Reconstructing Performance Art (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies) [1 ed.] 1032231343, 9781032231341

Citation preview

Reconstructing Performance Art

This book investigates the practices of reconstructing and representing performance art and their power to shape this art form and our understanding of it. Performance art emerged internationally between the 1960s and 1970s crossing disciplinary boundaries between performing arts and visual arts. Because of the challenge it posed to the ontologies and paradigms of these fields, performance art has since stimulated an ongoing debate on the most appropriate means to document, preserve, and display it. Tancredi Gusman brings together international scholars from different disciplinary fields to examine methods, media, and approaches by which this art form has been represented and (re)activated over time and its transnational history reconstructed. Through contributions and case studies spanning various countries, regions, and artistic fields, the authors outline an innovative theoretical-methodological framework for capturing the processes and strategies transmitting the tangible and intangible heritage of performance art. This book will be of great appeal to students, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of Theater and Performance Studies as well as Visual Arts and Art History, who have an interest in performance art, its history, and its presence in the contemporary artistic and cultural landscape. Tancredi Gusman is Assistant Professor in Theater and Performance Studies at the Department of History, Humanities and Society, University of Rome Tor Vergata. From 2017 to 2019 he led the EU Horizon 2020 project “Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977” at the Freie Universität Berlin and was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” He is currently co-convenor of the Historiography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). His research investigates the politics of representation and spectatorship, and the histories of performance art, performance documentation and theater criticism.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Rechoreographing Learning Dance As a Way to Bridge the Mind-Body Divide in Education Sandra Cerny Minton Politics as Public Art The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements Martin Zebracki and Zane McNeill Lessons for Today from Shakespeare’s Classroom The Learning Benefits of Drama and Rhetoric in Schools Robin Lithgow Notelets of Filth An Emilia Companion Reader Laura Kressly, Aida Patient, and Kimberly A. Williams Transcultural Theater Günther Heeg Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation Vanessa I. Corredera, L. Monique Pittman, Geoffrey Way

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre-Performance-Studies/ book-series/RATPS

Reconstructing Performance Art Practices of Historicization, Documentation and Representation Edited by Tancredi Gusman

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Tancredi Gusman; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Tancredi Gusman to be identified as the author 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 has been requested for this book ISBN: 9781032231341 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032231358 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003275909 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgments Disclaimer Introduction: On the Present of Past Performance: Investigating the Practices of Reconstructing and Representing Performance Art

vii xi xiii

1

TA N C R E D I G U S M A N

PART I

Reframing the Past: Histories and Historiographies of Performance Art 1 Mapping the Emerging Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe

19 21

A M Y B RY Z G E L

2 The 1968 Aesthetic and Political Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde

39

A NA LONGON I A N D M A R I A NO M ESTM A N

3 Collective Memory and Live Art: The Methodology of Performance Chronicle Basel

55

SA BIN E GEBH A R DT FIN K

4 The Historical Roots of “Performative Theater”: The Italian Post-Avant-Garde LOR ENZO M A NGO

72

vi Contents PART II

Unfolding the Action: Media and Documents of Performance Art 5 How Records and Documents Become Art: The Role of Documentation in the Preservation, Exhibition and Experience of Performance Art

83

85

G A B R I E L L A G I A N N AC H I

6 Performance Documentation: Ephemerality, Temporality, Authenticity

100

P H I L I P AU S L A N D E R

7 Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History

113

BA R BA R A BÜSCH ER

8 Listening to the Histories of Performance Art

134

H E I K E RO M S

PART III

Representing Performance: Information, Collection, Reactivation

153

9 Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art: The Joan Jonas Knowledge Base

155

B A R B A R A C L AU S E N , D E E N A E N G E L A N D G L E N N W H A RT O N

10 On the Long Road to Becoming a Matter of Course: Collecting Live Performances in Museums and Other Art Collections

173

WO L F G A N G B RÜ C K L E A N D R AC H E L M A D E R

11 Making Movement Memorable: Tino Sehgal and Boris Charmatz at Tate

189

SUSA N N E FR A NCO

12 Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta: Where Is Performance?

209

G E O RG I N A G U Y A N D J O H A N N A L I N S L E Y

Index

229

Contributors

Philip Auslander, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US. Philip Auslander  is Professor of Performance Studies and Popular Musicology in the School of Literature, Media and Communication of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US. His most recent books are In Concert: Performing Musical Persona (2021) and the third edition of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2023). Wolfgang Brückle,  Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland. Wolfgang Brückle is senior lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. His research focuses on late medieval art, art theory, museum history, contemporary art, and media history, with a special attention to photography-related topics. From 2018 to 2022, he led two SNSF-funded research projects on post-photography. Amy Bryzgel, Northeastern University, Boston, US. Professor Amy Bryzgel is a specialist in performance art from Eastern Europe. She has published three books on the topic, including Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 (Manchester University Press, 2017). Barbara Büscher, Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy”, Leipzig, Germany. Barbara Büscher has published essays on post-dramatic live art, performance theory and media art, performance/performing archives, performance art and architecture. Since 2017, she has been co-directing the research project “Architecture and Space for the Performing Arts” (funded by DFG). She is a co-publisher of the online journal MAP – media/archive/performance (www.perfomap.de). Barbara Clausen, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. Barbara Clausen is Associate Professor at the Art History Department at the University of Québec in Montréal, Canada. Her research, writing, and curatorial projects are dedicated to the historiography and institutionalization of performance-based art practices and the discourses surrounding the politics of the body and the archive.

viii Contributors

Deena Engel, New York University, US. Deena Engel, Clinical Professor Emerita in the Department of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, focuses her research on contemporary art. She also collaborates with conservators at major museums on projects that address the challenges involved in the conservation of time-based media art. Susanne Franco, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. Susanne Franco is an associate professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she teaches dance and theater studies. Her main interests are modern and contemporary dance and research methodology. She is the PI of the international research project “Memory in Motion: Re-Membering Dance History” (2019–2023) at Ca’ Foscari. Sabine Gebhardt Fink,  Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland. Sabine Gebhardt Fink is Professor of Contemporary Art at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, as well as a curator and author. She has co-founded the Performance Index Festival and the network Performance Chronicle Basel and recently collaborated with the exhibition Bang Bang at the Museum Tinguely in Basel. Gabriella Giannachi, University of Exeter, UK. Gabriella Giannachi has published Virtual Theatres (2004); The Politics of New Media Theatre (2007); Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts, ed. with Nigel Stewart (2005); Archive Everything (2016 and, in Italian, 2021); Histories of Performance Documentation, co-edited with Jonah Westerman (2017); Documentation as Art, co-edited with Annet Dekker (2022) and Technologies of the Self-Portrait (2022 and, in Italian, 2023). Tancredi Gusman, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy. Tancredi Gusman  is Assistant Professor in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He is currently co-convenor of the Historiography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). His research investigates the politics of representation and spectatorship, and the histories of performance art, performance documentation and theater criticism. Georgina Guy, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Georgina Guy  is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her book Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation: Displayed & Performed (2016) was shortlisted for the UK Theatre and Performance Research Association Early Career Research

Contributors  ix

Prize and formed the basis for a research-led course at Tate Modern, London exploring how performance is curated and collected by art museums. Johanna Linsley, University of Dundee, UK. Johanna Linsley is an artist-researcher and Lecturer in Creative Practice at the University of Dundee. She leads with Rebecca Collins the project Stolen Voices; their album Stolen Voices 001 was shortlisted for a Scottish Award for New Music in 2021. She is one of the editors of Artists in the Archive (2018) Ana Longoni, CONICET/ Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ana Longoni is a writer and researcher, specialized in the articulations between art and politics in Latin America since the 1960s. She has promoted the Southern Conceptualisms Network since its foundation in 2007 and was Public Activities Director at the Reina Sofía Museum (2018–2021). Her latest book is Parir/partir (2022). Rachel Mader,  Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland. Rachel Mader is professor and head of the Competence Center Art, Design & Public Spheres at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Her research focuses on artistic self-organization, art education, artistic research, ambiguity in art, and the collection of ephemeral art. She is co-president of the Swiss Artistic Research Network. Lorenzo Mango, University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy. Lorenzo Mango is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Theater at the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” His most recent books are Edward Gordon Craig (2021) and Il Novecento del teatro: Una storia (2019). He is co-editor of the online journal Acting Archives Review: Rivista di studi sull’attore e la recitazione (www.actingarchives.it). Mariano Mestman CONICET/University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mariano Mestman is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific Research (CONICET) and the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he teaches. His works include studies on working-class cinema, Third World cinema, and the artistic vanguard of the 1960s. His latest book is Los condenados de la tierra: un film entre Europa y el Tercer Mundo (Akal, 2022; in collaboration with A. Filippi). Heike Roms, University of Exeter, UK. Heike Roms  is Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Exeter, UK. Current projects include: sound documents of performance art; the participation of children in performance work of the 1960s and 1970s; the development of performance art in British art schools (Live Class, with Gavin Butt, Northumbria University).

x Contributors

Glenn Wharton, UCLA, Los Angeles, US. Glenn Wharton  is Professor of Art History at UCLA, and Chair of the UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. His publications cover a range of initiatives in the conservation of contemporary art, anthropology of public monuments, artwork identity, and enhancing sustainability and social justice through conservation intervention.

Acknowledgments

I want to express my gratitude to the authors who contributed to this volume for their inspiring research and for the enthusiasm and commitment with which they participated in this work and engaged in stimulating dialogues on crucial issues for the study of performance art. Sincere thanks also to the University of Michigan Press for the permission to include Philip Auslander’s contribution and to all the artists, art professionals, scholars and institutions that supported the research of the individual contributors and this publication in various ways. The conception of this volume has its origins in the results of the project “Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977,” which I led between 2017 and 2019 at the Freie Universität Berlin. This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska- Curie grant agreement No 747881. I am very grateful to the European Union and the Institute of Theater Studies at the Freie Universität. Without their support, the development of the ideas that subsequently guided my work as editor would not have been possible. My special thanks go to the board of directors and the academic staff of the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” for hosting the original project and in particular to Professor Erika Fischer-Lichte, the Center’s founding director, whose advice and input were invaluable. I would also like to extend my thanks to Professors Doris Kolesch, Jan Lazardzig, Annette Jael Lehmann, Matthias Warstat and Researcher Torsten Jost at the Institute of Theater Studies for their support and insight throughout the research project. While working on this volume, my methodological reflections have been enriched through dialogues and exchanges with many scholars and colleagues: among them, I would like to mention here in particular the Historiography Working Group of the IFTR and the Networking Performance Art Histories research group. I would like to express my profound appreciation for the support received from the Department of History, Humanities and Society at University of Rome Tor Vergata where I have completed my work as editor on this publication, and, in particular, to Professor Donatella Orecchia for our engaging discussions on Theatre and Performance historiography. I would also like to acknowledge the

xii Acknowledgments

meticulous work of Routledge Editor Laura Hussey and Senior Editorial Assistant Swati Hindwan and the great care and accuracy with which they oversaw every aspect of the development of this volume. Finally, I am grateful to Omid Soltani for his solid and attentive copyediting and to Tessa Marzotto Caotorta for her precise and thorough indexing. Tancredi Gusman

Disclaimer

The information and views set out here reflect only those of the authors, and the Research Executive Agency (REA) and the European Commission (EC) are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

Introduction On the Present of Past Performance Investigating the Practices of Reconstructing and Representing Performance Art Tancredi Gusman

Over the past two decades, performance art has gained increasing prominence in the art world. Major international museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York and the Tate in the UK have opened departments dedicated to this art form or devoted projects and resources to developing innovative strategies for its conservation and care.1 Works of performance art have taken center stage in global events such as the 57th (2017) and 58th (2019) Venice Biennale, where they were awarded multiple prizes.2 Moreover, performance art has driven the current transformation of the museum into a cross-disciplinary space where live artworks are collected and presented.3 In parallel with this, a lively scholarly debate around this art form has flourished, as evidenced by the growing number of research projects, conferences, and publications on the subject. New questions have arisen, and new approaches have been taken to address old disputes: What are the most appropriate strategies for preserving performance art? What is the status of the documents a work of performance art generates over time? How to rewrite the history of this art practice from a transnational perspective and include in it artists that have long remained on the margins of historiography? It was in this vibrant context, between 2017 and 2019, that I led the project “Between Evidence and Representation: History of Performance Art Documentation from 1970 to 1977.” This was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions with Freie Universität Berlin as the host institution. The project aimed to lay the foundations for a new critical approach to the disciplinary history of performance art. Departing from the perspective that had long dominated the debate on the subject, it was not concerned with defining whether performance could be captured through documents, or whether photographs or videotapes could be considered as legitimate means for its representation. Rather, by analyzing how early performance art was actually documented and how these documents have subsequently been circulated, collected, and exhibited, the DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-1

2  Tancredi Gusman

project explored the models that have shaped the reception and perception of this art practice. In other words, “Between Evidence and Representation” considered documents not merely as vehicles that convey, more or less accurately, information about past events but it examined them as devices that actively shape these past events and their reception according to specific strategies of representation. Thus, the project showed that documentation should not be considered only as a source for the reconstruction of past performance art but also as a means to critically scrutinize how this past and its narratives have been framed and formed by the media used to record them. As a consequence, performance documentation has become the tool with which to study how the aesthetic space of performance art was negotiated in the visual arts at the stage of its disciplinary formation.4 Furthering that project’s trajectory, the present book broadens the field and time frame of analysis to include a whole set of practices and processes through which various agents reconstruct past performance art and care for its permanence and change. In three parts, leading international scholars from various disciplines explore the historicization, documentation, archiving, collection, exhibition, and reactivation of performance art. In doing so, they offer original approaches to investigating the strategies of transmission of this art form as well as the politics of memory that these embody. As the book deals with processes of (re)presenting performance art and its past, it is essential to begin with a question that has preoccupied generations of scholars: what is performance art? Since the late 1970s, several attempts have been made to answer this question. Some scholars have identified the core of performance in the ephemeral and nonreproducible quality of the live act,5 whereas others have pointed out that a work of performance art is also composed of the recordings and supplements that it generates and that shape its subsequent reception.6 Over the decades, works with profoundly disparate, if not opposing, features have been subsumed under the category of “performance art” by publications, exhibitions, and collections: some were based on live interaction with an audience, while others were performed only for a camera; some involved the presence of the artist, while others were delegated; some were conceived as one-off events, while others were designed to be reenacted. The research was thus confronted with such a vast and expanding body of works that it soon seemed impossible to offer a definition of performance art as a medium that could encompass them all—unless in very general terms, describing an art practice involving artists, performers or other participants, performing actions. Such an extremely general definition, however, does not help us to decide when a performance is a piece of performance art. The difficulty of clearly demarcating the boundaries of this art practice has led, since its inception, to the emergence of a somewhat paradoxical definition, which has identified the nature of performance art precisely in its ability to escape definitions.7 More recently, theorists and curators such as Jonah Westerman8 and Catherine Wood9 have chosen a different approach.

Introduction: On the Present of Past Performance  3

Acknowledging the breadth of this art practice, they have offered a definition that focuses more on what performance does rather than what it is—that is, on the issues that performance art has addressed, such as the relationship between art and the social world. These authors have illuminated crucial aspects of the history of performance art and avoided the contradictions that arise with attempts to define performance as a medium with distinctive properties. However, even this recent approach does not allow us to unequivocally pinpoint what makes a performance a piece of performance art. While reaching such a strict definition seems impossible in theory, in practice things appear to work differently. Indeed, experts in the field, such as scholars, critics, curators, and conservators, are able to effectively identify a piece of performance art in their daily work and distinguish it from one which is not. There may be disputed attributions and discordant opinions, but at least in paradigmatic cases there seems to be agreement on what can potentially, if not incontrovertibly, be termed “performance art.” But how do they recognize performance art? By looking at this process of recognition, we can attempt to extract its underlying criteria. To do this, however, it may be useful to start with something that, despite close resemblances, is certainly not performance art. In 2018, as part of the wide monographic exhibition Il mondo fuggevole di Toulouse-Lautrec (The Fleeting World of Toulouse-Lautrec), curated by Danièle Devynck and Claudia Zevi at Palazzo Reale in Milan, some arresting photographs of the French painter caught my attention. A series of four images taken circa 1898–1899 by the photographer and friend of the painter, Maurice Joyant, showed the artist defecating on the beach at Le Crotoy in Picardy. Although the circumstances in which these photographs were taken are unclear, their ironic and provocative intent can be perceived from the title of the newspaper Toulouse-Lautrec is reading during the “act”: Le Petit (The Little). Another interesting photograph exhibited in Palazzo Reale, taken by Maurice Guibert around 1895, shows the artist, looking into the camera, cross-dressed, wearing a plumed hat and an ostrich boa. A viewer with some knowledge of the history of performance art might have been amused by the striking similarity between these and some iconic photographs of the genre. Seeing Toulouse-Lautrec cross-dressed, they might have thought, for example, of the pictures of Eleanor Antin dressed as the King of Solana Beach in the early 1970s, or of the images of the Mythic Being, the alter ego created by Adrian Piper in 1973, and of these artists’ explorations of identity constructions and gender representations. By looking at the series depicting the French painter defecating on the beach, they might also have been reminded of the sequence showing Vito Acconci in his “Drifts” on a beach, printed in the art magazine Avalanche in 1971.10 Nevertheless, it is somewhat difficult to imagine the curators of the exhibition in Milan presenting the photograph of Toulouse-Lautrec under the heading “performance art” or titling the section describing it in the catalog “performance art pieces by Toulouse-Lautrec.” And if they

4  Tancredi Gusman

had done so, we would have been faced with a provocative, unusual, or perhaps simply incorrect designation. But what makes the photographs of Antin, Piper, and Acconci images of performance art and distinguishes them from the photographs of Toulouse-Lautrec? When we analyze these pictures, or the actions they depict, without any prior knowledge of the artists or the contexts in which they realized the performances, it is quite difficult to find any intrinsic feature that would allow us to tell the difference. It is not even clear what the status of these images themselves is and how they relate to the “performance” they portray: Are they documenting an act or are they instead the visual medium of an art piece? The distinction between these series, therefore, does not lie in some alleged intrinsic properties of the images in question or the performances they record. Attempting to investigate the “intention” with which the artists made these performances and produced the set of documents/images would not be of much help either, and not just because the concept of “artistic intention” is elusive and its content arduous to grasp. In fact, even if it were proven that Toulouse-Lautrec “intentionally” staged his performances for the camera and disseminated them as postcards within art venues, that would not make them performance art pieces, nor would it make the postcards an edition of a work of performance art. Thus, neither the characteristics of the works’ medium nor the intentions of the artists producing them seem to be decisive factors in determining what makes a performance a piece of performance art. The primary discrepancy between the two sets of performances and images lies in the historical contexts in which they were made—that is, in the discursive and disciplinary frameworks within which they were produced and received as art pieces. What the works of Antin, Piper, and Acconci have in common, and what differentiates them from those of Toulouse-Lautrec is, first and foremost, their specific position in the history of visual arts. In the late 1950s, artistic practices began to emerge worldwide that, in various ways, challenged the idea of the artwork as a material, autonomous, and transportable object and thus undermined the assumptions of what was traditionally considered an artwork. Some of these new practices had, at their center, the artist’s body or the actions that the artist or other participants performed. These practices began to be framed with various categories such as “happenings,” “action art,” “body works,” “events,” and “activities”—to name the English terms only. It was in this context that, in the early 1970s, the concept of “performance art” was coined in the United States and quickly spread throughout the world, expanding its semantic field until it gradually subsumed the other terms and encompassed a vast and diverse set of artistic works. This generalizing dynamic was so rampant that the concept came to be used, retrospectively, to describe even Futurist and Dadaist performances of the early twentieth century.11 The increasing opacity and breadth of this concept, however, did not undermine its success because it did not designate a specific aesthetic object but functioned as a name to constellate a new complex of art

Introduction: On the Present of Past Performance  5

practices that shared a network of “family resemblances.”12 “Performance art,” by naming and making visible this new field, constituted it and, by opening up a common transnational disciplinary space, made legible a series of works as being related in their attempts to change the modes of art production and reception.13 So, what is performance art? I define “performance art” as a disciplinary formation that, ever since its emergence in the 1970s, has brought together a group of different artistic practices and programs. The scope and characteristics of this disciplinary formation have, from the very beginning, been negotiated, time and again, by artists, curators, historians, museums, and other institutions. It is these negotiations that have produced, over time, the layered set of paradigms and models that govern the way we look at performance art. What performance art is, is not fixed; it changes over time and through the work of these agents. Therefore, it is not far-fetched to imagine that even the actions and images of Toulouse-Lautrec would, one day, be proposed as categorizable under the rubric of performance art. But this negotiation alters the meaning of the term as well as the parameters of the field of phenomena it denotes. What defines performance art is not an essential core of properties but a set of paradigms that have been established historically and that have determined, performatively, the term’s scope of usage. It is this implicit disciplinary knowledge that enables experts to recognize a piece of performance art. It must be evident by now that it is not possible to offer a universal and static definition for performance art, on the basis of which one can then analyze how artists, scholars, curators, and conservators have historicized and transmitted this art form. Rather, it is precisely these processes that have shaped performance art and its modes of permanence. It was this idea which guided the conception of this volume, whose contributors were hence invited to explore practices of historiography, documentation, and representation of performance art and how these (re)construct it. The question then shifts from the realm of being to that of potentiality. The issue is no longer what performance art is but which of its virtualities have been realized through these processes and practices. This book aims to provide an innovative approach to the multiple ways in which performance art can be actualized.

Histories of Performance The first part of this volume, entitled Reframing the Past: Histories and Historiographies of Performance Art, is devoted to the historicization of performance art. Since the late 1970s, a historiography of the genre has developed that has contributed to the creation of a canon of performance artists and works, gradually consolidated by acquisitions and retrospectives in major international museums. For over a decade now, the recognition of the role and power of the canon in establishing specific narratives and genealogies has led an increasing number of scholars to challenge its limits

6  Tancredi Gusman

and to bring to light works and artists who, despite having participated in the formation of this artistic practice worldwide, have long remained invisible to its “archive.” This questioning of the canon and the widening of the area of inquiry have broadened the geography of performance art, previously focused primarily on the major artistic “centers” of the West. Publications such as Bátorová (2019), Bryzgel (2017), Cseh-Varga and Czirak (2018), Eckersall (2013), González Castro, López and Smith (2016), Johnson (2013), Morganová (2014), and Phelan (2012), arguing against a homogenizing understanding of performance art, have shown the specificity of local and regional performance art scenes while simultaneously demonstrating their active participation in a transnational artistic exchange. The great achievement of this new historiography has been to pluralize the scope of performance art: what matters is no longer one—implicitly ­hegemonic—history of performance art, but rather its histories. If the boundaries of performance art are the result of negotiations, then this expansion of the field has made it possible to include within it a diversity of practices that pursue a multiplicity of goals and methods. This expansion, however, has brought with it a series of methodological and epistemological questions that remain open. How does this new approach reframe our narratives of performance art and the way we investigate and write its histories? What kinds of categories and methodological tools are appropriate to capture histories that have so far remained untold? Through four local, national, and regional histories, Part I offers exemplary models for addressing such questions. The focus on circumscribed contexts does not mean abandoning the attempt to construct a broader history of performance art. On the contrary, these specific cases are the place to concretely test the methodologies of a transnational history of performance art and redefine its frameworks and categories. In addition to the presentation of methods and sources for reconstructing these histories, the contributors to this first section discuss the very object and scale of historiographic inquiry and examine its terminologies and genealogies. In the first chapter, Amy Bryzgel analyzes the history and historiography of performance art in East-Central Europe. To account for the specific ways and means in which this genre has circulated, Bryzgel expands the concept of historical writing beyond the domain of writing practices as such. Through the case studies of the artistic duo KwieKulik and the Labirynt Gallery in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s as well as the Zona Festival in Romania in the post-communist period, Bryzgel demonstrates that the reflection on this art form did not take place, except marginally, through art-historical writing, but rather through processes of self-archiving, as well as through exhibitions, festivals, meetings and “the discussions that occurred as part of events organized around these events.” In doing so, the chapter highlights how the discourse around performance art was codified in this region in the same alternative spaces and media through which the genre itself developed. By subsequently mapping the contemporary publications and historiographies

Introduction: On the Present of Past Performance  7

on performance art in East-Central Europe, Bryzgel shows how the ways in which this art practice has formed also necessarily determine the work, tools and, above all, the sources of the historians who intend to reconstruct it. In particular, the method of oral history, by providing access to the memories of those who were part of these artistic scenes, proves crucial to this endeavor. Writing a polyphonic history of performance art requires not only uncovering artists and works hitherto invisible to its archive and canon, but also putting back at the center the reconstruction of the context and conditions that determine the developments of specific art scenes. This theme is carried forward by the next two chapters of Part I. In Chapter 2, Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman delve into the history of “action art” in Argentina and the politicization of artistic creation in that country, which has so far remained peripheral in the historiography of international performance art. The focus of the discussion is Tucumán Arde, a collective artistic action of counter-information that took place in 1968. In their reconstruction, Mestman and Longoni criticize the historiographic approach that has turned Tucumán Arde into an exceptional event and art-historical icon, isolating it from the “social fabric” in which it took shape. Rather, the authors show how this collective action can only be understood correctly if it is considered as part of the wider process of radicalization and politicization of art that was taking place in Argentina at that time, which they call the “Itinerary of ’68” to underline the year in which it reached its climax. The attention to the uniqueness of the historical-artistic context in which Tucumán Arde emerged leads Longoni and Mestman, in conclusion, to reflect on how this avant-garde movement is named and categorized in art history. Without denying the legitimacy of using categories such as performance art, action art or conceptual art, the authors highlight how they potentially reabsorb these phenomena within the very aesthetic and institutional framework that these artists had sought to challenge. In so doing, the chapter reminds us of the epistemological power of art terminologies and their ability to construct specific genealogies. The third chapter, by Sabine Gebhardt Fink, further articulates the discussion around historiographical approaches capable of capturing the complex set of actors and exchanges that constitute a particular art scene. The author presents here the strategies and methodologies developed by Performance Chronicle Basel, a collaborative network of artists, researchers, scholars, curators, and witnesses, of which she is among the founding members. The aim of this network is to investigate the history of performance art in Basel since the late 1960s, with a particular focus on feminist, queer, and activist artistic practices, which have previously been largely neglected by the historiography of performance art in Switzerland. Once again, oral history appears as one of the key methodological tools for reconstructing histories that have long been invisible to art history. To trace these forgotten histories and capture their living, embodied memory, the project has primarily relied on witness reconstructions and videotaped interviews, supplementing them

8  Tancredi Gusman

with analyses of archival documents and sources. As the memory to be captured is plural and nonhierarchical, so are the processes of its interpretation: Performance Chronicle Basel experiments with a collaborative practice that involves scholars, artists, and other agents in jointly researching and mapping, through different media, the chronicle of performance art in Basel. After discussing the theoretical-methodological framework of the project, the chapter focuses on two case studies, namely, Alex Silber’s early performance art and the production Damengöttinnen am Äquator, showing through them the results generated by the research network. The first three chapters deal with histories of performance art that, for various reasons, have occupied a marginal position in relation to the dominant canon of the genre. Through them, they offer models for building a plural transnational history of performance art. The concluding chapter of Part I, by Lorenzo Mango, reflects on the categories and frameworks through which theater historiography understands international contemporary theater and performance. Mango inspects the post-avant-garde, one of the most relevant phenomena of Italian theater in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He reconstructs its history based, among other factors, on the work and reflection of Federico Tiezzi, one of its protagonists. The main characteristic of the post-avant-garde appears to be that of deconstructing theatrical language into its constituent elements, reducing it to its pure signifiers. Through this analysis of the post-avant-garde, Mango contributes not only to the reconstruction of an important episode of the international New Theater, but also to investigating the relationship between theater and performance art. The meeting ground between the two terms is described by Mango as “performative theater,” that is, theater that is not based on a narrative background or literary material, but on physical action carried out in a “real,” nonrepresentational time and space. The chapter shows how the post-avant-garde’s analytical approach to theatrical language represents a foundational moment for this model of “performative theater.” In doing so, the author outlines a genealogy leading up to the theater of the twenty-first century and shows how the theatrical avant-garde of the past century now represents the tradition, from the perspective of which it is possible to understand contemporary theater and its critique of representation.

The Art of Documentation Documentation has played a crucial role in the history of performance art. Through it, this art form has been historicized and the modes of its permanence have been negotiated and defined time and again. The second part of this volume, Unfolding the Action: Media and Documents of Performance Art, is devoted to the documentation of performance art and how it shapes and gives access to its past. The expression “performance art documentation” has been used in scholarly contexts and museum practices to refer to artifacts such as photographs, films, videotapes, sound recordings, and scores, all of

Introduction: On the Present of Past Performance  9

which have been associated with various functions. These documents have conveyed knowledge and information about past events to those who have not witnessed them. But they have also been used by artists as the medium and site of performance works. As a trace or relic of past artistic actions, they have been exhibited and collected, thus compensating for the absence of an art object. By providing instructions or scores, documentation has moreover offered guidance to artists wishing to reenact past pieces. Precisely because of this unique significance, the status and the role of documentation have been the focal point of performance art research for years. The debate has long revolved around the ontology of performance art and the ability of documents to capture and represent its supposed ephemeral nature. The influential writings of Rebecca Schneider (2001 and 2011) and Diana Taylor (2003) have radically challenged the very terms of the discussion, emphasizing how performance does not need to be documented to survive but can be transmitted from body to body and be thus reperformed. In the last decade, the dichotomy between liveness and documentation and the predominant ontological emphasis were abandoned. Research has since recognized, instead, the plurality of ways in which a performance can endure and has focused on the functions assigned to documentation by artists, curators, conservators, and other agents in museums and art institutions.14 Therefore, the objective is no longer to determine whether or not performance is by nature ephemeral but to examine the strategies chosen to make performance last. This approach shows that it is the “entanglement” of live events, material remains and documents that integrally constitutes performance art and its liveness.15 As a result of the increasing acquisition of live performance art by museums, documentation has also been the subject of applied research aimed at developing strategies to support the preservation and reactivation of performance works.16 Performance is no longer regarded as something whose meaning is completely contained and encapsulated in a one-time past event but as something that lives and unfolds through the chain of its representations and occurrences over time. Hence, performance art works can be considered as an aggregate of elements of which documents and reenactments are part. The mutual relationships between these elements and their overall configuration are determined by multiple agencies throughout the processes of their preservation, representation, and reactivation. This perspective is provided with a precise theoretical framework by Gabriella Giannachi in Chapter 5, which outlines an innovative model for understanding the constitutive relationship between performance and documentation. Adapting Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1988) philosophical concept of “assemblage” to the field of performance and new media, Giannachi looks at performance within the museum as a set of multiple instantiations and interventions encompassing both a performance event and its records, documents, and ephemera. Documentation is not synonymous with performance, but it is its arrangement that, time and again, defines and redefines its meaning and value. Using case studies

10  Tancredi Gusman

from the Whitney, the Tate, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), and LIMA, Giannachi analyzes the role that documentation has played in these museums since the 1970s. She goes on to demonstrate how documentation actively shapes the life of the performance art works through multiple agents involved in their archiving, collection, and exhibition. Documentation, thus extrapolated, does not simply offer a more or less accurate record of a past performance work but participates in its unfolding over time. With a double temporal index—as a record of the past and a document for the future—documentation, as Giannachi writes, “can trace and change the life journey of an artwork.” Consequently, the preservation of performance is understood not only as an activity directed toward the past but also as a process of negotiating the reappearance of the work in the future. Performance documentation enables the experience of performance art works rather than merely reproducing past events. This is the position advocated by Philip Auslander in Chapter 6, in which he looks at the role of documentation in the reception of works of performance art and discusses arguments and categories that have been employed to describe the interaction between live events and their documentary representation. At the heart of his thinking is the shift from an ontological to a phenomenological approach. The focus turns from the relationship between a performance and its documentation to the one between documentation and the beholder, who reactivates the performance through its media. Auslander challenges the primacy of the live reception of performance art. Although the experience that can be gained from a recording is not identical to that of attending a live event, he argues that it must nonetheless be acknowledged as a cogent experience of the performance, on the basis of which a valid understanding of it can be gained. “The performance experienced through documentation is the performance, not just a secondary reproduction of it.” The relationship between a performance and its photographs, videotapes, and other records is therefore not to be understood in terms of the authenticity and accuracy of a representation, but rather in the phenomenological terms of the multiplicity of ways for accessing a performance. By using different approaches and models, Auslander’s and Giannachi’s chapters converge in presenting performance artworks as complex systems that unfold over time and can be reactivated through different media. Documentation plays a prominent role in determining the trajectory of this unfolding. Its examination must therefore be considered as a means of exploring how this artistic practice has been articulated. The following two chapters, written by Barbara Büscher and Heike Roms, respectively, provide analyses of specific forms of documentation and how they have informed our experience of performance art. Both look into media that, while highly relevant to the history of performance art, have so far not received adequate attention in scholarly contexts. In doing so, their contributions open a new perspective on two fundamental strands of research.

Introduction: On the Present of Past Performance  11

Barbara Büscher treats the “book” as a medium and archival space for performance art. Although much of the information, representation, and historiography on performance art is transmitted through books, their essential role in the circulation of this art practice has not yet been sufficiently explored. The chapter scrutinizes a series of case studies spanning periods and disciplinary areas: the publications edited by Kasper König at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in the 1970s; the recent catalogs and monographs devoted to the work of seminal performance artists VALIE EXPORT (2012) and Joan Jonas (2015); and, finally, concerning theater and dance performance, The Wooster Group Work Book (2007), edited by Andrew Quick, and the series A Choreographer’s Score by Bojana Cvejić and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (2012–2014). Büscher outlines some of the strategies used to represent performance art through books and investigates their historical and disciplinary signatures. In Kasper König’s series, which stemmed from a context in which a new understanding of artistic work was emerging and its democratization was being pursued, the book is primarily used as a form of documentation aimed at making artistic processes transparent. In contemporary publications on VALIE EXPORT and Joan Jonas, on the other hand, it becomes the authoritative place in which the modes of accessing and interpreting works by iconic artists are codified. Finally, in the theater and dance publications under review, the book becomes the means with which to highlight the processual and cooperative dimension of theatrical and choreographic productions. The final chapter of Part II by Heike Roms is concerned with the documentation of sound in performance art and with sound as a means through which performance art has been documented. As Roms points out, the debate on performance documentation has so far assigned primacy to photography, leaving the field of sonic documentation largely unexplored. Starting from this gap, Roms formulates the outline for a future research inquiry into what she calls an “aural history of performance art.” The aim of such a history is to dig into the extensive sonic archive of performance art and to explore how sound documents “can supplement, enhance, or challenge its visual record.” The chapter begins by Roms describing the experience of listening to Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971). She shows how the sound recording of this piece gives access to aspects that are absent from the visual documents, thus helping us to understand its collaborative, durational, and spatial dimensions. After a brief overview of key theoretical investigations on the subject, Roms sketches—through a series of case examples—the sort of audio records and documents that would constitute such an aural history. As debates about the documentation of performance are at the same time debates about the nature of performance, Roms suggests, in conclusion, that this new inquiry into the sound archive of performance art has the potential to change the terms in which we conceive performance art and how it remains. Indeed, the specific materiality and temporality of sound phenomena may lead us to perceive performance not as something

12  Tancredi Gusman

that disappears and reappears but as something that persists and continues to resonate. This reflection on the temporality of performance art ideally ushers in the final part of the volume and the discussion of practices and models for the permanence and reactivation of this art form.

Representing Performance The analyses conducted in Part II invite us to consider performance art works as open-ended projects whose life trajectory is determined not only by the artists who produce them but by the agents involved in their care and transmission as well.17 Part III, entitled Representing Performance: Information, Collection, Reactivation, is devoted to challenges artists, researchers, curators, conservators, and art institutions face when archiving, collecting, and displaying performance art works. These practices raise, both directly and indirectly, the question of “representation” of performance art. The term “representation,” however, should not be understood in this context in a mimetic sense—that is, as referring to the reproduction of something that exists in and of itself and whose meaning is independent of its mediation. Rather, “representation,” as the procedure of framing an “object” of knowledge, is the very process through which that object is constructed. The representation of a performance work defines its essential features and how it should be archived, collected, and exhibited. “Representing” a work of performance art therefore means negotiating its very identity and determining how it should remain, change or reappear. The volume’s four concluding chapters, combining applied and theoretical approaches, present examples of collecting live works and their related data, analyze the politics and policies of memory transmission, and discuss strategies for exhibiting and reactivating performance art. Thus, they allow us to explore, in greater detail, how the tangible and intangible heritage of performance art is kept alive and endowed with symbolic and material value. One of the most pressing issues in the care of contemporary art is how to store and manage the amount of information generated by the iterations and transformations of performance art works. This issue is addressed by Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel, and Glenn Wharton in Chapter 9 where they outline the development of the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base ( JJKB), an open-source digital resource launched in 2021 which houses information on selected case studies of the pivotal multimedia and performance artist. The JJKB is part of the Artist Archives Initiative, a project founded at New York University with the aim of creating widely accessible information resources. It is especially meant to benefit art world professionals such as curators, conservators, performers, exhibition designers and researchers, providing them with essential documents and information about two seminal early artworks, Organic Honey (1972, 1972/1994) and Mirage (1976, 1976/1994/2005, 1976/2001), as well as three exhibitions of particular significance to Jonas’s artistic development. The three project

Introduction: On the Present of Past Performance  13

directors discuss the strategies that guided the team in assembling and organizing the materials related to these five case studies. Particular attention is paid to the technological infrastructure designed to capture the specific iterative and layered quality of Jonas’s works and to make the multiple interactions between their constituent elements discoverable and retrievable. By making the life trajectories of these works accessible, the JJKB—which is neither an archive nor a catalogue raisonée but an informational infrastructure of a curatorial nature—effectively provides a pioneering model for representing artworks that are generative and that change with each new activation and iteration. Capturing and defining the set of properties and components that constitute a performance art work proves crucial to incorporating it into art collections and ensuring its permanence. In Chapter 10, Wolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader analyze current models and procedures of collecting live performance art. Drawing on research conducted as part of the Collecting the Ephemeral project (2019–2023), which the two authors co-direct, they address the difficulties and objections that prevent collecting live performance art from becoming “a matter of course.” Analyzing institutional documents and taking the results of meetings and interviews conducted by the project team into account, the chapter compares collection practices developed by institutions of different sizes and types, ranging from large international museums and art centers to smaller innovative foundations, organizations, and art galleries. In doing so, Brückle and Mader outline a number of approaches and concepts with which these agents have responded to the challenge of creating procedures to ensure the permanence of these works without hindering their ability to change. The major challenge faced by each of these agents appears to be precisely that of fixing the identity of a live performance work and determining the tools and expertise needed for its preservation over the course of its recurrences. Brückle and Mader’s contribution encourages the development of new perspectives and highlights how, in order to overcome present obstacles, it is essential to rethink museum structures and concepts. They argue, in particular, that it is necessary to move from an idea of conservation, aimed at preserving the original state of an artwork, to an idea of caring for the living and transformative quality of these performative works. The first two chapters of Part III discuss how to effectively represent performance art works and construct models that enable their collection and reactivation. But such models, as we have seen, are not neutral. Defining the identity of a performance art work and choosing how to preserve it require complex interpretive processes that actively shape the life and afterlife of such works. In Chapter 11, Susanne Franco discusses strategies for the transmission and reactivation of dance and performance in museums and art galleries. The author reflects on how these practices challenge traditional discourses and models of art preservation and allow for the exploration of the politics of memory that emerge from the work of artists and institutions. The chapter focuses on two internationally celebrated

14  Tancredi Gusman

artists, Tino Sehgal and Boris Charmatz, and the pieces and events they have created at Tate in London. While starting from a shared germinal idea of a dancing museum, Franco demonstrates how the two artists develop opposite strategies and conceptions regarding how to transmit their individual works and, more generally, the heritage of dance and performance. What distinguishes them is not only the choice of “legitimate” means of documenting performance but also the determination of who the subjects are that are charged with interpreting and transmitting its memory. This ultimately sets how performance and its representations circulate and reappear. Thus, whereas Sehgal designs models of transmission that specify what memory is to be reactivated and who is responsible for this task, Charmatz engages with polyphonic and participatory processes of documentation that invite diverse memories and bodies to become bearers of the transformative persistence of dance and performance. The contributions by Franco and by Brückle and Mader reflect on issues that arise with the inclusion of performance as a live event in the collections and programs of museums and art institutions. These chapters are stimulated by processes of representing performance through what may appear to be its own matter: the living and performing body. The concluding chapter, by Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley, deals instead with exhibitions that display performance through artifacts, which, as they claim, “may document a performance or may be understood to ‘perform’ themselves.” The authors discuss the representation of performance through something which is not the performance itself but invokes and points to it. The chapter does not argue whether these artifacts accurately depict practices of performance. Rather, performance appears as a method, as an infrastructure that guides exhibition strategies, and as a process inhabiting these objects and their contextualization. Guy and Linsley investigate three recent retrospectives on pioneering performance artists in London institutions: Ana Mendieta at Hayward Gallery (2013), Rose English at Camden Arts Centre (2015), and Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern (2016). Central to the analysis is the “retrospective” considered as a device through which the historicization of an artist’s work is orchestrated and their oeuvre constructed. The authors ask where performance is to be found, how it is located in each of these retrospectives, how it appears or surfaces, and what the artistic and curatorial strategies of performance within each of them are. The current focus of museums on performance as an instrument for reflecting on the relationship between art and society seems to relegate questions about its ontology to the background. Guy and Linsley, by asking how performance is situated and materialized in these object-based exhibitions, pose a question that has ontological implications. However, they do not aim to define the nature of performance art or the properties of its medium: by tracing different strategies of retrospectives, they show the plurality of ways through which performance can be materialized and reveal its ontologies as the result of a negotiation taking place over time and involving multiple agents.

Introduction: On the Present of Past Performance  15

This reflection concludes the critical trajectory of the volume, whose primary objective is to examine practices of historicizing, documenting, and representing performance art. Guy and Linsley’s question about “where” performance is allows us to restate a key concept: It is not possible to determine the nature of performance art, but, at the same time, we cannot avoid the enterprise of analyzing the places and times in which it is, from time to time, materialized, situated, and brought into existence. A performance art work is not a finite and self-contained event but is produced over time through multiple instances and agents that negotiate the modes of its permanence and reappearance. Historiographies determine the genealogies, geographies, and scale of investigation of this art form; documentation defines its modes of transmission and access; archives, collections, and exhibitions delineate its identity and memory. Each of these practices actively shapes the aesthetic space of performance art. Through a variety of perspectives and methods, the contributors to this volume provide an original approach to exploring this aesthetic space. Special emphasis is placed on the agency of those who participate in these processes and, consequently, on the strategies of transmitting the tangible and intangible heritage of performance art. Reconstructing performance art means examining the processes of constitution of this art form as well as its unfolding over time. This is the challenge that this volume outlines and for which it proposes new critical tools.

Notes 1 In 2009, MoMA changed the name of the “Department of Media” to the “Department of Media and Performance Art,” reflecting a new specific focus on this artistic practice. A few years later, the Tate began researching the processes of preserving and collecting performance with the research network “Collecting the Performative,” (2012–2014) which brought together academic scholars and museum professionals, as well as institutions such as Maastricht University and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Research on performance-­based art at the Tate recently culminated in the project “Documentation and Conservation of Performance” (2016–2021). In response to the challenge of acquiring live performances, which began in 2006, the Guggenheim developed a new conservation and collection strategy described in Joanna Phillips and Lauren Hinkson, “New Practices of Collecting and Conserving Live Performance Art at the Guggenheim Museum,” Beiträge zur Erhaltung von Kunst- und Kulturgut, vol. 1, ed. Verband der Restauratoren (VDR) (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2018), 124–132. 2 In 2017, the work Faust by Anne Imhof was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation (Germany) at the 57th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. In the same edition of the Biennale, Carolee Schneemann received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. In 2019, the opera performance Sun & Sea (Marina) by Lina Lapelytė, Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation (Lithuania) at the 58th Venice Biennale. 3 This extensive process of recognition and institutionalization, as Bertie Ferdman and Jovana Stokic point out, has transformed the status of performance

16  Tancredi Gusman

4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16

art, which has been commodified and whose transgressive potential has been domesticated. However, they maintain that this does not mean performance has lost its critical and resistant potential. Therefore, they speak of an “oxymoronic” status of performance. See Bertie Ferdman and Jovana Stokic, “Squaring Performance Art,” in The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art, ed. Bertie Ferdman and Johanna Stokic (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 3–16, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350057609.0006. The methodological approach developed by the project is presented in Tancredi Gusman, “Between Evidence and Representation: A New Methodological Approach to the History of Performance Art and Its Documentation,” Contemporary Theatre Review 29, no. 4 (2019): 439–461, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10486801.2019.1657104. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). See Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 11–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00043249.1997.10791844; Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj.2006.28.3.1; and Barbara Clausen, “After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art,” in After the Act: The (Re) Presentation of Performance Art, ed. Barbara Clausen (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 2007), 7–20. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 6. Jonah Westerman, “The Dimensions of Performance,” Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art, accessed 1 September 2022, https://www.tate.org.uk/ research/publications/performance-at-tate/dimensions-of-performance. Catherine Wood, Performance in Contemporary Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2018), 20–23. “Drifts and Conversions by Vito Acconci,” photography by Shunk-Kender, Avalanche, no. 2 (Winter 1971): 82–95. See Goldberg, Performance. I use the concept “family resemblances” here with reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein to describe “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), §66–67. See Tancredi Gusman, “Between Evidence and Representation,” 440–443. See Gabriella Giannachi and Jonah Westerman, eds., Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018). See Nick Kaye, “Liveness and the Entanglement with Things,” in Artists in the Archive: Creative and Curatorial Engagements with Documents of Art and Performance, ed. Paul Clarke et al. (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018), 25–52. See Acatia Finbow, “New Approaches to Documenting Performance in the Museum: Value, History, and Strategy,” in Moving Spaces: Enacting Dance, Performance, and the Digital in the Museum, ed. Susanne Franco and Gabriella Giannachi (Venezia: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari 2021), 139–152, https://doi. org/10.30687/978-88-6969-534-6/014; Louise Lawson, Acatia Finbow and Hélia Marçal, “Developing a Strategy for the Conservation of PerformanceBased Artworks at Tate,” Journal of the Institute of Conservation 42, no. 2 (2019): 114–134, https://doi.org/10.1080/19455224.2019.1604396; and Phillips and Hinkson, “New Practices.”

Introduction: On the Present of Past Performance  17

18  Tancredi Gusman González Castro, Francisco, Leonora López and Brian Smith. Performance Art en Chile. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2016. Gusman, Tancredi. “Between Evidence and Representation: A New Methodological Approach to the History of Performance Art and Its Documentation.” Contemporary Theatre Review 29, no. 4 (2019): 439–461. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10486801.2019.1657104. Hölling, Hanna B. “Introduction: Object–Event–Performance.” In Object–Event– Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity since the 1960s, edited by Hanna B. Hölling, 1–39. New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022. Johnson, Dominic, ed. Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Jones, Amelia. “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation.” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249. 1997.10791844. Kaye, Nick. “Liveness and the Entanglement with Things.” In Artists in the Archive: Creative and Curatorial Engagements with Documents of Art and Performance, edited by Paul Clarke, Simon Jones, Nick Kaye and Johanna Linsley, 25–52. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018. Lawson, Louise, Acatia Finbow and Hélia Marçal. “Developing a Strategy for the Conservation of Performance-Based Artworks at Tate.” Journal of the Institute of Conservation 42, no. 2 (2019): 114–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/19455224. 2019.1604396. Morganová, Pavlína. Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain. Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Phelan, Peggy, ed. Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Phillips, Joanna, and Lauren Hinkson. “New Practices of Collecting and Conserving Live Performance Art at the Guggenheim Museum.” Beiträge zur Erhaltung von Kunst- und Kulturgut, vol. 1, edited by Verband der Restauratoren (VDR), 124–132. Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2018. Quick, Andrew, ed. The Wooster Group Work Book. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Schneider, Rebecca. “Performance Remains.” Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001): 100–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2001.10871792. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Simon, Joan, ed. In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2015. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Westerman, Jonah. “The Dimensions of Performance.” Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art. Accessed 1 September 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/performance-at-tate/dimensions-of-performance. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M.  Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Wood, Catherine. Performance in Contemporary Art. London: Tate Publishing, 2018.

Part I

Reframing the Past Histories and Historiographies of Performance Art

1

Mapping the Emerging Historiographies of Performance Art in EastCentral Europe Amy Bryzgel

While the history of performance art in East-Central Europe1 is inextricably connected to that of Western Europe, not to mention its global iterations, the historiography of performance in the region warrants particular attention. Although performance in Western Europe and North America presented itself, initially, as an extra-institutional development, critical of the institutions of art itself, it became co-opted relatively quickly by that system, becoming commercialized and canonized, as it usually happens with the avant-garde, at least according to Peter Bürger, in his 1974 text Theory of the Avant-Garde.2 In East-Central Europe, performance art also manifested as an extra-institutional phenomenon, mainly as it was where artists found the space to expand creatively and pursue new forms of expression, outside of the official genres of painting and sculpture, the only ones tolerated by the regime. For this reason, it was not institutionalized or commodified—other than occasionally by Western institutions and critics—but this process is beginning in the region now. In the following text, I will explore the manner in which the history of performance art in the region has been “written,” expanding the notion of writing to include other forms of codifying history—such as artists’ self-archivization, exhibitions, and festivals—and the discussions that occurred as part of events organized around these events, which were often the first opportunity for artists to showcase their work publicly and with an international audience. I will then explore the manner in which images of performances become icons and the canon of a performance art history is constructed. Lastly, I will examine contemporaneous examples of discourse and debate on performance art, finishing with an analysis of more recent histories of the genre, which rely heavily on the use of oral histories. In this chapter, I argue that the historiography of performance art in East-Central Europe developed in alternative spaces and media, in the same manner that the genre itself did.

Self-historicization and Self-archivization As a consequence of these unique sociohistorical conditions, artists developed different ways of capturing and preserving their activity, becoming their own archivists and art historians. A good example of this is the DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-3

22  Amy Bryzgel

artistic duo KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek). Their archive, amassed and preserved by Zofia Kulik, was a contemporaneous documentation and presentation of the artists’ work. From the 1970s to the 1980s, the two hosted regular events in their flat in Warsaw, presenting their work from the archive in slideshows. What they presented, in effect, was a contemporaneous art history lesson on the emerging performance activity in the People’s Republic of Poland. In 1974, KwieKulik established PDDiU, the Bureau of Activities, Documentation, and Dissemination (Pracownia Działań Dokumentacji i Upowszechniania). Although started as an informal part of their work, the aim was always to make PDDiU a legitimate institution, and the pair sought official recognition for it by the state, which would have given them some funding and space. At its inception, and for its duration, it was located in KwieKulik’s Warsaw flat (and later their home in the suburb of Łomianki) because the state never granted them institutional status. Interestingly, it never denied them that status either; it simply refused to respond to their numerous requests.3 PDDiU represents an early example of cognizance of the significance of documentation of performance art on the part of performance artists. KwieKulik very deliberately used the term działanie (activities) for their work, which encompassed preparation, presentation, and dissemination (through documentation). What they termed “performance” was simply the presentation of an action, for example, at a festival—only the live act. The distinction between these two terms on the part of the artists indicates a definition of live art that does not place significance on its ephemerality—rather, it focuses on the permanence of the work in the form of its documentation. Secondly, it includes the acts of selfhistoricization and self-archivization, which were so crucial to the preservation of experimental art activity under communism, insofar as this was usually not looked after by art historians at the time. KwieKulik were well connected to the international performance art scene. They participated in festivals abroad, either in person or by sending their documentation. Local audiences for their work, however, were small—as was the case with performance art across the globe. Nevertheless, many artists in East-Central Europe felt isolated because there were limitations placed on them that artists elsewhere may not have experienced. For example, getting a passport to travel abroad was not an automatic right. Many artists were denied passports to travel internationally, including, at one point, KwieKulik. Information, though it did pass through the porous Iron Curtain, was not as free-flowing as perhaps it could have been. Because of this, documentation, which allowed the artists to present their work abroad, became crucial to forging connections with the art world outside of Poland. It would be wrong, however, to infer from this that KwieKulik developed this approach to their Activities because of their historical circumstances.

Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe  23

As early as 1967, when Kwiek was still a student at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, he created a composition that comprised both the making of a sculptural form and the documentation thereof (Study of the Act of Lying below the Horizon). This would form the foundation of KwieKulik’s later performative work. Intent on capturing the process of creating the sculpture, he photographed it at every step of the way, documenting both the changes that he made as a result of his own progress as well as the changes that were made as a result of discussions with viewers. Without the photographs of the early stages of the work, the process of creating the piece— the performance of creation—would have been lost or forgotten. Thus, the documentation was a way of creating permanence out of ephemerality, and the fact that this happened to suit the conditions of the artists’ sociopolitical circumstances is coincidental.

