything is going to be new work. But one can see that the way the museum system works—with the registrars, the art handling, the wall builders, the publication team—that even though nothing about the artwork is known, you feel like you are on a conveyor

In conversation with Jonah Westerman  27

belt moving the right way within the institution. And with performance, you still at times feel like you are running the wrong way on the conveyor belt, producing projects within a museum. It is much easier to mount an exhibition, no matter how unconventional it is, than to make performances. There is still a learning curve about performance as, inevitably, it challenges every conceivable system in a museum. But maybe that is one inherent role performance always plays, both in art history and institutional histories.

Works cited Sanders, J., with Hoberman, J. (2013) Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970–1980, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

3 TATE, LONDON Catherine Wood, Senior Curator International Art (Performance); and Pip Laurenson, Head of Collection Care Research In conversation with Jonah Westerman, June 2016

How did the curation of performance begin at Tate? Catherine Wood: My own role grew in quite an organic way. My position was created initially on the back of a sponsorship offer that we were given (by Egg, an Internet bank). The one-year post was initiated in 2002 by Sheena Wagstaff, who had some interest in the relationship between dance, music, and art. Egg wanted to sponsor something at Tate that had never been done before; Sheena took this opportunity to raise the idea of funding live events. The terms of the sponsorship leaned towards large-scale, high-profile concerts or commissions, and Tate invited Alex Poots (ex-Barbican) and Jenny Waldman (Somerset House) to commission works by Nick Cave, Jessye Norman, PJ Harvey, and so on. I had previously been working in the Barbican Art Gallery’s curatorial department and had an interest in this area, but one that was—ironically—frustrated by the strict divisions between arts departments there (theater, art, music, and so on). Having just taught a course at Tate about Yvonne Rainer, in collaboration with dance group CanDoCo, I was brought in as a curator with a visual art perspective to work out how ‘event’ programming could ‘fit’ and make sense in the museum. I had been researching postmodern performance and dance as it related to visual art during my master’s degree at University College London, but, moreover, there were at this moment a number of young artists, like Mark Leckey, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (then Lali), hobbypopMUSEUM, and others, who were newly interested in performance, and I thought that we should be creating a space for them. So what evolved from this odd beginning was a year-long, two-tier program, where I brought in this younger generation with a program that, in relation to the high-profile stuff, was somewhat under the radar, but using part of the Egg funding. Nick Serota and Sheena liked and supported this kind of work, so they found a way to keep me. I worked across sites at Tate Britain and Tate Modern for a

In conversation with Jonah Westerman  29

couple of years and curated some of the Art Now projects at Tate Britain, including a collaboration between Ian White and Jimmy Robert, and a live program as part of the Tate Triennial in 2006, but I also worked with Dance Umbrella on the Merce Cunningham Anniversary Events in the Turbine Hall and programmed oneoff projects by Joan Jonas or Rosemary Butcher, for example. I organized them all on a somewhat opportunistic basis, as there was no core funding for performance at that time. In 2006, my contract was finally made permanent; I had a meeting with Vincente Todoli, who agreed to the title ‘Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance’. Although in one sense we knew that separating ‘performance’ out from contemporary practice was not adequate, he felt there should be signposts in the institution for specialist enquiries and so on. For me, it was a way to push a particular line of thought through all areas of my work. So my foothold as a curator was secured by working on exhibitions, though I could continue to program performance whenever possible, which I pushed to do. There had not been a history of commissioning performance from a curatorial perspective. In fact, until that point, there had never been curators commissioning performance at Tate Modern. The education department of the Tate Gallery had hosted some performance events in the 1970s and the 1980s, like Joseph Beuys’s Information Action (1972), Marc Chaimowicz, Silvia Ziranek, Rose English, among others. And then there were events like the Robert Morris retrospective in 1971, which wasn’t considered to be a performance, though we might look at it retrospectively as a performative installation. In the Tate Triennial (2006), led by Beatrix Ruf, I negotiated a space in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain that would be occupied by the performance program as a core part of the show rather than an after-hours thing; so Pablo Bronstein and Celine Condorelli designed a kind of architectural scheme that occupied that space, Pablo using tape on the floor for making a kind of architectural void, and Celine creating this seating structure cum viewing platform. We conceived of these elements to mark it out as a space for a different kind of spectatorship, different kinds of encounter. Pablo had an ongoing performance called Plaza Minuet that would animate his architectural interventions. Then there were a series of other commissions featuring artists like Liam Gillick, Linder, Chetwynd, Gerard Byrne, among others, using the given space as a free arena. The works had a solid position in the exhibition, unusually, because during the week leading up to the actual performance, people would see the testing and the rehearsing and everything was in situ, so instead of being relegated to after-hours, the works were literally central to the space. What was the institutional effect of moving performance more centrally into programming at the museum? Catherine Wood: The process of commissioning and working with historical artists making performance—like Ewa Partum, Jiri Kovanda, Joan Jonas, and Robert Morris—often opened up important acquisition-related conversations. I would be talking to them about their archives, and ways of proposing their work to be collected would emerge. So Joan Jonas presented a version of Lines

30  Catherine Wood and Pip Laurenson

in the Sand in 2005, which was a new work, and, through the conversation, we acquired her older piece The Juniper Tree from 1977. Ewa Partum remade her Active Poetry piece (originally done in Warsaw in the 1970s) in the Turbine Hall, and we acquired the rights to that piece, but not as documentation of what she’d done in the Turbine Hall, but rather the documentation of her original action, and the instructions for scattering the letters (the props she used) as an installation. What exactly does it mean that you acquired the rights to those pieces? Catherine Wood: For Active Poetry, you can either show just the photo and/or video of the original action, or you can do an installation with the scattered letters, which she’d originally done in the action in the gallery, and The Juniper Tree is basically the set from the original performance, with a slideshow of the original performance embedded in it. So we have the rights not to restage the performance, but to create this installation that’s a theatricalized version of the documentation. In the future, we plan to work with Joan to restage The Juniper Tree as a live performance. This shows a way in which commissioning and collecting are related. The active conversations with the artists who made performance historically fed into research that then contributed to our acquisition policy. By programming this kind of work, we started to realize how important it was for it to be visible in the context of art history in the museum, in proximity to other kinds of work. We acquired Roman Ondak’s Good Feelings in Good Times (2003) through the Frieze fund in 2004. That extended beyond what performance collecting had been or could have been until then. At the time, I wasn’t that interested in collecting. I was much more interested in putting work on to be experienced, albeit within a museum context that related it to other historical work, though I was always making sure it was photographed and documented. It was the younger generation that made us rethink the possibility of collecting. My thinking to that point had been: performance could be manifest as documentation, it could be a kind of stage set of some sort, it could be film; and now these artists were suggesting that it could viably be a score for re-performed action. An immaterial action could be acquired. That was a new realm of possibility. Jan Debbaut, our Collections Director at the point when we acquired Tino Sehgal’s and Ondak’s works, was very open to that kind of conceptual game. If you had the rights to restage something because you’d acquired it, would that entail adding to its archive by documenting it? And how would you then conceive the relationship between a collection artwork and an archival object? Catherine Wood: Yes. And Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008) actively anticipates that. It’s an action for which we have to work with the mounted police to stage two officers on horseback performing crowd control exercises, moving the crowd of visitors around inside the gallery, to no practical end. She requests that every time we stage it, we send her documentation, so she’s got the

In conversation with Jonah Westerman  31

über archive for that piece and its editions. Pip Laurenson and Acatia Finbow are developing a live documentation strategy for our live collection and for restaging on behalf of the conservation department. This is likely to affect how work is carried out in the future. I take photos of what we do for educational reasons, for publicity reasons, and because artists want it. One of the things we’ve run into as a problem is that artists like Carlos Amorales or Suzanne Lacy see the documentation as ‘the work’, and thus a potentially marketable commodity, so they might sell an image of their performance that was taken at Tate, potentially by a Tate photo­grapher. Tate usually has the rights to such images contractually, which opens up difficult questions because of course it’s the artists who are creating the visual tableaux that are being recorded in photographs. And there are artists who see those documents as the work as much as they see the live action as the work. A market has developed in the past 10 years to do with selling performance documentation. You can see the shift in status. Artists like Babette Mangolte and Charles Atlas—who I would have said 15 years ago were much more known as the people that documented Trisha Brown or Merce Cunningham—are now shown as artists in their own right. I think the secondary status of the document and the documenter has shifted a lot. I think we are in a moment now in which a significant number of artists are forcing a reconsideration of our value system. But the question is not simply to do with material versus immaterial: these modes of art-making necessarily coexist, and if you walk around the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the British Museum in London, most objects originated in ritual contexts. This deep history of art and artifacts fundamentally haunts what we have produced in the past 100 years. The museum, as we know, is set up for collecting material things, so thus far the performances that we have acquired have had to play to this priority to ‘pass’ by mimicking the attributes of an object, or being represented by material relics. My feeling is that as we go ahead in the next decades, we should be pushing towards developing a significant focus on collecting works in the format of information alongside objects: collecting scores for live work (which are economically light, in the sense that they are without storage costs) yet whose production to show requires financial investment and more intense production levels. This might represent an area of shift within what is ‘held’ and how the museum understands owning versus showing, a shift towards a notion of the collection being active when ‘in use’ rather than held in the vault. But it would be symptomatic of other shifts taking place within our ‘experience economy’ and the trading of intellectual commodities. I guess such a shift would represent a change in our sense of temporality: between work that is representing its initial time in its material traces and work that can be enacted in the present. There is already a confusion in the museum about where value resides: we have been treating certain installations or sculptures (Morris’s Mirror Cubes, Posenenske’s Revolving Vane) as ‘originals’ in the manner of old master paintings where we ought to have been treating them as scores, to be replicated or remade in ways that enable them to be ‘in use’.

32  Catherine Wood and Pip Laurenson

These questions of ‘use’ and multiplicity seem directly related to the development of the timebased art conservation team and some of the thinking you’ve been doing there, Pip. Pip Laurenson: This evolved over a number of years. I was a Henry Moore Foundation intern, on a two-year paid internship in sculpture conservation, when we acquired Bruce Nauman’s Violet Incident in 1993. There wasn’t a conservation plan for those works at the time. So that’s when I began to develop my interest in time-based media works of art. It was the early 1990s and at that point the Gabo Trust for Sculpture Conservation awarded me a travel grant for a research trip to the US to visit partner institutions: MoMA, the Whitney, and SFMOMA. In institutions that had a media arts curatorial team, the curator was often the person responsible for the conservation of the collection, so at that time few conservators in the modern and contemporary art museums in the US had time-based media works in their purview. Tate is structured a little differently—our curators weren’t organized around media, so the lines of responsibility for these works to the conservation department were a little clearer. During that trip, I met Bill Viola, who was very serious about the question of how to think about the conservation of his works. That included traditional conservation questions about deterioration and future access to the works, but more broadly he was thinking about how they’re experienced, how they’re displayed—intangible issues. That was something of an epiphany for me. After my internship ended, I worked as a freelance conservator for the Exhibitions Department at Tate, which at that time was led by Ruth Rattenbury. She brought me in to help install the time-based media works. That gave me direct experience of working with technology, issues around display, and working with the artist to understand the installation requirements of a work. Rites of Passage (1995) was a really important show for me in terms of developing a better understanding of these time-based media installations. I went off to the National Gallery in Washington on a short fellowship in sculpture conservation and came back to a contract where my job title was Sculpture Conservator for Electronic Media. Even back then, Tate had a sophisticated acquisitions procedure that involved dialogue between conservators, curators, and the artists, and often the gallery before a work was acquired to ensure a good understanding of the needs of the work for a life within a museum collection. Jeremy Lewison was our Head of Acquisitions at the time, and he needed somebody within conservation who could support the acquisition of an increasing number of complex time-based media installations. With the support of Jeremy, Ruth, and Derek Pullen, who was the Head of Sculpture Conservation, a case was made for this new area of conservation. This resulted in the creation of the first conservation position internationally that was focused on time-based media works of art. It was an important signal that Tate was not only committed to displaying new forms of artistic practice, but also in adapting the museum’s infrastructure to embrace these works. Could you expand on how working with these new forms involves conserving the intangible? Pip Laurenson: Because this was a new area of conservation, I was given a great deal of freedom to develop an understanding of what the conservation of these works

In conversation with Jonah Westerman  33

might involve in a broad sense. Of course, I needed to understand the technologies involved, but I was also able to think beyond the current state of contemporary art conservation theory. I looked to the philosophy of music to bring different ways of understanding concepts central to conservation, such as ‘authenticity’, to our practice and I also looked at other areas of conservation, such as ethnographic conservation and the work being done around intangible cultural heritage. What’s lovely about the notion of intangible heritage is that it points you to networks of skills and dependencies outside the museum, to the idea of learning the work. One of my doctoral supervisors, Jonathan Ashley-Smith, wrote Risk Assessment for Object Conservation (1999). In thinking about the risks that might undermine a time-based media installation, the work on intangible cultural heritage pointed beyond the material to a consideration of what might undermine us experiencing this object as the artwork in the future. The fundamental question within conservation is a very open one, namely: What is important to preserve for this particular work? This involves not only working with the artist to ensure we are honoring the artist’s design and intention, but also delving into a broader understanding of what it is, the form of practice it came out of, and the different forms in which it exists in the world; its ontology, if you like. Risk is a really useful frame because you ask yourself: What are the dependencies that we need to maintain for this artwork in order for us to be able to show it in a way that it can still be recognized as that work? If those dependencies completely break down, then can we work with the artist to think about different future forms? When I started my career as a time-based media conservator, many of the artworks entering Tate’s collection were from the 1990s and many were very tightly specified installations; my early thinking was shaped by these works. Despite the fact that they were dependent on fast-changing technologies, the artists were working hard to fix the way in which these works were presented. In recent years, partly due to a greater interest in the performative and the coming to the fore of different forms of artistic practice, there is a greater understanding of the variety of ways different forms of art might live and flourish in the museum. Between 2012 and 2014, prompted by the live works entering Tate’s collection, I led Collecting the Performative, a research network that examined emerging practice for collecting and conserving performance-based art, with Vivian van Saaze of Maastricht University. This network looked at how legacy was created through the lens of different areas of practice that many of the artists’ performance works were rooted in, namely dance, theater, and activism. Also, within this network, we worked with a range of museum professionals, transmitters, and artists to create a document called ‘The Live List’, which provides prompts for those thinking about acquiring or displaying live works (another outcome of this network was Laurenson and van Saaze’s ‘Collecting Performance-Based Art: New Challenges and Shifting Perspectives’, 2014). Subsequently, Acatia Finbow has worked with the conservation department at Tate to develop this list to also consider documentation. In thinking about the unfolding of different types of artwork within the museum, I have recently been looking at the work of Karin Knorr-Cetina, a sociologist of science. One of her books, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make

34  Catherine Wood and Pip Laurenson

Knowledge (1999), looks at the work of high-energy physicists and molecular biologists. She describes the work of these scientists as an epistemic practice, and the object of their experiments as an epistemic object. What I find helpful about this idea of epistemic practices when applied to the museum, is that it helps us to understand the different roles and relationships to the artwork that are determined by conservation, curatorial, art historical, and artistic practices. Not only do different practices have a specific relationship to the artwork as an object of enquiry itself, but those practices also bring a specific set of questions that are being explored through that object. An epistemic object is not a static thing; its ontology is unfolding. It unfolds over time, and the nature of engagement for the artist or the conservator or the curator is significantly different. Understanding the artwork in this way provides a means of understanding the distinct role and authority of these different players. It also explains how, if the artist is alive and involved and re-engages with their artwork as the object of their artistic enquiry, the artwork can unfold in very specific ways that only the artist can authorize, unless they specifically transfer those rights to another person or role. Our relationship to the artwork is demarcated by our roles. I am interested in the way in which artworks unfold through the re-engagement of the museum and the artist. I am keen to acknowledge these processes and to see them as part of the history of the work; let’s value these records, surface them, and make them public. I guess what’s nice about the idea of an archive is that sense of capturing and respecting the traces that these works make. We’re talking about a recalibration, a contextualist and constructivist museology showing the route of a work through a museum, and during its life in the museum. Records managers have something called ‘continuum theory’. This theory moves beyond the idea that you have something that’s fixed that reaches the end of its life and goes into an archive. Instead, it articulates a way of being mindful of the fact that something is developing as a historic record throughout its active life and its different transitions. When thinking about the range of different forms of artwork in our collections, I think one of the current challenges within the contemporary art museum is to develop our practice to acknowledge, recognize the significance of, and make visible the contexts and the different points of engagement between the various players and the artwork in its life within the museum.

Works cited Ashley-Smith, J. (1999) Risk Assessment for Object Conservation, London and New York: Routledge. Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999) Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laurenson, P. and van Saaze, V. (2014) ‘Collecting Performance-Based Art: New Chal­ lenges and Shifting Perspectives’, in M. Leino, L. MacCulloch, and O. Remes (eds), Performativity in the Gallery: Staging Interactive Encounters, Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, pp. 27–41.

4 SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Jill Sterrett, Director of Collections and Conservation; Rudolf Frieling, Curator for Media Arts; and Frank Smigiel, Associate Curator for Performance and Film In conversation with Gabriella Giannachi, August 2015 When does the history of performance at SFMOMA start? Frank Smigiel: It starts with the exhibition Sawdust and Spangles (1942), which brought performance into the museum. There were circus props, posters, and clown costumes. Jill Sterrett: That was under the direction of Grace McCann Morley, who led the museum for 23 years and was really interested in fashioning the museum as the place for modern life, rather than the vault for the treasures of time. Frank Smigiel: We had a television show called Art in Your Life that that took place just before Grace left for India . . .  Jill Sterrett: . . . where she founded the National Museum in New Delhi . . .  Frank Smigiel: . . . she saw the museum as a place for debate. We had hundreds of exhibitions every year, and in addition to that, we had a film program that became a model. She also avidly collected photography, a medium that people were not collecting at that time. Jill Sterrett: We had very late hours because she wanted people to have access to the institution after the workday . . .  Frank Smigiel: . . . a classic 1930s agenda! People have to work, so you need to stay open until 10 p.m.

36  Jill Sterrett et al.

Jill Sterrett: At the time, everybody in California feared that we would be under attack from the Japanese and we were protecting ourselves from an imminent attack. She bucked that fear, but she made sure that the skylights were covered so that, should there be an attack, a plane would not see the lights. Frank Smigiel: The original site of the museum was in the War Memorial Veteran Building, right by City Hall, so she ran the Arts and Skills Service, which offered 12 to 15 classes for convalescing GIs, hands-on art-making classes. In the late 1930s, we also had these Exhibition Extensions. You would get a box from the San Francisco Museum of Art, as we were then called, wherever you lived. On opening the box, you would find some reproductions of paintings, and you would be able to put them up. It came with a lecture, a kind of performance score. It was part of the idea of bringing art into your life. I am not sure whether she was aware of Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Suitcase) (1935–1941), but you would get the museum in a box. Jill Sterrett: As you could see from the Sawdust and Spangles exhibition, Grace was fundamentally interested in what museums could do for people. She really believed that art could change lives. She saw a great deal of value in showing just about everything. Frank Smigiel: There is a history to be written about the way major museums in America, after the nineteenth-century model, after the Metropolitan, were mostly founded by women. So if we think about the Whitney, it’s Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and her first director was Juliana Force, who, like Grace, was also a gay woman. The early Whitney was founded to showcase American art, in contrast with the white cube that showed modern art. Juliana was installing art in domestic spaces. There certainly is something in the DNA of a lot of American museums about the confluence of art and everyday life. Grace also had an important relationship with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and, more broadly, Mexican, Latin American art. These were certainly movements and artists who weren’t thinking about art in a rarefied, white cube way. Did documentation play any role at that time? Jill Sterrett: We had boxes that sat in storage for 60 years. They were not called an archive until about 12 years ago. Documentation just sat in those boxes. We had not formalized its role in the museum. In 2004–2005, we got a big grant from the Getty, and we started working with those boxes. During our 2010 anniversary exhibition, 75 Years of Looking Forward, there was an opportunity for us to put a catalogue together (Bishop et al. 2009). Then we went back to the boxes to start digitizing and copying everything.

In conversation with Gabriella Giannachi  37

How do your different departments co-operate in relation to performance? Frank Smigiel: It’s interesting to see how our different portfolios emerged and expanded, or contracted. I arrived in 2007, invited by Dominic Willsdon, our curator for education and public practice. In the museum world in America, performance is often housed in the Education portfolio, because it’s a live portfolio. I had the opportunity to see if we could jump-start a Performance and Film portfolio. Film had always existed, but there had been some dry spells. Jill Sterrett: Photography, too, was formed quite late as a curatorial department, but started really early as a stream of collecting. Frank Smigiel: It’s similar for the Performance and Film portfolio. We don’t collect, though. We just commission it. We’ll be naming six fellows each year to make new work, including participatory performance practices. Rudolf Frieling: There is a clear division between a public program and an exhibition program. In the best scenario, these two intersect, and in the best of all worlds, these two intersect in such a way that something will actually enter the collection at the end of the process. Technically speaking, we only collected two performance works that actually include a live performance element: Tino Sehgal’s This Is New (2003) and Dora García’s Instant Narrative (2008). When Frank produces a work that has a live element, though, it can be turned into a product, a finished product, which could enter the collection. In the case of Mika Tajima’s Today Is Not a Dress Rehearsal (Judith Butler) (2010), the work became an installation, and in the case of Rashaad Newsome’s Shade Compositions 2012 (2012), it became a video. We had an interesting discussion at our committee meeting about Newsome’s work, whether it had become an independent work of art, or whether it was just a documentation of a performance. There’s a whole series of works, historical as well as contemporary works, which look like performance documentation, but actually, they have their own status as artworks. Do you treat artworks and documentations differently? Rudolf Frieling: Since the mid-1960s, concepts became something that you could exhibit and collect, or collect and exhibit. If you think of Abramović-Ulay, and a lot of artworks produced in the 1970s, we only know about them because of the video documentation. In the 1990s, artists decided that this video documentation would become the work, and they made rarefied editions around the work. We collect what artists define as art, what makes sense in terms of our collection. A documentation could be really bad, but if it is in tune with the character and the concept of the work, and is defined as work by the artist, we are happy to consider it that way. Otherwise, we treat artworks and documentations absolutely differently.

38  Jill Sterrett et al.

Jill Sterrett: When you look at what Ann Hamilton does and what she sells, these can be very different things. SFMOMA had a hand in helping her transform one of her works into something that’s collectible. Rudolf Frieling: Artists like Ann Hamilton or, say, Christo, produce works that they sell, which they then use to finance other work, like their large, impactful, performative, or temporary installations. Others live on commissions and fees for performing, or teaching. Frank Smigiel: Matthew Barney’s DRAWING RESTRAINT 14 (2006), which was a performance, is another example of this. Dressed as Douglas MacArthur, Matthew climbs our atrium and draws. We have it as a video recording, but he won’t let us show that video anywhere next to the artwork. It really has to be designated as documentation. Rudolf Frieling: He never intended the work to be permanent and left the decision to the museum. When we closed the museum, we physically changed a support structure for parts of the work, meaning there’s no staircase any more. So you can’t quite understand now how he managed to get from the elevator, down the stairs, and up to the wall. It’s a minor change, but it is a physical change in the work. We tried for years to get Matthew to say something about this, to make a decision. Finally, the studio said that we can reinstall it now. Jill Sterrett: We are very conscious as a museum that we’re as committed to the relationship with Matthew as we are to the work in our collection. Knowing him over time is the way that we’re going to be able to navigate these questions. Rudolf Frieling: Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More, for example, lived online between 2002 and 2009. It is still online, but it is not participatory any more. There were 70 assignments and people could just send in their assignment or upload it. The 70th assignment was a closing moment. We discussed with the artist what it means to bring this work into our collection now. It’s a hard drive, code and digital artifacts, texts, audio, video, but also an archive with an exhibition history. At the end, we agreed that the work can take multiple forms of display, and there is not one way of doing it. We can show a part, or show it all. The only thing that needs to stay the same is the information about the artists and a list of the 70 assignments. Frank Smigiel: There was one proviso: it needs to be installed by another artist and it couldn’t just be us saying ‘put it there’.

In conversation with Gabriella Giannachi  39

You said something before about performance being in the education department because of the liveness. Frank Smigiel: It happened in a lot of different institutions in America—there was something about the distinction between the tempo of the gallery and the real estate of the gallery, versus the tempo of ‘I’m here now with you talking’, that often performance starts coming out of. For me, it’s been interesting just to see how to deploy that I am here now live in a gallery. Rudolf and I collaborated on Stage Presence (2012), where he basically built a screening and performance gallery, and let me hijack it once in a while. Rudolf Frieling: The point was to have a gallery that was about public programs and liveness. The space in itself was meant to be an artwork for that kind of theatricality. So we commissioned Tucker Nichols to design the space with just wallpaper. Frank Smigiel: I wish I had a strip of that. Jill Sterrett: You should come into my office. Frank Smigiel: You’ve got the wallpaper? Jill Sterrett: We do. We have been working to be a museum that keeps things in response to the way artists make them. Rather than imposing the museum structure on twentieth- and twenty-first-century art forms, we have thought about how we can effectively change the museum around them. If you start with that point of view, you think about what it is that you’re keeping. We’ve decided to be very generous about what we keep. We want to keep it all! So we kept the wallpaper. Then we confronted the idea that the museum doesn’t know how to classify such things, perhaps because they were not acquired by a curator. So we created this collecting category called the Artist Materials Archive. It’s for a new status of ‘things’. We attend to these things in the same way we would a collection, but they don’t get an official acquisition number, or a credit line, and they don’t go through the accessions process. We have a certain freedom with those materials because we’ve agreed to keep them, but we’ve also agreed to use them. This archive now has more than 400 items, including the wallpaper. It will not only be accessible in the new building; it will be on display in a learning space associated with conservation called the Workroom. Frank Smigiel: I have some things in my cube I have to give you. Jill Sterrett: That’s exactly how this archive was born and keeps on growing.

40  Jill Sterrett et al.

What are the priorities for the reopening in May 2016 in terms of this work? Rudolf Frieling: We chose to focus on the specific history of the Bay Area and Californian art. Ant Farm is one of the seminal groups that worked here, but the work is hard to collect, so it hasn’t been so far. In dialogue with Ant Farm, we identified things that we could collect, that could be defined as work, and acquired three slideshows. These are, typically, something you do at a lecture, not necessarily works for the gallery. One of them, Chip Lord and Doug Michels’s Cars and Owners (1969–1994), is a history of cars, designs, and people, so it’s a history of American culture, collected from the 1960s to the mid-1990s. George Lucas is part of that, with his Ferrari in the mid-1980s, as is our former director, David Ross, with a red Alfa Romeo. The problem is that it’s a double-channel work, so you have a series of pictures of cars matched with particular people in a specific order. But the voice that tells you about the connections is missing. We have to discuss with the artists how to provide that information, and possibly record Chip’s voice, and then discuss options of display. So this becomes a work as we go along, in discussion with the artist. Do you ever keep visitors’ documentations or their own viewpoints? Rudolf Frieling: Since we’ve begun to collect works that are generative, that produce materials, it becomes an interesting question to what degree that production actually is an integral component of the work. Another Bay Area artist who is obviously very much on our minds is Lynn Hershman Leeson, because of her hybrid practice that defies easy categorization. This has actually been one of the few times that Photography, Painting and Sculpture, and Media Art joined forces. We only have Agent Ruby (1999–2002) now, but we are in the process of acquiring more works to fill an historic gap. When we showed it in 2013, we decided that we would show the track record of 12 years of conversations with Agent Ruby. It turned out to be quite complicated to access the archive and to mine it, but we managed to collect thematic groupings of the conversations between Agent Ruby and visitors, and printed those out and displayed them with the work. Lynn loved this so much that, ever since, it’s become the default mode for her to show Agent Ruby. The question is still to what degree do you exhibit the effects of a work? Jill Sterrett: Gabriella, when we first met with you in 2011 in Amsterdam and then invited you to do a workshop on Lynn Hershman Leeson here at SFMOMA in 2012, it was to discuss Agent Ruby, and understand how this work was becoming the way for us to reimagine what we thought documentation could be. We have since been pulling back from the notion that it was object- and material-based alone, and forefronted the idea that artworks are activity-based and that there were actions around them. That project initiated a big change for us. This research has continued and it’s really been pushing us to rethink what’s possible. We’re now

In conversation with Gabriella Giannachi  41

experimenting with wiki platforms that allow for much more dynamic reporting on the way artworks exist, and we are experimenting with the Artist Material Archive. We’ve had so many conversations over the years about when to keep something and what to do with it. These things suggest layers of control that really urge us to think through new museum strategies.

Works cited Bishop, J., Keller, C., and Roberts, S. (2009) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: 75 Years of Looking Forward, San Francisco, CA: SFMOMA.

5 VAN ABBEMUSEUM, EINDHOVEN Christiane Berndes, Curator and Head of Collection; and Annie Fletcher, Chief Curator In conversation with Jonah Westerman, February 2015

How do you think about the place of performance in the institution? Christiane Berndes: The Van Abbemuseum never collected according to media. We do not have separate curators or departments for photography, paintings, and sculpture. There is only one collection, which has grown over the 80 years, and I am the curator of that collection. For the last 15 years, I have also been head of collections. Our reasoning for collecting artworks was based on our interest in the artist himself or herself, but now we are more and more interested in what the work communicates, or what it addresses. In the 1930s and 1940s, the museum focused primarily on painting, but from the 1950s, 1960s, the museum became broader and that medium was no longer a focus. Since 2004/5, we started to collect performance, including work by Tino Sehgal. In a way, performance was already in the collection in the form of video registrations of performances from the 1960s and 1970s. Lawrence Weiner had several shows here, and we had his films and videos in the collection, which we bought from Leo Castelli. But the status of what we bought was unclear: Was it art? Was it documentation? This, of course, changed in time. The early works of Weiner, Dan Graham, and Baldessari, for example, were all distributed via Electronic Arts Intermix in an unlimited edition. I think Castelli was the first one who bought a portable video camera and gave it to artists on loan, and they started to experiment with it, like Bruce Nauman did in his studio. They started to do something with the camera. But no one was thinking directly about selling at that time. So when you look back at the history of the museum, you see that performance was already there, in the form of documentation that then became the artwork. The artwork was the videotape.

In conversation with Jonah Westerman  43

Do you think that for work produced now, there’s the same distinction between the artwork and the documentation? Christiane Berndes: I think now artists are more aware that you can sell your performance and that this can be documented, activated, or reactivated. We think a lot about the future of collecting. We think now that the object, the material, is not the most important thing, although I think without some material object, text, or document, it is difficult to create a context. It is very interesting to think about artworks in an immaterial way. So what do we collect? We collect the right to reactivate a piece. How do you think about mounting live performance works in the museum? Annie Fletcher: It occurs on a case-by-case basis. There’s a huge openness to different artistic processes in the Van Abbemuseum, as Chris says, and I would like to think in a more expanded way about how museums habitually construct time— narrative (art historical) time, real time, performative time. Performance and its live events test the normative institutional structures of the museum and directly construct a different relation to audience, and I think I am interested in this rather than the discipline itself, and I think this falls very much in line with how we collect in a non-medium-specific way. When Charles Esche came in as director, one of the perspectives he brought with him was a certain institutional experimentalism and a willingness to think very, in a way, performatively about the institution itself. Also the Head of Research, Diana Franssen, activated our own archive as a series of critical interventions, which allowed for different thinking about the history of the program and even the institution itself. She understood the archive as everything: people, practices, and professional protocols, as well as documentation and artworks. It was through the combination of all this thinking collectively from within the team itself that a rethinking of the institution came about. Anything that agonizes the idea of the autonomous object seemed very interesting to us; and I’m sure that is probably why Tino Sehgal’s This Is Exchange was bought. Our collection policy is very explicit in that we have actually publically outlined certain fields that inform our purchases, for example, Art and Economy, Art and Art History, or Art and Social Change; so questioning and noticing an expanded field that challenges the policies and the rigours of the Modernist museum and object-based institutions was crucial for us especially in the context of a booming art market since the 2000s which actively fetishizes the object of art all over again. With Pavel Buchler, for example, we bought a drawing, which will eventually disappear the more it is shown in the light. To me, that is a performative object that has a different relationship to time. Another interesting example in the collection is Dan Perjovschi. He had made his work on the walls of the huge transition space between the old and the new building, and over the years we

44  Christiane Berndes and Annie Fletcher

found we didn’t want to take down these amazing wall drawings, so we negotiated with the artist a kind of lease system rather than an outright purchase where he would update the drawings every year over five years. These legal and financial negotiations are, to us, as fascinating as the work itself. I’m interested in the change in the institutional behavior, in the way in which this might open up another kind of collecting possibility. I suppose that’s when the museum performs itself so selfconsciously that it reveals its structures in obvious ways. How do you think about the position of your audience in all this? Is there a tension between pushing the boundaries of what can be shown in the museum and satisfying the Van Abbe’s public mandate? Annie Fletcher: Well, where we are based in Northern Europe, we are obviously watching the evisceration of the social democratic welfare state and, of course, our type of public museum was one of the institutional cornerstones of this regime. It’s completely clear that representative institutions, and indeed representative politics, are collapsing in the current global condition. So the relation to audience and ideas of what that public mandate is are changing accordingly. I think the tension, as you say, between trusting the capacity and even the intellectual project of the museum and trying to understand present conditions and how the museum addresses subjectivity is really productive and important—and it means asking questions simply like how can the museum function as public space right now, how do its relationships to the outside world become more porous and simply relevant? How can we even reinvent the museum’s potential—these questions are at the heart of what we are doing. We are having lots of discussions about the role of heritage institutions like ours with partner members of our expanded confederation, the Internationale.1 Being in a network like this and trying to think comparatively from one located context to another is really useful. Right now, our big collective question as L’Internationale is: if we could think about our public mandates and a relation between the museum and its constituency so that at least part of our community is more engaged and interdependent than before. Of course, it’s a slow process trying to understand what all of this might mean in the future, but that’s interesting. What are the models, either from art or from theory, that you use to think about staging objects in the performative mode you’ve suggested? Annie Fletcher: We are thinking about notions of ‘use’, we have just brought out a reader on this idea, which looks at the historical relationship in modernity between art and use and speculates on how we might revisit this today (Aikens et al. 2016). We’ve been inspired, of course, by Tania Bruguera’s ideas of Arte Util, and Stephen Wright’s Lexicon Towards Usership (Wright 2013), where he argues for retiring certain terms, like objecthood, spectatorship. I am also interested currently in the writing of Stacy Douglas, who comes from legal studies, and her text ‘Museums

In conversation with Jonah Westerman  45

as Constitutions: A Commentary on Constitutions and Constitution Making’ (Douglas 2015). I think these are immensely challenging ideas. At the most basic level, this is a recontextualization, or reimagining of things beyond what I would call the ‘pure’ art experience. Maybe it is even a thinking, an insisting on the collection being part of the archive, which can be read, used, and tested in much more robust ways than just through spectatorship. Chris is working on something called the Museum Index with the designer Joost Grotens, which looks at the museum as a repository, as a collection of things. It does not zoom in to look at the individual art object in itself or the artistic practice in itself, but reads it indexically in relation to all of the rest of the collection and then frames it through other parameters (rather than just aesthetics) like demographics, economics, or geography. I think this reading is full of potential, and the re-enactment of that in different moments as a whole operation. I suppose this is about the opportunity to construct a series of different subjectivities, as audiences, or as participants, or as people who are engaged. It is about producing a different imaginary in relation to art. If you’re thinking about use in the present, of producing a new imaginary, what’s the role of history in producing these subjectivities? Annie Fletcher: Art coalesces both historically and contemporaneously, but maybe other things do it too, like other forms of cultural production. Art produces a kind of intimate interpretation of the world around us at a particular moment, an imagination of it, an intimate experience, which may be personal or collective. There is a certain intimacy to the capacity of the artist to think an idea or a moment, or interpret a context. Becoming Dutch (2006–2008) was interesting on that level. When we constructed the exhibition, we developed an idea of an imagined past, an imagined present, and an imagined future, rethinking Dutch artistic life of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in relation to how the Dutch nation state and the Dutch identity was performed. So I showed Ed van der Elsken and Dan Van Golden, for example, not necessarily only in relation to their work, but very much in relation to the idea of how they performed themselves as masters of the universe, showing how they traveled, for example, or how Dan Van Golden was influenced by Zen philosophy and Japanese culture. Johann van de Keuken made the amazing film I Love Dollars (1986), which grappled with the flow of global capital. I was interested in how these artists were thinking the world as a way to discuss what becoming Dutch might be now. We constellated things together, by which I mean, literally, that I juxtaposed works in the same space, so they could be read one against the other. How does the museum’s archive figure in these constellations? Annie Fletcher: The DIY archive is a predecessor to a project curated by Christiane as part of the collection display at that time called Viewing Depot (2006–2009), where people could write in and request a work be put on display,

46  Christiane Berndes and Annie Fletcher

and we just had a very simple kind of storage grid in the room, and works could be hung there. The letters with the requests were also hung on the wall. So there was a relationship between the memory and the request to see, and the importance this had for somebody and their interpretation of a work. I really liked the Viewing Depot because you get this completely other iteration of people’s curatorial ideas, you get beyond ‘expert culture’, you see new unexpected interpretations, and it is all really open and refreshing. I think it is really interesting to see what people want to see. In the world of digitization and archives, do we really need to keep collecting new objects? How could we produce new knowledge from what we have already, as Warburg suggested at the beginning of the last century? Currently in the collection hang, much space has been dedicated to DIY Archive, which is in the new building. There are rooms specially designed for visitors to constellate and curate their own selection of art works and archives available on site. Perhaps we need to collect protocols now instead of performances or relics of performances or objects, and we are really constantly negotiating the idea of protocols that can be enacted. I think that’s super interesting. With Tania Bruguera’s show called the Museum of Arte Util (December 2013–March 2014), we started to build up a fascinating constituency of people who came in and used the museum in different ways. We put in place a lot of structures that offered alternatives to people’s basic modes of behaving in the museum; so people who wanted to be a ‘spectator’ had to pay the normal entrance fee, and then they could go to the collection, but if you elected to be a ‘user’ you got in for free! You could use the Light Therapy Room designed by Apolonija Sustersic, hold meetings, their own workshops, even made their own exhibitions. The ‘user’ had to make a conscious decision to choose using over spectating, or, vice versa, you could reject usership and pay as usual and come in as a spectator, which was interesting. The architecture and the professional disciplines, and the museum itself, you know, control behaviors, literally, all the time. Even the speed with which you walk around the museum or the length of time you stay is controlled. So we would like to keep a users’ room, and retain that whole tension between the user and the spectator. I’m sort of determined to keep some of those behaviors going because I think they are so important. Is there a way to then document what it is people do as users, how they behave differently when given the option? Annie Fletcher: Yes, I think it is crucial, because you add it to the memory and to the archive. That is when you start to think beyond just the art object and look at the museum practices or the relationships with artists, or with the public. Then, indeed, there is an incentive, permission, reflection, and possibility. Or some kind of consistency—maybe that’s another word for history—another way to look back to what happened in order to do something new.

In conversation with Jonah Westerman  47

Note 1 L’Internationale is a confederation of six modern and contemporary art institutions that proposes a space for art within a non-hierarchical and decentralized internationalism, based on the values of difference and horizontal exchange among a constellation of cultural agents, locally rooted and globally connected. It brings together six major European museums: Moderna Galerija (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, Barcelona, Spain); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium); SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey); and Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands) (see www.internationaleonline.org).

Works cited Aikens, N., with T. Lange, J. Seijdel, and S. ten Thijen (eds) (2016) What’s the Use? Constellations of Art History and Knowledge: A Critical Reader, Eindhoven: Valies. Bruguera, T. (n.d.) Arte Util, available at: www.arte-util.org/ (accessed October 6, 2016). Douglas, S. (2015) ‘Museums as Constitutions: A Commentary on Constitutions and Constitution Making’, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 11(3), October: 349–62. Wright, S. (2013) Lexicon Towards Usership, available at: www.arte-util.org/cms/wp-content/ uploads/2015/03/Toward-a-lexicon-of-usership.pdf (accessed January 4, 2017).

6 THE KITCHEN, NEW YORK Tim Griffin, Executive Director and Chief Curator In conversation with Jonah Westerman, April 2015

How has The Kitchen’s mission changed from the moment of its inception to now? In the context of your question, it’s fascinating to recall how The Kitchen’s founders, Steina and Woody Vasulka, initially created the organization in 1971 specifically for the emerging medium of video—and later jokingly suggested that they welcomed artists working in other media and disciplines, and particularly in the performing arts, only because those artists ‘had nowhere else to go’. The anecdote is more telling than you might expect when it comes to any notion of The Kitchen’s continuing mission. On the one hand, The Kitchen was clearly a reflection of 1970s loft culture, acting as a catalyst for interdisciplinarity primarily by virtue of providing an open, or porous, context in which different communities among and around artists could present work and exchange ideas, or even just mingle, in the same space, whether reflexively or not. You just dropped in and— if you happened to drop by during the 1970s—you’d be apt to encounter new works by Tony Conrad, Laurie Spiegel, and Joan Jonas, Robert Ashley and Sherrie Levine, or Laurie Anderson and Nam Jun Paik within months of each other, if not weeks. On the other hand, such porousness gave rise to a kind of fundamental ambiguity, or resistance, when it came to defining the very nature of the organization. Artists and audiences never knew just what to expect. In fact, Robert Longo once told me that the magic of The Kitchen during those early decades was that no one could ever quite figure out what it was. This observation is useful, I think, when considering The Kitchen’s mission today. Absolutely, and in a truly nonprofit and artist-run spirit, we aspire to offer artists and communities a place to make and strive for new work, while remaining open to failure. That’s our ‘mission’. As important, however, is that while organizations typically seek to resolve any ambiguity in their makeup—or maybe better, to create and adhere to a set of nearly overdetermined conventions for itself and

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for audiences—The Kitchen by such measures has historically sought to sustain such problems. The institution is bound up with the production and reception of the work that appears here, and that work is often on the cusp of legibility, with respect to both structure and cultural context. This is certainly true for the artists who have worked or curated here: Arthur Russell, for example, was apt to cross classical, country, and disco music in his work; Michael Smith would perform as his character Mike at The Kitchen and then appear in segments on Saturday Night Live; and while Lucinda Childs regularly performed here, Toni Basil also curated dance by Rerun from the TV program What’s Happening? Even The Kitchen’s conscious decision to stay in Soho in 1973, when the director Robert Stearns was concerned the area was becoming too commercial—putting itself both in counterpoint and dialogue with those forces—puts on display the organization’s tendency to run against the anticipated grain, whether culture’s or its own. For me, this remains exciting as so many of the problems for art today—from questions of interdisciplinarity to art’s interweaving with popular culture—are built into the DNA of the place. They are built into the actual architecture as well. In our current building, theater and gallery are stacked one atop the other; and when we effectively hand over the building to artists, they can use the protocols of these different spaces as material for their projects. At a moment when the basic parameters of art and its disciplines are often porous, in other words, The Kitchen lends the conversation some concreteness. For an artist such as Ralph Lemon, whose Scaffold Room appeared here last year, it’s possible to experiment on every level, even when it comes down to audience position: where one is supposed to stand, literally, in relation to this work. We value looking at the implicit politics of that kind of questioning, which correspond as well, I think, to the precariousness of larger societal structures and ideas of a ‘public’. In fact, the positioning of an audience by any given work sets the terms for a public, which in turn shapes all possibilities for the organization itself. If a big part of what The Kitchen does is provide a space for artists to do new things, how does the nature of that space influence process and production? How do you think about the relationship between the gallery and the black box, for example? Working with artists like Lemon, or in exhibition and performance programs like ‘From Minimalism into Algorithm’, I think that we’ve continually taken up the opportunity to use the architecture of this particular building, in which, again, you have black box downstairs and a gallery setting upstairs. Artists are able to mobilize and juxtapose different ways of seeing or, put another way, ways of positioning the audience member, allowing different temporalities of space to coexist—or, perhaps more accurately, for the contradictions to be laid out more plainly. A good example here might be Elad Lassry’s Presence (2012), for which dancers from a ballet corps performed among a sculptural set whose framing devices—moving walls had windows through which they were viewed—rendered them pictorial; and, at the same time, a gallery exhibition

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of photographs upstairs had walls with similar windows so audience members themselves were made to feel as if they were traversing a similar kind of stage. Audiences had a somewhat disarming experience of seeing a theatrical performance within an exhibition structure, as if the former were a sculpture or photograph in space. And such uncertainty is, I think, a kind of crystallization of the tensions around our moment, when performances are, for example, frequently placed within gallery settings without taking into account the deeply distinct temporalities of those spaces, to say nothing of the distinct relationships between viewing subject and object. And here again, I would say that such matters are in dialogue with the positing of individuals, and the modeling of behavior, in society more generally; and so there is a real sense of stakes. The stakes are all the more significant given how institutional structures and languages can often camouflage shifts in culture that have, in fact, already taken place; articulating those shifts is essential for the very sustaining of institutions, whether in art or broader society. It’s important to note that such questions also reach into funding structures. Until recently, I would have noted that many grants are built to keep institutions conservative, revolving around certain parameters for legibility. For example, you have to be able to say, ‘This is an exhibition’, as opposed to, ‘Actually, I don’t know exactly what this display structure is, and we’re actually trying to do something where we don’t know’. It’s like Wittgenstein, we’re trying to bump up against language, recasting its terms and usage. This is the only way to change our understanding of what happens in art. If you wish to tie such an implicit politic and mode of social address back to The Kitchen’s historical legacy, it may be worthwhile to consider how video in the 1970s was understood as a medium of radical democratic value, both in terms of production and reception. This had implications for art’s relationship with technology and pop culture, which here brings to mind Laurie Anderson and Nam June Paik, with Good Morning, Mr Orwell happening at The Kitchen (1984) and made accessible by satellite broadcast. And then there is Dara Birnbaum and her self-described ‘pirating’ of media, which then appeared on early MTV. Appropriation, and the recasting of media language, was always guided by artists back into the realm of public circulation and popular discourse. How much was all of that activity archived, and what role does that history play now? The Kitchen was always very assiduous about documenting its activities. Not everything was documented, and some probably went missing as artists and curators went their different ways over the years, but there was always an understanding that the document was important both for artists and the organization. How else could anyone know what happened, when so much was steeped in ephemeral, time-based media? As a director of a smaller nonprofit organization operating in a field where discursive platforms have dwindling resources—simply put, there are fewer newspapers, magazines, and online journals—I understand the imperative for an institution to document, and to provide a reading of itself, only too well.