Festivals and Galleries While, for the most part, performance art was ignored or excluded by galleries and museums across the region during the communist period, in places such as Poland and Yugoslavia, it was possible to present performances and even performance festivals. This occurred somewhat later, after the end of the single-party state, in places that had more restrictive or conservative regimes, such as Romania and Moldova, where such public activity was not possible before 1989. A number of independent-minded and forward-thinking organizations were crucial to the development of performance art in providing a space for the genre to develop, and as such, the history of performance art was written in these spaces and at these events. This section will explore two such organizations, the Labirynt Gallery in Lublin, Poland, functioning as a center for performance art as early as the 1970s, and the Zona Festival in Romania, which served as a platform for performance art in the post-communist period. This gallery and festival encapsulate the history of the development of the genre in the region. In places where writing about performance art was limited, discussions at festivals and exhibition openings formed an oral art history discourse in the absence of a considerable body of written literature.

Labirynt In 1974, art historian Andrzej Mroczek established the Labirynt Gallery, as part of BWA Lublin. BWA, or, the Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions (Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych), was a network of state-funded contemporary art galleries across Poland. As official galleries, they were therefore subject to the censors and visits to the director by members of the communist party, but nevertheless, Labirynt managed to push through a very progressive program. The gallery appeared at a time when artists across the globe were searching for new art forms and new types of art, and Poland was no

24  Amy Bryzgel

exception. Mroczek was drawn to performance after his first exposure to it in 1973 at a Festival of Student Theatre organized at BWA in Lublin by Zbigniew Warpechowski. Among the presentations was a manifestation, Transfiguration III (The Author’s Altar) (Transfiguracja III [Ołtarz Autorski]), by Jerzy Bereś, who was friends with Warpechowski and went on to become a regular guest at Labirynt. The performances Mroczek witnessed at the youth festival made a strong impression on him; according to Tadeusz Mroczek, his brother and an art historian, it “shaped how he saw contemporary art.”4 Mroczek was also influenced by Warpechowski and eventually made performance a key focus of Labirynt once he became director a year later. In many ways, his program followed the artists whose work he liked and with whom he had formed a strong relationship. These connections remained important as he built his performance program at Labirynt. He later described the gallery as a place of “presentation, confrontation, and documentation of art,”5 a description that interestingly mimics KwieKulik’s recognition of the preparation, documentation, and dissemination integral to performance art. As both KwieKulik and Mroczek realized, performing is not enough; there needs to be mechanisms to both document and distribute the remnants of the performance, especially in a situation such as that experienced by artists in Poland, where audiences for contemporary, experimental, and performance art were limited. Thus, the efforts of Mroczek and those like him to provide a space for performance art, to document and preserve it, and to distribute it through publication were integral to the development and survival of the history of performance art in Poland. BWA in Lublin hosted its first performative event in 1969, Phantasma, described in the program as an “audiovisual event” (zdarzenia audiowizualnego). Since then, the gallery has served as a meeting point for artists across both Poland and the world, who are interested in or are practitioners of performance. Given that the first book on performance art in Eastern Europe was published in Poland in 1984 as a collection of essays edited by Grzegorz Dziamski,6 and the first text that attempted to outline a history of the development of the genre of performance had been published by RoseLee Goldberg just five years earlier, in 1979 (in English), public presentations, talks, and lectures were among the few ways that artists could gain access to information about performance. And since performance was not taught in art schools, these events functioned as an alternative art history lesson—of the contemporary art happening at that time. In 1978, Labirynt organized the festival Performance and Body—the title in English in the original—which featured artists from across Poland active in performance. Performance and Body was the first event in Poland to use the English-language term “performance.” At the time, artists categorized their performative activity in a range of ways, as with KwieKulik above, who preferred the term “activities.” Likewise, Jerzy Bereś used the term “manifestation” rather than performance or action. But performance

Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe  25

was an international term, and its use in this event connected this small town in the East of Poland with the rest of the world. In his essay, “Performance—Traditions, Sources, Foreign and Native Manifestations: The Recognition of a Phenomenon” (“Performance— tradycje, źródła, obce i rodzime przejawy. Rozpoznanie zjawiska”),7 Grzegorz Dziamski traces the origin of the term “performance” in Poland to the festival at Labirynt and another event that happened in April of that same year at the Remont Gallery in Warsaw, I AM — International Artists’ Meeting. Organized by Henryk Gajewski, an artist and founder of Remont, I AM is considered the de facto first performance festival in Poland and involved a series of lectures, meetings and presentations. According to Tadeusz Mroczek, because Performance and Body took place seven months later, it was “more aware of itself ”8 as a performance festival, as evinced by the title. He noted that it was deliberately in English in order to connect the event with the activities of performance art going on in the rest of the world at that time.9 It involved not only performances and an exhibition of documentation of performance, but it also included discussions and artists’ talks, which were perhaps the most important aspects of the event. Artists’ talks were also part of other exhibitions organized by Labirynt. For example, at Oferta 76 (Offering 76), an exhibition of Labirynt’s “offerings” in 1976, Andrzej Partum and Andrzej Lachowicz gave lectures, and at Oferta 77 (Offering 77), KwieKulik and Andrzej Partum did. While some of the talks have since been published, the discussions that followed were perhaps most representative of ephemeral art, in that they only survive in the memories of the participants, as they were not recorded. Jolanta Męderowicz, a curator at Labirynt, remembers the meetings and discussions she attended, calling the participants “soldiers for freedom without guns… [trying to] change society through art.”10 Tadeusz Mroczek also recalled the significance of the lectures, above all: It should also be remembered that a great role, with the lack of publications devoted to art, was played by the lectures delivered by Wozniakowski, Ludwinski, Morawski, Bialostocki or the lectures by Zagrodzki with the first shows of avant-garde films from the interwar period.11 Thus, Labirynt participated in the oral tradition of art history, performing the discourse when it was not yet being written.

Zona The first Zone Festival, or “Performance Festival—Zone of Eastern Europe,” took place in Timișoara in 1993, organized by Ileana Pintilie and Sorin Vreme. Its goal was to establish “an open communication network

26  Amy Bryzgel

within the bounds of the Zone (Zone is a term with a specific political content in totalitarian societies, defining the places of the maximum concentration of the police, ideological, daily control).”12 According to Ileana Pintilie, it also aimed to “create an opening for types of experimental art which were banned in the past.”13 In Romania, this “ban” was perhaps more strictly enforced when compared to the rest of the Bloc. Artists working in the country in the 1970s—such as Ion Grigorescu and Geta Brătescu—mainly performed for the camera in the private spaces of their homes or studios, fearing the consequences should that work become publicly known. In other places, further from “the Zone” of Bucharest (where the surveillance was greatest), such as Timișoara, public performances did take place, but, in general, in the restrictive atmosphere of Ceaușescu-era Romania, performance art developed in spite of its circumstances. That changed with the end of communism and the advent of Zona, which offered a platform for Romanian artists to perform and witness performances by artists from abroad, and vice versa. The first Zona was in 1993, when Romania was still in a period of transition after the abrupt end of Ceaușescu’s regime in 1989, with his and his wife’s execution. At Zona, both locals and visitors to Romania were able to witness performances by Romanian artists for practically the first time. This was quite significant, as elsewhere at that time, performance art as a genre had waned. Commenting on his experience of Zona 3, in 1999, German curator Robert Fleck expressed surprise at the opportunity to witness live art: The most interesting aspect for a western art critic, before going to Zona, is the recent revival of performance art in the transition countries. I myself started more than twenty years ago, as a photographer and an assistant at performance festivals. Since about 1980, I have never again been the witness of a performance in the classical sense, or of an artist acting in front of a public.14 He also mused as to whether “this revival of performance art in the transition states is anachronistic […] or a profound and authentic phenomenon.”15 For artists in the region, it was not outdated at all; rather, it was the first time that they could present their work in such a public fashion. Zona therefore does not represent a “revival” of performance art in the region, although it might appear that way to a Western critic unfamiliar with the history there. Performance art continued to develop from the 1970s through to the post-communist period. Fleck does conclude that this proliferation of performance art in East-Central Europe is a “profound and authentic phenomenon,” and the critic felt as though he were “really touching a historical moment.”16 To be sure, the fact that a festival of performance art took place in Romania is historical, but in point of fact, the significance of this event lay perhaps more in the mapping of performance art history that was taking place during the discussions and

Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe  27

roundtables, as well as the catalog essays for the festival, than simply witnessing live performances long after the genre’s heyday. For example, in the catalog for Zona 4, Croatian art critic and curator Berislav Valusek discusses the manner in which performance art can be evaluated, or at least the lack of valid criteria with which to assess a performance, other than the aesthetic.17 In the absence of art school critiques or discussions of art-critical essays on performance art, these discussions were instrumental in offering ideas on the evaluation of performance. For Zona 2, several of the artists provided their own definitions of “performance art,” which were published in the catalog. For example, Dan Perjovschi understood it as an “irrepetitive act […] If we think of it only in terms of its picture taken in order to turn it into documentary evidence, the performance becomes a vogue, an object for sale,”18 echoing what Peggy Phelan had to say about performance and its documentation.19 However, Alexandru Antik and Geta Brătescu did not see a significant distinction between performance and other genres, or their other work in the visual arts, insofar as all artistic expression comes from the artist, and all creation is in some ways performative. These searches for a definition (or definitions) echo a more public conversation about performance art that took place in 1974 on Grampian TV in Scotland on a series curated by Richard Demarco entitled Images. Following a live performance by Romanian artist Paul Neagu, Cordelia Oliver, an art critic for the Guardian, Fred Stiven, a lecturer at Robert Gordon University, Demarco and Neagu engaged in a discussion about what had just occurred. While Demarco saw the performance as a “drawing,” Stiven saw it more as theater, and all aimed to assign meaning to the very complex performance they had just witnessed, titled Going Tornado. These are the types of discussions that would have taken place in art schools in North America around the same time. But in Romania (and Scotland, for that matter), where artistic education, for the most part, remains traditional to this day, such discussions were absent from the academies, nor could they be found in publications. Thus, the art-critical and art-historical discourse of performance art occurred as performative events at conferences and festivals such as Zona.

Icons of Performance Art There are numerous works of performance art from Western Europe and North America cemented in one’s mind through repeated exposure to iconic photographic images—for example, the women licking jam off of a Volkswagen Beetle in Allan Kaprow’s 1964 Household; the raked stage of Vito Acconci’s 1972 Seedbed performance, a lone black-cloaked viewer traversing it; Carolee Schneemann standing atop a table in 1975, pulling a text from her vagina in Interior Scroll, to name a few. One can perhaps point to fewer “iconic” works of performance art in Central and Eastern

28  Amy Bryzgel

Europe that were indeed “iconic” prior to their mass circulation following the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. Several works that were presented at Zona and Labirynt can now be classed as “icons” of East-Central European performance art. In 1993, at Zona, Dan Perjovschi had the word “Romania” tattooed on his arm, in an eponymous performance. The piece literally marked Perjovschi as a Romanian artist, with the word emblazoned on his upper arm, suggesting that the artist cannot be separated from his national identity. Ten years later, at Zona 4, he had the tattoo removed, commenting that although the ink was no longer visible on his shoulder, it had simply dispersed through his body, just as one can never shake off their identity—at least not the ones that others impose on them. The 1993 performance was included in Zdenka Badovinac’s Body and the East exhibition and catalog,20 the first exhibition of performance art in Eastern Europe, which helped to establish the canon of performance art in the region, thus contributing to the iconicity of the performances contained therein—at least among artists and scholars of East-Central European art. In 1978, KwieKulik presented Activity for the Head: Three Acts at Labirynt. The piece involved a series of actions in which, at various points, both artists had garbage bins on their heads, with the audience throwing garbage in them—filling their heads with rubbish, as the authorities in the People’s Republic of Poland often did. At one point, Zofia sat with her head inserted through a hole in the bottom of a washbasin, with Przemysław yelling obscenities at her and then washing his face in the bowl, splashing water on her face and nearly waterboarding her. This piece was also included in Body and the East. The significance of the creation of these “icons” is two-fold. Firstly, that they even exist is significant, given the familiarity in performance spheres with the icons of “Western” performance art. In order to gain equivalent recognition and representation on a global scale, East-Central European performance art needs such iconic images for inclusion in textbooks and art history lectures. Secondly, the space in which these iconic performances were created is important and should not be overlooked. In Western Europe and North America, while it may not have been possible to present performance and action art at every gallery or museum, it was considerably easier. The strongest objection a venue could have had would be to the radical content and the concern that the venue’s regular audience would not be amenable to such experimental art. In East-Central Europe, it was not simply the artistic content that could be objectionable—often that was the least of concerns. Rather, because every exhibition and festival had to be approved by the censors, and because organizers had to procure official permissions, it often occurred that censors either did not understand the work and thus dismissed it immediately, or they feared that something so radical would attract attention and thus cause problems. In East-Central Europe, where

Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe  29

presenting the work of contemporary experimental artists required a lot of finagling on the part of those organizing events, the place where these events occurred matters and should be considered as part of the context and interpretation of the artwork.

Contemporaneous Writing of the Histories While much of art history and art criticism in East-Central Europe was subject to control by the state, there were art historians and critics who were writing about performance art both locally and regionally during the communist period. Some examples of this are Grzegorz Dziamski in Poland, Jindřich Chalupecký in Czechoslovakia, and Branka Stipančić in Croatia. Others, however, self-colonized and reinforced narratives that performance art was something that only developed in the West. A case in point is two books published in Poland in the 1980s: Piotr Krakowski’s On New and the Newest Art 21 and Grzegorz Dziamski’s Notes on New Art.22 The former reads like any standard text on performance art that you could find anywhere else and basically rehearses the chronology and trajectory of performance art advanced by RoseLee Goldberg in her 1979 text Performance: Live Art from Futurism to the Present, which traces the lineage from Dada and Surrealism through to Jackson Pollock, Allan Kaprow and beyond. Krakowski’s text also offers a self-colonizing history of performance art, as something that happened “elsewhere,” not in Poland, despite the fact that it was happening in Poland at the very time of the writing of that book. Dziamski’s text, however, is much more nuanced and considers contemporary art not only of “the West” but also the local context, referencing both artists and art historians from East-Central Europe and the West—for example, Czech art critic Jindřich Chalupecký and American performance theorist Michael Kirby. He discusses the work of Gilbert & George and Marcel Duchamp, as well as that of Polish artists Ewa Partum and KwieKulik, placing Polish contemporary art in its wider context rather than ghettoizing it as Krakowski does. While Krakowski looks only to the center, Dziamski looks both at the periphery and to the center from the periphery—perhaps one of the earliest practitioners of Piotr Piotrowski’s “Horizontal Art History.”23 As noted above, Dziamski also edited the first book on performance art published in Polish,24 a collection of essays by a number of authors, including Dziamski’s “Performance—tradycje, źródła, obce i rodzime przejawy” (Performance—traditions, sources, foreign, and native manifestations); Klaus Groh’s “Theoretical Ideas on Performance Art”; a translation of an excerpt from Goldberg’s Performance: Live Art from Futurism to the Present; and original texts by artists such as Czech artist Jan Mlčoch, Polish artists Zbigniew Warpechowski and Jerzy Bereś, and Hungarian artists Miklós Erdélyi and Tibor Hajas, to name a few. Performance was published

30  Amy Bryzgel

by the same publisher as Dziamski’s single-authored book, Notes on New Art—Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza, or Youth Publishing Agency. As with exhibitions, clubs, and artists unions across the Eastern Bloc, the authorities had a much greater tolerance for youth activity, which therefore explains why Dziamski’s two books were published as paperbacks by a youth publishing agency, whereas Krakowski, an established art historian touting the “official” line of history, was published in hardcover by the State Scientific Publisher (Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe). According to Tadeusz Mroczek, there was very little published about contemporary art in Poland at the time, as there was nowhere to publish, and most art historians were not interested in writing about contemporary art—probably because they knew that if they did, they had little chance of their work being published. While authors such as Kwiatkowski avoided the local scene, there were others—aside from Dziamski—paying attention to this work. Jolanta Brach-Czaina was interested in environmental art and included the work of Teresa Murak in her 1984 book Etos Nowej Sztuki (The Spirit of New Art).25 Current director of Labirynt and performance artist Waldemar Tatarczuk also recalls that Jacek Wozniakowski, an important art historian from Lublin who taught at the Catholic University, was among those teachers who pushed people to think about art.26 He is the author of a text titled Co sie dzieje ze sztuka? (What Is Happening with Contemporary Art?).27 Tatarczuk also recalls that his teacher, Mikołaj Smoczyński, created “secret performances,” using a long exposure on the camera so that only trace elements of the gestures of the action would be captured on film.28 Labirynt also participated in the publication of significant texts by Polish artists in their exhibition catalogs—for example, the writings of Jan Świdziński, a conceptual and performance artist known for his theory of “Contextual Art,” on which he lectured often at Labirynt; Andrzej Partum’s manifesto “Insolent Art”; as well as texts by Jerzy Bereś on performance and by Andrzej Lachowicz on contemporary art. In his text, “The Necessity for a New Avant-Garde,” Świdziński writes, I am interested in art as far as the meaning is concerned, but not in the art looked upon from the aesthetic point of view. Hence, I am against formalism as a methodological position (it goes beyond the sphere of art), because it makes constructions (artistic and scientific) independent of the meaning.29 Świdziński’s theory of “Contextual Art” argued for the consideration of the context from which the art emerged, the opposite approach to the purported cold, impersonal conceptual art of North Americans such as Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth. As Świdziński stated, “Art does not exclude any meanings. It only imposes on their structure new ones.”30

Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe  31

Andrzej Partum’s 1977 “Manifesto of Insolent Art” calls for “the elimination of inspiration in art […] the elimination of full-time critics […] toward the understanding of art which encourages new statements from the artist […] the art of the lack of art provides hope for an answer […].”31 While comparable texts and manifestos by artists in North America were published widely in art journals and are now anthologized in critical texts of contemporary art, these artist statements from Poland and elsewhere in the Bloc had fewer opportunities for publication, smaller and narrower circulations, and very narrow audiences. Consequently, publishing and circulating these texts meant that those outside of those closed circles, as well as those abroad, could have access and exposure to the new ideas about contemporary art being formulated in Poland at the time. As an example of how difficult it was to publish texts on contemporary art at the time, in a video interview presented at the exhibition ewa partum. my gallery is an idea. galeria adres archive (curated by Karolina MajewskaGüde, Studio Gallery, 2019), Ewa Partum described a situation where she was trying to publish Andrzej Kostołowski’s Theses on Art because, in her words, it was “important to let people around the world know about art in Poland.”32 She found a publishing house that was willing to help her print the book, in the office of the Artists’ Union. The publishers told Partum that when the director of the Association of Polish Artists, which is where her Adres was located, found out, he was upset, but they were nearly done with the book. As was customary at the time, Partum offered some alcohol as incentive to the printers. They finished the book and Partum took it from the publishing house, so that when the director came, there were no copies of the book left for him to criticize or censor. But the scandal was not over. Later, according to Partum, the daily paper in Łódź, Dziennik Łódzki, published an article reporting that Galeria Adres had published a “black book,”33 referring to the design and layout of the book, which contained solid black pages. Therefore, it cannot be taken for granted that publishing of texts on contemporary art was a given in the People’s Republic of Poland. It often required close contacts, good will, ingenuity, and bartering.

Current Performance Art Histories and Oral History Aside from the various repositories discussed above, much of the history of the development of performance art in the region exists in the minds of those who were involved, resulting in dependence, nowadays, of historians on oral history. For example, the first history of Czech Action Art, written as a PhD dissertation in the 1990s by Pavlína Morganová, was constructed with the help of the artists whom Morganová interviewed and spoke with personally. The reliance on oral history places the burden on those who know and speak the language, usually local scholars. While many scholars in the region have been writing this history since the 1990s,

32  Amy Bryzgel

it has only recently become more available in English, enabling foreign scholars to take up comparative studies. Among the first national studies of performance art are the aforementioned book by Pavlína Morganová, Akční umění (Action Art), which emerged from her dissertation and was published in Czech by Votobia in 1999; and Ileana Pintilie’s text Actionism in Romania during the Communist Era.34 The latter is a 134-page well-illustrated book published in Romanian and English in 2000, but it remains out of print. However, Pintilie has published widely on Romanian performance art since the 1990s and was the organizer of the Zona Festival. Morganová’s book was recently updated and published in English in 2014 by Karolinum Press and distributed by the University of Chicago Press,35 and remains the key source on Czech performance art. Her more recent project re-examined and revisited the spaces in which Czech actions took place, as Morganová visited those sites with the artists, with whom she has had a working relationship since the 1990s, and interviewed them about the choice of space and the experience in situ. This book was published in Czech in 2014 and in 2017 in English, titled A Walk through Prague: Actions, Performance, Happenings 1949–1989.36 It makes a unique contribution to the history of performance art, in that it functions as a “performance art guide book,” with maps and photos, enabling the performance art tourist to revisit the sites of iconic Czech performances. Andrea Bátorová is the leading authority on Slovak performance art, and her book Action Art in Slovakia in the 1960s: The Actions of Alex Mlynárčik 37 focuses on one of the most significant Slovak performance artists. Mlynárčik was responsible for some of the most vivid actions of the 1970s and was a key figure in the art scene there due to a relationship he cultivated and maintained with French art critic Pierre Restany. While this book is currently only available in German, she has recently published The Art of Contestation: Performative Practices in the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia,38 introducing Slovak performance art to the English-speaking world. Suzana Marjanić has published a vast and comprehensive history of Croatian performance art, Chronotope of Croatian Performance Art: From the Travelers to the Present Day.39 Although criticized for being too sweeping and all-encompassing, Croatian artists have made such significant contributions to performance that a history of the genre in that country warrants such a compendium. Marjanić’s survey goes back to the early twentieth century, examining the pre-history of performance in the Dada and Constructivist activity in Croatia at the time, and then takes her study through to the present day, covering theater, dance, actions, happenings, body art, performance, and photographic and video performance. The threevolume book is only available in Croatian, but for the avid performance historian, it is perhaps worth the purchase for the images alone. What all of these publications rely on, not only for their completion but also their reliability and authority, are long-standing solid working

Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe  33

relationships with the artists, cultivated over time. These oral histories are not just professional but personal, in that they are inextricably tied up with the sociopolitical circumstances of the time, and it is not sufficient for a historian to swoop in, do one interview, and expect to have an understanding of the artists or their art. Indeed, the strength of the work by Morganová, Pintilie, Bátorová, and Marjanić is grounded in the enduring relationships these historians have cultivated with their artists. These national histories are crucial for foreign scholars to get to grips with the artists and different manifestations of performance in each country. Because secondary source material and print material in general are either scarce or scattershot, all of these authors have relied heavily on interviews with the artists to complete their research. In this sense, these publications fill the gap of both the missing primary source materials for the foreign scholar, in offering translations of artists’ statements in interviews, as well as translations of any locally published texts, and offering an interpretation of the work. Also crucial to the understanding of the genre in the region are the comparative studies being conducted by both local and foreign scholars.40 For example, although not focused exclusively on performance art, Klara Kemp-Welch’s books Antipolitics in Central European Art and Networking the Bloc41 both cover a range of material from across the region. Antipolitics discusses five male artists from the region who were active in performance and conceptual art: Tadeusz Kantor, Endre Tót, Jerzy Bereś, Július Koller, and Tamás Szentjóby. Each chapter is a dedicated study of the work of the artist, focusing on the manner in which they played politics without playing politics.42 Networking the Bloc covers performance art, mail art and conceptual art in the region—although in reality the lines between those three are often blurred—focusing on the networks and exchanges of information that occurred, both across the bloc and beyond, which were crucial to the development and dissemination of experimental art in the region. One could also mention Izabel Galliera’s Socially Engaged Art after Socialism: Art and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe,43 a comparative study of participatory and socially engaged art in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. The inclusion of Bulgaria is one of the book’s many strengths, as the country is one of the most underrepresented in studies of EastCentral European art. While most comparative studies will include Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, East Germany, and Yugoslavia, Bulgaria is rarely included. Although the Baltic countries are currently part of the European Union, they are also usually omitted from performance histories, despite Estonia, in particular, having a rich performance history. Studies of performance in the former Soviet Union usually focus on Russia, with Ukraine getting little attention and Moldova getting almost none. While performance art appeared relatively late in Moldova compared to other places (the late 1980s), it has a very rich post-Soviet performance scene that also warrants attention.

34  Amy Bryzgel

Advantages and Disadvantages of Oral History As an art historian working with living artists, I am often told by art historians of the Renaissance or Middle Ages that they wish they could just speak to their artists and ask them what they intended. I would strongly caution anyone against romanticizing the use of oral history in art history. While of course it has its advantages—in precisely the fact that a historian can ask the artist what they meant—the disadvantages are numerous as well. Firstly, oral history interviews in the humanities are markedly different than those in the social sciences, often leading to misunderstandings among researchers, as well as within funding bodies. While in the former, anonymization of data is crucial to protecting the living subjects in the study, in art history, anonymizing the artist makes no sense, because their work is in the public domain and created for an audience; therefore, to remove their authorship from the work would be wrong. Secondly, memory is of course flawed and encompasses more than just historicization. Memory includes place, smell, feel, sight, and sound. For this reason, Morganová’s latest publication represents an interesting development in the use of oral histories and narration, in interviewing the artists in the precise location where the event took place, and also guiding others to that place with a map of where it occurred. This enables a more holistic approach to memory than an interview in a studio or café. Oral history is also often criticized for being flawed—insofar as memory is. I would counter that criticism with the observation that any text or publication is flawed, subject to the biases of the author. To pretend that we as historians or critics do not have biases and can be truly objective in our analysis of work is unreasonable. Anyone who has ever published a book knows that books are invariably published with mistakes, and anyone who has ever written a book knows that by the time the physical object reaches the shelf, the author will have already revised some of their ideas and be wishing they could update the text. Just as no legitimate historian would rely solely on one text for his or her research, no legitimate historian using oral history would rely solely on the testimony of the artist, nor treat it uncritically. Thus, the key to using oral history is balance—to treat the statement of the artist as any other and combine it with a consideration of secondary sources as well as contextual interpretation. The historiography of performance art in East-Central Europe is an emerging one, and one in which artists and art historians alike are participating. During the communist period, it was primarily artists and artistic organizations that preserved and contextualized the discourse on performance art. Currently, local and national histories are underway, while, at the same time, those local histories are gradually being incorporated into more global studies and understandings of the history of performance art.

Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe  35

Notes 1 In this chapter, I use the term “East-Central Europe” deliberately, in reference to the late art historian Piotr Piotrowski’s adoption of the term to refer to the former communist countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, including the Eastern countries in the Soviet Union, as well as Yugoslavia, East Germany and Albania, many of which are excluded when the bracket of “Central Europe” is used. 2 See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 3 See Klara Kemp-Welch, “Art Documentation and Bureaucratic Life: The ‘Case’ of the Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation,” in Zofia Kulik & Przemyslaw Kwiek: KwieKulik, ed. Łukasz Ronduda and Georg Schöllhammer (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2012), 515–517. 4 Tadeusz Mroczek, interview by the author, interpreted by Aniolka Mroczek, Lublin, 12 April 2019. 5 Ibid. 6 Grzegorz Dziamski, ed., Performance (Warsaw: Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1984). 7 Grzegorz Dziamski, “Performance—tradycje, źródła, obce i rodzime przejawy. Rozpoznanie zjawiska” [Performance—Traditions, Sources, Foreign and Native Manifestations: The Recognition of a Phenomenon], in Dziamski, Performance, 1984. 8 Mroczek, interview. 9 Ibid. 10 Jolanta Męderowicz, interview by the author, Lublin, 11 April 2019. 11 Tadeusz Mroczek, “The Time Bygone,” in Czas Przeszły – Czas Obecny: Galerie BWA w Lublinie: 1956–2006, ed. Andrzej Mroczek, Tadeusz Mroczek, trans. Anna Mizińska, Małgorzata Sady (Lublin: Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych w Lublinie 2006), n.p. 12 Alexandra Titu, “East Europe,” in Festival de Performance Zona Europe de Est, ed. Ileana Pintilie and Sorin Vreme (Timișoara: Art Museum of Timișoara 1993), 9. 13 Ileana Pintilie, quoted in Hannah Bright, Eugen Babău, “Avant-Garde Art,” reprinted in Zona Europa de Est, ed. Ileana Pintilie (Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1996), 64. 14 Robert Fleck, “The Revival of Body Art and the Art of the 90s,” in Zona 3: Festival de Performance, ed. Ileana Pintilie (Cluj: Idea Design & Print Cluj, 1999), n.p. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Berislav Valusek, “Performance! Zone! Museum?,” in Zona 4: Festival de Performance, ed. Ileana Pintilie (Romania: Editura Fundaţiei “Moise Nicoară,” Arad, 2002), 5. 18 Dan Perjovschi, quoted in Zona Europa de Est, ed. Ileana Pintilie (Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1996), 29. 19 See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). 20 Zdenka Badovinac, ed., Body and the East (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 21 Piotr Krakowski, O Sztuce Nowej i Najnowszej [On New and the Newest Art] (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1981). 22 Grzegorz Dziamski, Szkice o nowej sztuce [Notes on New Art] (Warsaw: Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1984).

36  Amy Bryzgel



Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe  37 Bátorová, Andrea. The Art of Contestation: Performative Practices in the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia. Bratislava: Comenius University, 2019. Brach-Czaina, Jolanta. Etos Nowej Sztuki. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984. Bryzgel, Amy. Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Bryzgel, Amy. Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980. London: IB Tauris, 2013. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Dziamski, Grzegorz, ed. Performance. Warsaw: Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1984. Dziamski, Grzegorz. Szkice o nowej sztuce. Warsaw: Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza, ­ 1984. Fleck, Robert. “The Revival of Body Art and the Art of the 90s.” In Zona 3: Festival de Performance, edited by Ileana Pintilie, unpaginated. Cluj: Idea Design & Print Cluj, 1999. Galliera, Izabel. Socially Engaged Art after Socialism: Art and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe. London: IB Tauris, 2017. Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance: Live Art from Futurism to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979. Kemp-Welch, Klara. Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule, 1956–1989. London: IB Tauris, 2014. Kemp-Welch, Klara. “Art Documentation and Bureaucratic Life: The ‘Case’ of the Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation.” In Zofia Kulik & Przemyslaw Kwiek: KwieKulik, edited by Łukasz Ronduda and Georg Schöllhammer, 515–517. Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2012. Kemp-Welch, Klara. Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965– 1981. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Krakowski, Piotr. O Sztuce Nowej i Najnowszej. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1981. Marjanić, Suzana. Chronotope of Croatian Performance Art: From the Travelers to the Present Day. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 2014. Morganová, Pavlína, Akční umění. Olomouc: Votobia, 1999. Morganová, Pavlína. Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain. Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014. Morganová, Pavlína. A Walk through Prague: Actions, Performance, Happenings 1949–1989. Prague: Academy of Fine Arts Prague, 2017. Mroczek, Tadeusz. “The Time Bygone.” In Czas Przeszły - Czas Obecny: Galerie BWA w Lublinie: 1956–2006, edited by Andrzej Mroczek and Tadeusz Mroczek, translated by Anna Mizińska and Małgorzata Sady, unpaginated. Lublin: Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych w Lublinie, 2006. Partum, Andrzej. “Manifesto of Insolent Art.” In Galeria Labirynt 1974–1994, edited by Andrzej Mroczek and Jolanta Męderowicz, 146. 1977. Reprint, Lublin: Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych w Lublinie, 1994. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Pintilie, Ileana. Actionism in Romania during the Communist Era. Cluj: Idea Design & Print, 2000. Pintilie, Ileana, ed. Zona 3: Festival de Performance. Cluj: Idea Design & Print Cluj, 1999.

38  Amy Bryzgel Pintilie, Ileana, ed. Zona Europa de Est. Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1996. Pintilie, Ileana, and Sorin Vreme, ed. Festival de Performance Zona Europe de Est. Timișoara: Art Museum of Timișoara 1993. Piotrowski, Piotr. “Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde.” In Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, vol. 1 of European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, edited by Sascha Bru, Jan Baetens, Benedikt Hjartarson, Peter Nicholls, Tania Ørum and Hubert Berg, 49–58. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. Świdziński, Jan. “The Necessity for a New Avant-Garde.” In Galeria Labirynt 1974–1994, edited by Andrzej Mroczek and Jolanta Męderowicz, 141–142. Lublin: Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych w Lublinie, 1994. Titu, Alexandra. “East Europe.” In Festival de Performance Zona Europe de Est, edited by Ileana Pintilie and Sorin Vreme, 8–9. Timișoara: Art Museum of Timișoara, 1993. Valusek, Berislav. “Performance! Zone! Museum?” In Zona 4: Festival de Performance, edited by Ileana Pintilie, 4–5. Romania: Editura Fundaţiei “Moise Nicoară,” Arad, 2002. Wozniakowski, Jacek. Co sie dzieje ze sztuka? Warsaw: Państwowe Instityt ­Wydawniczy, 1974.

2

The 1968 Aesthetic and Political Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman

This chapter summarizes our extensive research begun in the 1990s and carried out about the relationship between the artistic avant-garde and the political vanguard in 1968 in Argentina.1 We published the result of this research in the book Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde” in 2000. Later, we revisited this experience and rediscussed its memory, especially the construction of a mythical narrative about Tucumán Arde as an exceptional event. Tucumán Arde, the best-known collective action of the Argentine avant-garde movement during the 1960s, is usually regarded as an isolated milestone. However, this chapter considers it instead as the corollary of the hectic process of aesthetic and political radicalization of the experimental artistic groups of the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario and intends to contextualize that production within this historical period. Starting in the mid-1960s, in reaction to events such as the US invasion of Santo Domingo, the Vietnam War and Che Guevara’s murder in Bolivia, politics irrupted into wider sectors of society, further radicalizing the avant-garde developments. A number of artists then envisaged their productions as a legitimate arena for taking a political stand as a way of contributing to the transformation of reality within the context of the revolutionary expectations that marked the age. Consequently, in 1968, a series of collective statements and actions signaled the avant-garde’s rupture with the art institutions, especially the Di Tella Institute, which had until then preponderantly sheltered their manifestations. The most politicized of these artists then shifted closer to the labor movement adverse to the military dictatorship that ruled the country and proposed a “new aesthetic,” inscribed in the revolutionary process they regarded as imminent and inevitable, which conceived violence and experimental action as legitimate forces capable of reshaping the conditions of life. It is at this particular crossroads that Tucumán Arde was carried out, and its abrupt closing under strong pressure by the government was followed by the disbanding of the groups and their abandonment of art altogether to end up in many cases adopting political militancy.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-4

40  Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman

The Itinerary of ’68 In 1966, a new military coup shook the unstable political life of Argentina. In addition to banning all political parties, the de facto regime followed an authoritarian and clerical cultural agenda carried out through censorship of the press, the shutting down of theaters, sanctions on radio stations, legislation restricting freedom of speech and outright repressive policies against institutions such as the Universidad de Buenos Aires. There were also acts of harassment and intimidation against the Di Tella Institute, which was accused of offending public morals and decency. Simultaneously, the creative ebullience of the art scene was so intense that journalists dubbed 1966 the “avant-garde year,” including works in the tradition of pop art, happenings and the incipient Media Art that proposed a new kind of artwork, one whose materiality would just consist in its circulation in the mass media.2 Two years later, in 1968, a significant number of artists belonging to avant-garde groups from Buenos Aires and Rosario would radically break away from art institutions—especially the Di Tella Institute. Deeply influenced by the increasing radicalization of politics, they established an active relationship with the trade union that opposed the dictatorship—the CGT de los Argentinos (CGTA)—and sought to make their own contribution to the revolutionary process, which they regarded as imminent. It was within this historical context that Tucumán Arde took place, though not as an isolated landmark but as a phenomenon that can only be fully understood if seen as the result of a radicalization process addressed to transform both aesthetics and politics. We call this process the “Itinerary of ’68,”3 a designation that, by underscoring the year in which this process reached its climax, links it to the general atmosphere of the period epitomized by the popular uprisings in France and Mexico. The Itinerary of ’68 consisted of a series of politically charged art actions and statements that were carried out collectively. These artists conceived of a plan of actions, which they called “new aesthetics” and which implied a progressive blurring of the boundaries between artistic and political action; political violence was turned into an aesthetic medium, not only as a metaphor or as a call to action but through the actual co-option of resources, methods and procedures used by radical left-wing organizations and guerrilla groups.

The Assault On April 30, 1968, the opening of the closing exhibition of Premio Ver y Estimar, one of the main contests in Buenos Aires for showcasing the newest experimental trends in art, was abruptly interrupted. One of the artists invited, Eduardo Ruano, entered the showroom of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, followed by several friends. To the cry of “Yankees,

The 1968 Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde  41

out of Vietnam!” and other slogans, the group walked over to the piece that Ruano had made as his contribution to the exhibition. It consisted of the official image of the assassinated President Kennedy protected by a glass pane. A few meters away, the artist had placed, as if part of his work, a lead brick on the floor. Accompanied by the support group, Ruano quickly smashed his piece, striking and scratching the image with the brick. The museum authorities called the police, but the demonstrators left the premises at once. The artist was expelled from the exhibition, but the impact had already been achieved. His art piece had been neither the intact installation as it had previously stood before the opening nor its remains, which the authorities immediately ordered to be removed. Rather, it was the very act of carrying out a political demonstration in the midst of an exhibition—in a formal ceremony in the heart of an art institution.

Experiences ’68: Argentine May On May 8, Experiences ’68, the latest iteration of an annual event devoted to new artistic trends organized by the Di Tella Institute was opened.4 During the few weeks it lasted, artist Pablo Suarez, standing at the door, distributed copies of a letter addressed to Jorge Romero Brest—director of the Centro de Artes Visuales of the institute—to the spectators and to the passersby, in which he announced his refusal to participate in any way other than that. In the letter, he also questioned the institution itself: “What I refuse to accept today is the Institute,” and wondered, “What’s the point of doing something inside the institution, even if it’s to contribute to its destruction” since These four walls enclose the secret of transforming everything inside them into art, and art is not dangerous […]. Those who want to be understood in some form, speak out in the street or where your words won’t be twisted.5 Roberto Jacoby presented in Experiences ’68 a large panel in which the visitors could read his manifesto titled “Message in Di Tella.” In it, he proclaimed that “Aesthetic contemplation is finished because aesthetics dissolves into social life. The work of art is also finished, because life and the earth itself are beginning to become art.”6 This comment was accompanied by a photograph of an Afro-American protesting against racism (“I am a man”) as well as a teleprinter that was connected to the Agence France-Presse which—without the artist having foreseen it—transmitted cables from France, reporting on both the labor and student riots that came to be known as the “French May.” Another of the pieces exhibited was Roberto Plate’s work Toilette. Although it did not have any explicit political content, it elicited police intervention. As implied by its name, it simulated a public restroom where

42  Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman

visitors found themselves alone in front of white walls. Some of the anonymous graffiti daubed on them condemned the dictator Juan Carlos Onganía. As (in)offensive as any graffiti in any public toilet, the inscriptions were found to be disturbing due to the symbolism of the space in which they appeared. Somebody alerted the authorities and the police decided to ban Plate’s installation. Over the course of that day, visitors who attended the exhibition could see a transformed (and distorted) artwork: A policeman, now part of the piece, prevented access to the restroom. In spite of their differences, the artistic proposals for Experiences ’68 shared a general, accelerated rhythm toward conceptual, dematerialized positions: a radical questioning of the status of artistic production. They not only went beyond conventional genres, but it was also impossible to label them with new names such as objects, happenings or settings. With their choice of materials and formats that included real persons, communication experiences, mass icons and spatial interventions, they encouraged the expansion of art to almost unimaginable limits. Nevertheless, these experiences also implied a significant leap in another direction. Many of the works submitted intended to materialize, in a crude novel manner, the extreme consequences of ceaseless experimentation, the conflict the artists encountered with space and the art milieu, and the dilemmas and tensions that emerged from the radicalization of art and politics. All that followed as a consequence of the Toilette closedown by the police, finally wound up in “the leap into the void” 7 taken by the Buenos Aires avant-garde. On May 23, in order to proclaim their solidarity with Roberto Plate, the artists protested by removing their works from the Di Tella. They destroyed them and threw their remains out into Florida Street, bringing about a tremendous tumult. Police intervention put an end to the brawl, and several artists were placed under arrest. Many artists and intellectuals signed a protest document. In the document, they protested against censorship and included a denunciation of the political repression carried out by the government on other social sectors such as students and workers. This episode, which implied a definitive break with the art institutions on the part of the avant-garde, did not mean that they were giving up art as a whole. Some of these artists supported a new “revolutionary art,” while others emigrated to Europe in search of less hostile conditions. The fact remains that one year before it was definitively closed down, the Di Tella lost most of the young talents who, throughout the decade, had filled its halls with their art.

Against Art Institutions On July 12, another action was carried out, this time by a group of avantgarde artists in Rosario. The artists interrupted Romero Brest while he was delivering a lecture in the Art Friends conference room in that city.

The 1968 Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde  43

Ten artists performed the “assault,” which they defined variously as an “action,” “a little act of violence we have committed,” “this sham assault” and, finally, “a work of collective action.”8 Following the tactics of a guerrilla commando, each member had been assigned a specific task; one of them took Romero Brest to the back of the room, another cut off the lights and the rest of them stood in front of the audience chanting slogans, while two of them explained the motives for their action: We believe that art is neither a peaceful activity, nor the decoration of anybody’s bourgeois life […]. We declare that Che Guevara’s life and the action of the French students are works of art more important than most of the rubbish hanging in the major museums of the world. We aspire to transform every piece of reality into an artwork capable of addressing the conscience of the world and revealing the intimate contradictions of this class society.9 The following day, they handed back to Romero Brest the grant the Di Tella had awarded them to finance the Experimental Art Cycle, a series of experimental pieces that had opened in a small rented store in a shopping mall turned into an art gallery. They also broke with the institution. The Cycle remained open as a self-financed effort until October. The last three events of the series—Eduardo Favario’s simulation of the gallery’s closure, Emilio Ghilioni and Rodolfo Elizalde’s faked street fight and Graciela Carnevale’s locking a group of spectators inside the gallery and then running away with the keys—represented both the literal and symbolic shifting away from the exhibition space and the moving of art to other circuits and modes of relationship with the audience. Perhaps the reason for finally closing the Cycle was not so much police intervention but the feeling that “it no longer mattered.”10 In early June, a group of Buenos Aires and Rosario artists engaged, for the first time, in a joint response to the Braque Prize 1968 (organized by the French Embassy in Buenos Aires). A large number of the artists invited to take part in the contest rejected new censorship regulations. They also protested against cultural imperialism, police censorship and the taking over of the public university by the government, and they claimed to support the revolutionary events at the time in France. Some of the artists also decided to take direct action during the Braque Prize-giving ceremony. They started a hit-and-run protest against censorship and “cultural colonialism.” Flyers, rotten eggs and stink bombs were thrown at the authorities and at some of the pieces, particularly at one submitted by award-winner Rogelio Polesello, which happened to show the colors of the French flag. As the ceremony was not canceled and Polesello went up to receive first prize in the Painting and Visual Experiences category, one of the demonstrators addressed him directly in a rude manner. There were blows as people

44  Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman

came to grips with one another. Finally, the police arrived and twelve people were arrested. The artists were sentenced to 30 days of imprisonments, and CGTA lawyers took up their defense. The events that took place at the Braque Prize brought about a second rupture with the institutions not long after Buenos Aires artists had broken with the Di Tella. This time, however, the scene had been staged in a hegemonic institution, the National Museum of Fine Arts. Furthermore, by that time, the Rosario group and several avant-garde artists from Buenos Aires (Léon Ferrari, Roberto Jacoby, Pablo Suárez, Eduardo Ruano, Margarita Paksa, Ricardo Carreira, among others) were already engaged in the preparation of Tucumán Arde.

A Theoretical Stance After breaking with the Di Tella and other art institutions, the group of avant-garde artists from Rosario and Buenos Aires organized the First National Meeting of Avant-Garde Art. Held in Rosario on August 10 and 11, 1968, this meeting functioned as the collective arena for the elaboration of the aesthetic and political ideas underlying the Itinerary of ’68 and clearly showed the artists’ awareness of the predicament in which they found themselves at the time. Both artists and intellectuals met to evaluate the turning point they were facing and set a goal “for their future action.”11 They had discussions on art’s true role in the revolutionary process. For them, the artist’s subjective commitment to the cause was not enough. Indeed, even the artists’ political militancy was deemed to be insufficient; in their view, it was necessary to produce an “objectively revolutionary” artwork, that is, a work that would actualize, by itself, the creator’s will to generate political and artistic change. Therefore, the revolutionary status of the artwork was not merely a question that could be reduced to its materiality or to its creator’s political views. Rather, it entailed the search for a new type of “work” that might have an effective political impact on reality. The issue of the work’s effectiveness was, then, one of the key points of the debate: How could art make an effective contribution to the ongoing revolutionary process? As Juan Pablo Renzi explained, “The type of work to be made ought to have a similar effect to that of a political action.”12 All this meant then that something other than merely specific contents had to be contrived. If the contents were to be expressed in a revolutionary manner, if the work was to make an effective impact on the recipients’ consciousness, it was essential to deal with the material in a disquieting, even violent way. Art will be neither beauty nor novelty; art will be efficacy and disturbance. An accomplished work of art will be that which, in the artist’s environment, can make an impact similar to that caused by a terrorist act in a country struggling for its freedom,

The 1968 Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde  45 13

concluded Ferrari. These allusions to an armed struggle, however, were not to be taken metaphorically. They were not merely a way of giving voice to a political stance; they implied a genuine artistic program. Besides mentioning the metaphoric effect of the artwork as an attack, Renzi openly spoke of “violence as an aesthetic language.”14 But for all their advancement of both political and artistic efficacy, these artists opted instead to remain within the field of art. They defined their actions as avantgarde art and themselves as “true avant-garde” artists, as opposed to a “false avant-garde,” that is, one that was formalist and disconnected from politics. Renzi’s text clearly expressed that artistic specificity had to be preserved for the sake of political specificity: From a political viewpoint, our attitude will make an impact on the culture if we act as a group and if our activity is clearly defined within the limits of our specific work, namely, aesthetic creation. Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming ambiguous and, consequently, of losing efficacy.15 Tucumán Arde can be seen as the collective experiment of this “new aesthetics.” And one of the first steps in this direction was the decision to strengthen their links with the trade unions that rallied forces refractory to the dictatorship and to take the dire situation in the province of Tucumán, Argentina—one of the issues of the CGTA emergency program—as the axis for their future action. At the time, Tucumán was the bridgehead of the neoliberal plan for the region and thus a breeding ground for social and political conflict. Thus, it was, they reasoned, the ideal site and subject for the collective artistic-political action they envisioned. Tucumán Arde A few weeks after the First National Meeting, the project started to gain momentum. While putting themselves at risk in various street actions, the artists engaged in what would turn out to be their greatest collective effort. Tucumán Arde—as a direct offspring of media art groups’ ­developments16 —aspired to build a counter-discourse capable of exposing the falsehoods of the official propaganda concerning the dire social crisis in Tucumán due to the shutdown of the sugar mills. Four stages, discontinuous in time and space, were designed for the realization of this originally anonymous collective work. In its first stage, the artists became researchers working in close collaboration with sociologists, economists, journalists and trade union members with the aim of collecting in situ information about the crisis. In order to do this, they traveled twice to Tucumán (in mid-September and late October), where they interviewed a number of people, took photographs, filmed and used other recording means to document all that was happening there, which the mass media

46  Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman

had ignored or even denied. The second stage, starting in late October, consisted of a massive undercover campaign using agitation tactics and advertising techniques in the streets of Rosario (and to a lesser extent in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe). This campaign was launched to raise expectations in large sectors of the population, first with enigmatic posters (showing just one word “Tucumán”) and then using graffiti and stickers with the slogan “Tucumán Arde” (Tucumán is burning).17 When the artists returned from Tucumán, a new poster with no apparent relation to the previous ads—since it displayed a different typography and made no mention of Tucumán—was plastered around town. It invited the public to visit the “First Biennial of Avant-Garde Art,” which was to be held in Rosario at the headquarters of the trade union adverse to the dictatorship. The artists also sought to get into the newspapers by calling a press conference upon arriving in Tucumán and then again before departing. The third stage was the exhibition-denunciation of the results of the research campaign that took place at the trade union headquarters, first in Rosario (opening on November 3) and then in Buenos Aires (opening on November 25). Far from being a conventional exhibition, it rather took the form of an “occupation” of the trade union premises that deeply affected their normal functioning. Although public meetings were banned under the dictatorship, thousands of people gathered for the event during the two weeks it lasted in Rosario, turning the exhibition into a political act of open defiance. In light of this complex design procedure, in order to fully understand Tucumán Arde, it is not enough to consider its exhibition devices alone. The different installments of the exhibition tend to be confused with the whole event, but they were each just one phase in a whole sequence whose fundamental goal was to produce a work of massive counter-information. The first installment of the exhibition, which lasted for two weeks, exceeded the organizers’ expectations with its large public attendance. The idea was to avoid cornering the whole exhibition into only one room, so as not to limit it to an enclosed area that could be visited like a conventional exhibition. Upon entering a large building, visitors were forced to step on posters bearing the names of Tucumán’s rich landowners. The walls of that same entrance hall were covered with collages made up of cutouts by Ferrari after conducting a search in the press for official information about Tucumán that sharply contrasted with the facts uncovered by the artists’ research. Once in the central lobby, where banners with hand-painted slogans were hung from side to side, visitors could see huge blown-up photographs of Tucumanians that had been taken by the artists. These were images of misery and poverty. There were also pictures showing the reactions of protest, such as demonstrations, rallies and “soup kitchens,” as well as the effects of repression. Texts and charts reinforced this denunciatory quality. Posters with the word “Tucumán” were accompanied with statistics of child mortality, unemployment, malnutrition and illiteracy among

The 1968 Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde  47

the population. Simple charts explaining wealth concentration and the relations of power in the province were also displayed. A comprehensive report titled “Tucumán is burning … why?,” by a group of sociologists, was distributed among the public. Testimonies of trade union leaders, workers and inhabitants could be heard through loudspeakers; interviews that had been mimeographed were handed out to the public; slides and documentaries about particular issues related to the Tucumán crisis were projected on the walls. A carefully rigged blackout left the building in the dark every few minutes as a reminder of the interval at which children were dying in Tucumán. On the opening day, sugarless coffee was served as an allusion to the sugar shortage brought about by refinery owners who hoarded the sugar. A whole array of strategies that relied on saturation and redundancy was employed in the pursuit of a didactic aim: to raise the public’s awareness through emotional impact. Thus, the staging as a whole sought to overinform visitors while moving them both at an intellectual and emotional level and affecting all their senses. The campaign had brought to public light the causes and consequences of the crisis in Tucumán, its victims, beneficiaries and accomplices. In the Buenos Aires version of the exhibition, the same resources were used, but the larger dimensions of the building forced the organizers to confine the exhibition space to the 1st, 2nd and 9th floors, the latter having been turned into a screening room. Stairs and doors were also used, and through blown-up photos, the inside of a humble shack was recreated in the elevator. Two other versions of the exhibition were also scheduled—one in Santa Fe and another in Córdoba—but the project was thwarted after the immediate closure of the Buenos Aires exhibition only a few hours after it opened due to direct pressure from the dictatorship. The fourth and concluding stage of the original plan—the collecting and publishing of all the documents generated throughout the entire process— never materialized. Apart from whatever bonds might be established between Tucumán Arde and previous experimental developments, the former brought about new tensions between the quest for new artistic forms and the adjustments needed to fit into a trade union format while at the same time appealing to a popular, lay audience. Ferrari referred to this problem when he mentioned the importance of language whenever the avant-garde moved to another milieu and to a different audience. He stated that the elite language used by experimental art but unknown to the masses was to be abandoned and that a new language, capable of conveying “meanings” to the new audiences, had to be found. The layout of the exhibitions betrayed the prevailing force of the informative dimension over the aesthetic quest. Some of the artists themselves remember the exhibitions in a way that reveals their disappointment at the poor quality of the artistic resources put into play18 and have complained about the lack of originality of the codes used. The connection to CGTA explains why the documentary register

48  Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman

prevailed and why the artists sought a “transparent” language. But this was not an imposition on the trade union’s part. Rather, it responded to the artists’ idea that their main goal was communicability. Giving up syntactic ambiguity for the sake of powerful communicative efficacy through the choice of more concrete, intelligible devices resulted in the heavily referential register of a documentary and in the conventional codes of a visual language taken from the masses. Regarding photographs, it is clear that blown-up images of undernourished children, ramshackle homes, police repression, etc., fell within the tradition of journalistic photography (information being in fact photography’s best-known function). While the intention behind the sociologists’ report was to explain the causes of the crisis, photos contributed a clear proof to the fact that there was a crisis. Hence, the exhibitions appeared as the underside of official propaganda, as the counter-discourse that brought the “real” Tucumán to light. While official propaganda made use of the old stock phrase “Tucumán, the Republic’s Garden,” a banner across the entrance to the Rosario CGT premises invited people to “Visit Tucumán, Destitution Garden.”

A New Aesthetics, a New Audience Whereas previous landmarks along the Itinerary of ’68 had already outlined some features for this “new aesthetics”—breaking with art institutions, appropriation of political violence as aesthetic material, interventions of an artistic and political nature—the novelty of Tucumán Arde lay in the fact that it explored a new, collective way of doing art while appealing to a different institutional support and to a new audience, away from the art world. Thus, in its opening statement, Tucumán Arde laid the emphasis on the search for an artistic event whose efficacy might be equated to that of a violent political action: Recognition of this new conception drove a group of artists to consider aesthetic creation as a collective, violent act, destroying the bourgeois myth about the artist’s individual nature and the passiveness usually attributed to art. […] Violence is now a creative act with new contents: it destroys the system of official culture, confronting it with a subversive culture that is a part of the transformation process, and thus creating a truly revolutionary art.19 The document then goes on to define the characteristics of this “revolutionary art.” It speaks of a “total art” originated in an awareness of reality and acting upon it, that is to say, “an art of transformation,” “a social art”: one that rallies “revolutionary forces that fight economic dependence and class oppression.” The artists had attained a work that pushed the boundaries of art into areas that did not pertain to art. In order to assess the way in which Tucumán Arde’s communicational strategy was received at the

The 1968 Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde  49

time, it is necessary to distinguish between two types of audiences that do not necessarily overlap: the mass, anonymous audience addressed by the communicational strategy chosen, and the audience that actually visited the exhibitions. The opening day in Rosario at the CGT headquarters saw the participation of trade unionists, workers’ leaders, students, militants, followers of experimental art, art critics and, no doubt, a considerable number of people whose curiosity had been aroused by the propaganda campaign. It was a rather unusual combination: an audience that exceeded the usual expectations aroused by any call to visit an art exhibition.

Closedown and Dissolution At the close of this collective work, carried out on the margins of the art world and with the support of the trade union, a number of conflicts between the artistic and the political avant-gardes became apparent. The corollary to Tucumán Arde, which was closed in Buenos Aires due to government pressure, was the dissolution of the groups themselves and their members’ decision—strictly adhered to for many years—to abandon art. Instead of interpreting Tucumán Arde as the extreme experience that led to this categorical decision, we prefer to read it as a final, lucid attempt to articulate “artistic” and “political” avant-gardes as terms not subordinate to each other, at a time when politics already aspired to impose itself as a categorical imperative to abandon all other specific practices in exclusive favor of a “direct action.” Although Tucumán Arde was a significant experience, it also brought to light the limitations in the relationship between artists and the workers’ opposition movement. While it is true that trade union leaders encouraged and supported activities that combined art and politics, it is no less true that, in some cases, certain political decisions resulted in tension between these activists. Still, the artists do not speak of the closing of the exhibition with a sense of frustration but as an inevitable decision, partly because the regime repression had shown them the dangers of working openly within the trade unions and partly because Tucumán Arde was already a thing of the past. The frenzy that had marked the experiences of the visual arts avant-garde throughout the entire decade once again pushed them on to leave this now beaten path and pursue their quest in new territories. The sudden interruption of Tucumán Arde precipitated the disbanding of both art collectives with most of their members giving up art. The limits of the most radical attempt to formulate a collective program that would allow artists to keep on making art from outside the art world, to carry out a “direct action to produce a political event,” had become evident. Most of these artists gave up art altogether, for a few years, at least, with the perception that it was not an effective tool for political transformation. Some of them turned straightaway to political militancy, while

50  Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman

others undertook other kinds of experiences, such as the (anti)magazine Sobre, impelled, among others, by Roberto Jacoby. The “Antiafiche”— or (anti)poster—(“A guerrilla fighter doesn’t die so he can be hung on the wall”) included in the first issue of Sobre, May 1969, was a disturbing artifact uneasy to handle (a poster that refused to be used as such) and that could be read bidirectionally: both as a call to political action and as an early criticism of the appropriation of the guerrilla fighter by the media. In spite of its migration to other spheres, attempts were made quite soon to bring back Tucumán Arde into the fold of art, taming its unruly nature. Some of the participants immediately protested against this “reabsorption.” With an explicit stress on the artistic function of propaganda, in the early 1970s, Juan Pablo Renzi made a series of numbered pamphlets (starting the series with Pamphlet No 2, and assigning retrospectively the No 1 to Tucumán Arde), which he presented in an exhibition organized by Jorge Glusberg in his attempt to include some Argentine works in the international conceptual art. In his Pamphlet No 3 (1971), titled La Nueva Moda, Renzi stressed, besides his absolute refusal to be considered one of the founders of “conceptual art,” the political nature of the disbanded revolutionary group’s works. León Ferrari also expressed similar objections in retrospection of Tucumán Arde that he wrote in 1973: “Those who link it with conceptual art, which is a new ‘avant-garde’ for the same old elite, forget that the people of Tucumán Arde started by turning their backs on the elite.”20

The Myth of Tucumán Arde In recent years, the construction of a mythical narrative about Tucumán Arde has become evident. This cannot be dissociated from the overrating of its relevance as compared to other events of the 1960s avant-garde. The operation by which Tucumán Arde is presented as a unique, unprecedented landmark tears this collective experience from the social fabric in which it was embedded (a fabric that comprised many other experiences to which Tucumán Arde owes a clear “debt,” such as the group Media Art [Arte de los Medios]), and stresses its radical exceptionality in the radicalized year 1968. Thus, the “memory of its fabrication,” once having lost its “historical quality,” is emptied of its contingency, as Roland Barthes points out when he characterizes myth as a “depoliticized speech”21 in a text that played a key role in the manifestations of the Argentine avant-garde of that period. Roughly speaking, the inclusion of Tucumán Arde in the canon is embedded in a double process of legitimization: On the one hand, it appears as the founding event of the Latin American “ideological conceptualism” and, on the other, as the “mother” of all later works of political art in Argentina, and even on the international scene.

The 1968 Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde  51

Many of the discourses (be they research works, papers, exhibitions or media articles, etc.) that in recent years have given Tucumán Arde an excessive prominence have contributed to promoting a logic that tends to blur the singularity of its historical background by turning it into an icon. Nevertheless, it must be said that this is not a unidirectional process but a complex fabric of conflicting views where discourses, alignments and political projects meet and settle the discrepancies of spaces not only different but sometimes even starkly antagonistic to each other: the art world, the academia and activism. We wonder if—in spite of the myth—it is still possible to reactivate the critical density of this experience, to question it (and let ourselves be questioned by it) in order to turn Tucumán Arde into an incisive response to our present. That or forget Tucumán Arde once and for all.

A Final Reflection The present volume is devoted to the processes of historicization and representation of the vast field of art practices that can be captured by the category of performance art. It is therefore crucial to add a final reflection on the ways in which the avant-garde discussed in this chapter is named and categorized in art history, especially since we are dealing with unruly experiences that manifested their reluctance to being regarded as belonging to the art-historical universe. Within the Argentine avant-garde of the 1960s, it was the notion of happening, rather than that of performance, which was used, even though none of the practices reviewed here applied to themselves this category that had its heyday in Argentina between 1965 and 1967, with the massive popular happenings created by Marta Minujín, Rubén Santantonín and others (La Menesunda, El Batacazo) and the theoretical positions and actions carried out by Oscar Masotta, Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa and others (the cycle Happening sobre Happenings, Para inducir al espíritu de la imagen, El helicóptero). At the same time, the artists that took part in the Itinerary of ’68 explicitly resisted almost from the beginning the inclusion of their actions in the emerging “conceptual art.” We will briefly recapitulate this question. In 1972, Spanish art historian Simón Marchán Fiz mentioned Tucumán Arde as part of the ideological conceptualism in his book Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (From Object Art to Concept Art).22 In 1973, American art critic Lucy Lippard included a reference to the Rosario avant-garde in her book Six Years.23 Parallel to this, in the early 1970s, Jorge Glusberg organized in the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) a series of local and international exhibitions by bringing together a number of experimental art practices in what he called “system art,” including therein some of the ex-members of the Itinerary of ’68. It was Juan Pablo Renzi, from Rosario, who, upon being summoned by the CAyC in 1971 to participate in one of

52  Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman

these exhibitions, made clear his discrepancy. As previously mentioned, in La Nueva Moda, his Pamphlet No 3, Renzi pointed out that now what is fashionable is conceptual art […] and it turns out that I am (at least for some critics such as Lucy Lippard and Jorge Glusberg) one of those responsible for the initiation of this phenomenon (along with my comrades of the former groups of revolutionary artists from Rosario and Buenos Aires of the 1967–1968). This statement is wrong. As is any intent to connect us with such aesthetic speculation.24 The pamphlet goes on to assert a concise conclusive program: “On our messages: 1) We are not interested in being regarded as aesthetic. 2) We structure them in view of their contents. 3) They are always political […] 4) […] We value them as a means of denouncing exploitation.”25 It is worth dwelling on the fact that Renzi chose a call to participation in an art exhibition (organized by the CAyC) as the place for publicly questioning the attempt (on the part of the CAyC itself ) to tame or bring back to the fold those positions and experiences of radical rupture with the art system. Similarly, as previously mentioned, León Ferrari pointed out in a long interview, carried out in 1973, the paradox that “we made Tucumán Arde in order to turn away from art and it’s through Tucumán Arde that we entered art history.” “Its purpose was to turn art into a revolutionary tool” that ended up being “used as a launching platform for conceptual art.”26 Both Renzi and Ferrari—as well as other artists belonging to the group—manifested an immediate awareness of the art system’s capacity to reabsorb and give new names to those positions that had distanced themselves from its sphere of influence. While seen from a contemporary perspective, it is possible to see the actions and definitions that integrated the Itinerary of ’68 as an undeniable forerunner in the genealogy of action art, conceptualism or performance, we should not forget the anxiety expressed by the artists when faced with the contradiction between their collective decision to advocate a new aesthetics combined with revolutionary political action, outside the institutionalized art world, and their actions’ rapid assimilation, with a new label, by that same art world.

Notes 1 A first and shorter version of this chapter was included in Jinshil Lee and Jin Kwon, eds., Working for the Future Past (Seoul: Seoul Museum of Art [SeMA], 2017), 230–260. Translated from the Spanish by Jorge Salvetti. 2 Cf. Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, “After Pop, We Dematerialize: Oscar Masotta, Happenings, and Media Art at the Beginnings of Conceptualism,” in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, ed. Inés Katzenstein (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 156–172; Oscar Masotta, Revolución en el arte (Buenos Aires: Edhasa,

The 1968 Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde  53

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

2004); and Oscar Masotta et al., Oscar Masotta: la teoría como acción (Ciudad de México: MUAC, 2017). Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia Artistica y Politica En El 68 Argentino (Buenos Aires: El cielo por asalto, 2000; 2nd ed. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2008). See Katzenstein, Listen, Here, Now!; and Patricia Rizzo, Oscar Terán and Lucas Fragasso, Instituto Di Tella: Experiencias ’68 (Buenos Aires: Proa, 1997). “Pablo Suárez to Jorge Romero Brest, Buenos Aires, May 1968,” in Longoni and Mestman, “Tucumán Arde,” 82–83. Roberto Jacoby, “Message at Di Tella, Buenos Aires, May 1968,” in ibid., 84–85. This expression has been taken from an article published by Primera Plana, no. 282, 21 March 1968, 70. Rosario Vanguard Artists’ Group, Assault on Romero Brest’s Lecture, Rosario, Amigos del Arte, 7 December 1968, in Longoni and Mestman, “Tucumán Arde,” 97–98. Ibid. Aldo Bortolotti, in an interview with Ana Longoni, Rosario, 1993. Juan Pablo Renzi, “La obra de arte como producto de la relación conciencia ética-conciencia estética (Intento de fundamentación del temario presentado al Primer encuentro nacional del arte de vanguardia)” [Artwork as a Product of the Relationship between Ethical Conscience—Aesthetic Conscience” (An Attempt to Substantiate the List of Topics Presented to the First National Encounter of Avant-Garde Art)], Rosario, August 1968, in Longoni and Mestman, “Tucumán Arde,” 132–136. Ibid. León Ferrari, “‘El arte de los significados,’ ponencia en el I Encuentro de Arte de Vanguardia, Rosario, August 1968” [“The Art of Meanings,” Presentation Given at the First National Encounter of Avant-Garde Art], in Longoni and Mestman, “Tucumán Arde,” 138–142. Renzi, “La obra de arte,” in ibid., 132. Ibid. Cf. Katzenstein, Listen, Here, Now!; and Roberto Jacoby, El deseo nace del derrumbe (Madrid: MNCARS, 2011). The name alludes to Paris brûle-t-il?, the 1966 film by René Clément, which had recently debuted in Argentina. When speaking about visual aspects of Tucumán Arde, some artists use words such as “poor,” “ugly,” “gloomy” and “pedestrian.” María Teresa Gramuglio and Nicolás Rosa, “Tucumán Arde—Statement for the Rosario Exhibition, Rosario, November 1968,” in Longoni and Mestman, “Tucumán Arde,” 190–194. León Ferrari, in reply to a questionnaire of the Escuela de Letras de la Universidad de la Habana, 1973, León Ferrari Archive, in Longoni and Mestman, “Tucumán Arde,” 231. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957). Simón Marchán Fiz, Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (Madrid: Alberto Corazón, 1972). Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973). Juan Pablo Renzi, “Panfleto Nº 3: La nueva moda, 1971” [Pamphlet Nº 3: The New Fashion, 1971”], in Longoni and Mestman, “Tucumán Arde,” 231. Ibid. Ferrari, in ibid., 231.

54  Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957. Jacoby, Roberto. El deseo nace del derrumbe. Madrid: MNCARS, 2011. Jinshil, Lee, and Jin Kwon, eds. Working for the Future Past. Seoul: Seoul Museum of Art [SeMA], 2017. Katzenstein, Inés. Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004. Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger, 1973. Longoni, Ana, and Mariano Mestman. “After Pop, We Dematerialize: Oscar Masotta, Happenings, and Media Art at the Beginnings of Conceptualism.” In Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, edited by Inés Katzenstein, 156–172. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004. Longoni, Ana, and Mariano Mestman. Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia artistica y politica en el 68 Argentino. Buenos Aires: El cielo por asalto, 2000; 2nd ed. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2008. Longoni, Ana. “El mito de Tucumán Arde.” Artelogie, no. 6 (2014). https://doi. org/10.4000/artelogie.1348. Marchán Fiz, Simón. Del arte objetual al arte del concepto. Madrid: Alberto Corazón, 1972. Masotta, Oscar. Revolución en el arte. Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2004. Masotta, Oscar, Olivier Debroise, Ana Longoni, Manuel Hernández, and Cloe Masotta. Oscar Masotta: la teoría como acción. Ciudad de México: MUAC, 2017. Rizzo, Patricia, Oscar Terán, and Lucas Fragasso. Instituto Di Tella: Experiencias ‘68. Buenos Aires: Proa, 1997.

3

Collective Memory and Live Art The Methodology of Performance Chronicle Basel Sabine Gebhardt Fink

In this chapter,1 I will elaborate on the methodology of Performance Chronicle Basel (PCB), a collaborative network of artists, researchers, scholars, curators and witnesses, whose aim is to reconstruct the history of performance art in Basel, Switzerland, between the late 1960s and today.2 The network (of which I am one of the founding members) was established in 2006 and is still active today. This reconstruction proceeds by applying a specific form of collective memory in the field of Live Art following the methods derived from oral history that we developed during the project. The first step in this reconstruction was a series of meetings initiated by the artists Muda Mathis and Chris Regn in 2006 in the setting of the VIA Studio, an art space in Basel where we gathered agents and protagonists of the city’s performance art scene. In the context of a collective dialog with eyewitnesses, data, facts and memories were retrieved and preserved as a map drawn by the artist Andrea Saemann while the collective meeting was taking place. Saemann devised a notation system to highlight names of people, venues and events that were emerging in the collective remembering. The map preserved only those memories considered of importance to the beginnings of performance art in Switzerland, and Basel in particular. As a result, it charted performances, festivals, institutions, artists, theorists, curators, art mediators and audiences. The two collective events were documented by the artist Sus Zwick as video recordings. Afterward, the map represented a tool to delve into the research. Following my input, we analyzed the map, focusing especially on information about feminist, queer and activist works and practices, whose reconstruction represented one of our main interests. This led the research group to further conduct oral history-based interviews with performance artists and former participants of the live events. By combining oral and archival sources, performance documents, film and video art, we reconstructed a history of performance art based on a communicative memory process. The core research team, consisting of Muda Mathis, Margarit von Büren and myself, edited—as one of the results of the project—the volumes Floating Gaps: Performance Chronik Basel (1968–1986) and Aufzeichnen und Erinnern: Performance Chronik Basel (1987–2006). In this long-lasting process, we make works of performance art in Switzerland visible and accessible DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-5

56  Sabine Gebhardt Fink

to a broader audience, often for the first time. Before our initial research, those works had mostly not been retrieved, researched or discussed in art historical debates, and they were of a small curatorial concern—which is significantly different from their status today.3 This chapter comprises four sections and focuses on the research about the early period of performance art in Basel published in the first volume. The first deals with the specific oral history method used for our research. The second explains the role of the videotaped interviews with selected performance artists, which we conducted and co-authored as researchers, and how we supplemented them with the examination of archival sources. The last two focus on case studies of works and performance artists who were analyzed and whose work was explored in the context of the project. Specifically, the third part focuses on queer positions of performance art in Switzerland in the 1970s by closely looking into Alex Silber’s performances, Photo Performance (1979), Weilen mit Pfeilen (1976, Passing Time with Arrows) and There Is No Style but Lifestyle (1973–1974).4 The fourth section is dedicated to an activist feminist collective work, which was eminent in the development of performance art, and at the same time intensely interwoven with political aims: Damengöttinnen am Äquator: Eine Produktion in 12 Bildern (1979, Goddesses at the Equator: A Production in 12 Images). Finally, I will summarize my results to enable other researchers, educators and artists to use them and generate new knowledge about these early Live Art productions.

The Critical Power of Communicative Memory Using oral history to document Live Art events was considered pioneering work at the time when we were starting our project in 2006. Nevertheless, oral history was used to research performance art or contemporary art by other scholars as well. As an example, I mention here Heike Roms and her outstanding project “What’s Welsh for Performance?”.5 From my point of view, the uniqueness of the research strategy of PCB was—and still is—the research focus on “communicative memory.”6 What does this term imply? It is defined by Jan Assmann, in his book Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination,7 wherein he explains that communicative memory comprises memories related to the recent past. These are what the individual shares with his contemporaries. A typical instance would be generational memory that accrues within the group, originating and disappearing with time or, to be more precise, with its carriers.8 In this way, it is distinguished from both individual and cultural memory as a sort of middle stage between the two. Cultural memory is objectified and exteriorized as texts, icons, rituals and monuments and transferred in

Collective Memory and Live Art  57

several forms to later generations. Communicative memory, on the other hand, as a living, embodied memory, is exchanged intragenerationally and is therefore lost when the last members of that generation die. Thus, there is normally no transfer of this knowledge to other generations, as it is based on live exchange.9 Assmann mentions Maurice Halbwachs as one of the first “to show that our memory depends, like consciousness in general, on socialization and communication.”10 Adopting the term “communicative memory,” Assmann breaks up Maurice Halbwach’s concept of “collective memory” into “communicative” and “cultural memory.”11 With regard to the method of PCB, we asked ourselves: how can we integrate this concept of communicative memory into our research, as this situated memory is shaped by “the sounds of words or the sights of gestures”?12 How can we prevent these collective experiences that are not yet objectified and symbolically enshrined and that were generated by a network of artists, participants, curators and activists of a certain time span and period from being “forgotten?” The main reason that drove us in this direction is that we conceptualize performance art, first and foremost, as a collective, embodied and communicative event, whose significance is therefore deeply entwined with that living process that constitutes communicative memory. Furthermore, we had the common goal to focus especially on feminist, queer and activist positions in order to enable a rereading and transmission of those important works of art to other contexts and generations since we were no longer in an “amazing decade” like the 1960s and 70s when women artists, activists and queer positions were at the center of nearly all performative artistic productions.13 Invoking Jan Vansina, Assmann points out that, in oral societies, there is a gap between the “informal generational memory referring to the recent past and the formal cultural memory which refers to the remote past.”14 This gap is not tied to particular historical moments but moves continuously with collective memory and is therefore called a “floating gap.” These floating gaps can be found in all collective narratives: a period of dense information followed by a period in which the information is rare. It shows the difference between cultural memory and communicative memory, which contains memories referring to the recent past and that which an individual shares with their contemporaries.15 The awareness of these floating gaps in specific groups within a society is not normally given. In contrast to cultural memory, the so-called communicative memory only lasts 80 years. After 40 years, the first “floating gap” starts to expand. After 80 years, the communicative memory has totally disappeared. What was particularly relevant for us was that collective memory “forms the object of oral history,” which is based exclusively on memories acquired in oral interviews.16 This is why we based our research on the methodology of oral history, as it has been described thoroughly by Valerie Raleigh Yow.17

58  Sabine Gebhardt Fink

In contrast to Assmann’s understanding of history as an objectified, universalist standardized phenomenon, we define history today in a different way, emphasizing its situated character. These days, a lot of social science researchers work with an understanding of history as a particular one— that is, its being only relevant to a specific place. For example, Tuck and McKenzie have demonstrated “how places and our orientations to them are informed by, and determinants of, history, empire and culture.”18 Feminist thinkers such as Silvia Federici have questioned such a universal concept of history in extenso, as it has meant ignoring blind spots of personal involvement as research subjects historically adopting a Eurocentric standpoint, informed by a specific habitus (class, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality).19 In this respect, I think our methodology, by integrating communicative memory into history writing, can contribute to a broader understanding of the history of performance art in Switzerland, as well as to the understanding of collective memory and the reactivation of collective histories in an activist way. Recalling the historiographical work of RoseLee Goldberg20 and her emphasis on the importance of presentness and the live act in the field of performance art, we can say that, in our case, this presence must also frame the relationship of the narrators/interviewees and artists with the moment to be remembered in the collective memory—to build on the reflections from Assmann and make these reflections fruitful for art historical and artistic research.

Videotaping Group Interviews and Revisiting Archival Sources Another distinctive feature of our specific approach to oral history was the video recording of the interviews. The collaboration for the video recording followed the concept of co-authorship: being three individuals with different perspectives—an artist, an art theorist and an art historian—we worked together guided by the map produced in the PCB meetings, conducting our preliminary research on the artists mentioned in it. The most important topics on which we focused our research were feminist performance and queer aesthetics, interventions in the city space and public areas, media transfers between video and performance art, the interaction between image production and subject construction, new forms of architecture based on bodily experience, the concept of a Bilderrepertoire or “image atlas”—named after Aby Warburg’s concept of the “Mnemosyne Atlas”—performance for the camera, as well as performative photography and, finally, several crossovers between dance and music.21 To prepare for the interviews, we conducted research in the archives of the Kunsthalle Basel as well as in the (at the time unpublished) collection of photographs by Franz Mäder—a photographer and later gallery owner who documented many performance events at that time.22 We also consulted the

Collective Memory and Live Art  59

archival materials of Theater Basel, the Galerie Stampa and the personal collections gathered by René Pulfer and Marianne Schuppe.23 Although, where there was a lack of information and a scarcity of archival sources, we resorted to video interviews with artists, gallery owners and activists, we proceeded carefully and with the full awareness that interviews have a very long artistic tradition.24 Valery Raleigh Yow has defined the method of oral history as a “recording of personal testimony delivered in oral form.”25 Historical evidence cannot be captured outside processes of recording and reflection. To avoid the researcher’s assumptions having an adverse effect on the results, the position of the researcher in the field must also be openly considered and acknowledged. Working together as a research team was very helpful in this regard.26 For the purposes of our methodological approach, this meant that the production of knowledge during the interview phase was constantly questioned and discussed by the research team and that the analyses were later shared between the three of us. Ethnographers and anthropologists are familiar with group interviews as an oral history method, but the novelty of PCB, from my point of view, is that we ourselves, the “fieldworkers” and researchers, worked in a group constellation. All interviews were conducted by the three of us in varying constellations—not always all together but by at least two of us in each case. Together we developed the questions we were interested in asking and discussed the most important information retrieved and placed on the map to prepare for the video interviews. After watching the video recordings, we produced a transcript of the entire interview. On the basis of the transcript, we developed, together with the interviewees, an authorized text to be published in our book. In the case of Alex Silber, for example, the text was revised several times, which is significant not only in relation to the historical knowledge we wanted to produce but also for the aesthetic reflection of the artist.27 One of the main objectives of the research in PCB was to examine events such as performances, festivals and activist interventions in the public sphere in close connection with the context in which they originated and, thus, not merely as the expression of individual artists and their practices. With respect to this contextual reconstruction, we were confronted with an extremely fragmented collective memory. This led us, starting from Assmann’s theorization of collective memory, to develop our own theoretical and methodological solutions. We decided to work on multiple settings that would favor the emergence of this contextual information, including the collection of biographical narratives in the context of social interaction—as in the case of the group meeting alongside which the initial map was designed—but also the organization of meetings with witnesses to reflect on documents and materials collected during the research. Through this process, personal experiences and their social conditions and contexts were linked to our analyses and interviews. The aim that has

60  Sabine Gebhardt Fink

guided our methodological elaboration since our first publication 28 has been to generate and transmit a nonhierarchical form of knowledge. With our strategy based on communicative memory, we tried to transport the specific characters of this nonhierarchical form of knowledge production into a multi-perspective writing of the history of performance art. Memory and its collection were the starting point for the writing of history. Since memories are specific to a group, to a certain social context, only by putting together records and/or documents in a critical manner can history be reconstructed as a collective and not an individual narrative. Thus, going back to “living memory” can help reveal counter-memories in the history of performance art. By drawing on a communicative memory, forgotten positions can be excavated and the objects of research can offer new answers and contribute to a reflection on the results. Moreover, this work has helped us to take a closer look at the moment of transition from living memory to the writing of history and to work critically on this threshold. This form of collaborative research, which connects the researcher and witnesses in the documentation of communicative memory, was an attempt to write a history that is based on communicative memory, the shared and situated information of a group, with the researchers themselves involved in a communicative process. I am aware that this threatens some earlier forms of art history writing, but we, as researchers in the field of art history, must remember that former methodologies are also historically constructed. While using collective commemoration methods, we also wanted to include critical strategies of historical writing based on archival sources and documents. We examined photographs, video documents, texts, flyers, curatorial information and budgets—for instance, in the archive of the Kunsthalle Basel. We asked artists to write short texts about specific performances and also encouraged witnesses to use additional documents during the interviews. We organized a series of workshops to support interested contributors, entitled “visioning,” “witness eye/witness ear” and “writing workshop.” In the workshops, we shared the materials collected during our research. For the network’s website29 and the printed book, we invited the contributors to work with the map and decode the “messy map” information generated by our oral history research. In the context of our investigation of sources and documents dating from 1968 to 1986, we realized that during the early years of performance art, there was one dominant, almost “dogmatic” way of documenting performance art: through a series of black-and-white photographs. There was also a division, on a critical–theoretical level, between the photographic image of the performance and the performative act itself; the assumption was that the performative act could not be reproduced—even though, from 1968 onward, performative practices have been extremely diverse and used video or film. By collecting communicative memory through videorecorded interviews and supplementing it with archival investigations, we

Collective Memory and Live Art  61

have established an innovative methodology in art-historical research, starting with the publication of Floating Gaps. Unlike many oral history undertakings, the great originality of PCB was to integrate oral sources and performance documentation in a structured manner. In so doing, it was possible to implement counter-memories and capture the collective processes at the beginnings of performance art in Switzerland. This has had an impact on exhibitions, curatorial attitudes30 and the historiography of performance art itself.

Queering Representations Already at its beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s, performance art addressed the relationship between the live act and reproductive media, such as photography or video, which became constituent components of performance art works.31 At that time, through video and photography, artists addressed and reflected metaphorically on the production of collective images and deconstructed the existing models of representation and embodiment that were being propagated by advertising, newspapers and broadcasts. Artists were also interested in the complex interplay between the production of artworks, their perception and their memory. An important site of investigation of performance at the time was, in this respect, the interaction between the production and reception of a performative act, which even then was widely understood as being characterized by a form of disturbance, an incongruent presentness. As with all perceptions, which always involve incongruities, the moment of action in the performative event is in fact not congruent with the moment of perception of the performative act itself. The condition for perceiving a performative act may be, for example, that the act itself is interrupted and transmitted in a media mode. The beginnings of performance art are marked by significant artistic research around the relationship between the concept of subjectivity and its collective impact. An excellent example of this type of artistic research is Alex Silber’s Photo Performance (1979). This project—working with the medium of photography—was realized as a “performance for the camera.” The time it took to photograph the pose coincided with the time of the performance as indicated in the title: this means an exposure time of 1/125 seconds. For Alex Silber, the photograph is an essential part of the performance. What we see or receive today is related to a past performative act, through which he produced a singular subject and an artistic statement. The persona invented by Alex Silber in his performance is only understandable in relation to Silber’s critique of the collective representations of the time and their gendered stereotypes of the binary opposition male/female. Alex Silber described his early performances in a video interview with Muda Mathis and me, conducted in the context of our research: “At least

62  Sabine Gebhardt Fink

after 1968, needs for a liberation movement got articulated; new expressions and new live concepts had been developed, and action art opposed stable artworks.”32 Performance art is thus connected to a critique of the power of mass media such as television, cinema and advertising, which are to be understood, following Althusser, as ideological state apparatuses that help establish certain values and power relations.33 Silber continues, “At the same time, political problems like the Vietnam war, terrorism in Italy and Germany and the oil crisis were challenging our everyday life.”34 Silber claims to have developed a “Biographist” attitude with reference to the work concepts elaborated by Joseph Beuys in his Aktionskunst: “Bio/graf/ist, which means to combine life and artistic production, circumscribes also the intention of my performance art.”35 This shows very clearly that Silber’s goal was to relate the position of the subject and the politics of representation in a critical and transformative way, as the title of Jean-Christophe Ammann’s exhibition Transformer: Aspekte der Travestie at the Lucerne Art Museum (1974) implies.36 He makes performative use of photography as a “Fotobild,” which includes the moment of staging, the performative act and the act of representation.37 The second influence on his artistic production was rock music and the models of contemporary artistic authorship it proposed.38 Silber states, Another important influence was Rock. In this field, the resonating space, the embodiment of performance and music production, as an artistic staging, was eminent. David Bowie, Brian Eno, Frank Zappa or Phil Glass and Robert Wilson: the image of the artist was impressive. Live style was an index for artistic production. Artists had to deal with their self and address the perception of subject constructions in their artistic production at the same time.39 According to Silber, this understanding was fueled by curators such as Harald Szeemann (Documenta 1972) together with Jean-Christophe Ammann and their definition of “individuelle Mythologien” (individual mythologies).40 In his work There Is No Style but Lifestyle (1973–1974), he dealt explicitly with these new mythologies of the self. He declares, as a self-reference, I expanded the self-portrait in 1973 to envision explicitly my appearance as an artist. This topic is present in performances for the photo camera, but in drawings and in texts as well, in which I realized self-representations as my own model.41 Alex Silber’s performances, produced between 1973 and 1974, are performances for the camera because the performance only lasts as long as the pose. As soon as the photograph is taken, the performance is over. So, the photograph is not documentation but a central element of the

Collective Memory and Live Art  63

performance itself. The artist himself interprets the process of taking a photograph as an artistic performance. The photographer here was Kat Zickendraht, but Silber collaborated with several photographers. In fact, he created the persona Alex Silber as a “company,” following a collective concept of artistic production. This analysis of Silber’s work, informed by the insights gained from our interviews, shows the critical and political content of Silber’s practice, thus offering an important corrective to some of the interpretative approaches with which early travesty performances have been read. For authors such as Colin Lang42—who refers in his interpretation to statements in Jean-Christophe Ammann’s Transformer catalog and texts in relation to Katharina Sieverding, whose work was part of Ammann’s Transformer exhibition—this sort of performance was to be seen as the sign of a historical shift from a political dimension to subjective individualism. Our analysis showed instead the deeply political character of this type of work on subjectivity. Another interesting example of the political character of Alex Silber’s work is Weilen mit Pfeilen (Passing Time with Arrows, 1976). He explains, My performance Weilen mit Pfeilen at Stampa Gallery in Basel (27.6.1976) was part of a collective event entitled Wo bin ich?—Eine Stunde mit Dir. There were actions going on by musicians like Hans Wüthrich or Daniel Cholette. Photographers like Claire Niggli took part too, and a group of artists performed. The topic of the event was Stampa informiert— explicitly not as an art space, but as a communicator.43 Silber describes the performance as follows: I was standing in front of a tapestry with arrows, wearing a shirt with the same pattern. Afterwards I jumped through this tapestry into a niche behind the tapestry. The result is a crack in the work—as an artwork. The relics of the performance do not exist anymore, but the photograph still exists. He concludes, “My leap into the image symbolizes a liberation from former habits, as well as it led me towards a new form of image production and a fundamental change of images of the self.” He considers it as a critique of fixed viewpoints and a “cut” through the concept of an artwork: “in this part of an artwork, in this change of scenery, I can subsume a lot of things that were relevant for me, at that time.”44 The effect of a performative act, to invoke Judith Butler, is a shift/displacement in the existing modes of action and habitus. Something must emerge in awareness that was not perceivable before. Something has to be expressed in a new way; something has to be different in the “semiotic process,” and the whole situation will change. According to Butler, this

64  Sabine Gebhardt Fink

“difference” is a threefold displacement: that of the actor, the audience or participants, and the situation.45 The paradox, following Assmann’s premise, is that change and transformation are only possible through collective remembrance when written down.46 This has an effect on the performative act as well. In the so-called “hot societies,”47 the performative act can reconfigure subjected modes of action and make visible moments of freedom. Cultural attributions, semiotic decoding and the reflection on cross-dressing are only at first sight subsequent to the “now” of the moment of reception; the “aftermath” of “attributions” is also a collective “before.” This can be described as a semiotic process from the present to the past, which generates an ongoing process of meaning production. Walter Benjamin was the first to analyze “the now” as a process of making the past present in the moment of perception.48 And this must be described as a crucial part of the performative acts enacted by Silber in the 1970s. Alex Silber’s work can be linked to that of a group of artists working on queering existing concepts of identity, such as Katharina Sieverding, Urs Lüthi or Mike Hentz, to whom Silber explicitly refers in his interview.49 But the gay community in Basel was also important for the art of Alex Silber. Their meeting point was the Bockstecherhof for dancing and clubbing. This club was opened in the 1970s for everybody, and “everybody met there.”50 His work fits extremely well with the issues of queering identities and trans personas,51 as well as fashion styles and flamboyante costumery.52 For Alex Silber, the performance was part of a collective event that was interwoven with music costumery and drag dance scenes, and he used this practice to challenge and queer traditional representations of embodiment and gender stereotypes. Nevertheless, as Kornelia Imesch has analyzed, the curatorial view at that time still mainly focused on male artists even in the field of performance art. Indeed, we have to remember that, for instance, Sieverding was the only female artist included in the Transformer exhibition.53 Imesch summarizes, “This tense narrowness” continued to have an effect, insofar as even in this “new attitude in Swiss art” the gender discourse remained largely absent.54

Activist and Feminist Positions In this last section, I want to briefly examine the strategies of drag kinging and feminist critique developed by a group of women for their project Damengöttinnen am Äquator (1979) at Theater Basel. In October 2010, Muda Mathis and I conducted a video interview with the group’s former members for PCB, during which we tried to reconstruct the structure of the performance as a first step. The group’s collaboration strategies and the process of the work’s development were described by Monika Dillier and

Collective Memory and Live Art  65

Lisa Stärkle, two of the group members. They informed us that the theater made a video documentation of the performance, which, however, has not been found to date. Monika Dillier, one of the performers, speaking of the context in which the work matured, states, All of us were engaged in the women’s liberation movement at that time. The squatting of the women’s Center was an important milestone for Basel. But the women had different political agendas. Some were part of the OFRA, others were engaged in the FBB—the autonomous women’s liberation movement in Switzerland. What is interesting is that, on one hand, political actions took place; on the other, aesthetical questions were addressed.55 Our research for PCB demonstrated that Damengöttinnen was an outstanding collaborative production from the early days of feminist performance art in Switzerland. It established radical ideas about new roles and new models of life and functioned, through a collaborative artistic production, as a trigger for social and aesthetic change in the local political and cultural context. Damengöttinnen was very important for feminist critique in performance art at that time. After the interview, we examined the flyers, documentation of the costumes (Monika Dillier’s script and design book) and a series of photographs from the rehearsals with the participants. The performance was developed by a collective of women with the stated aim of being staged before an audience. Thus, Theater Basel was contacted and allowed the group great visibility in the city and in its art scene.56 The performers were Anna Walser, Esther Schaller, Johanna Zumsteg, Judith Müller, Clara Berg (the choreographer), Lisa Stärkle, Maria Zemp, Marianne Kirchhofer, Monika Dillier, Pia Zimmer, Ruth Weilemann, Sibill Niklaus, Vera Lehmann and Yvonne Racine (an actress). Their collective art production was supported by an expert from Vienna—Clara Berg— and made use of the resources of the municipal theater in Basel. The theater supported the group with a small budget for some expenses. The theme of the production was political: the performance dealt with the roles of women and the liberation movement. According to Monica Dillier’s account, expressed in our interview with her, the performance was a great success and served to empower the feminist movement in Basel at that time.57 It was also an important contribution toward the inclusion of various groups of feminists and activists in the framework of the city’s cultural scene. Essential to the creation and staging of the performance was the development of shared cultural references and experiences within the artistic collective. To begin developing the performance, the group read together Irmtraud Morgner’s 1974 novel Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura and, as a strategy to raise collective awareness, debated the issues discussed in the West Berlin magazine

66  Sabine Gebhardt Fink

Die Schwarze Botin, which was edited by Brigitte Classen, Gabriele Goettle and others from 1976 onward. Monika Dillier states, Damengöttinnen was the final title because we did not want to essentialize mythical mothers or goddesses at all, but we wanted to create actual discourse on women’s roles in an urban society. We were envisioning something new, not yet reached and far away, like the Äquator […]. Morgner’s book was a starting point but we changed quickly to improvising and writing our own texts and scenographies, which were all collectively discussed and then written down.58 Topics covered—as we can see in the design book by Dillier—were violence against women, everyday life, working conditions and gender roles, artistic production by women in history (Minnesang) and myths, terrorism and the figure of Ulrike Meinhof, all ending with a cabaret scene. In the interview, Monika Dillier provides more insight: we constantly changed the scenes and discussed them endlessly. One day, as I remember, Heinz Holliger, the director, said, out of the dark, that this changing has to end now. He took me apart and asked me to keep quiet.59 Important influences for the creation of the performance were Ulrike Ottinger’s film Madame X and feminist topics as well as books by Silvia Bovenschen, Luce Irigaray and others on matriarchal structures.60 During the collective performance, emancipated women’s roles were presented to the audience, gender stereotypes were joyfully destroyed and future divas were staged. Monika Dillier sums it up as follows: At the beginning, there was this wish of fifteen women to make antitheater, to perform. At least the wish to show another theater production than the existing hegemonic patriarchal forms. Afterwards we went in totally different directions—each of us followed her own way. This was Damengöttinnen.61 The aim of the research conducted by the PCB network was to incorporate critical and forgotten histories, such as those of feminist and queer performance art, into the collective memory of the present and into art history. The collection of oral history sources, supplemented with the examination of archival sources and documents, as illustrated in the first section of this chapter, was an essential methodological tool to achieve this goal. Our theoretical and methodological elaboration stemmed from a political conception of knowledge production. Indeed, our objective was to write the first history of Swiss performance art from the margins and subvert the dominant Euro-American canon of performance art, so

Collective Memory and Live Art  67

often reproduced without critical questioning. We implemented a collaborative, co-authored research process and chose to focus on reconstructing the contexts and networks within which performance art practices in Switzerland became established, rather than on reconstructing the work of individual successful artists working within the confines of the conventional art market. Looking at the exhibition agenda in the late 1970s—for instance, the Zurich Art Scene of 1978—performance art seems to be invisible to an established exhibition institution and only a small group of women artists seem to have been included in the whole project.62 “Communicative memory” was what we sought to collect in our research and was the tool with which to attempt to uncover and integrate counter-memories in the historiography of performance art. The recording of group video interviews, together with the work on performance documentation and media, proved to be the ideal tools for enriching oral history approaches. Thanks to these methodological resources, we have been able to excavate and explore, among others, early queer positions, such as Alex Silber’s performance practice, and investigate their medial character, showing their political scope and their attempt at radically changing the role of artists after 1968. We also contributed, through the examination of Damengöttinnen am Äquator, to the study of the relationship between performance practices and strategies of feminist activism in the Swiss context of the 1970s. Since performance art does not produce self-contained artworks and does not address a single spectator, communicative memory is an urgent element to collect and filter for the critical writing of its history. The opportunity to do this in a collaborative environment was an important step toward new insights for us and stimulated an essential experience of the significance of shared care for memory.

Notes 1 I thank Varsha Nair for her proofreading. 2 See Performance Chronik Basel, accessed 16 July 2022, http://www. performancechronikbasel.ch/quellen/. 3 In relation to this research, many documents were digitalized by Muda Mathis and Iris Ganz and later retrieved by Tabea Lurk and Jürgen Enge for the Media Archive at FHNW Basel. See “Online Zugang zur Performance Chronik Basel,” Mediathek, accessed 16 July 2022, https://mediathek.hgk. f hnw.ch/pcb.php. 4 For general information on Alex Silber, see https://www.sikart.ch/ KuenstlerInnen.aspx?id=4001598. 5 Heike Roms initiated the project in 2005 and in 2008 published the volume: Heike Roms, What’s Welsh for Performance? An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales 1968–2008 (Cardiff: Trace Samizdat Press, 2008). 6 See Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Muda Mathis and Margarit von Büren, “Einleitung: Floating Gaps: Die Performance Chronik Basel als Versuch, Performance-Kunst zu rekonstruieren,” in Floating Gaps: Performance Chronik Basel (1968–1986), ed. Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Muda Mathis and Margarit von Büren (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2011), 15–17.

68  Sabine Gebhardt Fink

Collective Memory and Live Art  69













70  Sabine Gebhardt Fink

57 58 59 60 61 62

Later there was a performance in Berlin at SO36 and in Zurich. See Gebhardt Fink, Mathis and von Büren, eds., Floating Gaps, 40. Dillier, interview. Ibid. Ibid. See ibid.; and Gebhardt Fink, Mathis and von Büren, eds., Floating Gaps, 40. Dillier, interview. Kunstszene Zürich 1979, Kunsthaus Zürich, 1979. Organized by Stadt Zürich, Präsidialdepartement, Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft and Kunstgewerbemuseum der Stadt Zürich, KGMZ, 28 November–7 January 1979. Catalog.

Bibliography Adorf, Sigrid. “Prekäre Präsenz 1.” In Is it Now? Gegenwart in den Künsten, edited by Sigrid Adorf, Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Steffen Schmidt and Sigrid Schade, 96–109. Zurich: Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, 2007. Ammann Jean-Christophe, and Marianne Eigenheer, eds. Transformer: Aspekte der Travestie. Luzern: Kunstmuseum, 1974. Assmann, Jan. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 109–118. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2008. Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5/1, Das Passagen-Werk. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980. Butler, Judith. Anmerkungen zu einer performativen Theorie der Versammlung. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016. Egger, Lukas. “Ideologietheorie und Ideologiekritik als Grundlagen einer kritischen Rassismustheorie.” Austrian Journal of Political Science 48, no. 3 (2019): 18–28. Federici, Silvia. Caliban und die Hexe: Frauen, der Körper und die ursprüngliche Akkumulation. Translated by Max Henninger. Edited by Martin Birkner. 5th ed. Vienna and Berlin: Mandelbaum, 2018. Gebhardt Fink, Sabine. “‘The Amazing Decade’: Zur Performance-Kunst der 1970er Jahre in Basel.” In Floating Gaps: Performance Chronik Basel (1968–1986), edited by Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Muda Mathis and Margarit von Büren, 79–93. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2011. Gebhardt Fink, Sabine, Muda Mathis and Margarit von Büren, eds. Aufzeichnen und Erinnern: Performance Chronik Basel (1987–2006). Berlin and Zurich: Diaphanes, ­ 2016. Gebhardt Fink, Sabine, Muda Mathis and Margarit von Büren, eds. Floating Gaps: Performance Chronik Basel (1968–1986). Zurich: Diaphanes, 2011. Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979. Imesch, Kornelia. “Der Geschlechterdiskurs als ‘Nebenwiderspruch’ im schweizerischen Kunstbetrieb nach 1970.” In Inscriptions/Transgressions: Kunstgeschichte und Gender Studies. Vol. 8 of Kunstgeschichte der Gegenwart, edited by Kornelia

Collective Memory and Live Art  71 Imesch, Jennifer John, Daniela Mondini, Sigrid Schade and Nicole Schweizer, 107–130. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. Imhof, Dora, and Sibylle Omlin. Interviews: Oral History in Kunstwissenschaft und Kunst. Munich: Silke Schreiber, 2010. Kunstszene Zürich 1979. Kunsthaus Zürich, 1979. Organized by Stadt Zürich, Präsidialdepartement, Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft and Kunstgewerbemuseum der Stadt Zürich, KGMZ. 28 November–7 January 1979. Catalog. Lang, Colin. “Celluloid Drag, Sonic Disguise: Katharina Sieverding, Kraftwerk, and Glam.” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 1 (2017): 160–178. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Das wilde Denken. Franfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010. Mediathek. “Online Zugang zur Performance Chronik Basel.” Accessed 16 July 2022. https://mediathek.hgk.f hnw.ch/pcb.php. Performance Chronik Basel. Accessed 16 July 2022. http://www. performancechronikbasel.ch/quellen/. Rainer, Yvonne, and Ann Halprin. “Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin.” The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (1965): 142–167. Raleigh Yow, Valerie. Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2005. Roms, Heike. What’s Welsh for Performance? An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales 1968–2008. Cardiff: Trace Samizdata Press, 2008. Tuck, Eve, and Marcia McKenzie. Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

4

The Historical Roots of “Performative Theater” The Italian Post-Avant-Garde Lorenzo Mango

This contribution has two objectives with regard to defining the boundaries and contextualizing the historiography of contemporary theater and performance: first, to discuss the “post-avant-garde,” an influential chapter in Italian avant-garde theater—and in Italian theater tout court—the peculiarities of which are not very well known internationally; and second, to highlight some methodological issues concerning the concepts of “performance,” “theater,” and especially “performative theater.” More should be said on how the three terms “performance,” “avant-garde,” and “performative theater” are utilized here. Performance is very likely the most complex among the three. In the cultural debate, “performance” has accumulated a variety of attributes. We only take into account those related to performance art and the particular way visual artists have, since the 1960s, attempted to “break the frame” of art and produce events based on the experience of the artist within a “real” (i.e., nonrepresentational) time and space. Performance, as Marvin Carlson and Hans-Thies Lehmann have claimed, pertains to the presentation of reality as a linguistic factor that contradicts the representational and fictional dimensions of theater.1 The second term, avant-garde, does not only describe the artistic practices undertaken in the early twentieth century, but defines a concept that connects the first and the second half of that century with respect to processes of radical transformation of the fundamental components of language. It is not a coincidence that L’avanguardia teatrale in Italia, by Franco Quadri, is the title of the very first book written on the history of New Theatre in Italy in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s—a time of constant experimentation with theatrical language. That “avant-garde” was a buzz word in the Italian theoretical debate of the sixties and seventies is also testified by the fact that a group of theater artists have come to be identified as the post-avant-garde—expressing their close yet contradictory relationship with the avant-garde and, thus, simultaneously implying continuity and difference. As for performative theater, we follow Annamaria Cascetta’s proposal. According to Cascetta, theater in the last two decades of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century is “performative” in that it is marked by the “real” presence of its material elements—that is, it is a DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-6

The Historical Roots of “Performative Theater”  73

theater whose elements have no representational function.2 Performative theater stands for a critical designation which refers to a scene-centered form of dramaturgy also known as “stage writing.” But let us begin with the facts. This is indeed the best way to approach artistic and also theoretical subjects, as probably also Gordon Craig would have agreed.3 What is the Italian post-avant-garde? It is a phenomenon of the late seventies that radically changed the Italian avant-garde theater. It is an artistic movement that is similar to those of the first decades of the twentieth century. It consisted of a group of artists who worked in close relationship with one another, were influenced by shared principles regarding language, and who presented their works in venues hosting that kind of theater exclusively, or at rassegne—a word without an adequate equivalent in English, a sort of “festival” never termed as such, though, to avoid potential confusion with commercial events. Another element that can connect the post-avant-garde to the avant-garde movements of the early part of the last century is the figure of a “leader” who would gather different artists and define the guidelines, on a theoretical level, of the movement. This figure was Giuseppe Bartolucci, not an artist but a critic, who played a crucial role not only for the post-avant-garde but for the entire Italian New Theatre (as the avant-garde theater was called in Italy at that time), from the sixties to the eighties. His role was, first, to discover young theater groups with the potential to introduce some innovation in the context of the avant-garde, which he believed had to be an organism in permanent transformation. Then, he would bring those groups of artists together around an idea of theater that, although developing in relation to the performances, enabled the performances and the artistic works to acquire a clear identity. Bartolucci’s personal approach was communicated both in writing and through the rassegne that he organized, but, above all, through newly coined concepts/terms, such as “post-avant-garde,” applied to artistic phenomena.4 To him, we owe the concept of “scrittura scenica,” or stage writing, as opposed to “dramatic writing,” to specify the Italian New Theatre’s approach, as prioritizing the scene as the primary and autonomous material of creation.5 The term became so embedded into the Italian performance lexicon that it is now commonly used in reference to stage and scenic parts of a performance in every kind of theater and concerning any historical moment. But Bartolucci is also considered the “father” of Italian New Theatre— the term introduced by Edward Gordon Craig in 19136 —as well as the originator of the term “Theatre of Images.” First introduced with regard to the Living Theatre’s Frankenstein (1965) in 1970, seven years before the publication of Bonnie Marranca’s edited volume The Theatre of Images,7 for Bartolucci, the Theatre of Images was not only a critical instrument with which to approach a certain kind of theater (as it was for Marranca), but a catalyst idea for actively gathering a group of early-seventies artists around an artistic “tendency”—the same methodology that later led him to coin the term “post-avant-garde.”

74  Lorenzo Mango

The introductory part of this chapter has focused on the critic, Bartolucci, and the leading artists of the post-avant-garde have not even been named thus far. This is intentionally so. Compared to the rest of the European as well as to the American avant-garde theater, the Italian counterpart does not typically feature a set of singular, separate experiences, but rather a cultural system based on the contributions of artists, critics, theater venues, and intellectuals who were not necessarily involved with theater but who were strictly in contact with theater artists and groups. Within this system, Bartolucci’s role was key and must therefore be given prominence. The very configuration of the Italian avant-garde theater in terms of specific tendencies in the seventies and in the first half of the eighties is, in large part, due to him. First and foremost, when speaking of the post-avant-garde, we must make a critical and historical choice. The phenomenon, in the closest sense, identifies what happened from 1976 to 1979, a very short time frame indeed, but one that caused a radical shift in theorizing and practicing theater. The groups that identified themselves as post-avant-garde were Il Carrozzone (Federico Tiezzi, Sandro Lombardi, and Marion d’Amburgo) and La Gaia Scienza (Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, Marco Solari, and Alessandra Vanzi) as well as Simone Carella. Between 1979 and 1980, a break occurred not only due to the exhaustion of artistic practices—the artists burning themselves out with their own radicalism—but also because of changes in the social and cultural landscape. Bartolucci, always keen on forming definitions for new theatrical experimentations, coined another barely translatable expression, Nuova Spettacolarità, which meant to reemphasize the spectacular dimension of performance in contrast to, say, Grotowski’s “Poor Theatre,” or the minimalism of the first-wave postavant-garde. We might therefore think that the post-avant-garde died in 1979 and was replaced by a new phenomenon. However, the protagonists of the Nuova Spettacolarità were the same as those of the post-avantgarde, with the addition of two other important groups, Mario Martone’s Falso Movimento and Toni Servillo’s Teatro Studio. Both, one should add, started their activities in connection with the post-avant-garde movement. In view of this very unusual situation, must we necessarily regard the post-avant-garde and the Nuova Spettacolarità as two distinct movements? At the time, the situation was presented in these terms. Today instead things seem vastly different, and we can look at these movements not as two disparate phenomena, but as parts of one single experience. The Italian post-avant-garde can be consequently seen as a bifurcated movement, whose two stages are suitably captured by the “hot/cold” distinction Renato Barilli introduced about Informalism.8 According to this distinction, we would have a first, more analytic, cerebral, and “cold” post-avantgarde followed by a second, “hot” post-avant-garde, which adopted a new approach to spectacularism and was based on a postmodern idea of contemporary art.