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That said, there is always some danger to lingering on this history. When I arrived at The Kitchen, in fact, I was concerned that the name—wrongly— immediately conjured the past more than the present when it was spoken. So I sought to pivot slightly, allowing the present to be seen through the prism of that past, and vice versa. We presented the work of Gretchen Bender, for example, showing Total Recall, which appeared in the same space in 1987: past and present became weirdly entangled, with this historical document nevertheless retaining a science-fictional immediacy, resonating with a great deal of video work being made by younger artists today—uncovering roots that had been forgotten, reclaiming the present by giving whole swaths of contemporary artistic production a meaningful past. It’s been especially meaningful for me to hear now that a new generation of artists is able to see themselves within The Kitchen’s history. It’s not some inaccessible golden age that defines the place, but rather a context that manages to persist across the decades, and in the face of some very inhospitable cultural forces. Today, one of the most important things any institution can do is simply provide a sense of context. When you are looking at these materials, how much can you tell about what they thought they were doing by generating the documents they left behind? I do think the organization wished to give the artist a document of her or his work. That premise has everything to do with the place’s fundamental idealism and sense of obligation to the artist. And thank god, given how many amazing performances—music in particular—took place that we’d never otherwise know. Over time, and as artists became more nuanced in their understanding of the media’s coloring of perception, it’s interesting to see how performance begins to be done for the camera. The camera subtly enters onto the scene, effectively becoming part of the work, during the late 1970s and 1980s. Accordingly, perhaps, around this time you can also see that some videographers knew that they were making videos, not documents; they weren’t trying to capture everything, but instead made videos that were somewhat stylized and accepted their partiality. You could say that they obeyed the editing rules and limits of the televisual medium, and didn’t try to transpose the experience of seeing a performance in real space onto the screen. Taking a step back, and looking at demands placed on the organization in more recent years, it’s intriguing that camera work at The Kitchen went to the God’seye view-type shot eventually, given that an all-over display of action onstage or in the gallery was desired by granting foundations as they assessed the worthiness of given practices. And now, looking to the broader artistic context, it’s important to grasp the importance of the camera for performance. The example of Marina Abramović is especially significant as she has dealt with the aesthetics of documentation in performance, and even of performance’s very pictorialization: it exists as something seen as much as, if not more than, it is encountered within a coherent physical and social space. One becomes cognizant of how the presence of the

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cameras in the space, the rendering of the gallery into a stage set, changes the temporality of the space. ‘Am I in real time or am I in advanced time?’ The ‘event’ has not happened yet, because the performance is not just for the space, but also for the lens, through which it passes in order to be edited into a new work. This remains an active terrain for performance now. So what’s the significance of these different moments in pictorial attitude? I think of a work by Pierre Huyghe from the mid-1990s, for which he held a casting call in an art gallery—meaning that when you walked in, it was almost impossible to tell who was there to look, and who was there to try out. Who was the subject, and who was the object? This reversal, and tenuous ambiguity, is a condition that permeates culture, and the Abramović moment I described corresponds with that cultural development. In this respect, one might say the institution affords us the opportunity to sort out circumstances in society at large. Ironically, The Kitchen is, I think, well suited to that task because of the context’s immediacy. Artists who come to the space now often express a real excitement about the site’s relative lack of mediation—even if they are using all kinds of media—in the sense of actually being in real physical proximity to both the media that they are using and the people who are observing. This is not to conflate our endeavor with earlier relational work’s aspiration to create communal enclaves shielded from mediated and commercialized space. But there is a sense of the terms, and challenges, being concrete. When an artist comes in, curators here often talk about the space, and they engage these larger questions. To offer another take on Total Recall, one of the reasons our re-presentation of the piece really worked was that the installation was on the original site—and yet the location is far removed from its original context in 1987, when there was nothing but, like, seedy clubs in the neighborhood. The Kitchen started to feel a little bit like a seedy club, if the music was loud enough; and the image of the past obtained a physical presence. All to say, our own pictorial attitude might be one in which we establish a different relationship to the image, reinserting it in the physical world. How do you balance what you’re describing here as two antithetical drives? On the one hand, the artist might want to do something that is relatively unmediated, directly connects to, or touches the audience. On the other hand, as the institution, you want to create documents . . . We will talk it through with the artist. If the artist does not want documentation, we do not make it. Artist and choreographer Yve Laris Cohen did not want a document of his recent work, for instance. That ephemerality and specificity—and intimacy—is part of his work. So we did not make a document. In another vein, a musician might not want a digital copy made of his performance because such files are easily redistributed; it’s unfortunate, because being in the archive may be

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meaningful for them. Alternatively, we also work through camera positioning with artists; this might mean that the audience is aware of the camera. We can incorporate it in this way and try to participate in the problem-solving, establishing the relationship between performance and document. I have to say this brings to mind an experience I had when I was at Artforum, interviewing Tino Sehgal in 2005. To interview him, we had to have a preliminary conversation setting the ground rules. And the preliminary conversation about the parameters of the interview was definitely as informative as the interview. We did not publish it. It is not even transcribed. It was a great non-interview. But it is just one of those instances where the deep concepts, the real stakes, are in the document that can’t ever be a document, as opposed to the published interview that is one. I imagine that such paradoxes will increasingly come into play at The Kitchen as artists across disciplines render the protocols of gallery and theater increasingly interwoven.

7 WALKER ART CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS Philip Bither, William and Nadine McGuire Director and Senior Curator, Performing Arts; Eric Crosby, Associate Curator, Visual Arts; Robin Dowden, Director, New Media Initiatives; and Fionn Meade, Artistic Director In conversation with Jonah Westerman, April 2015 How does the Walker Art Center operate curatorially? Philip Bither: The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a contemporary multidisciplinary center for creative expression. We have a highly esteemed collection of contemporary art, and a visual art department that mounts exhibitions and curates a whole season of primarily visual art-based programs and exhibitions. We also have a very active long-standing Film and Media department, which presents cinema work as well as some media work within gallery settings, and we have a Performing Arts department, and the suffix -ing in that (versus -ance) is somewhat important in the sense that in a lot of museum settings, the Performance department is really primarily working with notions of performance out of a history of visual art practice. But here, dating from 75 years ago, Performing Arts is a place that extends beyond just visual art cultures and one that has been a home for lots of styles of expression and disciplines. So the way we have historically broken up curatorial responsibility is: Film; Visual Art; and in the Performing Arts departments. The Performing Arts department began really actively programming in the 1960s; 1963 was the year of our first commission. We seek out projects and artists that live between disciplines and whose work could be framed as exhibition and as performance. Sometimes the work is placed in galleries or is specifically designed for a gallery experience. Sometimes they are site-based or site-responsive works, like Merce Cunningham’s project Ocean (2008–2009) that we did in a 150-foot-deep granite quarry. The majority of the work happens in this beautiful Herzog and de Meuron designed theatrical space, which has set seats, but is quite flexible, and so artists have turned it inside out in all kinds of ways. When we commission works (which we think of as adding to our collection), we ask artists for design work, notes, scripts, and we shoot a

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documentation—single camera—for research purposes and for historical use. We also do that with special projects that aren’t commissions but which we feel need to be captured. We also create contextualizing events with the artists. With all the commissioned artists, I facilitate an hour-long curatorial interview that we immediately put online because we want our research to serve our public today. In the past, we’d just tape shows and put them in our archives, and they would be there for scholars at some point in the future, but now the interviews are online and are used by people all over the world. We call this the Walker Channel. When did you start collecting performance, as opposed to performing arts commissions? Philip Bither: In 2000, we collected our first object related to performing art history. We purchased a set piece called Walkaround Time (1968) that was based on Duchamp’s Large Glass but created by Jasper Johns for a major Cunningham work. This work became an important piece in our collection. We felt it filled a significant hole in our history around how the work of a choreographer like Cunningham or a composer like John Cage changed the practice of so many artists. Following that acquisition, we acquired 16 mm Earrings (1979), a video installation by Meredith Monk. We acquired drawings by Trisha Brown after an exhibition that we mounted. A visual art curator, Peter Eleey, and I mounted collectively an exhibition that involved live performance in a retrospective of Trisha’s work, and a gallery showing her drawing practice, along with the recreation of a piece called Planes (1968), which is an object turned into a dance prop. Then, about four years ago, we made the choice to make one of our largest acquisitions in the history of the Walker. We acquired the entire collection of props, sets, and costumes of the Merce Cunningham Company. That includes 60 years of collaborations with major visual artists from all over the world. So we now have over 4,000 pieces that constitute the Cunningham physical collection, and we are mounting an exhibition that will open in February 2017 simultaneously at both the Walker and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago showing that work, Cunningham pieces performed by other companies, music concerts by past Cunningham and Cage collaborators, as well as a host of new commissions in current dance practice reflecting the spirit of Cage and Cunningham. We also proceeded with an experimental acquisition, Scaffold Room (2014) by the choreographer/interdisciplinary artist Ralph Lemon. But we worried that acquisition would limit the future of who would get to see that work and where the artist could place it. We wanted to honor the memories and the experience of what that real-time event was and meant for people, so we suggested a real-time acquisition of the Minneapolis edition of Scaffold Room in which we conducted extensive documentation involving interviews with all those involved in the creation: the curators, performers, the audience, the guards, the people wandering by during the day when it was being rehearsed—all that will end up functioning as a score that we are in the process of constructing with the artists themselves. That will be a kind of map of memories. We are talking about hundreds of hours of shots from

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multiple camera angles. Also a range of written material from the creators, the source material that Ralph pulled from instructions, notes, and other ideas reflecting process, excerpts of things that were part of the map handed out to people going to the production. All this will turn into a larger score developed dramaturgically that relates to three years of development and three weeks of experiences in the galleries, combined with extensive video documentation. How do the different departments work with each other for such an interdisciplinary project? Philip Bither: Having multiple kinds of spaces and different kinds of audience interfaces serves artists well so they can come to the Walker and may be doing a film project one year and a performance the next. We’re trying to provide crossover mechanisms for artists who, primarily, work in one realm but have always wanted to make something in another, or to involve other kinds of collaborators. So because we have all these knowledgeable curators and we have all these resources, we feel like we can provide a pathway if an artist is interested in starting to blur their current practice with another world. Fionn Meade: You have to, in a sense, build the in-between through new production. We are commissioning six pieces to premiere in June 2015, including work by Moira Davey and James Richards. We knew they were interested in Derek Jarman and asked whether they would want to use that as a starting point to make new work to initially premiere online, and then have it enter our moving image collection and be shown in a gallery. This is a new thing. It’s only been about 10 years that you can show something online and it wouldn’t be a detriment to showing it in a gallery. This bridge allows our institution to take collections that need to be in discourse with each other and bridge them with these strategies. That makes collections circulate. Because if a collection does not circulate, it is not a real collection. It is just a repository. So building the in-between is something I think the Walker has done exceptionally well. Any great institution has to be able to revise itself. What’s the role of the Living Collections Catalogue in that circulation? Fionn Meade: It is where we get into how to surface archival material in dialogue and not just as an addendum to artworks. It attempts to address the question ‘What is a performance archive collection?’ not ‘What is a performance archive?’ This distinction is important. When it becomes understood, it has the value and the ethics of a caretaking in relation to the collection. It helps in understanding the challenges of display and in coming up with new innovations. It also comes right to the question of what is liveness right now, because we are living through an entirely new reality of broadcast. I know it is an old-fashioned word, but broadcast is apt. We all self-broadcast, but we also take in things momentarily. Instant historicization is part of our time. It is not just performance we are talking about; it is the condition of

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art. Of course it is important to tell the histories of performance and performance art as well, but what we are also seeing is that live, the mediation of the gestural, the present, is part of how we experience art now. Of course, that means that how we frame performance is going to come to the fore. Is it the generalized practice of archiving that drives the appeal of performance, or is it the other way round? Fionn Meade: That’s a really interesting question. It’s not primarily either/or. We are informed by a predominant idea of presence. The question is: Are we absorbing performativity in a way that is actually becoming atomized into our very understanding of art and experience? I think that the answer is yes, so if we have atomized it and ingested it so fully, then performance comes to the fore. Moreover, performance has a recurrent quality, and it is becoming extremely portable. In that regard, it’s resurgent, having a new moment of popularity, but it is also being absorbed. But we have to ask if it loses agency when it’s absorbed. Is it becoming too immediately consumed by the market or even by audiences? All of these are real important questions. Eric Crosby: We have a lot of cases within the collection that resist any formal means of documentation. These range from a Tino Sehgal piece, like This Objective of That Object (2004), to our Fluxus collection, for which there is a certain degree of unsearchability, unknowability, because of its varied contents. These areas of the collection cannot really be catalogued effectively or understood by a visitor to the website as lived performance over time, but they are very much part of an important art historical tradition. So the question really remains: How do you expand on that and shape it for an online viewer, beyond just publishing a collection database onto a museum website? How can you enrich it? And then also, how do you begin to connect it with all the other archival holdings of an institution, which are, in a sense, a different kind of collection? And that was a central goal of the second volume of the Living Collections Catalogue, which puts key works from the collection in direct dialogue with archival holdings that visitors to the museum don’t normally get to see. While the first volume considers questions of performativity, the second addresses histories of intermedia practice and the archive in conjunction with the exhibition Art Expanded, 1958–1978. There were certain aspects of the archive and the collection—whether they be ephemeral, performative, or no longer extant—that I was interested in presenting within the context of that exhibition. Ultimately, I found that our online publishing tools were more adept at presenting that material because of the media-rich environment. Robin Dowden: I think one of the things that’s interesting about the second volume and Eric’s exhibition is that the two things informed one another in the making, so it was not like Eric did the exhibition and then this happened—they

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were happening at the same time. The fact that the digital actually informed the exhibition, and it was not that one was a surrogate of the other, was really interesting. Eric Crosby: For instance, Allan Kaprow staged a Happening in St. Paul in 1962, which was commissioned by a group associated with the Walker Art Center, and has since been a part of Walker lore. It was an important work for Kaprow as the Happening form was evolving for him. This incredible, historic event occurred here, but we have never had a visual record of it. We do have, however, wonderful press clippings and correspondence between audience members and our director, handwritten correspondence from Kaprow, his own handwritten score, all his various cue sheets, and lighting diagrams, etc. So we have a kind of story of the production, a story of the event, that can be told, but it can’t really be visualized very well. So we began to look at some of the news clippings that included photographic documentation of the Happening, and one of our fellows, Liz Glass, went to the Minnesota State Historical Society and uncovered a trove of unpublished negatives that no one had ever seen. Now, with that material, we’re able to amplify the archival holdings, and tell a complete visual and document-based narrative of this key work, which is positioned well in Kaprow’s own development as an artist, just a few years after he begins experimenting with the form, and before he begins to crystallize what that means for him. So the exhibition problem becomes how do you convey this material, how do you present this material? Which is not easy because there is always a lack involved in presenting such documentary material of performance within the space of a gallery; there’s always something absent. How do you think about that relationship between the archive and collection? How can you tell where one stops and the other starts? Robin Dowden: We have always thought of the archives as part of the universe of our collection. There are different systems in place for cataloguing different things; as a result, some elements have received preferential treatment. Eric Crosby: There’s a disconnect in terms of language. The archive is a collection of objects, but we have a hard time understanding it and cataloguing it for what it truly is: a collection of events, a chronological record of an institution and its engagement with artists over time. And so one of the goals of Volume Two was to present such events that are uncollectable, that are effectively uncatalogued, in a way that is vivid and accessible. But I think there’s another disconnect: is the work an object, or is it an event? That is a very difficult shift for a collecting institution to make—to fully integrate its collection of objects and archival material. I do not think there is much to be gained from calling it all art, but I do think there’s a lot to be gained from abandoning some of the categorical definitions we apply to objects in the collection

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and artifacts in the archive. So, for example, our registrar and I might have a semantic disagreement about a Nikki de Saint Phalle painting. By virtue of its material construction, it is by all means a painting, but to me its performative mode of production outstrips that category narrowly defined. So, do I think that you should be able to find that when you click on ‘paintings’ on the collections website? Sure. But what about all the other points of entry into that object we’re foreclosing because we’ve deemed it a ‘painting’ for the matter of ease and consistency within our institution? It may seem small, but I consider it significant. I think there is much to gain from loosening these structures and naming conventions, and opening up different points of entry.

8 PERFORMA, NEW YORK RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Curator In conversation with Jonah Westerman, May 2015

What is Performa’s mission, and what conditions prompted or allowed it to come into existence? Right from the start, Performa was intended to make the history of performance by visual artists widely known and highly visible. I was tired of people not understanding the significance of that history, of always thinking of performance as a sideshow. My consistent mission, from the time I wrote my book on the history of performance art, first published in 1979, has been to show that performance is central to the history of art, that it shaped art history, that it was a catalyst for new ideas and new directions. My interest was to rewrite twentieth-century art history, showing the role of media and live performance throughout the entire century that indeed could be described as a ‘multi-media’ century. At the time, in 2004, it seemed that the art market was taking over the entire conversation of contemporary art. The New York art world felt very top-heavy with supersized galleries in Chelsea, a focus on art fairs and auction houses, and I felt the need to shake things up from the bottom, to return the conversation to art and artists and to a world of ideas. The first thing I did was create a series of talks, ‘Not for Sale’ at NYU, with artists, curators, writers. It was there that I announced the launch of Performa, an organization that would examine the history of performance art in depth and that would commission new works for the twenty-first century. Response was electric. Crowds overflowed the lecture theater and the conversation took off immediately. The idea to commission new work had begun several years earlier, when in 1999 I saw Shirin Neshat’s Turbulent at the Venice Biennial. On my return to New York, I asked Shirin if she would consider creating a live performance. I felt that her film installations had all the ingredients for a live production— visual storytelling, cinematic choreography, emotionally expressive music, profound content. She said yes. And that’s when I became a producer. Shirin’s Logic

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of the Birds (2001–2002) was presented as part of the Lincoln Center Festival and later toured (to the Walker Art Center and to London). It was a stunning debut of what I had hoped for as a new kind of visual art performance, and it opened up entirely new landscapes. The first Performa Biennial, in 2005, included several new commissions (Jesper Just, Francis Alÿs, Laurie Simmons) and references to performance history (Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces was presented by the Guggenheim Museum as part of Performa 05), among a full three-week program of events at partner venues across the city. The new commissions and the historic material became side-by-side pillars of the biennial going forward. The two together totally changed people’s minds about performance art. You just said that performance is what happens when art is intermedial. That’s a slight twist on how people usually think of it, no? Throughout the twentieth century, artists have drawn on a range of media for expressing their ideas. They have moved with ease between mediums, whether painting, poetry, film, music, dance, photography, adapting and adopting as they wished, taking from one discipline or another. The twenty-first century will only be more so. Performance will be more prolific because it allows for the multitasking, image- and technology-driven world in which we live to come into play. It provides a multilayered platform for articulating the complex climate of politics, culture and geography, and the many formal shifts in art-making of recent decades, in terms of art theory and practice. Curatorially museums are rehanging their collections, pulling down walls, literally, between disciplines. It has always been so. Artists in the Renaissance were expected to master many disciplines. Leonardo da Vinci created performances and pageants. In fact, such events were part of their job description at the courts. I don’t accept that it’s been neglected because performance is ephemeral. Rather, it’s because art historians have missed the significance of this material in shaping ideas and art-making. It’s been a blind spot. Why did Performa take the form of a biennial? An art biennial by its very nature implies research, a thorough investigation of a cultural moment in time, a concentrated gathering of information and people from around the world. It is a platform for discourse and discussion around which an international community gathers, to discuss the state of art and the world in which we’re living. There is a focus and an expectation that is particular to a biennial, it’s intense and energizing, and quite different from an annual festival, which is the ‘performing arts’ model. Also, the two-year spacing between biennials is essential for the commissioning process. We work closely with artists from concept to premiere. It’s a period of curatorial exchange, of building and distilling ideas over time. It’s this process that accounts for the originality and excellence of many Performa commissions. The biennial is an opportunity for viewers to see a lot of

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different work, to compare and critique, to come away with a sense of the range of material being made today in performance. The Performa Biennial is the time to visit New York to see the very best of what’s going on in this medium, but also in a lot of other media (dance, architecture, music, poetry) to understand the scope of contemporary art. We have residencies and workshops at the Performa Institute, artists delivering talks about their work, curators and critics visiting from different countries, meeting every day in the Performa Hub. There are so many polemical questions and so many exchanges of ideas that emanate from a biennial. Performa had to be a biennial. How does your sense of performance relate to what, in the UK, is called ‘live art’? The expression ‘live art’ comes from the subtitle of the first edition of my book, Performance: Live Art from Futurism to the Present, when it was published by Thames & Hudson in London in 1979. Back then, I was reluctant to use the term ‘performance art’, since for me it was a 1970s term. I didn’t feel that it applied to earlier periods, to the Futurists or Russian Constructivists, or to Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus, for example. ‘Live art’ is a good description, though. It’s easier to grasp, and that term took root in the UK. By the time the second edition of my book was published, ‘performance art’ was being used more broadly in Europe and the US to describe a vast range of different work. By then, it felt like the umbrella term that was generally understood and in use, hence the change in title. When you’re investigating a historical performance work, what is it that you look for, that communicates its aims and forms to you? I see performance as integral to the history of art. I view it in the context of what else is occurring at that time in the visual arts. Performance is a reflection of the aesthetics of the period in which it is produced, of a general conversation in a particular art community. It is of a place and time. I also ask myself how did a particular artist use it in their work? I look at the total oeuvre and investigate the way that each discipline, each medium used by the artists relates to the other. Oskar Schlemmer, for example, who worked in painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, and who taught at the Bauhaus in the early 1920s. For him, each discipline informed the other. He used performance both as a teaching tool for students to understand space, but also to understand the figuration and weight of a body in space. His drawing class, Man und Kunstfigur, illustrated his concepts. His famous Triadic Ballet (1928) played with the theory of color that was a preoccupation of several professors at the school. Another example where performance was integral to the arc of an artist’s oeuvre is Kasimir Malevich—the first time he created a solid white painting was as a curtain for his performance Victory Over the Sun in 1913; it was an important first step towards abstraction that he would later adopt. This date was overlooked, however, by historians, who usually place his first abstract work, the black square, several years later. Interestingly, and at last,

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the Malevich exhibition at Tate Modern gave an entire room to Victory Over the Sun, and the wall label quoted Malevich as saying that this particular performance was the clue to all of his subsequent work and ideas. When it comes to mounting exhibitions, or even generating documentation for new Performa commissions, how does that historical method inform your sense of contemporary process? The word ‘documentation’ is misleading. The photographs, the images which remain, carry enormous weight and project the performance into the future. Some years ago, I wrote in Artforum that we need to learn to look at the pictures, in the way that trained art historians are taught to do. Inch by inch, looking closely at a picture, its perspective, the frame around it. We’re taught to be good detectives, we look for clues, about the room where the event took place, the width of the floorboards, was the audience seated or standing? I don’t go along with ‘you had to be there’. Very few people ever were. All of history is cut off from our actual experience, but as good art historians we project ourselves back in time; imagination plus knowledge plus training allows us to ‘see’ the piece, even to ‘feel’ it. You learn to read the signs, the iconography. An entire story about the times is being told in the eye of the photographer. It’s not just a document; it is the kernel of a period. It’s like looking at a shard of ancient pottery. It contains an entire civilization. People who say ‘it’s just documentation’ are missing the entire art historical point, that a single photograph or a single image carries a world within it. In the introduction to my book Performance: Live Art Since the 60s, which focused on images over text, I spent a long time looking at photographs and asking myself these questions. And it was not just about how we look and learn to be more art historically minded. It’s also about how we know the world through images. If anything, the photograph, to me, is another way to penetrate the piece. The more I go back and look at it, the more information I gain from the image. I discover things that I had not seen before. So it’s possible that the photograph actually provides more information than what you might have seen when you were there. Artists intentionally made iconic photographs that would remain after the event, or sometimes made performances specifically to be photographed. When Yves Klein made Leap into the Void in 1960, he consciously made a visual metaphor that would encompass his theories about art, life, spiritualism. He shot ‘the leap’ twice, once with a mattress held by friends to catch him, and once to capture the empty street. The final image was spliced together in the darkroom. Similarly, Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), with Beuys’s face covered in gold paint, was no doubt considered from many angles, and the final photograph selected for its impact and its ability to remain relevant over time. So when I conceived the exhibition One Hundred Years of Performance Art (2009), the surprise was how the exhibition became in itself a fascinating history of documentation, and the mechanics of keeping records of performance,

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whether in photography, on film, or in video. Early television was sepia-toned, 1960s movies were black and white, early 1970s videos had an orange tinge, and finally the exhibition ended with hard-edge full HD color. The show to me was revelation—I loved the way that the light in each room changed depending on the technology of the times. So in some ways, the history of documentation is the history of performance, and vice versa. Each work makes us re-examine how we understand that relationship. For example, with Matthew Barney: Is the work a performance that happens to be filmed? Is it a performance made for film? Of course, he’s making films, but they’re performances first, and his process takes him down very different pathways than he would take if he’d started out as a filmmaker. I recall an interview with Pierre Huyghe, when he said to me, ‘All my work is performance, I made films as a way to make them solid, to hold onto them’. So is a Pierre Huyghe film a film or is it a performance? All Performa events are photographed and filmed, and after the biennial, we produce a book, which is an exciting conclusion to the entire two-year process of research, commissioning, and presentation in front of an audience. Performa books are written as a record of three action-packed weeks, as recall for those who attended, inspiration for those who did not, and for art historians, 30 years from now, who will want to understand a particular cultural moment from the past. We make a special effort to find the optimum way to interpret and report on cultural history in the making, to provide the reader with the background on each work, the artists’ own words. Regarding Performa’s future: we move into our second decade as committed as ever to the foundations pillars with which we began; examining the past, inserting it into our understanding of the present, and nurturing and producing new work for the future. Even as museums are building dedicated performance spaces, establishing curatorial departments, and presenting regular performance programming, which in many ways was the original call to arms of my book and of Performa to exhort these very institutions to ‘pay attention to performance history’, to bring this material into the fold of academia and museum studies—hence, some would say ‘mission accomplished’—the depth of Performa’s expertise and knowledge, in terms of performance history but also of production capacity, cannot be matched. We will continue to build on the many initiatives that we’ve begun; the Performa Biennial, Archives, Institute, Hub, Publications, Magazine, Touring, Radio, TV, Pavilion Without Walls, and much more. We offer Mellon Fellowships for training next-generation curators, and I teach a Performa Intensive at NYU, which feeds our internship program. We work in close tandem with curators and museums around the world, and collaborate and advise whenever we can. Performa, the institution, is a unique, innovative, highly flexible, and reflexive organization that looks across the great spectrum of art and media, that asks questions not only about performance, but about the role of art and artists, and radical forms of expression in understanding, reflecting on, and articulating the complicated global shifts at work that shape our daily lives.

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Works cited Goldberg, R. (2004) Performance: Live Art Since the 60s, London and New York: Thames & Hudson. Goldberg, R. (2005) Performa 05: The First Performa Biennial, New York: Performa Publications. Goldberg, R. (2007) Everywhere and All at Once: An Anthology of Writings on Performa 07 jrp/ ringier. Goldberg, R. (2009) Performa 09: Back to Futurism, New York: Performa Publications. Goldberg, R. (2011) Performa 11: Staging Ideas, New York: Performa Publications. Goldberg, R. (2011 [1979]) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, London and New York: Thames & Hudson. Goldberg, R. (2013) Performa 13: Surrealism, The Voice, Citizenship, New York: Performa Publications and Gregory R. Miller & Co.

9 LIMA, AMSTERDAM Gaby Wijers, Director In conversation with Jonah Westerman, February 2015

If you were to trace the institutional history of media art collection and preservation in the Netherlands backward from LIMA, where would you begin the story? The television producer Rene Coelho founded MonteVideo in 1978 to embrace video art, but also a broad mixture of media-related art forms. He saw the possibility to use technology to make new art forms and find new audiences. At that time, equipment was extremely expensive and rare, and it was important that artists could access it. MonteVideo started as a gallery but developed soon into an equipment-sharing production enterprise. Subsequently, it produced work, ran exhibitions, provided technical support, and generated educational programs. What was the thinking at that time around the role of preservation? In the 1970s and 1980s, people were solely aware of production, presentation, and distribution. In the 1980s, a number of installations were produced and exhibited. The works were often very technical, though some were interactive, and not fixed in a particular state. For example, the Vasulkas, who called themselves video artists, used all kinds of tools. Dealing with hybrid works is different from acquiring works that are fixed or finished. It was only in the 1990s that preservation became increasingly important. The collection’s purpose was then, as well as now, distribution. MonteVideo, and nowadays LIMA, do not own the collection, they distribute it. The artists own the work; we promote and present it for them. When a fee is paid, part of it goes to the distributor, but most of it goes to the artist. LIMA holds an archive comprising 50 years of recordings of these kinds of hybrid events and happenings. Nowadays, we work for over 500 artists. In the early 1990s, MonteVideo and Time Based Arts merged into MonteVideo/Time Based Arts Netherlands Media Art Institute, which later

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became the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk). MonteVideo specialized in electronic art, video art, and media installations that pushed the boundaries of the creative possibilities and technical qualities of the medium itself. In addition to the works that were produced and shown in the gallery, MonteVideo started actively selecting, collecting, and distributing works of some highly prominent artists. Time Based Arts was an association for video artists established in the early 1980s, with de Appel as its base of operations. Its collection included works by artists based in the Netherlands at the time, such as Marina Abramović and Ulay, Elsa Stansfield and Madelon Hooykaas, Ben d’Armagnac, as well as work by international artists such as Mona Hatoum and General Idea. Time Based Arts had an active collection policy in which any member who worked with video could attempt to have his or her work included in the collection. As it grew, the collection became exceedingly diverse and represented a substantial overview of the various uses of video in the visual arts. The Lijnbaancentrum collection also became part of the NIMk collection. There were works by Livinus Van der Bundt, the visual artist that used light, images, and sound, working with glass and small electronics, as well as works by Nan Hoover, which were more performance-based, or Bill Viola, now a wellknown video artist. In the late 1990s, NIMk moved to the Keizersgracht into a bigger building with exhibition spaces, editing suites, etc. We created a database so people could watch clips on the Internet. In the mid-1990s, I was asked to research digital formats for preservation. It had been a few years since the last preservation project had been carried out, and it was clear that every 7 to 10 years they had to do a new technology watch and transfer. Digital Betacam was the best format to use. At that time, we had a number of discussions with the museums about whether the transfer to another format would change the work. We were also trying to understand whether we were dealing with an autonomous work or a documentation, a channel, or a recording. I was then employed by the Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art, an independent organization in which contemporary art museums research preservation collaboratively. We felt that if a work was in several collections, perhaps one should preserve just one of them. When we suggested to all artists involved that we would preserve their work by using the collected master or submaster, most of them agreed this was a good idea, or provided new, technically improved masters. Interestingly, many artists noted that they did not know their work was still in these collections. At that time, it was very rare that a museum had a contract with an artist, and even where there were contracts, it was not always clear what the artists or the museums needed to do in terms of preservation. In 1990–1992, MonteVideo, with other partners, including the government, had curated an exhibition of Dutch and international media artworks, which traveled to Europe and Asia, producing also some manuals about how to install the works and carrying out early preservation projects. As a distributor working with video, MonteVideo had soon realized that a lot of works could not be played anymore because the tapes had deteriorated, or they no longer had the right equipment. So, in partnership with other Dutch museums and the Netherlands

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Office for Fine Arts, they converted all the works to analog Betacam and created a database. In the late 1990s, I was asked to transfer those data into a more robust database, and research the possibilities for their digital preservation, as they were aware that video had to be transferred every 7 to 10 years to another carrier. There were so many different versions of the same work (black and white, color, 15 minutes, 28 minutes, subtitled, not subtitled, single channel, installation—in formats like Open Reel, Umatic, VHS, etc.) that we had to develop a system to accommodate these conditions. At that time, if a work was in different collections, all its versions were preserved and, in the case of performance-based works, no distinction was made between the artwork and associated documentation of it. In 1996–1998, we created Cyclope, a public terminal, so that people could look things up in a mediatheque. How does this work with a more technical piece of video art that focuses explicitly on mediumspecific qualities? How do you think about preserving or conserving that medium-driven character, if you’re also migrating it from one form to another? Alongside this abstract description, that is more like a content description, there are all kinds of manifestations. If you look at a work by Marina and Ulay, for example, there is often more than one recording of the original performance. Sometimes the performance was done more than once in different cities. Sometimes, there is also a film version especially made for the camera without an audience. So when you start looking at the work, you do not know how many originals there are, and once you know you have to decide which one to preserve. Later, Marina and Ulay also made compilations and collected works in editions. Then they started editing everything again. During the preservation project, we interviewed them and they decided the longest versions were the ones to preserve, and said that they would not make new editions. However, Marina recently made new scans of all the films and decided they are not to be presented on monitors anymore, but in installations as projections (Wijers and van Saaze 2003; Wijers et al. 2003). You are dealing with the acknowledged multiplicity of a thing, but also wanting to pinpoint something about it that you could call authentic, or even original. Nan Hoover’s works, for example, which are often performance-based, are frequently shot in one take. The work is abstract, so the movement is very slow, and the colors, yellow and blue, are not that accurate, so you need to preserve this blurriness of the image. Another example is Marinus Boezem’s Breathing Upon The Tube (1971), which was made on film for broadcast. After it was broadcast, the artist presented it on video. The Film Museum projected it and preserved the film, but there were debates about the value of the film and whether it should be projected. We had expert meetings where we would present this work on 10 different monitors, like flat screens and cubes, and discuss the value of these different projection strategies with the artist and the public.

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Subsequently, the mindset changed and we started to develop model contracts between museums and the artists. The Stichting Behound Moderne Kunst (SBMK) facilitated this so as to give museums the opportunity to arrange preservation from the moment a work entered the collection. We started interviewing artists to discuss the preservation of their work in the collection. In 2010–2012, NIMk carried out another national video-preservation project, which was coordinated by SBMK. This consisted of the transfer of all the original analog works to uncompressed AVI stored on LTO. A larger number of institutions and museums collaborated on this and, in the case of doublers, the technical best version was preserved and owned by several museums. Since 2000, research has shifted towards presentation equipment, outlining the significance of having one file and not many separate ones, and presentation formats. Research also shifted from video signal preservation to media installation preservation and equipment. There were discussions about how to present monitors, or even which monitor should be preserved when more than one had been used. In 2002, the project ‘404 Object Not Found’ was the first EU-funded project I participated in that researched case-based studies on the presentation, registration, and documentation of four multimedia installations. New projects were created to look specifically at how to deal with born-digital material, its equipment, the role of installations, and obsolete equipment, including digital works from the 1970s and 1980s, which had not been thought of as digital at that time. In 2004–2007, as part of the project ‘Inside Installation’ (coordinated by the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, now Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands), I researched emulation as preservation strategy (on the base of documentation) for software-based artworks. We were increasingly interested in how to document participation and interactivity to maintain the authenticity and integrity, in the continuation of dynamics on multiple platforms in multiple manifestations. We launched at that time the series ‘To Transfer or to Transform’, where artists presented and discussed multiple manifestations of their works. In the 1980s and 1990s, very few works had multiple locations. Net art, with the use of several interlinking networks and the possibilities to be live auto- or participation-generated, changed this with its need for adapting to the existing models. How do you think about preserving something that is interactive and open-ended? I think works that use multiple locations and are open-ended and participatory are related to performance, and increasingly we think about documenting them rather than capturing them. The ‘Inside Installations’ project offered an online tutorial where we compared 200 recordings of installations and came up with some guidelines so people could create their own recordings. Through this, reuse and reinterpretation became a topic of research. Now we are working on a project in which we want to produce new works that are inspired by, represent, or look at artworks, but are not necessarily replicas or re-enactments of them. In the ‘Inside Installations’ project, we used works from the 1990 Imago exhibition as case studies and developed some tutorials comparing all recordings

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and installation documentations. We made some 3D models, tried to show how to install an artwork and created instructions (e.g., make a video, a pictogram, a diagram, a 3D model, etc.). We also looked into emulation and virtualization, using documentation when we selected works for which we knew the software was not working anymore (Wijers 2011). Later on, we studied more and more the conservation of installation equipment and the descriptions of hard and software, for instance in the Obsolete Equipment Project, together with PACKED (Wijers 2013). Over the years (as a distributor), we always paid attention to videos of the installations and of the audience’s behavior, and so we could measure by these video recordings things like timing and positioning. Over time, we started to see the work and the documentation as one thing. One could say that the work is the core and the rest is a shell around it. This means that they are always connected. We also worked on archiving artist materials, including the production process. Documentation entails an aspect of performativity, and we were becoming more interested in that. In 2010, we were part of the ‘Inside Movement Knowledge’ group collaborating with the Art Academy section Dance to create projects about mediation and transmission. For this, the International Choreographic Art Centre (ICK Amsterdam) created a motion-capturing tool that was used for training. We presented the results at the conference ‘Installations Art: Who Cares’ (2010), and discussed what contemporary dance mediation can learn from media art preservation and vice versa (Wijers et al. 2010). At the end of 2012, our budget was cut down by 100 percent. NIMk had been funded as a supporting institution to help the artists and the museums with all kinds of questions related to media art, e-culture, preservation, and to bring media art to audiences. We held presentations, residency programs, and educational programs. Despite the loss of the funding, we felt that we needed to carry on the work. So we created an e-depot, a professional electronic depot for media artworks, comprising 25 collections in the Netherlands—all the contemporary art museums as well as private collectors. When a museum buys a work and it is connected to LIMA, we check the technical quality of the work, and sometimes go back to the museum and suggest the artist should provide further documents. We also do the metadata, store the work in our e-depot, make a copy of it on LTO tape, and control it several times a year. If the museums need something for display, we can provide them with whatever they request. We also distribute the collection and research software-based art and documentation. Increasingly, we do a lot of work with contextual documentation and analyze its relation with the work. Although they are currently seen as something completely different, we are looking at how to keep them together in databases or in collection information systems.

Works cited Wijers, G. (2011) ‘To Emulate or Not: Conservation Case Studies from the Netherlands’, in K. Scholte and G. Wharton (eds), Inside Installations, Amsterdam: University Presses, pp. 81–91.

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Wijers, G. (2013) ‘Obsolete Equipment: Ethics and Practices of Media Art Conservation’, in J. Noordegraaf, C. Saba, B. Le Maître and V. Hediger (eds), Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art, Amsterdam: University Presses, pp. 235–53. Wijers, G. and van Saaze, V. (2003) ‘Reanimaties: Onderzoek naar de Presentatie en Registratie van Vier Media-Installaties’, kM, 46: 18–20. Wijers, G., Rodrigo, E., and Coelho, R. (eds) (2003) The Sustainability of Video Art: Preservation of Dutch Video Art Collections, Amsterdam: Foundation for the Conservation of Modern Art. Wijers, G., van Saaze, V., and Dekker, A. (2010) ‘What Visual Arts Preservation Can Learn from Dance Reconstruction: An Introduction to the Current State of Research within IMK’, RTRSRCH, 2(2): 15–17.

10 PICS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN Text by Catherine Wood, including an interview with Amalia Ulman

Within a classic narrative of performance art history, photographic or video ‘documentation’ is a poor substitute for the apparent authenticity of the act. In this scheme of things, a live action encountered in real time is primary, superior to the after-image that might stand in for its passing, within a book or exhibition. For works of ‘body art’ that sought to foreground the palpable vulnerability of the artist’s own presence in real time and in relation to the witness of a live audience—for example, early works by Marina Abramović or Chris Burden—access to the sensations and high stakes of the original act is inevitably hampered via its mediation as a photographic image, even if that image (of Abramović scratched and decked with roses and chains, smeared with lipstick in Rhythm O [1973]), or Burden clutching his arm in pain after being shot, in Shoot (1971) becomes a well-known and iconic representation. In the context of the USA and Europe during the 1970s, a number of artists began to make work in which they imagined performance taking place within a new reality: inside the space of the image itself. This may have been in part an anticipation of the increasing power of the documentary photograph to gain visibility, over and above the moment of the live act, but, moreover, it was an attempt for many artists to find ways to deal, artistically, with the acceleration of media images with which one was confronted on a daily basis, its protagonists (models, actors) offering new patterns for behaviors, appearances, and identities. Swapping authentic presence in ‘real life’ for iconicity, this kind of performance was not only primarily aimed at the camera’s eye instead of live audiences, but also imagined the world within the photograph’s frame as a space to inhabit: an alternative order of fictional space in two dimensions. Artists including Cindy Sherman in the USA, Urs Luthi in Germany or Natalia LL in Poland were, from different perspectives, transforming themselves into images that assimilated to or approximated other image-types already circulating in the world of mass media or art history: from Hollywood, fashion magazines, or pornographic magazines. They conjured characters who

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inhabited the image plane and submitted to it on its own terms. Their appearances were not fleshed out in the dimensions of real space and time, but compressed into flat still and moving images: pictures with limited depth but infinite potential to be manipulated, performed, and styled; a kind of two-dimensional theater space. But if Cindy Sherman and the Transformer generation inhabited the image as a space in which to act out, they did not, perhaps, push their image-avatars out into the real world. They performed for the camera, but their images did not necessarily act by being visible within distribution modes typical of the image habitat from which they were borne, being destined for display in the gallery.1 Since the later 1970s, artists such as Suzanne Lacy or Cosey Fanni Tutti have—in quite different ways—anticipated the workings of contemporary social media. These artists have initiated and directed the performance of not only images—whether from a basis of staging choreographed actions, or engaging in forms of self-performance—but also intervened in image distribution circuits. They have each instigated alternative orders of ‘liveness’ within the given institutions of mass media (television, newspapers, magazines), intervening in those formats from a feminist perspective. In the 1980s, live tableaux designed by Lacy on activist themes for works such as In Mourning and In Rage, or The Crystal Quilt, were deliberately designed and stageproduced to work for photographic and film capture. This material was either simultaneously or subsequently made visible through media broadcast and distribution on television, newspapers, or magazines, thus impacting a far wider audience than those who witnessed the action in its immediate present. More importantly, Lacy’s images were put out to ‘perform’ among and against a plethora of mainstream media images being consumed by that mass audience. Cosey Fanni Tutti’s appearances in pornographic magazines were conceived by her as a subtly transgressive form of self-performance in which the materials and tools of her production were co-opted by her participation in the industry. She would work as a model, perform and be photographed, and then would capture her own work by purchasing and archiving the magazines, and exhibiting her own pages in galleries. Meanwhile, her work was distributed as a stealth intervention, invisibly, through the ordinary circulation of the magazines. The fact that she was paid for the work was essential to her own economic survival as an artist. If Lacy’s approach to images was founded upon an attempt to intervene in an increasingly powerful image media landscape by inserting strong, alternative, activist images that redressed the under-representation of women, and women’s issues (so-called), Fanni Tutti took an approach of overidentification with given imagery, becoming identical with existing depictions of women and of women’s sexuality as a way of experiencing from the inside what it felt like to be ‘those women’ who are sold to us as fantasy: a form of apparent submission to the given modes of sexual pleasure on display, while profiting both economically and as an artist from the work (that effectively printed and thus produced her own artworks). Amalia Ulman, working within an increasingly complicated twenty-firstcentury context of social media, extends such strategies around inhabiting media institutions and ‘formats’ initiated by her feminist forebears in various ways.

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These apparently divergent attitudes to the relationship between ‘reality’ and the photo­graphic document—the former being either an indexical trace of something that really happened, the latter as a space in which reality might be conjured temporarily, imagined and played out—apparently conflict. But a number of artists of the contemporary generation inhabit a landscape that takes this photographic suspension of disbelief for granted. With the dissolving of photographic truth initiated by the tools of Photoshop, and the image-sharing, prosumer culture of social media (and its attendant myriad possibilities for image manipulation there too), the photograph serves as a double-edged form of evidence and fakery, not unlike the genre of documentary-soap (or docufiction) common in semi-scripted television series such as Made in Chelsea that present what they term a ‘structured reality’ performed for the camera. For many artists now, there is an inherent understanding of the extent to which the camera’s ubiquitous presence elicits performance rather than simply records, and the cross-platform nature of social

FIGURE 10.1 

Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 8 July 2014), (#itsjustdifferent), 2014

Courtesy Amalia Ulman and Arcadia Missa

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communications and networks means that there is little distinction between mediated and real-time presence so far as ‘authentic’ subjectivity or, indeed, social interaction goes. Questions of intimacy, identity, reciprocity, and responsibility tested in real time by the likes of Abramović can be explored—albeit in transposed fashion—through performance that inhabits image media, perhaps with a greater degree of authentic contemporary relevance than would a strategy involving the artist and audience sitting together in a room. In her most well-known work, Excellences & Perfections, a five-month-long Instagram narrative begun on April 19, 2014, Ulman shared pictures (as an apparently authentic user) of her makeovers and lifestyle choices, including the taking of extreme measures such as having plastic surgery, only later revealing the persona and story as a fabrication, with critics calling it a ‘hoax’. Throughout her body of work using social media, Ulman creates picture narratives with what she describes as a ‘middlebrow’ aesthetic, featuring herself styled as characters who build slowly through time, and whose appearance and interests more or less assimilate to commonly shared themes found on the medium. Using her real name, Ulman nevertheless constructs the storylines in which she appears (the implications of underlying emotional drama for the protagonist is refracted through attempts at changes of image), and which are released gradually through months or years on Instagram, gaining followers by utilizing ‘success’ strategies based on attractiveness and careful topic selection. Her interest in performing by inhabiting the fictional personae and worlds she creates is twofold: she tests her own life experience against this fantasy hybrid avatar that is part real and part invention, and she also investigates how her stories might utilize triggers to popularity common to the platform to insinuate themselves into people’s imaginations. Her followers are not sitting down to watch a film or read a story, but her images might play at the back of their minds and generate narrative interpolation. Questions concerning the nature of contemporary reality abound. What does her brand of Instagram ‘realness’ (to borrow a drag-ball term for passing from the 1980s) mean in relation to the lived reality she and her followers inhabit? Where does the performance lie, and what is the performed action? What does the artist’s use of her own body and name signify in an otherwise placeless topography of online communication? Can ‘action’ and ‘documentation’ be separated in Ulman’s evolving work, or does her work register a new reality in which life, performance, and media are impossible to unpick?

Interview Regarding your work, the question of ‘documentation’ doesn’t necessarily seem like the right term, but perhaps that’s a good starting point: Where is the performance? Can we say that you document your performances? It’s not as though they precede the image, because the image is what ‘performs’ on Instagram? I think these things are kind of simultaneous. Because of the Internet, the performance archives itself, and the moment of performance is when the image is uploaded first and people react to it first. So, it’s occurring ‘live’ when they

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are following the narrative on a day-to-day basis: that’s the performative aspect. But then instantaneously it gets archived so it is different from other kinds of photography of performances. As soon as a photograph is uploaded online, the performance and its archive are already the same thing. That’s an interesting paradox, there is no ‘real-time’ liveness, it’s to do with when the image is viewed or received by a viewer on their own device? I had thought about your work in classic terms, within a history of artists ranging from Claude Cahun to Cindy Sherman, who were— as our Tate show put it—‘performing for the camera’. Those images portray a sense of intimacy in their capture by the artist-subjects in their studios. But the later exposure (in books or exhibitions) is at a significant remove. They are clearly documents of an intimate process. But it is interesting that between that capture of your own image, and the performative moment of showing, by sharing on Instagram, there is a double layer to the intimacy that we somehow witness. I feel that the performance happens when the audience look at the image and they react in the way they are supposed to react as part of a narrative. And as soon they

FIGURE 10.2 

Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 1 June 2014), 2014

Courtesy Amalia Ulman and Arcadia Missa

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don’t feel that anymore, it just becomes a document: after that first interaction, it’s an archive. Because that is when the performance really happens. When they realize it’s a ‘work’, and it’s older, that is the archive of the performance. But materially it is the same image, it just functions on different levels. Traditionally, the debate in performance discourse in relation to photography began with whether you could capture the authentic live moment, it was about an indexical link to a lived occurrence: whether it could give some kind of palpable access to the real work. So, the live action is always primary, in that body-art-related discussion. But for you, that is asking the wrong question? Yeah, I guess so, because it is simultaneously archive and performance. The performative aspect comes from the interaction with the audience and the audience can interact with it any time. You know, it depends on their lives. And then background knowledge: people that already know it’s an art piece, I feel, have a different reaction. And then people that don’t know and have that genuine experience of the piece, that can happen anytime basically. Because even though Excellences & Perfections has had a lot of press, there are people that will find it and go through it and still maybe feel something outside of it being an archived piece of work. There are so many layers of intimacy, realness, and authenticity at play. On one level, there’s a certain sense of intimacy deriving from that moment, for you, when you are recording yourself. Yet you have already touched on the crux of the issue, which is that your action, actually the performative action, is the uploading and the conversation that happens publicly, subsequently. But then, as you said, people can come to it afterwards, even knowing it’s an artwork and have another kind of experience of it, and within the frame of seeing it as an artwork it offers a kind of meta-documentation of itself? Yes, because you know what it is. But then I feel there are other people that just come upon it and just have a similar reaction to the original reaction of people when they didn’t know. So, if you come with a knowing frame—knowing it is an artwork—you are seeing it as documentation. But, if you accidently come across it, even a year later, ‘innocently’, then it’s still performing ‘live’, it’s still active? Yeah, I think so. At least in the case of Excellences & Perfections. I don’t like using the word ‘hoax’, but it was more about that: it rested upon not really knowing that it was planned. I’m working on a new performance and I am allowing myself to be way more creative developing a character almost from scratch. So in this case, it is not something I am emulating and needs to be followed through by other people to be complete. It’s a different thing in the new work because the aesthetic is unique, the documentation and the live experience can be closer to each other. You can enjoy it the same even knowing it’s an art piece, because you don’t need . . . 

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That suspension of disbelief? Yeah, you don’t need to be tricked into thinking it’s not an art piece to enjoy it. In this case, my decisions are more aesthetic. So you can look it the way you look at a painting. So it is different from Excellences & Perfections, where you were embedded in Instagram in a sort of ‘invisible’ way, in the sense that you were assimilating to norms and modes of self-presentation that you found there? Yes. The problem with that for me is that as much as I enjoyed doing it, I didn’t have much creative freedom because I was emulating other things and had to be realistic. And, for example, you know, I couldn’t really go crazy or decide, ‘Oh, I have seen that girl make the avocado toast this way, but, you know, I am an artist and I am going to do it the other way’. It didn’t work.

FIGURE 10.3 

A  malia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 5 September 2014), 2014

Courtesy Amalia Ulman and Arcadia Missa

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FIGURE 10.4 

Amalia Ulman, Privilege 5/4/2016, 2016

Courtesy Amalia Ulman and Arcadia Missa

In Excellences & Perfections, you assumed—perhaps—a more ‘passive’ attitude towards the given successful images on Instagram. You became that girl with the avocado toast and champagne spa weekend. Would you say your new work, Privilege (2016), is more ‘active’? Yes, because instead of having to emulate other aesthetics for the sake of credibility, for Privilege I was able to create my own. Which was much more fun and interesting but couldn’t have happened without Excellences & Perfections. Excellences & Perfections was more like a camouflage in a way? You had to create a form of verisimilitude or ‘assimilatude’? Yeah, that didn’t work for me ultimately. I am interested in aesthetic composition. I like playing with everything: with drawing, texture, etc., and in the case of Excellences & Perfections I could construct good photos, but then I’d have to be copying all the other details—the color, the furniture, the music. I had to be very specific. Whereas, now I have created a character from zero and that allows me to really indulge with materials, colors, sound, things that I want to work with and that I have to develop myself. And I think that is why it took me a little longer than I expected to start this new performance, because to build the ground for it, for people to understand through repetition what was going on visually, to get used to how the performance is going to look, without really knowing it, was more laborious.

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What do you mean by building a ground? How do you do that? After doing the last performance, I stopped posting my own images and was using cartoons by another artist [drawings by Ed Fornieles], with whom I was collaborating, because I knew I was going to work on the new performance and I didn’t want it to go back to back. That would be very obvious to many people; so to create a more obvious pause, I had posted those cartoons. Then, after a while, when I started sharing the new material, I really needed to raise my viewing figures and be ‘popular’, and I know the tricks, I know what you need to do. So I began to employ those to get viewers again. How did you work those out, the ‘tricks’? (As an aside: ‘doing tricks’ is a phrase used in relation to prostitution.) It’s basic media, it’s old school. It’s creating an image of success and looking pretty. Really, it’s so basic it’s embarrassing. So, I would do things like posting magazines

FIGURE 10.5 

Amalia Ulman, Privilege 5/15/2016, 2016

Courtesy Amalia Ulman and Arcadia Missa

Pics or it didn’t happen  81

I was featured in. People would think that I was back to just being myself and self-promoting. But everything was a deliberate strategy for engaging people again. People would think I wasn’t performing any more, and then very slowly I would start repeating more and more often certain things, like—for example—a color scheme, or a certain topic to then tie the images of the new performance together into a story, in a very concise way. But because it was something that I made from scratch, although I expected it to take only one month, it took me four or five months to really get people to catch onto its elements: the setting of ‘the office’, the character ‘Bob’ (a pigeon). It was through repetition, during a few months, that people could begin to feel that these things existed, and that they knew who Bob is and that I like red, or whatever. People are now shifting their assumptions on what my normal behavior is. So, now that there is trust, I am allowed to do whatever I like again. So you build a trust with your brand almost? Yeah, exactly. So now I started being ‘pregnant’, for example, and now, you know, people buy into it, like, ‘yeah, sure’. They believe it. So, is this on Instagram, live, now? Yes, it’s the work I’m doing now. And it has already involved a lot of staged content. For example, Bob [the pigeon]: I bought him in a slaughterhouse, but then the scene I portrayed him in, it’s as if he had sneaked into my office. I took low-quality iPhone videos of him flying inside the cubicle while I screamed, ‘Oh my god, no!’ And people really think—it’s not that crazy, of course—that maybe he came in through the window. I don’t show the part where I drove the car around Vernon and bought him, put him in a cage, went to the office, let him free, and then pretended. So that sort of trickery is already part of a narrative where people are following the story. So the ‘narrative’ is all about your selection process of the photos you’ve constructed, what you choose to let out? Do you write a script in advance? Or how do you do it? I don’t really write it. I kind of know what I am going to do. Through what kind of time period do you plan? Well, with this one I had it easier. Because it’s a pregnancy, it has a clear beginning and a span of nine months, and it clearly has three episodes again. Usually, with the scripts, I know what kind of images I want to use and I more or less line things up. But it depends so much on feedback, and how people react to certain things. And then I can make decisions as I go to exploit some things or others. With the pregnancy story, I felt that it’s such a complicated, taboo, conflicted topic in America that it would be crazy to do it . . . but I wanted to.

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To ‘announce’ my ‘pregnancy’, I didn’t even write much, I just wrote ‘Boom, ha ha’, and showed a positive pregnancy test. That’s it. And then when I read the comments section, I saw that there had even been a little fight between people commenting things like, ‘Oh congratulations!’ and a girl who said, ‘Yeah, I have a bunch of those in a drawer and both of them are dead’, as in, I was pregnant twice and I had two abortions. Reading that and then answers like, ‘Do you think that is an appropriate thing to say?’ I was thinking, wow, it’s interesting how you can drop a little thing . . . It’s nice when you can be subtle and still raise hell. So by posting an image, you can just imply the beginning of a story, or spark one, you mean? That ‘Boom’ image (the one with the positive pregnancy test), yes. You put it there and then people will reflect their own things. And the less you say, I think, the more people build things up. You just guide them a little bit, and they project all their own ideas, feelings, experience onto it. Which is what happened last time as well, because I didn’t share much information either and people were really curious. So this is related, it seems, to the way in which you have described how Instagram might work ‘in the back of someone’s consciousness’? Rather than a person opening a book or watching a film, in a concentrated way, via Instagram they get fed a little drip every now and then, and as you have said, the narrative you conjure is glimpsed, and becomes embedded in, their daily life somehow? What is this space you are trying to open up in their lives? I feel as though it has to do also with the fact that these topics are very contemporary and are there for so many people. The first one was a lot about body issues and everyone—well, many girls especially—have considered, at some point, getting surgery—a boob job, for example. Even just thinking about it because you read about it in a magazine—for that split second, you consider it. My work reflects on that. And now pregnancy, because most of my friends are not baby crazy or anything, but . . . they have explored that thought: ‘I could have a kid . . . but, oh, I don’t have any money’. I am tapping into and exploiting my own insecurities, and the same insecurities are shared by a lot of people. And I think that it is when it really works because it is such a common thing. For example, I never had an abortion, but I always imagined what it’d be like to have kids and thought about it and made plans with ex-boyfriends. There is a lot of common ground. Either because you hate it, you know, or you really want one and you love babies, these kinds of issues are universal. So you take as ‘triggers’ those things that everybody has got an opinion on, somehow? You have talked about how your narratives insert this fiction into other people’s experience, and also open up a space where other people input their view. But what about your own relationship with making these images of yourself? Looking at yourself?

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Well, there is a lot of performance, actually, that comes into play in making my work. Because by contrast, for example, I was in a photo studio yesterday for a fashion magazine shoot. And that is absolutely not how I work. There, I was a mannequin basically, because I couldn’t see myself. And they said, ‘Oh, lift your arm a little bit more’, etc. And the photos don’t look natural, just very static. I posed for one minute and then put on a different outfit. I couldn’t get into any mood or role or whatever. I wasn’t really performing. I was just cold, still. This is because they were styling you and usually you are your own material? I mean it was my style, in terms of clothes, but I was being run by a team of people and having to pose. It was also a film camera, which changes the process a little bit; it’s like, five photos, five photos, instead of thirty photos where you can, you know, go crazy. How many photos do you take when you’re creating a shoot for your own work? What I do when I work on a performance is to take a lot of pictures on the same day. I go into the zone and I play around. It’s more the time that it takes me to get into the mood. So your relationship towards what you release through time is faked in relation to the actual moment in which it is happening. This is completely against the grain of what Instagram is meant to be. So, you might take enough photos in one session to last your ‘release’ of images a month? Yes, I’d get 10 photos in one day. It takes hours, and some of those hours I’m just lying on the floor and then I take, say, five photos. So, it has a lot do with performance because it’s not staged in a very cold way. I spend two days going crazy and getting all the material. So I feel that performance, for me, is very important in that sense. I can’t just plan it in the sense that: I really want to replicate this photo, so I am just going to go there, take it. Then I feel that the photo has no aura. If I am performing, and it’s for a certain period of time, I feel as though it has a little bit of truth in it. I am not just thinking about doing the laundry and doing the photo on the side. I really go into that zone, and I think that is really expressed in the photos later. So what is your working practice like, then? You might spend two days intensely making photos, where you have to be in the zone, but then other times with your work, what are you working on? I research or edit the photos. This is a different process. I can do that anytime. I could be sitting at a computer and editing, but then my practice has other sides

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to it: I’m reading and writing other days. But then I have found that most useful to just go into the zone to make the photos one, two days out of the week. When I do, it is fairly intuitive: I might say, ‘Today feels like the day of the crazy mood’. I feel that is also why I always like working in hotels, because it’s more separate from my life, and I can meet different people. So, you would rent a room to stage your photos? My office is the office that appears in the work, yes, which I am starting to hate because it is really too personal, like a house. To begin with, it was anonymous and didn’t have any personal feeling, which I liked: it makes you work really hard. I really hate it when people would say about the last performance, ‘Oh, she sneaked into hotels and took photos . . . ’ No, I rented rooms and stayed in those hotels for one or two days and really performed during those two days. People wanted to read it as though it was a guerrilla action of some sort? But it’s important to you that you did it ‘legitimately’, or in a normal, everyday way? How would you describe it? Yes. I stayed there, watched TV, got drunk, you know. I also looked at different moments of the day: when the light is different, for example, really experiencing the room, even dancing in it. There are a lot of things that are not captured on camera, just fooling around. And that’s more my process. I didn’t sneak in. I really stayed there, paid for it. I would spend time dancing and being silly and then take a photo and then nap and then take another photo, you know. I organize everything around spending time there, and then magic happens. But it is not really planned, I don’t plan the photographs, I create the situations. But I think that is how many artists work. For example, Rauschenberg, whose show I am working on now, would work like that: set everything up in a very organized way, and then have the time to play freely with it. Yes, I like things to have a sense of spontaneity. Even if it is planned, you also leave some things for chance, which I think is very important, because otherwise it looks like a fashion shoot that has to be made in four hours because people have to go to lunch. But you are doing it all yourself? All of my stuff I do myself. Are there people that work with you? Who takes the photos? Now, thankfully, yes. My boyfriend is a photographer, and he is really fun. I always hated working with partners, but he is really good.

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So he does the photographs for you? Only some of them. But during the last performance, everything was by me, and I still do a lot of it by myself. I use a tripod and it is pretty low key. I never really use lights or anything, because I like natural light a lot. So, I would play . . . that’s why I would stay in a hotel for 24 hours and use different lights. And then, yeah, now is the first time that I felt that collaborating is fun and it works out well, I feel comfortable enough to perform instead of being super stiff like, ‘Oh, there is someone else watching me’. And it is great for the new performance because there are things that I want to copy from popular themes or Vines that are done by more than one person, you know. And I really need his help, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do it. There are things I can’t be doing with the tripod only. So, it is great that he has a good photographic eye and can put himself inside my brain. It’s not pride; it’s more like an only child problem. I am used to closing the door and not having anyone else around. It has been a problem for many, many years; that’s why I never really collaborated, because I feel like I can’t really express myself. How much of you is outside the moment of being photographed, because, as you are saying, you allow improvisation in, you set up a space where you can improvise. But then you also would do things to prepare for how you are going to look. Like in one interview I was reading, you talked about facial beauty treatments or corrections or experimenting with that. That was a totally different thing, yeah, that was for the last performance. I was interested in very mild manipulations that were very normcore. Was this influenced by living in LA? I was interested in these small changes in relation to Orlan, for example, and how her surgical alterations were meant to be grotesque. And at the same time, I had been writing essays before Buyer, Walker, Rover (2013) about things like the wavy willow, which is a cheap dry plant generally used for decoration, an item that is everywhere, but that no one sees because it is so ubiquitous. Somehow, I felt that these new aesthetic procedures that you don’t really see were related to that, because the point is that you are supposed to not tell at all that someone has had anything done. I was interested in that idea of the invisible. Also, another part that interested me was how most of these treatments are to make you look freshfaced. Basically, they are meant for workaholics that are awake for days to still look like a baby instead of looking worn out. And that is also like cheating time, like cheating generally. So I was very interested in that in relation to class . . . the advantages of having money or not: better clothes, better shampoo, better face. So after a few months of research, I gave a talk with Doctor Brandt, who had invented the whole injection puffy face thing, the modern temporary facelift, at the Swiss Institute. Now the trend is for very mild, subtle changes. This sort of

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civilian beauty I find fascinating, as well as what they call racial ‘corrective’ surgery, like the very common double eyelid surgery many Asian women get. The whole thing is so interesting because younger and younger people, I am talking about 20-year-olds, are getting injections in their faces and lips and so on, after Kylie Jenner, etc. It’s weird, but people indulge in it because of the temporary aspect of it, in case it goes wrong . . . ‘Well I’ll go around like this for like a month or six’. But yeah, there are many girls who just have ‘a little touch’, and you don’t even know it is there. I was interested in it on that side of things, what concerns race, class, and appearances. You are right, it’s true, I mean it’s possible to not age in a completely different way if you have the money. It’s not just diet and exercise. Yes, so I am interested in that, in how that reflects and changes people’s interactions, how people react to one another, especially from the points of view of gender or race. Like when women who have, let’s say, a very big nose get it retouched and then they are like, ‘Oh, people are so nice to me now’. How do you think about the idea of real correction to your physical self, actual changes to your appearance in real time, in relation to the capacity to manipulate photos digitally? How much do you work with that in post-production? And what does it mean, this relationship between the photo (selfie) and real appearance? Especially given that so much social interaction happens online, via screens? Well, Photoshop is not that great, in my opinion. When I did the last performance, I really tried to be as fit as possible, you know, because there is a limit to what I could do with Photoshop. You know, it can help a little bit, but you cannot retouch everything. Also having to be half-naked in some photos, I’d rather feel good with myself as well. You know, I edited color and reshaping, but I did more makeup and prosthetics (a lot of socks) than Photoshop. Because it is easier to manipulate a photo when things are almost already there. How much, when you’re making your own photographs, are you really conscious of performing to the image plane, to the lens, and how much are you thinking about it as more of a social relationship to your audience? Or are those two things inseparable? Are you conscious of truth in Barthes’s idea that you are transforming yourself into an image in advance and you are thinking how will you look on a flat screen, or are you thinking more emotionally about how your look would connect with your audience somehow? I think it goes together, but with certain shots the way people would digest the image, or how they perceive the character’s behavior, has more weight than the visual composition. So in cases like that, I think about the storyline more than the photograph in itself, as photography. But when I get to do both, it’s a win/win.

Pics or it didn’t happen  87

As a composition? Yeah. Because I am working with a scripted narrative, I really see things in the longer term. Sometimes, to go with my story, I know that I have to post a shitty photo that is not going to get any likes. But, within the larger scheme of things, that’s going to make a lot of sense. At first, many people don’t see it making sense, but then from a distance and through time it gains meaning. So you are, in a sense, networking images? Yeah, so, I really think more about reaction or reception and the performative aspect than the photo. And then the photo is more like a side thing, if it looks good, great. But that’s not the main thing. So it is a tool? Yeah. Because you’ve talked about photo-archiving things rather than acquiring them physically. Excellences & Perfections looks very much to do with consumerism. But you have said that in a broader sense, you aren’t that into owning things, but more into documenting them? A photo is a tool in a story, but also a way to possess? That had to do with this video essay I previously mentioned, Buyer, Walker, Rover, where I analyze all these objects from Poundlands, Eurostores, Dollar Shops, etc. Then, I didn’t need, nor did I want, to buy those objects and collect them. Instead, I was interested in documenting them with photographs because they mattered to me visually; so their materiality was insignificant. I didn’t need to own them because knowing that they existed was enough for me. I feel like that with many things, that’s why I am not really offended by appropriation, even if it is of my own work. If other people use your image, reproduce it, how do you feel about that? For example, one of the photos that I took with Ilia recently went really popular so he said, ‘I bet you this is already on Tumblr with thousands and thousands of notes’. Which is great, but then it wouldn’t be attached to mine or his name; by then, the photograph wouldn’t be part of anything, but would be instead a free image—and I’m okay with that. That’s odd in a way, isn’t it, because if you are a painter it would be different? Because it’s a photograph, it assimilates to its context of other photographs . . .  Yeah, but that is how it works. For example, if something becomes very popular, people will save it to their desktop, put it on Tumblr and, like that, no one will

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FIGURE 10.6 

Amalia Ulman, Privilege 8/9/2016, 2016

Courtesy Amalia Ulman and Arcadia Missa

ever associate that photograph with a specific author unless they do a reverse search on Google and start connecting the dots. Most images have a free life afterwards. But that is part of the Internet; so I guess that if you are making art nowadays, you have to be conscious of this and take it for granted. And I feel the same way with my writing, especially because English is not my first language, and sometimes I see things written down, maybe just like three words together, that sound really good and I just put it in a text of mine. And I don’t really attribute it, and I feel many people work like that today. If anything, I’d mention the source’s name afterwards, but it’d never be like a traditional quoting. No, there is this collective brain thing, which bypasses that a little bit. Maybe a complication of the idea that all writing is quotation: and now phrases come as ‘readymades’. The building blocks of our word and image worlds are no longer, maybe, pure elements, but existing combinations, pre-made, that we again put together in new ways. But if your image is circulating freely online and anyone can effectively ‘use’ it, does it affect your own sense of freedom or identity as a person in real life? Well, I definitely wouldn’t perceive the use of these images, from either Privilege or Excellences & Perfections, as an invasion of my privacy because they are fiction and don’t reflect my private life. I don’t feel the violation so much. Just like I don’t feel flattered when someone comments on my huge tits in a photo where I know I stuffed my bra with socks.

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So where does your own reality come into the work? If the 1970s model of body art promised intimacy and access to the vulnerability of the artist’s live presence (theatricalized though this may have been), how does the image we see of you relate to your lived reality? What does it mean to be human in the age of Instagram?! Well, the main difference between now and the twentieth century is that everyone is confronted with problems that only people in showbiz had to deal with in the past. Self-representation, makeup, lighting, photography, charisma . . . All of those anxieties have now been applied to doctors, cleaners, teachers, etc. Although I love photographs, I personally find saying ‘POIDH’ (pics or it didn’t happen) terrifying because the happier I am, the more I forget to document things, which makes me ask myself to what extent all of these situations ‘don’t count’ because they are not ‘out there’ as images. I think that being alive today is to have to choose between ‘existing’ and ‘not-existing’ (via photo documentation); contrary to how it sounds, the second is less scary than the first, in my view. Does your co-option of Instagram as an art space mean that you see ‘outside’ of it, critically? You see it as a system? In relation to what? In this case, yes, it was for me a playground, a game where I cheated. But I could have never done this without the experience—perhaps guilt—of being part of the system myself. I’m never critical from the outside but more from within. I’m most critical of me as a product of capitalism. To what extent does immersion (imaginative, social) in online media and handheld technology affect your sense of real time and space, and your own body? We are so often, nowadays, sucked in to the screen, checking social media feeds, likes, followers: the micro-details that are heavily formatted in order to process and give a frame to human activity that actually feeds them. To what extent do you consider the nuances of the capacities or structures of this format as being an interesting or relevant part of your work? Or is it really just about images, and Instagram as a vehicle for image presentation? Well, I have been good at not caring too much about the reactions on a personal level. Nevertheless, I do look at numbers etc. because it is related to the work— people’s reactions, their feedback, is part of the narratives, but I only check it once every two days or so. I wouldn’t consider myself sucked in to the screen. With age, I’ve become less able to have reactions to comments and likes, which is good for my head but bad for business, because ultimately the system we live in celebrates it. And because of that, I would never say that Instagram is just a vehicle for images, it is more a platform for images to be sold.

Note 1 Although Cindy Sherman’s first series—the Bus Rider Series, a series of portraits of people traveling on the bus performed by Sherman in makeup and costume—was originally shown, pasted onto the inside of the bus.

PART II

Essays

11 PERFORMING THE ARCHIVE AND EXHIBITING THE EPHEMERAL Barbara Clausen

It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. Walter Benjamin (1999: 462, n 2a, 3) The performer sees herself as a medium. Information passes through. Joan Jonas (cited in Crimp 1983: 139)

Over the last two decades, artists and choreographers together with curators have come to perceive the format of the exhibition as an ideal environment in which to embrace a growing multitude of live practices and its parallel existence as an increasingly image- and object-based art form. This heightened attention towards the relationship between direct experience and knowledge is based, on the one hand, on the unique proximity artists and audiences are subject to within the exhibition space when they experience a live event; on the other, on the increasing accessibility of knowledge related to both live practices and archives dedicated to the history of performance in the arts.1 This development has allowed for a range of performance-based practice to not only find its way into art history, but to continue its evolution as an inherently interdisciplinary art practice, whose contingent nature is rooted in the tension between the live and the mediated. Performance’s shift from a body- and action-based genre towards a medium and method that takes on various forms—from relational to participatory practices to objects and images—has during the 1990s led to its current recognition as a crossdisciplinary and discourse-based art movement. The growing engagement of artists with the site- and time-specificity of performance is not only reflected by, but in fact constituted through, the representational politics of documentary recordings,

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affirming performance’s valorization and ideological impact within the white cube (Kotz 2005). The mechanisms and politics of this development reflect the desire of art institutions, from museums to art fairs, to partake in the promulgation and the collection of performance-based art practices. This revival of performance art and its ongoing institutionalization is based on the interdependence of its present and past. Recordings and photographs of actions, sometimes witnessed by many, sometimes only by the photographer hired to take account of the work for the future, have not only established the authenticity of the live, but also shaped our understanding and collective understanding of what constitutes a performance within the visual arts.2 Initially as a press image, then as a historical document, and finally as a work of art, these images, which in fact blur the boundaries between the staged or the documented, become part of the cultural archive. As the trace of a message, this material not only adds to the image archive of art history, but is also part of the ongoing process of its own cultural canonization, unfolding continuously through its reception. As time progresses, our view and understanding of both the significance and the authenticity of past performance events continuously changes, more often than not gaining attention and value.3 This visual and physical embodiment of the double representation of both the act of doing and the act of looking is fundamental for the evolution of a collective imaginary and historical consciousness of the aesthetics of performance-based practices, rooted in post-dramatic theater, postmodern dance, and conceptual and new media art from the 1960s and 1970s. These new forms of artistic encounters that have come to exist and persist within and outside of the institutional framework of the museum were consciously captured in a range of documentary sources that framed and conserved not only the events as they unfolded, but also the acts of agency they represented. The recordings and archives of artists and photographers such as those of Peter Moore or Babette Mangolte have in recent years become an essential source material not only for the field of art history, but also for performance-based practices whose appropriations of historical works and critical research into the past come to life within the exhibition space. The layering of time and space within the photographic and moving image (and its recognition as a threshold where we see how the past collides with the present) has enabled the correlation of the archival and the politics of the live. This synthesis of the archival and the performative is most visible in the recognition of the documentation of performance art as both an inherent part of the medium as well as an integral part of the practice of performance. This essay explores the ecology of performance’s media-based contingency, specifically looking at the pictorial and performance-based strategies of four case studies: the work of Joan Jonas and Babette Mangolte in the 1970s and that of Sarah Pierce and Jimmy Robert since 2010. Despite the wide range of approaches and methodologies, their work is representative of an ongoing interest in the parallels of the politics of the body and the archive, articulated through the site-specificity of the exhibition. Exhibition-, curatorial-, and installationbased strategies play an integral part in how these artists use performance as a

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medium to engage with the pictorial, physical, and imaginary spaces they occupy in their art. Each one in their own particular way addresses a time frame of four decades spanning from the 1970s until today. The image-based source materials addressed in relation to these four case studies range from documentary recordings, testimonies, and other archival materials that require intensive research, to live streams and clips available on various social media platforms. These images, regardless of being staged or documentary, lead us to reflect on how works of historical relevance embrace the dialectical relation of the live to image- and object-based art forms, and how they touch upon a sense of contemporaneity emblematic of their transdisciplinary existence. The images they work with function as sources of inspiration, foils for reflection, as well as structures and scripts to act out and upon. In their installations and performances, Robert, Pierce, Mangolte, and Jonas reference the continuous activation of the performative through the image as a medium that inherently incorporates various layers of time through its reproductive qualities. Their work addresses how the staging of documentary images of performances can constitute and carry forth the political agency of both past and present instantiations (Clausen 2007). They acknowledge and address the parallel and overcrossing construction

FIGURE 11.1 

Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll, Festival d’Automne, Musée Galleria, Paris, 1973

 Joan Jonas, 1973, Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll, Photo: Béatrice Heiliger

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of discourses within art’s historiography that have enabled performance’s transition towards a hybrid and discourse-based practice: a way of working, a tool as well as a medium, which constitutes and establishes its own processes of valorization production, conservation, and reception within the space of the exhibition. The exhibition as a medium and site of production thus becomes a site that literally frames the work as a process rather then an autonomous or singular act, instigating a simultaneous collapse and iteration of time. From early in her career, Joan Jonas was aware of the relationship between immediate experience and its various afterlives. In the early 1970s, Jonas began to stage her own working process of exploring the presence, movement, and image of her body within the setting of the performance space. This composition of spaces by layering drawings, videos, and still images was held together through the artist’s gestures. Jonas’s ongoing experiments with the complexity of visual layers, specifically the meeting of the live and the technological, is based in her interest to juxtapose different times and narrative threads that would allow her to make time ‘a material that I manipulate, and divide, and rearrange’ (Jonas, cited in Richard and Huberman 2015: 3). There is a photograph of Jonas performing as Organic Honey, taken in 1973 during one of the first renditions of Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, that is both emblematic of Jonas’s exploration of the politics of space and gesture within the pictorial, as well as of the potential the documentation of performance art would hold for the future. When I first saw this photograph, I became interested in two questions: first, the compositional significance of the woman on the left side of the image, recording Jonas’s actions, and second, Jonas’s choice of this moment (and this particular photograph) to represent the work in the future. It is a black-andwhite photograph that captures the presence and action of three women, of whom two are performing and two are engaged in the act of recording. The photographer who documented this performance, Béatrice Heiligers, remains outside of the frame. She is present through her subjective gaze that also simulates the position of the audience. The woman behind the visible camera, Babette Mangolte, is performing as well as recording. Her back is turned towards the spectator as she looks through the lens at Jonas; she is not only part of the technological setup, but also an integral part of the event. She is also central to the composition of the photograph, taking on the role of a narrative figure as she acts out her function and role as a cameraperson. The performer at the center of the image is Jonas. While the spotlight follows the fictitious female character, Organic Honey, the viewer becomes witness to the process of illusion that frames the visual interactions. Like her female protagonists in the stories they unspool and weave, Jonas holds the threads of the crossing gazes that unite the narratives as well as the temporal and spatial layers captured in her images. The continuous fracturing and duplicating of her self and her own image put into action what Judith Butler came to articulate two decades later—namely, that the performative staging of repetition offers the opportunity to transform, change, re-signify, and therefore reconstitute our understanding of gender (Butler 2003: 392–401). Jonas’s unraveling of the hidden mechanisms of visual regimes via a

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crossing of technical and social patterns specifically related to the cultural representation of women continues to be relevant for the fields of gender studies, performance history, and visual art.4 Viewers become witness to the de- and reconstruction of the visual regimes behind and in front of the camera, most notably in the video performances Vertical Roll (1973) and Left Side, Right Side (1974).5 In both works, Jonas’s body is captured between the mechanical processes of recording and projecting, producing a situation of spatial enclosure and self-reflection that underlines the dual indexicality of her presence and absence hovering between the original and its reproduction. Jonas’s use of the screen as a structuring device for her movements and gestures highlighted this duality even further, and led her to point the camera towards the monitor, creating an infinite and yet fragmented, at times purposely desynchronized, image.6 This particular use of the closed-circuit video effect created a doubled psychological and physical collapse that was iterated through its mediation (Krauss 1976: 53). The process of transforming the live event into the image was made visible through its perpetuation, which, whether as a gesture on stage or as a represented gesture in the image reproduced in the media, makes a process visible that is emblematic for performance art as a genre and its historicization.7 Jonas’s recordings, both those staged for the camera and the results of photographers and peers documenting the Organic Honey performances, have been increasingly sought in recent years. In the past, only a few carefully chosen images have been at the heart of performance art’s historicization, but since the late 1990s, the ongoing institutionalization of performance art and its various forms of documentation have resulted in an increased interest in the archives of numerous chroniclers and artists. These archives offer insight into the significance of performance, not only as a tool and a method of working, but also as a meta-genre that functions increasingly like an umbrella, framing interdisciplinary practices concerned with the idea of presence and immediacy in the visual arts (Clausen 2006: 12). This becomes especially apparent in the case of the Organic Honey series that was performed over a dozen times between the early 1970s and early 1980s, and which continues to have an afterlife as a series of videos, a multimedia installation owned by the Stedelijk Museum, and in the form of an installation-based presentation of the artist’s archive, Organic Honey Archive, consisting of over 100 documentary and staged photographs, notebooks, and hours of unedited video footage that continue to accumulate over time. Presented twice, once in 2005 in Vienna and a second time in 2016 in Montreal, these curated presentations of Jonas’s archive typify the significance of the archive to the institutionalization of performance art.8 While clearly identified as an archive and not as an artwork, the presentation of the materials in 2005 as part of a group exhibition differed from its display in 2016 when it was part of the artist’s retrospective. Despite the similarly chronological hanging order, the second rendition allows the visitor to question the status of the installation as an archive in relation to the artwork. This shift of the status of an archive of documentary sources on display in relation to the latest, more staged

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setting is detectable in three instances: first, the uniformity of the framing aesthetics of the photographs; second, the choice of the gray wall color so emblematic for Jonas’s installations and a decision by the artist that was aligned with other installations on view; and third, the contextualization of the archive with Jonas’s video works from the time, such as Duet (1972), Vertical Roll (1972), Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), as well as Richard Serra’s Anxious Automation (1971). These video works were part of the performance of Organic Honey and, within the presentation of the archive in the exhibition, were situated in relation to the varied documentary footage of the performance, such as Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll (1973), as well as the photographs, posters, drawings, and scripts. The first installation in 2005, which was part of a group show, did not include art videos related to the corpus of this oeuvre, but included two vitrines with the artist’s original notebooks and drawings, as well as hours of unedited footage on display. These vitrines were not presented in the more recent installation in 2016. These displays of a collection of archival materials and their evolving representational choices exemplify how the transition from document to artifact unfolds through the act of exhibiting. These developments and ongoing processes inherent to performance’s historicization eventually will lead the Organic Honey Archive to become an accompanying extension or even part of the multimedia installation of the work itself. Projected into the future, the documentary material that remains from the performance is not just a visual proof of an event, but constitutes the ability to comprehend the image as an index of its various future forms of existence as image, trace, and object. Jonas’s cross-disciplinary explorations are closely aligned to her engagement with space as both a sculptural and pictorial device, and the ability of video and digital media to reproduce and render depth, distance, and perspective. Like an antipode to the claims of authenticity and disappearance made for the live act, Jonas’s work is not driven by a longing for illusion, but by, as the philosopher Martin Seel states, ‘the striking production and emphasis of a presence, of a right here, right now of something taking place. And because it is happening in the present, it evades every attempt of grasping it completely’ (Seel 2001: 53). In Jonas’s work, the apparent disappearance of the authentic act is counteracted by a medial translation and the past’s doubling in the medium of its staging as an ‘act of appearance’, which makes it tangible in the present as well as the future. The images produced on either side of the suspended screen have extended the life of the artwork. The investigation of time and space within the process of visual reproduction and its relationship to the exhibition format is a central focus in Babette Mangolte’s work in both film and photography. Upon her arrival in New York City from France in 1970 and until the early 1980s, she documented a wide range of performances in dance, theater, and the visual arts.9 Considered a ‘first layer of history’,10 Mangolte’s photographs of Trisha Brown, Richard Foreman, Robert Whitman, Joan Jonas, Yvonne Rainer, Stuart Sherman, and many others are particularly significant for the historiography of performance art, dance, and theater in New York. The reason is not only Mangolte’s technical

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expertise, but even more so her precise composition and framing of the space that surrounded the bodies. This particular attention to the space that surrounds the body proceeds, on one hand, from her training as a cinematographer, and, on the other, her awareness of her own intermediary position between the action and the spectator. This presence defined by its absence was part of Mangolte’s strategy to remain invisible and to avoid any kind of identification with her subject. This became a guiding compositional principal for her photographs as well as her films and videos (Clausen 2010). Mangolte’s images, like mirrors as much as windows, reflect an awareness of the process of labor in front of and behind the camera. This consciousness for performance’s specific relationship to time and space in the 1970s manifests in the particular angle Mangolte takes her images from and the focus she holds on the space between the camera and the subject. Mangolte’s goal was to make palpable a set of assumptions around duration and space that was so familiar, almost invisible to those who were there at the time, but that has to be translated and presented to an audience from another era (Mangolte 2006: 48). The last time Mangolte documented a performance by Jonas was in 1979. The photographs documenting Jonas’s performance of Upside Down Backwards at the Performing Garage in Soho marked the end of a decade-long working relationship that started with the live recording of Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), followed by Glass Puzzle and Funnel in 1974, and the performance documentation of Delay, Delay (1972), Mirage (1976), and Juniper Tree (1977). By the late 1970s, Mangolte stopped documenting New York’s Downtown performance scene, while continuing to work as a director of photography and cameraperson for filmmakers such as Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Akerman and, most importantly, embarking on her own work as an experimental filmmaker. Mangolte’s first film, The Camera: Je or La Camera: I, shot in 1977, is indicative of her quest to visualize duration and space as vital factors for a new emancipatory cinema that subverts the heteronormative gaze of the spectator. The film scholar Ann Wagner recognizes in these early feminist videos and films a desire to find a new audience that will be courageous enough to engage in these new visual strategies: ‘They must be made to see anew. To see actively, to see critically, to see suspiciously. To see themselves doubled, maybe duped, by the artist who is the object of their gaze’ (Wagner 2000: 80). There is a brief sequence, which is relevant both to Mangolte’s view of performance art’s transcription into the two-dimensionality of still and moving images and of its translation into three-dimensional installations—a mode of working with documentation she developed later on. In this three-minute segment of an interior shot, we see an empty loft in Downtown Manhattan. The city appears as a façade behind the grid of the windows, as a backdrop of sound and image. At first, we see a still shot of a man in mid-step. He suddenly steps out of the frozen frame and resumes walking through the space. A staged interplay begins between the camera following two men walking through the room in opposite directions. Both men follow a choreography of movement and stillness, stop and go, framed by the camera and the iron grid of the loft windows. Neither the rolling footage nor the fictitious

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sound of the shutter of the camera we hear—pitting the still against the moving image—is in sync with the rhythm of the actors’ movements as they traverse the space. The scene’s dynamics derive from waiting for the image to freeze: ‘When in the middle of a flow’, according to Mangolte, ‘you suddenly interrupt the constant motion, and when with striking swiftness you shift to stillness, the opposition between stillness and movement creates dramatic tension, a jolt’.11 It is this captured ‘jolt’—the moment that is to represent the whole in the future—that speaks of the correlating influences and dependency between fictional and documentary modes of representation within the performative field. What makes this scene indicative of the relationship between the performance and its visual reproduction is the dynamic between the representational time of the protagonists’ movements in space and its framing through Mangolte’s staging of the subjective camera as the main character of the film (Clausen 2010: 42). Her gaze (and ours in turn) ceaselessly follows and directs its protagonists, poised for the audience ‘to reassess the way they look at film’ (Mangolte 1998) and to simultaneously establish an awareness of the recording apparatus and the process of production. This question, which also echoed Mangolte’s own explorations of ‘how we look’ at art, remains a core theme in her own films throughout the 1970s, one she was able increasingly to address due to the recognition of her artistic practice from the early 2000s onwards.

FIGURE 11.2 

Babette Mangolte, still moment in the film The Camera Je, La Camera: I, 1977, for the Muybridge Sequence shot in a loft in Tribeca

 Copyright 1977—Babette Mangolte (All Rights of Reproduction Reserved), courtesy of the Artist and BROADWAY 1602, New York

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This particular filmic staging of Mangolte’s first exhibition in The Camera: Je, La Camera: I, as a time-bound space, can be understood as a key moment in Mangolte’s future explorations of the format of the exhibition within the medium of film, as well as in her installation-based works. In her archive-based installations such as Looking and Touching (2007) or Rushes (2008), the staging of her archive is not only one of the main topics, but also the principal medium of her artistic production. These multimedia installations are key to Mangolte’s reflection on the archive of her own work as a chronicler, filmmaker, and photographer, as well as on the work of those captured in her images. The archival quality of her conceptual displays reflects equally on her methodology, her subjects, and on the expansion of her practice from filmmaker and photographer to visual artist. Similar to her careful treatment of space as a key protagonist within her films and photographs, Mangolte systematically uses the format of the exhibition as a situational structure, a time-space in which she can address how we perceive and therefore experience movement in time as an integral part of an aesthetic experience. The juxtaposition and appropriation of the cinematic and the curatorial, as an artistic practice, and the correlative translation of one within the other, gave her the space to develop an aesthetic dispositive that frames her own archive within the theatricality of the exhibition space. In particular,

FIGURE 11.3 

Babette Mangolte, Rushes Revisited, P.S. One Dismantle, 2013, view of the exhibition Babette Mangolte, VOX (Montreal), from January 25 to April 20, 2013

 VOX (Montreal) and Michel Brunelle

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her installation of Rushes consists of a conceptual reconstruction and portrait of an exhibition from 1978 within an exhibition in 2009. Mangolte translates the process of capturing an event (the planning and deinstallation of an exhibition) within her installations, arranging photographs, films, and items to reflect not only the passing of time, but her own relationship towards her archive. The central element of the installation, Rushes Revisited, P.S. One Dismantle (2013), is a short film entitled Rushes—P.S.1—Dismantle from 1978. This footage is in fact the epilogue of The Camera Je, La Camera: I. In it, we see Mangolte in the process of installing and dismantling, together with the curator, her first exhibition at PS1, entitled How to Look, in 1978. The projection faces a vitrine that holds a series of playing cards and photographs depicting friends, colleagues, and family, as well as building façades in Downtown New York, all of which are also visible as part of the exhibition depicted in the film. Mangolte’s mise en abyme-like installations tell the story of her own relationship to the experience of duration and are an act of acknowledgment of time passed as well as of immediacy—a folding of time that is central for the staging of her own archive from the 1970s (Clausen 2016). Looking back, the period in which she herself remained largely invisible as a cultural producer has become the means for the artist (four decades later) to be granted visibility within the shadow of performance art’s historicization and the spotlight of its rediscovery. Mangolte’s translations of her own archive of performance documentation from the 1970s into her recent multimedia installations display the complex economies that determine the symbolic systems generated through performance art’s semantic particularities caught in its correlative relationship between materiality and medial translation. Similar to Jonas, Mangolte reflects on and uses her past works, carefully orchestrating her multimedia installations rooted in the constantly evolving and cross-disciplinary character of their artistic projects—from performance, to film, to installation, to photography, to script. For both artists, the exhibition is not a site to stage a live event, but one in which the recoding and production of actions, images, and objects collide. Their installations announce, produce, present, chronicle, and reflect the changing status of authorship, reception, and witnessing—all inherent to our experience and understanding of performance art—predominantly through the many still and moving images we are left to look at, after the act. Artists who look to deconstruct the experience of the live as a layered experience create scenarios that acknowledge the museum as a heterotopic site, a continuum, where spectators and actors are offered a chance to continuously rethink the various relationships contemporary art entertains between the public and the agency of the archive. This interlinking of the archival within the exhibition space as a contemporary mode of production is indicative of the present collapse of the time spans that shape our cultural memory—from a period of three decades to that of several moments. Jonas and Mangolte’s interests in the perception of time and space in relationship to the moving body, a body that specifically addresses the representational politics of gender and how our understanding of gender is constituted

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and perpetuated not only through images, but also the spaces these images are projected upon and presented in. This interest in the exhibition as a medium through which the anachronistic relationship of historical documentation of performance art to the present can be negotiated echoes four decades later in the performances and installations of Sarah Pierce and Jimmy Robert.12 Pierce, in Future Exhibitions (2010), and Robert, in Draw the Line (2013), investigate through performative acts, carried out within the context of their installations, how the respective parallels and de-synchronicities in the history of performance art are played out as an infinite game of references and appropriations within the institutional framework of the exhibition. Both Robert and Pierce have developed strategies in which the stories that form the spine of art history’s own narratives, accumulated over time through the interactions of events, documentary sources, and, crucially, the idea of witnessing, not only affirm performance history, but also are seen to be as important as artists’ original intentions. The layered histories and events they address serve as structuring devices and references that reflect on the original time period and political context as well as the historiography and reception of the works. It is important to underline here that neither of the two artists engage in literal re-enactments, nor make references to the past in an homage-like manner. While Robert explores the intersection of choreographic thinking and site-specificity inherent to the ecology of images that feed the contingent existence of performance art by physically adapting and acting them out, Pierce uses the exhibition space as a site of production as well as a format to investigate the politics of the ephemeral and its physical manifestation at the heart of museum politics and the increasing desire for event-based art. In Future Exhibitions, Pierce echoes the contemporary museum’s growing desire to shift from an authoritative role focused on devising and upholding official narratives, to one that rethinks its own politics of public engagement (see Bishop 2012, 2013). For Pierce, the destabilization of time, the awareness in the present of the future, and the notion of contemporaneity within the archive are key issues and elements in her performance and installation Future Exhibitions. The work is composed of five scenarios, each one based on readings of fragments of art historical documents and images. They are presented within an environment of various objects spread out and arranged between two adjoined spaces. The first time Pierce was commissioned to present the piece at the Museum of Modern Art (mumok) in Vienna,13 she was offered the chance to stage it within Allan Kaprow’s installation Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann (Kaprow and Lebel 1966). The work is part of mumok’s collection and consists of a wooden trunk filled with handwritten instructions on cardboard. Kaprow first presented this work in 1963 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a ‘(comedic) action room’ (p. 315), in which the visitors were challenged to perform the interaction between art and real life by freely moving objects from one space to the other, following his instructions spelled out on a series of handpainted cardboard posters, which were both announcements of his pieces and the work itself. Pierce used Kaprow’s iconic performative environment and its

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FIGURE 11.4 

Sarah Pierce, Future Exhibitions, 2010–2011, video still of the performance within the reinstallation of Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann, 1963, in the exhibition Push and Pull, 2010, at the Museum Moderner Kunst mumok, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna

Photo by Katharina Cibulka, courtesy of the artist

instructional character as a framing device and scenographical structure for the unfolding of Future Exhibitions. Pierce adapted Kaprow’s initial concept for the work from 1963, displaying the crate with the cardboard posters made by Kaprow at the entrance of the black-andwhite space and hung all the original posters along the wall of the first, white room. Pierce then proceeded to collect a variety of office and museum furniture such as tables, pedestals, and paper rolls, and arranged them in the two adjoining spaces, one black, the other white. The seemingly random yet carefully chosen utilitarian objects served as both props and protagonists. Pierce describes the 20-minute performance as a script: A PERFORMER describes FIVE SCENARIOS to an audience. Each scenario relates to a particular document of an exhibition. After each monologue there is a scene change, witnessed by the audience, that involves re-arranging the objects as sculptures on the stage. This change is done with the assistance of stage hands, under the direction of the performer and is unrehearsed. The performance takes place in a black or white cube space.14 Future Exhibitions consists of five acts and shifting arrangements. Pierce’s first arrangement of objects resembles the setup of the famous photograph of the ‘0,10 The Last Futurist Exhibition’ (1915) that features works by Kasimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. The performance begins with the lines, ‘This is a photograph of

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an exhibition . . . ’. Pierce continues with a reading of ‘A Letter from Kazimir Malevich’ in the black box, giving voice to the artist from the afterlife, cynically commenting on the past and present state of the art world in 1986. This letter, obviously written many years after the artist’s passing, is an anonymous artist’s project, first published within the pages of Art in America, and which has been exhibited numerous times since its first appearance.15 Moving between the spaces, Pierce continues to rearrange the setup for her reading of Seth Siegelaub’s description of his exhibition project, One Month (1969), within the white cube space. Shifting to and continuing the rearrangement of objects within the second, black box-like space, Pierce, lying on her back on a diagonally slanted board, reads aloud a review by the critic Michael Compton. The review was published in 1971, and describes Robert Morris’s infamous exhibition, Robert Morris, at the Tate Gallery in London, which closed soon after opening due to safety concerns. Pierce concludes the five scenarios with an excerpt from a letter written by a young artist claiming compensation for a destroyed artwork in the exhibition Interaction 77 at the Project Art Center in Dublin (1977). The plea of the young artist is staged in the final state of the room, the objects scattered and piled in no apparent order within the white box space. The composition of objects is a direct reference to one of the publicity images of Morris’s Scatter Piece installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1970, looping the iconic image of The Last Futurist Exhibition together with Morris’s infamous rupture of the visible and invisible symbolic orders that constitute the exhibition as a public event. Each of the five short choreographic sequences, punctured by Pierce’s readings of her script, is constructed around a series of misunderstandings, moments of personal struggle, or a lapse of memory within the writing of art history. Pierce, through her artistic agency, recalls and brings these personal instances that are also integral to the symbolic value of the iconic works she sites, to our attention, by announcing and acting upon a series of forgotten but in hindsight significant moments in the history of art. Future Exhibitions is emblematic of Pierce’s continuous cross-reading of the unconscious realm of art history, drawing out an infinite map of social relationships that enfold the minor with the major, the known with the unknown. Her chosen resources, all of which have a history of public display, become literal markers, through which the invisible, administrative procedures the institutions maintain to anticipate and conserve ‘the work’ as art are (re)performed.16 From a curatorial perspective, Future Exhibitions activates the history of these documentary sources as artifacts and art objects through their performance within the exhibition, a mise en abyme that affirms not only their contingent status, but their potential as a source for new documents and recordings (see Santone 2008: 147; Clausen 2010: 23). Pierce, similar to Jonas and Mangolte, questions the mental and physical division that alienates the viewer from the reality of his or her experience when witnessing a performance as a recording (or even as a live event). This became particularly apparent in her concept for the video documentation of her performance in Future Exhibitions. The aim for the documentation of her own work was not to produce a neutral or ideal representation of the work, but to emulate the visual experience of

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first-person witnessing, of only seeing fragments of the performance. Pierce asked the Austrian artist and filmmaker Katharina Cibulka to follow and record her actions during the performance. Cibulka was instructed to work in an authentic, improvised manner, letting the eye behind the camera follow the event the same way a spectator on-site would and to record the entire performance in one shot. This overlap of the performing and the recording of the event, echoing Jonas’s early strategy of her video performances, allowed Pierce to re-enforce our understanding of ‘reality’ and the illusion of presence and absence by extending the lens’s duality of vision to a third dimension, that of the editor and viewer. Avoiding any edits or cuts and shooting the entire performance in one take, we the viewers move through the two spaces, as those present did. We recognize, through the frame of the camera, the limited visibility of the live event as well as the tension felt between the spectators, the performers, and the apparatus that follows and strives to record the event. The sometimes exact, sometimes de-synchronized doubling of the improvizational movements of the performance with the movements of the camera is a staging of a subjective camera as an independent protagonist, neither artist nor spectator, but chronicler and, hence, author of the events as they unfold in front of the camera. While the exhibition becomes the object of its own perception, the camera simulates the porous process, the gaps and the multiple viewpoints that come together in the writing of art history. The jumpy camerawork lays bare workings and multiple voices significant for the historiography of the documentation of performance art, and its claim and constitution of authenticity through media-based translations. Pierce allows the spectator to be aware of what is normally discarded over time, calling on history to reveal itself to us in new ways.17 She uses the documentation of her own work as a device to capture how the cultural production of time becomes visible in the slippages that occur during its recording and reproduction. Watching the documentation of Future Exhibitions allows viewers to comprehend how heteronormative narratives and power relationships inherent to the writing of art history take their outset in the institutional politics and administrative procedures within the museum (see especially Molesworth 2010: 504–5). For Pierce, an interest in acting out the museum’s operational anachronistic relationship towards its own past within the tightly curated framework of her performances and installations is not intended as a re-enactment or recovery of this forgotten history. Rather, she allows her findings about the entangled roles these documents played to serve as a blueprint for future action, visualizing the inevitable transition of their status and cultural value from historical source to artifact and artwork. Pierce continuously renegotiates the terms for making art, as an ongoing process, visualized through the act of the rehearsal. A contingent representational format that, according to the artist, highlights the potential for dissent and self-determination, the slippages between individual work and institution, and the proximity of past artworks.18 This interplay of visibility and invisibility, and the various material translations over time constituted through the documentation of performance art, play a vital role in artistic appropriations and a rising interest in feminist genealogies in performance’s various histories and herstories.19

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The final case study is dedicated to Jimmy Robert’s research and the crossdisciplinary practice he has created since the early 2000s, which takes the historical documentation of works by Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann’s Site (1964), Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965), or Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966) as the basis of his often collaborative projects. The exhibition is a site for Robert, in which he inscribes and alters the continuous flux of process-based events of the histories he appropriates. Robert uses the documentary sources he takes out of performance histories’ archives as a structural device through which he explores the complex relationship between the genealogies of feminist practices he frequently references. The photographs, manifestos, and documentary footage he unearths or chooses become scripts with which he explores the limits of dance in relation to performance, photography, and film. Performance’s relationship to the image, to the body, and to the changing histories it entertains are at the core of Jimmy Robert’s image- and text-based, site-specific installation and performance, Draw the Line (2013). This work is based on Carolee Schneemann’s seminal performance installation, Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–1976), which consisted of a performance, a text, an installation, as well as a series of documentary photographs. For Robert, who wanted to use the work ‘as a starting point to do something else’, a manifesto written by Schneemann in conjunction with the piece at the time, was the key to deconstructing and reassembling the documents he chose to work with.