The Historical Roots of “Performative Theater”  75

This philological clarification, which we are not accustomed to applying to contemporary arts, has its own methodological reasons nonetheless. What is the most accurate taxonomic approach? Is it appropriate to force into a new historical framework what was framed at the time according to a different narrative? Despite appearances, these questions are more important than first assumed, inasmuch, as they concern the problem of “historicizing” contemporary theater and art at a point in time when their memory is still alive. The problem, in other words, is the historical point of view. “Distance” is the factor that underlies the conditions for a re-categorization of phenomena, enabling us to read them within a larger framework without losing our perspective on the relevance of the “chronicle” of the “moment in time.” This is why it is preferable to consider, from a historical perspective, the post-avant-garde as a single phenomenon that includes more moments in the history of the Italian theater. Besides the articulation of “cold” and “hot” post-avant-garde, which allows an extension of the time frame to the mid-1980s, we can—indeed, must—attach to the post-avant-garde a third historical chapter, namely the one showcased by the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. Although belonging to another generation with no personal involvement in the original movement, this additional chapter features indeed an approach to theater and its language that is derived directly from it.9 All in all, when speaking of the post-avant-garde, we refer to a complicated epoch of the Italian theater. Due to this complexity, the post-avantgarde should be seen more as a process than as a moment in the history of theater. This contribution focuses on the “cold” post-avant-garde, as the part of the process defining the linguistic foundation underpinning the whole phenomenon in its various linkages. A useful term in this context is “transavantgarde,” coined by Achille Bonito Oliva about the visual arts.10 Both “post-avant-garde” and “transavantgarde” perceive the “avant-garde” as something to overpass. This does not entail a reactionary project, but a mode of engaging with the avant-garde as a historical concept rather than an absolute one. Whereas Bonito Oliva conceived of transavantgarde as the overcoming of the avant-garde patterns, marking a transition back to painting, in the field of theater the post-avant-garde pushed the same patterns to the “zero degree” of language. Simply put, we could say that the transavantgarde, in the aftermath of the radical deconstructive spirit of the seventies, aimed toward a reconstruction of the artwork, thus marking the transition to the eighties. The post-avant-garde’s attitude instead was the opposite. The Theatre of Images, which immediately preceded it, seemed to have produced a new style, marked by formalism, pleased with visual effects, and lacking in revolutionary fervor. Grotowski’s Poor Theatre, on the other hand, appeared as too engaged with anthropology. A new, critical approach to language was needed to deconstruct performance at a formal level; and the same could be said of the idea of theater. The target was to reach a zero degree at which language is reduced to its

76  Lorenzo Mango

phonemes, a point where the signifier is totally depleted of any significance, even the cryptic significance of the Theatre of Images and the ritual significance of Grotowski. In sum, the zero degree is where the theatrical sign simply states itself without any other implication.11 To clarify this statement, let us consider excerpts from a text by Federico Tiezzi. Tiezzi was the leader and director of Il Carrozzone, and advocated a very strong theoretical vision of theater. One of his statements from 1977 to 1978 reads, “We want to eliminate, progressively erase these meanings to reach the proposition of the pure signifier: the human who is not a vehicle of other meanings but their own presence on stage.”12 In a second passage from this text, Tiezzi explains how the deletion can be accomplished, positing “an intention of dissolving any pre-constituted language, authoritarian in itself, suggesting a linguistic ‘moment’ in fermentation” that leads to the “exit from theater,”13 not in the sense accomplished by the Living Theatre or the Odin Teatret, but as an exit from theater laws, from theater as an artistic product. These statements seem to be close to what the previous generation (the Living Theatre, Grotowski, etc.) held true, but their application, in theory as well as in practice, is totally different. Tiezzi states, “When Chopin composed his ‘studies,’ he thought only of placing himself in front of the piano’s keyboard to test and explore all the harmonic and tonal possibilities.”14 Today, he adds, “we must face theater as a keyboard: to explore its possibilities, to venture into knowing its linguistic instruments.”15 These ideas are applied in his “studies for ambient,” endeavoring to deconstruct the spectacle as a unity. Each “study” is a different exploration of space through the action of a body. This action has no representative or symbolic reference; it is a pure act—but a special act at that. The actor— today we would say the “performer”—acts within the space by measuring its dimensions, following ideal lines: horizontal, vertical, diagonal. The space is an environment, in Richard Schechner’s sense of the term,16 but an environment subject to an analytic treatment. This influences the action, not in an emotional sense but because the actors’ acts must be related to their actual presence in space: the actual actor in the actual space; the space as a place to investigate, and the actor as a body. Nothing else. The idea that “the actor is conceived as a body” might also need to be further clarified. The actor as a body has been the motto of theater reform since the sixties. Tiezzi, however, did not think of the body as a unified whole, as opposed to the distinction between mind and body with the primacy of the former over the latter. Tiezzi thought of the body as the presence of the actor in the space; the actor as the one who carries out material acts that do not express anything. To reach this aim, acts and gestures must be subjected to a process of deconstruction: segmentation, repetition, and acceleration (to borrow Tiezzi’s terminology).17 In this way, the gesture is broken down into its primary elements. Reduced to presence, without any other involvement, the space and the actor are treated according to their phonemic dimensions.

The Historical Roots of “Performative Theater”  77

In 1977, Il Carrozzone produced Vedute di Port Said (Views of Port Said). The title seems to suggest narrative or symbolic references, but none were included in the performance. The title did not correspond to anything. The audience would not see Port Said or Morocco, which for Tiezzi were only literary and emotional suggestions. What they could see, however, was a series of scenes, each different from the other, self-contained, without any causal connection to what came before or after, its length resulting from a musical piece, that is to say, something external to the internal development of the action. There was, of course, no dramatic play, nor words. And even though, many years later, Tiezzi talked about Beckett’s influence, at the time, his theoretical attention was focused on “studies for ambient” based on the body–space relation, on deconstructing the unity of performance (e.g., the sequence of studies could be changed at any time), on the zero degree of theatrical language: each act meaning nothing other than itself. The space was totally empty, with the exception of a few out-of-context objects: a chair, an armchair, a bed, and a fridge; slides projected on the walls, creating patterns of white lines in the dark to show the elements of space; and neon tubes playing a similar role. The music score was by Steve Reich: minimal music based on the reiteration of patterns. The actions consisted of simple acts: Each one could be divided into its elementary parts, or be reiterated in a mechanical but rhythmical way, always putting the actor in relation to the space. These were acts that measured the environment. Let us look at some concrete examples: In the first scene, an actor is seated on a chair. He stands, partially, then sits again. A second movement, and he stands up a little taller than before, then sits again. This goes on until he is fully upright. A simple act is thus deconstructed into its constituent movements—its phonemes. On the wall, a slide is projected, reproducing a wall. In another scene, an actor is wearing a jacket tied to a cord. When the actor moves, the jacket is pulled off his shoulders, and another actor, naked, stands up from a bed, stretching his arm and his finger pointing forward. Then, the act goes back to the beginning and is replicated many times until the scene, without a reason, ends. In a further scene, an actor is seated in an armchair, and another, tied to a cord, is walking on a wall. The illusion of seeing the scene from above is produced by their acting against the background wall. Just a few minutes before, the same scene had been acted out on the floor, exactly in the same way. In another “study,” two female actors, one naked and one dressed, are seen at the edges of a plank. Each holds one end of an elastic in her mouth, and they rock toand-fro until the elastic snaps and the scene ends. I chose Federico Tiezzi and his Il Carrozzone as a case study of the postavant-garde not only because of his capacity for theoretically communicating the linguistic proposals of his performances, but also because pieces such as Vedute di Port Said were prominent in the avant-garde European festivals and theaters of that period. His success was consolidated also by his

78  Lorenzo Mango

earliest piece from the “hot” stage of the post-avant-garde: Crollo nervoso (Nervous Breakdown). When Rainer Werner Fassbinder saw it in Köln, he was so impressed that he decided to film it, and Hanna Schygulla— then at the top of her career—asked to be part of a single performance, Ins Null, that took place in 1980 in the Olympiastadion in Munich. A second interesting case in point is provided by Simone Carella, the more radical exponent of the post-avant-garde, whose idea was to nullify theater not only as an act of staging but also as a performative act. Following his first encounters with Happening, he chose to reduce theater to an event—a particular event because it was not based on acting but on the environment itself becoming an actor. In 1976, he quite purposefully created a reenactment of Igor Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice (Fireworks) based on the 1916 edition by Futurist painter Giacomo Balla, one of the first examples of abstract theater. Carella’s philological reconstruction of the performance resulted in a symphony of music and colored lights projected on three-dimensional structures producing abstract suggestions. The title of Carella’s first breakthrough performance Autodiffamazione (self-accusation), was taken from a Peter Handke play Carella intended to stage. During the rehearsals, however, Carella grew disappointed and decided to eradicate everything and begin anew on a totally different path. He disposed of Handke’s play as well as the actors. The audience came to the small space of the Beat ’72 theater in Rome, the de facto headquarters of the post-avant-garde, directed by Carella himself. At the entrance, a screen showed a film of Pino Pascali’s funeral, one of the most prominent revolutionary artists of the sixties. The audience then went down to the theater’s main room, which did not feature a conventional stage. In the center, a chair was slowly lighted by a lamp. On each side, there were screens, on which were projected photos of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a film of Steve Paxton during a training session, and another of La Monte Young playing the piano, which also functioned as the soundtrack of the performance. Nothing happened. The audience’s sight was focused on the chair, which became a real “presence of absence.” Theater disappeared from the stage, leaving only a trace of its passage—the trace, precisely, of its absence—its language having been reduced to the complete deconstruction of everything we call theater. Autodiffamazione was not an installation, as was common in the visual arts at the time. The audience was and remained seated, even though the performance did not take place in a regular theater, and they could not manipulate the performance’s time because it was fixed. Autodiffamazione was a theater performance but without theater; or better, with theater at its zero degree. Many other examples could be brought here, but what has been described so far may suffice to move on to the second objective of this contribution, which was to utilize the discussion of the post-avant-garde as a framework for introducing some methodological problems. The first concerns the role of historical analysis in the study of contemporary theater. When approaching artistic experiences that, in the early

The Historical Roots of “Performative Theater”  79

twenty-first century, questioned the traditional codes of representation, we are very often tempted to highlight their new relationship with the audience, their liveness, their fusion of life and art, their concept of “truth,” etc., which are noticeable in the works of Jan Fabre, Milo Rau, Romeo Castellucci, and others. In other words, our attention tends to focus on those theoretical factors that undermine our conventional idea of theater, or what we are accustomed to call theater. This is not incorrect in itself, of course, but these statements risk to being treated as absolute, rather than derived from a given historical perspective. The present discussion of the post-avant-garde does not mean to convey the idea that all has been done decades ago, nothing new is possible, and so on. On the contrary, instead of emphasizing its differences with conventional forms of theater, the present discussion maintains that current New Theatre is better understood in relation to what emerged in the twentieth century. Can we be sure that the traditionally dominant model— with its primacy of representation, psychology, and the word—is the most suitable one to understand contemporary theater? Or is it just the most prevalent in the theaters of our cities? What happens instead when we apply the model which, in the previous century, rejected representation in the name of a totally changed vision of theater? From a historical perspective, instead of a chronological one, what we considered avant-garde 30 years ago, a theater opposed to the official institution, has now become a tradition in itself—very probably, the only real tradition of the last century—which means that it is time to speak of the “classical nature” of theater of the twentieth century. How does it change our perception of theater today? Totally, is the only answer. This forcibly raises the issue of delineating the history of contemporary theater. We deal with a twofold problem in this respect: First, we lack an essential distance from the facts; second, no less significantly, we lack adequate information with which to construct a historical framework that would allow us to comprehend the events as they occurred in their original context while enabling us to read them from a more general perspective. With the term “performative theater,” I mean exactly something that has been developed in time, not only with its constants but with its variables too. Performative theater, as well as the concept of performance itself, is not a matter of fact, set once and for all, but the result of a long process of construction that we must be able to consider with regard to its various aspects and in relation to several historical epochs as something homogenous and, at the same time, multifarious. We need to solve a historical puzzle, putting together different pieces, new or old, and thus prepare the conditions for a richer reading of the theoretical problems. There is, of course, a common ground that identifies performative theater. Hans-Thies Lehmann, in his Postdramatic Theatre, tries to catalog the key features of this common ground in what he himself calls a sort of “breviary,” a list of elements, most of which concern the “performance text”—the performance itself as a dramaturgy—and chief among them is the lack of hierarchy between the different linguistic elements, a paratactic structure in the organization of a play. Lehmann’s

80  Lorenzo Mango

“breviary” highlights performance in opposition to drama, which is reduced to the verbal aspect of theater. In a similar way, performative theater is a theater in which dramaturgy takes on the form of a scenic event. But performative theater is, at the same time, a general model and a historical model. Its linguistic elements are part of a comprehensive strategy to conceive theater and its language, but they assume different features in different contexts. Therefore, a historical approach is required for identifying how language changes within the same concept of theater. It is from this perspective that I chose to talk about the post-avant-garde. What the post-avant-garde underlines is an approach to language that emphasizes analytic deconstruction. This is evinced by, among other examples, the title of the 1980 edited anthology on the post-avant-garde, Per un teatro analitico esistenziale (Toward an Analytic-Existential Theater). With this term, we intended to synthesize two different components of that kind of theater: personal involvement, certainly, but, mainly, an analytic approach to language. This analytic approach was strictly connected to what had happened in the visual arts with the advent of conceptual art. What is at stake is not an analogy, but rather a direct exchange of knowledge and influence from one field to the other. The post-avant-garde emerged in connection with the experimentations in the visual arts of the sixties and seventies, working in a liminal space, a terrain vague where artistic specializations were not so specifically demarcated—precisely what is called performance art. But performance itself changed in the meantime, as did the words connected to it. Jan Fabre, for example, dislikes the word “actor” and prefers “performer”; in the seventies, this was not a problem on the agenda. Finally, some perspective can be gained if we look at widespread characterizations of performative theater and check the meaning of some of their keywords within the context of the post-avant-garde. Let us take, for instance, the word “presence.” By it, it is usually meant the performer as an actual person that we come across. That applies to the post-avantgarde too. There are no “characters” as such, so the actor does not have a mediational role. An actor is an actor is an actor (as Gertrude Stein would have said), but their presence, although connected to what they are as a person, is not influenced by this. Their body is “a” body; their act is “an” act. Who an actor is, is relevant, of course, but what was important in Vedute di Port Said, for example, is what they actually did, because the attention was focused on the pre-semiotic level of language, on its phonemic level. Another key aspect concerns the audience: Instead of being involved in the performance, the post-avant-garde audience perceived it from an emotional distance and their role was to look at the actions as an analytic process of deconstructing the unity of language. In conclusion, what epistemological purpose does the framework of postavant-garde serve in our understanding of performative theater? It provides us with the notion that performative theater is not merely based on the experience of sharing a “real” time and space; that liveness is a property

The Historical Roots of “Performative Theater”  81

that has to be scrutinized from multiple points of view; that theater, as well as performance, always has the dimension of an artificial language; and finally, that our understanding of “performative language” is underpinned by the analytic deconstruction of language itself. Performance art and Conceptualism are two complementary elements that emerged from the postavant-garde experience, which I still find useful for reading and analyzing performative theater. This is why I decided to speak of “historical roots.” Not because the post-avant-garde is in itself the basis of today’s performative theater, but because by analyzing the post-avant-garde, we can identify a possible methodological approach that brings together, as was customary in the seventies, Joseph Kosuth and Marina Abramović as part of the same discourse. Such a discourse namely foregrounds language both in its analytical approach and in its emotional experience. Finally, what emerges is that, since its 1970s development up to today, performative theater no longer presents itself as an antagonistic model but as a true “genre,” with its own modes, its own linguistic characteristics, its own “style,” and its own tradition, which is placed within the overall framework of what theater—between the end of the twentieth century and the first decades of the new century—can be.

Notes 1 See Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); and Hans-Thies Lehmann, The Postdramatic Theatre (in German, 1999; London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 2 See Annamaria Cascetta, European Performative Theatre: The Issues, Problems and Techniques of Crucial Masterpieces (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). 3 Gordon Craig, who was so involved in theory as to be often considered a “pure idealist,” in his book-notes introduced many of his projects with the words “facts and dates.” 4 Among Bartolucci’s books that had a significant impact on the critical and artistic context are La scrittura scenica (Rome: Lerici, 1968); and Teatro-corpo: Teatro-immagine (Padua: Marsilio, 1970). 5 On this subject, see Lorenzo Mango, La scrittura scenica: Un codice e le sue pratiche nel teatro del Novecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 2003). 6 See Edward Gordon Craig, Towards a New Theatre: Forty Designs for Stage Scenes (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1913). 7 See Giuseppe Bartolucci, The Living Theatre: Dall’organismo microstruttura alla rivendicazione dell’utopia (Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1970); and Bonnie Marranca, “The Theatre of Images: An Introduction,” in The Theatre of Images: Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Lee Breuer, ed. Bonnie Marranca (New York: Drama Book Specialist, 1977), ix–xv. 8 See Renato Barilli, Informale, oggetto, comportamento (1979; Milan: Feltrinelli, 2016). 9 In Staging the Post-Avant-Garde (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye use the term “post-avant-garde” in a larger sense, as a parameter to identify a type of Italian experimental performance from the seventies until now, based on the visual dominance of and a deconstructive approach to language. 10 Achille Bonito Oliva, Italian Transavantgarde (Milan: Politi Editore, 1980).

82  Lorenzo Mango

Part II

Unfolding the Action Media and Documents of Performance Art

5

How Records and Documents Become Art The Role of Documentation in the Preservation, Exhibition and Experience of Performance Art Gabriella Giannachi

The introduction of performance within the museum has led to radical changes in documentation, conservation and exhibition practices.1 Depending on where documentation is placed within the museum, documentation can be a record (in the archive), an exhibit (in the collection) or a mode of engagement (on social media). It is through documentation that museums orchestrate the historicization, value creation and spectacle of art. These findings about documentation show that artworks must no longer be considered purely as objects, or even as processes, but rather as instances in the rhizomatic assemblage of relational and contextual trajectories that trace the life of a work. By “assemblage,” I mean here not so much the ready-made, or the found object, as is the common use of the term in art history, but rather I refer to an adaptation to the field of performance and new media studies of the philosophical term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). The original French term agencement in fact refers to the idea of an arrangement as a topos for the analysis of fluidity, exchangeability and multiple functionalities of entities and their relationality or connectivity to other entities. The notion of assemblage, and so, more specifically, that of arrangement, thus indicates the possibility that it is the assemblage of a work’s documentation rather than the entity of a work that provides its meaning and value. Using case studies from the Whitney, Tate, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and LIMA, and analysing the evolving role that documentation has played in these museums in the period from the 1970s to today, this study shows that whether as a remain, ontological evidence, a preservation method, an art exhibit or even as a strategy for reinterpretation, documentation constitutes one of the most complex and dynamic fields of inquiry in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries precisely because documentation can trace and change the life journey of an artwork. Documentations, documents, records, photographs, videos, tweets and annotations are not only performance remains, to use Rebecca Schneider’s term;2 though it is obvious that none of these terms are synonymous with DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-8

86  Gabriella Giannachi

performance, or indeed with each other, as they may originate from different points in time, they also form part of a wider rhizomatic structure to which I will refer here as an assemblage. Before analysing precisely how assemblages operate and what the value of this term is in relation to the field of performance documentation, I will describe in more detail what I mean by documentation, documents and records. I refer to documentation as the paperwork that tends to be produced by museums at the point of purchase of a work, as well as what is created by viewers for their own consumption, and by artists for a range of motivations often to do with value accrual. Researchers have used this term in a range of ways. Toni Sant, for example, refers to documentation as “the process of storing documents and preserving them in a systematic way for long-term access through an archive.”3 This means that, for him, documentation is indiscernible from what I have called elsewhere the apparatus of the archive.4 Because as an assemblage, documentation is an arrangement or layout, as well as an entity, it is unfixed and therefore can change the status of an artwork. To understand the relevance of these claims, further distinctions need to be made between the terms “document” and “record.” Arguably, documents tend to entail instructions while records are generated as the result of an action. So, documents emerge as a consequence of planning or thinking about the future, while records are created as a consequence of something that happened in the past. A documentation, which often entails both documents and records, is therefore both past- and future-facing. Photographs, videos, tweets and annotations are records, but they may also be documents, form part of documentations or indeed be part of an artwork. I hope to show here that when we talk about the relationship between performance and documentation, we in fact refer to something which is probably even more complex than what past scholarship in the field has acknowledged. To explain why this is the case, I use the concept of assemblage and show how documentation plays a key role not only in the preservation but also in the exhibition and experience of performance art. Before I do that, I need to unpack what I mean by the term “assemblage,” which, as has been pointed out by theorists before me,5 does not refer to a theory, though other interpreters have come to see it as such.6 It is known that the English term “assemblage” does not reflect the fact that the original French term agencement (to arrange, to lay out, to piece together) refers less to a grouping or gathering than an arrangement or layout.7 In fact, the term implies “a multiplicity” that must be considered “neither a part nor a whole,”8 where what lies “in between” the elements is just as crucial as the assemblage itself.9 This suggests that it is the “how? where? when? from what point of view?”10 that defines the arrangement. Manuel DeLanda suggests that “emergent properties” or “properties of a whole caused by the interactions between its parts”11 is a defining characteristic of assemblages. For DeLanda, the elements of these wholes

How Records and Documents Become Art  87

maintain their autonomy so that they can “be detached from one whole and plugged into another one, entering into new interactions.”12 For him, however, it is the ontology of the assemblage that matters insofar as the whole and the parts are on the same ontological plane so, for example, he notes, the human species is an individual entity as well as the human organisms that form part of it.13 For him, assemblages therefore “have a fully contingent historical identity,” and so each of them is an “individual entity,”14 which is formed of “heterogeneous components,”15 that is, its materials and symbolic artifacts, and can be part of larger assemblages.16 This characteristic of the assemblage, entailing parts which are on different spatio-temporal planes but belong to the same ontological plane, is significant when considering the relationship between documents, records, documentation and performance. I now show how this concept works in relation to a complex artwork, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Roberta Breitmore (1972–1978), in which the artist embraced the role of the fictitious, homonymous character for six years. Using photography and moving image, Hershman Leeson documented various moments in Roberta’s life, creating a set of documents and records that were then re-formed, often through collage, including text and painting, into individual artworks. From these documents (instructions to stage Roberta) and records (evidence that the performance of Roberta Breitmore had taken place), a number of biographical factors can be deduced. For example, from Untitled from Roberta’s External Transformation from Roberta (Roberta’s Construction Chart) (1975), we know that Roberta was born on 19 August 1945; she was educated at Kent State University, where she majored in Art and Drama; she married Arnold Marx in 1969 and was divorced after three years; and she travelled on a Greyhound bus to San Francisco and checked into room 47 at the Hotel Dante on Columbus Avenue. Hershman Leeson’s live performance started with Roberta’s arrival in San Francisco, where she underwent a series of external and internal transformations that can be traced through a number of documents and records. The Roberta Construction Chart #1 (1973) shows how Roberta was painted by “Dior eyestick light,” blushed through “‘Peach Blush’ Cheekcolor by Revlon” and how her lips were shaped through “‘Date Mate’ scarlet.” Untitled from Roberta’s External Transformations (From Roberta’s Body Language Chart) (1978) shows that she also had a vocabulary of gestures. After checking into the Hotel Dante, Roberta tried to find a roommate by placing an advert in some local papers. Roberta’s meetings with potential roommates were documented through photography, while Roberta Breitmore Blank Check (1974) shows that she also had a financial existence. Hershman Leeson subsequently engaged three women, including the art historian Kristine Stiles, to act as Roberta. Thus, Hershman Leeson recalls that Stiles went out as Roberta, and Hershman Leeson as herself because “there was a rumour about Roberta” and she wanted people to “think

88  Gabriella Giannachi

that she existed.”17 All performers wore wigs and costumes identical to the ones worn by Hershman Leeson when performing Roberta, and all underwent a series of transformations. Finally, Hershman Leeson ceased performing as Roberta, leaving the three hired performers on their own. After being exorcized at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara (1978), Roberta was re-mediated as the telerobotic doll CyberRoberta (1995–1998), who was dressed identically to Roberta. Roberta was also brought back in ReConstructing Roberta (2005), which shows an image of Hershman Leeson taken in recent years. Additionally, Roberta appeared as a bot in the Second Life remake of The Dante Hotel, called Life to the Second Power or Life Squared (2007–), which turned a number of documents and records in the Hershman Leeson archive about the homonymous artwork now hosted at Stanford University Libraries into a mixed reality experience where visitors could explore digital reproductions of fragments of the original archive under Roberta’s guidance in Second Life.18 Apart from the re-mediations mentioned above, and “reincarnations” such as Lamp Test (2005), Roberta in Black Face (2005), among others, there are a number of less-known records and documents, including birthday cards, which form the “Anonymous Social Constructions” series, for example cards from Hillary and Bill Clinton (1992), Nancy and Ronald Regan (1992) and Richard Nixon (1992); a set of comics about Roberta by Spain Rodriguez (1975); and essays such as Roger Penrose’s extract on black holes and a list of artworks by Arturo Schwarz, including “The Alchemical” (1978), all of which, arguably, form part of Roberta Breitmore. The work is now part of a number of collections, including MoMA, the Walker Art Center, the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Donald Hess Collection, and featured in a major retrospective about Hershman Leeson’s work at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) which toured Germany and the United Kingdom in 2015. The documents and records as well as artifacts and ready-mades that form Roberta Breitmore are usually shown individually. However, at the ZKM retrospective, a number of them, including dresses, photos and collages of transformations, were exhibited alongside each other. If we look at Roberta Breitmore as an assemblage, we can see that the documents and records that constitute the work can be arranged in different ways, and this affects the interpretation of the work as a whole. We can also see that there is a certain fluidity in this work among the usually distinct categories of records, documents, documentations and artworks. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that when contemplating as to whether to purchase Hershman Leeson’s work, former Tate curator Kelli Dipple pointed out that the complete Roberta “inventory” consisted of “around 300 individual photographs, documents and artefacts”19 and due to the nature of the project I was unable to settle on the best way to annotate the individual vs. collective artwork. I started with the

How Records and Documents Become Art  89

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.20 Dipple’s comments not only illustrate how Roberta Breitmore challenges our understanding of the relationship between performance and documentation as dichotomous21 and rather presents performance and documentation as inter-related 22 but also shows that each element (whether a document, record or documentation) forms part of the Roberta Breitmore assemblage, operating both as a part and a whole, and each one of them is therefore located on the same ontological (though not necessarily ­ spatio-temporal) plane. I now move on to discuss a cartographic visualization of the museumand art gallery-based participatory performance. This visualization was created as part of the Cartography project (2017), an EPSRC-funded collaboration between researchers in New Media, Computer Science and Tate. The aim of the platform was to visualize the rich and burgeoning history of the field of participatory art in museums and art galleries, using, to start with, a number of case studies from the Tate collection. The platform prototype was built so as to encourage users to confirm or disagree with what others stated, leading to visualizations of divergence as well as convergence. To ensure that the platform was developed so as to empower artists but also other participants to document each other’s work, a set of workshops was conducted at Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool in 2016 and 2017, in which leading practitioners from the field of participatory arts were asked to contribute their ideas to the design of the platform. This in turn led to the development of a relational model of documentation based on Graph Commons, an existing open-source platform created by the artist Burak Arikan. It was felt that the platform should visualize long-term projects by association across countries and organizations so as to show which organizations had acted as catalysts for this work. This was to document the life of the work across organizations and over time rather than in isolation. By referring to the life of the work, I draw from Renée van de Vall, Hanna Hölling, Tatja Scholte and Sanneke Stigter’s seminal study suggesting that “the meaning of an object and the effects it has on people and events may change during its existence,” which means that we should construct the “lives” of these objects “as individual trajectories.”23 If the life of an object, or an artwork more broadly, is formed by the individual trajectories that traverse it, then the mapping of these trajectories through documentation becomes crucial. When looking at a work diachronically, terms like “process and participant” and “documentation and archive” become as significant as terms like “art and artist” and “creativity and performance.” The assemblage of these factors offers a more complex understanding of the artwork than if we had looked at it in isolation.

90  Gabriella Giannachi

The vision for the Cartography was that contributors should not only be able to annotate what had already been uploaded, but they also should be able to generate entries even when they were not associated with any existing element. To brainstorm this particular use of the platform, a second workshop was organized at Tate Liverpool in 2017 with members of three major participatory art projects: O.K. – The Musical, Homebaked and The Welsh Streets. The feedback significantly impacted the subsequent iteration of the platform and revealed that, in most art forms, we still elevate individual artists over their collaborators and rarely document their or the audience’s contributions. In looking at the final iteration of the prototype, it is clear that each of the artworks the team focused on at the Liverpool workshops is now visualized as a set of relationships among people, organizations, artists and participants, and between different art forms. Nina Edge’s map, for example, expresses a complex rhizomatic structure which visualizes nodes of activity radiating out, as well as interdisciplinary or relational patterns connecting distant points on the map. While Edge herself features prominently in the Cartography as an “enabler” rather than an artist, so do her collaborators, which means the work is not only seen in relation to the artist but also to its makers and participants. The vision for the Cartography was that it could constitute at once a mapping tool, through which new knowledge could be produced by users, and as an immersive field of practice that would develop iteratively over time.24 Having unpacked the differences among records, documents and documentations, and indicated how the concept of assemblage is a useful tool to understand how these relate to each other and to performance more broadly, I now look into how a number of museums have hosted performance and dealt with its documentation from the 1970s and 1980s. The case studies I focus on include examples from the Whitney, Tate, SFMOMA, MoMA and LIMA, which were the subjects of the study of the Performance at Tate project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2014–2016). I will draw on a series of interviews conducted and edited by Jonah Westerman and myself,25 which illustrate the ways in which these museums have acquired, exhibited and preserved performance and documentation in the period in question. For Jay Sanders, formerly Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, although the history of staging performances at the Whitney goes back to the 1960s, it was only in more recent years that documentation started to play a more central role within the museum. When curating Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970–1980 (2013–2014), Sanders and his colleague Greta Hartenstein dealt with the scarcity of documentation for these works by researching journals from the 1970s and 1980s and looking into individual works’ “social network[s].”26 Each work required a somewhat different treatment. For artists like Julia Heyward and Jill Kroesen, they used videotapes, props

How Records and Documents Become Art  91

and ephemera to “understand the intrinsic vision of the artist and the character of the work,”27 whereas for Ralston Farina, who, in Sanders’s words, “was wilfully cryptic and did not leave traces of his work,” they had to contact his friends and other artists, and only a few months before the exhibition opened, two old friends of his “basically FedExed everything he had saved surrounding his live performances” to the museum.28 Rituals of Rented Island, one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of performance in the 1970s and 1980s, thus consisted of photographic materials, scripts, storyboards, original programmes, press releases, props and drawings, an assemblage that subsequently became inextricably associated with the work itself. The next example featuring a case study at the Tate shows how the documentation could lead to acquisitions and exhibitions. Similar to what we have seen in relation to the Whitney, while the education department of the Tate Gallery had hosted some performance events in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Joseph Beuys’s Information Action (1972), curators were not specifically commissioning performance, and so documentation was not a particular concern at that time. However, documentation became increasingly strategic in recent years. Thus, when Joan Jonas presented a version of Lines in the Sand in 2005, conversations about the work led Tate to decide to acquire her older piece The Juniper Tree (1977). Unable to purchase the actual performance, Tate curators decided to show the work as an installation. Catherine Wood, Senior Curator International Art (Performance), notes how the work was in fact “a theatricalized version of the documentation,”29 in that the set from the original performance was shown with a slideshow of the original performance embedded in it. For Wood, this example shows how commissioning and collecting are closely related, in that the conversations with the artist about the historical work fed into research that then contributed to the museum’s acquisition,30 suggesting that here documentation was used not instead of but as the artwork. The Juniper Tree is an adaptation of a story by the Brothers Grimm about a wicked stepmother who murders her young stepson, and the subsequent wreckage the boy causes after reincarnating as a bird. The first iteration of the work was a performance for children that the artist was commissioned to do by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Subsequently, The Juniper Tree became a solo piece, a “work in progress,” capturing “the shifting nature between performance, memory and physical presence.”31 The installation at the Tate contained props and paintings from both the collaborative form and the later solo version of the work in which Jonas played each of the different characters of the piece. Forming a unique installation, the Tate work was considered an artwork in its own right 32 and could be considered as an iteration in the lifetime of The Juniper Tree. This 1977 work marked the moment when Jonas moved away from film and video and became interested in fairy stories and narrative. For Douglas Crimp, just “as the video performances had generated videotape,” the

92  Gabriella Giannachi

performance works “generated autonomous drawings.”33 The drawings represented the boy and the girl, and the striking colours had been drawn from the story itself. Jonas recalls that she wanted to work with props and objects “in a more theatrical way,” and that for the more intimate solo version of the work, which she showed in the studio, she “made a set that represented elements of the story,” including the drawings, that was in a way “a return to the sculptural.”34 For her, in The Juniper Tree, the literary text had in fact become a medium through which “I distanced myself from the viewer in and behind the object. It was my way of developing a language of the moving image.”35 Here, the structure, she noted, became “my sculpture.”36 As the text itself had become the medium, the drawings to some extent operated as the documentation. The documentation in the pre-acquisition file in the Tate archive describes the full inventory of items that form the installation, indicating that the work consists of 22 acrylic paintings on cloth (silk) from the original performances; a kimono; a metal suitcase; a box containing bones; a doll; a plastic mask; a dog mask; three paper masks; wooden balls; twigs; two glass jars; lights; an apple; ladder (reconstruction); wooden house structure (reconstruction); mirror with painted numbers (reconstruction); poster for performance; a knife; a soundtrack by Jonas with songs by Simone Forti, adapted for the performance; and a slide projection.37 Notes about each of the paintings also draw attention to the condition of the work as a result of its use during the original performance of The Juniper Tree and its subsequent exhibition history, revealing information about the condition of the drawings, their possible position in relation to other panels, but also showing their value as an assemblage, a documentation and an artwork. At MoMA, artists used performance as a subversive element in the 1960s and 1970s often alongside what was happening within the Summer Garden program. MoMA photographers and, frequently, photographer Peter Moore documented some of these performances, and the documentations, as Ana Janevski, Associate Curator at MoMA, notes, are in MoMA’s archives. These materials, over the years, formed part of a number of exhibitions, raising the questions, in Janevski’s words, as to what belongs in the archive and what belongs in the collection, and as to whether this kind of documentation has a market as well as a preservation value.38 For her colleague Stuart Comer, Chief Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art at MoMA, there should be no “hierarchy between a work and the archival document, particularly in performance-related work.” So, like Janevski, he asks, “Is a photograph an archival index or an artwork?” Indicating that he would personally prefer to keep that rule “totally indeterminate” so that photographs could “circulate throughout all kinds of platforms, exhibitions, publications, websites, films,” Comer draws attention to the fact that the value of such documents and records lies precisely in their hybrid status.39

How Records and Documents Become Art  93

Within the museum context, documents and records have a different status as to whether they are physically located in the archive or in the collection. Technically, all items that are acquired are in the collection, but documents and records donated by artists alongside works are often placed in either the collection or the archive. Works in the MoMA collection, for example, are subject to nine-month-loan request deadlines, whereas works in the archive can be seen or hired by anybody. So, for Comer, these works challenge museological structures, in that they require “more and different kinds of access.”40 An example of a museum which constantly revisited its structures to accommodate complex performance works is SFMOMA. The history of hosting performance at SFMOMA started even earlier than in other museums, according to Frank Smigiel, Associate Curator for Performance and Film, who pointed out that performance started to be shown there with the exhibition Sawdust and Spangles (1942), which used circus props, posters and clown costumes. At that time at SFMOMA, like in the other museums discussed in this study, there were different practices for documenting materials in the collection, but also awareness that performance was behaving differently from other genres. Jill Sterrett, Director of Collections and Conservation at SFMOMA, noted how curators started to accumulate materials related to specific performances in boxes which, at that time, were uncatalogued and did not form an archive until 2004–2005, when a big grant from the Getty meant curators could start working with these materials to create a catalogue for the 2010 anniversary exhibition, 75 Years of Looking Forward.41 Nowadays, the museum still has an Artist Materials Archive preserving uncatalogued items that are not acquired by curators but which may one day become significant for the museum. For Sterrett, the Artist Materials Archive and similar initiatives adopted by other museums mark “a new status of ‘things’.” Thus, she notes, 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 […]. 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.42 Crucially, the Artist Materials Archive constitutes a hybrid museum space, which is not in the collection nor the archive but entails characteristics of both. An as-yet uncatalogued assemblage, this is where future interpretation and exhibition materials are likely to emerge from. As we have already seen in the case of Roberta Breitmore and The Juniper Tree, artworks often breed almost organically from other artworks,

94  Gabriella Giannachi

sometimes through different materials and/or media. This, Rudolf Frieling, Curator for Media Arts at SFMOMA, noted, is particularly evident in the context of conceptual art where since the mid-1960s, concepts became something that you could exhibit and collect, or collect and exhibit. If you think of AbramovićUlay, 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.43 As Gaby Wijers, Director at LIMA, also pointed out, when looking at a work by Abramović–Ulay, there is in fact often more than one recording of the original performance, which means that each work could become a multitude of works. Wijers, a leading preservation expert, pointed out how different each of these versions can be, so that, in her words, “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.”44 In fact, Abramović and Ulay often made compilations and collected works that they had previously performed together in editions, while continuing to edit everything, forcing LIMA to decide which of these versions to preserve. While interviews with the artists usually bring clarity to this dilemma, in the case of Abramović and Ulay, this was not the case. So when, after a conversation with them, LIMA decided to preserve the longest versions of the works, as the artists had confirmed that they would not make new editions, Abramović then proceeded to make new scans of all the films which she decided ought not to be presented on monitors anymore, but in installations as projections,45 hence rendering the previous museum documentation not so much obsolete as incomplete, marking a phase in the life of the work rather than offering a definitive documentation of the overall work. We have already seen how museums acquire documents and records, sometimes alongside the right to perform a work, and how it is often the conversation between curators and the artists that determines what the acquisition should consist of, then, crucially, also determining what the assemblage forming the work is. SFMOMA, for example, recently decided to acquire works by the art collective Ant Farm. In a dialogue with the artists, the museum identified what could be collected and acquired three slideshows. These are, Frieling notes, “typically, something you do at a lecture, not necessarily works for the gallery.”46 One of them, Chip Lord and Doug Michels’s Cars and Owners (1969–1994), is a history of cars, designs and people showing, in Frieling’s words, “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.”47 The slideshow is a double-channel work,

How Records and Documents Become Art  95

matching pictures of cars with particular people, but the voice linking the two is missing, so the museum suggested that Lord’s voice should be recorded, and then options of display could be discussed with the artists. In Frieling’s words, “this becomes a work as we go along, in discussion with the artist.”48 This suggests that, regardless of what the work was at its point of origin, how the work entered the museum collection in this case is as an assemblage of records, documents, ephemera and documentations that was created and curated at the point of acquisition into what visitors would subsequently encounter as the artwork. As Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives at MoMA, points out, 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.49 Thus, curators at the Van Abbemuseum and Reina Sofía started to think of the museum space, in Elligott’s words, as “the archives of the commons,” “reclassifying the museum collection when possible, erasing the classification of ‘work of art,’ and reclassifying everything as archival.”50 This crucial change in the distinction between collection and archive represents a significant step ahead in the recognition of the role of documents, records and documentation in art. For Pip Laurenson, Head of Collection Care Research at Tate, the way in which artworks unfold in the museum in fact forms “part of the history of the work” because it shows “the route of a work through a museum.” In referring to records managers’ practice of “continuum theory,” Laurenson notes how 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.51 It is the history of documents, records and artworks that documentation can trace, thus offering crucial insight into the ontology of the work as an assemblage rather than just a material entity. Here I hope to have shown that existing debates about the relationship between performance and documentation are grounded in “lifecycle models,” looking at phases like creation, use (i.e., performance), modification (i.e., restaging) and disposal (i.e., preservation) as a linear model.52 A continuum model, often used in the context of digital preservation, does not distinguish between “active life” and “end-of-active life”53 and rather considers preservation (and therefore also documentation) as part of the active life of an object. Looking at performance through continuum

96  Gabriella Giannachi

theory, we can see that performance within the museum might be looked at as an assemblage, encompassing an event that usually took place (or was fabricated) in a different space and time as well as the records, documents and ephemera that mark its life in different venues, with different publics and interpretations over a period of time. It is the documentation of these life journeys, showing the lifetime of an artwork, which I here called assemblages, which are both past- and future-facing, that museums need to exhibit and preserve to respect the complexity of the works artists are currently cocreating with curators, participants, technologists, researchers and, of course, past, current and future audiences.

Notes 1 I acknowledge the AHRC for funding AH/M004228/1 and the EPSRC and Horizon for funding EP/G065802/1. 2 Rebecca Schneider, “Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001): 100–108. 3 Toni Sant, ed., Documenting Performance: The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017), 1. 4 Gabriella Giannachi, Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016). 5 See Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 6 See Thomas Nail, “What Is an Assemblage?” SubStance 46, no. 1 (2017): 21–37. 7 Ibid., 22. 8 Ibid., 23. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 DeLanda, Assemblage Theory, 9. 12 Ibid., 10. 13 Ibid., 13. 14 Ibid., 19, italics in the original. 15 Ibid., 20. 16 Ibid. 17 Lynn Hershman Leeson, interview by Gabriella Giannachi, 29 August 2015, private archive. 18 See Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye, Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 19 Kelli Dipple, “Reasons for Acquiring,” Lynn Hershman Leeson, PC 10.4, A31490, Tate Archive. 20 Kelli Dipple, “Lynn Hershman Leeson Notes,” email to Frances Morris, 9 July 2009, PC 10.4, A31490, Tate Archive. 21 See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 22 See Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 11–18; Barbara Clausen, ed., After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 2007); and Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): 1–10.

How Records and Documents Become Art  97













98  Gabriella Giannachi

Bibliography Askew, L. “Joan Jonas, pre-acquisition action form,” n.d., PC10.1, A30406, Tate Archive. Auslander, Philip. “The Performativity of Performance Documentation.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): 1–10. Bacile, R. “Re: Jonas in form for June 08 CC,” email to Karin Hignett and Lucy Askew, 22 May 2008, PC10.1, A30406, Tate Archive. Bishop, Janet, Corey Keller, and Sarah Roberts, eds. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: 75 Years of Looking Forward. San Francisco: SFMOMA, 2009. Clausen, Barbara, ed. After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art. Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 2007. Crimp, Douglas, ed. Joan Jonas: Scripts and Descriptions 1968–1982. Berkeley: University Art Museum, University of California, 1983. Daneri, Anna, and Cristina Natalicchio, eds. Joan Jonas. Milan: Charta, 2007. DeLanda, Manuel. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, 1988. Dipple, Kelli. “Lynn Hershman Leeson Notes,” email to Frances Morris, 09 July 2009, PC 10.4, A31490, Tate Archive. Dipple, Kelli. “Reasons for Acquiring,” Lynn Hershman Leeson, PC 10.4, A31490, Tate Archive. Giannachi, Gabriella. Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016. Giannachi, Gabriella, and Nick Kaye. Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Giannachi, Gabriella, Rebecca Sinker, Steve Benford, Acatia Finbow, Helena Hunter, Valentina Ravaglia, Emily Pringle, and Tony Glover. “The Cartography Project: Towards a Relational Form of Documentation, the Case of Participatory Art Practices in Museums and Art Galleries.” In Digital Cultural Heritage, edited by Horst Kremers, 315–329. Cham: Springer, 2019. Giannachi, Gabriella, and Jonah Westerman, eds. Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018. Hershman Leeson, Lynn. Interview by Gabriella Giannachi, 29 August 2015, private archive. Jonas, Joan. Interview by Karin Schneider. BOMB Magazine, 1 July 2010. https:// bombmagazine.org/articles/joan-jonas/. Jones, Amelia. “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation.” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 11–18. Lagos, Nikolaos, Simon Waddington and Jean-Yves Vion-Dury. “On the Preservation of Evolving Digital Content: The Continuum Approach and Relevant Metadata Models.” In Metadata and Semantics Research, edited by Emmanouel Garoufallou, Richard J. Hartley and Panorea Gaitanou, 15–26. Cham: Springer, 2015. Laity, K. A. “Joan Jonas’s ‘The Juniper Tree’ Exhibition.” K. A. Laity, accessed 12 August 2022. https://kalaity.com/2010/06/12/double-bitchbuzztea-and-fairy-tales/.

How Records and Documents Become Art  99 Nail, Thomas. “What Is an Assemblage?” SubStance 46, no. 1 (2017): 21–37. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Sanders, Jay, with J. Hoberman. Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970–1980. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2013. Sant, Toni, ed. Documenting Performance: The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017. Schneider, Rebecca. “Performance Remains.” Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001): 100–108. Smith, Valerie, ed. Joan Jonas: Five Works. New York: Queens Museum of Art, 2003. Tate. “Cartography Research Project.” Accessed 28 July 2021. https://www. tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/tate-research-centre-lear ning/ cartography-research-project. van de Vall, Renée, Hanna Hölling, Tatja Scholte, and Sanneke Stigter. “Reflections on a Biographical Approach to Contemporary Art Conservation.” In ICOM-CC 16th Triennial Conference Preprints, Lisbon, 19–23 September 2011, edited by Janet Bridgland. Paris: International Council of Museums, 2011. Available online at http://www.hannahoelling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/ Reflections_on_a_Biographical_Approach_t.pdf. Accessed 28 July 2021.

6

Performance Documentation Ephemerality, Temporality, Authenticity Philip Auslander

It has become commonplace to assert that performances, as live events, cannot be adequately documented, or cannot be documented at all, or that performance documentation is at least highly problematic.1 Many critiques of performance documentation are premised on the belief that ephemerality is the key defining characteristic of performance—that it is in performance’s nature to disappear and that to force it to remain through reproduction is to violate its very being. However, in recent years, the primacy of performance’s ephemerality has been repeatedly called into question through arguments that generally take one of two approaches. The first approach is to argue that performance is not ephemeral, in that it inevitably leaves something behind in addition to an audience’s retained memory of the experience. Diana Taylor classifies performance’s remnants into the two categories mentioned in the title of her influential text The Archive and the Repertoire. In the archive, she argues, reside the tangible artifacts of performance that serve as primary sources for traditional inquiry: “documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to change.”2 Whereas it might be said that the archive enacts institutional memory, Taylor explains that “the repertoire enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non-reproducible knowledge.”3 Taylor thus posits that the very aspects of performance considered to disappear persist as bodily practices and are therefore recoverable and reproducible. She maps the idea of the live onto that of the repertoire by arguing that the allegedly ephemeral aspects of performance can only be reproduced through performance rather than documentation: The live performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive. A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is part of the repertoire).4 In my book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, I argue at length against such binary thinking when it comes to the question of the live and DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-9

Performance Documentation  101

the reproduced, and I favor perceiving the playback of a recording, for instance, as a performance in its own right, an idea that I have reiterated many times in various writings.5 Here, I simply ask what I see as a commonsense question: if I seek to recover a gesture or movement associated with a particular kind of performance and if that gesture or movement is available to me on a video, in what sense am I not accessing the repertoire if I learn the movement from the video rather than through live body-to-body transmission? The argument that whereas the movement recorded on the video belongs to the repertoire, the video itself is part of the archive assumes a questionable distinction between form and content, a distinction that has become increasingly untenable in light of contemporary performance and archival practices. For example, since 2012, the BMW Tate Live Performance Room at Tate Modern in London has presented performances that are accessible to their audiences only through online streaming. Although the performances take place in a room at the museum at specific times and are streamed live, no audience shares the physical space with the performers. The same stream that one can watch live is captured and becomes the documented version of the performance. The only differences between experiencing the live stream and the captured stream lie in the knowledge that one is seeing the performance as it is happening and in the ability to chat online with others watching it and to participate in a question-and-answer session after the performance. However, if we limit our consideration to the actual performance, the live experience and the archived experience are identical, radically challenging any distinction between a performance as content and its documentation as a way of reifying the content.6 Rebecca Schneider has also pointed out that Taylor’s distinction between the archive and the repertoire fails to escape binary logic: “The parsing of discourse as belonging to the archive on the one hand and non-discourse as the realm of performance on the other replicates the very gnarled bind Taylor’s book simultaneously works, so very productively, to trouble.”7 I share Schneider’s positive assessment of Taylor’s questioning of the idea that performance simply disappears and derives its power from disappearance. She agrees with Taylor that the performing body can be seen as a “recording machine” through which the supposedly ephemeral aspects of performance are preserved, but Schneider resists Taylor’s bifurcation of the way performance remains into the two categories of the artifactual (the archive) and the corporeal (the repertoire).8 For Schneider, performance is intrinsically something that troubles these categories, not by transcending them but by making the distinction between them permanently irresolvable. When we approach performance not as that which disappears (as the archive expects), but as both the act of remaining and a means of reappearance and “reparticipation” (though not a metaphysic of presence), we are almost immediately forced to admit that remains do not

102  Philip Auslander

have to be isolated to the document, to the object, to bone versus flesh. Here the body […] becomes a kind of archive and host to a collective memory […]. This body, given to performance, is here engaged with disappearance chiasmically—not only disappearing but resiliently eruptive, remaining through performance like so many ghosts at the door marked “disappeared.” In this sense, performance becomes itself through messy and eruptive re-appearance. It challenges, via the performative trace, any neat antimony between appearance and disappearance, or presence and absence, through the basic repetitions that mark performance as indiscreet, non-original, relentlessly citational, and remaining.9 In characterizing performance in terms of “basic repetitions” and as “non-original” and “relentlessly citational,” Schneider questions the understanding of performances as singular, nonrepeatable acts, an understanding that often goes hand in hand with the idea that they cannot be meaningfully documented. The second kind of argument against the notion that ephemerality is intrinsic to performance takes the position that precisely the documentation of performance makes it not ephemeral. This approach generally assumes that the performance experience of the initial, physically present audience, if there was one, cannot be privileged as definitive in a context in which most people will come to know the performance through documentation and reproduction. As Frazer Ward puts it, Generally speaking, then, in relation to presence, viewer activation, and duration, we have to allow that performance art does not only happen when and where it happens. And given the importance of its documentation […] it is a viable claim that the afterlife of performance is as important as the initial moment, insofar as that is when and where its meanings unfold, and that is where it generates transformations of the audience that are not strictly event-reliant.10 Ward’s statement that “performance art does not only happen when and where it happens” implies that it also happens at other times and in other places (much the way the performances in the BMW Tate Live Performance Room happen as both live streams to be experienced at a set time and captured ones that can be experienced at any time). This understanding suggests that the performance experienced through documentation is the performance, not just a secondary reproduction of it. Henry Sayre clearly states the means by which the performance happens apart from its live instantiation: “Since these objects [performance documents] are the means by which the work’s larger audience is addressed—the means by which the art makes contact with the community at large—the audience must always reinvent the performance for itself ” in its own place and time.11

Performance Documentation  103

Since we always experience documented performances in our present, documentation is not some sort of device for time travel that allows us to go back to the original moment of performance. When I listen to recordings from Woodstock, watch Brian De Palma’s 1970 film of the Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69, or look at photos of Chris Burden presumably being shot (Shoot, 1971), these events are reactivated12—or restaged, so to speak—in my living room or study. Even though I know these events occurred at another time and in another place, I experience them as performances in the here and now, with myself as audience. However, even as I argue for an understanding of performance documentation that emphasizes its ability to provide its audience with an experience in the present moment, I am mindful of the need to honor a performance document’s connection to the past. After all, even if the document does not provide access to an originary event that exists meaningfully apart from its representations, its connection to the past, the performance’s historical context, is important and probably prompted our interest in the document in the first place. Even though I experience Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void now as I would have in 1960, from the photograph, the fact that the photograph was made in that particular year is a crucial part of my understanding of the work. My thoughts on this subject depart from a premise similar to Frazer’s and Sayre’s. My approach to performance documentation is rooted chiefly in pragmatism. It is quite obvious to me that we regularly rely on documentation of one sort or another to give us a sense of performances that are not immediately available to us in live form. This pragmatism undoubtedly stems partly from my background in theater. If it were not possible to achieve a sense of what it was like to experience a past theatrical production from the documentary evidence (sometimes very scanty) that it left behind, the project of theater history would come to a grinding halt. Any discussion concerning performances that are not directly available to us depends on there being some kind of record to which we can refer so as to construct a common understanding of the event under consideration. Without such an understanding, no conversation is possible. I define performance documentation very broadly, to include not just documentation produced in the context of the art world but also the full range of commercial recordings (including books, films, television programs, and so on) of theatrical, musical, art, dance, and other kinds of performances. We engage with performance documentation not only in the contexts of art making and academic research but quite regularly in the course of daily life. As I pointed out in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, there is statistical evidence that most people, at least in the United States, experience most genres of performed art in what could be called “documented forms” far more regularly than as live performances.13 For this reason, if no other, to insist on the primacy of the live experience seems quixotic at best.