FIGURE 11.5 

Jimmy Robert, Draw the Line, 2013, performance at the Power Plant, Toronto, 2013

 The Power Plant, Toronto, photo by Henry Chan

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Commissioned by the Power Plant in Toronto and curated by Julia Paoli, Draw the Line was first of all an architectural intervention that consisted of flooding the exhibition space with natural daylight by exposing a series of windows behind a wall; second, it included a stack of takeaway posters that announced a performance; third, there was a collaborative drawing collage (produced with Kate Davis in 2010) based on the photograph of Up to and Including Her Limits. In addition, Robert presented a sound recording of himself writing in pencil on a smooth surface and a roll of large photographic paper unfurled throughout the exhibition space, which was also used as a sculptural prop for a performance that took place a week after the opening. During the performance, Robert executed a series of choreographed movements and poses while reciting Schneemann’s text. Robert ‘moves into the text and image’,20 using both speech and movement as tools (Paoli 2013). In this sense, both the exhibition and the performance of Draw the Line can be read through its various modes of expression: as a poem, seen as an image of a script, or heard as a score. Schneemann’s constrained horizontal markings are lifted off her entrapped vertical body, liberated back into the three-dimensional as Robert writes out the script with his body. He deconstructs the privileged status of the historical document through its live rereading, staging an encounter that questions the cause and effect relationship between the original performance as an ontological event and its valorization within the museum as an artifact and art object. Schneemann’s feminist critique of painting’s canonization and inherent relationship to indexicality as a male gesture is, both figuratively and conceptually, translated into the present. As Robert takes control of his own limits as a non-dancer and explores the architectural limits within the exhibition space, he creates an equilibrium between body, history, and space. Each element intersects with the others in choreographic thinking. As he questions the representational power dynamics of gender and their site-specific inscription within the exhibition space and the architecture of the museum via his physical interventions, he pays homage to Schneemann, shedding light on her incomplete and belated recognition and institutionalization (Molesworth 2010: 501). The physical inscription of his body within the Power Plant’s white cube architecture as he draws and dances stands for the expression of a physical and temporal mark within the context of social networks and discourses that determine the constantly changing representational codes of gender and ethnicity. Robert’s claim of authenticity is affirmed by transcribing his state of flux upon that of another, namely Schneemann, whose late and slow valorization within the dominating heteronormative standards of the art world continue to hinder her from entering the canon of art history. Robert’s interest in the politics of subjective and collective actions is emblematic for understanding how the historiography of performance art is constructed over time, long after the act of the performance itself. Due to the continuously evolving relationship between the live and the mediated, the canon of art history has also evolved to include more early feminist and emancipatory performancebased works. This new inclusivity is due to an endless flow of documentary

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materials and archives of performance-based practices reproduced and made available alongside an infinite stream of images of performances in the now. Whether presented as art, digitized for a wider audience, or captured on social media, each image questions and also confirms the process of valorization that takes its outset within the exhibition (von Hantelmann 2010: 20). This interest has led to the recognition of artists whose disappearance by virtue of their works’ ephemerality has led them to remain in the shadows of art history, often only recognized in their status as artists’ artists or as well-kept curatorial secrets. The categorization of performance art as ephemeral—despite its original critical, anti-commercial, and anti-establishment connotations and socio-historical impact—has also facilitated the exclusion of many marginalized vanguard artists, women, and non-white artists from a predominantly heteronormative canon for many decades. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s with Yves Klein’s and James Lee Byars’s uses of signed certificates issued during events, conceptual practices have relied on such gestures to affirm their presence and valorization within the realm of the art market as well as art history.21 At the same time, performance and early video art were continuously branded as not sellable because of their material contingency and ephemerality. The question of performance’s ephemerality appears differently when we recognize performance’s status as a practice that affirms rather then denies its contingent material status through the process of being performed.22 Both Pierce’s and Robert’s methodologies and awareness of the past are comparable to Mangolte’s and Jonas’s compositional positioning and awareness of the future. In their montages of performer, space, and audience, they take on the double role of mediator and medium. By becoming a medium and hence a carrier of the invisible, each allows the visitors’ attention to shift between subject, image, and object, visualizing the economy of the personal in relationship to the representational politics of the canon of art within the museum. Their bodies not only reinterpret historical information, but activate the pictorial layers of space, between the document and the action. Each in their own way affirms how performance art is anchored in the relationship between the physical and pictorial space that surrounds the body of both the performer and the spectator—a space crucial to Mangolte’s specific aesthetic when documenting performance, dance, and theater. This awareness of how we look at art speaks of an effort to take into account not only what spectators experience on each side of the stage, but also what they experience moving back and forth between and within the spheres of art and life. A spectator, according to Richard Schechner: sees the event, he sees himself, he sees himself seeing the event, he sees himself seeing others who are seeing the event and who, maybe, see themselves seeing the event. Thus there is the performance, the performers, the spectators, and the spectator of spectators, and the self-seeing-self that can be performer or spectator or spectator of spectator. (Schechner 1985: 8)

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Despite their generational differences, the four artists under consideration are guided by the extension of structural principles of the postmodernist credo of plurality and heterogeneity into the complex system of performance art’s parallel historicization and institutionalization. This extension is rooted in an awareness that performance operates and can be appropriated not only from one medium to another, but also from one time period to another. Each of these artists speaks about their respective contemporary conditions of artistic labor and visuality while encouraging a dialogue with the past and the future. They bring to light how a performative act becomes a contingent entity of its own, from a documentary source to a performable script, from a prop to an artifact. The works share a sensibility towards the site- and time-specificity of the institution in which they are situated. Despite their differences, these practices are based on the interest to translate and enact their sources through the framework of the exhibition, exposing the exhibition as a performative medium, and which, similar to a live act, remains visible through its medial translation into still and moving images. For Jonas, this meant simulating an object of desire embodied through the translation of her gestures into installations and sculptural forms. Pierce, like Mangolte, is interested in deconstructing the relationship of the theatricality of exhibition-making to the cultural archives it references, employs, and valorizes, exposing the chronological and performance-based nature of the exhibition format itself. Pierce continuously renegotiates the terms for making art, as an ongoing process, visualizing the potential for dissent and self-determination, the slippages between individual work and institution, and the proximity of past artworks.23 In contrast to Pierce’s engagement with a present yet hidden history that re-encounters its own agency and historicity through the actions and words of the artist, Robert’s performing body did not became the locus of an historical encounter, but rather a filter that puts its documents on view. Bound to infinitely reappear and explore the contingency of its various contents’ forms and relations to both the past and the future, Draw the Line embarks to unveil the temporality of all of its sources. Robert carefully stages his work within the architecture of the exhibition space by being at once inside and outside of his work—similar to Jonas’s mirroring of her own presence through the medium of video and other performers. Finding new ways to expand the idea of sculpture through the relationship between gesture and object, Robert investigates the status of the body in the exhibition by questioning the representation of its archival status through choreography, juxtaposing various temporal layers that unfold equally within the exhibition as a site of display and as a performative setting. While Robert plays out the parallels and de-synchronicities as a mise en abyme of the correlative relationship of performance art to its imagebased and archival status, Pierce addresses how the historiography of minimal and conceptual art through its exhibitions thrives in the tension between its overlapping self-referentiality and its various inherent institutional realities (such as being highly collectible despite its ephemeral character). Their interpretations consciously expose and integrate the discontinuities and ruptures that are usually edited out in the processes of performance art’s historicization and institutionalization, rendering visible

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the contingent nature of performance art, while acknowledging of all its transitional moments, formats, and histories. Jonas, Mangolte, Pierce, and Robert have created scenarios in which a temporal and psychological collapse between the experience of actually witnessing a performance and the experience of acquiring knowledge—by reading about an event or seeing a recording—can unfold and come together to become another version of the original event, affirming performance’s contingency as an ongoing process. For all four, their modes of working and addressing the exhibition space as a site of production, reflection, and conservation allow the viewer to bear witness to numerous art historical references and to perceive them as echoes of the struggles embedded in the present. Said differently, these works enable the viewer to acknowledge the invisible procedures performed by the artist, the institution, and art history, all in efforts to maintain an idea of originality that can be iterated infinitely in the future.

Notes   1 A number of studies and research projects since the early 2000s have focused on the strategies of documentation, and specifically the significance of performance archives (see, among others, Clausen 2006; Morris 2006; Bégoc et al. 2010; Bénichou 2015; Büscher and Cramer 2016).   2 I am referring here to a debate that has evolved out of an exchange of opinions and essays between Peggy Phelan (1993), Philip Auslander (1999), and Amelia Jones (1997). According to Auslander, our idea of what we consider to be live is based on its potential of repetition as well as factual reproduction. Auslander’s inspiring analysis can be traced back to Jean Baudrillard’s (1981, 1984) and Jacques Attali’s (1985) writings on the simulacrum and the economy of representation. Contrary to the belief that the live event in the arts can withdraw itself from the regime of reproduction, Auslander as well as art historian Jones have proven that the live, as an unfiltered experience, is not only created through media, but guarantees the existence of people’s fascination with media.   3 This is the case for the photographic archives of performance art’s most well-known chroniclers such as Mangolte, Peter Moore, and Robert McElroy (see Clausen 2006: 10).   4 See Catherine Wood’s and Pamela Lee’s acknowledgment of Jonas’s pivotal role in the arts (Lee 2015; Wood 2015).   5 Both performances are emblematic for Jonas’s visual experiments with the fragmentation of the gaze and the performance of the impossibility of looking into one’s own projected eyes during the process of live recording and rendering one’s image (Doane 2003). For an exact description and script of this work, see Simon (2015: 54). In a recent public conversation with the author, Jonas elaborated on one of the inspirational moments while working on the Organic Honey performance series in 1971: ‘Organic Honey, was based on the idea of watching yourself on camera while an audience watches you. I actually got the idea, when I read somewhere that Marilyn Monroe sat in front of a camera, and people were watching her being filmed. I realized that the experience of seeing her in front of the camera was totally different than what the camera would see. So, I made a whole performance based on that idea, that the audience sees the image that the camera sees simultaneously with the performance’. This conversation took place during her retrospective exhibition, Joan Jonas: From Away, which I curated, at DHC/ART in Montreal in 2016. See http://dhc-art.org/joan-jonas-exhibition/ and http://www.hexagram.ca/ en/activities/affinities/ (accessed August 28, 2016).   6 As in her video Vertical Roll (see Crimp 1983: 9; revised version Crimp 2015: 136).   7 See also Christiane Kuhlmann’s analysis of early twentieth-century dance photography (Kuhlmann 2003: 194).

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  8 I was engaged in a series of curatorial projects addressing these particular questions around the historization and institutionalization of performance art, in a series of exhibitions presented between 2005 and 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna. One of the concepts for the exhibition and conference After the Act: The (Re)presentation of Performance Art in 2015 was focused on the reception of performance art through its documentary images. Jonas gave me permission to present the entire archive of approximately 200 images taken by a dozen photographers, culminating in the choice of a select 10 images that have represented this over the last 50 years.   9 Mangolte was responsible for the camerawork on a variety of Jonas’s projects, such as Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy and Verticall Roll in 1972 and 1973, followed by Glass Puzzle in 1974, as well as the photo documentation of the Mirage performance at Anthology Film Archive in 1977 (see Clausen 2010). 10 From an unpublished transcript of a public conversation between RoseLee Goldberg and Babette Mangolte during the exhibition Art Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance at TATE Liverpool, November 15, 2003. 11 From an unpublished interview of Connie Short with Babette Mangolte, dated 1996, from the archive of Babette Mangolte, New York. 12 Here, we could also mention the work of artists, performers, and choreographers such as Janes Janda, Sharon Hayes, Ai Karawa, Ryan Mcnamara, Andrea Geyer, Lili ReynaudDewar, Gerard Byrne, Sophie Bélair Clement, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Pauline Olowska, and others. 13 This commission was for a two-part performance series and exhibition entitled Push and Pull I & II, a co-production between the mumok in Vienna and Tate Modern in London, curated by Achim Hochdörfer, Catherine Wood, and the author in November 2010 and March 2011. 14 See images, sources and script for Future Exhibitions (2010) by Sarah Pierce (see also Pierce and Frank 2013: 136–57). 15 For more on this appropriation of Malevich’s persona by an anonymous Slovenian artist, see Milena Tomic’s ‘Hommage à Malevich: Black Square Continued’ (Tomic 2015). 16 Email conversation between the author and the artist, 2010, during the production process of the piece for the exhibition Push and Pull I in Vienna. 17 An interest that Pierce shares with artists of her generation, such as Andrea Geyer, who in her work Three Chants Modern (2013) has also addressed the loss of information through the process of historization. See also www.sbcgallery.ca/#!andrea-geyer/chqt (accessed February 9, 2016). 18 See artist statement at http://themetropolitancomplex.com/ (accessed November 30, 2016). 19 See, for further elaboration on the practice of appropriation, Jones and Heathfield (2012). 20 Conversation between the author and the artist, May 2013. 21 See also Lippard (1973) and Ward (2012). 22 See also Buskirk (2003). 23 See Pierce and Frank (2013) and artist statement at http://themetropolitancomplex. com/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

Works cited Auslander, P. (1999) Live Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Attali, J. (1985) Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Baudrillard, J. (1981) Simulation and Simulacra, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, J. (1984) ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, in B. Wallis (ed.), Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New York: New Museum, pp. 253–81.

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Bégoc, J., Boulouch, N., and Zabunyan, E. (eds) (2010) La Performance. Entre archives et pratiques contemporaines, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Bénichou, A. (ed.) (2015) Recréer/scripter: mémoires et transmissions des œuvers performatives et chorégraphiques contemporaines, Dijon: Les presses du réel. Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London and New York: Verso. Bishop, C. (2013) Radical Museology: What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books. Büscher, B. and Cramer, F. A. (eds) (2016) Fluid Access. Media – Archive – Performance, New York and Hildesheim: Olms Verlag Hildesheimm. Buskirk, M. (2003) ‘Contingent Objects’, in The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 211–60. Butler, J. (2003) ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in A. Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 392–402. Clausen, B. (ed.) (2006) ‘After the Act’, After the Act. The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art, After the Act. The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art, mumok Theory Series 03, Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna: Verlag Moderner Kunst Nürnberg, pp. 7–20. Clausen, B. (2007) ‘Documents between Spectator and Action’, in A. M. Roxby (ed.), Live Art on Camera: Performance and Photography, Southampton: John Hansard Gallery, pp. 68–78. Clausen, B. (2010) ‘Babette Mangolte, Performing Histories: Why the Point Is Not to Make a Point’, Afterall, 23: 36–43. Clausen, B. (2016) ‘Staging the Documentary’, in B. Büscher and F. A. Cramer (eds), Fluid Access: Media – Archive – Performance, New York: Olms Verlag Hildesheimm, pp. 19–200. Crimp, D. (ed.) (1983) Joan Jonas: Scripts and Descriptions, 1968–1982, exhibition catalogue, Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum. Crimp, D. (2015) ‘De-Synchronization in Joan Jonas’s Performances’, in J. Simon (ed.), In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas, New York: Gregory R. Miller Co., pp. 136–8. Doane, M. A. (2003 [1982]) ‘Film and Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, in A. Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 60–72. Jones, A. (1997) ‘“Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation – Performance Art Focusing on the Human Body in the Early 1960s through the 1970s’, Art Journal, 56(4): 11–18. Jones, A. and Heathfield, A. (eds) (2012) Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, Bristol: Chicago Intellect. Kaprow, A. and Lebel, J. J. (1966) ‘Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann’, in Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, New York: H. N. Abrams, pp. 314–21. Kotz, L. (2005) ‘Language between Performance and Photography’, October Magazine, 111, Winter: 3–21. Krauss, R. (1976) ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October Magazine, 1, Fall: 51–64. Kuhlmann, C. (2003) Bewegter Körper – Mechanischer Apparat, Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln, Studien und Dokumente zur Tanzwissenschaft, Cologne; Peter Lang Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften. Lee, P. M. (2015) ‘Double Takes’, Artforum International, 53(10): 308–16. Lippard, L. (1973) Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, revised edition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Malevich, K. (1986) ‘A Letter from Kazimir Malevich,’ Art in America, September 9. Mangolte, B. (1998) ‘My History (The Intractable)’, October Magazine, 86: 82–4. Mangolte, B. (2006) ‘Balancing Act between Instinct and Reason or How to Organize Volumes on a Flat Surface in Shooting Photographs, Films, and Videos of Performance’, in B. Clausen (ed.), After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art, Theory Series 03, Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna: Verlag Moderner Kunst Nürnberg, pp. 35–51. Molesworth, H. (2010) ‘How to Install Art as a Feminist,’ in C. Butler and A. Schwartz (eds), Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Museum of Modern Art, pp. 499–513. Morris, C. (ed.) (2006) 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theater, and Engineering 1966, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paoli, J. (ed.) (2013) Jimmy Robert, Draw the Line, Toronto: Power Plant. Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge. Pierce, S. and Frank, R. (eds) (2013) Sketches of Universal History Compiled from Several Authors by Sarah Pierce, London: Book Works. Richard, F. and Huberman, A. (2015) Joan Jonas Is on Our Minds, San Francisco, CA: CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Santone, J. (2008) ‘Marina Abramović´s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation Strategies for Preserving Art’s History’, Leonardo, 41(2): 145–52. Schechner, R. (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Seel, M. (2001) ‘Inszenieren als Erscheinenlasses: Theses über die Reichweite eines Begriffs’, in J. Früchtl and J. Zimmermann (eds), Ästhetik der Inszenierung, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 56–7. Simon, J. (ed.) (2015) Joan Jonas: In the Shadow of a Shadow, New York: Gregory Miller. Tomic, M. (2015) ‘Hommage à Malevich: Black Square Continued’, Artmargins, October, available at: http://artmargins.com/index.php/exhibitions-sp-132736512/768-hommagea-malevich-black-square-continued (accessed January 7, 2017). von Hantelmann, D. (2010) ‘The Societal Efficacy of Art’, in How to Do Things with Art, Zurich and Dijon: JRP Ringier/Presses du Réel, pp. 8–21. Wagner, A. M. (2000) ‘Performance, Video and the Rhetoric of Presence’, October Magazine, 91: 59–80. Ward, F. (2012) Innocent Bystanders, Performance and Audience, Interfaces Studies in Visual Culture, Dartmouth/Hannover: College Press. Wood, C. (2015) ‘The Year in Performance’, Artforum International, 54(4), December: 129–30.

12 AT THE EDGE OF THE ‘LIVING PRESENT’ Re-enactments and re-interpretations as strategies for the preservation of performance and new media art Gabriella Giannachi Well, I often wish that I had a camera and just took the thing as it went along, because, certainly, very often in working one loses the best moments of a painting in trying to take it further. And, if one had a record of what it was, one might be able to find it again. So it would almost be nice to have a running camera going all the time that one was working. Francis Bacon (cited in Silvester 1980: 158)

In June and September 2016, two workshops organized by Gaby Wijers and Lara Garcia at LIMA in Amsterdam reflected on the use of re-interpretation in the context of conservation of media arts. The term re-interpretation was chosen vis-à-vis others, like re-play, re-mediation, re-staging, and re-enactment, to reflect the fact that works were not simply to be re-performed or re-staged, but also interpreted anew. The interdisciplinary team brought together at the workshops, which were part of a oneyear project, ‘Unfold: Mediation by Re-Interpretation’, reflected on the affinities and differences between these terms, looking also at practices such as arrangement, homage, reappropriation, and emulation, that are commonly utilized in other disciplines. In this chapter, I show why such practices constitute fundamental strategies for preservation, focusing specifically on re-enactments and re-interpretations. By preservation, I do not so much mean the conservation of something that occurred in the past, but rather a claim to its ‘living’ quality in the present. I start by looking at case studies that include both historic and artistic re-enactments, as well as re-interpretations of past works through different media. I then move on to explore the notion of repetition, building on Giorgio Agamben’s proposition that repetition is what prevents the medium from disappearing, where, by ‘medium’, Agamben (writing about cinema and following Hegel) intended ‘an image, a word, or a colour’ (Agamben 2002: 318). Finally, I show that performance generates an environment whose unfolding through

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re-enactment and re-interpretation brings us closer to the edge of what philosopher Gilles Deleuze described as the ‘living present’ (Deleuze 2000: 19) and explain how this is significant for the preservation of artworks. Preservation, I suggest, should in fact not just focus on a work as it manifests itself at a precise point in time, but rather take into account how a work may have appeared or behaved over time, so as to reveal how various aspects of the work were brought to life at different points in time. As Amelia Jones has suggested, historical re-enactments became increasingly popular after 1946 when R. G. Collingwood published The Idea of History, which argued that history constitutes a form of re-enactment (Collingwood 1994). Jones cites well-known examples, such as Jeremy Deller’s 2001 The Battle of Orgreave, which re-enacted the British miners’ strike of 1984, and Felix Gmelin’s 2002 Colour Test, Red Flag II, which re-enacted for videotape a 1968 activist protest where, in Jones’s words, ‘students from West Berlin, organised by his own father (who was their professor), ran through the streets of the city passing a red flag in a relay’ (Jones 2011: 23). Other well-known re-enactments include Anri Sala’s 1998 video-artwork Intervista (Interview) in which lip readers were employed to interpret the performer’s mother’s words in ‘a silent film footage from a 1977 congress of Albanian Communist youth’ (Jakovljević 2011: 51); the re-enactment of the settlers’ passage from Ipswich, Massachusetts, to Marietta (1936–1937), which attracted 2 million people (Schwartz 1996: 269–76); and Rimini Protocoll’s 2007 production World Premiere: The Visit in which eyewitness accounts of the members of the audience who had been present at the 1956 premiere of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit were used to stage a reconstruction of the original piece (Jakovljević 2011: 51–2). Historical re-enactments such as the ones cited above are known to often entail a ‘distortion in scale’ (Rushton, cited in Bangma et  al. 2005: 6). Such was the case, Steve Rushton notes, in Peter Watkins’s Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959), where First World War trenches were ‘filmed in a cast member’s backyard after a two-and-a-half metre plot had been dug up and hosed down with water’, and in his Forgotten Faces (1956) the Hungarian Revolution was filmed ‘in a cul-de-sac in Canterbury’ (p. 7). Re-enactments are also known as hybrid works that play with canonical conventions regarding the relationship between performers and audience. Thus, Sven Lütticken notes how historical re-enactments tend to eliminate ‘the safe distance between performers and audience in order to create ambiguous, mixed states’ (Lütticken et al. 2005: 27). Moreover, as Inke Arns showed, historical re-enactments often do not so much deliver accurate reproductions of the past, but rather privilege an engagement with the ‘present’ (cited in Arns and Horn 2008: 2). Part of a culture of repetition and copy (Schwartz 1996), which is in turn part of our wider obsession with memorial practices (Rushton, cited in Bangma et al. 2005: 11), re-enactments can be described as forming part of the broader operation of the apparatus of the archive as an epistemological strategy for mapping, and hence getting to know, the everyday (Giannachi 2016). These considerations position, as Anke Bangma suggests, the re-enactment as a ‘framing concept’ (cited in Bangma et al. 2005: 14) that is capable of disclosing the immediacy of a work, where by immediacy I mean its ability to affect our ‘living’ present.

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We know that historical early twentieth-century pageants, such as Louis Napoleon Parker’s pageants, which presented scenes from local history ‘ranging from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century’ (Lütticken et al. 2005: 31), were ‘about a community being presented with an image of itself’ (p. 33), the emphasis being on the generation of ‘an immersive’ and perhaps also reflective ‘experience’ (p. 40). This immersive and reflective quality of pageants is a defining characteristic of re-enactments and re-interpretations. The ‘experience’ produced thereby was not so much, as Peggy Phelan would have it, a ‘slavish reproduction’, but rather an attempt to ‘create a difference’ (Phelan, cited in Lütticken et al. 2005: 5), setting up the conditions for a ‘re-presencing’ of a work. This difference constitutes a crucial component as to the significance of re-enactments and re-interpretations for preservation. For Jennifer Allen, re-enactments utilize ‘the body as a medium for reproducing the past’ (Phelan, cited in Lütticken et  al. 2005: 181) only that this body and the one that is re-enacted cannot be the same. Crucially, re-enactments therefore must, by establishing this difference, also redefine what is meant by ‘origin’, thereby giving it ‘a definition and an identity that it may not have had for itself’, so that witnessing a re-enactment implies the act of ‘recognising something that has already happened, even if the event was never experienced first hand by the witness’ (p. 185). Thus, re-enactments treat the past’s ‘linearity and continuity as an architectural site, if not a stage that can be animated by new players’ (p. 187). Forming, for Allen, both ‘a reproduction of the past and a reproduction of itself’, the re-enactment ‘emerges as yet another original with its own claims to authenticity that are inextricably linked to its reproduction’ (p. 195). Through the re-enactment, the past is not re-staged; rather, it is created anew. In these cases, as Rosalind Krauss suggested in talking about the Modernist grid, originality should be considered as ‘a working assumption that itself emerges from a ground of repetition and recurrence’ (Krauss 1986: 7). This is a crucial factor as to why re-enactments, but also re-interpretations, constitute an interesting strategy for preservation as well as for the creation of original work. In showing how originally re-enactments were not so much about ‘recalling’ the past, but rather about re-structuring the past, Rushton suggested that re-enactments often ‘customise’ or create a subjective ‘version’ of the past (cited in Bangma et al. 2005: 6). One example of this is Francis Alÿs’s Re-Enactments (2001). In 2000, Alÿs illegally purchased a gun in Mexico City. Twelve minutes later, he was arrested. Shortly after his arrest, the action was carried out again. This time, he used a fake gun and the police officers that had originally arrested him allegedly joined in the re-staging. Alÿs’s friend, Rafael Ortega, documented both actions and the documentations form what viewers see in the actual work Re-Enactments (Alÿs 2004). In her analysis of the work, Emily Rose Lyver-Harris showed that whereas the first footage was labeled ‘Real’, the latter was labeled ‘Re-enactment’ (Lyver-Harris 2011). Lyver-Harris also showed that in ‘Real’, there was a timer that was absent in ‘Re-enactment’ as if to indicate that time matters only in history, not in its reproduction. She noted that in ‘Real’, the artist was tracked from behind as if ‘excerpted from a continuous take’, while ‘Re-enactment’ utilized ‘a variety of

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camera angles which change rapidly, often stitching together quick shots from a variety of perspectives’ (Lyver-Harris 2011). Thus, ‘Real’, for her, was a documentation, whereas ‘Re-enactment’ was an artwork. Along the two-channel video, sketches were also exhibited showing how the second action had been based on the time code readings of the first one. For Lyver-Harris, in a comparison of the two videos, one might therefore ‘perceive “Real” to be a more credible account of the live performance’, but as the title of the work as a whole, Re-Enactments, is plural, it means that it is possible that ‘both videos, despite their individual titles, are reproductions of the original performance’ (Lyver-Harris 2011). This capacity of the re-enactment to be both original and a reproduction reveals a fundamental aspect of artistic production in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, namely the fact that the production process itself is becoming perhaps less important than the often performative accumulation of what could be described as relations between different works, but also among different versions of a work. This means works need to be seen in terms of their capacity to build a range of relations. Jane Pollard and Ian Forsyth’s re-interpretation of Vito Acconci’s video work WalkOver (Indirect Approaches) (1973), called Walking After Acconci (Redirected Approaches) (2005), was described by a reviewer as appropriating ‘Acconci’s confrontational strategies’ by remixing them ‘with contemporary references and techniques’, to produce a work that could be described as ‘multi-layered’ (McQuay 2005). There are clear differences between the two works, especially in relation to the position of the viewer. Whereas the Acconci work places the viewer in the position of the rejected lover, in the Pollard and Forsyth version the two remain distinct. Moreover, while the Acconci work is a degraded, low-resolution black-and-white video, the Pollard and Forsyth work is in color and realized though contemporary production techniques. Both the Acconci and the Pollard and Forsyth titles are indications that the works all constitute ‘approaches’, denoting a change in position, in space and time (e.g. ‘Walk-Over’/‘Walking After’), and direction (e.g. ‘Indirect’/‘Redirected’). Though they are distinct works, Acconci’s original is somehow related to Pollard and Forsyth’s re-interpretation, bound up in it after the fact. As was the case for Alÿs’s Re-Enactments, different qualities of the original works are brought to life by the re-enactments. I would argue, then, that these works now are not only the original performances, or the documents that remain from them, but also the relation between them and what was brought to life by their re-enactments. It is well known that re-enactments and re-interpretations are often used by artists as a strategy for the production of documentation. This is crucial to understand how artists preserve and ‘grow’ performance works, whether the original artwork was their own, or it was created by another artist. For example, Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces (2005) consisted of the re-interpretation of a number of 1970s performance works at the Guggenheim in New York, including VALIE EXPORT’s Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969). EXPORT’s piece was a set of six identical posters produced to advertise an action that had occurred at a cinema in Munich one year earlier. These show the artist holding a machine gun and sitting on a bench wearing a pair of trousers from which the crotch

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was missing. The black and white photographs, Action Pants: Genital Panic, taken by the photographer Peter Hassmann in Vienna in 1969, were, however, not so much a documentation of that specific action, as a form of re-enactment or re-interpretation carried out for the production of the poster. Different accounts of the 1968 action were made over the years by EXPORT. In a 1979 interview with Ruth Askey published in High Performance, she described the action as having taken place in a pornographic film theater: I was dressed in a sweater and pants with the crotch completely cut away. I carried a machine gun. Between films I told the audience that they had come to this particular theater to see sexual films. Now, actual genitalia was available, and they could do anything they wanted with it. (Askey 1981: 15) However, this version of events was subsequently denied by the artist: ‘I never went in a cinema in which pornographic movies are shown, and NEVER with a gun in my hand’ (cited in Stiles 1999: 17–33). More recently, in an interview with Devin Fore, EXPORT pointed out that she had been invited to a film screening at an experimental cinema, and upon entering the cinema, wearing the pants, she said ‘Was Sie sonst auf der Leinwand sehen, sehen Sie hier in der Realität’ (What you usually see on the screen, you see here in reality) (cited in Fore 2012). Interestingly, for EXPORT, it was ‘extremely important . . . to retain some of their “poster” status and to counteract any misunderstanding of the image as a unique work’, where the number six was ‘in keeping with her original concept of seriality and reproduction’ (Anonymous 2006). As suggested by Mechtid Widrich, the composition ‘makes the images resemble movie posters, while the grainy structure seems to relate them to documentary photographs’ (Widrich 2008: 56). This creates an ambiguity about the original images that was recalled by EXPORT in describing the difference between her work and its re-interpretation by Abramović: ‘The big difference between the two performances, then, is that I wore the action pants in a cinema, while Marina put herself on display in a museum. It’s a completely different context’ (cited in Fore 2012). For Amelia Jones, EXPORT’s Genital Panic is a statement about documentation. Thus, the work, she suggests, ‘unfolds as part of a reiterative ever-expanding network of meaning, generating ideas, images, and beliefs that themselves relate to an ever-metamorphosing concept about what constitutes the “original” event’ (Jones 2011: 21). This sequence, she adds, is based on ‘a lie’, and so: if temporality is understood more as a network of ideas that expands outward but always from multiple rather than singular origins, and origins that only exist as themselves represented in history and memory—a Bergsonian layering rather than a point-to-point teleology—then the impossibility of Abramović’s project retrieving something authentic from an original event becomes clear. (p. 22)

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This may well be why Abramović restaged EXPORT’s documentation of Genital Panic rather than the ‘original’ performance itself (see Santone 2008: 147). Abramović, too, noted: ‘It was really difficult to determine the facts about the original piece from all the archeological evidence. [ . . . ] In the end, I thought, given the circumstances, it was best for me to create an image’ (cited in Spector et al. 2007: 22), which led scholars such as Erika Fischer-Lichte to suggest that with each evening of Seven Easy Pieces, Abramović ‘created a completely new, original artistic event, which, in some respects, referred to performances of the past, but by no means repeated them’ (cited in Spector et al. 2007: 42). Thus, Santone points out, it was the use of the EXPORT poster that helped Abramović to ‘emphasize what was at stake in this reperformance: the gaze of the artist directed at the audience’ (Santone 2008: 149). I have already suggested that the re-enactments and re-interpretations are valuable insofar as they generate a network of relations between works that then form part of the legacy of each work. While there are obvious differences between historical re-enactments and artistic re-enactments and re-interpretations that this chapter does not have the time to address, they all form part of what Michael Shanks would have described as an archeological imagination (Shanks 2012). In handling and by embodying the remains of the past, we not only re-visit the past as present and thus produce affordances, mostly captured by images, that lead to possible futures; we also re-visit other possible presents and futures that may have transformatively emerged from a work’s past, what Francis Bacon described as the other possible lives of a given painting. At the heart of this transformation is an act of repetition. Noticeably, re-enactment and re-interpretation, in line with other memory practices, entail the prefix ‘re-’. For Inke Arns and Gabriele Horn, the popularity of this prefix is explained by the fact that ‘experiencing the world, whether past or present, is increasingly less direct’ (Arns and Horn 2008: 7). So, they suggest, as the experience of the world is primarily in the ‘now’, framed by media communication, re-enactments, and, I may add, re-interpretations, enable not only ‘an experience of the past in the present’, which is achieved ‘by eliminating the distance between the historical event as represented by the media and the immediate present, between actors and audience’ (p. 7), but also the framing of the present as a future past. As Arns notes, re-enactments, as well as re-interpretations, are therefore challenges or ‘questionings of the present’ (p. 43, original emphasis), in which it is indeed the present that is perceived to be at stake. This questioning is achieved, for Arns, by utilizing documents produced in the past so as to understand what they may mean to us now or what they may afford in the future. This, Arns indicates, generates a ‘paradoxical approach’, ‘erasing distance to the images and at the same time distancing itself from the images’ (p. 43). In fact, the prefix ‘re-’, which means ‘again’ and also means ‘back’, implies both a return to a previous condition and the repetition of an action, so that verbs containing the prefix ‘re-’ tend to suggest both a restoration and a repetition. I have already mentioned that re-enactments and re-interpretations produce spatio-temporal distortions, but here we see how they often expose, as Arns suggests, an ‘uncanny’ paradox

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FIGURE 12.1 

T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm, The Eternal Frame 1975, installation view, Long Beach Museum of Art, 1975, left to right: Jody Procter, Chip Lord, Doug Hall

Courtesy Doug Hall

in that they bring back something that ‘is actually known but has been repressed, from whence it returns’ (p. 63). Thus, re-enactments and re-interpretations bring back something that is ‘new’ by means of repetition that relocates the past at the edge of the present—i.e. at the edge of, in Agamben’s words, ‘the unlived element in everything that is lived’ (Agamben 2009: 52). T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm’s The Eternal Frame (1975–2008) consisted of the restaging of the assassination of former US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) and demonstrated the role played by media in the reception of history. The Eternal Frame, a pun on ‘the eternal flame’ at the Arlington National Cemetery, JFK’s burial place (Lord 2015a), was the result of a collaboration between two San Francisco-based collectives: T. R. Uthco (1970–1978) and Ant Farm (1968–1978). The re-enactment can be seen as part of an installation, which consists of two sofas, a lamp, a television, a number of JFK mementoes, tapestries, postcards, wallpaper, carpet, sound, and the video, which shows the re-enactment and lasts approximately 24 minutes. This was originally shot in 1975 for an exhibition curated by David Ross at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1976. The work, which was then re-fabricated in 2008 as the 1976 original installation had not been preserved, consists of a small American living room decorated with 1960s furniture and wallpaper with a vintage TV, showing the company’s re-enactment of the JFK assassination.

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The re-enactment of the Kennedy assassination was based on the Abraham Zapruder film, a silent color film shot by Zapruder with a home-movie camera, which showed the assassination of the US president in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. An important instrument in the Warren Commission hearings, as well as in all subsequent investigations of the assassination, the Zapruder film was bought from him by Life magazine, which then ran still frame images on the cover the following week while the film itself, and its copies, were not seen by the public until the mid1970s. Chip Lord points out: ‘during the three days after the assassination, all three American TV networks broadcast non-stop coverage, news coverage, of the events as they unfolded, though the Zapruder film itself was not shown since Time-Life owned it’ (Lord 2015b; see also Sturken 1997). For Lord, this meant that JFK’s death was received as a media or ‘television event’, with particular frames from the original Zapruder film being reproduced time and again across channels and media (Lord 2015a). The artists succeeded in obtaining a bootlegged copy of the film that ‘had been copied so many times it had lost all its colour’ (Lord 2015a) and looked at this copy ‘over and over to choreograph the assassination sequence’ for the re-enactment (Hall 2015b). For Doug Hall, ‘it was still frames from the film that we first saw in Life’ that were used for the re-enactment, ‘so it is not so much television in and of itself but how media brought the image to a standstill—the frozen moment that reverberated on the pages of Life’ (Hall 2015b). By means of repetition, The Eternal Frame made visible this operation, showing the assassination as we recall it, as a media construction.

FIGURE 12.2 

T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm, The Eternal Frame 1975, production still, Dealey Plaza, Dallas

Photo by Diane Andrews Hall, courtesy of Doug Hall

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Lord recalls, ‘when we arrived in Dealey Plaza, it was 7 in the morning’ and the ‘crew had a lot of experience at shooting on the street’, which was useful, as the site was already crowded with bystanders who were there to pay homage to JFK, completely unaware that The Eternal Frame was about to be staged there (Lord 2015a). For Hall, the ‘repetitions at the site of the assassination [15 takes were shot at the time] mimicked the way the images repeated in the media. Our mimicry’, he pointed out, ‘functioned along the lines of what Gregory Bateson might have called a metalogue’ (Hall 2015a). In Bateson’s words, a metalogue is ‘a conversation about some problematic subject’ in which both the conversation and the structure of the conversation as a whole is ‘relevant to the same subject’ (Bateson 2000: 1). The proliferation of shots of the re-enactment of the assassination is integral to how the artists understood media as the relentless and pervasive machine of image production that is alluded to by the title of the work. At the center of the video, Lord notes, is in fact not only the re-enactment, but also the machinery of its ‘preparations, like having the makeup applied’, which is captured in the documentation. For Lord, the most interesting element of the video was the fact that ‘even though the re-enactment is a poor facsimile of the actual event, it’s still enough to generate genuine emotion and put people in that space of experiencing it again and again’ (Lord 2015a). The press at the time picked up on this. Merrill Schindler, art critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, noted that ‘[a]gain the motorcycles, the waves, the jerk forward then back, the figure hoisted on. Again. Then again. Then again, again, again’ (cited in Scott 2007: 283). I have already suggested that re-enactments and re-interpretations are not so much about the past, but rather about the present, or, to put it with Agamben, the ‘unlived’ in what is lived. What facilitates the act of presencing, of approaching the ‘unlived’ in the lived, is rendering the medium in the present. This is because in the presence of the medium, we don’t only see the construction of a given work, we also see its relations to other works. For Agamben, repetition is what prevents the medium, ‘an image, a word, or a colour’, from disappearing (Agamben 2002: 318). Curator Stuart Comer notes that The Eternal Frame constitutes ‘a critical examination of the role played by the media in the creation of historical spectacle and myth’ (Comer 2008). I would add that, precisely because of its use of repetition, the work points to the always re-mediated nature of the reception of history, that every telling is a re-telling. For Comer, ‘in the uncanny simulation of the Zapruder film’, the impersonations raise ‘questions about the veracity of the televised image’ so that ‘image and reality collide’. The fact that we witness the work from a domestic living room, he also notes, further highlights, in his words, ‘the collapse of public and private space and the fundamental role that television and the media image have assumed at the heart of American family life’ (Comer 2008, added emphasis). The appropriation of images, Zapruder’s of JFK’s death, Life magazine’s of Zapruder’s film, T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm’s of Life magazine stills from the film does not give us control over the images, but rather allows us to ‘nurture them in our own imagination’, so much so that a truth might emerge, in Lord’s words, precisely from their ‘re-staging’ (in Llewallen). In fact, while the re-enactment of the JFK assassination

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itself constituted a ‘poor facsimile’, it nevertheless produced ‘genuine emotions’ (Lord 2015a) precisely because it allowed for a collapse of image and reality, which, in its repetition, was also seen as a process of re-mediation. This suggests that the power of re-enactments and re-interpretations resides in the knowledge gained in posteriority of the role a medium played in an experience generated in anteriority. In The Eternal Frame, it is the repetition of the re-enactment that renders the medium, the frame, once again visible to the viewer, and it is knowledge gained in posteriority about the mediated quality of this anterior event that informs its possible preservation. History here is seen as it is produced through the present replication of the past mechanism that frames its future reception. We witness in this work not only a deflation of the here and now, but also its uncanny multiplication in time. The Eternal Frame repeatedly relocates a known past image as a re-mediated event taking place in the present, i.e. at the edge of, in Agamben’s words, ‘the unlived element in everything that is lived’ (Agamben 2009: 52). By bringing the past into what is as yet unlived, the work produces an uncanny return of what was known into what is as yet unknown, only that in doing so what was known is seen in the act of being re-interpreted, and so it is seen in a new light. Researchers have shown that re-enactments and re-interpretations produce distortions in scale, often generating hybrid environments in which art and life are seen to uncannily overlap. We have also seen how they can be used as framing

FIGURE 12.3 

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Signature of Roberta in Gallery Book, 1974

Courtesy Lynn Hershman Leeson

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concepts to generate present versions of a work in which the emphasis is not so much on the value of the past per se, but on its performative capacity to generate networks of relations that interconnect different works as well as different versions of a work, and in doing so bring a work into the present. We have also seen that re-enactments and re-interpretations make visible the medium of a work, and by doing so render visible the mechanism for its multiplication and, crucially in terms of the preservation of media arts, for its reception. In this last case study, I show how an artist has used re-interpretation as a strategy for multiplying her work, illustrating how re-enactments and re-interpretations produce environments within which it is possible to look at different versions of a work. The work is Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Roberta Breitmore (1972–1978), a time-based and hybrid work, comprising performance, video, photography, a graphic novel by Spain Rodriguez, a diary, and a number of documents, including a check, an x-ray, a driving license, and a psychiatric evaluation. Like other works by Hershman Leeson, Roberta Breitmore crossed the boundaries between art and life. For a period of four years, the artist embraced the role of Roberta Breitmore through the donning of a costume consisting of a wig and makeup, and the creation of a persona who had an identity and a physical embodiment consisting of ‘a set of individual gestures, needs and fears’ (Rötzer, cited in Schwartz and Shaw 1996: 136). For Hershman Leeson, Roberta was ‘the archetypal ego of a collective culture; a modern heroine who is a blend of persona and environment’ (cited in Gunn et al. 1997: 11). While Roberta was ‘live’, Hershman Leeson produced, by using surveillance technology, a number of documents that were intended, at the time, to provide the evidence that the work had occurred. Over time, she then modified these documents, by adding additional text or by drawing onto them. For Hershman Leeson, the persona of Roberta acted as some kind of cultural barometer and ‘reflected the values of her culture’ (Hershman Leeson n.d.). From these documents, we know that Roberta was born on August 19, 1945 and that she was educated at Kent State University, where she majored in English and where, in 1969, she married Arnold Marx. After three years of suburban marriage in Cleveland Heights, she divorced and, literally, came to life by moving to San Francisco on a Greyhound bus (Atkins n.d.) in 1972. This date marked an important moment as the first document pertaining to Roberta coincided with her arrival in San Francisco, where the performance started. Here, she checked into room 47 at the Hotel Dante (Tromble 2005: 25). As Roberta lived on, more and more documents testifying to the construction of her persona appeared. From these, we can trace the production of her ‘identity’. Roberta was subsequently involved in a series of social interactions. She picked up two credit cards, a driver’s licence, from which we can see she lived at 3007 Jackson Street, San Francisco, visited a dentist where she had some x-rays, interacted with a psychiatrist, rented an apartment, placed an advert in the San Francisco Progress and the San Diego Union & Evening Tribune to advertise for a roommate, and met with each respondent a number of times. Meetings were documented photographically and via a tape recorder, so that the people who replied to the advert became part of the work (Hershman Leeson 1996: 330).

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FIGURE 12.4 

Lynn Heshman Leeson, Roberta Psychiatric Chart, 1978

Courtesy Lynn Hershman Leeson

Eventually, Hershman Leeson engaged four additional women, the art historian Kristine Stiles, at first, and then subsequently Michelle Larsen and Helen Dannenberg, to re-enact Roberta. Stiles went out as Roberta with Hershman Leeson as herself because ‘there was a rumour about Roberta’ and Hershman Leeson wanted people to ‘think that she existed’ (cited in Hershman Leeson 2015). All performers wore wigs and costumes identical to the ones worn by Hershman Leeson when performing Roberta: ‘[e]ach had two home addresses and two jobs—one for Roberta and one for herself—and each corresponded with respondents to the advertisement and went on dates that were obsessively recorded in photographs and audiotapes’. All four Robertas existed simultaneously for a short time, until Hershman Leeson ceased performing as Roberta, leaving the three hired performers on their own (Tromble 2005: xviii). These four performing Robertas, Tate curator Kelli Dipple

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noted, ‘produced three complete editions of the Roberta Breitmore archive, in addition to one artist’s proof set, containing items from Hershman’s personal rendition of the character’; ‘each archive’, she added, ‘consists of around 300 individual photographs, documents and artifacts’ (Dipple n.d. a). In 1978, an exhibition of Roberta’s artifacts entitled Lynn Hershman Is Not Roberta Breitmore/Roberta Breitmore Is Not Lynn Hershman was presented at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, during which a Roberta lookalike contest was run, which led to further re-enactments and multiplications of Robertas. Roberta was finally exorcised in a 1978 performance at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. Subsequently, she was re-interpreted as CybeRoberta (1995–1998), who was dressed identically to Roberta, and whose fictional persona was, in Hershman Leeson’s words, ‘designed as an updated Roberta’ (Hershman Leeson 1996: 336). Additionally, Roberta appeared as a bot in the Second Life remake of The Dante Hotel, another work by the artist taking place in the hotel where Roberta Breitmore started, called Life to the Second Power (2007–), which turned parts of the Hershman Leeson archive at Stanford Libraries into a dynamic mixed reality experience where visitors could explore digital reproductions of Stanford archive under Roberta’s guidance in a re-fabricated Dante Hotel room in Second Life. Roberta also appeared as the addressee of a series of postcards from celebrities and political leaders, including Hilary Clinton (1992) and Tipper Gore (1996). Moira Roth noted that Roberta ‘was about process, change and transformation [ . . . ]’ (Roth n.d.). Although she may have originated as performance, she subsequently became other media (film, photography, graphic novel, text, painting). These other media formed an environment, producing an ecology of relationships between sites and people that continued over the years. Each of these works, by reproducing a part, re-activates aspects of the whole environment. Seen in isolation, each one of them is a punctum, or, to put it with Roland Barthes, a ‘detail’ (Barthes 2000: 43) that has ‘a power of expansion’ (p. 45), generating a presence that has to do with a ‘perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live’ (p. 79). Each one of them draws attention not so much to ‘what is no longer’, but to ‘what has been’ (p. 85), to what persists in the present and what invariably implicates us too within the hybrid network of inter-documents (to use Suzanne Briet’s term [Briet 2006]) that is Roberta Breitmore. For Dipple, Roberta Breitmore ‘confounds any simplistic understanding of the performance as “primary” and its documentation as “secondary”’ (Dipple n.d. a). Each of these documents, edited, re-edited, combined with others, grouped in editions, operates as a part to a whole forming a perspective within a broader ‘body’ of this work. It is therefore not surprising that in an email to Frances Morris dated July 9, 2009, Dipple noted: due to the nature of the project I was unable to settle on the best way to annotate the individual vs. collective work. I started with the Roberta Construction Chart # 1 vintage print, but found that most explanation of the artwork was indeed an explanation of the entire project of Roberta Breitmore. (Dipple n.d. b)

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In fact, Hershman Leeson ‘set up the structure’, a ‘skeleton’ to create Roberta’s ‘sociological and educational background and then whatever happened happened’ in a series of ongoing acts of re-interpretation between herself and the public. ‘Constantly accumulating’, these documents re-formed, in Hershman Leeson’s words, the ‘liveness that continues’. For her, even now, Roberta Breitmore is in fact an ‘infinity loop that doesn’t ever finish’ (cited in Hershman Leeson 2015). Arguably, Roberta Brietmore is the media that produced a number of interrelated works. Roberta Breitmore is both the parts—the embodiments of a role, the individual documents that point to different social, medical, and legal testimonies that society at large recognized that role—and the whole, i.e. the performance, its collected documentation and re-enactments, and even its reception over time. Here, too, like in The Eternal Frame, we are made constantly aware of the medium that frames our identity as part of society at large, and in doing so, again and again, renders this process of mediation visible, thus re-forming everyday life as part of art itself. We have seen that by looking at the practice of repetition, we may understand more precisely what happens during a re-enactment or a re-interpretation. In his study of Samuel Beckett and repetition, Steven Connor states that ‘repetition must always depend on some thing or idea which is by definition pre-existing, autonomous and self-identical’ (Connor 1988: 3). He then argues that not only is repetition dependent on originality, but also originality ‘can never be apprehended as such unless the possibility exists for it to be copied or reiterated’ (p. 3), making repetition the place where difference confirms identity (p. 6). I have also shown that Agamben suggests that repetition is what prevents the medium from disappearing (Agamben 2002). In writing about the use of repetition in Guy Debord’s work, Agamben suggests that repetition paradoxically both ‘restores the possibility of what was’ and ‘renders it possible anew’ (p. 316). For him, ‘the current concept of expression is dominated by the Hegelian model, in which all expression is realized by a medium—an image, a word, or a color—which in the end must disappear in the fully realized expression’. Hence, Agamben suggests, ‘the expressive act is fulfilled when the means, the medium, is no longer perceived as such’. The medium disappears ‘in that which it gives us to see’. However, he notes: the image worked by repetition and stoppage is a means, a medium, that does not disappear in what it makes visible. It is what I would call a ‘pure means’, one that shows itself as such. The image gives itself to be seen instead of disappearing in what it makes visible. (p. 318) In Agamben’s words, repetition: restores the possibility of what was, renders it possible anew; it’s almost a paradox. To repeat something is to make it possible anew. Here lies the proximity of repetition and memory. Memory cannot give us back what was: that would be hell. Instead, memory restores possibility to the past. (p. 316)

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Through re-enactments and re-interpretations, the medium used becomes ‘more’ visible. It appears as an excess. This uncanny return of the possibility of the past in the present as an excess of the medium is what makes such practices interesting cases for preservation—they challenge convention notions of what it is we need to be preserving. The explanation of this lays not so much in repetition’s ontology, but in its role as an epistemological strategy. Re-enactment and re-interpretation occupy a privileged position within other repetitive forms in that they offer another version, or unfolding, of a work: a past possibility of a work that we can only see in the present, as the yet unlived becoming live(d) because of its re-interpretation and re-enactment. Performance and documentation should not be looked at as a chronological progression on a linear timeline, but as a series of folds. The preservation of an aspect of this fold, say a specific version of a work, will not help us in understanding what is happening between the folds. This is because in the fold, Deleuze tells us, the ‘inside’ space ‘is topologically in contact with the “outside” space’, bringing the two, inside and outside, ‘into confrontation at the limit of the living present’ (Deleuze 2000: 118–19). For Deleuze, to perceive means to unfold, something that can only occur ‘within the folds’ (Deleuze 1993: 93). To unwrap a document into performance, and vice versa, make a document out of performance, through acts of re-interpretation and re-enactment, means unfolding one into the other. This brings us into direct contact with that topology where inside and outside meet. Re-enactments and re-interpretations are our methods to perceive what is between the folds, what is ‘at the limit of the living present’. This is why re-enactments form an ‘appropriate’ preservation strategy, for the facilitation of ‘the circulation of a work within its context of origin again, as performance and through encounters with a new generation of spectators’ (Clarke, cited in Borggreen and Gade 2013: 373, original emphasis). But this is also why re-enactments ‘unlock, release, and actualize a work’s many (virtual) com- and incompossibilties’ (Lepecki 2010: 31). Moreover, this is why re-interpretations were described, in the context of digital preservation, as ‘the most radical preservation strategy’ (Depocas et al. 2003: 128). Both produce a topological paradox between past and future versions of a work, and in doing so place their viewer, as witness of an act of transformation of a work that occurs at the very edge of their own presence, of what is as yet unlived, of our ‘living present’ (Deleuze 2000: 19). These re-enactments and re-interpretations of art then draw our attention not only to ‘those best moments’ of a work that had become lost in taking the work further (Bacon, cited in Silvester 1980: 158), but also to what we ourselves do not yet know about the possible past of a work in our present.

Works cited Agamben, G. (2002) ‘Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films’, trans. B. Holmes, in T. McDonough (ed.), Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 313–19. Agamben, G. (2009 [2006]) What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. D. Kishik and S. Pedatella, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Alÿs, F. (2004) ‘La Cour des Miracles: Francis Alÿs in Conversation with Corinne Diserens – Mexico City, 25 May 2004,’ in Walking Distance from the Studio, OstfildernRuit: Hatje Cantz, pp. 93–5. Anonymous (2006) ‘VALIE EXPORT’, Genital Panic, Acquisition File, PC 10.4 2006, Tate Archive. Arns, I. and Horn, G. (2008) History Will Repeat Itself, Dortmund: Hartware Medien Kunstverein and Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Askey, R. (1981) ‘VALIE EXPORT Interviewed by Ruth Askey in Vienna 9/18/79’, High Performance, 4(1), Spring: 14–19. Atkins, R. (n.d.) ‘Who Is Roberta Breitmore? And What Is She Doing to the Arts?’ Box 33. Lynn Hershman papers, M452, BOX 24. Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California. Bangma, A., Rushton, S., and Wüst, F. (2005) Experience, Memory, Re-Enactment, Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute. Barthes, R. (2000 [1981]) Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard, London: Vintage Classics. Bateson, G. (2000 [1972]) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Borggreen, G. and Gade, R. (eds) (2013) Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Briet, S. (2006 [1951]) What Is Documentation?, trans. E. Day, L. Martinet and H. G. B. Anghelescu, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Collingwood, R. G. (1994) The Idea of History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Comer, S. (2008) The Eternal Frame, 1975–1976, refabricated 2008, 2010, available at: www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/t-r-uthco-doug-hall-born-1944-ant-farm-chip-lordthe-eternal-frame-t13850 (accessed July 7, 2016). Connor, S. (1988) Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, Oxford: Blackwell. Deleuze, G. (1993) The Fold, trans. T. Conley, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. (2000) Foucault, trans. S. Hand, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Depocas, A., Ippolito, J., and Jones, C. (eds) (2003) The Variable Media Approach, Performance through Change, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Dipple, K. (n.d. a) ‘Reasons for Acquiring’, Lynn Hershman Leeson, PC 10.4, A31490, Tate Archive. Dipple, K. (n.d. b) ‘Lynn Heshman Leeson Notes’, email to Frances Morris, July 9, 2009, PC 10.4, A31490, Tate Archive. Fore, D. (2012) ‘VALIE EXPORT’, Interview, October 9, 2012, available at: www. interviewmagazine.com/art/valie-export#page2 (accessed April 29, 2016). Giannachi, G. (2016) Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gunn, G., Rogers, M., and Rubbo, K. (1977) Lynn Hershman Dream Weekend: A Project for Australia, Victoria, Australia: The Ewing and George Paton Galleries in conjunction with the Exhibition Gallery, Monash University. Hall, D. (2015a) Email note to Gabriella Giannachi, November 2, 2015, private archive. Hall, D. (2015b) Email note to Gabriella Giannachi, November 3, 2015, private archive. Hershman Leeson, L. (n.d.) Papers, M452, BOX 19. Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California. Hershman Leeson, L. (ed.) (1996) Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Hershman Leeson, L. (2015) Interview with Gabriella Giannachi, August 19, 2015, private archive.

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Jakovljević, B. (2011) ‘On Performance Forensics: The Political Economy of Reenactments’, Art Journal, 70(3): 50–4. Jones, A. (2011) ‘“The Artist Is Present”: Artistic Re-Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence’, The Drama Review, 55(1): 16–45. Krauss, R. (1986) The Originality of the Avante-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, available at: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/kraussoriginality.pdf (accessed January 6, 2017). Lepecki, A. (2010) ‘The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances’, Dance Research Journal, 42(2): 28–48. Lord, C. (2015a) Interviewed by Gabriella Giannachi in San Francisco on August 25, 2015, private archive. Lord, C. (2015b) Email note to Gabriella Giannachi, November 2, 2015, private archive. Lütticken, S., Allen, J., and Phelan, P. (eds) (2005) Life, Once More: Forms of Re-Enactment in Contemporary Art, Rotterdam: Witte de With. Lyver-Harris, E. R. (2015) ‘Performing the Document in Francis Alÿs’s Re-Enactments (2001)’, Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, available at: http://ivc. lib.rochester.edu/performing-the-document-in-francis-alyss-re-enactments-2001/, (accessed June 10, 2016). McQuay, M.-A. (2005) Walking after Acconci, available at: http://iainandjane.com/press/ walkingafteracconci/index.shtml (accessed June 28, 2016). Roth, R. (n.d.) ‘Leaping the Fence: An Introduction to the Work of Lynn Hershman’, Lynn Hershman Leeson papers, M452, BOX 19. Department Of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California. Santone, J. (2008) ‘Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation Strategies for Preserving Art’s History’, Leonardo, 41(2): 147–52. Schwartz, H. (1996) The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likeness, Unreasonable Facsimilies, New York: Zone Books. Schwartz, H. P. and Shaw, J. (eds) (1996) Perspektive der Medienkunst, Cants: Heinrich Klotz. Scott, F. D. (2007) Living Archive 7. Ant Farm: Allegorical Time Warp: The Media Fallout of July 21, 1969, Barcelona and New York: Actar Publishers. Shanks, M. (2012) The Archaeological Imagination, London and New York: Routledge. Silvester, D. (1980 [1975]) Interview with Francis Bacon, London and New York: Thames & Hudson. Spector, N., Fischer-Lichte, E., Umathum, S., and Abramović, M. (2007) Seven Easy Pieces, Milan: Edizioni Charta. Stiles, K. (1999) ‘Corpora Vilia. VALIE EXPORT’s Body’, in Ob/De+Con(Struction), Philadelphia, PA: Moore College of Art and Design, pp. 17–33. Sturken, M. (1997) Tangled Memories, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tromble, M. (2005) (ed.) The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Widrich, M. (2008) ‘Can Photographs Make It So? Several Outbreaks of VALIE EXPORT’S Genital Panic 1969–2005’, in H. van Gelder and H. Westgeest (eds), Photography between Poetry and Politics, Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 53–67.

13 DOCUMENTING INTERACTION Katja Kwastek

Challenges of documenting interaction This chapter is devoted to questions of documenting interactive media art, i.e. artworks that require the active involvement of the recipient, and which comprise electronic or digital feedback processes. However, many of the observations made also hold for interactive art that does not use electronics or digital media, and which is often described as participatory. Both interactive media art and participatory art rely on action, and, we could argue, on performance, although this performance is required by the visitor, not by the artist.

Interactive art It is a commonplace that interactive art places the action of the recipient at the heart of its aesthetics. It is the recipient’s activity that gives form and presence to the interactive artwork, and the recipient’s activity is also the primary source of her or his aesthetic experience. Accordingly, the main challenge of documenting interactive artworks is to find ways to record aesthetic experience. Even though interactive art depends on action, there are crucial differences between this genre and (other) performative practices. In performance art, recipients usually remain in the role of viewers, whereas in action art and happenings, they are often invited to join in the action of the artist(s). In both performance art and action art, whether or not recipients remain passive or become physically active, the actual co-presence of artist (or instructed performer) and recipient is usually required for the realization of the work, which is conceived as an event experienced jointly by the artist and the audience. Interactive art, by contrast, is usually based upon an action proposition that has been created beforehand, making the artist’s presence during the interaction process itself unnecessary. Such an action proposition is an artifactual system or

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entity, which exists as a material or coded interaction offer, independent from its actual realization by the visitor. This is why it can be presented in the context of an exhibition, as opposed to a scheduled performance. This is also why it can age, and turn into a historic ‘work of art’, just as a work of visual art can.

Documentation versus preservation We could argue that this artifactual system can be preserved like art objects, while its performative realization can only be documented, as is the case for performance art. However, the situation turns out to be more complex. First, artists often revise their work over the years, so that we are faced with a work in progress that goes or has gone through various versions. Second, even if we can take a specific artifactual version for ‘the work’, often its reliance on specific hardware and software components makes a long-term preservation barely possible. In such cases, a detailed documentation of the workings of a project has to be created, in order not only to keep track of prior versions, but also to be able to migrate, emulate, or reconstruct technical processes if necessary (see also Noordegraaf et al. 2013). Preservation is thus highly dependent on documentation, concerning the technological workings of interactive media art. On the other hand, when it comes to the documentation of interactive media art’s performative realization—which will be the main focus of this chapter—we have to question if a mere documentation of an exemplary interaction process can actually do justice to the works’ focus on individual aesthetic experience.

The first-person paradigm There is one principle that justifiably can be considered an unwritten law of studies of interactive media art—at least as regards the frequency and vehemence with which it has been expressed by scholars in the field: ‘Never write about a work that you have not experienced yourself’! Scholars have been describing artworks on the basis of their own perceptions for centuries, and this practice has seldom been called into question. But the above imperative of personal experience of interactive art refers not only to individual access to the work, but also and especially to the need for an active, embodied realization. It demands that the scholar should experience the interaction process in person, rather than only observing it. However, this requirement has turned out problematic for two reasons—one practical, the other methodological. First of all, as time passes, older interactive media artworks become less available for personal experience. Interactive media art, already today, looks back on more than 60 years of history. Usually, interactive projects have been exhibited only briefly, often in the context of a festival. Most of the interactive artworks that have ever been created are thus not installed anywhere today, if they still exist in any functional form at all. If we were to take the premise above to the letter, works that are no longer accessible would become foreclosed as objects of study. If we

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want to foster an art history of interactive media art, however, we have to accept that documentation is often the only means through which we can still learn about corresponding works from the past. The second, methodological problem with the above premise even holds for works that are (still) accessible for a first-person experience. It concerns the challenges of personal involvement: interactive art’s foundation on the physical activity of the recipient contradicts a fundamental condition to which the possibility of aesthetic experience of any art form is often linked: that of aesthetic distance. According to this theory, the aesthetic object is constituted only in the contemplative act of the viewer. Hans Robert Jauss, a pioneer of reader-response criticism, maintains that ‘aesthetic pleasure differs from simple sensuous pleasure by means of the differentiation of the ego and the object, or the aesthetic distance’ (Jauss 1982: 31). As argued above, however, in interactive art, we are not faced with an artistic offering that requires straightforward observation; rather, the aesthetic object must first be made accessible through the action of the recipient before any act of contemplation (or reflection) is possible. Does first-person experience of interactive art thus go at the expense of aesthetic distance, which would be guaranteed, by contrast, if the researcher were to consult good-quality documentation or simply observe other recipients? The anthropologist Colin Turnbull argues that liminal phenomena—such as threshold situations between different states of consciousness in ritual behaviors—cannot be studied objectively and must be experienced through participation (cited in Carlson 2004: 25). The ethnologist Dwight Conquergood distinguishes five possible research attitudes in ethnographic studies, of which he criticizes the ‘archivist’, the ‘skeptic’, and the ‘curator’ as too distant. But he sees excessively enthusiastic identification as equally misguided because it fails to do justice to the complexity of cultural differences. Conquergood calls instead for a dialogical approach that seeks to bring different opinions, worldviews, and value systems together in a single conversation (Conquergood 1985). According to these arguments, we thus have to formulate a second premise for the documentation of interactive art: ‘Never write about a work only on the basis of your own experience!’ Instead, the goal should be a dialogical approach, in the sense of allowing different (descriptive, interpretive) voices to support an—actually or metaphorically—dialogical analysis, including the possibility of establishing a dialogue across time, accommodating potential historical changes in reception. This premise thus emphasizes the value both of any form of historical documentation material and of intentionally created, multi-perspectival documentation that records experiences of a broad array of recipients. In the following, I will look back on the history of documenting interactive art, with special attention to research projects I have been involved in myself. Working through some exemplary cases, I will trace some historical developments in the creation of documentary material—whether conscious or accidental—and question how far they meet the above-mentioned challenges. In doing so, special attention will be devoted to questions of documenting the aesthetics of interaction, which form one of my specific research fields (see Kwastek 2010b, 2013).1 While it is not the main

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goal of this chapter, it will also become clear how different documentation media and genres (visual documentation, textual description, metadata) speak to different approaches to documentation.

From video recordings to documentary collections Video recordings and festival submissions When it comes to historical documentation materials of actual interaction processes, video documentation is the closest we can get. Documentary tapes exist from early interactive performances such as Nine Evenings (New York, 1966), interactive multimedia environments such as the Pepsi Pavilion (Osaka, 1970), or cybernetic sculptures such as Edward Ihnatowicz’s Senster (1970).2 However, such early filmic documentations are rare and usually only exist for projects that received considerable institutional support. From around 1990 on, though, in the context of the growing number of media art festivals, a new genre of documentation emerged, which we might want to describe as promotional documentation. As an example, in 1991, the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz (Austria) introduced ‘interactive art’ as a new category of the Prix Ars Electronica. While the main intent behind introducing this new category was to give interactive media art increased visibility, the specific setup of the competition also led to the important side effect of a growing archive of documentations.3 To participate in the competition, artists had to submit documentation of a work. Along with technical drawings, photographs, and textual description, these files very often contain video documentation. As some works were not fully completed when submitted, the material occasionally also contains plans, concepts, and videos of working prototypes. Their specific purpose makes these documentations both highly interesting and highly problematic. While they offer in-depth information about technical details, artistic intentions, and often also actual workings, they are usually focused on some exemplary interaction—executed by the artist or by an instructed person—in order to represent the piece as it unfolds in the ideal vision of the artist. Nevertheless, the material offers an unprecedented and broad collection of documentation material, ranging from the early 1990s to today.

Documentary classification: from the instrumental to the experiential Next to visual reproductions and textual descriptions, art historians traditionally offer some classificatory metadata to accompany catalogue entries or collection inventories. However, such metadata are usually rather technical in nature, dealing with material, size, and technology of the work in question. The same goes for the above-mentioned festival submissions. While they often included some textual description, classification by means of metadata was quite limited. In the early entry forms, artists were asked mainly to provide some technical specifications

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concerning hardware and software, but there was no common ground as to how to describe the processual or aesthetic parameters of a work. This is the reason why, in the 2000s, several initiatives sought to develop a documentation model that would better represent the processuality of such work (see also Dekker 2013). For example, in the early 2000s, scholars and curators in the US and Canada joined forces in the Variable Media Network to develop a descriptive model for artworks, focusing on the special characteristics of ephemeral, time-based, and media-based works. Their taxonomy identifies the following general types: ‘contained’, ‘installed’, ‘performed’, ‘interactive’, ‘reproduced’, ‘duplicated’, ‘encoded’, and ‘networked’. Within these broader terms, narrower designations apply. Interactive artworks are described among others concerning input media and interaction partners (Rinehart 2004; Variable Media Network 2004). The project Capturing Unstable Media, conducted by the V2 Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam in 2003 and 2004, had an even stronger focus on the description of interaction processes. They proposed to record whether a work is time-flexible (such as exhibited or online works) or whether it has to be scheduled at certain times (such as performances). Furthermore, the minimum/maximum number of users was to be specified, as well as the sensory modes of the project: ‘visual’, ‘auditory’, ‘olfactory’, ‘tactile’, ‘gustative’. They also suggested distinguishing several interaction levels: ‘observational’, ‘navigational’, ‘participatory’, ‘co-authoring’, and ‘intercommunication’ (V2 Organisation 2003: 16). This suggestion followed a common tendency to classify interaction processes according to degrees, measured by face-to-face communication. Already in the 1970s, Stroud Cornock and Ernest Edmonds had suggested distinguishing between static and dynamic art systems, with the latter divided into kinds of dynamism (depending on environmental variables): ‘reciprocal systems’ (treating the spectators as environment, with responses through time), ‘participatory systems’ (focusing on the interpersonal reactions of a group of participants to a situation specified as a matrix), and ‘interactive systems’ (offering a mutual exchange between man and machine, elaborately related on either side of an interface) (cited in Graham 1997: 39). Beryl Graham, in her 1997 thesis on audience experiences with interactive artworks, modified this taxonomy using a metaphor of conversation, but sticking to the idea of the ‘real conversation’ as the highest degree of interaction, ‘a category which is a possibly unobtainable end point but remains as a possible future aim’ (Graham 1997: 10; see also Lister et al. 2003: 21f.). However, assessing interactive art by a comparison with direct communication disregards the fact that the choice of a mediating technology for an artwork is a deliberate one. The objective of interactive media art often is precisely to uncover and reflect the specific constraints of interaction brought about by new media, as opposed to making them as transparent as possible. Categories intended to characterize the interactive potential of artworks should therefore identify and denominate their processual structures and experiential potentials, irrespective of an assumed hierarchy. However, classification approaches trying to accommodate the experiential intentions and effects of a work were rare in the past. An interesting exception was presented by French

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media artist Jean-Louis Boissier in 2004. He described how, in the course of his own artistic work, he was able to identify certain ‘figures of interaction’. He distinguished between figures that are generated from internal structures and those that describe attitudes of recipients. The internal figures he identified are ‘forking’, ‘break/interruption’, ‘change’, and ‘transfer’. The recipients, according to Boissier, may conduct actions of ‘comparison’, ‘description’, ‘distancing’, and ‘empowerment’ (Boissier 2004). Though his categories were strongly linked to his own screen-based works, the advantages of describing aesthetic characteristics by means of verbs instead of nouns are obvious: whereas a noun may be suitable for naming a process, it leaves open the question of its directionality. A verb, on the other hand, demands a specification of the subject of the process—whence it derives and whither it is directed. The noun ‘observation’, for example, leaves open whether the work is meant to observe the viewer, or vice versa. Instead, the formulation ‘the visitor can observe’ specifies the direction of interaction. This approach finds its theoretical parallel in the writings of media theorist Dieter Mersch, who argues that ‘verbs remove the static properties of nouns and liquidate their identity in direction of the non-identic’ (Mersch 2002: 249). He further argues that the transformation from noun to verb breaks with the traditional ontology of art and moves aesthetics from an analysis of objects to an analysis of processes (p. 250). In a research project conducted in 2008 and 2009 at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research and aimed at retroactively enriching the abovementioned material of the Ars Electronica Archive with metadata, we therefore included categories offering verbal descriptions (see also Kwastek 2010b). We suggested describing whether the ‘visitor/performer does’ ‘observe’, ‘explore’, ‘activate’, ‘control’, ‘select’, ‘navigate’, ‘participate’, ‘leave traces’, ‘store something’, or ‘exchange information’. The work, on the other hand, could be specified as ‘telling’ or ‘narrating’ something, ‘documenting’ or ‘informing’, ‘visualizing’ or ‘sonifying’, as built to ‘enhance perception’ or to ‘offer a game’, to ‘monitor’ something or to ‘serve as an instrument’, to ‘transform’, to ‘collect’ or ‘store’, to ‘process’ or ‘mediate’. While we were confident of having contributed to a better differentiation of interaction processes concerning their aesthetic potential, the resulting taxonomy was still the product of one restricted group of researchers. Though we had worked through a collaborative process, as a group of specialists we nevertheless could not do full justice to the idea of allowing for multiple voices to dialogically contribute to a documentation of interactive art. Therefore, after having retrospectively classified approximately 350 projects documented in the Ars Electronica archives, the resulting taxonomy was integrated into the online submission tool in 2008, inviting applicants to directly apply it to their works during the submission process. Of course, the fact that the indexing process is related to a competitive submission process may lead to special indexing strategies—users may try to open up a spectrum as broad as possible or emphasize aspects that they consider especially innovative or befitting a particular competition. Nevertheless, we considered their perspective on their work at least as valuable as ours. In 2008, 312 out of 393

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FIGURE 13.1 

 axonomy developed at Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research T for winners of Prix Ars Electronica Interactive Art

Screenshot: author

entries were indexed by the artists. To a great extent, they kept to the keywords suggested in the form. Those keywords that have been newly added by the users in describing their own works can be divided into: (a) terms that existed in the taxonomy anyway, but were subsumed under another broader term; (b) detailed work descriptions; (c) terms that had been consciously avoided in our suggestions as they appeared too broad (e.g. play, interact); (d) ‘counter-terms’ that ironically comment on the taxonomy (e.g. ‘de-enhance perception’ as opposed to ‘enhance perception’, or ‘high-tech’ as opposed to ‘low-tech’); and (e) complementing, fitting terms. New notions were, for example: the visitor does ‘learn’, ‘experience’, ‘archive’, ‘search’, or ‘subvert’. The taxonomy was not intended to determine a fixed set of normative categories. Rather, it provides an extendible but still comprehensive vocabulary that helps to differentiate between the various types, strategies and intentions of interactive processes and artworks. In its attempt to develop a diversified language and to identify possible perspectives of interpretation, such a taxonomy can significantly improve the documentation of interactive art. Allowing for artists and scientists to collaboratively elaborate a classification system over time seemed to us a promising way to proceed. Nevertheless, we were fully aware of the shortcomings of any classificatory system once it comes to the challenge of doing justice to each and every individual project. While taxonomies are an important tool for developing specific terminologies, charting new fields of research and viewing works of art in a comparative context, they will always remain generalizing. In the end, the claim for dialogical and multi-perspectival documentation made at the beginning of this chapter can only be accommodated by means of extensive case studies, for which interesting models have been developed in the course of the 2000s.

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‘Real’ vs. ‘ideal’: from artist interview to documentary collection Case studies already constituted a key element of the approach of the abovementioned Variable Media Network. They implemented a strong focus on the artist as provider of information and developed a specific questionnaire aimed to help document the work as closely as possible in terms of the artist’s intention (Depocas et al. 2003). The Variable Media Network thus already chose a dialogical approach, which was, however, restricted to a dialogue between curators and artists, excluding general audience experiences. But how can those other voices be accommodated? The answer to this question will differ depending on the context of the documentation. What might be beneficial to a sociological approach will not necessarily be meaningful at all in a study with an aesthetic focus. Sociologists of art are usually interested in knowing what share of the visitors to an exhibition of interactive art are willing to interact with a work at all, or—as a subsequent step—willing to take the time to explore a work in more detail. But such (quantitative) knowledge is less relevant for an aesthetic study. The relevance of statistical surveys is also question­able when it comes to the interactions that take place. Though reception experiences or interpretations may be considered more significant when they are supported by a representative number of similar reports, individual ‘original’ interpretations or experiences might be considered particularly interesting. Also, recipients can, of course, behave entirely differently than the artist expected them to—a spectrum of such behaviors exists, ranging from ignoring the invitation to interact to attempts to destroy the work. However, as John Dewey and, more recently, Martin Seel have pointed out, an aesthetic experience requires a certain degree of willingness to enter into the experience itself, as well as the readiness to consciously reflect and comment on one’s own behavior (Dewey 1934: 113; Seel 2005: 90–6). Taking such considerations into account, Lizzie Muller and Caitlin Jones, two scholars from Australia and Canada, respectively, developed a highly effective methodology of documenting interactive media art during a parallel fellowship at the Daniel Langlois Foundation in 2007. While Jones was one of the key figures behind the Variable Media Questionnaire described above, Muller has a background in artistic practice and audience research. They emphasize the fact that they were working with a productive tension between their two approaches: whilst Caitlin’s approach sought to identify an ‘ideal’ form for the work through an exploration of a work’s ‘medium independent’ qualities, Lizzie’s approach emphasized the ‘real’ experiences, which were often very far from the expected or desired description given by the artist. ( Jones and Muller 2008: 2) They ended up creating what they call ‘documentary collections’, combining an artist interview with extensive audience research, complemented by technical drawings, exhibition photographs, or textual descriptions, ideally documenting various versions and exhibitions of the work over time. For the audience interviews,

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FIGURE 13.2 

Setup for VCR interviews at Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, 2009

Photo: author

they used a method they named video-cued recall (VCR). In VCR, recipients are filmed during the interaction and subsequently asked to comment on their actions and perceptions while watching the video recording of themselves interacting with the work. This commentary is then registered as a voice-over of the actual interaction documentation. An in-depth interview with the recipients is carried out only after this procedure (Muller 2008). Jones and Muller conducted their first case study with David Rokeby’s Giver of Names when it was exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2007 (Jones and Muller 2008). In 2009, the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research invited them to collaborate on creating further documentary collections in the context of an exhibition entitled See This Sound held in 2009/10 in the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz (Jones and Muller 2010; Kwastek 2010a). In what follows, the two selected case studies—another work by David Rokeby and a work by the artist collective Tmema—will be described in more detail in order to demonstrate the potential of this approach, especially for a closer documentation of the specific aesthetics of interactive art.

Rokeby’s Very Nervous System Canadian artist David Rokeby’s interactive environment, Very Nervous System (since 1983), is a complex system for interaction between human motion and sound.

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Visitors who enter Very Nervous System encounter an empty, silent space. As soon as they move, however, they hear sounds—either the timbres of different musical instruments or everyday noises such as human breathing or gurgling water. The system records the visitors’ movements via video camera, analyzes them digitally, and responds to them by emitting sequences of sound. Since its creation in the 1980s, the system has been modified several times. It has been exhibited internationally on numerous occasions at various venues. In 1991, it won an Award of Distinction for Interactive Art at the Prix Ars Electronica. Early video documentation of the project, including the 1991 Prix Ars Electronica submission, exclusively shows the artist himself or a hired performer interacting with the system. In a 1998 interview, Rokeby himself admits the pitfalls of mainly having used himself to activate the work at first. He recalls that, at the first public presentation of Very Nervous System, he was astonished to see the system reacting only weakly to the actions of the recipients. It was only by then that he realized that because he had only ever tested the system himself, he had internalized certain sequences of movements and then configured the system to react to these specific actions (Rokeby 1998: 31). This anecdote shows that, even in the production phase of a work, the analysis of actual interactions by various visitors can be of great value. While it supports the artist in further developing his or her work, its documentation allows for the researcher to obtain a differentiated picture of actual interaction processes. As illustrated below, the method developed by Jones and Muller does not only encourage and document a dialogue of the researcher with various audience members. By including an extensive artist interview (and any further textual or visual material available) into the documentary collection, it allows for a differentiated comparative analysis of artistic intentions and visitor interactions. Some of the participants interviewed in Linz recounted that they were initially surprised not to find any objects or visual compositions in the room. However, most of them quickly began to explore the work by moving around the room, trying to understand its spatial limits and the structure of the sound. One participant explicitly stated that she had been trying to ‘find’ sounds (interview with Birgitt, cited in Jones and Muller 2010). This goes in line with Rokeby describing interaction as a spatial

FIGURE 13.3 

David Rokeby, Very Nervous System (since 1983), visitor interactions at Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, 2009

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acting out when he describes the work’s radius of action as having a sculptural presence (interview with Rokeby, cited in Jones and Muller 2010: Question 6). Also, the willingness to engage intensively in exploring the relationship between different movements and their effects varied greatly from one person to the next. Many recipients were more comfortable exploring the sounds by moving through space than by specifically moving individual body parts. Such movements were mostly limited to swaying back and forth, crouching down, or carefully raising one’s hands. Other recipients, one of whom was a theremin player, explicitly experimented with moving individual limbs. One visitor explained in detail that not only had he wanted to explore the boundaries of the interaction space, but he was also trying to find out which movements created which sounds, and trying to reproduce the same sounds again and to deliberately trigger individual sounds (VCR with Markus, cited in Jones and Muller 2010). Rokeby emphasizes that his interest in interactivity is not focused on straightforward and intellectually comprehensible control of processes. His aim is to create a system based on intuitive bodily actions in order to challenge the image of the computer as a logical machine with no connection to the body. He is interested not in control, but in resonance; not in power, but in the recipient and the system adjusting to one another. Rokeby uses the word resonance to emphasize the way that the recipients’ actions can take place unconsciously.

FIGURE 13.4 

David Rokeby, Very Nervous System (since 1983), documentary collection, 2009, available at: www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page. php?NumPage=2186

Screenshot: author

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As soon as recipients allow themselves to react spontaneously to the sounds of the system, the sounds are ‘played by the installation [. . .] allowing the music of the system to speak back through one’s body directly, involving a minimum of mental reflection’ (Rokeby 1990). Two of the participants in the research project pointed out that it was not really possible to control the work. Nonetheless, neither of them, contrary to the artist’s intention, seems to have entirely abandoned herself to this situation. They simply limited themselves to further exploring the functioning of the system. One of the two described her attitude toward the installation as intellectual, as opposed to a potentially more emotional approach (VCR with Susanna, cited in Jones and Muller 2010). Another visitor also tried to investigate how the installation responded to her, but entirely ignored its technical workings. However, it was also clear from the interview of the latter visitor that understanding the work was not important to her. She actually experienced the interaction as at least a potential resonance with the system: ‘I didn’t quite find out whether the sounds wanted to make me move or not, but it was more enjoyable all the time’ (VCR with Birgitt, cited in Jones and Muller 2010). At another point, she described how her own movements merged with the sounds of the system, speaking of a sense of abandoning herself to the sounds. Other participants compared their enjoyment of the interaction with that of a child trying out a new toy; still others described the meditative effect of the installation, which they said had made them slow down.4 The collected material provides many more examples of the various ways in which recipients of interactive art can oscillate between reflection and immersion (see Kwastek 2013), and of different ways of verbalizing the associated aesthetic experiences. Especially in comparison with the expressed intention of the artist, such statements are highly valuable to come to a better understanding of both the actual visitor performance within such environments and the visitor’s understanding and perception of their own experience. In this case, the various visitor reactions clearly illustrate that while the artwork was able to trigger reflections about the ambivalence between control and resonance (as aimed at by the artist) in nearly all participants interviewed, the actual exploratory strategies and conceptualizations varied from highly conceptualized exploration to rather playful contemplation. Together, they thus sketch a far more differentiated picture of the nature of aesthetic experiences in interaction processes as compared to a description of the latter based on just one experience, mostly made by the researcher him or herself.

Tmema’s Manual Input Workstation Our second case study aimed at documenting audience interactions with Tmema’s Manual Input Workstation. Here again, the development of the work is interesting in itself, as it was initially conceived as a device for use during a performance undertaken by the artists, not as an object designed for direct interaction with audiences. At the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Tmema, a duo consisting of British

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artist Golan Levin and US artist Zachary Lieberman, presented a performance entitled The Manual Input Sessions, using a custom overhead projector to produce shadows that are live-recorded and digitally processed, resulting in an abstract audiovisual animation projected onto the wall. Later, they transformed the device used for this performance into an installation for audience interaction. Accordingly, the first documentations associated with this work show the artists’ performance. When the work was later exhibited as an interactive installation at the Linz Ars Electronica Center, some audience interactions were documented, but mainly in photographic stills. As interactive installation, the Manual Input Workstation allows users to create and manipulate images and sounds, in varying modes. At first glance, it resembles a normal overhead projector with some cutout cardboard shapes lying next to it. Visitors can place the shapes on the glass top so that shadows of the shapes are projected onto the facing wall. But the work also records these shadows with a video camera attached to a computer. The software analyzes the video data, then generates sounds and animated objects corresponding to the shapes, which are superimposed via a data projector onto the overhead projection. Thus, what the visitors perceive are the silhouettes of the shapes overlaid by computer animations and accompanied by sounds. Most visitors quickly realize that they can create images using not only the shapes that have been provided, but also other objects— especially their own hands. The possibility of manipulating the sounding objects in real time allows the recipient to observe the interplay between shape and sound precisely. The factors that contribute to the generation of notes (volume, pitch, and timbre) are directly assigned to the characteristics underlying shapes (volume, contours, and position). Thus, the manipulation of shapes and sounds in real time invites the recipient to reflect, via exploration, on basic visual and acoustic phenomena. During the VCRs conducted during the research project, one visitor, who described himself as musical, was initially attracted mainly by the acoustic phenomena. He immediately began to move his fingers in time to the sounds, as though he were plucking the strings of a guitar. Observing himself on video afterward, he said he had found the overhead projector to be a physical hindrance, and he was surprised to see how little he had moved. He also explained that he had found it difficult to coordinate his two hands with the mirror-inverted projection, a problem he had also often noticed in his job as a teacher. Such self-observations reveal not only how greatly aesthetic experiences can vary, but also how much they depend on formative influences and previous experiences on the part of the recipients. While formulating his reflections retroactively during the VCR session, the teacher said that during the interaction, he had mainly felt immersed in the work. His evident enthusiasm for the process of interaction was confirmed by the fact that while watching the recording of his interaction, he spontaneously commented on the shapes he was creating with the words ‘Looks cool!’ (VCR with Helmut, cited in Kwastek 2010a). A female participant was also enchanted by the constellations that emerged:

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That was fascinating, when all these little things fell down and I knew they were coming from my hands, I liked that very much, I just liked the colors and I saw them falling, I didn’t think so much about the music then, it was more the colors, the shapes that were fascinating me, so I tried them very often because [laughs] I thought it was really nice. (VCR with Heidi, cited in Kwastek 2010a) The acoustic elements of the work were, she said, of secondary importance to her, in contrast to the teacher. Also, her full attention was captured by the work’s visual potentials, as opposed to an observation of her own physical activity. Generally speaking, these visitors’ approaches can be described as experimental exploration led more by intuition then by a quest for analytical understanding (Kwastek 2013: 128–30). They allowed themselves both to be guided by spontaneous ideas and to be enthralled by the shapes that were created. The female visitor even declared that she could have continued for hours. Another interviewee was a media theorist, and it quickly became clear in his self-observation and self-description that he was used to dealing with interactive art: ‘I think my first approach was to try and figure out how it worked more or less and then to use it as an expressive device. That’s what I was hoping to do’ (VCR with Francisco, cited in Kwastek 2010a). Later, after about three minutes of interaction, he described the situation as follows: ‘Up until now I was really laboring a lot to try and figure out, ok, what are the rules of interaction and hopefully they will be more interesting than something you just do once and then it’s over’. At another point of the recording, he recalled that his main aim had been to find the most efficient way to achieve something new, ‘as opposed to sort of repeating the same thing over and over again’. Thus, his self-description focused on the exploration of the system’s functionality, and he was also interested in discovering the limits of the work. He also verbalized the difference between immersing himself in the activity and reflecting on it: This is like an interesting tension between, on the one hand, trying to deal with it in a sort of right-brain kind of way, as here for example, just sort of playing with it, and then, on the other hand, sort of a left-brain kind of way, to try to figure out what some of the algorithmic logic and intuition there is. Whereas this visitor explicitly verbalized the oscillation in the aesthetic experience between exploration, creativity, and immersion, the other two visitors tended to reflect on single aspects of their experience, such as their gestures or their focus on either acoustic or visual creations. As these two case studies prove, multi-perspectival, dialogical approaches to documentation are highly valuable when it comes to the documentation of interactive art. As opposed to the documentation of just one interaction process, selected by the artist or the researcher as exemplary, they open up a more differentiated

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view of interaction processes, allowing for the identification of common exploratory strategies or interpretive approaches, as well as the possible range of diverse approaches informed by individual character, precognition, etc. The general value of such multi-perspectival documentation is that they not only allow for a comparison of artistic intentions and actual performative realizations of a work, but they also document the broad range of possible visitor interactions, including those visitors’ conceptualizations of their own actions, generating a new set of terms based on these other perspectives. Of course, the specific design of such documentations largely depends not only on the specific interests that motivate the documentation, but also on the actual work or project in question. Approaches differ when it comes to projects that afford a longer interaction time, or include headphones or recording techniques, as is the case in many works of the artist group Blast Theory, such as their Rider Spoke (Kwastek 2013: 248–59).5 Also, being set up by an individual researcher or research group with their specific research agenda, such documentations can never be objective or neutral, and the visitor reaction and behavior will be informed by the research setup and the questions asked. While the projects described were clearly guided by my own research interest in the aesthetics of interaction, such dialogical documentation also allows for a stronger focus on social, technological, or cultural contexts. Together with more comparative classificatory approaches made in the context of collection documentation, multi-perspectival documentation can contribute both to developing a more differentiated set of criteria for the description and analysis of processual art, and generate documentation of such often ephemeral works that hopefully will allow for future researchers to continue (re)writing the history of these art forms. However, it also proves that such documentation, which is usually based on digital media, is just as threatened by disappearance as are the artworks themselves. As long as the documentation of interactive art is left to temporary research projects or institutes, we are in danger of facing a loss not only of the artifactual systems, but also of their documentation.6

Notes 1 This chapter builds on research for my Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (MIT Press, 2013), which offers an elaborate theory of interaction aesthetics. Some of the passages from this chapter are direct quotations from various passages of the book.The sub-chapter on taxonomies is based on my ‘Classification vs. Diversification: The Value of Taxonomies for New Media Art’, in J. Schäfer and P. Gendolla (eds), Beyond the Screen:Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, Bielefeld 2010, pp. 503–20. 2 Material of the Nine Evenings has been collected by the participating artists and is preserved in the archives of the Getty Institute and the Daniel Langlois Foundation (see www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=294). The Pepsi Pavilion was documented on film by cinema director Eric Saarinen; a copy is also available at the Getty Institute.Videos of Ihnatowicz’s work circulate online. 3 Lot of the material of this quite well preserved archive is available online at http://archive. aec.at/prix/. Another context for documentation authored by artists themselves are funding applications and processes (Dekker 2013: 152).