104  Philip Auslander

If I want to learn about a performance of any kind that I have not seen or heard, recall details of one I have seen, or communicate information about a performance to others (e.g., my students or the community for whom I post things on social media), the first thing I do is look for some kind of record of it, whether in the form of a still photograph, film, video, or written account. I have likened the activity of examining the available shards of information about a performance to the work of an archaeologist studying an archaeological record. An archaeologist […] seeks to construct a sense of what these events were, what they were about, what it was like to have seen them, by digging into the artifacts they throw off. These artifacts—curatorial and artist’s statements, [critics’ analyses and reviews,] photographs, videos—themselves have various relationships to the [events]: whereas some are conceptual and preceded the actual events, others are documentary and record what happened.14 While I certainly recognize that the experience I obtain from my examinations of the archaeological record is not the same experience I would have had by participating in a live event, I still understand it as an experience of the performance. I do not carefully frame the experience of examining a performance document as an experience of the document only, to be understood as separate from and not necessarily related to an experience of the performance itself. If anything, I and, I believe, most people who use recordings and documents to experience performances—whether performance art, rock concerts, or any other genre of performance— operate on the assumption that one can gain usable information about a performance and come to a valid understanding of it on the basis of its documentation. That said, for documenting performances, it is not self-evident that video or film, time-based audiovisual media that utilize moving images, are inherently superior to still photography, which remains the most common means. For one thing, still images are not just still. A still image, particularly of a performance, which entails an unfolding action of some kind, either can evoke what came before and after the particular moment depicted or stand as an encapsulation of the entire action. Dance photographer Lois Greenfield suggests the first possibility when she discusses the questions her images raise in a viewer’s mind: ‘Where are they coming from? Where are they going?’ Or even, ‘How is he going to land without breaking his neck?’ It intrigues me that in 1/500th of a second I can allude to past and future moments even if these are only imagined.15 In reference to the latter possibility, Koral Ward writes that motion picture film editor Walter Murch would select one frame from each cinematic

Performance Documentation  105

sequence to represent it, saying that “each of these single frames of film [contains] an essential kernel of the whole sequence of action,” from which the action can be extrapolated.16 The still image remains still only when it is not beheld. As soon as someone looks at it, that person may well perceive the image not as an isolated and suspended moment but as part of a sequence of action that tells us something about the whole action. Any claim that time-based media are the best means of capturing performance depends on stable binary distinctions between movement and stillness, past and present, and time-based and seemingly timeless media. Schneider challenges these shibboleths in a discussion of the presence of statuary in Greek and Roman theaters. I am interested in troubling the distinction between live arts and the still arts to which we have been habituated. The niches for statuary and the statues themselves can remind us quite fulsomely that the “live” occurred and occurs not as distinct from but in direct relation to the place of the frozen or stilled or suspended—yet arguably observant—statues. The live, so often composed in the striking of stills, takes place in the place of the still; and the still takes place live.17 Schneider’s last point is crucial: because our encounter with any image or document necessarily takes place in the present, the still image, whether document or statue, does not belong only to the moment in time that it represents or in which it was produced. Through our encounter with it, an image or record from the past becomes part of our present and also gestures toward the future. As Koral Ward puts it, What comes to presence [in a still photograph] is brought to the fore, something “stands before us,” though not present in time. An event stilled and held constant in the “now” shows us what was “then,” but this “then” is always tempered by the present and personal perspective. Neither does this “then” remain identical to its own moment in the “now,” it gains significance and meaning as we carry it with us into the future.18 In other words, a photo that documents a performance does not simply freeze the event in its past moment. The very act of freezing is undertaken at a specific point in time as a gesture toward a future audience so that the “now” of the moment at which the photograph was taken is also a future “then.” When the future audience experiences the performance from its documentation, the audience’s experience takes place in the present (which is the future anticipated in the moment of documentation) but also has reference to the past (the moment at which the performance was documented). The moment at which the photograph is beheld refers to the past and is thus the future anticipated in the past, but it also constitutes an event in the present. This is the “complex temporality”19 of performance documentation.

106  Philip Auslander

Although the term performance documentation, taken at face value, implies a fairly straightforward relationship between an event that once existed apart from its documentation and an artifact that represents the event in some medium, the possibilities for what is called “documentation” are actually much broader and more complex. I have proposed two categories of performance documentation, the documentary and the theatrical.20 Whereas artifacts in the first category adhere to the definition just stated, those in the second category are distinguished by the fact that the performance they record has no existence independent of its recording. Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), Haley Newman’s work, and the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) are cases in point since each provides its respective beholders with the experience of a performance that never took place in the way the photograph or record presents it.21 I am certain that this second category would not count as performance documentation at all for some. Ultimately, however, the difference between the documentary and the theatrical is much less substantial than it may appear. Consider the status of the initial audience with respect to documentation. Whereas sociologists and anthropologists who discuss performance stipulate that the presence of the audience and the interaction of performers and audience is a crucial part of any performance, the tradition of performance art documentation is based on a different set of assumptions. It is very rare that the documentation of an audience approaches the same level of detail as the documentation of the art action. The purpose of most performance art documentation, including films and other archival materials, is to make the artist’s work available to a larger audience, not to capture the performance as an “interactional accomplishment” to which a specific audience and a specific set of performers coming together in specific circumstances make equally significant contributions. For the most part, scholars and critics use eyewitness accounts to ascertain the characteristics of the performance, not the audience’s contribution to the event, and discussions of how a particular audience perceived a particular performance at a particular time and place and of what that performance meant to that audience are rare. In this sense, performance art documentation participates in the fine art tradition of the reproduction of works, rather than the ethnographic tradition of capturing events.22 I submit that the presence of the initial audience has no real importance to the performance as an entity whose continued life is through its documentation because our usual concern as consumers of such documentation is to re-create the artist’s work, not the total interaction. As a thought experiment, consider what would happen were we to learn that there actually was no audience for Chris Burden’s Shoot, that he simply performed the piece in an empty gallery and documented it. I suggest that such a revelation would make no difference at all to our perception of the performance, our understanding of it as an artwork and an object

Performance Documentation  107

of interpretation and evaluation, and our assessment of its historical significance. In other words, the presence of an initial audience may be important to performers, and being present at an event may be important to spectators, but these things are merely incidental to the performance as documented. In the end, the only significant difference between the documentary and theatrical modes of performance documentation is ideological: the former mode’s assumption that an event is staged primarily for an immediately present audience and that its documentation is a secondary, supplementary record of an event that has its own prior integrity. I argue that what makes an event a work of performance art is not the initial presence of an audience but its framing as performance through the performative act of documenting it as such. Considering philosopher David Davies’s discussion of Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) allows me to pursue these questions further. One of Acconci’s descriptions of the piece reads, “FOLLOW DIFFERENT PERSON EVERY DAY UNTIL PERSON ENTERS PRIVATE PLACE.”23 Davies writes, Our access to what Acconci did is limited to a few photographs which […] were staged after the completion of the performance.24 Here the performance-event in question arguably enters, as vehicle, into the identity of the work only by instantiating the type of performance characterized in the performative constraints set out by Acconci. The photographic record serves only to imaginatively enliven the performance for the receiver, to help her to imagine what the performance was like in virtue of satisfying those constraints. The use of photography in such a minimal documentary role is understood by the receiver as indicating that visible features of the actual performance not preserved on film are not important for the appreciation of the work. The photographs serve to isolate those features of the performance-event, as vehicle, which bear upon the articulation of an artistic content.25 By acknowledging, as wholly unproblematic, that Acconci’s photographs were staged after the fact, Davies does us the great favor of implicitly stipulating that performance documentation does not have to capture a specific instantiation—or even any instantiation—of the performance in question. At a single stroke, Davies takes off the table the questions of documentation’s fidelity to an original event and its authenticity as a record of the event by positing that the document’s relationship to the work, rather than any particular instantiation of the work, is the crucial one. Whereas Davies does not take the next step of suggesting the possibility that the performance staged in Acconci’s documentation never took place at all, Martha Buskirk does, pointing out that the power of such works lies partly “in the challenge they pose about whether to believe the artists’ claims to have done what they describe.”26

108  Philip Auslander

Discussing Acconci’s performance alongside other related ones, Buskirk asks, “Does it matter whether a photograph actually documents the activity that it represents?” She replies, “In a sense it is not important whether these photographs are fact or fiction, actual documents or staged, because this is how each artist has decided to represent the work.”27 Her position is similar to that of Davies, who suggests that the fundamental purpose of performance documentation is not to record a specific event or to verify that it actually occurred but to articulate “an artistic content” and enable an audience “to imagine what the performance was like.” (Acconci’s documentation of Following Piece confounds the distinction between document and notation, in the same way as Nick Kaye argues site-specific art does.28 Acconci’s rendition of the performance as a work of visual art functions equally well as a record of the performance or a set of instructions, with illustrations, for executing the performance, and we can imagine what the performance would be like on the basis of either.) More problematic is Davies’s characterization of Acconci’s “use of photography […] in a minimal documentary role.” In another discussion, Davies argues that Francis Alÿs’s 1997 Patriotic Tales cannot be considered a performance work because the video that purports to document it has been digitally manipulated to make it seem as if something happened when it never did.29 Davies thus implies a distinction between using a medium in a minimal documentary way that is more or less transparent and using a medium in a way that produces the reality it supposedly represents, a distinction that maps onto my categories of documentary and theatrical representations of performances, respectively. The problem is that the line between these uses of a photographic medium, between straightforward recording and distorting manipulation, like the line between the documentary and the theatrical, is much less distinct than it may appear. It is well known, for example, that Klein constructed his famous Leap by having two photographers take two different photographs: one of Klein leaping out the window, with friends holding a tarpaulin below to catch him; the other of the empty street in which this event took place. These two images were composited in the darkroom to make it look as if Klein jumped without the benefit of a safety net. Based on what he says about Alÿs’s piece, I am fairly certain Davies would not consider Klein’s Leap to be a performance work and therefore would not consider the photograph of it to be a performance document. I hypothesize that he would characterize this image the way he does Alÿs’s video, by saying that Klein’s piece is a photographic work, not a performance, even though performed actions are among the raw materials the artist shaped into the work. But on what ground could such an analysis rest? Since Davies admits staged representations of performances into the category of performance

Performance Documentation  109

documents and since it is not verifiable, from the documentation, that Acconci ever actually performed Following Piece, the difference between these two works cannot derive from the fact that one really happened and the other did not. Klein claimed that the photograph of his leap was intended as a re-creation of an action he had executed earlier without benefit of documentation.30 Acconci advances a similar claim by presenting staged photographs to document something he had done earlier. In both cases, it is impossible to verify that the earlier incidents re-created in the documents ever took place. Davies’s analysis depends entirely on the notion that Acconci produced the representation of his performance by using the medium of photography in a “minimal, documentary” way, while Klein’s photographic image resulted from technological manipulation. Klein could have produced a similar image using photography in a “minimal” way, by simply framing the image so that the men holding the tarpaulin could not be seen. In this case, the image would seem to meet Davies’s requirements for performance documentation: it would not involve technical manipulation after the performance, and it would allow a beholder to imagine what the performance was like. The image would also be “understood by the receiver as indicating that visible features of the actual performance not preserved on film [in this case, the men with the tarpaulin] are not important for the appreciation of the work.” The photograph would “serve to isolate those features of the performance-event […] which bear upon the articulation of an artistic content.” Since, as both Davies and Buskirk suggest, the question of whether or not the document represents an actual occurrence is moot, what matters is the function of the document as a vehicle through which an artist communicates an “artistic content” to an audience, and this communication is something that Acconci’s and Klein’s photographs do equally well. From my perspective, the limitation that Davies’s approach shares with most discussions of performance documentation is a near-exclusive focus on the ontological dimensions of the subject, an overemphasis on the relationship between the performance and its document and on the accuracy and authenticity of the latter’s representation of the former. I have credited Davies with the insight that performance documentation does not have to be a record of a specific instantiation of a performance work in order to provide an audience with a sense of the work, but his insistence that the document has to be an authentic, unmanipulated record of whatever it represents (even if Acconci’s photographs are not of an actual performance of Following Piece, they still have to be documentary images that testify to the actuality of whatever they do show) reinstates the primacy of the ontological connection at one remove. Ultimately, the ontological relationship between a performance and its documentation is far less interesting and significant than the phenomenological relationship between the document and the beholder who experiences the performance from it.31

110  Philip Auslander

Notes







Performance Documentation  111

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

description of what it represents. See Page Benkowski, “Seeing the Unseen: Reading the Performance Document” (2012), 19–20. Available at yumpu, accessed 8 July 2022, https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/11317378/ seeing-the-unseen-reading-the-performance-document. This observation is intended only to mark disciplinary differences, not to suggest that the ethnographic bent of at least some versions of performance studies provides a superior perspective on performance than the fine art tradition embedded in art history. Vito Acconci, “Following Piece, 1969,” Museum of Modern Art, accessed 8 July 2022, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/148165?locale=en. For a discussion of the evidence that Acconci staged the “documentary” photographs of Following Piece, see Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 232. David Davies, Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 214. Buskirk, Contingent Object, 221. Ibid., 223. Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation (London: Routledge, 2000), 218. Davies, Philosophy, 216–217. Yves Klein, “Leap into the Void, 1960,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed 8 July 2022, http://www.metmuseum. org/toah/works-of-art/1992.5112/. For a phenomenological account of the relationship between the performance document and its beholder, see Auslander, Reactivations, 55–67.

Bibliography Acconci, Vito. “Following Piece, 1969.” Museum of Modern Art. Accessed 8 July 2022. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/148165?locale=en. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2023. Auslander, Philip. “The Liveness of Watching Online: Performance Room.” In Perform, Experience, Re-Live: BMW Tate Live Program, edited by Cecilia Wee, 112–125. London: Tate Modern, 2016. Auslander, Philip. “Pictures of an Exhibition.” In Between Zones: On the Representation of the Performative and the Notation of Movement, edited by Raphael Gygax and Heike Munder, 269–277. Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2011. Auslander, Philip. Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217– 251. New York: Schocken, 1969. Benkowski, Page. “Seeing the Unseen: Reading the Performance Document.” 2012. Available at yumpu, accessed 8 July 2022, https://www.yumpu.com/ en/document/read/11317378/seeing-the-unseen-reading-the-performancedocument. Buskirk, Martha. The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

112  Philip Auslander Davies, David. Philosophy of the Performing Arts. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Ewing, William A. “An Interview with Lois Greenfield.” In Breaking Bounds: The Dance Photography of Lois Greenfield, 99–110. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1992. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Benjamin’s Aura.” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 336–375. Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation. London: Routledge, 2000. Klein, Yves. “Leap into the Void, 1960.” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accessed 8 July 2022. http://www.metmuseum. org/toah/works-of-art/1992.5112/. Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Ward, Frazer. No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012. Ward, Koral. Augenblick: The Concept of the “Decisive Moment” in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

7

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History Barbara Büscher

It is a well-known and little-questioned fact that much of the information about, representations of and the historiography of performance art is conveyed in book form. Books not only make up a large part of the material collected (or to be collected) on performance practice and performance art and provide a basis for historical research on the subject but can also—and this is the aspect I would like to discuss here—be regarded as a form of archive themselves. Books are, moreover, holders of collections that are relatively easy to access and transport. In recent years, explorations of the complementary nature of a live performance and its media recordings have given rise to a new understanding of the accessibility of performance for historical research and of the transparency of archival processes. But this has not—as far as I can see—led to a discussion of the constitutive role of books in these processes.1

The Mediality of Artifacts Generated by the Archiving of Performance Art In the research project “Records and Representations: Media and Constitutive Systems in Archiving Performance-Based Arts,”2 conducted in cooperation with Franz Anton Cramer, we placed the focus of our investigations on the mediality of artifacts, whether they be understood as documents, traces or recordings.3 Each of these terms, denoting artifacts in archival processes, points to different ways of approaching artifacts as objects of research, starting from the premise that they are media transformations with significantly varying technical, aesthetic and discursive parameters. To understand the specific reference qualities of any medium, it is important to factor in the mode of recording and other steps in the transformation—e.g., analog or digital image processing, montage/editing, colorization and photocomposition, etc.—as well as the historical standards of technology and design by which they were made. If, for instance, we think of the seminal photographs of performances of the 1960s and 1970s, which are so important for accessing their history, it is evident that a predominantly black-and-white format has become inscribed as a specific aesthetic in the readability of these artifacts. In 2007, the British DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-10

114  Barbara Büscher

art theorist and photographer Alice Maude-Roxby curated an exhibition titled Live Art on Camera in the Hansard Gallery, Southampton, for which she researched the relationship between performance photographs and general contemporary photographic practice. She summarized her observations in the exhibition catalog as follows: Within the photographers’ archives I often noted surprising similarities within image compositions as well as how the body had been framed across several portfolios of work, widening a sense of how photographic styles and conventions are characteristic of broader cultural and temporal influences. Diverse portfolios were sometimes linked by an evident photographic style, connecting the performance photographs to entirely different image contexts. At other times there seemed little stylistic connection but rather social or cultural common ground adding to an understanding of the underlying conceptual content of a performance and its relationship to contemporary culture.4 I quote this as just one illustration of the extent to which these aspects—the technical and the aesthetic, in their peculiar historical constellations— “coauthor” such processes of media transformation. Or think of the elaborated discourse on the documentary in film and video, of the standards in documentary film and how they are transcended—and how the documentary film has become sedimented in film history as an independent genre.5 Any exploration of the crossreferential relationship between the filmic “document” and the enactment or performance must factor in this discourse. At the same time, it emerges that the artifacts resulting from these transformations can change in status from document to work, and vice versa.6 The impact of exhibitions and the accompanying catalogs on this status is considered in the summarized reflections on VALIE EXPORT in the corresponding section below in this chapter. The process of transformation can also be read in both directions: from a performance to a media artifact and from an artifact to a performance. Recordings as scores, as concepts and as collections of images and sounds can precede the enactment or performance and/or can be received as accompanying material. This aspect is especially important if we regard performance not as an act of staging, as a one-off event, but as a process in which the various stages of artistically exploring a subject, by means of specific materials and concepts, are integral parts of the work. It also emerges that statements about past events can only be made on the premise that these diverse processes of transformation are complementary.7 As the various media processes take place and are ordered and arranged in synchrony or in conflict with each other, they provide mutual extension and enhancement and make the artifacts of performance history

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History  115

readable on new and different levels. (Re)combining them is what opens “fluid access” to the events—that is, access that facilitates evermore new methods of appropriation beyond the reconstructive approach. These are the main points, in brief, of a program of inquiry which includes the following reflections and observations on book as a medium, a specific system of arrangement and an archival space.

Book as Archival Space and a Medium of Art Processes The typographer and exhibition architect Walter Nikkels placed the two terms “archive” and “space” on the cover of a thin booklet of his lectures, referring to book as a medium. In an endless series of catalogs, we document visual art worldwide. In this way, an immense archive is built in museums and libraries, a kind of “shadow museum” in a reproduced form. All these publications write a second history, that of today’s art business and the question of how we deal with art.8 He describes books as a place where art processes, performances and exhibitions are stored and documented; as that which remains; and as something that promises more than a website does, for instance, thanks to their design, their weight and their claim to represent. At least that is what the continuing widespread appreciation of books in the art world would seem to suggest. The book as an art medium is “something which remains” —of the temporary configuration of an exhibition or an enactment of any kind, including performances and installations. And it offers relatively easy access to the history of performative events. Its mediality comprises a specific structure that arranges the collected material and directs our access to it. If and how this structure makes the implicit narrative readable, or highlights it, is a question I will now go on to consider, along with these books’ status between documentation and work (presentations). In her major study, Esthétique du livre d’artiste, 1960–1980, the French art historian Anne Mœglin-Delcroix explored the book-medium’s affinity to collections: the book assembles objects or images in the form of reproductions and enables them to be collected, stored, identified and classified on its pages.9 Within the homogenous structure of the double page, individual “collector’s items” are stored as if on shelves or in boxes. The serial and sequential character of the book’s arrangement implies a certain temporality of reading; to turn or leaf through the pages is to observe an implicit instruction to follow the narrative.10 The reader (or user) can, however, interrupt or reverse the linear sequence of the pages and their layout and can prolong or cut short the time spent on the haptic activity of leafing through as well as on reading and perusing.

116  Barbara Büscher

Building upon this formal similarity with collections, I propose to understand books as archival spaces, in which artifacts derived from artists’ works are made accessible following media transformation. I would like to share some observations on books as a medium of performance art and as a specific archival space by focusing on examples from two phases: a series of publications from the 1970s and two recently published monographs on major female artists whose oeuvres also encompass performance art—VALIE EXPORT and Joan Jonas. In the last section, to these comments on publications concerning and circulated in the visual arts sphere, I would like to add some observations on two workbooks from the field of theater and dance performance: the Wooster Group Work Book (2007) by Andrew Quick and the three-part series A Choreographer’s Score by Bojana Cvejić and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (2012–2014).

A Series of Publications from the 1970s: Source Materials of the Contemporary Arts11 Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–1973, one of the most important sources on the early works of this dance and film artist/choreographer, was published in 1974 in Halifax, Canada, as part of a series of books curated and produced by Kasper König at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). In the early 1970s, König embarked on a lecture tour of various art colleges and universities to find backing for his publication project, conceived as an alternative to exhibitions for providing access to the work and working methods of contemporary artists who had left the traditional visual arts genres. He struck lucky at the NSCAD, which not only employed him to launch the series but also made funding available so that the artists could work on the books on-site and simultaneously be present at the college, making contacts and contributing to discussions. The Nova Scotia Series as it became known, also titled Source Materials of the Contemporary Arts, was not intended as an artistic exploration of books as an object but was primarily concerned with making artistic processes transparent—ranging from statements of objectives and conceptual drafts to materials used, via performances and presentations. And it was about doing this work in conjunction with the artists. One of the first volumes in the series to be published was Claes Oldenburg: Raw Notes—Documents and Scripts of the Performances (1973). Machinetyped script and handwritten notes, supplemented by drawings, give the book a workshop character. It was followed, a short time later, by the previously mentioned volume Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–1973, which Benjamin Buchloh so described: Work 1961–73 traces, on one level, the development of a body of work from early solo dances to evening-long dances for large groups (both of which were to prove extraordinarily influential), to a more recent

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History  117

work that investigates narrative, film, slide projections, spoken and projected texts, and objects. […] The story is told through various kinds of documentation: photos, scripts, facsimiles of notebook pages, concert programs, etc. Also included are theoretical analyses, commentaries, and reminiscences written at different points in her career (and from very different points of view).12 Another volume published in 1974 was Simone Forti: Handbook in Motion, which “includes drawings, ‘dance reports’ (short descriptions of events whose movement made a deep impression on the author’s memory), and documentary materials such as scores, descriptions, and photographic records of performances.”13 Steve Reich, Donald Judd and Hans Haacke are also among the artists who, in very different ways, published, in the series, materials showing their work processes, documentations of their works and thoughts on the art system. In 1979, Dan Graham, who had supported the series’ launch from the start, authored Dan Graham: Video – Architecture – Television, edited by Benjamin Buchloh. Lastly, I would like to mention the volume by Michael Snow, the film artist, who is best known for his structural film experiments of the 1960s. Cover to Cover, published in 1975, is, as Buchloh puts it, conceived […] as an original work in book form. The book is totally photographic. The methodology employed is that the other side of the page is always the other side: if one page shows a face, the other side shows the back of the head. […] The two-sidedness often consists of both inside and outside spaces.14 While most of the books in the series use the book-medium more or less in the classic sense as a form of documentation, Snow overlays the book’s specific mediality with that of photograph and so makes the book medium itself the subject. This approach to book publishing, involving intensive, conceptual artist participation, arose in the 1960s and 1970s partly from the changing idea of working methods and a new understanding of artwork. But it also arose from ideas of democratization and accessibility. The curator and art theorist Lucy Lippard—known chiefly for her book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973)—summarized the development in a text published in 1977: The artist’s book is the product of several art and non-art phenomena of the last decade, among them a heightened awareness of how art (especially the costly ‘precious object’) can be used as a commodity by capitalist society, the new extra-art subject matter and a rebellion against the increasing elitism of the art world and its planned obsolescence.15

118  Barbara Büscher

In 1976, Lippard and associates including Sol LeWitt cofounded Printed Matter, Inc., a “non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’ books and related publications,”16 which still exists today. And there are similar, more recent initiatives that testify to a continuing interest in the connection between art and books, beyond the exhibition catalog or catalog of works.

VALIE EXPORT and Joan Jonas—Access through Catalogs and Monographs I will now consider two comprehensive publications on the works of two major protagonists of performance art, VALIE EXPORT and Joan Jonas, as illustrations of current publications and their readability as “archival constellations.”17 VALIE EXPORT—Archiv is an exhibition catalog produced by the artist in conjunction with the curator Yilmaz Dziewior to accompany the exhibition of the same name at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2011.18 In the Shadow a Shadow—The Work of Joan Jonas is a monograph published by the artist with the art historian and curator Joan Simon in 2015.19 The exhibition catalog and the monograph mark two variants of the book–art marriage; as “artists’ publications,”20 the combination could take many other forms.21 Both the exhibition catalog and the monograph (dedicated to the body of work of one artist or group of artists) are long-standing, well-established publication formats in the art industry. To curators and exhibiting institutions, catalogs are evidence of their activities, to which they attribute independent significance—in terms of impact and relevance—alongside exhibitions. Catalogs open the discursive frame of exhibitions and so provide “future research not only with bio-bibliographic material but also complex ideas and scientific insights.”22 Embedded in this is the list (i.e., the catalog) of exhibited objects, presented works and processes. In this way, the catalog continues to form the basis of documentary representations of the—temporarily accessible—exhibition. To artists, catalogs and monographs are useful for conveying and controlling interpretations of their work, or as in the case of conceptual and performance-based art, for raising its visibility and accessibility.23 So, how are performances and video art works, including the work processes behind them as well as the ways they are presented, portrayed within the structure of a book? How are works from an artist’s oeuvre selected, arranged and ordered within a narrative? VALIE EXPORT—Archiv In 2011–2012, VALIE EXPORT and the curator Yilmaz Dziewior presented a comprehensive and elaborately staged exhibition under the title

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History  119

VALIE EXPORT—Archiv in Kunsthaus Bregenz, accompanied by an eponymous catalog. In the introduction, Dziewior writes, At her solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, VALIE EXPORT is providing for the first time insights into her comprehensive archive that until now has remained inaccessible to the broad public. In 57 large display cases, materials from her archive have been arranged according to works and themes, unfolding a panorama that not only lays out the artist’s multifaceted core oeuvre, but also provides an eloquent account of experimental art from the 1970s through correspondence, newspaper, clips, and texts. […] Her most well-known works such as TAPP und TASTKINO, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik and Body Sign Action are not simply presented separately as autonomous pieces, but in conjunction with the reference materials relevant for their making.24 The catalog VALIE EXPORT—Archiv shows all 57 display cases featured in the exhibition in a threefold way: Firstly, the content (materials on black or white mounts with paper labels showing the date and description of each case) are documented in photographs each covering one doublepage-spread of the catalog. Here, a media transformation takes place, flattening the display case arrangements and turning their spatial organization into the linear one of the large-format pages. Secondly, the contents of the display cases are described in detail in a kind of catalogue raisonée, which also gives the names of the photographers. Lastly, the transcript of an indepth conversation is printed, in which VALIE EXPORT and Yilmaz Dziewior comment on the arrangement and selection of the artifacts in each of the display cases. What makes the catalog, with its combination of material/documents/ preparatory works, accessible to future historical research on the work of VALIE EXPORT? What do the “archival constellations,” as Jürgen Thaler defines the arrangements within the display cases, tell us about the relationship between the creative process, the performance and its documents? How is the difference between archival artifact and artistic work made visible; and is it intended to be made visible at all? Thaler explains the complicated relationship between archival artifact and artistic work, which varies according to what is shown and in which contexts: On closer inspection, however, any sheet from the archive that is raised to visibility connects the corresponding work with the entire invisible archive. It would be far too simple if we declared all archive materials shown in an exhibition to be works of art. The task is rather to negotiate the status of archival items and works of art from case to case. […] The status of the work of art is called into question by the

120  Barbara Büscher

archival item. […] From the interplay of the two different types of material [i.e., archival item and work] a new work, which might be referred to as an archival constellation, emerges from the archive.25 In the display cases of the exhibition, works that have already entered art discourse and the art market are combined with preparatory sketches, notes and scores from the work process as well as contemporary material on the context of the works. The interplay of which Thaler speaks was curated by the artist and arranged and presented in the display cases. The juxtaposition of artifacts suspends each one’s individual status (as work or archival item). The arrangement of the display cases becomes a new, temporary staging of the work. In this sense, Thaler continues, Archival constellations of this kind are snapshots, as it were, of an almost infinite variety of opportunities that have often been tried out by VALIE EXPORT in the context of presentations of her work. […] The constellatory approach can be productively used for the way in which VALIE EXPORT deals with archive materials. To bring an individual document from the archive into an archival constellation (as part of an exhibition or publication) fundamentally changes not only the status of the archive but also that of the corresponding work.26 In the list of works, too, the various components of the “archival constellations” are all described in equal detail; their status varying between archival item and work is, then, treated as ambivalent or undecided. In this regard, the catalog brings one concept, above all, to the fore, which was reflected both in the exhibition’s curatorial focus and the book’s design: the idea that the artist’s control over the interpretations and contextualization of her work, gained by making parts of her archive visible, is precisely what blurs the distinction between artifacts as archival items and artifacts as works. And it sets in motion an ongoing exchange between the artist’s archives and the art market. In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas The monograph comprising works by Joan Jonas of the years 1968–2015 was also published in parallel with an exhibition.27 This heavy volume holds an informative collection of material on the work of an artist who has been equally active in the fields of performance and video/film art and all the variants in between for 50 years. “Migration” and “transformation” or “transmission”28 are key aspects of her works, as the book’s editor, Joan Simon, explains: The fluidity of Jonas’s movement among media—and of her reuse of images, texts, sounds, videos, and props over time—is an integral part

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History  121

of her practice. More than simply extracting objects, images, drawings, and texts from an inventory of these elements, she abstracts and edits them depending on context and changing concerns. Certain videos have functioned both as independent works and as components of performances.29 The key artistic strategies of switching back and forth between media and circulating material, conceptual ideas, narrative fragments, images, objects, scenes and situations—these form the core of the narrative that the book also follows. This aspect of the book’s arrangement is already visible and comprehensible in the list of contents—a first major gain for anyone hoping to explore Joan Jonas’s work in the future. In a more in-depth text, I analyzed the materials and information on each of the individual works or work clusters that are printed in the book and what insights they can give the reader or researcher.30 Here I would like to summarize by just highlighting one aspect of this book that seems especially interesting to me, relating to the question of circulating and recontextualizing material and subject matter: while Jonas’s early performances are portrayed, and considered captured, by a short continuous text describing the action sequence, accompanied by a few photos each, the scripts describing her first “video performances,” are more complex and differently formed. The video performance Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll (1972) is the first work in the book recorded in the form of a written table, consisting of three parallelizing and synchronizing columns, labeled “Performance,” “Video and Film Images” and “Sound.” This demonstrates the precise interplay between the three levels and points out, as Joan Simon explains in her commentary, that “a videographer took part and, following Jonas’s prior instructions, shadowed the artist and focused on details of her actions that were seen in a monitor or in a projection.”31 Here, too, the script acts both as a protocol, in a retrospective view, and as instructions. A side note32 points out that, over the years, Joan Jonas has continued to develop this method of recording or protocolling her works since she first used it in 1971 for a film script she devised with Richard Serra. These scripts are reprinted in the book in full. The script of the video performance The Shape, the Scent, the Feeling of Things (2005–2006), then, comprises the columns “Text,” “Action,” “Video” and “Sound and Lights,” is divided into 16 scenes, and takes up a total of 18 pages of the catalog. It resembles a shot list for a film or stage directions for a play. These scripts offer a very specific form of access to Jonas’s performances. They record in detail the course of the performances and the media used in them but transform everything into written text. In this way, they indicate that the visualization of each performance is to be regarded as its ephemeral/fleeting variant. Or—seen from another perspective—they leave the visualization to the reader’s imagination, supported and guided

122  Barbara Büscher

by a few photos. The “stills” show certain situational constellations but convey little sense of the movement. Meanwhile, using reproductions of photographs in the catalog brings the emblematic nature of the individual photographs to the fore. Most works are illustrated by only a few photographs, but many of these are strikingly large. As the scripts serve equally well as instructions for future performances, and have on occasion already done so—as the information on Mirror Check, for instance, shows—their publication in the catalog raises the question of what status the artist herself attributes to these recordings in relation to the enactments/performances. To summarize, in my view, this initial and partial exploration of book as an archival space for performance art has opened an area of research that offers much to be discovered, especially regarding the mediality of books and the related discourse. But the fact cannot be ignored that all the book examples referenced here—and I think this is symptomatic—are from the field of visual arts. The book, the catalog, etc., as that which remains still has a good reputation and continuing importance in this sphere, which is rooted in a different tradition than theater, the other field where performance takes place. If we consider today’s artistic involvement in and curatorial appropriation of performance history, we find a distinct division along these lines. One branch of performance art is regarded as an integral part of the visual arts and follows its system of production methods, evaluations, work concepts and circulation in museums and exhibitions. The other branch is viewed as an element of the theater and dance scenes and adheres to the corresponding production forms, work concepts, sites and contexts of presentation and other publicizing strategies. In the light of the book’s archival status in the theater/performance context, this general observation raises the question of whether there are any major forms of publication in this field comparable to catalogs in the visual arts.

Workbooks as the Process-Oriented Documentation of Performative-Theatrical Productions Here, I use the term “performative-theatrical productions” to denote works that take place and are received in the context of (post-dramatic) theater and dance. These works circulate within a distribution system that differs from that of the visual arts in several ways. Without going into this difference in depth, there are two areas to consider that determine positions on recording/documentation and their publication in the field of theater/performance/dance. One is the widespread practice of filmic recording, which is obviously considered to be the most suitable mode for the subject of performance, although it is often regarded and

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History  123

used merely as an internal tool. The second is the material published in book form, such as programs, brochures and profiles focusing, for example, on directors or scenographers, published in a theater context by specialist publishing houses and magazines. For the self-presentation of and archive-building on the history of performative formats, however, these provide a less valuable and less systematic mode of accessibility than exhibition catalogs and catalogs of works in the visual arts. That at least is the current observation.33 Below, I will consider two cases from the field of post-dramatic theater and contemporary dance that can serve as examples demonstrating the parameters for informative publications in this field, which support the aspects of archive-building for performance arts in the sense advanced above. Both cases focus on documenting work processes. In this way, they emphasize—with differing clarity—the cooperative aspect of art production in theater as well as the significance of a fluid conception of the work—in these cases, the production/performance or choreography. And they show how widely the (recording and) appropriation of stage material can vary, depending on the views of and access gained by the various people involved in the production. The Wooster Group Work Book The Wooster Group Work Book came out in 2007, edited by Andrew Quick. Following several essays and two monographs, this was the first publication to present extensive material from the archive and the group’s history with the aim of shedding light not only on the group’s working methods but also on the concept of appropriating textual and filmic material in the production process. By then, this internationally influential post-dramatic performance theater group34 had been active for over 30 years. The workbook presents material on five productions by the Wooster Group—Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony, Brace Up!, Fish Story, House/Lights and To You, The Birdie! (Phèdre)—created between 1985 and 2002. Quick describes it as a book of work. It engages, as directly as possible, with how the Wooster Group make their performances. It does not seek to find thematic or theoretical frameworks in order to contextualize and explain their practice, although theories and contexts inevitably ghost throughout the following pages. Rather, this book’s premise is to locate and juxtapose the multiple languages (textual, physical, aural, technological, anecdotal, filmic, televisual and so forth) of the Wooster Group’s practice and history in order that the reader might gain some understanding of the diverse and complex way in which the […] performance pieces […] have been put together.35

124  Barbara Büscher

In line with the working processes documented, the book is arranged into five chapters, each dealing with one production and each supplemented by an interview with Elizabeth LeCompte, the group’s artistic director, or with the participant and actor Kate Valk, or both together. The interviews do not directly comment on the published material but add to it the interviewees’ views on the work processes and the conditions in which they occurred. The material on Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony, for example, is divided into four different, detailed sections: “rehearsals” (24 pages), “video” (3 pages), “set” (1 page) and “performance” (9 pages). The longest section, concerning the rehearsals, includes short excerpts from typewritten, annotated or handwritten scenarios or scores/storyboards by various participants and from different phases and levels of the production. Unfortunately, they cannot be clearly matched to specific phases of development in the working process or indeed the structure of the subsequent performance. Hence the reader gains an impression of the diversity of recordings but no precise idea of the process by which the materials were utilized, nor of the relation between the pages selected for publication and the entirety of the recordings made or the texts and film/TV material used. One aspect is entirely missing: the fact that the creative process comprises a series of decisions—on which material to select and how to order and arrange it—which helps to define the gesture of appropriation and (temporarily) maintain it for the production’s structure. The only complete score included is for Fish Story. This records the performance in a way similar to the tables Joan Jonas devised for her performances, as described above. The categories “text,” “stage” (=stage action), “sound” and “video” are arranged synchronously in four adjacent columns. Combined with photos and a sketch on the set, this provides the reader with a detailed guide. Although Quick outlines the five productions in the introduction in terms of the scene sequences and materials used, as well as the ways they relate to each other and earlier productions by the group, the crucial weakness of the workbook remains that it does not provide access going beyond rather fragmentary and general impressions of the group’s working method. In a review of the book, Johan Callens writes “Due to the fragmentary nature of the book, it is at times difficult to decipher the evidence so that interpretation has to be suspended until more information can be gathered from the interviews and critical essays.”36 To end the book—under the title “Conclusion: Only Pragmatics?”— Quick offers some systemizing and summarizing comments on various aspects of the working methods documented. Among other things, he elucidates the special importance of recording as an aspect of work on productions and in the process of creating performances. This work

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History  125

typically involves the processing of source material—whether it is drawn from classical theater texts, contemporary drama or films and TV series— by re-inscribing, dissecting and rearranging it: Each of the documentary sections is made up of texts, performance scores and choreographies that are the outcome of a constant re-writing, re-scoring ad re-editing. These re-writings, which can be seen in the multiple examples of scribblings, notations, jottings, listings, sketches, in the patchwork of post-it notes and the thick tracery of amendments on performance scores, explicitly mark the temporal development of each work as it is constructed, layer by layer. 37 In this way, the dual character of recording in and for the Wooster Group’s working method emerges: for one, scenic situations and structures are recorded and stored, and secondly, ideas, thoughts and processes are noted down to make them available for further processing: “The documents in this book also reveal how important the activity of documentation is to the Wooster Group’s compositional methodology, how the practices of notation, recording, transcribing and copying are put to use in constructing the work.”38 Making recordings accessible—by various participants and in different media—is not only crucial for the understanding of the work in the sense of performance and production but also for the creative process. It is now 13 years since The Wooster Group Work Book was published and, as far as I know, no further print publications on the group’s work, with a comparable intention and idea of making archive material accessible, have followed.39 The interest in “performance genetics,” defined as “genetic research on the creative processes in theatre, dance, and performance”40 has been articulated in various publications and research projects in recent years. Researching the documentation of creative processes is regarded as an integral part of scholarly inquiry into performative artistic works. The project titled “The Didascalic Imagination,”41 especially, in which a group of Antwerp-based theorists analyzed the notebooks of contemporary directors (including Jan Fabre, Jan Lauwers, Luk Perceval and Romeo Castellucci), underlined the fact that the role of text on stage no longer takes precedence over the scenography, the presence of the performer, the material quality of the voice, the lighting and other elements of the scenic language. Retracing the genesis of theatre should thus also include the embodied, visual, and immaterial aspects that characterise the aesthetics of postdramatic performance.42

126  Barbara Büscher

This extension of the focus on, and thus the approaches to, documenting work processes, has led to very individual modes of recording and highlights their intermediality.43 A Choreographer’s Score The second example I would like to mention pursues intermedial documentation in a very specific and—to my mind—accomplished way and provides the reader access to work processes and their conceptional and conceptual context by very condensed and precise means. It is the series of three publications titled A Choreographer’s Score, exploring different phases of the work of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker through dialogs between the dramaturg and performance artist Bojana Cvejić and De Keersmaeker herself.44 In the following, I will focus on the second part in the series, which documents and explores the productions En Atendant and Cesena. Published in 2013, this edition encompasses three “registers,” as Cvejić writes in the foreword,45 and comprises two books—one of texts and one of photographs—as well as three DVDs. A key approach for accessing choreographic working methods is the dialog. Here, conversations between Cvejić and De Keersmaeker provide the basis for the textual part in transcript form and for the three DVDs in film protocol form. The conversations are arranged according to themes and grouped into three parts. The first part is titled “Introduction” and refers to shared conceptional stimuli and references—e.g., “formal patterns and principles from Far Eastern thought.”46 Each of the other two parts is dedicated to one of the productions named in the title. Aspects of the material, basic themes and narrative elements of the production are considered and related to the structuring and scenes of the performance in a separate subchapter under the heading “Chronological Outline of the Performance.” The three DVDs are arranged in the same way, giving the reader/viewer an additional perspective on the material that is published in written form in the textual part. As Cvejić puts it, “The third register is contained in the voice and gesticulation of the choreographer in the three videos: an indispensable affective supplement to the understanding of De Keersmaeker’s poetics.”47 In addition, a montage of dance demonstrations and excerpts from the filmic transformations of the performances is included. While the photo book and films are in color—even the setting for De Keersmaeker’s interview works with intense color—the book of texts is reduced to black and white. Photos, (handwritten) notes, drawings and diagrams, material from the work and programs are included alongside the transcribed and sequence-edited dialog. The photo book leaves the medium to speak for itself, without any commentary or captions. This “hybrid publication which reconstitutes the work of dance from a choreographic point of view”48 devotes most space to the choreographer’s accounts, even if she talks about secondary aspects—such as the music,

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History  127

dramaturgy and the participating visual artists. Yet, in this way, it opens clear, comprehensible access to the conceptional horizon informing the choreographer’s working methods, to the artistic decisions made and the reflections that led to them: The interviews included in this volume draw the first interpretative circle around the two works, giving De Keersmaeker […] an opportunity to immediately reflect on how initial ideas, problems or fantasies are resolved in certain compositions and then how these compositions continue to operate after the works have been completed.49 In the work on archive-building processes in the performance-based arts, interviews and conversations are often seen in terms of oral history as eyewitness statements, which only aim to preserve the event by the memory of its occurrence. A more fruitful approach, I find, is Cvejić’s concept of linking the use of conversations with archeological excavations: The creation of A Choreographer’s Score began with an attempt to conversationally exhaust the knowledge surrounding the construction of the choreography of De Keersmaeker’s first piece. […] The “archeological” findings unraveled problems or clues pointing to what was invisible in the work alone. Hence they helped me formulate questions about the genealogy of the project, about aborted ideas, discarded materials, tasks to achieve, unresolved problems, and dilemmas. These questions triggered a dialogue in which De Keersmaeker and I tried to lay out the work in everything that constitutes it.50 The appearance of this publication, not just as printed books but in a multimedia form offering a variety of different views and perspectives, perhaps marks an extension of book as an archival space. But if we look at the multifaceted history of performance, dance and post-dramatic theater, this publication emerges as one of the very rare attempts at providing access to processes and work structures, different methods of working with the material and modes of appropriating historical knowledge for conceptual designs. Referring to two major catalogs/monographs published in recent years, each on the work of an acclaimed female performance artist, I have sought to show the significance of such publications as archival spaces, presenting an easily accessible, curated and staged (designed) outlook on the history of performance art. They were based on the long-established publication format that is an integral part of circulation practice in the visual arts. Indepth inquiry shows, moreover, that these publications not only provide access but also generate specific narratives on the artists’ body of work. However, since performance art can also be an integral part of the theater/ dance system, a comparative inquiry into different publication strategies

128  Barbara Büscher

can be useful for accessing their history. The two case studies on workbooks considered here—on the Wooster Group and the work of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker—point to another understanding of “book as archival space” in which the presentation of the processual plays a key role.

Notes

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History  129

7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24 25

and New York: Routledge, 2018), 2–3. See also Barbara Büscher, “Bewegung als Zugang: Performance – Geschichte(n) – Ausstellen,” MAP 4 (2013), http://www.perfomap.de/map4/ausstellen-und-auffuehren. Barbara Büscher, Franz Anton Cramer and Lucie Ortmann, “Archivprozesse manifestieren: Schlussfolgerungen aus der Arbeit des Forschungsprojektes Verzeichnungen,” MAP 8 (2017), http://www.perfomap.de/map8/ archiv.-analysen-teil-1/archivprozesse-manifestieren. Walter Nikkels, “Es erscheint ein Katalog,” in Der Raum des Buches (Cologne: Tropen, 1998), 38, my translation. Anne Mœglin-Delcroix, Esthétique du livre d’artiste, 1960–1980: Une introduction à l’art contemporain (Paris: Mot et le Reste, 1997), 185. Ibid., 57. For a detailed consideration taking in many different materials, see Barbara Büscher, “Source Materials of the Contemporary Arts – Das Buch als Medium für neue Kunst,” MAP 9 (2018), http://www.perfomap.de/map9/ buch-kunst/source-materials-of-the-contemporary-arts. Benjamin Buchloh, quoted in Garry Neill Kennedy, ed., The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968–1978 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 245. Ibid., 246. Ibid., 282. Lucy Lippard, “The Artist’s Book Goes Public,” Art in America 65, no. 1 (1977): 40. See the information provided on the website http://printedmatter.org/about. Jürgen Thaler, “Archivische Konstellationen: Valie Export,” in VALIE ­EXPORT—Archiv, ed. VALIE EXPORT and Yilmaz Dziewior (Bregenz: Kunsthaus, 2012), 23–32. VALIE EXPORT and Yilmaz Dziewior, eds., VALIE EXPORT—Archiv (Bregenz: Kunsthaus, 2012). Joan Simon, Johanna Burton, and Joan Jonas, eds., In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2015). Sigrid Schade and Anne Thurmann-Jajes, eds., Artists’ Publications: Ein Genre und seine Erschließung (Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2009). See, e.g., Stephanie Götsch, “Entfaltungen: Channa Horwitz und das Leporello,” MAP 9 (2018), http://www.perfomap.de/map9/kunst-buch/ entfaltungen-channa-horwitz-und-das-leporello; and Regine Ehleiter, “Von der Wand auf die Seite in den Raum der ‘portablen Galerie’: Ausstellungen und Publikationen der Berliner Galerie situationen 60 zwischen Dokumentation und Kunst,” MAP 9 (2018), http://www.perfomap.de/map9/kunst-buch/ von-der-wand-auf-die-seite-in-den-raum-der-portablen-galerie. Michael Glasmeier, “Transformationen des Ausstellungskatalogs,” in Der Ausstellungskatalog: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Theorie, ed. Dagmar Bosse, Michael Glasmeier and Agnes Prus (Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2004), 197, my translation. See Anne Mœglin-Delcroix, “Dokumentation als Kunst in Künstlerbüchern und anderen Künstlerpublikationen,” in Artists’ Publications: Ein Genre und seine Erschließung, ed. Sigrid Schade and Anne Thurmann-Jajes (Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2009), 30–31; and Peter J. Schneemann, “Eigennutz: Das Interesse von Künstlern am Werkkatalog,” in Legitimationen: Künstlerinnen und Künstler als Autoritäten der Gegenwartskunst, ed. Julia Gelshorn (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 205–222. Yilmaz Dziewior, “VALIE EXPORT—Archiv,” in VALIE EXPORT— Archiv, ed. VALIE EXPORT and Yilmaz Dziewior (Bregenz: Kunsthaus, 2012), 21. Thaler, “Archivische Konstellationen,” 37.

130  Barbara Büscher

­

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History  131







132  Barbara Büscher Cvejić, Bojana. “A Choreographer’s Score: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.” In Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maike Bleeker, 52–61. London: Taylor & Francis, 2017. Cvejić, Bojana. “Choreography of En Atendant and Cesena in Score.” In En Atendant & Cesena: A Choreographer’s Score, by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Bojana Cvejić, 7–15. Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2013. De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, and Bojana Cvejić. A Choreographer’s Score: Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena’s Aria, Bartók. Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2012. De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, and Bojana Cvejić. Drumming & Rain: A Choreographer’s Score. Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2014. De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, and Bojana Cvejić. En Atendant & Cesena: A Choreographer’s Score. Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2013. Dogramaci, Burcu. Fotografie der Performance: Live Art im Zeitalter ihrer Reproduzierbarkeit. Paderborn: Fink, 2018. Dziewior, Yilmaz. “VALIE EXPORT—Archiv.” In VALIE EXPORT—Archiv, edited by VALIE EXPORT and Yilmaz Dziewior, 19–21. Bregenz: Kunsthaus, 2012. Dziewior, Yilmaz and Barbara Engelbach, eds. Yvonne Rainer. Raum Körper Sprache  / Space Body Language. Bregenz: Kunsthaus and Cologne: Museum Ludwig, 2012. Ehleiter, Regine. “Von der Wand auf die Seite in den Raum der ‘portablen Galerie’: Ausstellungen und Publikationen der Berliner Galerie situationen 60 zwischen Dokumentation und Kunst.” MAP 9 (2018). http://www.perfomap.de/map9/ kunst-buch/von-der-wand-auf-die-seite-in-den-raum-der-portablen-galerie. EXPORT, VALIE, and Yilmaz Dziewior, eds. VALIE EXPORT—Archiv. Bregenz: Kunsthaus, 2012. Giannachi, Gabriella, and Jonah Westermann, eds. Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Glasmeier, Michael. “Transformationen des Ausstellungskatalogs.” In Der Ausstellungskatalog: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Theorie, edited by Dagmar Bosse, Michael Glasmeier and Agnes Prus, 192–204. Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2004. Götsch, Stephanie. “Entfaltungen: Channa Horwitz und das Leporello.” MAP 9 (2018). http://www.perfomap.de/map9/kunst-buch/entfaltungenchanna-horwitz-und-das-leporello. Hahn, Daniela, ed. Beyond Evidence: Das Dokument in den Künsten. Paderborn: Fink, 2016. Hohenberger, Eva, ed. Bilder des Wirklichen: Texte zur Theorie des Dokumentarfilms. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1998. Jonas, Joan. “Transmission.” In Women, Art, and Technology, edited by Judy Malloy, 114–133. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2003. Kennedy, Garry Neill, ed. The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and ­Design, 1968–1978. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Krämer, Sybille, Werner Kogge and Gernot Grube, eds. Spur: Spurenlesen als Orientierungstechnik und Wissenskunst. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2007. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theater. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Le Roy, Frederik, Edith Cassiers, Thomas Crombez and Luk Van den Dries. “Tracing Creation: The Director’s Notebook as Genetic Document of the Postdramatic.” Contemporary Theatre Review 26, no. 4 (2016): 468–484.