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4 These interviews by Lizzie Muller with, respectively, Alexander and Claudia were not included in the documentary collection. Recordings and transcripts are available in the author’s archives. 5 This work is also a good example of how artists themselves sometimes embrace documentation as a valuable part of the work itself (Dekker 2013). 6 It is only small consolidation that more and more artists also publish documentation on their own websites, or have it circulate on online platforms (see Cook and Graham 2010: 200).

Works cited Boissier, J.-L. (2004) La rélation comme forme. L’interactivité en art, Geneva: Mamco. Carlson, M. (2004) Performance: A Critical Introduction, London and New York: Routledge. Conquergood, D. (1985) ‘Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance,’ Literature in Performance, 5: 1–13. Cook, S. and Graham, B. (2010) Rethinking Curating, Cambridge: MIT Press. Dekker, A. (2013) ‘Enjoying the Gap: Comparing Contemporary Documentation Strategies,’ in J. Noordegraaf et al. (eds), Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 149–69. Depocas, A., Ippolito, J. and Jones, C. (2003) Permanence through Change: The Variable Media Approach, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications/Foundation Daniel Langlois. Dewey, J. (1934) Art as Experience, New York: Balch. Graham, B. (1997) A Study of Audience Relationships with Interactive Computer-Based Visual Artworks in Gallery Settings, through Observation, Art Practice, and Curation. Dissertation. Sunderland: University of Sunderland. doi=10.1.1.476.6598. Jauss, H. R. (1982) Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, C. and Muller, M. (2008) Introduction to the Collection, available at: www.fondationlanglois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2122 (accessed July 20, 2016). Jones, C. and Muller M. (2010) ‘David Rokeby. Very Nervous System (since 1983). Documentary Collection’, available at: www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page. php?NumPage=2186 (accessed July 20, 2016). Kwastek, K. (2010a) ‘Tmema (Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman). The Manual Input Workstation (2004-2006). Documentary Collection’, available at: www.fondationlanglois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2220 (accessed July 20, 2016). Kwastek, K. (2010b) ‘Classification vs. Diversification: The Value of Taxonomies for New Media Art’, in J. Schäfer and P. Gendolla (eds), Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 503–20. Kwastek, K. (2013) Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I., and Kelly, K. (2003) New Media: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge. Mersch, D. (2002) Ereignis und Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Muller, L. (2008) Towards an Oral History of New Media Art, available at: www.fondationlanglois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2096 (accessed April 22, 2016). Noordegraaf, J., Le Maître, B., Saba, C. G., and Hediger, V. (2013) Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Rinehart, R. (2004) Appendices to a System of Formal Notation for Scoring Works of Digital and Variable Media Art, available at: http://archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/formal notation_apndx.pdf (accessed July 20, 2016).

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Rokeby, D. (1990) ‘The Harmonics of Interaction,’ Musicworks 46: Sound and Movement, available at: www.davidrokeby.com (accessed July 26, 2016). Rokeby, D. (1998) ‘The Construction of Experience: Interface as Content’, in C. Dodsworth (ed.), Digital Illusion: Entertaining the Future with High Technology, Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley. Seel, M. (2005) Aesthetics of Appearing, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Variable Media Network (2004) Variable Media Network, available at: www.variablemedia. net (accessed July 26, 2016). V2 Organisation (2003) Deliverable 1.3. Description Models for Unstable Media Art, available at: http://v2.nl/files/2003/articles/1_3_metadata.pdf (accessed July 26, 2016).

14 SCREEN CAPTURE AND REPLAY Documenting gameplay as performance Henry Lowood, Eric Kaltman, and Joseph C. Osborn

Digital game performance involves interaction between two systems. It is liminal, in the sense that it occurs at a place of contact between humans and machines. Digital games encourage us to explore what happens in this space, which Alexander Galloway in The Interface Effect describes as an interaction ‘perched there, on the mediating thresholds of self and world’ (Galloway 2012: loc. 78–9). Such claims lead us to consider human-machine co-performance as a particular problem for performance studies, as well as game, software, or computer design studies. In other words, we would like to know more about digital play as performance. In order to do that, we will need methods for archiving and reactivating play, whether as a research object or for other purposes, such as training or spectatorship. Where do we begin? We propose to divide this problem, like Gaul, into three parts. First, we consider how capturing game performance has, for want of a better phrase, played out through technologies of replay. Second, we review historical terms and technologies of replay in sports and sports media, thereby focusing on an ongoing tension between re-viewing and redoing past performance. Third, we will track the implications of defining game play performance as a sequence of actions associated with interactions of a player or players with a game system. Finally, we conclude with a proposal for a performance capture tool that could provide a method for saving, playing back and analyzing past gameplay that takes neither the player nor the game system as primary, but instead considers game performance as a production of their interaction.

Perfect capture Chris Crosby, known as NoSkill, was among the first highly skilled players of the multiplayer game DOOM (id Software, 1993) to receive the accolade ‘Doomgod’. Before e-sports, he personified a new kind of competitive performance. Its arenas

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were local area networks or game servers hosted somewhere on the emerging Internet, along with forums and channels for supporting game communities. Crosby’s reign as a Doomgod was brief, lasting roughly from 1994 to 1996; in 2001, he died in a car accident. In thinking about how to capture or replay such superlative performance, we must consider the methods available at the time and their capacity to deliver a sense of that performance to us as viewers more than two decades later. The documentation formats that we use to revisit theatrical or athletic performances include a wide range of media: texts (scripts and playbooks), video and audio recordings, narrative accounts in newspaper reviews, analytical summaries in boxscores, spectators’ recollections and camera photos, and more. Researchers, coaches, fans, and others can recall historical performance through such documentation. These ways of re-experiencing performance take place in a new venue under new circumstances, such as on a display screen or printed artifact, or in a researcher’s imagination. Videotaping NoSkill’s performances or writing about one of his games would have provided such documentation. However, like many activities that take place in digital environments, his gameplay can also be re-experienced in another way. It could be reactivated in a sense quite different from point-of-view recording or a narrative account. In addition to photographs and other documents associated with his lived life, visitors to Crosby’s online Memorial Site also find a collection of DOOM replay files. These digital artifacts make it possible to recreate matches in which he played between May 1995 and April 1996 (NoSkill Memorial Site 2004). The replays are stored as ‘demos’ or ‘lump’ files (from the.lmp file extension for files holding ‘lumps’ of DOOM data); loading these data into the correct version of the game instructs the game ‘engine’ to execute a sequence of commands. These commands mimic the input control commands generated by Crosby’s actions during every ‘tic’ or time frame of a historical game. Additional metadata in the file exactly describe the conditions under which the game engine will re-execute these commands, such as the game version, map, and difficulty level. A demo is not a video recording, although such a recording (or ‘video capture’) might seem to show the same imagery on a computer screen. The demo replay is a script that reactivates a game system and produces a perfectly rendered reperformance by the machine alone, provided that the instructions are executed by a copy or emulation of the same version of the game. This is reactivation, not documentation, of historical performance. DOOM introduced the computer game genre later known as the ‘first-person shooter’, a fast-action, shoot-’em-up format played from a first-person perspective. Demo replay therefore provides an eerie paradigm for performance documentation. When we load NoSkill’s files into DOOM, we reactivate a dead game—in the sense that the version and computing system he used to play the game have long been obsolete—and reanimate the gameplay of a deceased player. Not only do the game and the gameplay come back to life; we watch through NoSkill’s eyes. Is this performance capture so perfect that it not only enacts a historical performance, but also puts us in touch with the experiences of the original player?

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FIGURE 14.1 

 eplay files on the NoSkill Memorial Site, Internet Archive, captured R January 14, 2002

Screenshot provided by the authors

Gameplay preservation has long been characterized by the metaphor of capture, whether it takes the form of screenshots, replays, video, or other means. The process involves capturing data, whether the data consist of scripts that represent discrete actions, as in the demo file, or streams of time-stamped audio and visual information that record what we see on the screen and hear in our headphones. As a metaphor, capture is a freighted word. Capturing a performance might mean that we are trapping a perfect reproduction of game events, or it might emphasize putting away a player’s subjective view of an event for later liberation by a game engine. As historians, we are of course intrigued by the possibility of perfect reproduction of historical activities suggested by replaying NoSkill’s matches and seeing more or less what he saw, at least in terms of images flashing on the screen. We expect that future historians will be thankful for access to replays as experiences of past performances in digital spaces. We are nevertheless convinced that data preservation and replay without contextual documentation fall short of satisfying their research needs because data alone reveal little about the events and motivations that created, surrounded, and informed the use of these data (Lowood 2011, 2013). Speaking of digital gameplay as performances that might be captured obligates us to dig into the implications of such capture.

Replay history Capturing digital gameplay has generally involved either saving game data or recording what is visible on-screen to screenshots or video files. These methods offer several options. In the case of saved data, for example, we will distinguish among replays ‘game saves’ and ‘memory saves’. All of these methods produce data files that can be stored, then described by adding metadata for later discovery. Specific kinds of computer applications, such as a game engine for a demo replay or a media player for recorded video, execute these files. The ‘captured’ performance is thus re-enacted.

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Replay and recording predate digital games, of course. The connection between game replay and television replay is particularly resonant. Creative programming (e.g. ABC Television’s Wide World of Sports, f. 1961), innovative production technologies, and a growing appetite for televised sporting events created a media climate that encouraged new ways to watch live matches and athletic competitions on TV. Replay in particular became a familiar concept to television viewers during the 1960s in the form of ‘instant replay’, which was used almost exclusively during televised sports events. US television viewers first encountered it during the live broadcast of the annual Army–Navy football game by CBS Sports in 1965. Two years later, Ampex Corporation in California released the HS-100 ‘Color SlowMotion Sports Recorder/Reproducer’. Its name highlights replay as both capture and reproduction. Ampex engineers worked closely with television producers such as Roone Arledge at ABC Sports on video recording technologies such as the HS-100 that might enhance live broadcasts. Producers used Ampex’s magnetic

FIGURE 14.2 

Ampex HS-100 Sports ‘Recorder/Reproducer’, product brochure, c.1967

© Stanford University, image provided courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

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disk-based video recording technology not just to revisit a performance highlight, but also to slow down or ‘freeze’ the action, allowing in-booth commentators to explain the buildup of a play by applying ‘slow motion’ or ‘stop motion’ effects during a replay, techniques also developed by Ampex. Viewers accepted this new way of watching live performance, and instant replay became a staple of live sports coverage. Along with other technical innovations, it profoundly altered sports spectatorship. Viewers learned how to integrate recorded (replayed) segments and live broadcasts. As a consequence, the privilege associated with physical presence at a sporting event was diminished. As broadcast teams learned to use instant replay, slow motion, telestrators (real-time video markers), and more, ‘live spectatorship, with a distanced view and lacking replay, could seem to be missing an element. No longer was the spectacle staged simply for those who were there; now it was, increasingly, stage-managed for the television viewer’ (Whannel 2009: 215). Instant replay shifted attitudes about live and mediated performance. The concept became familiar enough for the American football player Jerry Kramer to use Instant Replay as the title of his diary of the 1967 football season (Kramer 1968). Less than a decade later, Marshall McLuhan praised instant replay ‘as a very powerful and important new development in our time’. He concluded that there was no longer much reason to prefer live over recorded performance, whether of sports or a symphony (McLuhan 1976: 27). As instant replay changed the experience of watching sports, it also redefined ‘replay’ for the conduct of games and matches. Before the 1960s, replay usually meant playing again; after instant, televised replay, its use invoked viewing again. The earlier sense of replay was that a new performance would occur; it did not refer to recording or archiving a previously played game or event within a game. For example, in May 1935, the Harvard baseball team, as a sign of good sportsmanship, agreed to ‘replay’ a game played during the previous month against the rival Princeton team in response to a ‘debated interpretation of rules’. This was replay as do-over, with a new match erasing the results of a previous competition (‘Harvard Sportsmanship’ 1935). A similar meaning carried over from sports to games in the form of the pinball replay introduced during the late 1930s. In this case, replay referred to the reward from a winning game that entitled the winner to a free play on the same machine. This kind of replay substituted for earlier forms of payoff prizes (including cash) that ran afoul of gambling laws in various US jurisdictions, a complicated episode of game and legal history that does not concern us here (‘Slot Machines and Pinball Games’ 1950: 68–9; Urban 1958). What is worth noting is that, as in sports, pinball replay referred to playing a new game or continuing gameplay, rather than revisiting a previously played session. After television’s successful introduction of replay technology, the older prospective meaning of replay as playing again gave way to the retrospective idea of watching again. The examples we have recounted illustrate a general tension in replay between capturing and reperforming, or between review and redo, that predates replay as associated with digital games. On the one hand, we have a meaning associated with recording, with playing back rather than playing again. On the other, we have a

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meaning that describes a new event. Teams meet again, players set up the pieces for another go, or pinball machines yield a free play to a victorious player. As a form of performance capture for digital games, replay has assimilated the tension between redo and review in a way that matches the particular affordances of game systems with respect to data and image capture. The history of performance capture for digital games raises the question: What do we mean by game-based performance? Richard Schechner, in his influential introduction to performance studies, reveals many different ways to understand the statement that ‘performances mark identities, bend time, reshape and adorn the body, and tell stories. Performances—of art, ritual, or ordinary life—are made of “twicebehaved behaviors”, performed actions that people train to do, that they practice and rehearse’ (Schechner 2002: 22). He arranges numerous kinds of performance along a spectrum that allows for multiple modes of interaction among various performance activities: play, games, sports, popular entertainments, performing arts, daily life, and ritual (p. 42). The range and diversity of performance as understood by Schechner and others (e.g. Goffman 1959; Carlson 1996) is of course a compelling idea; we are interested especially in Schechner’s emphasis on play (along with ritual) as anchoring components of any kind of performance. This approach leads Schechner to consider play, including games and sports, as a component of a more general framework of performance studies. As he puts it, ‘one definition of performance might be: ritualized behavior conditioned/permeated by play’ (Schechner 2002: 79). A game, in particular, is a structured form of play consisting of a sequence of ‘basic physical units’ that Schechner calls ‘play acts’. In their magisterial study of game design, Salen and Zimmerman break play activity into three categories: gameplay, ludic activities, and ‘being playful’. Gameplay, in particular, encompasses the ‘formalized interaction’ of a player with a game system. As the term suggests, it takes place only through and in games, while ludic activities and playfulness involve less structured modes of play. As Salen and Zimmerman put it, gameplay is the ‘experience of a game set into motion through the participation of players’ and includes a range of forms that include competitive, athletic, and performative play activities (Salen and Zimmerman 2004: 305, 309–10). We will consider the ‘play acts’ of game-based performance as the expression of gameplay, that is, as a sequence of actions associated with the interaction of a player or players with a game system. Our perspective on game-based performance as it relates to digital games thus involves both the player as enactor and the active system (platform + game software). Capturing this performance involves more than recording human activity. Archiving player activities outside this interaction—facial expressions, bodily movements, conversation with others in the living room, etc.—produces contextual documentation that helps us to understand performance, but we do not consider these actions here as game performance. This does not lessen the importance of such documentation, particularly with regard to questions such as the ‘feelings and moods of the players and the observers’ (Schechner 2002: 84). However, these documents tell us about para-performance rather than play acts per se. Focusing on

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player interaction with a game system emphasizes the liminal nature of game-based performances. The interaction between enactor and system occurs at a boundary between the player and the game system, and it produces data that are captured there, such as replay scripts based on controller inputs, records of system memory, or video captured at the display screen. We are looking for systems that capture these data in a manner that makes it possible to reproduce, view, and cite game performance as a sequence of play acts. We would be delighted to write a clean definition of performance capture based on the specific criterion of time-based interaction between player and system. However, our definition thus far skips over consideration of the difference between replays and saved games. Is a saved game a form of performance capture? The term ‘save’ refers to a mix of methods and data formats for documenting the state of a game system at some point in time during gameplay, such that the saved data can be reloaded into a compatible system to produce the same state at a later time (Tobin 2016). Saved games have been produced by save systems for many home console games, often tied to specific memory cards and game data formats, as PC game files (for saved games or replays) valid only for specific versions of a game title, or as maps of memory state information generated by emulators. We distinguish two broad classes of saves: ‘game saves’ and ‘memory saves’. We will have more to say below about these methods. With respect to performance capture, we consider saves as preserving the result of play performance rather than performance per se; saves give us a particular moment, often the concluding moment, of gameplay, but tell us little about the interactive play acts that occurred. Of course, this distinction is not absolute, as replay might be understood as the sequential reproduction of a series of game states, and saved games often provide opportunities for continuing a previously played game. On the whole, we associate replays with re-viewing previously played (captured) games, and saves with redoing them (reperformance rather than performance capture). The history of capturing game-based performance weaves through a remarkable variety of practices. This variety responded to technical constraints associated with specific platforms and games, modes of performance (e.g. single-player versus competitive multiplayer games) and uses for archived game performance such as redoing and re-viewing. This history includes methods used for pre-digital games. Adam Tobin has written that ‘Games were being saved long before they went digital’ (Tobin 2016: 385). He points to examples such as play-by-mail games, chess books, newspaper bridge problems, scribbled notes about the state of an interrupted game on writing pads, and clips for holding together sets of cards in a particular order. Some of these methods involved recording game states (such as the point at which one intended to continue playing), but others came closer to later game replay by summarizing sequences of already played actions. The latter group includes chess books with move-by-move summaries of a played game, and the ‘after action reports’ of war gamers. Kirschenbaum notes that these ‘AARs’ were ‘narrative retellings of events that unfolded during gameplay’ and sometimes offered ‘procedural records of moves’ (Kirschenbaum 2009: 357, 368). Players of manual

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(non-digital) games developed methods of performance capture that tracked specific elements of gameplay that they considered central to their experience. Saves and replays of digital games from the era of Spacewar! and Adventure during the 1960s and 1970s, or of arcade consoles, and early home video game systems during the 1980s did not circulate between users at the time for the simple reason that provisions were not made in early game systems to create them. What we do have in the way of documentation from this early period does not match up well with our criterion that game-based performance capture must reproduce interactions between players and game systems. Television coverage and reportage about the computer game Spacewar! (Brand 1972; Monnens and Goldberg 2015: 140) informs us about players and environments such as computer laboratories and arcades around these interactions. Saved paper tapes and printouts deliver historical software, including source code, but we learn little from these records about gameplay during the 1960s and 1970s. Some transcripts of text-based games such as Adventure and MUD1 survive as printouts of sequences of typed player commands and computer responses. Jerz, for example, cites a transcript of a short segment of gameplay from the Crowther-Woods version of Adventure dating from 1977, and Richard Bartle has preserved short passages recording player interactions in MUD1, probably from the late 1970s (Bartle 1992; Jerz 2007). These transcripts give us text output from conversations between players and game systems as well as among players, and thus might be the closest thing we have to replays for this period. In their historical study of the early dissemination of Spacewar!, Monnens and Goldberg consider the paucity of relevant documents from the period between 1962 and 1972 by speculating that ‘neither Spacewar!’s creators nor its players had any idea of its historical significance, perhaps even that they were witnessing the origins of something extraordinary’ (Monnens and Goldberg 2015: 125). This observation might also explain why little attention seems to have been given to saving data related to gameplay. As digital games became more popular during the 1980s, greater attention to replay by developers gave players more options for saving game states and performances. Some games published during the 1980s stored information about played games in order to play again from a specified point in a previously played game. For example, a computer game called Chess Partner (c.1983; ‘Biding Your Time with Computerized Chess’ 1983) stored information that made it possible for a player to recreate her chess game from the beginning move; she could then delete an unsuccessful last move and redo it. Chess Partner exemplifies performance capture both for reviewing and redoing; as with many of the more robust replay systems of the 1990s forward, the goal of such replay was educational. Reviewing played games became a standard method for improving one’s own performance. Yet this was not the only purpose. Several sports games during the 1980s were inspired by television’s instant replay. Electronic Arts’s One on One, released in 1983, rewarded a particularly good play by showing it to the player again immediately afterwards, but without capturing information for playback after the game was completed. Saving games for continuation at a later time also

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became a common practice by the end of the 1980s. Game systems began to offer ready methods for storing save files, such as using floppy drives on home and personal computers (and some game consoles of this era) or the batterypowered save functionality provided by some game cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System console. The capability of preserving game states for continuation of gameplay aided the success of long-form games, some lasting dozens of hours or more, such as Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda (1986). As we noted earlier, however, such game saves usually served replay in the sense of continuing or redoing play rather than reviewing it. By the end of the 1980s, a mix of increasing attention to competitive and real-time games and improvements in technology encouraged closer attention to the ways in which gameplay could be recorded and studied. Dani Bunten Berry’s head-to-head multiplayer game Modem Wars (Electronic Arts, 1988) emphasized player performance from the perspective of how ‘each person had their own specialized style of play’. Recognizing this as a mode of performance conducive to spectatorship, she designed the game to make it possible to create ‘game film’ from stored data associated with a played game, expecting that players would use the ‘opportunity the game films offered to [. . .] create stories out of the intense and ephemeral experience’ of the game (Berry 1992). Berry’s games, including Command HQ (Microprose, 1990) and Global Conquest (1992), brought competitive player performance and spectatorship to real-time strategic gameplay. Unfortunately, technical limitations may have limited the use and distribution of this replay technology, as replay files associated with these games have proven difficult to locate. Over the course of the next decade, replay (including demo replay) and screen capture began to be used extensively for recording game performance, particularly in online, competitive games played on personal computers and the networks that connected them. Most replay formats since the mid-1990s have defined ways of producing linear, time-stamped logs of play actions recorded in a proprietary or game-specific data format for later execution by a copy of the same version of the original game. These play actions usually involve a player’s interaction with the game system, such as moving at a specific rate, pressing a controller button, or picking up an object in the game world. NoSkill’s replays were recorded as DOOM demos stored as lump files. Nitsche describes demo replays as ‘traces of play, recorded in-game action’ that also ‘can be manipulated and moved independently from the main game engine to be played back on different computers’ (Nitsche 2016: 103). Introduced as a feature of DOOM, during the 1990s such replays became a vital part of the culture of competitive, multiplayer games, especially first-person shooters and realtime strategy games. As Berry’s vision of turning strategy gaming into a space for social performance had predicted, networked players made movies that documented their prowess for other players to watch (Lowood 2007, 2009). Space does not permit a full accounting of all the practices and games associated with active communities of replay creators and spectators. Instead, we would like to emphasize three historical points that position replays in a larger context of play, spectatorship,

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and community-building associated with digital games. First, replay could also be pre-play. DOOM had followed a tradition set by ‘attract mode’ screens in arcades by running a demo of co-designer John Romero’s own gameplay as the game started up. Thus, demos were sometimes called ‘intro’ movies. Loading a demo file to prepare the player recalls usages such as game film (the term appropriated by Berry) for sports. Second, the use of replay as rehearsal echoes our previous hints at the educational use of game replays. These educational uses recall other ways of thinking about the demo (or demonstration) as a method for showing or showing off. Demos in this sense ranged from the computer program as prototype or demonstration (e.g., Spacewar! 1962, or Douglas Engelbart, ‘Mother of all Demos,’ 1969) to the ‘single-standing pieces of real-time animation’ called cracktros, and from there to the ‘demoscene’ that required ‘remarkably optimized code to render out largely noninteractive animation sequences’ (Nitsche 2016: 103). As one veteran of DOOM’s rather different demo scene pointed out, ‘Use of demos for their educational value has been going on since almost the beginning’. DOOM demos as demonstrations of skill by admired players such as NoSkill, XoLeRaS, and Smight circulated widely, supporting study by ‘a new player who wants to get better’ (Herrmann 2004). Third, using replays to improve skills took the viewer beyond spectatorship. Game replays were interactive in a way that televised replays could not offer. When a game engine was activated to reproduce a previously played game based on information stored in the replay file, it did more than produce a recording. Since the game engine interpreted and played back scripts stored in the proprietary replay format, features of the game were available while viewing. A replay spectator might choose which player’s view to follow or even move the camera, sometimes by interacting with in-game menus or those made available in replay mode. This active spectatorship bled into another practice made possible by the demo format: editing the replay scripts. Once the demo format was understood, players learned tricks such as ‘recamming’ (changing the camera perspective), first associated with Quake speedrun replays. Editing demo files converged with related practices such as modifying game assets to lead from replays to narrative moviemaking, thus setting the stage for the game-based video productions first known as Quake movies, but later renamed Machinima. Demo replays produce small script files. These files could be easily distributed even during the early days of the low-bandwidth Web. This advantage was mitigated by the reliance of demo recording on specific game formats. Efforts to broaden the appeal of Machinima by releasing these entertainment videos from their binding to specific player communities and game engines led to the adoption of video as a more accessible format. The availability of higher download speeds and better viewer applications by the early 2000s encouraged the use of video, as did the desire of many players to include footage captured on game consoles or in virtual worlds, platforms that did not offer access to demo replay. The gradual shift to video as the format of choice for Machinima contributed to the increased use of screen capture for performance documentation, which meant routing audiovisual

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game output directly to raw video files (or later, to compressed video formats). Capturing video directly from a display screen (or more likely a PC graphics card) differs from the demo or replay as performance documentation in several respects, beginning with the interface between player and system that it monitors. Unlike replay, which tracks play acts as primitive commands generated by control devices and interpreted by game engines, video capture records gameplay as a view on performance. It is also produced at a difference interface: the screen. These differences—actions versus view, controller versus screen—produced contrasting takes on performance capture recorded, say, as DOOM demos versus video recordings. Techniques for capturing gameplay to video date back to the 1980s, and even earlier if we include the use of film and video cameras to document arcade gameplay. For example, Sharp and Nintendo collaborated on the production of a device called the Famicom Titler, released in Japan in 1989; the Titler was essentially a Nintendo (Famicom) game console that produced color RGB video and output S-Video signals directly to an external device such as a video camera; it also included a few basic editing and audio recording capabilities. While the Titler had little impact outside Japan, these features emphasized a use of replay that has become a prominent feature of more recent screen capture technologies: the encapsulation of experiences. Aptly named, the Titler enhanced a spectatorial point of view produced at the screen with subtitles and commentary. By the late 1990s, the intimate connection of video capture and game-based movie-making in the form of Machinima, better software applications for producing and playing back video on computers, and increasing access to broadband for file transfer of large video files favored increasing preference for video as a replay format. Video capture differs from demo replay not only because it produces documentation that is not interactive, but also because it leaves out machine states. Both of these differences condition video replay as preservation of a specific and unchanging point of view rather than detailed understanding of game actions.

A performance capture tool The various approaches to documenting game performance, whether the work of game designers or players, have led us to consider how game studies might benefit from access to replays and saves. How might a research tool providing access to recorded gameplay work? We begin with our insistence on the replay as documenting interactions between the player and game system. As a digital game is played, a player and a game system engage in a feedback loop. The player provides inputs to the system via a controller, keyboard, or other device, and the system interprets this input as it relates to the state of the game in its memory. The system then responds via visual, aural, or, in some cases, haptic output to which the player again responds. Due to the nature of this feedback loop, the player and system are simultaneously spectators and performers. The player’s input performance is a reaction to the output performance of the system, and vice versa. Performance capture of digital games based on video capture of either the visual output of the system

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or the physicality of the player’s input is limited in ways that video recordings of a theatrical or sports performance might not be. Videos of digital games are not interactive and do not recreate the original conditions of the performance; they merely deliver the images and sounds of a past instance of play. Because playing a digital game is conditioned by the actions and reactions of a digital system, the performance of that system must also be captured as a digital object. Digital game systems are always managing a specific part of computer memory during gameplay, in accordance with the rules of the game’s source code. The player’s inputs trigger specific transitions from one state of memory to the next, and these transitions usually correspond to changes of audiovisual output. In ‘replays’ based on screen capture, these audiovisual outputs are captured through an external source (video camera, microphone, etc.) Demo and other game replay files provide the means for a game system, or a specific engine, to itself replay previous inputs recorded from a player. However, because a system has to be designed to interpret, record, and play back demo files, most games do not support this functionality. On the other hand, many older games can be played today through emulation, where a host computer imitates the processes and architecture of an earlier machine. This circumscription of one system (the target) within another (the host) allows for the host to record all the inputs, internal processes, and outputs of the target. Demo files can reproduce input (if available) and video can record the outputs, but emulation collapses the input/output (redo/re-view) distinction because it provides a means to capture the performance of the entire system. Since the system is being reproduced inside the host, all the memory transitions, the succession of computational states that manifest into a game performance, are available for recording and reproduction at a later time. This blurs the distinction between redoing a performance and re-viewing it, because from the perspective of a system under emulation, the same succession of inputs (and of memory states) will reproduce the same outputs. It is as if the aforementioned Harvard–Princeton game could be replayed on the same field, with the same players (and their internal mindsets), and the same play conditions resulting in the same plays being made with exactly the same final result. We propose a citation tool that leverages the capabilities of emulated systems for sharing and reproducing system performances. Specifically, emulators can record inputs for any game, as well as computational state information. Emulation allows for a demo file-like replay of any game, since it is possible to provide an emulator with the same time-indexed inputs as those contained in demo formats. An emulator also allows for the saving of the system’s memory at any point in time, which amounts to creating a snapshot of all system processes that can then be referenced and reactivated at a later time. This ‘memory save’ enabled by the emulator is akin to a traditional saved game file, except that the latter must be saved and restored by the original game system. A saved game file is also constrained temporally by the location or availability of save functions within a played game (such as save points or a menu allowing one to ‘Save’). Emulated memory saves avoid this constraint by, in effect, copying the entire system.

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This performance citation tool allows for the management, capture, and replay of system performances, and provides a means of linking them to structured descriptions of their provenance (the game and emulator that produced them). For example, using the tool, it is possible to load Super Mario Bros. (SMB) into an emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System (in this case, a program called FCEUX). The tool will record the inputs of a player to the emulator along with a video capture of the resulting gameplay. If at any point some aspect of the game piques the player’s interest, say a particular level or an especially difficult jump, he or she can instruct the tool to create a memory save and mark that point for later investigation. If for some reason the performance does not go as planned (maybe after falling prey to a difficult jump), the tool can instruct the emulator to load an earlier memory save and continue play from that point. The tool will also automatically edit the failed jump out of the accompanying video. When the player is satisfied with the performance, he or she can instruct the tool to save it. This instruction engages its management component. When recording a system performance, the tool accounts for certain crucial bits of information. Any citation of a system performance requires a reference to the specific emulator and specific game that created it. In the SMB example, there are many different potential NES emulators and many different versions

FIGURE 14.3 

A citation tool interface, with the running emulation top left

Screenshot provided by the authors

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FIGURE 14.4 

 inking from a researcher’s text to a running emulation illustrating the L text with historical gameplay, which in turn could be played anew from the point cited

Screenshot provided by the authors

of the game. A change to either component (emulator or version) might disrupt the ability to reactivate the system performance, so the tool records all this information through a detailed metadata scheme. It checks that a playback system configuration matches the original before reactivating a previous performance. Additionally, the tool links the SMB performance both to its video recording and to the various memory saves the player made along the way. If a researcher wants to simply view an example of play, the video is available immediately, but if that researchers prefers to experience something seen in the video (maybe a final battle with the evil Bowser needs a closer look), the tool will reactivate the system performance at the closest memory save to the video’s current position. Unlike video capture, the tool provides the options of jumping right into the game to continue a particular performance or simply re-viewing gameplay segments that they themselves may not have the skill to reach. Our game performance capture tool records all the relevant data for reactivating a system performance; it is a simple step to encode and share a citations of a performance that is also an entry point into that performance. Because many emulators can be executed inside modern Internet browsers, linking to an active system performance is now a possibility. We can record our performance, share a link to

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it with a collaborator, and have that person see what we did or take over where we left off. The tool will also allow for the embedding of multiple system performances on the same page, making comparative analysis much easier. If a specific glitch in SMB differs in two versions of the game, a researcher could describe them and provide playable links to supplement the comparison. If a historical player recorded a seminal feat of SMB mastery, he or she could allow anyone in the future see it, to hop in and play along, or maybe even do them one better. System performance citations might thus produce a meaningful dialogue between the gameplay (and players) of the past and future, an affordance that incidentally encourages consistent citation and description of games, game systems, and the performances produced with them. In these ways, we hope to exploit the potential for gameplay performance capture as the ultimate synthesis of historical takes on redoing and reviewing, as well as the interaction of human and system performance.

Works cited Bartle, R. (1992) 1979–1997. Richard Bartle Papers, Stanford University Libraries. Berry, D. B. (1992) Game Design Memoir, available at: https://web.archive.org/web/ 20110725030024/http://www.anticlockwise.com/dani/personal/biz/memoir.htm (accessed March 13, 2016). ‘Biding Your Time with Computerized Chess’ (1983) PC Magazine, September: 449–58. Brand, S. (1972) ‘SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums’, Rolling Stone, December 7, available at: www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_ stone.html (accessed March 13, 2016). Carlson, M. (1996) Performance: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge. Galloway, A. (2012) The Interface Effect, Cambridge: Polity (Kindle edition). Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ‘Harvard Sportsmanship’ (1935) Princeton Alumni Weekly, 35, May 17: 670. Herrmann, L. (2004) E-mail from Laura ‘BahdKo’ Herrmann to Henry Lowood, January 28. Jerz, D. (2007) ‘Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 1(2), available at: www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html (accessed March 13, 2016). Kirschenbaum, M. (2009) ‘War Stories: Boardgames and (Vast) Procedural Narratives’, in P. Harrigan and N. Wardrip-Fruin (eds), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 357–71. Kramer, J. (1968) Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer, New York: World. Lowood, H. (2007) ‘“It’s Not Easy Being Green”: Real-Time Game Performance in Warcraft’, in B. Atkins and T. Krzywinska (eds), Videogame/Player/Text, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press/Palgrave, pp. 83–100. Lowood, H. (2009) ‘Warcraft Adventures: Texts, Replay and Machinima in a Game-Based Story World’, in P. Harrigan and N. Wardrip-Fruin (eds), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 407–27. Lowood, H. (2011) ‘Memento Mundi: Are Virtual Worlds History?’, in M. Winget and W. Aspray (eds), Digital Media: Technological and Social Challenges of the Interactive World, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, pp. 3–25.

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Lowood, H. (2013) ‘The Lures of Software Preservation’, Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Software Preservation, Washington, DC: Library of Congress, available at: www. digitalpreservation.gov/multimedia/documents/PreservingEXE_report_final101813. pdf (accessed March 13, 2016). McLuhan, M. (1976) ‘“It Will Probably End the Motor Car”: An Interview with Marshall McLuhan’, Pay-TV, August: 26–9. Monnens, D. and Goldberg, M. (2015) ‘Space Odyssey: The Long Journey of Spacewar!, From MIT to Computer Labs Around the World’, Kinephanos, June special issue: 124-46. Nitsche, M. (2016) ‘Demo’, in H. Lowood and R. Guins (eds), Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 103–8. NoSkill Memorial Site (2004) NoSkill Memorial Site, available at: www.doom2.net/noskill/ index.htm (accessed March 13, 2016). Salen, K. and Zimmerman, E. (2004) Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamental, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schechner, R. (2002) Performance Studies: An Introduction, London: Routledge. ‘Slot Machines and Pinball Games’ (1950) Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 269, May: 62–70 (anonymously written). Tobin, S. (2016) ‘Save’, in H. Lowood and R. Guins (eds), Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 385–91. Urban, R. J. (1958) ‘Gambling Today via the “Free Replay” Pinball Machine’, Marquette Law Review, 98, Summer, available at: http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/mulr/ vol42/iss1/12 (accessed March 13, 2016). Whannel, G. (2009) ‘Television and the Transformation of Sport’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 625, September: 205–18.

15 MIXED REALITY PERFORMANCE THROUGH ETHNOGRAPHY Peter Tolmie and Steve Benford

This chapter focuses upon four different and contrasting artistic engagements we documented as ethnographers. In each case, the documentary challenges were distinct, presenting unique methodological problems and resulting in different documentary outcomes. Uncle Roy All Around You was created by the UK-based interactive media arts group Blast Theory and involved online and physical players in a collaborative quest to find a specific location. It was run across three cities in the UK in 2003. Here, the problem was one of capturing interactions that were distributed across an ecology of events. Rider Spoke was another Blast Theory creation where cyclists followed a route around a city at night, leaving and collecting personal reflections. It toured in London, Brighton, and Athens in 2008. In this case, the problem was one of capturing an adequate record of a technologically augmented and mobile activity. If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? was a project enacted over a two-day period in the Tate Modern in London in May 2015, where, under the direction of Boris Charmatz and Musée de la Danse, a group of dancers took occupation of a range of galleries and public spaces in the museum in order to perform a variety of different dance forms with commentary. For this study, adequate documentation required comparison of contrasting circumstances over different periods of observation. The Carolan Guitar was designed by members of the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham as a cultural probe. It was handmade by a luthier, who inlayed a variety of interactive Celtic knotwork patterns into various parts of the instrument, which were then used to document its use in performances over time. Here, the concern was one of capturing diverse materials over an extended period, across numerous different environments, and with a large variety of different participants such that traditional observational approaches were not sufficient, but rather demanded the use of innovative technology itself to document significant parts of people’s activities and interactions. For each of the engagements, we shall examine the part played

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by ethnography in assembling a record, the kinds of documents produced, and how the ethnographic documentation of the performances reflected the specific challenges posed by capturing an adequate record. We shall also briefly outline how the specific ethnographic approach adopted provided for particular kinds of insights that could be used in turn to inform future new media art design and documentation.

Ethnography and systems design There are some core features that mark ethnography out against other approaches to gathering data about human action and behavior. These central tenets are encapsulated in two basic exhortations one of the key early figures in ethnography, Bronislav Malinowski (1922), offered up to his fellow anthropologists: to ‘get down off the veranda’, and to ‘grasp the native’s point of view’. Ethnographers immerse themselves within the setting they wish to study. ‘Grasping the native’s point of view’ means that in acquiring an understanding of what is going on in the setting, one must live with the members of the setting and ascertain how they reason about and account for the things they do. The ethnographic record can take many forms, including video and audio recordings, handwritten notes, formal reports, diagrams and sketches, transcripts, photographs, actual specimens and artifacts, and so on. It is increasingly the case now that much of the ethnographic record is digital in character, with this also extending to non-traditional formats such as computer logs and databases. Within the fields of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work, where ethnographic approaches took particular root as a means of bridging the gap between the social world and systems design, the form it has taken has frequently been related to a notably empirical kind of sociological research called ‘ethnomethodology’ (Garfinkel 1967). Ethnomethodologists are concerned with paying minute attention to the actual visible practices people use in all of their affairs (see Crabtree et al. 2012; Button et al. 2015). They are also keen to explicate how these practices can be seen to be orderly, for instance through their sequential relationship with one another, or how it is that people call one another to account for the things they do. The actual practice of ethnography in these terms supports a number of different objectives, depending on how it is used (Crabtree et al. 2012). In the context of systems design, it may be used to explore the characteristics of some human domain where a system may be deployed. In this situation, it can help designers to identify exactly what new systems must support, and also sensitize designers to the character and constitution of these domains, thereby providing inspiration and leading to new opportunities. Further on in the design cycle, it may also serve to evaluate new technology in order to help designers assess ‘how well it works’. It is this latter aspect that has proved to be especially important to the use of ethnography in the context of design and artistic engagements, both in terms of assessing the actual working efficacy of a design and as a means of uncovering the kinds of experience a design may currently be seen to promote.

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Design ethnography in the context of artistic engagements Design ethnography and its associated practice of developing rich documentation of situated practice has become an important part of how engagements involving both artists and computer systems design have been studied in the field of HCI (human-computer interaction). For those practitioners who come from an ethnomethodological background, the ways new artistic endeavors may serve to breach existing patterns of social organization can be illuminating. Furthermore, because such engagements may often attempt to make use of technology and systems in relatively untested ways, artists and museums have come to value ethnography’s contributions to the innovation and design cycle. A substantial corpus of studies where ethnography has played a part in the documentation and development of performances and experiences now exists in HCI. In the case studies below, we shall be examining some examples of materials from this corpus through a brief history of our own engagement in these exercises across four engagements that span 12 years of ethnographic work in the MRL. Each of the case studies has been chosen to be illustrative of different kinds of challenges to adequately documenting the specific practices involved in undertaking different kinds of performances: distribution across multiple enacting parties; mobility and technological complexity; temporal displacement; and the scale of realization across time, place, and person. For each study, we begin with a short outline of the performances studied and how the ethnography was conducted. We then provide some sample documents and how they relate to the problems confronting the assembly of an adequate record. Finally, we discuss some of the important insights the study provided for the pursuit of future design.

Uncle Roy All Around You Uncle Roy All Around You, designed and orchestrated by the interactive media arts group Blast Theory, was played simultaneously on the streets of a real city and online in a virtual representation of the city. The structure of the game meant that online players and players on the street had to collaborate even though they were strangers. Their goal was to find the office of a fictional character called Uncle Roy, after which the collaborators were asked to make a one-year commitment to be available for each other for commentary and support. For the staging of the experience in Manchester in 2004, over 1,000 members of the public took part, encompassing 415 street players and over 1,200 online games, and it ran for six hours a day on nine days over a two-week period. Street players registered to play the game, bought a ticket, had their photo taken, and a description of their appearance was constructed for posting online. They also had to hand over their current possessions, in exchange for which they received a PDA. They were then given 50 minutes to find Uncle Roy. The PDA provided the street players with a map representing part of the game zone and the names and whereabouts of any nearby online players. The game began with a

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message from the game server, telling the players how to start. After this, further messages were delivered, notionally from Uncle Roy. Street players were able to interact with online players by recording short audio messages on their PDAs. Online players used avatars to move around a virtual city that was a representation of the real city. They had to find one of four postcards that had been hidden at various locations in the virtual city. Once a street player had declared his or her position in the real world, it caused an avatar to appear for them in the virtual world. Online players and street players then had to collaborate in order to locate Uncle Roy’s office. Upon arrival at Uncle Roy’s office, the online player was asked a series of questions that concluded by asking them if they were prepared to commit to being available for the street player for a period of 12 months. If agreement was forthcoming, the online player was asked to enter their postal address in to the system. At this point, a webcam enabled them to see the street player. In the real city on the desk in the real Uncle Roy’s office, a postcard was placed that read ‘When can you begin to trust a stranger?’ The street player was at this point asked via their PDA to write a response to the question and take it away with them. In cases where both the street player and the online player had agreed to the commitment to a stranger, they were paired. After this, the street player was taken back to the starting point, where they were able to collect their belongings and exchange addresses with the online player. A great deal of work was involved in orchestrating this game behind the scenes, including facilitating the interaction between the street players and the online players, sending clues, and so on. Monitoring work also took place on the streets, with performers keeping an eye on the players. The performers were further supported by a range of game management interfaces in a control room. One of the challenges involved in trying to capture an adequate record of the performance was the way it involved simultaneously players physically moving around a real city, remote players engaging in the activity online, and a significant body of technical personnel and performers whose job was to make the whole thing run smoothly. This distribution of people and elements could not be overlooked, but neither could one ethnographer on the ground capture it all. This meant that street players, online players, and performers each had to be studied separately and each of their particular perspectives grasped. The actual ethnographic work was conducted during a nineday deployment of Uncle Roy in Manchester in 2004. The primary emphasis was placed upon shadowing the street players as they went through induction and out onto the streets. Doing this allowed for capture of a measure of the orchestration work at the same time and also provided an opportunity for capturing interactions between street players and their online counterparts. Supplementary observations were then also made of online play, the specific work of the street performers in keeping things running, and the work of remote orchestrators using the management interfaces. As is commonplace in the kinds of ethnographic studies conducted in the MRL, materials were gathered using a mixture of video and audio and handwritten notes. Important extra data were also made available through the logs generated by the game servers. This enabled surrounding interactions relating to specific street players to be identified and assembled.

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In view of the nature of the experience and its dependency upon distributed coordination across a variety of parties, the ethnographic materials particularly concentrated upon the collaborative work involved and its situated character. Here, for instance, we see extracts of the ethnographic records relating to both the interaction between a street player and an online player, and interactions between performers working together to locate a lost player. Figure 15.1 demonstrates some recurrent aspects of ethnographic documentation, such as detailed moment-by-moment descriptions of action and careful transcriptions of talk. It also shows the way in which excerpts from the system logs regarding messages exchanged between parties can be embedded within the document to create a composite record of the action that supplements what the ethnographer had physically available to them at the time. This is critical to being able to properly explicate distributed phenomena where part of the experience is how they unfold through interactions with remote parties that are mediated through a device. Another thing to note about this kind of ethnographic record is the way it is worked up sequentially to match the lived experience of the event. People experience these kinds of phenomena in temporally and spatially ordered ways and their reasoning about what is going on is situated within that unfolding order, so every effort is made to preserve these orderly characteristics within the record. However, an ethnographic document of phenomena such as these is more than just a detailed and sequentially ordered description. It is also an explication of how the visible order was accomplished, what kinds of reasoning are associated with that, and, when the end-goal is design, an effort to pull out specific orderly features to illustrate their implications. As a result of handling the documentation in this way, the published work relating to the ethnographic study of Uncle Roy All Around You focused especially upon how the performance of the event hinged upon the activities of distributed parties, with many of the interactions being mediated by technology in some way. This rich tapestry of conjoint physical and digital components promoted interaction that had a fragmented character. Crabtree and Rodden (2008, 2009)

FIGURE 15.1 

Some of the documentation relating to: (a) player interactions; and (b) locating a lost player (2004)

Courtesy Andy Crabtree

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termed this mixture a ‘hybrid ecology’ and used the ethnographic materials to underscore a number of its key characteristics. Thus, they pointed out that, as a matter of course, the ways in which players were obliged to communicate led to notable ‘communicative asymmetry’ (Crabtree and Rodden 2008: 486) according to which channel they were obliged to use, with text messages being constraining in a number of ways. They also noted that the upfront cooperation between players was matched by a ‘behind-the-scenes’ body of collaboration necessary to support the players as they pursued the course of the game (p. 488). Most notably, they pointed to how awareness of ‘the state of play’ was distinctive from other studies of awareness and how it might be supported by design. While other studies of awareness among distributed interactants had previously emphasized the ways in which communicative asymmetry could be problematic (e.g. Heath and Luff 1992; Luff et  al. 2003), the fragmented character of the interaction across multiple channels in Uncle Roy (mobile devices, audio messaging, virtual environments, and text messaging) meant there was no symmetry to disrupt in the first place. Successful gameplay therefore turned upon being able to reconcile and act upon the different fragments you encountered, and it was clear from the observations that players had little difficulty in accomplishing this most of the time. They also noted that the behind-the-scenes orchestrators of the performance had to operate in a similar hybrid environment and that here too reconciliation of both physical and digital traces was largely unproblematic, and that the fragmented character of the elements did not disrupt awareness in significant ways. They also suggested that ‘new computing environments’ were increasingly being constructed in this way, and that design therefore needed to be pitched towards the ongoing support of fragmented interaction within a hybrid ecology of digital technologies in physical space (p. 488). In Uncle Roy, the ethnographic documentation had to resolve action across numerous distributed parties in order to provide a coherent record of what the performance actually looked like for those involved. Analysis itself exposed how resolving the distributed and fragmented character of the interaction was equally the key challenge for both the players and the orchestrators of the event. The ethnographic record therefore provided a means of examining exactly how the work of reconciliation took place.

Rider Spoke In Rider Spoke, there were similar elements of distribution and fragmentation for those orchestrating the event, but here the key problem confronting those seeking to build an ethnographic record of the experience was the way in which the participants actually had to engage with it. Rider Spoke was originally described by its designers as ‘an artistic location-based experience for cyclists’ (Rowland et al. 2009; Giannachi et  al. 2010; Chamberlain et  al. 2011). As with Uncle Roy All Around You, it was designed and implemented collaboratively by the interactive media arts group Blast Theory and the MRL.

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In principal, the event involved participants coming to a host venue where they could register, sign a disclaimer, and leave credit card details in lieu of a deposit. They were then given a basic outline of the event, a safety briefing, and instructed in the use of the equipment. The equipment itself amounted to: a simple touchscreen device that could handle all of the basic interaction; headphones; and a microphone that was clipped to their clothing. After this, they were given a bike, and the touchscreen device was attached to the handlebars. The device used continuous Wi-Fi scanning to triangulate Wi-Fi access points into a unique ‘fingerprint’ for any particular location (Rowland et al. 2009; Giannachi et al. 2010; Chamberlain et al. 2011). Once the rider had set off, they received audio and screen-based messages telling them to leave recorded responses to requests in various locations. Riders did not follow any pre-specified route as such. However, if the rider tried to stop at a place where a message had already been recorded, this was recognized by the system and they were told to continue cycling. Aside from recording their own messages, riders were also able to access recordings of previous responses from other players. Meanwhile, their own recordings then became part of a larger database of recordings from the event that was used to populate the available recordings for the following day’s event. After about an hour, the rider received instructions to return to the venue, where they returned their bicycle and equipment and were given back their credit card information. The event, which was followed ethnographically, took place in Brighton in May 2008. Rider Spoke events had previously been run in London and Athens. The Brighton event had therefore been refined technically and in terms of content as a result of these prior experiences. A key feature of each event was that they were evening/nighttime experiences, designed to encourage cyclists to explore an urban area after dark. The decision to study Rider Spoke ethnographically arose from a keen interest in the nature of the experience from the point of view of a participant, how the experience was organized and managed by the riders themselves, and how that was informing their interactions with the technology and the delivery of content. This resulted in a number of significant challenges with regard to acquiring an adequate ethnographic record. The event was studied by following three riders throughout the course of their registration and their subsequent ride during a Friday night. The first rider was a 54-year-old part-time adult literacy teacher who had lived in Brighton all of his life, who kept mostly to the seafront, and who described himself as a casual cyclist. The second rider was a 42-year-old regional advisor for a voluntary group who had lived in Brighton for the past 10 years. This rider cycled to the remoter parts of town and said that she did off-road cycling as a hobby every weekend. The final rider was 23 years old and currently working for the festival press office. He said he had only lived in Brighton for about four months and that he liked to cycle generally around the city, often seeking out higher-up places. He also said he cycled to work every day. To create an ethnographic record of how each of these riders was engaging with the experience, it was necessary to resolve a number of issues. First of all, they had

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to be allowed to experience the event in much the same way as the other riders, i.e. alone. This meant that usual practice of directly accompanying participants could not be adopted. At the same time, because the riders were following audiobased instructions in their headphones and were sometimes required to provide oral input themselves, there was a need to capture sound even if the ethnographer was not actually directly adjacent. On top of this, rider interactions with the system via their touchscreens had to be collected and their trail through the city plotted so that their activities could be related to the system record once the event had taken place. In order to solve these various problems, we proceeded in the following way: first of all, to allow the participant to perform the activity on their own, the

FIGURE 15.2 

A sample of the ethnographic record for Rider Spoke (2009)

Courtesy Peter Tolmie

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FIGURE 15.3 

The additional record of the GPS trail (2009)

Courtesy Peter Tolmie

ethnographer followed each of the riders on a bike himself, keeping at a distance of between 5 and 20 meters, capturing a comprehensive video record throughout the registration process and the course of each ride wherever possible.1 To solve the problem of capturing audio, a sound recorder was attached to each of the riders. This captured both their own voices and the incoming messages from the game. Finally, to facilitate marrying the ethnographic record with the system logs, a GPS device was attached to each rider and GPS data was captured throughout their ride. Once the capture of the materials themselves had been undertaken, there still remained a significant challenge to assembling the different elements into one coherent record. This was also an issue in Uncle Roy, but in Rider Spoke the physical distance the ethnographer was obliged to maintain aggravated the task significantly. In the end, a number of composite records were created for each of the riders followed. When it came to analyzing the materials, a key concern was how the experience provided participants with license to reason about and undertake actions they would not have in everyday life. Thus, the ethnographic record was especially valuable for how it highlighted moments where riders made it obvious they were breaching ordinary cycling behavior.

If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? was an event that took place at Tate Modern in London during May 2015, and ethnographic work was undertaken to garner insight about the activities of groups of people as opposed to individuals (as in the previous two examples). With Musée de la Danse, French choreographer and dancer Boris Charmatz seeks to use the ephemerality of dance to ‘redefine the very

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notions of museum and collection’ (Wood and Perrot 2014). A particular interest of Charmatz’s was to challenge visitors’ ordinary expectations such that they might seem to be ‘wearing glasses with a “corrective” function’, whereby the juxtaposition of the museum setting and the dance might ‘open up people’s perceptions to the “found” choreography happening everywhere in the museum’ (ibid.). For Tate, the interest was in exploring the overlaying of different institutions upon one another and a shift of focus to highly ephemeral activities (ibid.). The ethnographic work was one of a variety of documentary methods that were adopted to build a record of the live event, including video, photography, interviews, mapping, documentation of the processes involved, and the use of social media. The event was run over two days and, on each day, a range of dance-based activities involving around 90 dancers occurred throughout the museum. In the largest space, the Turbine Hall, large-scale public performances involving multiple dancers alternated with various sessions involving public participation, including a disco with a large mirror ball installed for the occasion. In the concourse areas at each level throughout the museum, and within many of the galleries, 20 dancers performed and discussed different kinds of dances from the twentieth century. The galleries themselves were changed as little as possible for the performances. Ordinary visiting was not suspended, and visitors were able to continue to look at the displayed exhibits during the performances if they so wished. An important feature of the ethnographic work was that it spanned two weeks and sought to gather data about visitor behavior across two strongly contrasting conditions: an ordinary weekend when no special events were taking place in the museum, and the weekend of the event itself when the galleries were hosting a variety of dance performances. This enabled us to chart not only how people engage with artistic performances of this kind and in this kind of setting, but also how that engagement compared to their usual comportment in such spaces. The other feature to emphasize here is that the ethnographic work was focused upon capturing the activities of whole groups of people who might be counted as indicative of a broad ‘visiting public’. Thus, the observations took three basic forms, resulting in different kinds of information: static observations of general comportment; fluid observations of specific events in crowd settings; and following specific groups of people throughout the course of their visit to the museum, which was the principal strategy used. The first block of observations set out to get a sense of how people usually went about visiting the museum and the kinds of behaviors one might normally witness in the various galleries. The second block of observations aimed to capture the dress rehearsal for the event and then the actual unfolding performances. People’s visiting practices and engagements with both the artworks and the dance performances were then open to direct comparison with the data that had been collected the previous week. The people who were followed over the course of the study came from a wide range of different backgrounds, were of widely spaced ages, and formed a variety of groups, though a larger number of couples followed during the observations matched a notably high proportion of couples visiting the museum generally.

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The different groups of visitors observed followed a wide variety of trajectories through the museum, and this was found to be the case on both ordinary and performance days. Several of the groups took the approach of ‘bottoming’ the museum, while others had specific exhibitions in mind. The actual lengths of visits observed were also hugely variable on all occasions. Some were as short as 20 minutes; others took about three hours. In Figure 15.4, we see what detailed engagement looked like in the two contrasting conditions. Comparison of these two examples shows immediate differences between how visitors organize themselves within the gallery space (moving freely around the space versus standing largely as a block and looking one way), how they move around and relate to the object they are observing (circling the object to look from various angles and getting up close versus maintaining a single viewpoint and a constant distance from the object), and how they interact with one another (free interaction, on the one hand, and highly circumscribed interaction, on the other). Overall, the ethnographic work enabled us to track in detail a range of transformations that were seen to take place across the museum during the performances. Flows through and between galleries were necessarily interrupted both by people

FIGURE 15.4 

Records of contrasting kinds of engagement in the Tate (2015)

Courtesy Peter Tolmie

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configured as audiences and spaces around performers being oriented to as performance spaces. The presence of onlookers in galleries turned many entrances/exits into choke points, blocking the flow and obliging those trying to pass through to resort to other routes or to push their way through regardless. Because routine passage through the galleries could be unexpectedly blocked by people in the doorways and performances could limit ordinary circulation within the galleries, a planned trajectory through the museum was hard to accomplish, especially if visitors were there primarily to see the static artworks. Appropriate trajectories therefore had to be worked out as they were pursued. Viewing artworks therefore became episodic and opportunistic rather than something that could be undertaken as a matter of course. Critical to the effectiveness of the performances in the Tate was the way in which gallery spaces could be reconfigured as performance spaces. Some of this was handled in planning the event, but the ethnographic record makes visible ways in which the act of performing itself does work to constitute a space as a performance space. This is not an accomplishment of the performer alone, but rather of the performer and the spectators working in concert. Audiences themselves make visible that they are an audience in various ways. One of the things we were able to observe was that when events like this take place, there is a reconfiguration of the rights people have within a gallery space. Suddenly people have rights to behave and watch in different ways. This was particularly the case with regard to how visitors occupied the gallery space. In almost all cases, an audience formed an arc around a performer such that they faced the performer and the performer faced towards them. Between this arc and the performer, an empty space was carefully maintained. People who attempted to look at the art rather than performer, and who thereby in any way disrupted these spaces, could be, and indeed often were, tutted at or glared at by other people in the audience, even though they were proceeding in what would be wholly ordinary ways on any other day. Nowhere was the work undertaken by audiences to constitute themselves as audiences more visible than in the public performance that took place in the Turbine Hall entitled manger (Tolmie and Giannachi 2017). Here, the performers continually disrupted how the audience had configured itself, forcing their way through the boundaries of bubbles of spectators that had formed around them, breaching the carefully maintained distance between audience and performer, and thus constantly forcing the audience to reconfigure itself as an audience in a new format to contend with the new organization of the dancers. Thus far, we have seen how ethnographic documentation of performances can overcome the challenges of different kinds of performance conditions: simultaneously distributed and fragmented interactions; mobile interactions conducted in isolation; and group interactions across contrasting circumstances. However, some kinds of documentary exercises are addressed to circumstances that move beyond the scope of any conventional observation techniques, obliging the construction of a different sort of ethnographic record entirely.

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FIGURE 15.5 

The audience of manger in bubble formation (2015)

Courtesy Peter Tolmie

The Carolan guitar In this final section, we will discuss an MRL-designed artifact that can itself document aspects of how it is used in performance so as to provide material that traditional ethnographic approaches would find it hard to capture. The Carolan guitar is an augmented acoustic guitar designed to act as a cultural probe (Gaver et al. 1999; Benford et al. 2015, 2016). The idea was to embed the possibility of engaging in a range of digital interactions and creating a variety of digital documents in a physical object. The idea was also to capture aspects of interaction over extended periods of time that previous ethnographic work had left untouched. A guitar was chosen because it is a pervasive object that can be found all around the world, it is portable, it has a lifespan that will typically span many decades, and it may pass through the hands of numerous individuals,2 and it often has numerous personal memories associated with it. The guitar was handmade by a traditional luthier, who inlayed a variety of interactive Celtic knotwork patterns into various parts of the instrument (see Figure 15.6). These patterns can be scanned using a mobile device, giving access to its ongoing digital record. The design of the interactive patterns themselves grew out of another MRL-based project called Aestheticodes,3 which makes use of a pre-existing technology called ‘D-Touch’ where computer-readable visual codes are embedded into the topology of images (Costanza and Huang 2009). The name ‘Carolan’ was chosen to be evocative of a ‘legendary 18th century nomadic Irish harpist and storyteller’ (Benford et al. 2016). Over 30 people were invited to play the guitar, and together they created a corpus of documents based on the guitar’s use: hundreds of photographs,

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100 video recordings, and five studio audio recordings. These were then made available through a series of 50 blog posts.4 Over the span of a year, it was hosted in six homes, played at three gigs, involved in two recording sessions, and taken to eight clubs and jam sessions and an open mic event. It also spent time in a shop and was taken on an international road trip. The documentary record was initially seeded by professionals playing the guitar. It was then augmented with a variety of highly detailed contributions from its various hosts. The collection of images in Figure 15.6 shows how, during its time at the luthier’s, the instrument garnered ‘design sketches, photographs of the luthier at work, time-lapse videos of the front and back being laser etched and an official photoshoot’ (Benford et al. 2016). Beyond this, in the spirit of the original notion of cultural probes (Gaver et al. 1999), a camera was provided to the various hosts, prompting the capture of numerous videos, many of which were constructed as personal archives and linked to personal spaces. A professional band used the guitar to make a record of a new song, incorporating the original lyrics and chord sheet. Another musician used it to create

FIGURE 15.6 

Some of the documents generated by the Carolan guitar

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a composition with the record, ‘capturing multiple versions of the piece as it evolved’. On the basis of this, copies of some of the Carolan’s patterns were inserted into CDs. Some parts of the record were used to support the production of public performances on the guitar, and it was also used to construct lessons, for other users down the line. Other ways in which the instrument evolved as a device for documenting its own use and history were the incorporation of sensors that could record its movements and temperature data, and an internal camera to capture a ‘guitar’s-eye view of the world’ that was triggered by movement. Overall, the guitar captured five types of digital record: ••

•• •• ••

••

The provenance of the instrument, including certification of its maker, when and where it was made, sustainable sourcing of materials, maintenance log, and a documented history of ownership (including loans). Personal and public archives of performances, recordings, and compositions, documented as video, audio, lyric sheets, and chord charts. Historical and fictional stories inspired by Carolan, including stories of other found, owned, lost, damaged, and regained instruments that people recounted. Documentation to support ongoing use, including an extended user guide (with playing and recording tips contributed by players), personal set lists, playlists to be called up during live shows, and materials for lessons. ‘Data pertaining to long-term wellbeing including measurements of movements and environmental conditions during transportation and storage that might encourage good practice or account for any damage’ (Benford et al. 2016).

While some aspects of each of these records would be open to capture by ethnographic records already being compiled in the MRL, the scale, diversity, and thoroughness of each of these would not typically be available because an ethnographer would only be able to be physically present during a small subset of the interactions. Pinning the assembly of the record to the artifact itself means that wherever the artifact goes, whoever is using it, whenever it is being used, and whatever it is being used for, the record continually develops. This takes recordbuilding across boundaries of time, place, and person that would be a challenge for even a whole team of ethnographers. Analysis of the numerous deployments of the Carolan guitar led to the development of the concept of an ‘accountable artifact’: ‘a “thing” that becomes connected to an evolving digital record over its lifetime and that can be interrogated to reveal diverse accounts of its history and use’ (Benford et al. 2016). The insights generated by an ethnographer working to acquire a person’s perspective, however, do not simply spring from accountable artifacts. Thus, there is a body of work still to be undertaken to interpret what can be seen within the record itself. What the Carolan guitar does demonstrate, however, is that it is possible to garner significantly richer documents of performance through the augmentation of existing artifacts than the kinds of documents made available through system logs that the previous case studies were drawing upon. Thus, it can be seen that the ongoing

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evolution of ethnographic practice in the MRL is also a story of how ethnographic work is able to drive and make use of technological innovation in its own right.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have brought together four case studies that illustrate the variety of challenges that can confront the assembly of an adequate ethnographic record of performance. Uncle Roy had to handle capturing simultaneous activity across distributed parties. For Rider Spoke, we had to come up with a way to capture remote mobile interactions in a potentially challenging environment. For If Tate was Musée de la Danse?, the challenges concerned capturing contrasting contexts of interaction and acquiring a sense of engagement across a broad public made primarily of groups rather than hand-picked individuals. The Carolan guitar seeks to surmount challenges posed by the physical limitations experienced by any human investigator. We have sought to show through these detailed accounts how ethnography provides for a uniquely detailed record of performance that is hard to acquire in any other way, and how in each new setting, and with each new body of performance, the actual pursuit of the ethnographic study has had to adapt in some way in order to preserve that quality of record. Beyond all of this, in each case study, we also sought to illustrate how the ethnographic work is in no sense limited to the acquisition of a detailed record. Rather, it has been driven by a wish to understand how particular phenomena are socially organized and to then use that understanding of the social order in play as a resource for inspiring new approaches to performance and design. So the study of Uncle Roy was able to offer up new insights regarding how people are able to work successfully within hybrid ecologies and manage fragmented interaction. The study of Rider Spoke offered up insights regarding the nature of instruction following and how breaches in conventional ways of acting and interacting can be brought about in effective ways. The study of the dance performances in the Tate revealed in detail how people behave and hold one another accountable differently depending on whether they understand themselves to be doing ordinary museum visiting or watching a performance. And analysis of the record being created around the Carolan Guitar has become focused upon how use of the record might be constituted as a social enterprise where the record can be interrogated to arrive at specific socially coherent accounts. This, of course, harks back to Malinowski’s original recognition of the need to ‘get down of the veranda’ and ‘grasp the native’s point of view’. The record alone is only ever indexical to this point of view. It takes further work to explicate the record and make visible how the phenomena recorded are actually organized as lived sequences of events.

Notes 1 Note that a further challenge was that, as the rides took place mostly during the hours of darkness, it was not always possible to get decent video recordings, even with night vision. 2 See Annie Proulx’s novel Accordion Crimes (Fourth Estate, 2009), where she makes use of just these kinds of characteristics of musical instruments to create a series of interwoven

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short stories that tell the tale of immigration in the USA and pose profound questions about what it is to be American. 3 An introduction to Aestheticodes: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW39Mt5kscQ, accessed May 1, 2017. 4 See www.carolanguitar.com, accessed May 1, 2017.

Works cited Benford, S., Hazzard, A., and Xu, L. (2015) ‘The Carolan Guitar: A Thing That Tells Its Own Life Story’, Interactions, May–June: 64–6. Benford, S., Hazzard, A., Chamberlain, A., Glover, K., Greenhalgh, C., Xu, L., Hoare, M., and Darzentas, D. (2016) ‘Accountable Artefacts: The Case of the Carolan Guitar’, Proceedings of CHI’ 16, ACM, 1163–75. Button, G., Crabtree, A., Rouncefield, M., and Tolmie, P. (2015) Deconstructing Ethnography: Towards a Social Methodology for Ubiquitous Computing and Interactive Systems Design, London: Springer-Verlag. Chamberlain, A., Oppermann, L., Flintham, M., Benford, S., Tolmie, P., Adams, M., Row Farr, J., Tandavanitj, N., Marshall, J., and Rodden, T. (2011) ‘Locating Experience: Touring a Pervasive Performance’, Personal Ubiquitous Computing, 15(7), October: 717–30. Costanza, E. and Huang, J. (2009) ‘Designable Visual Markers’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’09), ACM, New York, 1879–88. Crabtree, A. and Rodden, T. (2008) ‘Hybrid Ecologies: Understanding Cooperative Interaction in Emerging Physical-Digital Environments’, Personal & Ubiquitous Computing, 12: 481–93. Crabtree, A. and Rodden, T. (2009) ‘Understanding Interaction in Hybrid Ubiquitous Computing Environments’, Proceedings of MUM09, Cambridge: ACM. Crabtree, A., Rouncefield, M., and Tolmie P. (2012) Doing Design Ethnography, London: Springer-Verlag. Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Gaver, B., Dunne, T., and Pacenti, E. (1999) ‘Design: Cultural Probes’, Interactions, 6(1): 21–9. Giannachi, G., Rowland, D., Benford, S., Foster, J., Adams, M., and Chamberlain, A. (2010) ‘Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, Its Documentation and the Making of Its Replay Archive’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 20(3): 353–67. Heath, C. and Luff, P. (1992) ‘Media Space and Communicative Asymmetries’, Human Computer Interaction, 7: 315–46. Luff, P. et al. (2003) ‘Fractured Ecologies’, Human Computer Interaction, 18(1): 51–84. Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, London and New York: Routledge. Rowland, D., Flintham, M., Oppermann, L., Marshall, J., Chamberlain, A., Koleva, B., Benford, S., and Perez, C. (2009) ‘Ubikequitous Computing: Designing Interactive Experiences for Cyclists’, in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on HumanComputer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, ACM, 21. Tolmie, P. and Giannachi, G. (2017) ‘On Becoming an Audience: If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse?’, in A. Janevski (ed.), Boris Charmatz, MoMA Dance Series, New York: MoMA, forthcoming. Wood, C. and Perrot, C. (2014) Tate Modern as the Musee de la Danse. London: Tate Modern.

Afterword THE INTENTION OF THE ARTIST AND THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE AUDIENCE Performance documentation revisited Gabriella Giannachi

In 1951, Suzanne Briet published the essay Qu’est-ce que la documentation (Briet 2006 [1951]), which is often hailed as one of the most significant contributions to the development of the contemporary practice of documentation. Writing after Paul Otlet, a figure that many consider the father of information science or documentation, who had suggested that documents could be three-dimensional, or sculptural (Buckland 1997: 805), Briet argued for a notion of the document that could include artifacts, natural objects, as well as works of art, as long as they were relocated to a museum. For her, documents formed an ecology of inter-documents, comprising primary documents (created at the time of a live event); secondary documents (created from the initial documents); and auxiliary documents (created by a juxtaposition of documents). Rather than delivering remains of an isolated event, documents, were seen by her as forming part of a matrix or network of signs. So, Briet noted: ‘through the juxtaposition, selection, and the comparison of documents, and the production of auxiliary documents’, the content of documentation becomes ‘inter-documentary’ (Briet 2006: 16). For Corina MacDonald, Briet’s pioneering work situated documentation within a ‘network of cultural and social production’ (MacDonald 2009: 59). Documentation and knowledge creation were seen to be operating in ‘parallel and even convergent’ ways (p. 62). This consideration is of crucial importance within the context of most artistic practices that have a stake in documentation, be it performance, interactive arts, new media, game studies, the design of mixed reality work, or other, showing that documentation is not only a form of evidence or validation that is useful for preservation, but also that it is a crucial aspect of knowledge creation and transmission. Here, we will see why it is therefore crucial that the audience is placed at the center of such a production process. While societies have always been documenting in some way or other, it was during the 1960s that changes in practice, partly to do with technological innovation, led to what Jacques Le Goff described as a ‘documentary revolution’

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(Le Goff 1978: 40, my translation). New kinds of documents started to proliferate, including parish documents, which allowed people to trace their own family histories. While, on the one hand, this established an interest in personal forms of documentation, it also led to a phenomenon known as ‘mass documentation’ (p. 40, my translation), which in turn brought on a fascination with collective memory creation (p. 41), and led to the identification of memorial practices as strategies for aesthetic, social, and political change. Prompting what philosopher Jacques Derrida famously described as ‘an archival fever’ (Derrida 1995: 23), this obsession with documentation led to the emergence of an archaeological sensibility (Pearson and Shanks 2001) that in turn explains the role that the archive and associated documentary practices increasingly play in facilitating the mapping our everyday lives (Giannachi 2016). This phenomenon, which was referred to by Hal Foster as an ‘archival impulse’ (Foster 2004: 3), inspired André Lepecki, in commenting on Foster, to note how dancers that restage past works do not so much ‘fix a work in its singular (originating) possibilization’, but ‘unlock, release, and actualize a work’s many (virtual) com- and incompossibilities, which the originating instantiation of the work kept in reserve, virtually’ (Lepecki 2010: 31). With this statement, Lepecki drew attention not only to the crucial role of re-enactments, which I addressed in my contribution to this book, but also to the evolving nature of the relationship between performance, documentation, and the archive that is so important to build an understanding of the role of documentation within museological practices. While performance documentation entered museums from the late 1930s, it is only since the 1960s and 1970s that the approach to documentation, largely because of the work of photographers Peter Moore and Babette Mangolte, as well as, later, the photographer and video-artist Charles Atlas, became more systematic, resulting in a set of practices that are still influential nowadays. For Peter Moore, it was important to ‘do justice, as much as you are able to, to the intention of the artist, rather than impose your own point of view on it to such a degree that it becomes distorted and unrecognizable’ (cited in Argelander 1974: 52). To achieve this, he stated, documentation should be shot ‘from the point of view of someone in the audience in a “normal” viewing position’ (p. 53). For him, an ideal photographic documentation consisted of a ‘cross between still camera technology and motion camera technology’ in the sense that a single sequence should be created that would form a ‘positive workprint, like a movie workprint’ from which one could select a final documentation (p. 53). Babette Mangolte, on the other hand, adopted the two organizational concepts of automatism and chance (Mangolte 2009). However, she too, like Moore, aimed to ‘identify with the position of the spectator in the middle of the audience’, rather than, as she claims had been the case for Moore, from the side, trying to ‘capture the mental images that would become what an audience would likely remember of the piece’, the so-called ‘“iconic” images for the piece’ (ibid.). Moore and Mangolte’s documentation strategies—capturing the artist intent and the point of view of the audience—were profoundly influential in the way that the practice of performance documentation subsequently evolved.

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Over the years, museums, photographers, and video-makers have been documenting performance within museums and galleries, often alongside each other. Museums frequently employed photographers and video-makers to capture live events for their own records. Photographers and video-makers, too, often independently, documented performance. Some of them subsequently became artists in their own right. Artists often generated documentations of their work, whether though photography, video, painting, sketches, diagrams, or text. Whether, like Chris Burden, they documented their work through single iconic images, on occasion accompanied by brief textual descriptions (Schimmel 1998: 97), or, as Philip Auslander noted (Auslander 2006), they employed photographers to generate images of actions that never occurred, as in the case for Harry Shunk’s photographs of Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), documentation was for them not only a remain, a material evidence that an event had occurred, but a way to perform. Catherine Wood, Senior Curator International Art (Performance) at Tate, explains how artists performed for the camera by describing in her interview how in the 1970s in the USA and Europe, a number of artists had begun ‘to make work in which they imagined performance taking place within a new reality: inside the space of the image itself’. These artists, Wood notes, ‘imagined the world within the photograph’s frame’ so that: their appearances were not fleshed out in the dimensions of real space and time, but compressed into flat still and moving images: pictures with limited depth but infinite potential to be manipulated, performed, and styled; a kind of two-dimensional theatre space. This practice of performing for the camera renders the image, and herewith documentation, not only a trace or remain, participating in the archival economy described by Derrida (1995) and Foster (2004), but also an entirely different space for performance, one that often includes and even implicates the audience in the process of documentation (see also Giannachi 2016). Already in the 1930s, documentation started to be used within exhibitions that entailed a performative dimension. Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives at MoMA, notes in her interview how in the 1940s, MoMA had collected photographs, as well as watercolours, that led to exhibitions such as the American Indian Art Exhibition of 1941, a well-known ‘museological landmark’ for its cutting-edge installation strategies (Berlo 2015). As Elligott points out, there was an interest, even in those days, in a ‘participatory activation’ of the museum that directly involved its audience. This was largely because of the 1939 New York World Fair, which had featured, for example, exhibits such as the Westinhouse Time Capsule, comprising writings by Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, but also seeds, a Mickey Mouse watch, and millions of pages on microfilm, among other artifacts, that were not to be seen for 5,000 years. The Fair also hosted a group of Salvador Dalí performers who posed as statues in the Spanish Pavilion, an early example of live art within a gallery setting. But, as many of the interviews show, while performance and documentation

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entered museums, largely though their acquisition and education departments in the 1930s and 1940s, it was only after the 1960s and 1970s that documentation acquired a more prominent role within museums and arts galleries. Among a number of curators who led the way was the Swedish collector and museum director Pontus Hultén, who, in talking to curator and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist about the influential exhibitions he curated at that time at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet and at New York’s MoMA, pointed out that he did not privilege artworks, but rather worked with documentation, and that in fact, ‘documentation was something we found very exciting!’ (cited in Obrist 2011: 43). This was a strategy he maintained throughout the 1970s while at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and subsequently at Palazzo Grassi, in which his Futurismo & Futurismi exhibition catalogue (Hultén 1986) included 200 pages of documentation. Over the years, the purchase of performance as part of museum collections altered the way in which museums conceived of documentation. Originally, documentation entered museums through acquisitions, produced or bought alongside works and documents pertaining to previous versions of the work, records about value, place in the collection, as well as records about its preservation. As Christiane Berndes, Curator and Head of Collection at the Van Abbemuseum, points out in her interview, a lot of performance documentation that entered the museum in such ways, whether as photograph or videotape, over time then became the work. Hence, art historian Barbara Clausen explains in her contribution that documentation has been playing three functions in the history of museum practice: ‘initially as a press image, then as a historical document, and finally as a work of art’. In this sense, Clausen suggests, documentation is not ‘just a visual proof of an event’, but, ‘projected into the future’, it produces ‘the ability to comprehend the image as an index of its various future forms of existence as image, trace, and object’. Documentation therefore has multiple, often co-existing, past- and future-facing qualities. As Pip Laurenson, Head of Collection Care Research, Tate, explains in her contribution, a documentation like a Babette Mangolte photograph ‘can be very fluid in terms of whether it stands on its own as an image, or as a document of a particular moment in time—whether it is seen as a means of illustrating, for lack of a better word, a dance. It is going to have different kinds of use value, depending on the context of presentation’. Documentation is where performance can trans-form, i.e., where it might migrate between forms. It is where it becomes an object, or a product. Artists occasionally make visible these processes of capture or trans-formation into a document or product that could enter history, and often in doing so include the audience in this process. Thus, Tim Griffin, Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen, in talking in his interview about Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present (2010), a 736-hour and 30-minute piece, in which the artist sat immobile in MoMA’s atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her, notes that the audience became aware of the cameras surrounding the ring-fenced area in which the artist and the sitters were located. For him, witnessing the filming of the documentation means that they were at once in the event and in its

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historicization: ‘Am I in real time or am I in advanced time? The “event” has not happened yet because the performance is not just for the space, but also for the lens through which it passes in order to be edited into a new work’. While it could equally well belong in a library, an archive, or a collection, documentation has a hybrid status that serves different functions and can change over time. Rudolf Frieling, Curator for Media Arts at SFMOMA, points out in his interview that the fact that works that entail a live element ‘can be turned into a product’ and enter the collection as artworks, often through documentation, shows ‘that in museum practices, there is a certain margin of ambiguity as to whether a documentation remains a document or becomes a work’. This ‘margin of ambiguity’ has rendered museums increasingly alert to the changing properties of documentation, as Jay Sanders, Engell Speyer Family Curator of Performance, Whitney Museum of American Art, also indicates in his interview, so much so that new strategies have often been introduced not only for its capture, but also for its storage and exhibition. Thus, Jill Sterrett, Director of Collections and Conservation at SFMOMA, notes in her interview how SFMOMA started an Artist Materials Archive, which contains over 400 ‘things’ that do not have official acquisition numbers or a credit line, but yet are on display in the new building in a learning space associated with preservation called the Workroom. These ‘things’ have an ambivalent ontology, and are kept, as in the case of a piece of fabric dyed with a combination of powdered tea and red wine by Robert Rauschenberg in 1998 as a possible replacement of the silk in his Collections (1954–1955), ‘in the event that it was needed in the future’ (Roberts 2013). Yet while more and more museums have been recognizing the value of documentation, artists continue to challenge their most established practices, proving that documentation does not necessarily occur through the creation of physical artifacts, but also through often highly subjective processes of memory creation. While the intention of the artist and the point of view of the audience have formed the core of what performance documentation has tended to capture, in recent years attention has focused more and more on the documentation of the audience, not just in terms of what the audience sees, but what it does. This is a consequence of the increasingly active role played by the audience in the co-production of the artwork. Allan Kaprow traced the participatory role of the audience to Jackson Pollock’s action painting (Kaprow 2003: 5). He noted that, with and after Pollock, the viewer became increasingly implicated into the work of art, which in turn became more of an environment. This suggests that a painting, or an installation, can be read as a form of documentation of the action that produced it, where by action I mean that of the artist(s) as well as the audience. Thus, Stuart Comer, Chief Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art, MoMA, notes in his interview that he does ‘not actually see a radical difference in terms of the indexicality of a photograph of a dance or a performance, versus a Jackson Pollock painting or any other number of ways that movements are traced and recorded’. As art historian Amelia Jones, writing some 50 years after Pollock was working, suggested in relation to body

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art, it was in fact the ‘introduction of the body into (or “as”) the work of art in relation to an embodied spectator’ that defined what must be considered as ‘a major structural shift away from modernist beliefs’ (A. Jones 2008: 155). Hence, increasingly, curators, such as Annie Fletcher, Chief Curator Van Abbemuseum, in her interview, consider documentation as something that should be about relationships between artists and their work, but also between the artists, the works, and the public. This focus on participation to a work marks a shift in the way that museums think of documentation. No longer only a strategy for preservation, exhibition, or reactivation, documentation becomes a way of looking at the history of the reception and co-production of a work, showing the evolution of the inhabitation of a work by its audience over time. The changing role of the audience in performance documentation illustrates that performance is not purely constituted by a live event and documentation does not solely lead to a process of retrospection. Rather, performance, in the course of its transcriptions, is subject to significant shifts caused by the constantly altering reinterpretation of its documentation over time. Documenting each reception could generate a novel history of performance, one in which works are seen in a fluid or unfolding state, as processes and networks rather than products. As Stuart Comer notes in his interview, a work may in fact take ‘multiple forms throughout its history’. To tap into those histories, it might be necessary, as Comer suggests, to consider the ‘audience as archive’. As performance studies scholar Diana Taylor suggested in her own research, looking at the audience as an archive implies the documentation of intangible practices (Taylor 2008: 91), including behaviors, that could offer an alternate performance history ‘based on memory, events, and places rather than just documents’ (p. 101). This alternative way of documenting the history of performance would capture relationships not only between artists and their publics, but also among different versions or interpretations of a work. To acknowledge the role played by audiences not only in the reception but in the production or performance of artworks, and often in response to research in this field (see C. Jones 2008; Jones and Muller 2008; Giannachi et al. 2012), museums started to exhibit documentations showing histories of interactions with works. So, for example, at SFMOMA, Jill Sterrett, researching how best to exhibit Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Agent Ruby, an artificial intelligence Web character, noted that a number of performance and new media artworks are, as she indicated in her interview, ‘activity-based’, which means that there are ‘actions around them’ that need to be captured as part of the evolving history of a work. This prompted her, in 2013, to pilot a novel way of exhibiting this work, which was called, in acknowledgment to the role played by the documentation of the original piece, The Agent Ruby Files, showing 10 years of interactions between Agent Ruby and audiences at SFMOMA. The awareness of the importance of capturing histories of interaction prompted museums such as SFMOMA to experiment with wiki platforms allowing for dynamic reporting within collections. These changes in documentation practices, as Tate curator Catherine Wood points out in her interview, suggest that the storage of documentation

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and, I add, the creation of platforms that are capable of visualizing behaviors and relations among stakeholders, are likely to become a priority for the sector in future years. It will be interesting to see not so much whether, but rather how, these platforms will facilitate documentation by and of audiences. In parallel to these changes in documentation practices within the museum sector, a number of academic disciplines started to reflect on the significance of documentation for the capture of live events. These evolved somewhat separately from each other and this book constitutes an attempt to read them alongside each other. Performance studies and art history, as we have seen in the introduction, started to dedicate sustained attention to documentation from the 1990s, partly in response to Peggy Phelan’s well-known assertion that performance ‘cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations’ (Phelan 1993: 146, original emphasis). Art historian Amelia Jones drew attention to the interrelationship between performance and documentation (Jones 1997: 16) and Barbara Clausen suggested that the interest in performance should not begin with or end with the ‘authentic experience’, or live, present moment, but rather that it should be seen as ‘an ongoing process’ or ‘an interdependent relationship between event, medialization, and reception’ (Clausen 2007: 7). Herewith, Clausen shifted the focus of the debate from the ephemerality of the live event to how this is renegotiated ‘after the act’, drawing attention to the role of the audience in this context. As performance studies scholar Philip Auslander pointed out, ‘documentation does not simply generate image/ statements that describe an autonomous performance’, but rather it can produce ‘an event as a performance’ (Auslander 2006: 5). These considerations, moving away from reflections about the authenticity and autonomy of performance to the consideration of documentation and the archive as a space for performance transform the latter, as performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider noted, and as Jay Sanders also confirmed in his interview, into a site for a ‘social performance of retroaction’ (Schneider 2001: 105, original emphasis). Performance herewith becomes not only a strategy to inhabit the frame of the image, but also an instrument for interrogating, exhibiting, and building the apparatus of the archive, often through a re-reading or even a re-creation by its audiences (Giannachi 2016). Other disciplines engaged with performance documentation, especially in recent years, addressing these problematics in novel ways. These often consisted in placing the audience at the center of the documented event, be it an interactive artwork, a game, or an experiment in human computer interaction. Thus, for example, in line with scholars in other fields, information scientists Christina Manzella and Alex Watkins were drawn to performance by the challenge posed by the fact that, in terms of documentation, performance ‘is not an object but an interaction between artist and viewers’ (Manzella and Watkins 2011: 28). For them, this means that a performance record, following the model of the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), a 1998 framework produced by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), needs to address different levels of ‘representation’. So they argue that

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a work is formed by an ‘idea’, an ‘expression’ (i.e. a range of performances), its ‘dependant parts’ (documentation, artifacts, ephemera), and a number of ‘items’ (such as press releases) (p. 29). They suggest that to appreciate a work, these interdependent ‘representations’ should be considered alongside each other. In other words, the artists’ intention, alongside the audience’s point of view, are still privileged elements in performance documentation, but each manifestation of a work, they show, may present a novel point of origin. In this sense, a work is recreated every time it is shown not only through its reception, but also through its ‘expression’ or, in museum terms, its exhibition or performance. A work is not only each part, but also the summation of idea, expressions, dependant parts, items, etc. Most importantly, a work is not fixed; rather, because of the focus on its interpretation, it is in flux. Crucially then, not only it is important to capture the point of view of the audience as it witnesses an event, but also perhaps as it (re-)encounters its documentation. If performance occurs for a camera, and inside the image, the point of view of the audience is also that of those that subsequently look at, interact with, or reactive that image. The same goes for other media. Documentation is playing an increasingly important role in the analysis of and even creation of digital games. In this context, documentation may take the form of screenshots, replays, video, or other means, through data or screen capture that reveal fundamental knowledge about structures of experience and offers insight into how audiences understand themselves within this context as forming part of the operation of cultural artifacts. For Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science and Technology at Stanford Libraries, and computer scientists Eric Kaltman and Joseph C. Osborn, capturing game performance, which has ‘played out through technologies of replay’ exposes a certain ‘tension between re-viewing and re-doing past performance’, which is also characteristic of performance studies, and exposes a tension in the re-performance of historical work between restaging and reinterpreting. This, in turn, highlights the importance of capturing a range of points of view (see also Giannachi et al. 2012), which offer insight into how gamers may use such processes to reach a certain self-awareness or self-consciousness while playing a game. While this exposes, to some extent, the impossibility of capturing a ‘total’ documentation, it also reveals that the capture of a range of points of view facilitates the creation of a more environmental, and so potentially one day immersive, documentary architecture. For Lowood, Kaltman, and Osborn, one step in this direction is the performance citation tool, which records all data that are needed to reactivate a system performance and facilitates a viewing that is, in their words, ‘comparative’, and so able to produce ‘a meaningful dialogue between the gameplay (and players) of the past and future, an affordance that incidentally encourages consistent citation and description of games, games systems, and the performances produced with them’, showcasing therefore histories of interaction between human and system performance, as well as historical takes on redoing and reviewing. Tools such as these, or the CloudPad documentation tool prototype (see Giannachi et al. 2012; Giannachi 2016) facilitate the generation of individual

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replay systems or environments of documents that can be navigated to experience not only the audience’s point of view, but that could also be used to capture their self-awareness or self-consciousness within the game. Crucially, such tools expose the operation of the archive as an apparatus (see also Giannachi 2016), offering insight into technology’s role in building our own sense of ourselves in the context of a given human-computer interaction. Some disciplines utilize documentation to bring on technological innovation in the design of computer-human interactions. At the University of Nottingham, the Mixed Reality Laboratory makes specific use of ethnomethodology for the assessments of its work with artists such as the well-known British company Blast Theory, whose collaboration with the Lab I discussed, with Steve Benford, in Performing Mixed Reality (Benford and Giannachi 2011), which not only utilized documentation for the design of a framework, but also made the capture of documentation a significant aspect of the design of mixed reality experiences. Citing Bronislav Malinovski, the ethnographer Peter Tolmie and computer scientist Steve Benford note in their contribution that while ethnography is adopted so as ‘to grasp the native point of view’, ethnomethodology is useful to show how ‘people call one another to account for the things they do’. For ethnomethodologists, participants in an activity or performance produce an order through shared sense-making practices. For the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel, the method of interpretation means that an event should be treated as the document of a presupposed underlying pattern that then becomes visible through it. The fact that these documents are at the same time interpreted according to what is known about the underlying pattern (Garfinkel 1967: 78) generates what has been described as a ‘hermeneutic circle’ or ‘paradox’ (Okrent 1988: 157–72) that could also be described as being at the heart of the relationship between performance and documentation. Disciplines such as these, as is clear from Tolmie and Benford’s contribution, show that documentation not only reveals the point of view or action of the audience; it also exposes the operation of hermeneutics, indicating that the document is not only interesting insofar as it tells us something about the relationship between artists and their audiences, but also because it may tell us how further publics arrived at creating meaning through this process. It is clear from these developments in other disciplines that not only has the point of view of the audience been playing a more prominent role, but also that the intention of the artist, while still important, also needs looking into so as to include the history of production (not just creation) of a work. In other words, as performance is continuously recreated, the notion of provenance may be expanded to include multiple points of origin. In line with these findings, performance studies scholar Vivian van Saaze suggests that the ‘artist intention’ should not simply be ‘derived from the artist’, but rather that this is ‘produced’ as the ‘result of what is done in knowledge and documentation practices’. This suggests that the curator, or the conservator, is not just a ‘passive custodian’, but can be ‘considered an interpreter, mediator or even a co-producer of what is designated as “the artist’s intention”’ (van Saaze 2013: 115, original emphasis). Additionally, van Saaze,

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inspired by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (Latour 1987), suggests ‘that an artwork, like any other participant (both human and non-human) is an ‘actant’, not ‘a static object, frozen in a single state’ but something with a trajectory or career’ (van Saaze 2013: 28). In short, a work is not only part of an environment that also includes its documentation; it is in flux, delineating one or even multiple evolutionary trajectories. Locating a work in a collection and a documentation in an archive has meant that elements of the same environment or network of trajectories have been historically displaced from each other. It is therefore not unsurprising that, as Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives, MoMA, points out in her interview, more and more museums, such as the Van Abbemuseum and Reina Sofía, are considering ‘museum spaces as the archives of the commons’, hereby ‘erasing the classification of “work of art”, and reclassifying everything as archival’. If the work is also the documentation, then the archive, where the documentation tends to reside, becomes indistinguishable from the collection. Over the years, curators have devoted more and more attention to the relationship between different versions of a work, but also, as my paper shows, its re-enactments, re-interpretations and re-mediations. As Gaby Wijers, Director of LIMA, indicates in her interview, the revision of preservation strategies of video art became more of a priority in the 1990s, precisely as a consequence of the fact that artists started to produce multiple manifestations of their works, often using different media. Because of the performative dimension of multimedia as well as new media works, findings by researchers and conservators in this field have become increasingly significant for performance documentation, and vice versa, performance documentation has played a more significant role for conservators of new media works. Thus, Gaby Wijers draws attention to the complexity of distinguishing between ‘an autonomous work’ and a ‘documentation, a channel, or a recording’, so that, for example, ‘if a work was in several collections, perhaps one should preserve just one of them’. This also points towards the fact that not only, as art historian Katja Kwastek indicates in her contribution, is ‘documentation dependent on preservation’, but also preservation may become increasingly oriented towards documentation, focusing, for example, not only on the object but also the ephemera, records and documents that are produced and remain after a performative act, including emails and press releases, as well documentations generated by the audience, which are not currently, usually, collected by museums. To explore how best to capture and gather the most complex and complete record of a new media work, a number of documentation initiatives were carried in out in the 1990s and 2000s in digital arts and new media. One of the most influential projects discussing the behavior-centricity of new media works was the Variable Media Initiative, a non-traditional preservation strategy developed in the late 1990s. Designed by Jon Ippolito, among others, who at the time was at the Guggenheim Museum, and with the support of the Daniel Langlois Foundation, the Variable Media Initiative aimed to look into the preservation of non-traditional media artworks with the help of an interactive questionnaire available online. The framework underpinning the questionnaire recognizes that works now are often