Book as Archive of Performance Art and Source Material of Its History  133 Lippard, Lucy. “The Artist’s Book Goes Public.” Art in America 65, no. 1 (1977): 40–41. Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger, 1973. Maude-Roxby, Alice, ed. Live Art on Camera: Performance and Photography. Southampton: John Hansard Gallery and University of Southampton, 2007. Mœglin-Delcroix, Anne. “Dokumentation als Kunst in Künstlerbüchern und anderen Künstlerpublikationen.” In Artists’ Publications: Ein Genre und seine ­Erschließung, edited by Sigrid Schade and Anne Thurmann-Jajes, 19–33. Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2009. Mœglin-Delcroix, Anne. Esthétique du livre d’artiste, 1960–1980: Une introduction à l’art contemporain. Paris: Mot et le Reste, 1997. Nikkels, Walter. “Es erscheint ein Katalog.” In Der Raum des Buches, 38–69. Cologne: Tropen, 1998. Quick, Andrew, ed. The Wooster Group Work Book. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Schade, Sigrid, and Anne Thurmann-Jajes, eds. Artists’ Publications: Ein Genre und seine Erschließung. Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2009. Schneemann, Peter J. “Eigennutz: Das Interesse von Künstlern am Werkkatalog.” In Legitimationen: Künstlerinnen und Künstler als Autoritäten der Gegenwartskunst, edited by Julia Gelshorn, 205–222. Bern: Peter Lang, 2004. Simon, Joan, Johanna Burton and Joan Jonas, eds. In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2015. Thaler, Jürgen. “Archivische Konstellationen: Valie Export.” In VALIE edited by VALIE EXPORT and Yilmaz Dziewior, 23–32. EXPORT—Archiv, ­ Bregenz: Kunsthaus, 2012. Tourney, Michele M. “Caging Virtual Antelopes: Suzanne Briet’s Definition of Documents in the Context of The Digital Age.” Archival Science 3 (2003): 291–311. Universiteit Antwerpen. “The Didascalic Imagination: Refigurations of the Regiebuch in Contemporary Postdramatic Theatre.” Accessed 23 April 2022. http:// dighum.uantwerpen.be/didascimagination/.

8

Listening to the Histories of Performance Art Heike Roms

Listening to Shoot The screen is black. A male voice can be heard: “You know where you’re gonna do this, Bruce?” Another male voice responds, but it is difficult to make out the words. The sounds boom and echo in a way that suggests a large and empty room. The first speaker again: “I’m gonna stand here.” Footsteps. The ratcheting of a shotgun being loaded. More footsteps. “Are you ready?” A camera starts whirring. An image appears on the screen, a little fuzzy but bright. A man points a rifle at another. Then the deafening concussive sound of a gunshot bouncing off the walls. The shot man staggers forward, holding his upper left arm to inspect the wound. The screen turns to black once more. Voices. An empty shell dropping on concrete (as heard in: Chris Burden’s Shoot, documentation).1 This chapter2 is concerned with the documentation of sound in performance art and with sound as a means through which performance art has been documented.3 It takes the form of a draft outline for a future inquiry into what I would like to call an “aural history of performance art.” Chris Burden’s Shoot, arguably the most famous work in the performance art canon, helps me here to sketch out some of the themes and questions that this inquiry will explore. Shoot was performed at the F-Space gallery in Santa Ana, California, on November 19, 1971, and it was documented in several ways: by mostly black-and-white photographs taken by Alfred Lutjeans (with additional Polaroids by Barbara T. Smith); by several seconds of Super-8 film, shot by Barbara Burden; and by a text work by Chris Burden himself, which was first printed alongside some of the photographs in a self-published artist’s book issued in 1974, and which offers a concise account of the work: “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.”4 In addition to these visual records, there is also a sound recording of the action,5 which was made available by Burden on a compilation of audiovisual documentation of his work, where it is edited together with the film footage; the account above details what I am able to hear as well as see in that recording. Shoot features as a key work in the long-running debate in art history and performance studies on performance art and its relationship to DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-11

Listening to the Histories of Performance Art  135

documentation. While Burden’s action (carried out against the backdrop of the Vietnam War)6 has rich political and ethical implications that still resonate today, it is the manner of its documentation that has secured its continuing legacy. The meticulous way in which the artist exercised control over the documentary record of his performance and its circulation set the template for what we expect to see in body art documentation of the 1970s. The black-and-white images of Shoot evoke the grainy aesthetic of crime reportage. Coupled with the matter-of-fact macho bluntness of Burden’s description,7 the documentation harnesses the combined indexical force of photograph and language to leave its viewer in no doubt that this audacious act really took place. Amelia Jones has pointed to the “mutual supplementarity” of photographic documentation and 1970s body art performance: “The body art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened; the photograph needs the body art event as an ontological ‘anchor’ of its indexicality.”8 Unsurprisingly, Shoot has served Philip Auslander as the prime example for what he has identified as the “documentary” type of performance documentation; the photo acts as record and evidence, thereby creating a connection between performance and document that is “thought to be ontological,” as it seeks to confirm the existence of one through the other.9 Auslander contrasts it with the “theatrical” type of documentation, which refers to performances that are the result of image construction or manipulation and that have “no meaningful prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences.”10 His argument ultimately aims at the dissolution of this distinction, declaring the shared “authority” of both documentary and theatrical documentation to be “phenomenological rather than ontological”: 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 the present audience.11 This echoes Kathy O’Dell’s work on the haptic dimension of performance documentation, for which Shoot is again a major reference point: O’Dell argues that Burden’s photos were not exclusively to be looked at but to be handled and touched by viewers who would encounter them predominantly in the pages of a publication.12 Attention to the material context and circulation of Burden’s images is also central to Christopher Bedford’s notion of performance art’s “viral ontology”: analyzing Shoot’s “trace history” that began with the performance and has continued through multiple reproductions in publications and exhibitions, Bedford argues that While Burden’s photographs are unquestionably indices of his performances, it is the specific interplay of text and image [in his artist’s

136  Heike Roms

books, gallery displays or magazine spreads] that animates the imagination and activates the performance as an event unfolding in the present.13 Shoot—or rather its visual documents—has thus become emblematic of how we understand the nature of performance art documentation and, by implication, the nature of performance art itself. Given Shoot’s ubiquity as a reference point in the debate on performance documentation, it is surprising that there are no reflections (that I have come across) on its sound recording; in fact, very little has been written about the film document either.14 Why does this matter? In some respects, Burden’s use of moving images and spoken words is merely an extension of the way in which the artist applied still images and written text, and equally meticulously executed. The low-grain quality of the Super-8 film evokes a similar scene-of-crime aesthetic as the photographs; and it is introduced by a studiedly off-the-cuff, matter-of-fact voice-over, with which Burden directs our attention to specific moments: In Shoot, I’m shot in the … upper left-hand arm by a friend of mine … —erm—with a .22 rifle. The only visuals I have of this piece is a very short film clip of about 8 seconds long. So I am gonna begin … the piece with an audiotape that was made during the actual performance. In the audiotape, some of the things to listen for a-… are: “Do you know where you are going to stand, Bruce?” Then later, right before the film clip … happens, you’ll hear me say, “Are you ready?” Then you’ll hear the clicking of the Super-8 camera. Later, after the clip is over —em—… another thing to listen for is the … sound of the empty shell dropping on the con-… crete floor. Okay, so I think we can go right into the audiotape. (as heard in: Chris Burden, Shoot, documentation)15 But the audio document also offers us a different kind of access to the action. In his discussion of Burden’s approach to documentation as a kind of “virtual performance space,” Bedford argues that, in the case of the photographs and text documents, it is their very incompleteness that “seduces viewers’ minds into an act of spurious reproduction: they must conjure an event they never witnessed, based on the selective evidence presented by Burden.” Bedford goes on to suggest that the viewers might summon the various narrative details absent from the official record of Shoot: the tension before the performance, the sound of rifle fire in an enclosed space, the subsequent panic of the audience, Burden’s response, even the reaction of the marksman. It is, then, the absence of detailed information in Burden’s textual re-performance that is the ultimate enticement to the viewer’s imagination.16

Listening to the Histories of Performance Art  137

Yet, though these details may be absent from the visual and textual record, they are present in Burden’s (equally “official” and widely distributed) sound recording of Shoot. In fact, the artist explicitly asks us to listen out for some of them: we can hear the negotiations between Burden and the shooter (Bruce Dunlap) as they work out where to stand; we can hear the presence of other people in the space; we can guess at the size of the room from its echo; we get a sense of the temporal unfolding of the event; we hear how in the aftermath of the shoot the voices resume to figure out what happened. The sound recording gives us access to the collaborative and spatial aspects of the piece. And, most importantly, we hear the sound of the rifle fire. Indeed, the very centerpiece of Burden’s action, the shoot, is accessible only as sound.

Listening Out for an Aural History of Performance Art An Aural History of Performance Art proposes to listen out for the sounds of performance art as they have been captured on reel-to-reel tapes or audiocassettes, LPs or CDs, or on the soundtrack of filmed or videoed recordings. My particular interest lies in performance works of the 1960s and 1970s, which have left behind numerous such audio documents, recorded by or on behalf of the artists or bootlegged by audience members, languishing in archival collections or publicly released as albums. Allan Kaprow’s happenings were frequently documented on audiotape; Joseph Beuys (whose interest in auditory–visual synesthesia led him to an engagement with sound in many of his performances)17 released recordings of his actions as limited editions on vinyl; and a great number of performances in the name of Fluxus (aptly described by Kristine Stiles as “the music of action animating things”)18 by artists including Ay-O, Philip Corner, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Milan Knížák, Charlotte Moormann, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson, and Emmett Williams were sound-recorded.19 The roots of Hermann Nitsch’s Orgien Mysterien Theater are musical as well as philosophical, and Nitsch, who was also an accomplished composer of orchestral symphonies, reworked some recordings of his performances into sound installations. Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Jacki Apple, Ian Breakwell, Terry Fox, Jack Goldstein, Bruce McLean, Otto Mühl, Dieter Roth, Wolf Vostell, and Silvia Ziranek all released sound recordings based on their actions, happenings, events, and performances in the 1960s and 1970s.20 Such recordings have also been featured by broadcasters in programs including Radio Bremen’s (Germany) “Pro Musica;” “Kunstradio-Radiokunst” on Austrian ORF; or “Ars Sonora” on Spain’s Radio Nacional de España, highlighting the mutual supplementarity of experimental art practice and public broadcaster remit. Yet, this sonic archive of performance art is rarely considered. Sound is almost never discussed in the literature on performance documentation; most publications do not even list it as a term of importance

138  Heike Roms

in their indexes. And it is still common for exhibitions devoted to performance history to be entirely silent, displaying works of performance art in the main through striking but mute images. An Aural History of Performance Art aims to survey, assess and analyze the extant sound recordings made of performance art works in the 1960s and 1970s. What can these recordings tell us about the importance that sound had for a performance? Was sound a key element through which the work was realized and understood? Was it an incidental by-product of actions carried out and objects handled? Or was it merely the usual background rustling of environmental noise making itself heard? What kind of soundscape did the work create, and by what means? Was it ambient or musical; generated through instruments, voices, or electronic sounds; how did it work with rhythms, resonances, and volume? How did the performance’s sonic dimension shape its reception; how did it affect its audience, slip into their ears, enter their bodies and vibrate their inner organs? How did the artists appeal to the audience’s listening as a performative act? The research aims to ask: What kind of trace are sound recordings? What technologies were used to produce them? What impact do the chosen technologies have on how these recordings perform in the present? How have sound documents been disseminated, and by whom and for whom? How have sound documents been remediated to create new work? And listening to the sounds of performance art also means paying attention to the absence of sounds. What qualities of the work are not audible? When and why might artists have purposefully employed silence in their work?21 And what and whose sounds are missing from the archive and how might they be heard again? An Aural History of Performance Art proposes to focus on the audio documents of performance art as they have thus far been largely absent from consideration. It is important to stress though that the documentation of sound in performance art is not the same as the documentation through sound. Scores, textual instructions, or verbal descriptions that provoke or invoke sounds can also be considered a form of sonic documentation; as can, for that matter, photographs that show artists engaged in actions that trigger certain acoustic imaginaries. On the other hand, audio records can also indicate visual qualities of the work, such as the use of space or objects. And not all performances for which sound is key have been documented with the help of audio records nor is the existence of audio records necessarily an indication of the importance of sound in the work. Consider another piece of canonical body art created in the period, Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972). Seedbed involved the artist masturbating underneath a false gallery floor, using the noises of the visitors walking up and down above him to fuel his sexual fantasies, which he spoke into a microphone to be broadcast into the room. Seedbed’s sonic dimension is the primary manifestation of the work, and it is impossible to discuss the performance without considering the relationship between physical actions and sounds, bodily

Listening to the Histories of Performance Art  139

sensation and spoken language, and visual absence and audial presence. There is, though, (to my knowledge) no available audio record of Seedbed. Its sonic dimension is entirely evoked through written text and silent still and moving imagery. The importance that the sound has for the work here might, in fact, be the very reason for the absence of a recording of it. A key question that an Aural History of Performance Art needs to examine is what differences there are between the visual and audio records of performance art and whether such differences are of degree or substance. This will require careful attention to each performance work and its specific approach to documentation. I have proposed that in the case of Shoot, for instance, the sonic dimension captured on tape gives access to the collaborative quality of the action, its spatial aspects, and its temporality, and that these are qualities that are mostly absent from the visual representations of the work. Sound is contingent and relational: we access it through the bodies it touches, the space it fills, and the time it takes; and the relations of bodies, space, and time can be accessed through sound. But I do not wish to imply that the audio record of Shoot, therefore, offers a greater plenitude of information than its visual record. On the contrary, sonic events can be especially difficult to grasp, as sounds diffuse,22 and on the tape of Shoot, too, there are noises that are hard to pin down. To borrow Christopher Bedford’s phrase, in the case of audio documentation, too, the absence of detailed information can serve as an “ultimate enticement” to the listener’s imagination. But can paying attention to the sound recording of a performance change our understanding of the work? In the case of Shoot, the qualities captured by its audio record are arguably enhancing rather than revising the common reading of the action as one that challenges the ethical protocols governing personal and public responsibility. There are other cases, though, where the sounds of a work might well invite a different reading of it. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964–), for example, involves a performer (most famously Ono herself ) who sits motionless while members of the audience are invited one by one to cut away a piece of the performer’s clothing. The sound dimension of one of Ono’s performances of the work in 1965 (captured as a soundtrack to a 16-mm film recording)23 documents the audience’s diverse responses to the invitation, highlighting (as Lara Shalson has argued in her careful reading of Cut Piece)24 that the performance did not just unfold as individual acts of aggressive objectification but rather as a collective’s negotiations of such acts. Attending to the sounds of Cut Piece thus opens up a different understanding of Ono’s performance to the one suggested by its visual record—one that here, too, emphasizes the temporal and collaborative aspects of the work.

Theorizing the Sound Documents of Performance Art “In spite of the recent surge of interest in sound in the arts and humanities broadly and within performance more specifically, still the work of

140  Heike Roms

theorising sound in relation to performance documentation is largely undone.”25 This is the succinct conclusion reached by Johanna Linsley in a recent essay on the topic; and there are indeed, to date, only a handful of scholarly publications, Linsley’s included, that have attended to the sound of and sound as performance art document. Linsley goes on to speculate on the reasons for this lack of attention: whether because “sound poses material and logistical challenges for institutional imperatives around documentation and evidencing […], or because the terms of debate around performance documentation have so often circulated around disappearance, thus reinscribing appearance as the central—if negative—concept [...].”26 Indeed, debates about performance documentation are always in essence debates about what performance is. Photography, with its particular purchase on ontological notions such as “reality” and “fact” and its imbrication in conceptualizations of death and life/live, has proven to be an especially productive foil for thinking through the “liveness” of performance. (Video documentation, on the other hand, despite also being largely examined as a visual medium, has engendered much less conceptually rich discussions.)27 Furthermore, as Tancredi Gusman has suggested, debates about performance art have frequently happened in the “disciplinary framework of the visual arts,” within which “documentation has become, since the 1960s, the means to mediate between ephemerality and objecthood;”28 a bias toward visual forms of documentation is therefore not surprising. The performance scholar whose work regularly examines sound-related questions is Philip Auslander, who publishes widely on popular music as well as avant-garde performance art and who has criticized the absence of music-based performance from scholarship in theater and performance studies. Auslander frequently refers to debates in musicology to help him shape his own arguments on performance and documentation. In his influential book on Liveness, for example, he cites scholarship on the relationship between performance and recording practices in rock music, where the live concert serves largely to authenticate the record; an insight used by Auslander to challenge the privileging of liveness in performance studies discourses of the late 1990s.29 In a follow-on essay, “Performance Analysis and Popular Music: A Manifesto,” Auslander turns his attention to the analysis of sound recordings of musical performances and argues that the listener’s phenomenological experience of them as performance derives not only from our direct somatic experience of the sound and our sense of the physical gestures the musicians made to produce it but also from various forms of cultural knowledge, including knowledge of the performance conventions of particular genres of music and the performance styles of specific performers.30 Auslander returns to the idea that documents can perform phenomenologically in his aforementioned essay on “The Performativity of Performance

Listening to the Histories of Performance Art  141

Documentation.” Here again, he refers to music theory, this time to philosopher Lee B. Brown’s distinction between “documentary” (“mere windows onto performances existing independently of the recordings of them”) and “phonographic” (“sound-constructs created by the use of recording machinery for an intrinsic aesthetic purpose”) recordings,31 on which Auslander bases his own distinction between “documentary” and “theatrical” performance art documentation. What makes this parallel move possible is, as he proposes, that “the cultural situation of performance art is similar to that of popular music: that its audience experiences it primarily through documentation, rather than live performance, and that the documents effectively become the performances.”32 Though when Auslander speaks of documents of performance art, he refers again only to photographs. In her contribution to a book on artists’ creative use of performance archives, Johanna Linsley offers a close reading of 9 Beginnings, a stage work by Chicago-based company Every house has a door, which is composed of sonic moments taken from the opening sections of nine archived performance videos. Linsley explores how 9 Beginnings revoices the vocal deliveries of the previous works, or replays the rhythms of the earlier pieces, or amplifies their silences, thereby creating a new performance through which the “echoes of historical performances reverberate [...].”33 Resonating through Linsley’s chapter is the proposition that sound documentation has very different qualities to visual documentation; as material immateriality, sound is less wedded to the notion of evidence. Attending to the sonic dimension of documents and its relative openness and indeterminacy, Linsley argues, challenges the assumption that we might be able to access the knowledge of past performances as a certainty contained within these documents, and instead allows them to help shape the “possibility and potentiality”34 of future work. There has been some cognate research undertaken on sound archives of theater, although it tends to retain an interest in the document as a vehicle for knowledge of past events. Ricarda Franzen has explored recordings kept in the Dutch theater sound archive (currently hosted by the University of Amsterdam) with the intention to establish what kind of insights such recordings can offer into historical theater shows and their “dramaturgy of sound.”35 Franzen uses the “source-critical” approach to recordings developed by sound conservation specialist George Brock-Nannestad, which focuses on the impact that audio technologies and reproduction conditions have on recordings; yet, as Franzen points out, in the case of theater recordings, an analysis of their technical conditions must be combined with an attention to their aesthetic and conceptual aspects. This is the case for performance art recordings too: sonic distortions may result from artistic choices as much as from substandard equipment. Sound documentation of performance art as a point of access to past works or as a material for future works; as parallel or as different in essence

142  Heike Roms

to visual documentation; as objects created by artistic intent or limited by the technical capabilities of the period—these have been some of the preoccupations of the writings on the topic thus far.36 A more profound rethinking of the relationship between sound, performance, and the document is proposed by Fred Moten in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, his study of black avant-garde performance as resistant black radicalism. In his reflection on the “phonic substances” that animate black performance—the scream, the shriek, the cry, the shout—Moten also turns to the soundings of key moments of black history that are documented in supposedly still images. In particular, he considers the 1955 photograph of Emmett Till’s broken face, taken as the boy lay in his coffin after having been tortured and lynched. Moten invites us to listen to the vocalization of black pain (of Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who insisted on an open casket for the world to bear witness to the atrocity of her son’s murder) that cuts through the image. “In positing that this photo and photographs in general bear a phonic substance, I want to challenge […] the ocularcentrism that generally—perhaps necessarily— shapes theories of the nature of photography and our experience of photography,” Moten writes; and he proposes instead “something like a mimetic improvisation of and with that materiality that moves in excess of meaning.”37 Moten’s rendering of the acoustics of Till’s photograph urges us to rethink visual documents too as, in essence, documents of sound.38

The Sonic Archive of Performance Art What does the sonic archive of performance art sound like? What kinds of audio documents have been produced by performance art practice? What sounds do they hold? The following overview is not meant to be an exhaustive typology under which all such documents can be grouped; rather, I offer it here as a sketch to indicate the sorts of audio records with which an Aural History of Performance Art will engage. There are many instances of audio documents that hold live captures of performances. Sound recording equipment in the 1960s and 1970s was cheaper than film or video cameras, and artists frequently made use of it for the purpose of retaining a record of their events. Among the Allan Kaprow papers at the Getty Research Library in Los Angeles, for example, are no fewer than 44 reel-to-reel audiotapes and 42 audiocassettes, a number of which carry recordings of Kaprow’s happenings and other performance activities.39 Such recordings are, in the main, unedited and unprocessed—“documentary,” to use Auslander’s term. (Although, of course, just as photographs are constructed from decisions over viewpoint, focus, lighting, etc., so are even supposedly documentary recordings impacted upon by the position of the microphones, the application of filters, or the choice of volume.) Then, there are many sound documents connected with performance art that might be termed “phonographic”

Listening to the Histories of Performance Art  143

(Brown) or “theatrical” (Auslander), as they are the product of further editing and remixing. Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age Musik, for example, partly draws on recordings of his happenings, to which the artist applied his method of “dé-collag/age,” a process of gradual sonic subtraction and destruction. The results were released on vinyl in 1982 on avant-garde label Multhipla,40 and while their sourcing from live events is retained in the titles of the tracks (e.g., Dé-coll/age manifesto—1961, Happening), their subsequent treatment has secured them a separate identity as works of sound art. Such treatment though is not the condition for a recording to become sound art; rather, its circulation as such is. The recordings that have been released of Joseph Beuys’s performances, for instance, are mostly unedited live captures, such as Beuys’s and Albrecht/d.’s Performance at the ICA London 1 Nov. 1974, which appeared on Samadhi Records in 1974.41 They are simultaneously documentary and theatrical; they have a dual identity as both sound documentation and sound art. A second distinction can be drawn between an audio document that is a sound recording of a performance and one that was used as a sound element in a performance. Among the many sound objects in Allan Kaprow’s collection are several tapes labeled “sound materials” or “sound sources.” Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), for example, is linked in the archive with five tape reels, four of which came from an earlier environment by the artist, which the catalog notes were subsequently incorporated into the happening. Similarly, for a number of his actions in the 1960s and 1970s, Joseph Beuys collaborated with composer Henning Christiansen, who worked primarily with the medium of tape.42 For Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Schottische Symphonie (Scottish Symphony) (performed in Edinburgh in 1970), Christiansen laid underneath a grand piano to record on tape the sounds of the instrument being tuned while Beuys walked around, singing and tapping on the floor with a stick. The resulting recording was played in the first and final part of the performance, alongside other taped sound, and it was later released as a limited edition multiple on vinyl. Again, these sound recordings have a dual identity: they were an element in the performance that then became an archived piece of documentation of it. In this way, Beuys’s and Christiansen’s tape and Kaprow’s “sound materials” have more in common with other types of performance remains that share this ambiguous status, such as scores or objects, than they have with photographs, which are rarely both in and of an event. In Kaprow’s archive, a third type of audio document included there are recordings of discussions about his work (including his influential How to Make a Happening audio lecture, released in 1966 by Mass Art).43 For Beuys, too, whose “extended definition of art” (“erweiterter Kunstbegriff ”) encompassed the performance of lecturing as art action, there are a large number of such lectures and interviews that are accessible through sound recordings, the majority of which were self-published under the banner of Beuys’s Free International University project.44 These recordings, too,

144  Heike Roms

can be considered a form of performance documentation. They do not record the work in a narrow art historical sense, meaning a performance as a defined event in space and time; but they document the work in a more expanded sense, through the labor and process of its creation. And they offer a vehicle for a reflection about the work that helps define how certain events and actions in space and time are to be considered performance art. Documents of this kind make up a substantive part of the sonic archive of performance art, not least due to the efforts of (cassette-based) audio magazines such as Audio Arts (founded in 1973). Audio Arts was conceptualized by its curator, William Furlong, in terms of a “soundtime that the magazine’s tape-cassette format makes available as a space within which artists (and critics and others) might make work or pursue discussion.”45 Audio Arts did not merely record experimental art practice such as performance art but presented the discourse about it, too, as a performative sonic event. A sound document of performance art therefore often possesses an ambiguous identity: it can be part of a performance, a record of it, a reflection on it, or a performance work in its own right. This ambiguity—as I have already hinted at in reference to the live captures of Beuys’s actions— tends to have less to do with the immanent qualities of the event they record or the qualities of the recording and more with the ways in which that recording has been labeled, distributed, and received. In a critical engagement with Auslander’s distinction between “documentary” and “theatrical,” Tancredi Gusman has similarly argued that the difference between modes of documentation may not be “based on immanent qualities of the performance/document but on ideological processes of its definition/reception,”46 processes that he relates to historically contingent art historical framings. However, in the case of sound, the ideological processes through which a recording is defined and received as either a sound document or a sound work often materialize in different formats for their distribution. Whether a recording is made available as vinyl LP, audiocassette, or MP3 file speaks of more than just technological advances. Vinyl, which can be produced in small editions and includes the visual components of album covers and sleeve notes, has been the format of choice for artists who have reconceptualized the audio records of their performances as works of sound art. Audiocassettes, which are cheap to produce and easy to mail, became popular formats for audio magazines. (Though, like vinyl, audiocassettes are subject to deterioration, which over time has increased their market value as collector’s items.) Digital files have now become the primary format for archiving recordings. And different formats have gone hand in hand with different forms of circulation, too. Audiocassette magazines were distributed through mail art networks and subscriptions, building audience communities for the work. Recordings of performance art works on vinyl have been part of the art market’s commercialization of an artist’s output: in Beuys’s case, for example, his

Listening to the Histories of Performance Art  145

vinyl releases were sold as limited editions, alongside print works and other multiples by the artist, by art edition publishers including Edition Block (In Memoriam George Maciunas: Klavierduett, 1982), Edition Schellmann (Schottische Symphonie, 1973), and Gabriele Mazzotta Editore ( Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja, Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee, 1970) and distributed through galleries.47 Or recordings were released by small record labels such as Milan-based Multhipla and Alga Marghen or New York’s One Ten Records, in the company of and framed as sound art, experimental music, or concrete poetry. As such, they have found their way into public radio programs devoted to experimental sound works and, increasingly, are also collected by archives. The Zentrum für Künstlerpublikationen (Centre for Artists’ Publications) in Bremen includes in its collection of sound art (Sound Collection Guy Schraenen) many audio documents of performance art; the Fondazione Bonotto collection of Fluxus materials also holds sound recordings of Fluxus events; and Tate Archive acquired Furlong’s Audio Arts collection in 2004. Among the archived Audio Arts programs is a two-volume edition published in 1982 of artists’ sound works, “Live to Air,” which featured performance artists including Stuart Brisley, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Tina Keane, Frank Uwe Laysiepen (Ulay), Bruce McLean, and Hannah O’Shea. O’Shea contributed an extract from her durational piece, A Litany for Women Artists, which she recorded during a storm.48 As the artist chants the names of dozens of women artists to expose the “ignorance and historical denial of their contribution as creative instigators” (sleeve note) and raises the brightness of her voice above the heavy rain and rolling thunder, we are reminded that an Aural History of Performance Art must also attend to those whose work has been excluded from the archive and of the effort it takes to make us listen for and to their absence.

Still Listening to Shoot This chapter has introduced an Aural History of Performance Art as a research inquiry that is yet to be developed; in place of a conclusion, therefore, I would like to offer a final thought that may open up a further strand of this inquiry. I have proposed that listening to the sound documents of performance art can supplement, enhance, or challenge its visual record. But can it also offer a more radical rethinking of performance itself and the manner in which it remains? As already noted, debates about the nature of performance documentation are always in essence debates about the nature of performance. When Philip Auslander, Kathy O’Dell, and Christopher Bedford refer to the photographs of Burden’s Shoot, they do so in order to open up a conversation about performance’s “ontology,” famously articulated by Peggy Phelan in 1993 as performance becoming “itself through disappearance.”49 All three writers challenge Phelan’s proposition

146  Heike Roms

by arguing for the reappearance of performance art as enacted through its photographic document: whether in our phenomenological beholding of the photograph (Auslander), our haptic experience of touching it (O’Dell), or our imaginative engagement with what it does and does not show (Bedford). Unlike an image, though, sound—itself ontologically performance-based—cannot be said to appear; as James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow propose in their writing on “sound objects,” sound “does not appear to stand before us but rather to come to or at us.”50 Neither does sound disappear; instead, its energy slowly dissipates as it is absorbed by the air or by the surfaces with which it comes into contact. In the field of acoustic archeology, some researchers have recently gone as far as to suggest that sounds, after they are emitted, are still bouncing around for centuries. Every time they hit a surface, of course, they lose a lot of energy, but in a way some part of sounds created centuries ago is still bouncing around, maybe at incredibly minute levels, of course, that will never be heard.51 To pay attention to an Aural History of Performance Art thus means not to mourn the disappearance of performance nor to seek its reappearance through the document but to listen out for its continuing reverberation in the air and across time, in bodies and spaces; to prick up our ears and listen out for Chris Burden’s Shoot as it continues to bounce around the former site of F-Space gallery in Santa Ana today.

Notes 1 Chris Burden, Documentation of Selected Works 1971–1974, 16mm (Los Angeles: Published by Chris Burden, 1975). 2 I would like to thank Dr Anne Thurmann-Jajes and the Zentrum für Künstlerpublikationen at the Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst in Bremen for supporting the research for this chapter. 3 There is a certain interchangeability of terms in this chapter: sound, audio, aural, sonic, auditory, etc. The development of a more precise terminology will form part of the inquiry. 4 Chris Burden, Chris Burden 71–73 (Los Angeles: Published by Chris Burden, 1974), 24. 5 An audiotape reel, “Chris Burden—Piece at F [Space] / Bruce shoots Chris / 1972 / Recorded on DAT tape #6,” is included in Barbara T. Smith’s papers at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, box 303. Smith co-established F-Space with Burden and Nancy Buchanan. 6 For a fuller discussion of Burden’s Shoot, see Frazer Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching ‘Shoot’,” October, no. 95 (Winter 2001): 114–130 in the context of the work’s “negative inference of an ideal public realm” (117); and Lara Shalson, Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 8ff., who reads the

Listening to the Histories of Performance Art  147

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

work as an example of an art of endurance that examines the workings of objectification. Amelia Jones has pointed to the “laconically macho” quality of Burden’s text works as a considered performance of masculinity: “In this way, Burden produced himself for posterity through meticulously orchestrated textual and visual representations.” Amelia Jones, “Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform Their Masculinities,” Art History 17, no. 4 (1994): 568. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 37. Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (PAJ 84) (2006): 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 9. Kathy O’Dell, “Displacing the Haptic: Performance Art, the Photographic Document, and the 1970s,” Performance Research 2, no. 1 (1997): 74. Christopher Bedford, “The Viral Ontology of Performance,” in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 78. The exception is an essay by Hans-Friedrich Bormann on Burden’s audiovisual compilation tape, which discusses the artist’s voice-over as a “medium” between document and viewer that allows for a collapse between the event of performance and the event of watching its documentation. Hans-Friedrich Bormann, “Der unheimliche Beobachter. Chris Burden, 1975: Performance als Dokument,” in Wahrnehmung und Medialität/Theatralität 3, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte et al. (Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 2001), 403–419. Burden, Documentation. Bedford, “Viral Ontology,” 81, 82–83. For an in-depth study of Beuys’s interest in music, see Jürgen Geisenberger, Joseph Beuys und die Musik (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 1999). Kristine Stiles, “Between Water and Stone: Fluxus Performance, A Metaphysics of Acts,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 65. For a comprehensive list of Fluxus recordings, see Walter Rovere and Patrizio Peterlini, eds., Sense Sound/Sound Sense: Fluxus Music, Scores & Records in the Luigi Bonotto Collection (Ravenna: Danilo Montanari Editore, 2019). See Dan Lander and Micah Lexier, “A Discography of Recorded Works by Artists,” UbuWeb, accessed 27 April 2022, https://www.ubu.com/papers/ artists_recordings.html. Adam Czirak has discussed the political and ethical application of silence in performance art in Eastern Europe as a means to expose state silencing and censorship. Adam Czirak, “Von den stummen Diskursen der osteuropäischen Performance-Kunst. Die Rhetoric des Schweigens in der Zweiten Öffentlichkeit,” in Sound und Performance: Positionen, Methoden, Analysen, ed. Wolf-Dieter Ernst et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015), 241– 253; Rosemarie Brucher has examined the performative silence of many body artists, which purposefully negates an expression of pain, as a challenge to models of subjectivity based on transcendence; Rosemarie Brucher, “Stille Größe: Zur Performativität des Schweigens in Ästhetiken des 18. Jahrhunderts sowie in der zeitgenössischen Performance Art,” in ibid., 695–712. According to Rey Chow and James A. Steintrager, “even when we attend to a sound’s source, we sense sound as an emanation and as filling the space around us. Objects as sonic phenomena are points of diffusion that in listening we

148  Heike Roms attempt to gather.” Rey Chow and James A. Steintrager, “In Pursuit of the Object of Sound: An Introduction,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22, no. 2–3 (2011): 2. 23 Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 16mm, dir. Albert and David Maysles (New York: Maysles Films, Inc. & Yoko Ono, 1965–1966). 24 Shalson, Performing Endurance, 62ff. Shalson attends to both the audio and the visual components of the film documentation and concludes that Cut Piece, then, does not just manifest ‘women’s physical vulnerability as mediated by regimes of vision,’ [Thomas Crow] but sets the stage for a collective reckoning about responsibility toward a body that in its very objecthood refuses the fantasy of reciprocal recognition. Disorienting the audience, the object/body poses the question anew: how ought I to behave in relation to you? Ibid., 68. 25 Johanna Linsley, “9 Beginnings: Sonic Theatrical Possibilities and Potentialities in the Performance Archive,” in Artists in the Archive: Creative and Curatorial Engagements with Documents of Art and Performance, ed. Paul Clarke et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 225. 26 Ibid. 27 For an overview of the debates about performance documentation since the 1980s, see Heike Roms, “How and Why Are Performances Documented?,” in Thinking through Theatre and Performance, ed. Maaike Bleeker et al. (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019), 225–239. 28 Tancredi Gusman, “Between Evidence and Representation: A New Methodological Approach to the History of Performance Art and Its Documentation,” Contemporary Theatre Review 29, no. 4 (2019): 445. 29 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), esp. 61–111. 30 Philip Auslander, “Performance Analysis and Popular Music: A Manifesto,” Contemporary Theatre Review 14, no. 1 (2004): 5. 31 Lee B. Brown, “Phonography, Rock Records, and the Ontology of Recorded Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 4 (2000): 368, 363. 32 Auslander, “Performativity,” 10n19. 33 Linsley, “9 Beginnings,” 243. 34 Ibid., 224. 35 Ricarda Franzen, “In and Out of ‘Earsight’—Listening to Historical Theatre Sound Recordings,” Theatre and Performance Design 2, no. 3–4 (2016): 312–325. For the concept of “dramaturgy of sound,” see Mladen Ovadija, Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-garde and Postdramatic Theatre (Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2013). 36 Worth mentioning here is Deirdre Heddon’s performance-inflected reading of the work of sound artist Graeme Miller, whose installations frequently feature sonic archives; Deirdre Heddon, “The Horizon of Sound: Soliciting the Earwitness,” Performance Research 15, no. 3 (2010): 36–42. 37 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 197. 38 Note also the (at the time of this chapter as yet unpublished) work by Joshua Chambers-Letson on the presence of the scream in Yoko Ono’s lifelong practice (documented through scores and photographs as well as recordings), which Chambers-Letson reads as an expression of a queer mode of living-with grief.

Listening to the Histories of Performance Art  149



150  Heike Roms Brown, Lee B. “Phonography, Rock Records, and the Ontology of Recorded Music.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 4 (2000): 361–372. Brucher, Rosemarie. “Stille Größe: Zur Performativität des Schweigens in Ästhetiken des 18. Jahrhunderts sowie in der zeitgenössischen Performance Art.” In Sound und Performance: Positionen, Methoden, Analysen, edited by Wolf-Dieter Ernst, Nora Niethammer, Berenika Szymanski-Düll and Anno Mungen, 695– 712. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015. Burden, Chris. Chris Burden 71–73. Los Angeles: Published by Chris Burden, 1974. Chow, Rey, and James A. Steintrager. “In Pursuit of the Object of Sound: An Introduction.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22, no. 2–3 (2011): 1–9. Czirak, Adam. “Von den stummen Diskursen der osteuropäischen PerformanceKunst. Die Rhetoric des Schweigens in der Zweiten Öffentlichkeit.” In Sound und Performance: Positionen, Methoden, Analysen, edited by Wolf-Dieter Ernst, Nora Niethammer, Berenika Szymanski-Düll and Anno Mungen, 241–253. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015. Franzen, Ricarda. “In and Out of ‘Earsight’—Listening to Historical Theatre Sound Recordings.” Theatre and Performance Design 2, no. 3–4 (2016): 312–325. Geisenberger, Jürgen. Joseph Beuys und die Musik. Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 1999. Gooding, Mel. “The Work.” In Audio Arts: Discourse and Practice in Contemporary Art, by William Furlong, 6–12. London: Academy Editions, 1994. Gusman, Tancredi. “Between Evidence and Representation: A New Methodological Approach to the History of Performance Art and Its Documentation.” Contemporary Theatre Review 29, no. 4 (2019): 439–461. Heddon, Deirdre. “The Horizon of Sound: Soliciting the Earwitness,” Performance Research 15, no. 3 (2010): 36–42. Jones, Amelia. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Jones, Amelia. “Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform Their Masculinities.” Art History 17, no. 4 (1994): 546–584. Lander, Dan, and Micah Lexier. “A Discography of Recorded Works by Artists.” UbuWeb. Accessed 27 April 2022. https://www.ubu.com/papers/artists_ recordings.html. Leddy, Annette. “Allan Kaprow papers, 1940–1997—Finding Aid (no 980063).” Getty Research Institute. Accessed 27 April 2022. http://hdl.handle. net/10020/980063s10. Linsley, Johanna. “9 Beginnings: Sonic Theatrical Possibilities and Potentialities in the Performance Archive.” In Artists in the Archive: Creative and Curatorial Engagements with Documents of Art and Performance, edited by Paul Clarke, Simon Jones, Nick Kaye and Johanna Linsley, 223–245. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. O’Dell, Kathy. “Displacing the Haptic: Performance Art, the Photographic Document, and the 1970s.” Performance Research 2, no. 1 (1997): 73–81. Ovadija, Mladen. Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-garde and Postdramatic Theatre. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Listening to the Histories of Performance Art  151 Roms, Heike. “How and Why Are Performances Documented?” In Thinking through Theatre and Performance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher and Heike Roms, 225–239. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019. Rovere, Walter, and Patrizio Peterlini, eds. Sense Sound/Sound Sense: Fluxus Music, Scores & Records in the Luigi Bonotto Collection. Ravenna: Danilo Montanari Editore, 2019. Shalson, Lara. Performing Endurance: Art and Politics Since 1960. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Stiles, Kristine. “Between Water and Stone: Fluxus Performance, A Metaphysics of Acts.” In In the Spirit of Fluxus, edited by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, 62–99. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993. van der Meijden, Peter. ‘“Not Incorrect and Particularly Not Irrelevant’: Joseph Beuys and Henning Christiansen, 1966–71.” Tate Papers, no. 31 (Spring 2019). https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/31/joseph-beuys-henningchristiansen. Ward, Frazer. “Gray Zone: Watching ‘Shoot’.” October 95 (Winter, 2001), 114–130. Audio Materials Cited Beuys, Joseph. Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja, Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee. Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, 1970. Beuys, Joseph, and Henning Christiansen. Schottische Symphonie / Requiem of Art. Munich: Edition Schellmann, 1973. Beuys, Joseph, and Albrecht/d. Performance at the ICA London. 1 November 1974. Stuttgart: Samadhi Records, 1976. Beuys, Joseph, and Nam June Paik. In Memoriam George Maciunas: Klavierduett. Berlin: Edition Block, 1982. Beuys, Joseph. Kunst = Kapital (Three lectures held in Achberg, Germany, 1973, 1974, 1978). Wangen: FIU-Verlag, 1992. Burden, Chris. Documentation of Selected Works 1971–1974. 16mm. Los Angeles: Published by Chris Burden, 1975. Escape Velocity. USC Viterbi School of Engineering Podcast. Episode 1, “Acoustic Museums.” Posted on Soundcloud, 7 March 2016. https://soundcloud.com/ escape-velocity-197738573/episode-1-acoustic-museums. Kaprow, Allan. How to Make a Happening. New York: Mass Art, 1966. Ono, Yoko. Cut Piece. 16mm. Dir. Albert and David Maysles. New York: Maysles Films, Inc. & Yoko Ono, 1965–1966. O’Shea, Hannah. A Litany for Women Artists. Audio Arts 5, no. 3–4 (1982). Available at Tate, accessed 27 April 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/ items/tga-200414-7-3-1-19/audio-arts-volume-5-nos-3-4. Vostell, Wolf. Dé-coll/age Musik. Milan: Multiphla, 1982. Selected Online Collections of Sound Documents of Performance Art Fondazione Bonotto Luigi Bonotto Collection. Accessed 27 April 2022. https://www. fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/.

152  Heike Roms Tate Archive. “Material relating to William Furlong’s Audio Arts Magazine 1968–2004.” Accessed 27 April 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/ tga-200414-7/audio-arts-audio-recordings. UbuWeb. “UbuWeb: Sound.” Accessed 27 April 2022. https://ubu.com/sound/. Zentrum für Künstlerpublikationen. “Sound Collection Guy Schraenen.” Accessed 27 April 2022. http://forschung-kuenstlerpublikationen.de/Sound- Collection. html.

Part III

Representing Performance Information, Collection, Reactivation

9

Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art The Joan Jonas Knowledge Base Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton

The Artist Archives Initiative and the Construction of Artist Knowledge Bases The museum world moved forward rapidly in the first decades of the twenty-first century as artists and their agents began selling performance works in series, and museums of modern and contemporary art began acquiring these works for their permanent collections. It is now common for museum staff to work directly with artists and their associates to reenact performance works from their collections. Conservators, curators, collection managers, registrars, exhibition designers, audiovisual technicians, and others engage with artists and performers to understand, interpret, and present these works. They rely on documentation of prior performances, artist-authored scripts and scores, and artist interviews to interpret these works and stage reperformances. Museum practices around the stewardship of performance art have become increasingly established over the past two decades. Artists fill out questionnaires, create instruction manuals, and participate in interviews and meetings to discuss reperformance. Museum staff produce their own documentation through each life stage of the artwork. New documentation practices extend protocols established for more traditional collections as the artwork’s archival footprint expands from museum acquisition through each phase of an artwork’s institutional life, including storage, exhibition, loan, and conservation. Models now exist for documenting artist preferences for training new performers and restaging their work. One outcome of developing thick documentation for conserving and presenting these works is the production of extensive and varied formats for collecting information that will assist museum staff and performers in future performances. Within museums, these new methods of documentation complement new information storage systems adapted for variable works that are generative, interpretive, and not object-centered. Artist interviews and ethnographic analysis borrowed from the social sciences and the humanities provide rich resources for museum staff to draw from as they follow protocols established by artists and work to extend the life of performance works. Catering information management systems to the behaviors of DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-13

156  Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton

performance art continues to challenge museums, whose collections’ databases were initially constructed for discrete objects that circulate through cycles of storage, conservation, exhibition, and back to storage. The needs of performance art and other variable formats such as installation and time-based media require more flexible systems that allow for the documentation of multiple instantiations of works as they change over time, along with documentation in multiple formats. Museums require systems that allow staff to search for information using traditional object-oriented categories and according to the complex event-oriented identities of performance artworks. As museums develop these internal systems of knowledge, allowing their staff access to information about the past and potential future of their performance collections, there is a growing need for similar resources that are more widely available to art world professionals, artists, scholars, and the public. Likewise, museum professionals will benefit from access to resources outside of their own internal records as they borrow works from other owners and consider options for restaging the works in their own collections. Launched in 2015, the Artist Archives Initiative was formed in part to address this need for more flexible, responsive, and accessible information resources on contemporary art. The initiative responds to the growing demand for information on past art performances and the need for guidelines for the future performance and exhibition of these works. Administratively housed at New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections, one of the initiative’s projects is to develop “knowledge bases” for individual artists. The knowledge bases are open-access information resources that are available to the public. The intended users are curators, conservators, performers, exhibition designers, and other art world professionals and researchers, who depend on documentation to make conservation and display decisions that honor the artist’s vision for their work. Through symposia, publications, and online communications, the Artist Archives Initiative also strives to advance discussion on broader issues underlying the curation and conservation of contemporary art, including authorship, authenticity, and the ethical responsibilities of contemporary art world professionals. As we define it, an artist knowledge base is neither an archive nor an exhaustive catalogue raisonée. There are no finding aids for researchers to enhance their discovery of primary materials. Instead, it is curatorial in nature as it contains highly selected and partially interpreted materials assembled by our research team of students hired with the support of grants and donations. These materials come from various personal and institutional archives, publications, and other resources. A knowledge base also contains images, videos, floorplans, and other audio and visual documentation selected to help researchers better understand the past and potential future of featured artworks and exhibitions. Perhaps most importantly, a knowledge base contains interviews with the artist, if available, and with

Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art  157

the curators, performers, conservators, designers, technicians, and others who worked with them. The research undertaken by the Artist Archives Initiative’s collaborators to produce artist knowledge bases places equal emphasis on the work’s conception and its history of public display and reception, and aims to use appropriate technologies to archive and make information accessible to the public. The collaborative directorship of the project combines the academic and practical expertise of curators, conservators, art historians, and computer scientists. There is a strong multidisciplinary motivation underlying the Artist Archives Initiative to engage students, faculty, art world professionals, and artists to produce information resources that also generate new knowledge about the art and technology of our times. To date, the Artist Archives Initiative has developed two resources: the David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base and the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base. The artists and their artworks are quite different. Wojnarowicz is deceased, so our focus was on archives, published resources, and interviews with those who had worked with him.1 Jonas is alive and became central to our research by providing us access to her archives, her personal network, and her own time, offering us multiple interviews and additional guidance. Although the artists and their work are quite different, common themes emerged during our research. The most pronounced was the core problem that is faced by museums: how to design a database that allows users to successfully search for information that will benefit their research. We now refer to this as the “database challenge.” Standard relational database applications, inside or outside of museums, do not adequately accommodate documentation related to installation, media, and performance art. They do not easily facilitate searches for information, in part because of the complex relationships between the various attributes of contemporary artworks. We wanted to create resources that would accommodate multifaceted and nonlinear relationships between objects, media, people, dates, places, exhibits, conservation reports, publications, and other archival resources. These relationships proved to be challenging to conventional database design that privileges a highly structured and hierarchical arrangement of information. A guiding principle in the design of the knowledge bases was to develop a sustainable open-source product that could be easily maintained and would serve as a model for future research on other artists and collections. The research for the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base took place over a fouryear period, beginning with an initial discussion about the artist and the need for more public information about her working methods and her concerns about future presentation of her work. After receiving Jonas’s support for the project, we formed an advisory board of Joan Jonas scholars, curators, conservators, and technology advisors to help guide us as we proceeded. The following sections describe the development of these components by tracing the questions that arose and the decisions we made along the way.

158  Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton

Translating Performance to an Online Knowledge Base The Joan Jonas Knowledge Base ( JJKB) presents a collection of documentary materials, texts, and interviews about two seminal early multimedia works by Joan Jonas: Organic Honey (1972, 1972/1994) and Mirage (1976, 1976/1994/2005, 1976/2001). These two artwork case studies are complemented by three exhibition case studies that represent important moments in Jonas’s artistic development from the early 1980s to today and, crucially, were also occasions on which the two core case studies were displayed. These exhibition case studies include the artist’s first US retrospective at the University Art Museum (now the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive) in 1980, entitled Joan Jonas: Performance/Video/Installation, followed more than a decade later by the first comprehensive museum exhibition of Jonas’s works, entitled Joan Jonas: Works 1968–1994, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1994. As a final exhibition case study, we present materials from the exhibition Joan Jonas: Light Time Tales, presented at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan in 2014. To further reflect on the scope of our research and the curatorial concept and collaborative processes that shaped the JJKB, it is important to take a brief look at Jonas’s artistic strategies and introduce the interdisciplinary multimedia practice that has defined her performances and installations to this day. Jonas studied art history and sculpture in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is part of a generation of avant-garde artists who were active in Downtown Manhattan. This milieu furnished the generative social and cultural environment in which she developed her own practice. Jonas set out to visualize process and time as artistic materials and to find new ways to approach the audience. She understood performance to be a genre-defying medium that, as she famously said, would allow her to push the physical and object-based boundaries of art aside and literally using time and space as a medium.2 Jonas translates popular culture, anthropological influences, and literary sources into a reduced and minimalist language of objects and gestures that have extended to conceptual art, theater, and new media art. From early on in her work, Jonas’s art-making strategies responded to the expanding institutional reception of performance art from the 1990s onward, as she began producing works in hybridized formats that encompass both live performance events and gallery-based media installations. Given the extent of Jonas’s work, we decided, in consultation with the artist, to dedicate the first two years of our research to two specific early works, Organic Honey and Mirage, and to then expand our research to three exhibition case studies. This choice was based on the generative status of these works in the artist’s career and their numerous iterations and continuous evolution across various media, periods of time, and spatial formats.

Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art  159

From a curatorial and conservation perspective, several factors guided the decision to limit the research to only two artworks and three exhibition case studies. We decided to provide a lot of information on several complex artworks and exhibitions, rather than offer less information on a larger number of works and exhibitions. The focus on five case studies allowed us to research the works not only in the year of their first appearance or presentation but over several decades. This decision also followed one of the key aims of the Artist Archives Initiative to provide models for other researchers to continue this form of long-term in-depth research. The JJKB is not an artist website but an academic research project interested in how an online resource might help conserve the unique mechanics of authenticity and immediacy within performance-based practices. How could an open-source database retain and acknowledge the various forms of existence and activation of performance works, which continuously change with each exhibition and iteration? Taking note of our own positionality and input, we wanted to document the collective labor involved in the assessment, gathering, and mediation of such a knowledge base as a tool for future research. We remained aware of the effect our choices would have on the kinds of materials we would both find and select to include in the JJKB. Of particular importance was the fact that a large majority of the documents would be made publicly available for the first time. Jonas actively works with her archive as a source of reference in her practice and as part of her installations and works, and we took note of the impact that the accessibility of an artist’s personal archive could have—on the reception of her work, on the artist’s self-referential way of working, and on the future lives of the artworks themselves. Jonas collaborated with our team by opening her archives and allowing us to interview her about a range of issues related to the principal artworks and exhibition case studies. Most of the documents on the JJKB are from the artist’s personal studio archive, which had previously not been cataloged or made available to the public. These findings are joined by the materials we researched and received from the institutions that exhibit and collect her work—from museums and private collections to festivals, galleries, and libraries. Each of the case studies is connected to further artworks, exhibitions, and a range of different contexts that stretch over a period of half a century, and that we tried to represent with as much information as possible on the JJKB. Within the knowledge base, each of the five case study sections includes an overview of the artwork or exhibition and various collections of documentary materials and sources, such as notebooks, floor plans, interviews, chronologies, photographs, videos, and detailed bibliographies. A series of interviews with the artist, scholars, curators, conservators, and others familiar with Jonas’s work accompanies the case studies.