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hybrid (Ippolito 2003: 48) and that contextual information needs to form part of documentation as well as interpretation panels, for example, to express the variation or multiple versions that are common in digital artworks and capture the ‘medium-independent behaviours’ of such works (cited in Depocas et  al. 2003: 48). In the words of digital media expert and curator Richard Rinehart, these kinds of systems captured both the ‘performative’ and ‘behaviour-centric’ as well as the ‘artifactual’ and ‘object-centric’ aspects of media art (Rinehart 2007: 181). Crucially, the questionnaire encourages artists to define their work independently from the medium used so that the work can be reinterpreted if the medium subsequently becomes obsolete. Thus, the Variable Media Initiative questionnaire identifies the following general types: ‘contained’, ‘installed’, ‘performed’, ‘interactive’, ‘reproduced’, ‘duplicated’, ‘encoded’, and ‘networked’. For Kwastek, the questionnaire was a milestone in the development of her own documentation practice. Thus, in her contribution, she illustrates how her work at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research, which aimed ‘at retroactively enriching’ material of the Ars Electronica Archive with metadata, she included categories offering verbal descriptions that described whether the visitor/performers do ‘observe’, ‘explore’, ‘activate’, ‘control’, ‘select’, ‘navigate’, ‘participate’, ‘leave traces’, ‘store something’, or ‘exchange information’. A work, still in Kwastek’s words, could be specified as ‘telling’ or ‘narrating’, ‘documenting’ or ‘informing’, ‘visualizing’ or ‘sonifying’, so as to ‘enhance perception’ or to ‘offer a game’, to ‘monitor’ something or to ‘serve as an instrument’, to ‘transform’, to ‘collect’ or ‘store’, to ‘process’ or ‘mediate’. Interestingly, for Kwastek, the practice of documentation forms part of the taxonomy of how a work behaves or performs in that the audience might ‘leave traces’ or ‘store something’ while the work might operate as an archive and ‘collect’ or ‘store’ something, with replay constituting a fundamental strategy for the gathering of documentary materials. This again confirms that a work and its documentation are implicated in each other not only, as Jones indicated, because a photograph ‘needs the body art event as an ontological “anchor” of its indexicality’, just as the latter needs the photograph to show that it occurred (Jones 1997: 16). This also shows that while works may start to operate archivally, audiences may engage with them as documentalists. For curators Caitlin Jones and Lizzie Muller, media artworks challenge conventional documentation models (Jones and Muller 2008: 418) because they require a strong focus on the user experience (Muller, cited in Jones 2008: 8–9), and on the inclusion of both the intention of the artist and the point of view of the audience to create, in Jones’s words, ‘a dialogue between the ideal, conceptual existence of the work and its actual manifestation through different iterations and exhibitions in the real world’ (C. Jones 2008: 418). For them, works offer ‘access points’, rather than points of analysis (p. 419), which should result in a ‘collection of documentation that provides multiple perspectives of the work as well as multiple layers of information, held together with—and not superseded by—the idea of a unified total’ (p. 419). These access points, with respect to standard archival terminology, often referring to archives in architectural terms, were conceived of as doorways or trajectories of use,

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and included interviews to the artists as well as the audience documenting various aspects of a work over time. For Sandra Fauconnier and Rens Frommé, because it is the experience of users that needs documenting, one must speak, again, of activities, and not of works (Fauconnier and Frommé 2003: 5). Thus in talking about Thecla Schiphorst and Susan Kozel’s whisper (2003), they suggested that works have different ‘research and test activities’, as well as ‘occurrences’, each of which are often documented differently (p. 6). Rather than focus on static objects these new forms focus on processes (Frommé and Fauconnier 2004). Muller too noted that media artworks ‘exist primarily in human experience rather than as discrete objects’ (Jones and Muller 2008: 418), and that rather than focusing on ‘an authoritative collection of documentation, which establishes a fixed identity for the work’, museums should perhaps attempt ‘to capture its mutability and contingency through the dialogue between its experiential, conceptual and technical aspects’ (p. 419). Such views were very influential on the development of the field of new media documentation and, as Kwastek’s contribution highlights, focus on the capture of a work not as an object or even an event, but as a process in flux that entails more than one dimension. To address these problematics, which increasingly, like other world challenges, may only be resolved by interdisciplinary and international teams, and in view of the fact that works are now often in multiple collections or even shared by museums, art organizations, and galleries, museums set up in 2003 Matters in Media Art, comprising a consortium of curators, conservators, and digital experts from New Art Trust, MoMA, SFOMA, and Tate to provide guidelines for the care of timebased media works of art. The aim was to produce a template aimed at preparing a work for preservation and possible future installation. Among the most interesting findings of this project was the fact that the ‘challenge of preserving time-based media is best met collaboratively’ (Matters in Media Art n.d.). This suggests that perhaps in the future, museums may collaborate not only among each other, but also with the public in generating documentation, as is the case of the Cartography project, a collaboration between Tate Learning, Exeter University, and University of Nottingham (2016–2017) to design a participatory online platform for the documentation of participatory art in museums and art galleries worldwide. Crucial in this context were the recommendations of the Variable Media Initiative as well as the Capturing Unstable Media models produced by V2 in 2003. This, in turn, was a conceptual model for the description of works that recognized the role of collaboration and distributed authorship. The model included an analysis of users and, crucially, distinguished three phases in the development of a work that require documentation: the research phase; the development phase; and the implementation phase (cited in Dekker et al. 2010: 24), hereby expanding the idea of documentation to include not only reception, but also what occurred during the creative and research phases of a work, addressing therefore also what the terms ‘artist’ and ‘audience’ might mean in these different contexts. Curators and performance studies and new media experts Annet Dekker, Gaby Wijers and Viv van Saaze suggested in their ‘The Art of Documentation’

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(Dekker et  al. 2010) that with the arrival of performance, as well as video or digital works, a shift occurred in museological documentation whereby museums started to address the fact that documentation is a subjective process whose selection criteria are of ‘great importance’. This indicates that while ‘provenance and transparency’ maintain ‘important positions’ (p. 22), the cohabitation of multiple forms of documentation may also prove to have significant value. In view of these changes in practice, and in the aftermath of the international research project Inside Installations (2004), which was a collaboration between conservators, art historians, scientists, and developers of information systems, an information architecture was recommended that, again, aimed to record the evolution of artworks, in particular installations. The model considered four basic modules: identification and description, material and technique, location and exhibition history, and condition and conservation. The model also provided instructions for documentation procedures, such as the creation of new records within different modules, additional records describing evolution over time, and the work’s conservation history. Special features included links to various archives and thesauri, rendering the documentation more of an architecture and environment that could be, one day, visited, or perhaps even experienced as a 3D environment. On December 7, 2016, a Facebook post appeared on digital media artist Franco Mattes’s profile. The post said: Our work ‘Perpetual Self Dis/Infecting Machine’—a customized computer infected with our virus #Biennalepy—was out for an exhibition and came back disinfected. The virus was gone. Someone thought it was an error, and managed to wipe the virus out before returning the sculpture. LOL. This comment, somewhat jokingly dismissing a preservation blunder in an unidentified museum, shows how complex the field is in terms of the relationship between documentation, liveness (in this case of a virus), and preservation. It also shows how interesting documents about works may appear in unexpected locations, such as social media, raising complex questions about copyright and the ethics of crowdsourcing knowledge in this way. Maybe in the future of the Internet of things, artifacts such as the Carolan guitar, a self-documenting musical instrument created at the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham, which is discussed by Peter Tolmie and Steve Benford in their contribution, will provide not only for richer documentations, but become, in Steve Benford’s words, an ‘accountable artifact’, one that is ‘connected to an evolving digital record over its lifetime’ that ‘can be interrogated to reveal diverse accounts of its history of use’ (Benford et al. 2016). Thus, not only will we perhaps in the future inhabit environments formed primarily by documents, but also the artifacts we are surrounded by will self-document so that we will no longer see a separation between the archive, ourselves, and the world we live in (see also Giannachi 2016). It is noticeable from all these developments in new media arts that while conventions such as the intention of the artist and point of view of the audience have

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been maintained, and still play a significant role in performance and new media art documentation, what is meant by intention of the artist (or the curator as the recreator of the work) and the audience (as participant and co-producer of the work) has changed substantially over the years. Thus documentation may now include the intention of the artist, but also the intention of the curators who brought a work to life iteratively, and even the public, acting as participants or co-producers or even co-documentalists of a work. A documentation may not just focus on an individual performance or its remains, but look at a trajectory or at the behavior of a work over time, which includes its translational ability to reside in different media or be reinterpreted by other artists. A documentation may identify multiple access points that make up for the high degree of subjectivity the experience of performance and new media works frequently entails. It may unwrap the history of a work, including its conception, but also its reinvention by different stakeholders, from curators to other interpreters and the public. It may comprise not only the exhibition record or history of a work, including its reception, but also its capa­ city to communicate to other works, and even archives. Finally, it may include the practice of documentation as an aspect of a work, and may therefore become more of a network within which artists, curators, researchers, publics, over time, produce the environment of the work and its documentation. This volume brought together a range of voices, practices, and histories, showing that, as RoseLee Goldberg put it in her interview, ‘in some ways, the history of documentation is the history of performance, and vice versa’. These approaches place the audience at the center of the process of documentation, thus implicitly reading a work as a social network of activities. This suggests that documentation, just like performance, not only should comprise the different phases of these activities, but also that stakeholders from these different phases would reveal, through documentation, diverse aspects of a work. Ultimately, performance and documentation comprise architectures, entail practices, and lead to transformations whereby each part is able to activate a whole, a whole that in and of itself, remains, however, elusive, ephemeral and ungraspable, just like life itself.

Works cited Argelander, R. (1974) ‘Photo-Documentation (and an Interview with Peter Moore)’, The Drama Review, 18(3): 51–8. Auslander, P. (2006) ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 28(3), September: 1–10. Benford, S. and Giannachi, G. (2011) Performing Mixed Reality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Benford, S., Hazzard, A., Chamberlain, A., Glover, K., Greenhakgh, C., Xu, L., Hoare, M., and Darzentas, D. (2016) ‘Accountable Artefacts: The Case of the Carolan Guitar’, Proceedings of CHI 16, ACM, pp. 1163–75. Berlo, J. C. (2015) ‘The Art of Indigenous Americans and American Art History: A Century of Exhibitions’, Perspective, available at: http://perspective.revues.org/6004 (accessed January 31, 2017). Briet, S. 2006 [1951] What Is Documentation?, trans. E. Day, L. Martinet and H. G. B. Anghelescu. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

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Buckland, M. (1997) ‘What Is a “Document”?’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(9): 804–9. Clausen, B. (ed.) (2007) After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art, Vienna and Nuremberg: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Verlag Moderner Kunst. Dekker, A., Wijers, G., and van Saaze, V. (2010) ‘The Art of Documentation’, , RTRSRCH, Amsterdam: Amsterdam School of the Arts. Depocas, A. Ippolito, J., and Jones, C. (eds) (2003) Permanence through Change: The Variable Media Approach, Montreal: Daniel Langlois Foundation. Derrida, J. (1995) Archive Fever, trans. E. Prenowitz. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Faucconier, S. and Frommé, R. (2003) Capturing Unstable Media: Summary of Research, available at: http://capturing.projects.v2.nl/summary.html, (accessed December 1, 2009). Foster, H. (2004) ‘An Archival Impulse’, October Magazine, 110: 3–22. Frommé, R. and Fauconnier, S. (2004) ‘Capturing Unstable Media Arts: A Formal Model for Describing and Preserving Aspects of Electronic Art’, in U. Frohne, J, Guiton and M. Schieren (eds), Present Continuous Past(s): Media Art: Strategies of Presentation, Mediation and Dissemination, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Giannachi, G. (2016) Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Giannachi, G., Lowood, H., Worthey, G., Price, D., Rowland, D., and Benford, S. (2012) ‘Documenting Mixed Reality Performance: The Case of CloudPad’, Digital Creativity, pp. 1–17. Hultén, P. (1986) Futurismo & Futurismi, Milano: Bompiani. Ippolito, J. (2003) ‘Accommodating the Unpredictable: The Variable Media Questionnaire’, Proceedings from Permanence through Change: The Variable Media Approach, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, pp. 47–53. Jones, A. (1997) ‘“Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation’, Art Journal, 56(4), Winter: 11–18. Jones, A. (2008) ‘Live Art in Art History: A Paradox?’, in T. C. Davis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 151–65. Jones, C. and Muller, L. (2008) ‘Between Real and Ideal: Documenting Media Art’, Leonardo, 41(4): 418–19. Jones, C. (2008) Surveying the State of the Art (of Documentation), available at: www.fondationlanglois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2125 (accessed December 12, 2009). Kaprow, A. (2003 [1958]) ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, in J. Kelley (ed.), Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 1–12. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Le Goff, J. (1978) ‘Documento/Monumento’, Enciclopedia Einaudi, Torino, vol. 5, pp. 38–43. Lepecki, A. (2010) ‘The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances’, Dance Research Journal, 42(2): 28–48. MacDonald, C. (2009) ‘Scoring the Work: Documenting Practice and Performance in Variable Media Art’, Leonardo, 42(1): 59–63. Mangolte, B. (2009) Balancing Act between Instinct and Reason, available at: www.perfo map.de/map1/i.-bewegung-plus-archiv/balancing-act-between-instinct-and-reason (accessed January 31, 2017). Manzella, C. and Watkins, A. (2011) ‘Performance Anxiety: Performance Art in TwentyFirst Century Catalogs and Archives’, Art Documentation: Journal of Art Libraries Society of North America, 30(1): 28–31. Matters in Media Art (n.d.) Matters in Media Art, available at: www.moma.org/explore/ collection/conservation/media_art (accessed February 11, 2017).

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Obrist, H. U. (2011) A Brief History of Curating, Zurich and Dijon: JRP Ringier and Les Presses du Réel. Okrent, M. (1988) Heidegger’s Pragmatics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre Archaeology, London and New York: Routledge. Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge. Rinehart, R. (2007) ‘The Media Art Notation System: Documenting and Preserving Digital/Media Art’, Leonardo, 40(2): 181–7. Roberts, S. (2013) Collection: Rauschenberg Research Project, available at: www.sfmoma.org/ artwork/72.26/essay/collection/ (accessed January 31, 2017). Schimmel, P. (ed.) (1998) Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, London and New York: Thames & Hudson. Schneider, R. (2001) ‘Archives: Performance Remains’, Performance Research, 6(2): 100–8. Taylor, D. (2008) ‘Performance and Intangible Cultural Heritage’, in T. C. Davis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 91–104. van Saaze, V. (2013) Installation Art and the Museum: Presentation and Conservation of Changing Artworks, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

INDEX

1001 Mile Paper 16 75 Years of Looking Forward (SFMOMA) 36–7 Abramović, Marina 37, 51, 61, 67, 68, 72, 75, 118, 120, 185 absence model of performance 7–9 abstract art 62, 68 Acconci, Vito 118 acquisitions 29–30, 32, 39 Action Pants: Genital Panic (EXPORT, 1969) 118–20 Active Poetry (Partum) 30 activism 73, 116 activity-based, artworks as 40–1, 132–3, 145 actor-network theory 191 administrative procedures 106 aesthetic distance 134 aesthetic experience 139 Aestheticodes (MRL) 177 after-hours versus regular hours 29, 35 Agamben, Giorgio 115, 121, 123, 124, 128 Agent Ruby (Leeson, 1999-2002) 40, 187 Aikens, N. 44 Akerman, Chantal 99 Allen, Jennifer 117 Altria 24–5 Alÿs, Francis 117, 118 ambiguity, embracing 48–9, 52 Amorales, Carlos 31 analog Betacam 68 Anderson, Laurie 50

Ant Farm 40, 121–3 Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (Whitney) 22 architecture 21, 29, 46, 49, 67, 108 see also spaces, use of archives: archival fever 183; archivecollection divide 3, 16, 17–18, 19, 43, 56–9, 67; archives of the commons 19, 191; audience as an 19, 187; cataloguing 58–9; continuum theory 34; as installations 97–8, 101–2; mapping everyday lives 183; multiple copies 69; multiple versions 67–8; performance archive collection versus performance archive 56; photographs as performance archives 94, 97; photographs as simultaneous archive and performance 76, 77; public access to 57; re-engagement of artist 34; self-historicization 26; social media 76; unpublished earlier documentation, incorporation of 58; Van Abbemuseum 45–6; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 56–9 Argelander, R. 183 Arns, Inke 116, 120 Ars Electronica 137, 138, 141, 144, 192 Artforum 53, 63 art history 3, 60–1, 63, 72, 93, 94, 103, 105, 108, 134, 188 artist contracts 67, 69 artist-curator relationship 26 artist intention 8–9, 19, 33, 103, 139, 143, 182–97

Index  199

Artist Is Present, The (Abramovi? 2010) 12, 185 Artist Materials Archive 39, 41, 186 artist-run enterprises 48–9 Art Now (Tate London) 29 Ashley-Smith, Jonathan 33 Askey, Ruth 119 Atkins, R. 125 Atlas, Charles 18, 31, 183 Attali, Jacques 111n2 audiences: as archives 19, 187; artworkaudience relationship 9; audiencecuration of selections 46; changing roles of 195; collaboration with (to produce documentation) 193–4; co-production role 186; documenting interaction and participation 135–41; experiences of spectators 109–10; experimentation with audience position 49; ordinary versus extraordinary occasions 174; performance of audience in interactive/ participatory art 132; point of view of audience 182–97; position of spectators 118; public mandates 44; ‘public’ nature of 49; rights of space usage 176; statistical surveys of 139; ‘users’ versus ‘spectators’ 46; visitor movement 30–1; visitors’ documentation 40; what audiences want to see 46 Auslander, Philip 7–8, 111n2, 184, 188 authenticity 33, 68–9, 72, 75, 77, 94, 98, 106, 188 avatars 73, 75, 168 background research 22–3 Bacon, Francis 115, 129 Baldessari, John 5, 42 Bangma, A. 116, 117 Barney, Matthew 38, 64 Barr, Alfred 15 Barthes, Roland 127 Bartle, R. 156 Basil, Toni 49 Bateson, Gregory 123 Baudrillard, Jean 111n2 Bauhaus 62 Becoming Dutch (2006-2008) 45 behavior-centricity 192 Bender, Gretchen 51 Benford, Steve 11, 165–81, 190, 194 Benjamin, Walter 93 Berlo, J. C. 184 Berndes, Christiane 4–5, 42–7, 185 Berry, Dani Bunten 157, 158

Beuys, Joseph 63 biennials 5, 6, 21, 60–1 Biesenbach, Klaus 17 Birnbaum, Dara 50 Bishop, C. 103 Bither, Philip 4, 54–9 black box spaces 4, 49, 104, 105 Blast Theory 11, 146, 165, 167–73, 180, 190 Boezem, Marinus 68 Boissier, Jean-Louis 137 books, as documentation 64 bootlegging 122 Borggreen, G. 129 Borja Villel, Manolo 19 born-digital art 5 Brand, S. 156 Breitweiser, Sabine 17 Breuer, Marcel 21 Briet, Suzanne 127, 182 broadcasting 56, 68, 73, 122, 152–3 brochures 15 Bronstein, Pablo 29 Brown, Trisha 25, 31, 55, 98 Bruguera, Tania 30–1, 44, 46 Buchler, Pavel 43 Buckland, M. 182 Burden, Chris 72, 184 Burnham, Linda Frye 1 Butler, Judith 96 Buyer, Walker, Rover (Ulman, 2013) 85, 87 Byar, James Lee 16, 109 Cage, John 55 The Camera Je, La Camera: I (Mangolte, 1977) 99–101, 102 cameras, presence of 51–2, 53, 72, 76, 86, 99–100, 106, 183, 184, 189 capitalism 19 capture 151, 157, 159–63 Capturing Unstable Media 136, 193 caretaking of collections 56 Carlson, M. 134 Carolan Guitar 11, 165, 177–80, 194 Cartography Project 193 cartoons 80 Castelli, Leo 42 cataloguing 58–9, 70, 135–8, 188–9, 192 categorical definitions 58–9 Chamberlain, A. 170 characters, building 80–1, 96, 125–9 Charmatz, Boris 11, 165, 173–4 charting an artist’s work 23 Childs, Lucinda 16–17, 49

200 Index

Cibulka, Katharina 106 cinema/ film: departmental structures 37; as documentation 64; live tableaux for 73; Mangolte 98–103; Performa, New York 60; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 35, 37; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 54; Whitney Museum of American Art 22, 26 see also video classification schemes 135–8 Clausen, Barbara 10, 93–114, 185, 188 CloudPad tool 189 Coelho, Rene 66 Cohen, Yve Laris 25, 52 collaborative projects 23, 55, 67, 107, 137–8, 169–70, 193–4 Collecting the Performative (Tate) 33 collection policies 43 collections versus repositories 56 Collingwood, R. G. 116 Comer, Stuart 3, 15–20, 123, 186, 187 commissioning works 29, 37, 54–5, 56, 60–1 communicative function of art 42 communicative purpose/ use of work (versus medium) 5, 42, 44 competitions/ prizes 135, 141 Composers’ Showcase 21–7 Compton, Michael 105 concepts 37 Condorelli, Celine 29 Connor, Steven 128 Conquergood, Dwight 134 conservation plans 32 conservative funding structures 50 construction site, as part of art 22, 25, 43–4 context 19–20, 31, 34, 43, 51, 98, 185 contextualizing events 55 continuum theory 34, 154 contracts 67, 69 Cook, S. 147n6 Cornock, Stroud 136 Costanza, E. 177 Crabtree, A. 166, 169, 170 Crimp, D. 93, 111n6 Crosby, Chris 149–50 Crosby, Eric 54–9 crossover mechanisms 56, 75 cultural archives 94 cultural heritage approaches 33 cultural probes 177 cultural shifts 50 Cunningham, Merce 54, 55 curator, role of 26, 190–1, 195

curatorial structures 3–4 CybeRoberta (Hershman Leeson, 1995-1998) 127 DAM (digital asset management system) 20 dance: documentation 70; durational dance pieces 22; ethnographic conservation 165; If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? 173–6; Jimmy Robert 107–8; The Kitchen 49–50; photography 17, 18; re-interpretations 183; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 55 Dance Constructions 16 Dannenberg, Helen 126 Dante Hotel (Hershman Leeson) 127 databases 57, 67, 68, 70, 166, 171 Davey, Moira 56 Davis, Kate 108 debate, museums as places of 35 Debbaut, Jan 30 Dekker, Annet 136, 146n3, 147n5, 193–4 Deleuze, Gilles 116, 129 Deller, Jeremy 116 demos 158, 160 departmental structures 3–4, 15, 17, 32, 36, 42, 54, 56, 184–5 dependencies, conservation of 33 Depocas, A. 129, 139, 192 Derrida, Jacques 183, 184 descriptive models for interactive works 136–8 Dewey, John 139 digital archives 19, 20, 36, 67–8, 129 digital artifacts 38, 165, 177–80, 194 digital arts 5, 177–80, 191–2 Digital Betacam 67 digital game performance 149–64, 189–90 Dipple, Kelli 126–7 distribution of works versus ownership 66 DIY archive 45–6 Doane, M. A. 111n5 documentary-soap/ docufiction 74–5 documentation: 3D/ scriptural 182; Amalia Ulman 75–90; and art history 63; artistgenerated 184; for the artists’ benefit 51, 52; audience at center of 46–7, 182; Carolan Guitar 178–9; conclusions on 182–97; co-production with audience 193; dance (Jimmy Robert) 107–14; documenting interaction and participation 69; document of artwork versus artwork in own right 18–19, 31, 37–8, 42–3, 183–7; ethnographic conservation 165–81; exhibitions as

Index  201

63–4; as folds rather than linear 129; and the gallery model of presentation 58; of gameplay 154–5; of identity 125–6; indexicality of 185; interactive art 133–4; The Kitchen 50–1; knowledge creation 182–97; Lima, Amsterdam 69–70; mass documentation 183; meta-documentation 77; as part of commissioning process 55; Performa, New York 63–4; as performativity 70; ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ 89; published versus non-published 53; and re-enactment 123; and re-performances of earlier works 30–1; research into artists’ work 23; revealing what is normally discarded 106; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 36–7; secondary status of 31; subjectivity 194; synthesis of the archival and the performative 94; totality of 189; Ulman on 72–90; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 55–6; works that are resistant to 57 domestic spaces, art in 36 DOOM 149–50, 157, 158 double-channel works 40 Douglas, Stacy 44 Dowden, Robin 54–9 Draw the Line (Robert, 2013) 103, 107–9, 110 D-Touch 177 dynamic versus static art systems 136 ecologies of relationships 127 e-depots 70 Edmonds, Ernest 136 education 37, 39, 62 Electronic Arts 156, 157 Electronic Arts Intermix 42 electronic records archives 19 Eleey, Peter 55 Elligott, Michelle 15–20, 184, 191 emulation 69, 70, 160–3 ephemerality: and art history 109; exhibition of 93–114; and the need for documentation 50–1; and not making documentation 52; research into artists’ work 23–4; and the role of the audience 188 epistemic practices 34 Esche, Charles 43 Eternal Frame, The (T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm, 1975-2008) 121–4, 128 ethics of caretaking 56

ethnographic conservation 33, 165–81, 190 ethnomethodology 166, 190 event programming 28 events versus objects 18–19, 58 everyday life, and art 36 Excellences & Perfections (Ulman, 2014) 74, 75–9, 87 Exhibition Extensions 36 exhibitions 18, 26, 54, 58, 63, 93–114, 133 experimentation, allowing artistic 49, 55 EXPORT, VALIE 118–20 Famicom Titler 158 Fanni Tutti, Cosey 6, 73 Farina, Ralston 23 Fauconnier, Sandra 193 feedback loops 159 feminist perspectives 73, 99, 106, 107, 108 festival submissions 135 film see cinema/ film Finbow, Acatia 31, 33 first-person paradigm 133–5 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 120 Fletcher, Annie 5, 187 Fletcher, Harrell 38 Force, Juliana 36 Fore, Devin 119 Fornieles, Ed 80 Forsyth, Ian 118 Forti, Simone 16 Foster, Hal 9, 183, 184 Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art 67 Four Evenings, Four Days (Whitney) 22 Franssen, Diana 43 Frieling, Rudolf 35–41, 186 Frieze fund 30 Froebel, Boo 24 Frommé, Rens 193 funding structures 50, 70 Future Exhibitions (Pierce, 2010) 103–5 Gade, R. 129 gallery settings 49, 52, 54, 174–6 Galloway, Alexander 149 gameplay 149–64, 167–70, 189–90 García, Dora 37 Garcia, Lara 115 Garfinkel, Harold 166, 190 Gaver, B. 177 gender 96–7, 102–3 Geyer, Andrea 112n17 Giannachi, Gabriella 10, 115–31, 170, 176, 182–97

202 Index

Glass, Liz 58 Gmelin, Felix 116 Goldberg, M. 156 Goldberg, RoseLee 5–6, 60–5, 195 gossip 19 GPS logs 173 Graham, Beryl 136, 147n6 Graham, Dan 5, 42 grants and funding structures 50 Griffin, Tim 4, 48–53, 185 Grotens, Joost 45 guerilla action 84 Guerrilla Art Action Group 16 Guggenheim Museum, New York 61, 118, 191 Gunn, G. 125 Hall, Doug 121, 122, 123 Hamilton, Ann 38 Hanhardt, John 22 Happenings 58 Hartenstein, Greta 22–3 Hassmann, Peter 119 health and safety standards 10 Heath, C. 170 Hegel, G. W. F. 115, 128 Heiligers, Béatrice 96 hermeneutics 190 Herrmann, L. 158 Hershman Leeson, Lynn 40, 124–9, 187 heteronormativity 106, 108 High Performance 1, 119 historical performances 9–10, 17 see also re-enactments historicization 56–7, 97, 102, 110 history: documentation for historical purposes 45–6, 187; and interactivity 133–4; and The Kitchen 50–1; memory 128–9; and a new imaginary 45; Performa, New York 60–5; and re-enactment 116, 123–4 Hoover, Nan 67, 68 Horn, Gabrielle 120 Huang, J. 177 Huberman, A. 96 Hultén, Pontus 185 human-computer interaction (HCI) 167–80, 190 human-machine interaction 149, 166, 167 Huyghe, Pierre 52, 64 hybrid works 66, 96, 116, 124–5, 170, 186, 192 iconography 63, 72, 183 identity 8, 45, 75, 88–9, 125, 128, 137, 193

If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? 165, 173–6, 180 image manipulation 74, 86 image rights 31 immediacy 1, 51, 52, 97, 116 immersive experiences 117 impermanence of work 38 in-betweens, building 56 indexicality 17–18, 74, 77, 98, 185, 186, 192 index of museum 45 infrastructure, museum 18, 21, 25–6, 29, 32 ‘Inside Installations’ 69–70, 194 ‘Inside Movement Knowledge’ 70 Instagram 6, 74–90, 75 installations 32, 33, 69, 70, 97, 99, 133–4 instant historicization 56–7 instant replay 153 institutional politics 106 instructions 103–4 intangible, conserving 32–4 intention of artist 8–9, 19, 33, 103, 139, 143, 182–97 interactivity: Amalia Ulman 82; documentation 132–48; exhibiting the ephemeral 103–4; gameplay 157, 167–70; histories of interactivity 187; Lima, Amsterdam 66, 69; Uncle Roy All Around You 165 interdisciplinarity: collaborative projects 193; exhibiting the ephemeral 97; Joan Jonas 98; The Kitchen 48–9; Performa, New York 61; and re-interpretations 115; tension between live and mediated 93; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 54, 56 intermediality 4, 22, 57, 61 International Choreographic Art Centre (ICK Amsterdam) 70 Internationale 44 interviews, artist 55, 139–41, 193 intimacy 5, 45, 52, 75–7 Ippolito, Jon 191 Jakovljević, B. 116 Janevski, Ana 15–320 Jarman, Derek 56 Jauss, Hans Robert 134 Jerz, D. 156 Johns, Jasper 55 Jonas, Joan 29–30, 93, 95, 96–8, 99, 102, 106, 109, 110–11 Jones, Amelia 9, 111n2, 116, 119, 186–7, 188, 192

Index  203

Jones, Caitlin 139–40, 141, 142, 143, 187, 192–3 July, Miranda 38 Juniper Tree, The (Jonas) 30 Kahlo, Frida 36 Kaltman, Eric 11, 149–64, 189 Kaprow, Alan 58, 103, 186 Kennedy, J. F. 121–4 keywords 138 Kirschenbaum, M. 155 Kirstein, Lincoln 15 Kitchen, The (New York) 4, 48–53 Klein, Yves 63, 109, 184 Kluver, Billy 16 Knorr-Cetina, Karin 33–4 Kotz, L. 94 Kramer, Jerry 153 Krauss, Rosalind 97, 117 Kuhlmann, Christiane 111n7 Kusama, Yayoi 16 Kwastek, Katja 10–11, 132–48, 191, 192, 193 Lacy, Suzanne 31, 73 language, and cataloguing 58–9 Larsen, Michelle 126 Lassry, Elad 49 Latour, Bruno 191 Laurenson, Pip 4, 28–34, 185 Leap into the Void (Klein,1960) 184 lease systems 44 Leeson, Lynn Hershman 40, 124–5 legacy 33, 120 Le Goff, Jacques 182–3 Lemon, Ralph 49, 55 Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz 140 Lepecki, André 129, 183 letters from artists 105 Levin, Golan 144 Lewison, Jeremy 32 LeWitt, Sol 18 Lieberman, Zachary 144 life of objects 19 Lijnbaancentrum collection 67 Lima, Amsterdam 5, 66–71, 115 Lincoln Center Festival 61 Lister, M. 136 live art 62–3 live documentation strategies 31 Live List, The 33 liveness, questions of 1, 2, 7–9, 186, 188, 194; Amalia Ulman 72, 73, 75–6; exhibiting the ephemeral 105; integrated

with replay 152–3; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 37, 39; tension between live and mediated 93; Van Abbemuseum 43 Living Collections Catalogue 56–7 ‘living present’ 116, 127, 129 LL, Natalia 72 Logic of the Birds (Neshat, 2001–2002) 60–1 logs, as data 157, 166, 168, 169 Long Beach Museum of Art 121 Longo, Robert 48 Lord, Chip 40, 122, 123, 124 Lowood, Henry 11, 149–64, 189 Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art. Research 137, 138, 140, 192 Luff, P. 170 Luthi, Urs 72 Lütticken, Sven 116, 117 Lyver-Harris, Emily Rose 117, 118 MacDonald, Corina 182 Machinima 158 Malevich, Kasimir 62–3, 104 Malinowski, Bronislav 166, 180, 190 manger 176–7 Mangolte, Babette 18, 31, 94, 95, 96, 98–103, 109, 110–11, 183, 185 Manual Input Workstation (Tmema) 143–6 Manzella, Christina 188 maps of memories 55–6 mass documentation 183 mass media 73 masters, preservation of 67 Matters in Media Art 193 Mattes, Franco 194 McCann Morley, Grace 35, 36 McElroy, Robert 111n3 McGuire, Nadine 4, 54–9 McGuire, William 4, 54–9 McLuhan, Marshall 153 McQuay, M.-A. 118 Meade, Fiona 54–9 mediation 5–6, 52, 75, 93 mediatization 8, 188 medium-driven cataloguing 59 memory creation 46, 120, 128, 183, 186 Merce Cunningham Company 55 Mersch, Dieter 137 metadata 70, 135, 137, 162, 192, 194 metalogues 123 M. H. de Young Memorial Museum 127 Michel, Doug 40 middlebrow aesthetics 75 mission statements 15, 48, 60–1

204 Index

Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL) 165, 170, 177, 180, 190, 194 mobile technologies 89 Modernism 3, 43, 117 Molesworth, H. 106, 108 MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) 3, 15–20 Monk, Meredith 25, 55 Monnens, D. 156 Monte, James 21 MonteVideo 66, 67 Moore, Peter 16, 94, 111n3, 183–4 Morris, Robert 22, 105, 107 motion-capture tools 70 Muller, Lizzie 139–40, 141, 142, 143, 187, 192–3 multimedia installations 69, 97, 98, 101, 102, 135 multiple copies, archiving 67 multiple locations, works in 69–70 multiple perspectives, archiving 192–3 multiple versions of the same work 125–9, 133, 187, 191 multiple viewpoints 40, 106 Musée de la danse 11, 165, 173–6, 180 Museum Index 45 Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 55 Museum of Modern Art (mumok), Vienna 103, 165 music performances 51, 52–3 narratives, construction of 75, 81–2, 96, 179 Native American art 15, 184 Nauman, Bruce 42 Neshat, Shirin 60 Netart 69 Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk) 67, 69, 70 networks 44, 120, 123, 125, 127, 195 newsclippings 58 Newsome, Rashaad 37 Nichols, Tucker 39 Nitsche, M. 157, 158 nonprofits 48–9 Noordegraaf, J. 133 NoSkill 149–51, 157, 158 notes, drawings, instructions etc 56, 70, 98, 135, 139–40, 166, 191 ‘Not for Sale’ talks 60 objects, museums based around 31 objects of art, fetishization of 43 objects of art versus events 18–19, 58 Obrist, Hans Ulrich 185

obsolescence (technological) 69, 70 Obsolete Equipment Project 70 Ocean (Cunningham, 2008-9) 54 Off the Wall (Whitney, 2010) 25 Okrent, M. 190 Ondak, Roman 30 One Hundred Years of Performance Art (Performa, 2009) 63–4 online media: Amalia Ulman 72–90; closing of online performances 38; collaborative projects 193–4; curatorial interviews placed online (Walker Art Center) 55; documenting interaction and participation 69; game demos 158; gameplay 162–3, 168; Lima, Amsterdam 67; and performances 26; performativity of 18; as premiere for work 56; for providing access to archives 57; selfpublication of documentation 147n6; social media 19, 73–90, 109, 174; Variable Media Initiative 191–2; wiki platforms 187 Ono, Yoko 107 ontology of performance 2, 6–7, 8, 186 opening ceremonies 25 opportunistic events 29 ordinary versus extraordinary occasions 174 Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll 95, 96–8 originals versus scores 31–2 Ortega, Rafael 117 Osborn, Joseph C. 11, 149–64, 189 Otlet, Paul 182 outdoor spaces 26 Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998) 23 out-of-hours exhibitions 29, 35 ownership versus distribution of works 66 PACKED 70 pageants 117 Paik, Nam June 50 Paoli, Julia 108 Parker, Louis Napoleon 117 participation, documenting 69–70 see also interactivity participation, shift towards 93–4 participatory art 132, 184–5 partnership working 24–5, 44, 64, 67, 107, 136 Partum, Ewa 30 payment for works 66, 73 Pearson, M. 183 Performa, New York 5–6, 60–5

Index  205

Performa Biennials 61–2 performance art, use of term 62 Performance at Tate 4 performance scores 30, 31, 36, 55, 58, 108 performance versus mediation 7 performing art versus performance art 4, 54, 55 Perjovschi, Dan 43–4 Perrot, C. 174 Phelan, Peggy 7, 8, 111n2, 117, 188 photographers 96, 99 photographs: Amalia Ulman 72–90; archives 183; Carolan Guitar 178; as documentation of live performance 31; document of artwork versus artwork in own right 18, 94; evidence-fakery 74; free life of 88; as freeze frame 100, 122; If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? 174; image rights 31; indexicality of 17–18, 74, 77, 98, 186, 192; Joan Jonas 96–7; the ‘jolt’ 100; The Kitchen 50; layering of time and space 94; live tableaux for 73; Performa, New York 63–4; performativity of 18; performing for the camera 184; presence of cameras 51–2, 53, 72, 76, 86, 99–100, 106, 183, 184, 189; reproductions of 87–8; Roberta Breitmore (Leeson, 1972-1978) 124–9; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 35; social media archiving 76; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 58 see also video Photoshop 74, 86 pictorialization of performance 51–2 Pierce, Sarah 95, 103–6, 109, 110–11 play, as performance 154–9 Plaza Minuet 29 poetry, performance 22 Poitras, Laura 26 Pollard, Jane 118 Pollock, Jackson 17, 186 Poots, Alex 28 pop culture 50 pornography 73, 119 posters 118–19 postmodernism 94, 110 practice, focus on 2–3, 8 Presence (Lassry, 2012) 49–50 presence model of performance 7–9 presentation equipments, research into 69 privacy 88 Privilege (Ulman, 2016) 79–90 production process, archiving 56, 70, 98, 118, 135 see also notes, drawings, instructions etc

Project Art Center, Dublin 105 projections of films, versus installations 68–9 promotional documentation 135 props/ sets/ costume collections 3, 23, 30, 35, 55, 104, 108, 110 Protocoll, Rimini 116 protocols, collection of 46 Proulx, Annie 180n2 public mandates 44 Pullen, Derek 32 Qu’est-ce que la documentation (Briet 2006 [1951]) 182 Rainer, Yvonne 22, 28, 98, 99, 107 Rattenbury, Ruth 32 Rauschenberg, Robert 84, 186 real-time events 55, 72, 75, 76 recontextualization 5, 45 re-enactments 9–10, 69–70, 106, 108, 115–31, 183, 188, 191 rehearsals/ preparation, in full view 29 reimagining 45 Reina Sofía 19, 191 re-installations of previous works 38 re-interpretations 69–70, 115–31, 183, 191 re-mediation 124, 191 re-performed action 30, 52, 105 repetition 10, 79, 81, 96–7, 115, 116–17, 120–4, 128 replay 149–50, 151–9, 160, 189–90 repository, museum as 45 re-presencing 117 retrospection 24 reuse 69–70 reviews 105 Rhizome 19 Richard, F. 96 Richards, James 56 Rider Spoke (Blast Theory) 146, 165, 170–3, 180 rights of reactivation 43 rights of space usage 176 rights to earlier performances, acquiring 29–30 Rinehart, Richard 136, 192 risk assessment 33 Rites of Passage (Tate, 1995) 32 Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama— Manhattan, 1970–1980 (2013–2014) 22–3, 24 Rivera, Diego 36

206 Index

Robert, Jimmy 95, 103, 107–14 Roberta Breitmore (Leeson, 1972-1978) 124–9 Rodden, T. 169, 170 Rodriguez, Spain 125 Rokeby, David 140–3 Romero, John 158 Ross, David 121 Roth, Moira 127 Rowland, D. 170 Ruf, Beatrix 29 Rushes (Mangolte, 2008) 101–3 Rushton, Steve 116, 117 Russell, Arthur 49 Sala, Anri 116 Salen, K. 154 Sanders, Jay 3, 21–7, 186, 188 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 3, 35–41 Santone, J. 105, 120 saved games 154–7, 160–3 Sawdust and Spangles (SFMOMA) 35, 36 Scaffold Room (Lemon, 2014) 49, 55 Schechner, Richard 109, 154 Schimmel, P. 184 Schindler, Merrill 123 Schlemmer, Oskar 62 Schneemann, Carolee 107, 108 Schneider, Rebecca 188 Schwartz, Charles 21–7 Schwartz, H. P. 116 scores 31–2, 55–6, 58, 108 Scott, F. D. 123 scripts 81, 95, 102, 104, 107, 108, 110, 150 sculpture, performable 16 Second Life 127 Seel, Martin 98, 139 Sehgal, Tino 37, 42, 43, 53, 57 self-historicization 26 selfies 86 selling of performance documentation 31, 52–3 sensory modes, recording 136 Serota, Nick 28–9 Shanks, Michael 120, 183 Sherman, Cindy 6, 72, 73, 76 Sherman, Stuart 23, 98 Shunk, Harry 184 Siegelaub, Seth 105 signed certificates 109 Silvester, D. 129 Simon, J. 111n5 simulacrum 111n2 single-take/ continuous shooting 106, 117

site-based/ site-responsive works 54 see also spaces, use of Smigiel, Frank 3, 35–41 Smith, Jack 23 Smith, Michael 49 social meaning 9–10 social media 19, 73–90, 109, 174 sociological approaches 139, 166 sound installations 140–3 source materials 56 spaces, use of 21, 25, 29, 49, 54, 174, 176 spectators, experiences of 109–10, 183 see also audiences Spector, N. 120 sponsorship 28 spontaneity 84 sport replays 152–3 staged images 73, 81, 83–4, 94, 95–6, 106, 117, 153 stealth interventions 73 Stearns, Robert 49 Stedelijk Museum 97 Sterrett, Jill 35–41, 186 Steve Reich @ the Whitney 25 Stichting Behound Moderne Kunst 69 Stiles, Kristine 119, 126 structured reality 74–5 Sturken, M. 122 subversive performance elements 16 surveillance technology 125 suspension of disbelief 78 Sussman, Elisabeth 21 systems design 166, 189 Tajima, Mika 37 Tate, London 4, 11, 28–34, 63, 105, 165, 173–6 Tate Triennial 29 Tatlin, Vladimir 104 Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (Bruguera, 2008) 30–1 taxonomies 136, 137–8, 192, 194 Taylor, Diana 187 technology: and art history 64; digital game performance 149–64; and digital preservation 67, 69; and the ‘documentary revolution’ 182–3; ethnographic conservation 165; and gameplay 154–5, 157; human-computer interaction (HCI) 167–80, 189–90; and interactivity 135–6; and intermediality 61; The Kitchen 50; modern mobile technology 89; obsolescence 69, 70; preserving interactivity 133; surveillance technology 125; and time-based media art 32–3 see also digital arts; online media; video

Index  207

television events 122 television replay 152 The Camera Je, La Camera: I (Mangolte, 1977) 99–101, 102 thematic displays 4 Time Based Arts 66, 67 time-based works 5, 32, 43, 50–2, 57, 117–18, 136, 169 time-stamping 157 Tinguely, Jean 16 Tmema 143–6 Tobin, Adam 155 Todoli, Vincente 29 Tolmie, Peter 11, 165–81, 190, 194 Tomer, Limor 25 Total Recall (Bender, 1987) 51, 52 training for curators 64 trajectories, tracking 175 transcendental meaning 9–10 Triadic Ballet (Schlemmer, 1928) 62 Tromble, M. 125, 126 T. R. Uthco 121–3 Tucker, Marcia 21, 22 Tumblr 87–8 Turnbull, Colin 134 Ulman, Amalia 6, 72–90 Uncle Roy All Around You (Blast Theory) 165, 167–70, 180 unpublished earlier documentation, incorporation of 58 use/ communicative purpose of work (versus medium) 5, 42, 44 user experience, documenting 192–3 ‘users’ versus ‘spectators’ 46 V2 Institute for Unstable Media, Rotterdam 136 VALIE EXPORT 118–20 value, location of 31–2 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 4–5, 19, 42–7, 191 Vanderbilt Whitney, Gertrude 25, 36 van Saaze, Vivian 33, 68, 190–1, 193–4 Variable Media Initiative 191–2, 193 Variable Media Network 136, 139 Vasulka, Steina 48, 66 Vasulka, Woody 48, 66 Very Nervous System (Rokeby, 1983- ) 140–3 Victory Over the Sun (Malevich, 1913) 62–3 video: and art history 64; of audience interaction 140, 141; Carolan Guitar 178; closed-circuit effect 97; digital

archives 67–8; as documentation 184; documentation of interactive art 135; and ephemerality 109; gameplay 150, 168; The Kitchen 48, 50, 51; Lima, Amsterdam 66, 67, 70; medium-specific qualities of video 68; performances for the camera 51; quality of 118; replay history 151–9; single-take shooting 106; still frames from 122; video documentation 37–8, 42; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 55–6 see also photographs video-cued recall (VCR) 140, 143, 144 Viewing Depot (2006-2009) 45–6 Viola, Bill 32 virtualization 70 visitors see audiences visual metaphor 63 von Hantelmann, D. 109 Vuocolo, Jeanette 24 Wagner, Ann 99 Wagstaff, Sheena 28 Waldman, Jenny 28 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 4, 54–9, 61 Walker Channel 55 Wall Drawing 18 Walther, Franz Erhard 16 Watkins, Alex 188 Watkins, Peter 116 websites 26, 55 see also online media Weiner, Lawrence 42 Whannel, G. 153 white cube spaces 4, 36, 94, 104, 105, 108 Whitney Biennials 21, 25, 143–4 Whitney Live 25 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 3, 21–7, 105 Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris (subsequently Altria) 24–5 Widrich, Mechtid 119 Wijers, Gaby 5, 66–71, 115, 191, 193–4 wiki platforms 41, 187 Willsdon, Dominic 37 women’s role in museum development 36 Wood, Catherine 4, 6, 28–34, 174, 184, 187–8 World Fair, New York 184 World War II 15 Wright, Stephen 44 Yuji Agematsu 26 Zapruder, Abraham 122, 123 Zimmerman, E. 154