160  Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton

Figure 9.1 Artwork case studies page of the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base featuring the case studies Organic Honey and Mirage by Joan Jonas.3

As one of her key performances, Organic Honey was first enacted in 1972 and subsequently expanded into a group of iterative, variable, and interrelated artworks based on Joan Jonas’s persona and alter ego: Organic Honey. The initial performance included a closed-circuit camera and monitor as well as projections that Jonas used to create a new situational experience, enabling audiences to view different aspects of her performed movements simultaneously. Jonas’s video and performance works from the early to mid-1970s, and her performances Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy and Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll in particular, set out to challenge the way the viewers perceived and experienced the notions of gender and identity by combining choreography, still and moving images, sound, sculpture, and poetry into live multimedia environments held together through the artist’s presence, her carefully choreographed gestures, and her use of video. Organic Honey was performed 15 times throughout the 1970s. In 1994, Jonas developed the installation version of the work based on an earlier setup composed in 1980 for her first retrospective at the Berkeley University Art Museum. The installation version of Organic Honey’s Visual

Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art  161

Telepathy / Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll (1972/1994) was first shown at the Stedelijk Museum in 1994 and has since been shown numerous times as a multimedia installation. The second artwork case study, Mirage, was first presented in 1976 as a performance with film projections and pre-recorded video at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, where Jonas used film, video, drawing, and props to evoke new rituals, forms of movement, and transformations between the stage and the screen. Mirage was performed about six times from 1976 to 1983 and was restaged almost four decades later as an adapted version at Tate Modern in 2018. Jonas’s profound interest in history, myth, ritual, and collective memory is matched by her sensitivity to shifting political, environmental, and technological changes. Jonas’s attention to the symbiotic relationship of the female body and psyche to its simultaneous recording and transmission is driven by Jonas’s passion for the deconstruction of cultural, historical, and social norms. These concerns at the heart of Mirage and Organic Honey are central to the artist’s entire practice. Organic Honey and Mirage are significant for the way the moving image is placed in dialog with live action through their overall iterative quality, altering the viewer’s experience. These installations take shape as variable arrangements of video monitors, slide projections, projections, sculptural elements, drawings, and photographs, offering fragments of the work’s initial performance(s), interspersed with the props, and costumes used by Jonas in her restagings of the works. In compiling the JJKB, we wanted to show how Jonas uses the exhibition as both a medium and a site of production, thereby framing her installations as ongoing processes rather than instances that presented a collection of relics from past performances. Retracing the stories of both Organic Honey and Mirage necessitated looking at their various modes of existence within and beyond the institutional spaces they have occupied over the years of their existence. The exhibition case studies examine how Jonas develops her artworks in relation to their exhibition histories and give insight into her precise planning and conceptualization of her works, as well as the ways in which she adapts and contextualizes her work to the sites of their presentation. The first exhibition case study is a 1980 exhibition titled Joan Jonas: Performance/Video/Installation, held at the University Art Museum in Berkeley and curated by David Ross. The presentation combined live performances, video screenings, and early performative installations in one space. These early stage-like environments for her performances, which were accessible during exhibition hours, were important for Jonas’s future development of her installations. The second exhibition case study is Jonas’s first European museum retrospective, Joan Jonas: Works 1968–1994, curated by Dorine Mignot at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1994. For this exhibition,

162  Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton

Jonas developed her performances into multimedia installations that were presented either individually or in small groupings in a series of museum galleries. Each work, since its first performance and recording in the early 1970s, has been repeatedly performed and translated into multimedia installations, which are now part of various museum collections such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The third and final exhibition, leading us to the present, is her retrospective Joan Jonas: Light Time Tales at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, which was curated by Andrea Lissoni in 2014. This exhibition is exemplary of how Jonas engages the sites and spaces of her exhibitions as central to the experience of her works. While in prior museum exhibitions her installations often occupied separate spaces, Jonas’s retrospective at the Pirelli HangarBicocca took place in a giant airplane hangar. The vastness of the darkened space allowed the visitors to move through a kind of landscape of installations, from one work to the next. The overflow of sound and choreography of the order of the installation were emblematic of Jonas’s multilayered and recursive way of working. Although there have been many other important exhibitions of her work, these specific exhibitions play a significant role in Jonas’s development of her multimedia installations. Spread out over a period of four decades, the three exhibition case studies give insight into the interconnectedness of her work’s various iterations and moments of transition, for example, when her performances became video works, environments, sets, and multimedia installations. We were specifically interested in the instances when a work enters a museum collection, which was the case for Jonas’s first retrospective in Amsterdam in 1994, when Organic Honey and the multimedia installation of Sweeney Astray (1994) were subsequently acquired by the Stedelijk Museum. The confluence of developing a performance into an installation that is then acquired by a museum signifies both the end of the work as an ephemeral performance and yet also represents the beginning of a work’s existence within an institutional context. Performances-turnedinstallations become part of a museum’s collection and are anchored within its institutional regulations and rituals. From a conservation perspective, this is the moment at which the originality of the work is affirmed, and a kind of finality is brought upon the work. And yet, investigating Jonas’s involvement with the institutions that own and regularly exhibit her work reveals her close and often long-term collaborations with curators and conservators. We gave equal attention to the “before” as much as the “after” of the event, taking note of each site-specific adaptation and the continuous evolution of Jonas’s work over the past six decades when it was shown. The common mission to conserve the “liveness” of the work is

Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art  163

especially evident in the documentation and collection files we were given by the conservation and curatorial department at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam for Organic Honey or the in-depth interviews we were able to conduct with the conservators at MoMA. As a result, the JJKB shows, on the one hand, how the artist remains involved in the conservation and representation of her multimedia installations over time and, on the other hand, how these works are deeply embedded in the curatorial and institutional choices and politics that have defined the lives of these works over the decades.

Developing the JJKB The dense network of relations, adaptations, and collaborations inherent to Jonas’s artistic practice led to the articulation of two central objectives: to document our own process and to develop a narrative structure for the JJKB. The first was to research and document, in the greatest possible detail, how Jonas developed Organic Honey and Mirage. Our interest was to look beyond the dates of their first appearance and to document and map out each iteration and all transformations over a period of several decades. The second objective was to find a way to organize and classify our findings and interlink the contingent quality of her multimedia practice through the example of these two seminal early artworks. After two years of research on Organic Honey and Mirage, we were ready to widen our focus. Instead of choosing further art work case studies, we decided to expand our research to three key exhibitions. This broadening of our research materials meant looking at how Jonas’s works were and continue to be exhibited, collected, and conserved once they became part of museum collections. This equal focus on the production, the presentation, the conservation, and the restaging of the works gives insight into the artist’s creative process and the multilayered historiography of their institutional lives once they are acquired by collections. This research phase was complemented by documenting the rich reception of the artist’s work from the early 1970s to the present, offering detailed case study overviews and a portrait of the context in which Jonas developed her work. The four years of research can be broken down into several stages:4 First, defining the scope of our research with the artist and conceptually mapping the materials we found and produced; second, classifying the materials via different case studies, thematic and chronological groupings, and interlinking these different categories; third, collaborating with the technical team to integrate these findings into an online structure that allows for the research to be easily accessible while respecting the interconnectedness of the artist’s work; and finally, thinking about the accessibility, sustainability, and impact of our research.

164  Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton

Figure 9.2 This visualization map of Organic Honey was drawn by art history student Brendon Eng in 2017, and completed by museum studies student Tracy Robinson in 2020. This map was vital to understanding the various iterations and complexities of the artwork case studies.

In order to establish a classification system for the various types of documentary materials and recordings that were collected, we proceeded in two steps. The first step was to map and visualize, in detail, the history of the two artwork case studies Organic Honey (Figure 9.2) and Mirage. The aim of the two visualization maps5 was to organize the artworks by their various formats (i.e., performances, videos, and installations) and to offer detailed chronologies, images, drawings, floorplans, and interviews relevant to each work’s version. A careful investigation of every rendition of these two works in the past and present was important to capturing the extent and impact of these works as well as the context, adaptations, and transformation that came with their iterations over a period of five decades. Researched and developed by members of the student research team, Brandon Eng, Tayler Healy, and Tracy Robinson, these maps give a portrait of the works through the lens of art history, mapping the consistency and variations over long periods of time.

Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art  165

In the second step, the two visualization maps of Jonas’s works were the starting point for us, together with Kristin Poor, assistant curatorial research director, and Allison Kalb, website manager, to develop and implement, in consultation with the technical team, the internal structure for the JJKB WordPress platform.6 This involved the organization of Jonas’s works’ attributes, histories, and interconnections into distinct yet related data points. The chronological and thematic mappings were key to developing a classification system and site structure that, while easy to navigate, would interconnect on various levels within the resource section of the knowledge base. The resource section functions as a meta platform that compiles information from across the knowledge base, relating the case studies across shared themes, drawing a broader picture of the context of Jonas’s work. This section includes a wide range of additional resources including collected documentation of the case studies and all of their related works and exhibitions, an artist chronology, a section dedicated to the Downtown New York context, and extensive bibliographies for each of the case studies, compiled by research student team members Amrit Dhillon, Brandon Eng, Joo Hee Kim, and Tracy Robinson. It also houses two special sections that give an overview of the artist’s own writings, documentation of the artist’s notebooks, as well as interviews with collaborators, curators, conservators, writers, and the artist herself. The resource section is the spine of the JJKB, connecting each of its other sections. This interconnected and nonlinear approach is reflective of her artistic vocabulary, which moves through the layers of time, stories, and networks activated in and through her work. It also serves as a tool to document the contingent and iterative quality of Jonas’s multimedia practice and the rich historiography and reception of her post-conceptual, interdisciplinary performance and multimedia installations since the early 1970s. These two structural models—the map and the spine of the resource section—played a major role in the decision-making process of how to visually and textually communicate and integrate our findings on the website. This was a highly collaborative process that included writing descriptions and establishing reference pages as well as designing posts and the general layout of the site. All design choices for the knowledge base were driven by factors such as sustainability and accessibility while keeping the complexity of copyright issues in mind. Over a period of one and a half years, in order to provide free access to over 800 items on view in the JJKB, we negotiated with the artist’s studio, various institutions, photographers of Jonas’s work, as well as numerous individuals who generously shared their archival materials and their knowledge with us. This coming together of different communities to establish the JJKB affirmed the public nature of the project. Our strong belief in sharing archival matters with the greater public was one of the reasons we decided to use “linked open data,” an open-source data format described below. Two of the main

166  Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton

challenges were to propose data visualizations that specifically support and enhance research on performance art, and to offer as many perspectives and online points of access to Jonas’s work as possible to our users beyond the website of the JJKB. We selected Wikidata to meet both of these goals. This database challenge—discussed in the next section of this chapter— was crucial not only for capturing but also for mediating the layers of interconnection and self-referentiality at the core of Jonas’s work.

The Database Challenge The digital culture theorist Lev Manovich posed the question “What is the relationship between database and another form that has traditionally dominated human culture—narrative?” 7 In order to build a digital infrastructure to contain the narrative and data that we collected on Joan Jonas and her work, we considered the use of a database, a collection of stored information that can be accessed electronically. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (2021) defines data as “Related items of (chiefly numerical) information considered collectively, typically obtained by scientific work and used for reference, analysis, or calculation.”8 But where does this leave us as we research and collect qualitative information on the visual arts generally and on performance art in particular? Event-based histories of performance art—artworks which are variable and by necessity change over time—seem to deposit us in the realm of narrative. A narrative is defined in the OED (2021) as “An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them; a narration, a story, an account.”9 The complex terrain of researching and documenting time-based performance art makes visible the seeming tension between data and the comparatively abstract, qualitative nature of narrative. In other words, as humanities scholars invested in the histories of contemporary art, we were confronted with the database challenge. In relation to the work of Jonas, the dilemma was how to present her work in ways that would allow for discoverability, manipulation, and information retrieval without losing the thread of the story of this artist and her densely layered practice. As noted above, a traditional database used to capture and track works of art that manifest as physical objects, such as paintings and sculpture, stores the data in sets of related tables of information. For example, the information about each artist (e.g., country of origin, date of birth, etc.) is stored in one table of artists. Information on each artwork (e.g., the artist who created the work, the year it was completed, the medium, its weight and dimensions) is tracked in another table where each work is associated with its artist(s) in the table of artists. The ease of discoverability (e.g., how many oil paintings by Brazilian artists are in this collection?), consistency, and accuracy are the positive outcomes of correctly recording these data points into the appropriate rows and columns of the specific tables.

Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art  167

As we evaluated how best to study and present our research on Jonas’s performance art, it became clear that one of the distinguishing features of the medium—that a single work may have many iterations over time— precluded our ability to use a traditional database. The technical team introduced the database challenge to examine the findings of our humanities colleagues on the project and to evaluate how best to capture the results of their research electronically with support for discoverability and custom output.

Designing the Knowledge Base Technology Infrastructure We made a commitment to share our resources and document the infrastructure of our approach so that other scholars could use it as a model to house rich narratives that capture art historical, curatorial, and conservation research while simultaneously building out a database that captures specific facts and figures about the represented artist. The JJKB model employs open-source software to avoid the cost of proprietary software or expensive licenses and supports a commitment to the long-term preservation of these valuable digital resources to ensure accessibility in the future. When faced with the combination of narrative and data, we were inspired by the digital humanities concept of the “database documentary.” A database documentary, as described in a digital humanities study, differs from a cinematic documentary: where cinematic documentaries work with image and sound materials in a linear narrative, database documentaries are modular and combinatoric, branching and hypertextual, often structured more like a multimedia prose piece than a film […]. They are not watched, but rather performed by a reader/viewer who is provided with a series of guided paths […]. The paths are reversible, allowing for trackbacks to the sources from which individual documents are drawn and/or to external resources.10 The JJKB provides the user with the experience of performing a database documentary by exploring the work of a performance artist through the research compiled using WordPress to host the narrative contents of the JJKB website as noted above.11 In addition, to allow for the searchability and visualization of information included on the knowledge base’s WordPress website, we entered relevant names, locations, dates, and other discrete data points from the materials into a dataset that supports searches through “linked data.” Linked data is a paradigm that loosely mimics natural language in statements of three parts, each to describe relationships among entities, actions, and concepts. Each “triple” consists of a subject, a predicate, and an

168  Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton

object—not unlike many sentences in the English language. For example, the following are true statements about Joan Jonas: Subject

Predicate

Object

Joan Jonas Joan Jonas Joan Jonas Joan Jonas

describes her field of work as describes her field of work as was a participant in is represented by

Video art Performance art documenta 5 Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)

An object can also serve as a subject, thus allowing links from one statement to the next: Subject

Predicate

Electronic Arts Intermix was founded by Electronic Arts Intermix has an official website at

Object Howard Wise http://www.eai.org/

Artists, artworks, institutions, and all entities as “subjects” or “objects” are uniquely identified for consistency; for example, Joan Jonas is referenced as Q453808 (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q453808), while Electronic Arts Intermix is referenced as Q5358214 (https://www. wikidata.org/wiki/Q5358214). Linked data are both human-readable and machine-readable and are internationally recognized in accordance with the principles published by the World Wide Web Consortium.12 Linked Open Data (LOD) refers to linked data that are open-source, free of charge, and readily accessible, promoting cross-institutional and cross-national discoverability. Many online cultural heritage resources are expensive and restrict access, while LOD, with its principle of openness, offers an opportunity to expose data from a variety of institutional repositories and thus supports collaboration among scholars and practitioners across cultural institutions and national boundaries. Jonathan Blaney, of the Programming Historian website, sums up the three most important aspects of LOD that support cultural heritage research: LOD refers to data that are open and available to anyone on the internet; LOD aims to standardize ways of referring to unique entities such as a specific artist, artwork, or institution so that data can be shared; and the manner in which LOD is made up of triples describes relationships between entities.13 Indeed, as the technology team’s research progressed during the development of the JJKB, we found that LOD allowed us to ask questions of the data about the artist and her work to provide meaningful results to our curatorial and art historical colleagues on this project. The JJKB researchers collated discrete facts such as performance dates and locations, collaborator names, performance titles, objects used, the

Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art  169

documentation available (e.g., floorplans), and resources associated with given works of art and their performances, and entered the information into tables set up so that the data could be exported as triples. One of the challenges rooted in the qualitative nature of research in cultural heritage is the need to standardize terminology in order to ensure consistency and searchability. Murtha Baca, of the Getty Research Institute, writes, “We recognize that a single concept can be expressed by more than one word, and that a single word can express more than one concept.”14 The JJKB implemented standardized properties (in this case, for the predicates) designed for shared use by the galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions comprising the cultural heritage research community.15 In order to post the data so that the results of the JJKB research would be discoverable and freely available, the JJKB team uploaded data to the Wikidata website, a shared knowledge base that is free of charge, multilingual, and widely used (https://www.wikidata.org). From a practical standpoint, it was first necessary to review and prepare the data for upload. This is a standard step in projects that rely on data in order to ensure consistency and accuracy in the data that are often input over a period of time and by more than one project participant. Lozana Rossenova, assistant linked data research director, used the open-source software tool OpenRefine (https://openrefine.org), which is widely used for cultural heritage research, to prepare the JJKB data for upload into Wikidata.

Data Visualization: Introduction to SPARQL When we search databases, large or small, we often think of the results in a list or table format: the contacts on one’s phone listed with their names and phone numbers; the newest photograph books available at your local bookstore along with titles, authors, and publisher. Data visualization refers to presenting data and information in a visual context: rather than displaying data or information in tables, data visualization techniques allow for the output to be drawn as charts, graphs, or other shapes and structures such as trees or bubble charts. Cultural heritage scholars have introduced this approach, traditionally reserved for the sciences and social sciences, into scholarship on the fine arts, literature, and beyond. SPARQL (pronounced “sparkle”) is a technology used to ask questions of linked open data hosted on Wikidata and is available through an interactive window on the Wikidata website (https://query.wikidata.org). The results of searches can be displayed in traditional tabular form, such as listing the floor plans available for Organic Honey and Mirage along with their URLs for quick access, or listing all the instantiations of Organic Honey and Mirage that feature masks. SPARQL also supports functionality to build timelines to display the chronology of the artist’s works studied, maps to

170  Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton

Figure 9.3 All instantiations of Organic Honey including materials used. Interactive graph data visualization example. Query by Lozana Rossenova.

display the geographical distribution of her performances, and other formats. Some of the formats are interactive in order to further encourage the users to explore the underlying data visually.

Conclusion: Documenting the Process After the online launch of the JJKB, the focus of the project shifted to ensuring the sustainability, growth, and impact of the research. From an educational standpoint, we were working to ensure the long-term preservation of the JJKB by including video tutorials detailing the work that was undertaken and giving detailed credit to members of the student team as part of a larger mentoring experience. To best support the resource users as well as the cultural heritage and contemporary art research communities, our goal was not only to share the data openly but also to provide a model for other arts organizations. To this end, the JJKB provides two tutorial modules housed in the “Linked Open Data” section of the website: Workflow: Working with Cultural Heritage Datasets and Write Your Own Queries. From a conservation perspective, we wanted to document the fouryear interdisciplinary and collaborative process that brought the JJKB into existence. This approach allowed us to bring forth the people it takes to create a knowledge base that continues to grow and expand to include further case studies. The JJKB is dedicated to the paradoxical task of capturing and pinning down Jonas’s works while also highlighting their evolving states of existence. This implied translating performance to a knowledge base while maintaining and foregrounding the contingent nature of the work and to produce a platform that—just like Jonas’s performances and multimedia works—continues to evolve by looking back and into the future.

Capturing Narrative and Data in Performance Art  171

Notes

Bibliography Baca, Murtha. “Foreword.” In Introduction to Controlled Vocabularies: Terminology for Art, Architecture, and Other Cultural Works, 2nd ed., edited by Patricia Harpring, x–xi. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2013.

172  Barbara Clausen, Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton Blaney, Jonathan. “Introduction to the Principles of Linked Open Data.” Edited by Adam Crymble. Programming Historian, no. 6 (7 May 2017). https://doi. org/10.46430/phen0068. Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp. Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Joan Jonas Knowledge Base. Accessed 8 May 2022. https://artistarchives.hosting. nyu.edu/JoanJonas/. Jonas, Joan, and Joan Simon, eds. In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2015. Lawson, Louise, Acatia Finbow, and Hélia Marçal. “Developing a Strategy for the Conservation of Performance-Based Artworks at Tate.” Journal of the Institute of Conservation 42, no. 2 (2019): 114–134. Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form.” In Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Electronic Mediations 20, edited by Victoria Vesna, 39–60. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Simon, Joan. “Scenes and Variations: An Interview with Joan Jonas.” Art in America 83, no. 7 ( July 1995): 72–79, 100–101. Tate. “The Live List: What to Consider When Collecting Live Works.” Accessed 9 July 2022. http://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/collecting-performative/ live-list. Wharton, Glenn, Deena Engel, and Marvin J. Taylor. “The Artist Archives Project: David Wojnarowicz.” Studies in Conservation 61 (2016): 241–247. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00393630.2016.1181350. Wikidata. “Wikidata: WikiProject Digital and Performative Arts/ Provenancial Data.” Accessed 8 May 2022. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/ Wikidata:WikiProject_Digital_and_Performative_Arts/Provenancial_Data. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). “Linked Data.” Accessed 8 May 2022. https:// www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data.

10 On the Long Road to Becoming a Matter of Course Collecting Live Performances in Museums and Other Art Collections Wolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader In 1982, the French Ministry of Culture created the Fonds régionaux d’art contemporain so as to decentralize official cultural policy and, in the process, also embed collection activities in regional cultural life. One year later, 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine was founded as one of the several institutions emerging from the government’s new strategy, but initially without being granted permanent exhibition spaces. This state of affairs was to last for more than 20 years. Against this background, a remarkable curatorial decision was made early on, which founding director Béatrice Josse, in retrospect, summed up in a simple formula: “Collect the ephemeral!”1 Even after moving into its current premises, FRAC Lorraine remains committed to this focus. The collection is largely stored there in archival boxes of the type usually used to file records or newspaper clippings. Currently, the collection assembled since the creation of the institution includes 1003 works by 374 artists, and most of the works it contains are “proposals rather than their tangible realization.”2 The boxes contain a number of documents proving the purchase of the respective work (such as a purchase contract and a certificate of authenticity), explaining the conditions of its reperformance (in the production or loan contract) and, depending on the nature of the work, additional documents such as questionnaires on various aspects of conservation, interviews with the artists, recordings of presentations or specifications on technique, props or reception.3 While the handling of the “propositions” is standardized via these documents, the curators responsible, Claire Valageas and Agnès Violeau, nevertheless emphasize that each work represents a “particular case.”4 In so doing, they point out the challenges that collections face in acquiring intangible works. On the one hand, institutions expect binding arrangements that would ensure the sustainability of collecting these works and standardized processes of recording them. On the other, however, these expectations often risk clashing with the potential mutation of works with each new reperformance. These challenges require time-intensive negotiations and individualized arrangements. DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-14

174  Wolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader

The practice established at FRAC Lorraine is still anything but selfevident today. It is true that performance art can look back on a history that is now at least 50 years old. Prestigious awards for representatives of this field of ephemeral art practices testify to a recent increase of attention in the art world, as evidenced by the awarding of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale to the performance artists Anne Imhof, in 2017, and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, in 2019, after Marina Abramović had already received this award in 1997. What is more, the promotion of participatory practice in museums that want to be a place of exchange leads to a growing interest in performative art practices. It is probably not unrelated to this commitment that an interest in historiographical reappraisal in exhibitions has also grown: acknowledging the importance of performance art and aiming to rewrite the canon retrospectively are two sides of the same coin.5 Nevertheless, live performances are still hardly represented in permanent collections. This is mainly due to the abovementioned tension between the desire for liveliness and the demand for sustainability; in other words, this lack of representation has to do with problems that result from the supposedly ephemeral character of performance-based artworks in an institutional context. These are precisely the problems that the authors of this chapter are currently addressing in the research project Collecting the Ephemeral: Prerequisites and Possibilities for the Inclusion of Performance Art in Collections.6 In cooperation with museums, galleries and artists, a transdisciplinary team is analysing the institutional and discursive structures and attitudes that have so far prevented the collection of live performances from becoming a matter of course. Part of our work is geared towards compiling a handbook that offers possible approaches to dealing with difficulties as well as suggestions for developing a new contemporary understanding of art collections. The aspects discussed below relate to moments in the acquisition process that have been identified by our partners as particularly challenging. They all are of fundamental importance indeed. They reveal the difficulty of determining the identity of the work as well as the documentation needed for its conservation and reactivation. In the following, we give an outline of how the defining features of the work or its identity are negotiated and are indeed a product of collaborative action and permanent exchange. We discuss documentation strategies as developed in the process and the extent to which they potentially enhance the longevity of the live performance. It will become apparent that live performances are not necessarily “ephemeral” in the traditional sense of this overused term but can assume changing identities over time. It will also become evident that insisting on existing institutional frameworks and attitudes, whether structurally given or consciously endorsed, makes it difficult to deal appropriately with performance art in the museum, but also that the common vocabulary needs to be adapted with regard to the acquisition of live performances.

Collecting Live Performances in Museums and Other Art Collections  175

Preserving Identity Instead of Objects: New Parameters for Understanding the Work of Art The task of art collections is generally summarized in the triad of collectingpreserving-presenting. The object of these activities also seems to be clearly defined, namely, the work of art. But when Karen Archey, the first curator of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam officially responsible for time-based media, decided to acquire Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. (2019) after a performance of this piece in her institution, it quickly turned out that it was actually not at all clear how such a work should be accessioned. Part of the problem was that HIGHER xtn. is a complex work based on an adaptation of a performance that had been staged since 2015 under the title HIGHER in various other frameworks. In consultation with the curator, the artist had adapted it to the specific context of the Stedelijk Museum, particularly with regard to the number of performers and the spatial arrangement.7 The overall package of information necessary for the creation of the version created for this venue included various definitional, personnel and legal clarifications concerning both the work itself and its possible reperformance, also with regard to a possible loan to other institutions. It had to be clarified how the performers were to be prepared, clothed and paid; how the use of the music was to be legally regulated; and how the documentation of reperformances was to be planned.8 Financial agreements and planning had to be adapted to the ephemeral nature of the work as well. Provisions had to be worked out that clarified how the performers engaged for future performances would be compensated and how the artist himself—should he be present at the respective performances—would be remunerated. Finally, it was noted in the accession documentation that such agreements around the performance of the work will develop alongside the lifespan of the artist himself and will eventually change if the artist were not able to perform or if he were to pass away. Rizzo thinks of HIGHER xtn. as one work which, however, must be adjusted to the unique environment of each and every venue in terms of spatial, temporal and casting aspects.9 He maintains an artist’s proof of the work. This puts him into a position where he can autonomously adapt HIGHER xtn. and freely present the work in various stage-based and museum contexts. This approach seems to be reminiscent of practices developed for works produced in editions but is not yet established when dealing with ephemeral art. It can be considered rooted in what we think is a progressive approach to the institution’s role. In this regard, it makes sense to refer to arguments that Archey, beyond her activities as a museum’s representative, endorsed theoretically when considering the implications of institutional critique to the practice of collecting. She did not, in that context, explicitly address the challenges of performance art, but it is easy to see the link: she argues for an “internal-external position” from which curators can resist the domination of traditional institutional self-understanding and

176  Wolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader

the prevailing distribution of privileges; in her view, this also includes the granting of appropriate honoraria for artistic labour and the willingness to treat artists “with a collaborative spirit.” Archey summarizes these approaches under the term “care.”10 Since it can also be used to define a new approach to the relationship between the institution that owns a performance and the work itself, this term deserves special attention in our context. The practice of conserving and restoring an artwork usually prioritizes its original material condition. However, to ensure the survival of a live performance, it is necessary to draw on different concepts. The extensive conversations between the artist and the curators prior to the acquisition were not limited to gathering knowledge about the genesis and context of the work and to discussing the preconditions of future performances. The features that define the work itself had to be determined too. Unlike when dealing with paintings or sculptures, such determinations are often not based on fixed parameters when it comes to live performances; they may even change with each new activation. Annalisa Rimmaudo, curator in the Collections contemporaines department of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, told us about one such challenge: in 2014, this collection acquired Senga Nengudi’s RSVP Performance Piece, a work originally created in 1978. The work comprises both a material dimension, consisting of six pairs of stockings, and a live performance. Whenever the material object is exhibited, it needs to be complemented with the performance, realized according to a photographic documentation of one of its first activations. When the Lenbachhaus inquired about receiving the work on loan in 2019, the Centre Pompidou asked the artist’s permission to create a remake in order for the performance to be reactivated. New specifications were made at her request: most importantly, each subsequent activation is to include one of the six previously used stockings necessary for the performance so that, as the artist says, energy will flow from one performance to the next.11 Nengudi thus found a highly idiosyncratic way of safeguarding the identity of the artwork. It has the consequence— seemingly paradoxical—that the unfolding of the work changes its identity.12 Pip Laurenson, the long-time head of Collection Care Research and of Time-Based Media Conservation at Tate, has dealt with this phenomenon also from a theoretical perspective. On the basis of her practical experience with materially changeable and temporally unfinished works, she argues for applying a new “conceptual framework” to the acquisition of such works.13 This framework, however, is not to be understood as a set of fixed rules. Rather, it requires a flexible response to new contexts and a constant negotiation of suitable criteria for an adequate staging of the work with all the agents involved. With important implications for the very concept of the artwork, this means that when the live performance enters the collection, it is not its original state and condition that is to be recorded. Instead, its identity must be determined and captured through conversations with the artist and various documentation techniques.

Collecting Live Performances in Museums and Other Art Collections  177

In the process, a certain degree of indeterminacy inevitably remains. Many artists try to limit indeterminacy by preparing instructions or notations. But in doing so, definitional imprecisions persist. As a rule, they pose a problem in the institutional environment. For example, Alexandra Pirici, an artist experienced in handling the sale of live performances, was unable to dispel the skepticism of the acquisition committee of the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Münster: the committee had considered a purchase following the performance of her Leaking Territories during Skulptur Projekte 2017 but shied away after realizing that elaborate preparations for reactivations would be unavoidable.14 Such concerns might not come as a surprise, but something else also comes into play. In our conversations with representatives of Swiss museums, what repeatedly came up was the issue that with the inclusion of performances in collections, a new interpretation of the professional roles of the people in charge might become necessary and that this necessity can be unsettling. Not all curators and conservators are comfortable with the assumption that they might be implied in the creative act.15 What is more, they may be in need of financial resources that were not allocated to a work which was meant to be performatively activated but was originally bought without considering the extra costs of hiring performers. Zurich’s Migros Museum curator Nadia Schneider Willen, for one, is facing this problem when dealing with time-based media. In many institutions, moreover, the financing of live events is the responsibility of departments specifically entrusted with this task, such as at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Furthermore, the budget for acquiring artworks is usually strictly separated from that for staging live events, whereas, in the case of live performance art, the two budget items must necessarily be combined.

New Documents, Processes, Standardizations Those institutions that have begun to purchase live performances or works with performative components in recent years have responded to the destabilization of conventional approaches by standardizing the processes of acquiring and recording works and by proposing alternative documentation practices. Rather than just reporting conditions and metadata, these new practices were established in order to capture the identity of the respective work and ensure that its future activations would not distort it. Creating frameworks for these processes is usually preceded by a clarification of what constitutes a live performance and why it cannot be grasped through the conventional tools of conservation. This difficulty encompasses all areas of collecting. Many of our project partners have expressed respect for these new tasks, which affect the conceptual foundations of their work. However, they mention several reasons for their current reluctance to purchase live performances: the medium’s unattractiveness in inter-institutional art exchange transactions, which are mainly devoted to

178  Wolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader

securing institutions’ prestigious loans for their own special exhibitions; the lack of knowledge and expertise on the part of teams with regard to the works’ maintenance and reactivation; and the great risk of high follow-up costs in the event of reperformances. But such concerns may have more to do with the novelty of the task than with the actual skills required. A glance at a number of highly demanding installations that have been added to Swiss collections in recent years suggests as much. Take, as just one example, Heidi Bucher’s latex works: to exhibit them as part of the artist’s solo show in the summer of 2022, an enormous conservation effort proved unavoidable, which the Kunstmuseum Bern was willing to undertake, even though the aging process of the material would degrade the artwork in the long term.16 It was a complicated task and it was expensive, but it was considered sufficiently relevant. Actually, it is not unusual for conservators to do extensive research into the treatment of particular works and document that research to ensure the conservation of the work. Experimenting with conserving live art should not be seen as so different after all. Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. was not the first live performance purchased by the Stedelijk Museum. It was preceded by a work by Tino Sehgal who, as is well known, categorically refuses to put anything in writing in the process of his now numerous sales: institutions are allowed to activate the work, but there will be no written contract or instructions.17 As a consequence, clarifications for HIGHER xtn. broke new ground in this field: little was self-evident and very much had to be negotiated. With Archey’s hiring in 2017, the museum decided to place a higher priority on dealing with time-based media, and her collaboration with Rizzo can be considered a practical experiment in shifting parameters. Under her leadership, the Stedelijk Museum also launched a research initiative on the conservation, acquisition and display of time-based media, in the context of which a series of documents was drafted on how to more adequately collect and process time-based artworks. This was a huge step to make for the museum which, among other things, led to the first time-based media conservator to be hired at a Dutch institution. In accordance with the use of the term in English, a wide range of media came under scrutiny. More than for other media, however, it is especially true of performance art that new challenges are encountered with its integration into this larger discursive context. Various new accession and documentation processes were formulated, for example, in a leaflet outlining the most important steps of the acquisition process, a guideline for preparatory interviews with the artists and for transcripts of these often very detailed conversations, and a template for documenting the work including its genesis and exhibition history, as well as information about the artist and the relationship of the work to the existing collection. In addition, in the case of HIGHER xtn., the artist contributed further documents and materials which, above all, are intended to facilitate the preparation and execution

Collecting Live Performances in Museums and Other Art Collections  179

of the performance reactivations: a video tutorial serves as a template for the movements; in the HIGHER xtn. Choreographic composition and installation instructions, the placement of dancers, the audience and the sound equipment are determined. The certificate of authenticity, which legally validates the authenticity of the work, is a formalized component of all purchases. More or less similar initiatives to formalize the acquisition of timebased artworks have been launched internationally by several museums in recent years. More often than not, this has taken place within the framework of research projects, which were almost always initiated by larger institutions such as the Tate in the United Kingdom; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. As early as 2012, the Tate established a research network that sought to investigate the emerging practice for collecting and conserving performance-based art in a transnational effort. After three workshops, each dedicated to a genre or a theme (dance, theatre and activism), the project was concluded in 2014 with the so-called Live List, a comprehensive catalogue of questions and prompts to consider when collecting live works, from the definition of the work itself to the role of the audience.18 The project and the list formed the basis for an additional initiative—Documentation and Conservation of Performance—lasting from 2016 to 2021. This follow-up project was to develop processes and tools that, despite the diversity of the individual performances, would enable a simpler and, consequently, more casual approach to the art genre, which remains unwieldy from an institutional perspective. The results include a Map of Interactions—in which an “activation report,” institutional memory and the preparation process are taken into account—as well as a strategy paper for the documentation and conservation of performances. All of this is based on the idea that instead of the preservation of authenticity, the aim must be “to continuously capture the concept of the artwork.”19 The recognition of the changing identity of performance artworks prevails over a narrow faithfulness to their original realizations. The London research group thus took up what, as we discussed above, Laurenson had already advocated in 2006. Farris Wahbeh, who, as Director of Research Resources at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, is responsible for addressing the same challenges, is tackling another problem. Not only does he insist on the necessity to adapt the databases used so far by the institution to the requirements of performances, but he also proposes to understand the entry as a “continuum of instances” in which the complexity of the “genealogy of the work” can be traced and recorded with regard to the individual “constituents.” It follows, to begin with, that the original enactment of the acquired performance should be described in detail—for instance, including a precise description of the participating performers and the respective venues. Additionally, however,

180  Wolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader

the subsequent history of reperformances of the same work should continuously be recorded in detail in the same customized database.20 Wahbeh’s position is obviously in line with what Laurenson postulates as a necessary renewal of the notion of the artwork, since he aims at grasping the identity of the work in such a way that it can be restaged in other contexts and with other agents. One may come to think that some of the tools which were intended to facilitate institutional procedures actually confirm that it is well justified to raise concerns about the unwieldiness of live performances as collectibles. As a matter of fact, the scope and degree of differentiation of the catalogue of questions and prompts developed by the research network Collecting the Performative heralds a workload and a volume of tasks that may seem to be unmanageable within existing structures and procedures. Yet, apart from the activities of the research projects mentioned here, there are also some highly relevant proactive curatorial initiatives to be named. In fact, a few institutions and organizations have already been including live performances in their collections for some time, and with an astonishingly casual attitude, or have even programmatically oriented their collections towards them. The relatively small size and young age of both FRAC Lorraine and the KADIST foundation may have made it easier to focus on the flexible practices that proved crucial in developing a suitable approach. What has been crucial for this commitment is an awareness of the need to catch up in dealing with an art genre whose key role in the development of contemporary art has not been sufficiently appreciated. What is more, there is a growing awareness of the necessity for art institutions to deal with the conditions of artistic labour and the possibility of contributing to discourses on social responsibility, which has come to be understood by some performance artists as their very working material.21 However, the procedures of the institutions that have adopted this approach sometimes differ significantly. The FRAC Lorraine, for instance, bases all its purchases on one and the same standardized purchase agreement, leaving the compilation of the accompanying detailed documentation to the seller. Yet, over time, the same institution has established a way of handling the acquisition of live performances that makes this process appear not as an extraordinary effort but as everyday business. For the private KADIST foundation, on the other hand, the medium does not play a role at all: for them, director Émilie Villez says, a purchase is only the “starting point” of a collaboration with the artist, which they then continue in the context of residencies, exhibitions or events. 22 Each proposal submitted to the selection committee for the purchase of a performance is accordingly quite naturally accompanied by a budget for its reperformance. This makes it possible to lend the work to other institutions. Pirici’s Parthenon Marbles, for example, a work commissioned by KADIST together

Collecting Live Performances in Museums and Other Art Collections  181

with the art space State of Concept (Athens, Greece), has already been reactivated in Tokyo and Moscow.23 The collection, which has grown to around 1,700 works since 2001, contains only 15 performances. According to Villez, however, this is not due to hesitations on the side of the institution. Rather, she says, it can be attributed to the lack of a straightforward commercial model for performance or immaterial artworks, and the process necessary for artists and their galleries to figure out the best shape and instructions for the piece to circulate. Where this is indeed the case, it may be fair to consider a simple lack of time as part of the problem: the FRAC Île-de-France, for example, although quite interested in acquiring performances, just does not have the necessary time and human resources to develop an appropriate process, according to information from assistant curator Bernadette Kihm. Yet, she also highlights other challenges: for example, with regard to past acquisitions, it was not explicitly stated at the time of a performance purchase whether the documentation created during the first activation would take the place of the original performance as an artwork in its own right, or what role the artist should play in the case of subsequent activations.24 It was precisely this sort of challenge that the Amsterdam-based gallery owner Ellen de Bruijne, who has been involved in the sale of live performances for several years, responded to by developing documentation practices appropriate to this art form. In addition to the usual information about the artist, the work and its price, it also lists information about the “collectible components,” a “performance notation” and references to video and audio documentation as a source for reperformances.25 De Bruijne’s pragmatic handling of these necessities suggests that the difficulties inherent in the art genre play a smaller role than a lack of knowledge about appropriate institutional measures in impeding a matter-of-course approach to integrating live performances permanently in museum collections.

Necessary Rearrangements: New Concepts and Approaches From the very beginning, the integration of live performances into collections has been marked by resistance and obstacles of various kinds. This has to do, first and foremost, with the emphasis on the personal involvement of the artist and, more generally, the aesthetics of presence. This conceptual framework has long characterized the approach of artists, critics and art historians to performance art.26 Although documents, relics or sketches of performances were very soon included in collections, live performances were not considered compatible with the requirements of preservation for artworks designed for permanence. Meanwhile, perspectives have changed. To begin with, theoretical perspectives now

182  Wolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader

include a growing sense of how complex the very concept of ephemerality actually is: it is not, in a nutshell, the outright opposite to permanence, and performance can be conceptually framed as an act of remaining and reappearance.27 Developments in performance art itself have also contributed to this, both in terms of the artists’ conception of their own role and of the relationship between the paradigms of authenticity and uniqueness, on the one hand, and delegation and repetition, on the other. The relevance of recent attempts at “outsourcing authenticity” by employing performers not identical to the artist cannot be overestimated in the context of the challenges and shifts discussed here.28 While some artists have come closer to becoming the organizers of live performances that are not necessarily identical to their own performative acts, these live performances can also more easily do without the artist’s personal presence and indeed also continue to exist after the end of the artist’s life. To cite just two examples: Rizzo does not think he necessarily needs to perform; Sehgal only ever did once. In combination with the art genre’s enormous increase in popularity in the art world, this general shift can be considered to have had an impact on the willingness of institutions to collect live performances. The change in attitudes is evidenced not only by the abovementioned attempts at standardizing processes for acquiring performances. In very fundamental ways, some museums have also addressed the opportunities for institutional innovation that might arise in the process of aligning their structures with these ephemeral art practices. Tate’s 2018–2021 research project Reshaping the Collectible, for example, stems from an effort to respond to the inherent demands of artworks “that challenge the structures of the museum” rather than trying to adapt these artworks to the existing museum structures.29 Philip Bither, a senior performing arts curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, who has been charged with the acquisition of performances for many years, considers it an opportunity for critically examining the institutional self-image, and for further developing the institution on the basis of artistic practice.30 Finally, performance artist Pirici proposes that appropriate institutional handling of performances be grasped by recourse to the term “care.” She thus draws on a concept we have already come across in connection with the way museums can redefine their responsibilities. In this sense, Pirici demands the better handling of live performances, in that they should not be treated as frozen entities but cared for as a “living, moving sculpture.” With the help of this very designation, she also distinguishes her own work from other art practices based on live acts, and from other possible labels such as “theatre piece” or “event.” Moreover, she emphasizes that each of her projects is an “artwork” that can only be “reactivated” according to the particular rules she herself has established.31 It is these reactivations—“retakes” in Rizzo’s terminology, or “performatively activated” works according to Schneider Willen—for which the traditional

Collecting Live Performances in Museums and Other Art Collections  183

museum structures are not prepared.32 What we have described here are the approaches of a few individual museums and experts. But in many respects and in most places, it is still true that there is a lack of appropriate strategies of documentation and a lack of knowledge about rehearsal and performance techniques and their transmission through time (e.g., body knowledge). Live performances should be a natural subject of collection activities. On the part of the artists, hardly anything hinders this today. Yet a matter-of-course handling of the challenges for the acquisition of performances requires more than just a theoretical conviction that they represent an important part of the collective artistic memory. It also requires a desire and will to care for them as active objects in permanent collections. To make this possible, a new flexibility in the conception of institutional structures and a vocabulary that adequately captures these tasks and their objects are required.

Notes

184  Wolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader

­

Collecting Live Performances in Museums and Other Art Collections  185

186  Wolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader the Ephemeral (blog), HSLU, 22 April 2021, https://blog.hslu.ch/collectingthe-ephemeral/documentation/. The term “Living Sculpture” comes from a statement she wrote regarding a planned sale of her performance Leaking Territories to the Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster. The terms quoted above are also taken from this document, which can be viewed in the archive of Skulptur Projekte Münster. See also Mader, “Performances kaufen,” 222. 32 Nadia Schneider Willen, “On the Acquisition of Live Performances. Im Gespräch mit Rachel Mader und Philipp Bergmann,” Collecting the Ephemeral (blog), HSLU, 21 April 2021, https://blog.hslu.ch/collecting-the-ephemeral/ documentation/.

Bibliography 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine. “Carnets de bord. Prélude.” Accessed 21 July 2022. http://collection.fraclorraine.org/page/show/2. Archey, Karen. After Institutions. Berlin: Floating Opera Press, 2022. Archey, Karen. “What Makes Performance the Required Medium of the Day?” Frieze, no. 206 (2019), https://www.frieze.com/article/what-makesperformance-required-medium-day. Bishop, Claire. “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity.” October 140 (2019): 91–112. Bither, Philip. “Rethinking the Role of Institutions and Curators in an Interdisciplinary Age.” In Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice, edited by Dena Davida, Marc Pronovost, Véronique Hudon and Jane Gabriels, 315–319. New York: Berghahn, 2019. Boutard, François. “Interview avec Béatrice Josse, sur la collection du FRAC Lorraine.” artdesign tendance, 12 August 2014. https://artdesigntendance.com/ art-contemporain/interview-beatrice-josse-directrice-du-frac-lorraine/. Centre Pompidou. “Senga Nengudi: RSVP Performance Piece, 1978 / 2014.” Accessed 21 July 2022. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/ cABRGpz. Clausen, Barbara. “Performance: Dokumente zwischen Aktion und Betrachtung. Babette Mangolte und die Rezeptionsgeschichte der Performancekunst.” PhD diss., University of Vienna, 2010. Collecting the Ephemeral (blog). HSLU. Accessed 21 July 2022. https://blog.hslu. ch/collecting-the-ephemeral/. “Dance Performance by Julie Anne Stanzak with Senga Nengudi’s ‘Performance Piece’ (1977).” Posted by Lenbachhaus München, 8 January 2020. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeVwH6c-lvE&t=22s. Engel, Xymna. “Wir müssen mit Schäden rechnen.” Berner Zeitung, 5 April 2022. https://www.bernerzeitung.ch/wir-muessen-mit-schaeden-rechnen651570256099. Hölling, Hanna B. “Introduction: Object—Event—Performance.” In Object— Event—Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity Since the 1960s, edited by Hanna B. Hölling, 1–39. New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022. KADIST. “Alexandra Pirici: Parthenon Marbles.” Accessed 21 July 2022. https:// kadist.org/work/parthenon-marbles/.

Collecting Live Performances in Museums and Other Art Collections  187 Laurenson, Pip, Christiane Berndes, Hendrik Folkerts, Diana Franssen, Adrian Glew, Panda de Haan, Ysbrand Hummelen, Andrea Lissoni, Isabella Maidment, Angela Matyssek, Kate Parsons, Capucine Perrot, Vivian van Saaze, Tatja Scholte, Patricia Smithen, Sanneke Stigter, Paulien ‘t Hoen, Renée van de Vall and Gaby Wijers. “The Live List: What to Consider When Collecting Live Works.” Collecting the Performative Network, 24 January 2014. https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/collecting-performative/ live-list-what-consider-when-collecting-live-works. Laurenson, Pip. “Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of TimeBased Media Installations.” Tate Papers, no. 6 (2006): 1–12. Available at Tate, accessed 2 September 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/06/ authenticity-change-and-loss-conservation-of-time-based-media-installations. Lawson, Louise, Acatia Finbow and Hélia Marçal. “Developing a Strategy for the Conservation of Performance-Based Artworks at Tate.” Journal of the Institute of Conservation 42, no. 2 (2019): 114–134. Lawson, Louise, Acatia Finbow, Duncan Harvey, Hélia Marçal, Ana Ribeiro and Lia Kramer. “Strategy for the Documentation and Conservation of Performance.” Published as part of Documentation and Conservation of Performance (March 2016–March 2021), a Time-based Media Conservation project at Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/ documentation-conservation-performance/strategy-and-glossary. Lenbachhaus. “SENGA NENGUDI: Topologien, 17. September 2019 – 19. Januar 2020.” Accessed 21 July 2022. https://www.lenbachhaus.de/entdecken/ ausstellungen/detail/senga-nengudi. Mader, Rachel. “Performances kaufen: Über das wiederkehrende Aushandeln von Werkbegriff, Autorschaft und Öffentlichkeit.” In Public Matters: Debatten und Dokumente aus dem Skulptur Projekte Archiv, edited by Hermann Arnhold, Ursula Frohne and Marianne Wagner, 219–226. Cologne: Walther König, 2019. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Phillips, Joanna, and Laura Hinkson. “New Practices of Collecting and Conserving Live Performance Art at the Guggenheim Museum.” In Beiträge zur Erhaltung von Kunst- und Kulturgut, vol. 1, edited by Verband der Restauratoren (VDR), 124–132. Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2018. Pirici, Alexandra. “On the Acquisition of Live Performative Works.” Collecting the Ephemeral (blog), HSLU, 22 April 2021. https://blog.hslu.ch/ collecting-the-ephemeral/documentation/. Schneider, Rebecca. “Performance Remains.” Performance Research 6, no. 2 (2001): 100–108. Schneider Willen, Nadia. “On the Acquisition of Live Performances: Im Gespräch mit Rachel Mader und Philipp Bergmann.” Collecting the Ephemeral (blog), HSLU, 21 April 2021. https://blog.hslu.ch/collecting-the-ephemeral/ documentation/. Schulze, Karin. “‘Gehen Sie in den hintersten Winkel des Gartens’.” Spiegel online, 11 February 2011. http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/museumsstar-chris-dercon-gehen-sie-in-den-hintersten-winkel-des-gartens-a-744706. html.

188  Wolfgang Brückle and Rachel Mader Stedelijk Museum. “MICHELE RIZZO: HIGHER XTN.” Accessed 21 July 2022. https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/events/michele-rizzo-higher-xtn. Tate. “Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum.” Accessed 21 July 2022. www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/reshaping-the-collectible. van Saaze, Vivian. “In the Absence of Documentation: Remembering Tino Sehgal’s Constructed Situations.” Revista de História da Arte 4 (2015): 55–63. Wahbeh, Farris. “A Continuum of Instances: Archival Strategies for Performance-based Artworks.” Posted by SNSF Performance Conservation, 8 December 2021. YouTube video, 6:26:19. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8hTOVW1A_w0&t=12962s.0

11 Making Movement Memorable Tino Sehgal and Boris Charmatz at Tate Susanne Franco Over the past two decades, the increasing tendency to host performance and contemporary dance in museums and art galleries has generated new opportunities for dance artists to reconsider their practices.1 Altogether, these performances, events, and exhibitions have contributed to critiquing the ocular-centric nature of traditional (re)presentations of material artifacts and instead valorized visitors’ kinesthetic experiences. Dancers and performers have also experimented with new ways of relating to the visual arts and the audience by exploring participatory and socially engaged art practices. Artistic inquiries have inevitably fueled discussion among scholars and curators on the supposed ephemerality and non-collectability of performance and choreographic-based works. Additionally, they have raised new awareness of documentation’s ontological status and function, the role of archives and archival processes in preservation policies, and the different temporal, spatial, economic, and behavioral codes in theaters and museums.2 Finally, dance and performance in the museum have called into question the historical narratives and the imagery that have nourished our idea of cultural heritage and our sense of belonging in a social context.3 This chapter reflects on the implication of memory and practices of remembrance in performance and choreographic-based projects inside museums by taking the example of the work and poetics of two internationally celebrated artists, Tino Sehgal (b. 1976) and Boris Charmatz (b. 1973), and the pieces and events they have presented at Tate in London. Tate Modern, in particular, opened in 2000 with an exhibition format which challenged the chronological progression of historicism and the art historical canon. As its former director Chris Dercon has pointed out, Tate Modern “has shown that the museum in the contemporary world is no longer a fixed entity with an established circuit of acknowledged masterpieces” but “rather a place where the audience and the collection are both in the process of transformation, coming together to make culture.”4 Tate Modern’s special care for the public and the collection is evinced by the fact that, having hosted (participatory) performance-based works and events since its inception, it is also one of the first museums to have dedicated a department to exploring art as a process rather than only a product. Dance and performance constitute effective tools for challenging past historical DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-15

190  Susanne Franco

discourses by reflecting on the role of oral, visual, and embodied memories as methods of inquiry, as well as on the effects of forgetting, removal, and silence.5 Tate’s research project on performance documentation6 and, more generally, museums’ recent shift toward the acquisition of performance and choreography-based artworks for their collections have inspired a re-evaluation of remediation and reactivation processes within art, curation, and conservation as opposed to the search for “original” works by theorists and artists.7

Common Roots, Opposite Directions In 1999, as part of the exhibition I’ll Never Let You Go at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sehgal presented his first noteworthy solo entitled Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century. Later officially announced as Untitled (2000) in other venues, Sehgal orally renamed the piece each time it was performed to adapt it to the specific context in which he presented it (in German: … das XX. Jahrhundert, and in French: Musée d’Art Moderne, Section XXième Siècle, Departement).8 For 55 minutes, he performed naked, on a stage without a designed set or music, a series of signature movements in 20 different techniques and styles ranging from George Balanchine to Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, from Vaslav Nijinsky to Pina Bausch, and from Trisha Brown to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Xavier Le Roy. He aimed to exhibit the medium of dance by adapting the spatial and temporal codes of the white cube to those of the black box. On this occasion, the curator Jens Hoffmann noticed that “it [was] like a museum of dance.”9 After this experiment, Sehgal opted to explore the interplay of white cube and black box, but in the other direction, and brought the stage to the museum, where he felt audiences more often asked questions about medium rather than activity. Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century also constitutes the germinal phase of the project of a dancing museum, which was later developed by Charmatz and has since become one of the principal reference cases for studying and practicing how dance and museums can interact. Sehgal’s decision to leave the world of dance to enter the world of visual (conceptual) art is a consequence of his declared desire to challenge the institutional policies of museums and art galleries, imagining formats and alternative production modes that would bring to the fore the value of immaterial forms of art and privilege the transformation of actions, instead of the transformation of material.10 He ended up creating a series of what he named “constructed situations” or “living sculptures” that the art critic Dorothea von Hantelmann describes as “a situation between two people”11 but can involve numerous interpreters (as Sehgal calls his performers). They carry out instructions pre-established by the artist and sing, move, or speak in recurrences, sometimes linguistic and sometimes choreographic. The constructed situations, which are scheduled to adhere to the length of an exhibition display and require forms of interaction between

Making Movement Memorable  191

interpreters and visitors, depend on a solid dramaturgical-choreographical structure, sometimes quoting past dance pieces or artworks and often situating them in a dense web of references to visual and performing arts history. From the beginning, Sehgal was not interested in reinventing the dance’s codes and conventions or its historical narrative.12 Rather, his interest lay in discussing the value of the presence of (choreographed) live actions inside the museum as a way to rethink the existing parameters of artistic production. This, he believed, could lead to challenging the Western mode of art production tied to material objects and the related market, and thus to criticizing capitalism. Seghal’s radical critical stance against the production of material objects of any kind goes so far as to prohibit any kind of documentation of his works, from pictures to videos, and from the wall labels in the exhibition rooms to the texts in the catalog. He insists that the audience needs to experience them in the immediate space of the encounter, and that “substituting [the work] with some material object […] is not an adequate form of documentation.”13 And yet, this unauthorized material is easily found on the web in blogs, posts, and reports shared by visitors who bypassed or ignored the interdiction. Despite the remarkable amount of documentary material, these clandestine pictures and videos are excluded from the museums’ archives. Moreover, when Sehgal sells his works to a museum, he also prohibits the production of written instruction or a receipt of any kind. The transactions are conducted orally but involve the presence of a notary, as was the case for This Is Propaganda (2002) presented within Tate Britain’s collection galleries as part of the Tate Triennial in 2006.14 In 2009, ten years after Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century, when Charmatz started to direct the Centre Chorégraphique National de Rennes et de Bretagne, he took up the germinal idea of a museum of dance by Sehgal and decided to name the institution “Musée de la danse” (Dancing Museum). In the Manifesto for a Dancing Museum,15 published the same year to present his project, Charmatz explains why he considers “national,” “choreographic,” and “center” obsolete concepts and, therefore, removed them from the name. From his perspective, dance and dancers no longer need a “center,” and dance deserves to be placed outside the choreographer– interpreter–company framework.16 On a theoretical level, Charmatz wanted to facilitate the fusion of museum and dance, starting with the erasure of the idea of the museum as a static place of preservation and display and reconsidering the relationship between dance and choreography. On a practical level, he wished to transform the original Centre by introducing a new pedagogical structure more informed by dance history and theory. For this reason, and following the museums’ approach to preserving history and memory, Charmatz has also created a collection consisting of tangible materials such as photos, films, and installations in Rennes, where, he claims, he has found no trace of documents and “real archives” of the previous 14 years of activities “as if the question of memory did not arise.”17

192  Susanne Franco

In the Manifesto for a National Choreographic Centre, which is based on the idea that a museum of dance is not a static place of preservation but rather an essentially “cooperative,” “immediate,” and “incorporated”18 institution, he affirms that “We are at a time in history where a museum can modify BOTH preconceived ideas about museums AND one’s ideas about dance.”19 Musée de la danse, though, does not call into question the traditional functions of the museum and the professional figures managing its various activities. Instead, it places artists and visitors at the center of its existence. Moreover, the core of Charmatz’s project is the idea that contemporary dance requires (but also offers) a new concept of the museum and that the bodies (of the artists and visitors) are, in themselves, museums.20 Charmatz is convinced that museums are places where the central role accorded to the embodied dimension of memory makes it possible “to put into perspective the supposed impermanence, immateriality, and non-collectability of dance.”21 Most of his projects have explored the tension between dance’s ontological and historical resistance to entering a collection and its potential to spread and persist through oral, corporeal, and written memories. To inquire about the traces of the performance’s afterlife, Charmatz has also widely experimented with alternative approaches to transmitting past dances and repertoires by encouraging participants to learn dance movements, document, witness and co-create events, and share their experiences outside the museum, once the event is over.

The Past, Present, and Future of the Ephemeral Some curators and scholars have acknowledged the significance of performance documentation in performance’s ontology, affirming that what we experience through it is “the performance” as well. Others still distinguish the value of the performance moment over its documentation, which, from this point of view, is considered a mere representation of something existing elsewhere. A third perspective suggests accepting the “fragmentary evidence” of the “performance afterlife” and avoiding the binary opposition of material and immaterial performing remains to stress the problematic importance of their combined contribution to the epistemology of culture. This approach, in particular, considers more the function than the status of documentation as the main value of documentation consists essentially of how it engages the viewer with the performance in the present.22 In many choreographic- and performance-based productions hosted in the museum, documenting, archiving, and transmitting are three crucial and not necessarily distinct phases of the project. The new centrality given to dance and performance by museums is also one of the effects of the recent care for intangible forms of cultural heritage and of the shift from understanding the archive as an institution to its procedural, performative, and relational nature. Artists, curators,

Making Movement Memorable  193

and scholars have questioned the ephemerality of dance and performance as well as the practice of radical embodiment they involve. They have discussed how the afterlife of dance and performance could be retraced and preserved, and have explored to what extent the (dancing) body can function as a site of (embodied) memories and, therefore, as a source of knowledge. They have also delved into how bodily movement can be understood as an archival process and as performance remains. Referencing various notions of memory and processes of embodiment, artists, in particular, have experimented with new strategies for archiving and transmitting the works that they inherited from their masters or other dancers and choreographers.23 These archival counter-models that Cristina Baldacci has defined as “impossible,” in that they are deliberately open, nonstatic, and nonfinishable,24 have contributed to rethinking also the function of museums as places for the survival of memory as well as sites of knowledge production and dissemination. Michel Foucault has defined the archive as “the general system of formation and transformation of statements,”25 a function that we can easily attribute to the museum. Today, we see archives and museums as working concepts that are troubling the epistemic “truths” sustained by historical discourses and material documentation in favor of other ways of knowing and remembering. They are, above all, spaces where realities and possibilities intertwine, shape, and mobilize our thoughts and ideas. André Lepecki has observed that the archive is the outcome of a series of acts of “exclusions and misplacements”26 and that dance can survive not only as what “passes away (in time and across space)” but also as what “passes around (between and across bodies of dancers, viewers, choreographers),” and eventually, as what “comes back around.”27 For dance artists, reenactment has been the privileged way to approach these issues across the past 20 years, precisely because it treats past dances as something that exists in the present. Removing claims of authenticity through legitimizing contemporary iterations, reenactment actualizes the many possibilities of past works to exist over and over and plays a fundamental role in crossexamining the domination and selectiveness of the canon, censorship, marginalization, and other forms of cultural and political control or oblivion. For this reason, artists who engage in reenactment are confronted with multiple and overlapping temporalities and many layers of memory. Their works can also be politically subversive as they offer an alternative understanding of past productions or entire repertoires and allow these counter-memories to exist. Interestingly, when Charmatz connected his dancing museum project to Sehgal’s first productions and poetics, he made it a reenactment of a reenactment. In 2009, he danced Untitled with Frank Willens and Andrew Hardwidge, transforming it into “one solo in three variations.” When inheriting the piece, it was immediately clear to him that he did not dance some Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinsky, or Martha Graham, rather only

194  Susanne Franco

“some Tino Sehgal”28 because the historical object was the solo piece, not the dances of the twentieth century it was made of. In other words, Charmatz thinks that this solo based on the idea of reworking the memory of dance was already historical because it allowed Sehgal to place himself within “both modernity and the realm of the museum.”29 In turn, Charmatz also did this with all his projects, particularly when he presented If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? at Tate Modern.

Tino Seghal and Boris Charmatz at Tate Transmitting, documenting, archiving, and collecting dance were central issues for Sehgal and Charmatz when they were invited to Tate. Here, in 2006, Sehgal presented This Is Propaganda (first performed in 2002 at the Venice Biennale), which was purchased by the museum as one edition of four in which the work actually exists. Tate acquired the right to enact the performance, bringing it each time from its “dormant” to its “active”30 status. In 2006, the “interpreter,” working in shifts and dressed as a gallery guard, performed a set of precise actions designed and instructed by Sehgal, or a member of the Tate staff trained by the artist (and more recently also by one of the producers). The instructions of the work are not written down and only exist through oral transmission. The title and refrain of the work—“This is propaganda, you know, you know”—is taken from the lyrics of a song by the Norwegian electro-pop band Briskeby and refers to the art on display in the museum as much as the role of art in shaping public taste and opinion.31 At a certain point, the attendant/interpreter says, “Tino Sehgal, 2002, courtesy of the artist” as the label of the piece—no physical label or wall text accompanies it. With this constructed situation and many others that followed, all starting with the deictic “This is…,” Sehgal critically alluded to the system of contemporary art and its rules, including those determining how the audience receives it.32 In 2012, Sehgal presented These Associations, which was also the first live commission of The Unilever Series at Tate Modern. The Turbine Hall was inhabited by the encounters between people and, in this case, a swarm of participants moving around, clustering, agglomerating, vocalizing, and conversing with the visitors. Following a cyclical structure which lasted about an hour and was repeated for the entire day, all the participants (consciously or not) acted according to a simple movement score that consisted of a series of stories narrated by the interpreters; this involved speaking of themselves and about life-changing moments which was alternated with improvised dialogs with the visitors. The situation consisted entirely of the enactment/narration of these anecdotes by the interpreters and the experiences of the visitors interacting with them. In 2012, Tate Modern also invited Boris Charmatz to present Flip Book, which he had created in 2008 and was based on David Vaughan’s 1997

Making Movement Memorable  195

book Fifty Years on Merce Cunningham’s choreographic corpus. The piece, which exists in several versions featuring former members of Cunningham’s company or amateur practitioners, was later included as Roman Photo in If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?, the major event to date created by Charmatz for this museum in May 2015. Made of several different pieces, If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? lasted 20 hours over a period of two days and involved 90 dancers but no objects or designed set. The event was made exclusively by the dancers’ and visitors’ movements, interacting with each other throughout the museum. The choreographic works listed by the program were created at different times, but they all revolved around the idea of shaping a museum for/ with dance to tell its history, make its memory manifest, and share these processes with visitors. À bras-le-corps (1993), performed by Charmatz and Dimitri Chamblas in the Turbine Hall, was followed by Levée des conflits (2010) and a collective warm-up called Adrénaline. The latter was led by Charmatz and ended with the Turbine Hall transformed into a dance floor for everyone. Roman Photo and the premiere of Manger (2014, Decomposed) performed by 14 dancers were the other pieces included in this tight palimpsest. Two more works were performed simultaneously throughout the collection galleries lasting ten hours over two days: 20 Dancers for the XX Century and Expo Zéro. In the first, each dancer was invited to present, against the background of the visual artworks exhibited at Tate, a short version of one or more historical solos from the previous century, which they considered to have been relevant to their careers. Dancing was the starting point to explore these repertoires both through their relationships with the original choreographer and through the process of embodiment. In other words, the dancers did “dig into their own corporality in order to unveil the gestures,” which made their bodies “containers of works of art, exhibition, and curatorial spaces.”33 Finally, in Expo Zéro, a group of key scholars in the performing arts were invited to discuss their ideas of what a museum of dance could look like with the participants. During the two days, Charmatz and his dancers also taught some movement sequences of the programmed choreographies to the audience. Tailored and complex documentation was planned from the beginning of the project, which is symptomatic of the institutional investment in the entire event, its afterlife included. Two professional photographers were hired for the occasion, and video documentation was also produced of the works showcased in the Turbine Hall and the Galleries by several cameras placed among the audience. The video material was live-edited and then streamed on Tate’s YouTube channel to expand the physical borders of the museums and explore the potential for the digital experience of the live event.34 The entire series of pictures and videos was later collected on an interactive website, and the audience was encouraged to record their own experience of the piece and to share these memories in different formats and via social media.

196  Susanne Franco

The event was also documented by ethnographer Peter Tolmie, and his notes and pictures were used to analyze how the audience behaved— that is, selecting what to attend to and choreographing its own walking around.35 As Gabriella Giannachi notices, in If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?, the audience ended up inhabiting both the performance and the museum spaces “by documenting one through the other” and becoming an “augmented observer […] adopting different roles, using different interfaces.”36 As a consequence, the role of the visitor became more fluid and oscillated between spectating, documenting, and participating. From a museological perspective, the experiment, as much as the emphasis given to its documentation, revealed to what extent dance and performance can impact the visitor’s perception of both the space and the work, and how documentation itself can make the work persist over time in a state of constant becoming.

History and Memory in Theory and Practice As an interdisciplinary phenomenon, memory has recently become a subject of great interest for many academic disciplines and a key concept of scientific and cultural discourses providing new tools for studying the processes of embodiment and knowledge transmission. The act of remembering (and forgetting) is also implicated in the production of historical meaning, and the proliferation of memory studies is also symptomatic of the emergence of a new present-oriented regime of historicity (or how societies articulate the categories of past, present, and future), which François Hartog calls “presentism.”37 The questioning of the linear, causal, and homogeneous conception of time enforced by the modernist regime of historicity caused a shift in the historians’ gaze, allowing them to perceive the past as persisting in the present. The recognition of the importance of personal and collective memories and the nonlinearity of memorial processes—which have long been marginalized or ignored by official historiography—has impacted curatorial and museum practices. Last but not least, it has deeply influenced the handing down of dance and performance and the writing and staging of art history, exposing it as rhizomatic and discontinuous.38 The past as memory does not exist as it occurred; it has to be recalled, and the act of remembering consists of “doing” or “performing” something, as the verb “to remember” suggests.39 Paul Connerton has pointed out that the performative can be seen as a method for recalling the past into the present through “acting out,”40 and Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks suggest that “memory is not inventory, but is the act of memorising.”41 Memory is also very much a cultural construct, and contemporary cultural memory studies stress the intermediality and performativity of the act of remembering. Aleida Assmann distinguishes between active and passive modes of remembering in societies and conceives archives as the institutions that

Making Movement Memorable  197

tend  to preserve the past as past, whereas the canon carries out the past as present. From her perspective, cultural memory is composed of storage memory (connected with cataloging and the act of conservation, and involving forms of material repositories such as archives, libraries, and museums) and functional memory (characterized by group usage orientated toward the future).42 Moreover, storage memory contains a “repertoire of missed opportunities, alternative opinions, and chances not used,”43 whereas functional memory keeps the past alive in the present because it is connected with people who constantly re-embody it. In other words, collective cultural memories circulate orally (and bodily!) but also through other cultural mediation channels such as written texts, objects, images as much as through museums, rituals, and performances, which altogether serve as mnemonic triggers to activate meanings associated with what has happened. Museums, therefore, are not only repositories but also memory mediums and places where the past is constantly (re)constructed and produced, and where dance and performance interact with these dynamics and politics of memory, sometimes amplifying or challenging their effects, at other times creating short circuits. To remember past movements or choreographic sequences, we need to reactivate our memory and recall, reinvoke, and reawake the ephemeral traces residing in the body, inevitably transforming them every time through this process. Bodies are not only repositories of memory but also archives or systems or zones,44 as André Lepecki calls them, where the work survives through time, thanks to its endless changes. The concept of “body as archive,” which first entered dance studies through the seminal essay by Inge Baxmann,45 has therefore radically challenged our understanding of dance as ephemeral, introducing to this field the idea that the body can be understood as a “storage place” of sensory, emotional, and cognitive experiences, which carry the memory (and the history) of a dance piece. Once archived in the body, dance becomes inseparable from that body’s specific abilities and shape but also from the empathic relationships through which we experience the world. These complex processes not only affect how the body stores a dance piece or technique but also how it reactivates them. The notion of “body as archive,” which has spread extensively among dancers and performers, at this level risks remaining a powerful although over-referred metaphor and less a scientific concept because we still need to further explore where corporeal memory precisely resides, how it exists with other forms of memory and how it can be recalled and accessed.46 Recent empirical studies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggest that cognition is distributed throughout the entire neuromuscular system, and that learning and performing (dance) movements rely on various cognitive processes and operational procedures that integrate physical actions with working and procedural memory.47 Neurobiology has shown that memory is largely a neuro-chemical process and that it is produced

198  Susanne Franco

and stored through our sensory and muscular actions, which constantly update our perceptions. But, while we can consciously access some forms of memory such as the autobiographical and the episodic (which recall, narrate, or react to other people’s narrations of facts that we did not experience personally), and the declarative memory (which contains verbally expressible knowledge), other forms like procedural memory (which refers to what we learn via motor skills acquired through repeated trials) are not available as language. Additionally, when it comes to the performing arts, memory is stimulated by imagery, and the aesthetic evaluation of the perceived movements is strongly influenced by the observer’s motor, visual, and conceptual expertise, which coincides with knowledge about the cultural history of dance.48 Discussing or writing about dance and performance also implies the activation of forms of memory such as “communicative memory,”49 which is conveyed within a social group and weaves personal experiences into a shared past. Spectators retain different forms of their personal and collective experiences of dance and performance in their visual and kinesthetic memory and, in turn, dance and performance transform spectators not only into dynamic archives in motion but also committed witnesses and potential storytellers who co-archive the work, connecting it to the experiences they have made of it. Lepecki suggests that the audience becomes itself when it witnesses what it has experienced, passing its testimony of the event to other people,50 and stresses how the performative-narrative act of witnessing has its own “aesthetic force.”51 From his perspective, the role of the witness is fundamental in establishing a bridge “between historicity and futurity,”52 and “the subjective-corporeal-affective-historical dimension of witnessing”53 generates an active relation to the future historicity of the event as a trans-post individual dimension. Susanne Foellmer, though, casts doubt upon the value of witnessing and testimony in dance studies because while witnessing is certainly about the sharing of experiences, and the testimony has a productive and reproductive character,54 it also fails “to ‘deliver’ the ‘full’ event.”55

Strategies of Remembrance Cultural memory, collective identity, and political legitimation are interconnected, and therefore, to control archives and museums means to control memory. Paraphrasing the title of a recent essay on participation by Gabriella Giannachi, the question here is “who decides who remembers?”56 and, particularly when it comes to choreographic- and performance-based works (and their often participatory dimensions inside museums), to what end? Choreographic- and performance-based works are the outcome of what Dorothea von Hantelmann defines as an “experiential turn” in contemporary art, where “the creation and shaping of experiences have increasingly become an integral part of the artwork’s conception.”57 This

Making Movement Memorable  199

trend reflects a turn to the “experience economy” promoting the moving away from material goods (artifacts) and the orientation of museums’ directors and curators toward the creation of exhibitions and performative events in which memory itself becomes a product.58 Sehgal and Charmatz operate in this frame, though with different ambitions, approaches, and achievements. Usually, Sehgal entrusts the task of transmitting his constructed situations to the curators, who, as authorized “installers,” teach the selected new interpreters how to reactivate them, although the artist is often also directly involved in this process. In recent times, however, Sehgal seems to have partially changed his mind and now involves the producers, who have become the recognized “repositories” of the works.59 In turn, the interpreters “are contractually obligated to pass, at an appropriate moment, their knowledge of the work on to someone younger than themselves.”60 This means that the museum needs to maintain contact with performers and organize regular working sessions or “re-fresh meetings,” as they are known at Tate Modern. The new policy proves that museums can absorb (and institutionalize) one of the most common transmission processes in the dance world, where legacies are passed down through a chain of bodyto-body and oral instructions from masters to pupils. However, museums can hardly master the kinesthetic memories of the performers of a specific work, let alone that of visitors. Furthermore, on a theoretical level, Sehgal states that each of his constructed situations “exists in [his] mind, in [his] body and the bodies of the people who know how to do it, and it also exists in their memories and of those of the people who saw it.”61 More specifically, his works rely on autobiographical, embodied, visual, procedural, individual, and collective memory, but to preserve them, Sehgal privileges institutional memory over the others. Despite the fact that Sehgal has pointed out that the oral culture of remembrance is “the most powerful instance of knowledge transfer,”62 in his productions, the audience is not recognized as an active, plural subject remembering and witnessing the event but as a collective, anonymous entity and an unauthorized activator of the memory of the work, implying that there is an authorized and legal dimension to memory. Moreover, the fact that visitors produce material and immaterial documentation by sharing and storing their (mis)memories—which neither Sehgal nor the museum legitimates—poses a problem to the ontological status of these performance remains. The nonuse of these forms of documentation undermines the ideological assumption of Sehgal’s work as it excludes an important part of memory through which dance and performance travel through time and space. The nonuse denies to what extent documentation and performance are inseparable and fails to recognize that the ontology of performance is relational. Sehgal claims that his work is based on an equal distribution of power, but by filtering the embodied memories of the interpreters, and by not

200  Susanne Franco

taking the memories of the visitors and their role as witnesses into account, he delegates the responsibility for the afterlife of his work to the museum. When Sehgal sells his constructed situations to a museum, they are entitled to enter the official history of this institution and of contemporary art. He transmits factual and subjective pieces of information about the works to the museum, based on selected forms of his own remembrance, not on tangible remains, nor on intangible traces. When museums acquire a constructed situation, they implicitly legitimize this cultural and political attitude. Since there is no “original” version, and thanks to the intrinsic repeatability of the constructed situations assured by the “appearance– disappearance–reappearance cycle” or the system of “action’s production, repetition and circulation”63 that Sehgal activates each time, these artworks are easily exhibited inside museums, where they exist every time as a new stage of an ongoing process. In this regard, Acatia Finbow states that Sehgal sells “the extension” of the work, not the possibility to return to the “original.”64 It is precisely because of these features of his works that Sehgal, who aims to allow them to enter the realm of contemporary visual art, disagrees with their description as theater, dance or performance, though they set “questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world,” as Jonah Westerman defines performance art.65 Along the entire process, Sehgal ensures his role as the only author who transforms the capacities of his interpreters into “his creative, malleable ‘human resource’”66 and who does not consider audience memories and experiences as fully representative of the work.67 As he has clearly affirmed, “I’m still producing objects not in the material sense of the word but in the product sense of the word.”68 As Sven Lütticken notices, “far from being a leftist critique of capitalism,” the constructed situations contribute to “sav[ing] capitalism by deflecting its destructive archaic turn in a more benign primitivist utopia.”69 Moreover, Sehgal seems to contradict the artist’s declared debt to Guy Debord, who has suggested that art should awaken the spectators by pushing them out of their comfort zone and activating them as sovereign members of society.70 Sehgal’s statements about defusing the power of the museum—based on the possession and display of the material dimension of art—do not translate into effective strategies for subverting the market and the museums’ apparatus. On his side, Charmatz is convinced that “Art does not only exist in the real object, it functions very much in the mind, in the memory” 71 and that the museum, as a utopian project, needs to be transformed through dance. His vision of a dancing museum as constantly in the making is reflected in the question mark in the title of the event hosted at Tate Modern, which represents one stage of a long research process exploring its rules and boundaries.72 One of the pillars of this investigation, though, is the emphasis on dance rather than choreography because dancers are “not just

Making Movement Memorable  201

works by an author” but “multiple and complex hybrids,” 73 each with his/ her layers of memory of the embodied pieces because “dancers’ bodies are one of the main spaces for collecting works.” 74 Through the dancing bodies, Charmatz brings to the museums what it misses, the kinesthetic experience of time, compensating for its “extreme poverty” 75 due to the overwhelming objectifying culture and its predilection for historical discourses over the traces of memory. Inside museums and through diverse forms of reenactment and/or participatory formats, Charmatz explores the “pastness” of dance or the complex temporalities linking living memory to contemporary performance. He starts from the idea that museums are precious devices through which to empower at once dance and the audience, and that participation is a way to produce knowledge. When at Tate Modern he passed some of his dance pieces to the audience, he made evident to what extent participation not only generates knowledge but redistributes power even when producing a form of consumption woven into the complex web of post-Fordist economies. On the other hand, the proliferation of (partially inducted) kinesthetic, oral, visual, and written memories and the hypertrophic documentation created around If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? are the outcomes of Charmatz’s investment in shared and circulating (mis)memories but also in giving back to dance what it constitutively lacks to make it fully meaningful in our societies: a material (and historical) dimension. The diverse forms of anarchival impulse of the reenactment and the participatory dimension of If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? contributed to defying the linearity of official art history as well as the regime of truth that museums have enriched with their traditional narratives and display strategies. The entire event offered a new opportunity to approach dance and its history by personally and physically engaging with its legacy. In doing so, it also transformed many participants into conscious heirs of a too often neglected cultural heritage. Moreover, through the diverse memories produced/activated by the performers and the audience, Charmatz assured a polyphonic and faceted dimension of the afterlife of If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?. He allowed dance to enter the institutional (visual) art history without producing/exhibiting material objects and without even selling anything to the museum’s collection. He made the museum a place in which people are invited to experience culture and learn and rethink art (dance) history by practicing and sharing diverse memories. Some of Sehgal’s and Charmatz’s statements put this entire inquiry back into a different perspective that, while not nullifying their work at the museum, cloaks it in the doubts and uncertainties that art produces. Sehgal recently affirmed that he realized to what extent “all of this puerile art theory about ‘dematerialization’ from Lucy Lippard to Dorothea von Hantelmann76 is actually quite useless” and that he no longer needs a gallery or museum “to write obtuse press releases about [his] work anymore.” 77

202  Susanne Franco

Charmatz, on his part, has aired the hypothesis that “The whole interest in the Musée de la Danse is that it can’t exist. The body ages and movement disappears.” 78 Interestingly, even in revealing their doubts and the aporia dimension of their poetics, they confirm their different attitudes toward the museum, the role of dance and performance in our cultures, and the ontology of memory.

Notes

­

Making Movement Memorable  203







204  Susanne Franco







Making Movement Memorable  205

63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

Theater, Kunst, Performance in der Gegenwart, ed. Ingrid Hentschel, Una H. Moehrke and Klaus Hoffmann (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2011), 116. Finbow, “TINO SEHGAL.” Ibid. Jonah Westerman, “The Dimensions of Performance,” Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art, accessed 1 September 2022, https://www.tate.org.uk/ research/publications/performance-at-tate/dimensions-of-performance. Catherine Wood, “People and Things in the Museum,” in Choreographing Exhibitions, ed. Mathieu Copeland and Julie Pellegrin (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2013), 115. Jessica van den Brand, Tino Sehgal: Art as Immaterial Commodity (Saarbrücken: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015), 2. See also the research project “Documentation of Visitors” at Tate Modern conversations: Saul Albert, “Tino Sehgal’s These Associations Documented via Visitors’ Conversations,” Saul Albert, 21 December 2013, https://saulalbert.net/blog/ tino-sehgals-these-associations-documented-via-visitors-conversations/. Obrist, “Interview with Tino Sehgal.” Sven Lütticken, “Progressive Striptease,” in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 188. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). Charmatz, “Interview,” Inferno. Charmatz, “Interview,” Dance Research Journal, 50. Ibid. Ibid., 49. Mark Franko, “Museum Artifact Act,” Tanz und Archiv 5 (2014): 96–107. Dorothea von Hantelmann, “The Materiality of the Artwork: Object and Situation in the Work of Tino Sehgal,” Kunsten, accessed 6 August 2022, https://kunsten.dk/en/content/the-materiality-of-the-artwork-9211. Dorian Batycka, “After a Lifetime of Rejecting Technology, Artist Tino Sehgal Falls in Love with Instagram,” Hyperallergic, 1 April 2019, https:// hyperallergic.com/492739/after-a-lifetime-of-rejecting-technology-artist­ tino-sehgal-falls-in-love-with-instagram/. Boris Charmatz, “Boris Charmatz in Conversation with Mathieu Copeland,” in Choreographing Exhibitions, ed. Mathieu Copeland and Julie Pellegrin (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2013), 111.

Bibliography Albert, Saul. “Tino Sehgal’s These Associations Documented via Visitors’ Conversations.” Saul Albert, 21 December 2013. https://saulalbert.net/blog/ tino-sehgals-these-associations-documented-via-visitors-conversations/. Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Assmann, Jan. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning, 109–118. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Baldacci, Cristina. Archivi impossibili: Un’ossessione dell’arte contemporanea. Monza: Johan & Levi, 2016. Batycka, Dorian. “After a Lifetime of Rejecting Technology, Artist Tino Sehgal Falls in Love with Instagram.” Hyperallergic, 1 April 2019. https://hyperallergic.

206  Susanne Franco com/492739/after-a-lifetime-of-rejecting-technology-artist-tino-sehgal-falls­ in-love-with-instagram/. Baxmann, Inge. “The Body as Archive: On the Difficult Relationship between Movement and History.” In Knowledge in Motion: Perspectives of Artistic and Scientific Research in Dance, edited by Sabine Gehm, Pirkko Husemann and Katharina von Wilcke, 207–216. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2007. Bel, Jérôme, and Boris Charmatz. Emails 2009–2010. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2013. Bishop, Claire. “Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention.” TDR: The Drama Review 62, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 22–42. Bishop, Claire. “No Pictures, Please: The Art of Tino Sehgal.” Artforum International (5) 2005. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/No+pictures,+please%3 A+Claire+Bishop+on+the+art+of+Tino+Sehgal.-a0132554959. Bläsing, Bettina. “Embodied Archives of Complex Motor Action: Memory, Learning and Expertise in Dance.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Memory, edited by Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Bläsing, Bettina, Martin Puttke and Thomas Schack, eds., The Neurocognition of Dance: Mind, Movement and Motor Skills. London: Routledge, 2018. Borggreen, Gundhild, and Rune Gade, eds. Performing Archives/Archives of Performance. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013. Burt, Ramsay. Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance and the Commons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Charmatz, Boris. “Boris Charmatz in Conversation with Mathieu Copeland.” In Choreographing Exhibitions, edited by Mathieu Copeland and Julie Pellegrin, 105–113. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2013. Charmatz, Boris. “Interview with Boris Charmatz.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 (December 2014): 49–52. Charmatz, Boris. “Manifesto for a National Choreographic Centre.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 (December 2014): 45–48. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995. Degen, Natasha. “Making and Selling Ephemeral ‘Situation’ Art.” Financial Times, 14 February 2009. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8d4928dc-f96e11dd-90c1-000077b07658.html. Dercon, Chris. “Foreword.” In Tate Modern: The Handbook, ed. Frances Morris. London: Tate Publishing, 2017. Finbow, Acatia. “New Approaches to Documenting Performance in the Museum: Value, History, and Strategy.” In Moving Spaces: Enacting Dance, Performance and the Digital in the Museum, edited by Susanne Franco and Gabriella Giannachi, 139–152. Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2021. Finbow, Acatia. “TINO SEHGAL BORN 1976 THIS IS PROPAGANDA 2002/2006.” Tate, August 2015. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/performance-at-tate/perspectives/tino-sehgal. Foellmer, Susanne. “What Remains of the Witness? Testimony as Epistemological Category: Schlepping the Trace.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, edited by Mark Franko, 269–284. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Making Movement Memorable  207 Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge. 1969. Translated from the French by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Franco, Susanne, and Marina Nordera, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Franco, Susanne, and Marina Nordera, eds. Ricordanze: Memoria in movimento e coreografie della storia. Turin: Utet, 2010. Franko, Mark. “Museum Artifact Act.” Tanz und Archiv 5 (2014): 96–107. Franko, Mark, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Franko, Mark, and André Lepecki, eds. “Dance in the Museum.” Special issue Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 (2014). Gehm, Sabine, Pirkko Husemann and Katharina von Wilcke, eds. Knowledge in Motion: Perspectives of Artistic and Scientific Research in Dance. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2007. Giannachi, Gabriella. “Chi decide chi partecipa? Ripensare l’epistemologia della partecipazione.” L’artivismo: forme, esperienze, pratiche e teorie, no. 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.13130/connessioni/15263. Giannachi, Gabriella, and Jonah Westerman, eds. Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Giannachi, Gabriella, Peter Tolmie and Acatia Finbow. “How Tate Modern Became the Musée de la danse.” Contemporary Theatre Review 28, no. 2 (2018): 210–223. Griffin, Tim. “Tino Sehgal: An Interview.” Artforum 43, no. 9 (2005): 218–219. Gusman, Tancredi. “Between Evidence and Representation: A New Methodological Approach to the History of Performance Art and Its Documentation.” Contemporary Theatre Review 29, no. 4 (2019): 439–461. Hartog, François. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. Translated by Saskia Brown. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield, eds. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Bristol: Intellect, 2012. Lawson, Louise, Acatia Finbow and Hélia Marçal. “Developing a Strategy for the Conservation of Performance-Based Artworks at Tate.” Journal of the Institute of Conservation 42, no. 2 (2019): 114–134. Lepecki, André. “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances.” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 28–48. Lütticken, Sven. “Progressive Striptease.” In Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, 187–198. Bristol: Intellect, 2012. Moehkrke, Una H. “Another Mode of Production: Tino Sehgal im Gespräch mit Una H. Moehrke.” In Im Modus der Gabe. Theater, Kunst, Performance in der Gegenwart, edited by Ingrid Hentschel, Una H. Moehrke and Klaus Hoffmann, 116–122. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2011. Obrist, Hans Ulrich. “Interview with Tino Sehgal.” In Katalog des Kunstpreises der Böttcherstaße. Bremen: Kunsthalle, 2003. Available at yumpu, accessed 1 September 2022. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/5873345/ hans-ulrich-obrist-interviews-tino-sehgal-huo-johnen-galerie. Olcèse, Smaranda. “Interview: Boris Charmatz.” Inferno, 5 February 2014. https://inferno-magazine.com/2014/02/05/interview-boris-charmatz/.

208  Susanne Franco Pape, Toni, Noémie Solomon and Alanna Thain. “Welcome to This Situation: Tino Sehgal’s Impersonal Ethics.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 3 (December 2014): 89–100. Pearson, Mike, and Michael Shanks. Theater/Archeology. London: Routledge, 2001. Richards, Mary. “This Progressive Production: Agency, Durability and Keeping It Contemporary.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 15, no. 5 (2012): 71–77. Tate. “Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art.” Accessed 6 August 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate. Tate. “Performance at Tate: Collecting, Archiving and Sharing Performance and the Performative.” Accessed 6 August 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/ about-us/projects/performance-tate-collecting-archiving-and-sharingperformance-and-performative. Tate. “Tino Sehgal: This is propaganda.” Accessed 6 August 2022. https://www. tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sehgal-this-is-propaganda-t12057. Thurner, Christina. “Time Layers, Time Leaps, Time Loss: Methodologies of Dance Historiography.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, edited by Mark Franko, 525–532. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. van den Brand, Jessica. Tino Sehgal: Art as Immaterial Commodity. Saarbrücken: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015. van Saaze, Vivian. “In the Absence of Documentation: Remembering Tino Sehgal’s Constructed Situations.” In “Performing Documentation in the Conservation of Contemporary Art.” Special issue Revista de História da Arte, no. 4 (2015): 55–63. von Hantelmann, Dorothea. “The Experiential Turn.” In On Performativity, edited by Elizabeth Carpenter. Vol. 1 of Living Collections Catalogue. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2014. http://walkerart.org/collections/publications/ performativity/experiential-turn. von Hantelmann, Dorothea. “The Materiality of the Artwork: Object and situation in the work of Tino Sehgal.” Kunsten, accessed 6 August 2022. https:// kunsten.dk/en/content/the-materiality-of-the-artwork-9211. von Hantelmann, Dorothea. How to Do Things with Art: The Meaning of Art’s Performativity. Zürich and Dijon: JRP|Ringier & Les presses du réel, 2010. Westerman, Jonah. “The Dimensions of Performance.” Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art. Accessed 1 September 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/performance-at-tate/dimensions-of-performance. Wood, Catherine. “People and Things in the Museum.” In Choreographing Exhibitions, edited by Mathieu Copeland and Julie Pellegrin, 113–122. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2013.

12 Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta Where Is Performance? Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley Tate’s website entry for the term “performance art” cites a definition from art historian Jonah Westerman that states, “performance is not (and never was) a medium, not something that an artwork can be but rather a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world.”1 Such expansive understandings, foregrounded by art museums that now incorporate live events in their programs and collections, situate performance as a mode of arts practice particularly oriented toward context. Statements such as Westerman’s, which often accompany performance’s accommodation in the gallery, signify less concern for what performance is ontologically as how it functions sociopolitically and what it offers to art institutions seeking to generate experiential encounters from object-based collections and epistemologies. The framing of performance by contemporary art museums not as a formal but rather a conceptual tool for approaching ideas of encounter and relation raises questions, for us, as well as other performance-minded visitors, about how and where to locate the particular materialities and theoretical concerns of performance as it is produced by artists. If Peggy Phelan’s foundational ontological inquiry in Unmarked (1993) might be phrased as “what is performance?” then our reflections ask instead, “where is performance?” In what follows, we attend closely to a selection of retrospective exhibitions by performance artists that hinge on the display of objects. Our intention in seeking to locate performance in these curated events is not to reinforce medium specificities but to reassert performance as a way that artists (make) work. There are formal particularities to processes of contextualization. By examining strategies of display and location, performance reemerges as method and infrastructure. Within each event, the work of the artist is itself identified, via our analysis, as engaged with complex practices of contextualization, which we might call form. Our focus on the retrospective as a certain type of solo exhibition thus allows for a complementary but differently elaborated engagement with performance as context. It unpacks ontology as the result of a negotiation that takes place over time and involves multiple agents

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275909-16

210  Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley

(artist, curator) so that different ways of “situating” performance come to produce its alternative ontologies. Given the emphasis, in this chapter, on context, it seems relevant to gesture to the circumstances in which it is written. In her contribution to a forum discussing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on performance and performance studies, Amelia Jones reevaluates if not her position on the ontology of performance, then the value of gathering in person. Jones holds that neither in person nor screen-mediated encounters are “morally or politically or aesthetically superior” but admits that, within months of isolation, the “lack of actual bodies in spaces (performing and witnessing) starts to wear thin.”2 The radical shift in social practice and its impact on experiences of physical proximity since the first pandemic lockdowns alters the coordinates of our discipline.3 Familiar terms like “liveness” and “document” take on new dimensions. As Heike Roms argues, the skills and frameworks developed by performance practitioners to “bring people together in shared spaces’ have actually proven remarkably adept at supporting encounters at a distance.”4 Roms points to how performance “has at its heart an examination of transfers and connections across remoteness.”5 Writing this chapter together as an exchange “across remoteness” elucidates further how performance travels. This collaborative chapter constitutes a set of remarks in response to three recent retrospective exhibitions of work by pioneering performance artists in London institutions: Ana Mendieta at Hayward Gallery (2013), Rose English at Camden Arts Centre (2015) and Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern (2016). The selection is in part expedient. London is where we have lived and worked, and the pandemic radically curtailed opportunities to attend gallery-based practices. More substantially, these events attest to increased regard for performance by art institutions of varying sizes both within the UK capital and beyond. Such presentations—to which we might add Carolee Schneemann at MoMA PS1 in New York City (2017–2018) and the Barbican in London (2022–2023) or Simone Forti at Museum der Moderne in Salzburg (2014)—constitute an international remarking of the significance of certain performance artists, often women, on wider art historical conversations. What interests us here is how these artists, prominent since the 1970s, meet a more contemporary moment through the format of retrospective exhibition, and how reviewing this work post-pandemic opens new views on the display of performance. Led by visual work, the exhibitions we consider in this chapter share a strategy of display that relies on artifacts, which may document a performance or may be understood to “perform” themselves. This technique diverges from another prominent approach (of which the previously mentioned Forti exhibition is indicative) wherein live performers reenact, reconstruct or reimagine earlier performance works within a gallery or museum context.6 The context of display, as Guy has observed, is a

Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta  211

“strong basis for reflecting on performance in terms of duration and in relation to the object.” 7 The particular objects used by Hatoum, Mendieta and English offer rich possibilities for such reflection. We find in these exhibitions a partiality toward materials like earth, sand and glass—granular substances reducible to particle form that gain their shape and force in the world through accumulation. We notice concavities and convexities— the impression of a body in a landscape, a glass vessel literally produced through the capture of breath, a line in the sand continuously wiping itself out. Overwhelmingly, the distinctive gestures we observe in these examples are characterized by movement and transformation. It is for this reason that we find it valuable to bring a formal lens to our inquiry into performance and exhibition, not to enforce category boundaries but to discover how these artists mobilize materials, ideas and contextual relations, and how these performance strategies are reproduced or represented within the retrospective space. Our method is to approach each of the three examples in our study through attention to questions of form that are necessarily, we argue, also questions about institutional structures, methods of display and modes of perception. Despite being an established curatorial form, prominent in contemporary international art museums, the solo exhibition itself has been, João Ribas suggests, “insufficiently historicized.”8 This is incongruous with the ubiquity of this mode, as well as with its function as a display format that has a distinctive relationship to practices of historical contextualization. The retrospective is a specific kind of solo exhibition that works by decontextualizing artworks from the conditions of their making, and previous situations of public presentation, to then recontextualize these objects within the framework of the artist’s oeuvre. Retrospective shows thus recollect objects in an order that constructs an account of an artistic practice as a whole and makes a case for that practice as culturally necessary. One function of the retrospective, then, is to expand who is included in historical narratives (women artists, artists of color, artists who are explicitly political, artists who use materials that are challenging, artists who disrupt formal disciplinary boundaries). As a “corrective” to exclusive canonical formations, the retrospective can be said to function, Ribas argues, as the “archive of contemporary art history.”9 The connection of retrospective and archive is especially relevant for performance and its exhibition. If performance is defined by globally prominent institutions (Tate) that seek to curate it precisely as context, what moves do artists and curators have to make in order to translate performance into the distinctive type of contextually weighted space of the retrospective, which functions both by detachment (from past circumstances of production and display) and amalgamation (within an oeuvre)? Acts of curation are often defined in terms of contextualization. As dance specialist Funmi Adewole expresses, curating can help to “stimulate an intellectual context and

212  Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley

critical discourse for the artists’ work, which is often undocumented or overlooked.”10 It can be the responsibility of the performance curator to sustain cultural specificity. In a related way, the task of reenactment is also to contextualize, in this case by pointing to tensions between the live and the documented. In the retrospective, the idea of contextualization functions somewhat differently, not least because, as João Ribas details, the “solo exhibition is seen as more directly representing the artist’s voice, and so supposedly comes with curatorial self-effacement.”11 The idea of the retrospective is deeply entangled with the notion of the artist; it is an accounting for and of an artistic life. This emphasis on the artist within the retrospective form, and the convention of “curatorial self-effacement” noted above, mean that particular curatorial gestures can be difficult to unpick from the artistic mechanisms they work to highlight. In our analysis, we pay attention to the ways in which artistic and curatorial moves operative in each exhibition are wrapped up with questions of performance, and how the curation of performance-related works itself demands a wrangling with performance materialities and methods. The role of the curator is very different across the three shows we examine, inflected by institutional priorities, the relationship with the artist and the overall discursive aims of the exhibition. In the case of the Mendieta exhibition, the approach of Stephanie Rosenthal, then-Chief Curator of the Hayward Gallery, is necessarily conditioned by the fact that the artist is not present, and in our analysis of the exhibition, we touch on the complex modes of advocacy that emerge through this context.12 On the other hand, for Jenni Lomax, curator of the English exhibition and then-Director of Camden Arts Centre, the curatorial task is to work directly with the artist on an exhibition that might be understood as a work of art in its own right. This is in line with what Lomax has articulated as a wider priority for the organization: “having artists present and part of the process of thinking and shaping the programme.”13 Finally, the curatorial team behind the Mona Hatoum show—which includes Clarrie Wallis (Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate) and Christine Van Assche (Honorary Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris) with Katy Wan (Assistant Curator, Tate Modern)—stage a large-scale and “comprehensive exploration” of the practice of an artist still living and working.14 Our focus on the exhibitions addressed in this chapter is on the distinctive ways each artist provides a technique for bringing performance into the gallery, which structures the curatorial response and is not to do with a specifically conceived live event or reenactment but rather an approach mapped across an oeuvre or lifetime of work. Such practices of artistic accumulation require curators, rather than providing a schema, to be attentive to the mechanism of the artist. In our thinking about the

Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta  213

Mona Hatoum retrospective, we focus on practices of rescaling, displacement and detachment that conjure particular circumstances and forces, working, paradoxically, through decontextualization. We take the title of the exhibition Traces: Ana Mendieta as a prompt to imagine connections and divergences from acts of forensic depersonalization. In addressing the catalog of work by Rose English, we look at the retrospective flipped back to front, asking how ideas of “premonition” lay bare a process of display conditioned by a theatrical apparatus of spectating. In each case, we look at specific artworks to find strategies of performance within object-based exhibitions and consider how modes of display across the exhibitions draw on these approaches to position the artists’ contribution in a wider field. In this way, we argue that performance is not only referenced in these exhibitions but is fundamental to the way they function as retrospectives.

Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern, London (2016) A metallic arm simultaneously rakes and smooths concentric semicircular furrows in a round container of sand. The rod, which equals the length of the diameter of the circle, is saw-edged on one side and plane on the other. It rotates with regularity so that one half of the sediment in this large-scale canister is consistently rippled while the other side is invariably level. The polished bar marks the point of transition between these two states.15 In this mechanized act of smoothing and unsmoothing, marking and unmarking, the exhibit manifests a representation of the ontology of performance as ephemeral. This literal image might be epistemologically uncomfortable. It might prompt a rehearsal of certain statements about the historicization and documentation of performance, and about the relative status of its objects, that have been variously said and unsaid by theorists and makers interested in its archival and curatorial prospects. This is not our experience. In the context of a retrospective titled Mona Hatoum and staged at Tate Modern, London, from 4 May to 21 August 2016, this artwork, + and – (1994–2004), is beautiful precisely in how it presents something akin to performance. This object rendering of performance’s ontology is specifically not a performance document. Nor is it, or at least not only, a kinetic sculpture of the sort that can, in the satisfying workings of their motion, deter further thought or interrogation. The politics of Hatoum’s practice are essential to this thickening. Throughout the exhibition, and the sense of an oeuvre presented therein, Hatoum’s work powerfully references destructive apparatuses and regimes by taking objects out of context. Earlier in the layout of the retrospective (+ and − comes later), Grater Divide (2002) and Daybed (2008) refigure household objects beyond their domestic dimensions so as to underscore their proximity to “hostile environments.”16 By making

214  Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley

enormous kitchen utensils designed to shave and peel, Hatoum reframes these everyday tools for review as agents of violence. It is precisely by transplanting and rescaling such objects beyond their usual frames of reference that a specific political circumstance—of conflict and displacement, Israeli settlement, Palestinian culture, Lebanese civil war, British imperialism and the gender politics attending all these—is made apparent. All the works presented under the title Mona Hatoum refer to particular circumstances and conditions by, paradoxically, taking things out of context. This provides an approach to Hatoum’s performance referents. While the paradigm of performance evoked by + and − is literal, the effect is not. Or rather, it has something also to do with abstraction and the specific tension between the material and the conceptual staged in Hatoum’s objects. Acts and sites of exhibition involve processes of decontextualization, and curatorial interventions often look to explicate or bridge inevitable disconnections of place and encounter. This is evident in displays of archival documents intended to situate and recontextualize historic events of performance. Hatoum’s practice preempts this task of reintegration by performing activities of removal and disconnection in advance. Such dissociative moves form a central part of Hatoum’s creative approach and the means by which her artworks function legibly within gallery environments. These acts of displaced reimagining make particular demands on those seeking to exhibit Hatoum’s objects. They require curatorial modes attuned to these processes of detachment that at once uncouple Hatoum’s referents from their expected contexts and invoke specific situations unequivocally. Viewed retrospectively, Hatoum’s practice offers a distinctive approach to the curation of live art practices within a growing field of exhibitions composed of performance-related artworks, archives and installations. The perspective demanded by documents of performance art when displayed in the gallery—the prerequisite understanding that these things refer to removed acts and circumstances while simultaneously performing here among other configurations of objects, audiences and settings—is already embedded in Hatoum’s wider work. Looking at an enlarged domestic tool, visitors appreciate the apparatus alluded to precisely by its being taken out of context. Thus, performance is apprehended in Hatoum’s acts of disconnection rather than in standard curatorial interventions of historicization. Hatoum’s methodology works in relation to performance because it is already doing—and demanding—all those things visitors do when we encounter archival documents with objects that are neither documentary nor performance-derived. Modeling a relation between specifically delineated experiences outside the museum and the effects of dissociation that inevitably accompany display, Hatoum identifies an insightful means for exhibiting performance ontologically. Within the framework established by the exhibition at Tate Modern, the monochrome photograph Performance Still (1985–1995) can be

Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta  215

displayed eight rooms away from the edited video of the event it aesthetically represents because visitors will either be familiar with this point of reference in advance or anticipate the contextual specificity of the image via its decontextualization. Performance Still is evoked by curators as metonymic of Hatoum’s broader practice, since it represents a coincident shift “from live and durational works to object-based work” and “from narration to an open-ended proposition.”17 Referring to an act of performance wherein Hatoum walked barefoot through Brixton, London, with boots tied to her ankles, the image is cropped by the artist so that the “context of Brixton in the 1980s is no longer clearly legible” and instead, via the positioning of the image at floor-level, the specificity of the pavement is displaced by the less distinct gallery floor.18 Here again, the decontextualizing force of exhibition is deployed in advance by Hatoum. Hatoum’s process of art making thereby sets out a spectatorial approach to performance documents. Sand, of course, speaks of time. Mona Hatoum collects together an assembly of objects variously identified by curators as documentary, sculptural and installational created, as the idea of a retrospective implies, over an artistic lifetime. In compilation, these artworks reveal an approach shared across Hatoum’s various modes of production: in the aesthetic reframing of archival documents that relate to specifically staged events, in sculptural and installational works that, taken out of context, invoke very particular political conflicts and circumstances, and in those pieces, like + and –, that take further this nuanced mode of abstraction so that the expressed point of reference becomes not a discrete instance but rather a phenomenon or form—in this case, performance. Instead of developing from identifiable and recognizable historical actions, such artworks take up Hatoum’s distinctive mode of decontextualization to “make visible some sense of performance more broadly.”19 The literalness of Hatoum’s ontological presentations is nuanced and drawn across a distinctive association of multiform and multidecadal works that variously have nothing and everything to do with performance.

Traces: Ana Mendieta at Hayward Gallery, London (2013) The photograph shows the outline of a body cut into damp soil with arm-like appendages carved to frame the figure’s head. A schematic and provisional femininity is suggested by a curve at the hips, but “legs” are fused into a single column. There is a placid sheen of red liquid covering the inner dimensions of the cavity, recalling blood of course, though without the direct reference to injury that some of Ana Mendieta’s other works contain. This is the body abstracted, less in the sense of a concept distilled or distinct from concrete experience, and more in the way that time, weather, erosion, political decisions and the proliferation of other

216  Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley

forms of life might wear away the edges of a crater while still leaving evidence of a collision. We zoom out to take in the other related images of leaf-strewn ground with an indistinct depression in the middle, which transforms through the sequence of eight photographs into the crimson body-like figure. These images are part of Mendieta’s well-known Siluetas series, featured prominently in Traces: Ana Mendieta, a major retrospective of the artist’s work at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2013. For this series, Mendieta uses her own physique as an index for the creation of profiles dug into the earth in locations as varied as Mexico, Cuba and Iowa, USA—the last is the location for the images we are viewing. These outlines are specifically not self-portraits, however, but neither are they transcendent representations of an idealized body. Indeed, as Julia Bryan-Wilson notes, in later iterations of this work, Mendieta would remove the arms to avoid associations with “goddess” imagery prominent in predominantly white US-based feminist arts.20 Bryan-Wilson, contextualizing Mendieta’s participation in, reception by, and critique of feminist movements, argues that Mendieta “goes against ‘the body’ to reassert the existence of, and interdependency between, many bodies.”21 Multiplicity is absolutely central to Mendieta’s work. At the same time, looking at Untitled (Siluetas Series) (1975), we are struck by the singularity of the figure in the center of the image, even in its repetition. It is neither autobiographical, pointing necessarily to Mendieta herself, nor is it the universalized every-body. It is a body, both impersonal and specific, leaving its mark among many others. It is a body that is necessarily in relation, in the sense, perhaps, that Judith Butler means when they argue that “who we are, bodily, is already a way of being ‘for’ the other, appearing in ways that we can neither see nor hear.”22 It is the figure’s context that makes it singular. Everything that surrounds it—from the landscape of which it is part to the sequence of eight photographs in which it appears to the wider multi-year series to which it contributes—constructs this body in its particularity. The notion of the trace from the title of the exhibition is useful in conceptualizing a complex play between singularity and context. Traces are remnants of an event or action that might be left in a place where something has happened. To trace something might mean to render an object in outline or it might signify an approach that works backward, seeking connections toward an origin or cause. A trace amount of something is just enough to be detectable. There is a sense of the forensic in the term, a sense not just of the documentary but the evidentiary. Mendieta’s practice is precisely concerned with the imprints and impressions a body leaves through immersion in a landscape or (often violent) encounter with other bodies. As viewers, we are also enjoined to perform acts of tracing, drawing connections between this assemblage of images, objects, inciting

Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta  217

events and possible futures. The retrospective in this instance makes its account of the distinct and singular artist via a process of accumulation more akin to seemingly impersonal modes of scientific research or legal investigation. There is a rough chronology to the exhibition, so that we encounter Mendieta’s earlier work at the beginning. Here, she uses her own body to produce traces, or her body is itself the site on which traces appear. The work of tracing has a direct, even literal dimension, though different to the literalness we found in Hatoum’s + and −. In this work, social and political comment is explicit, as in Mendieta’s 1973 Rape and Rape Scene, made in response to the sexual assault and murder of a woman at the University of Iowa where Mendieta was a student. As Traces curator Stephanie Rosenthal notes, these images or “tableaux” were “created in public under the gaze of her fellow students,” so that the resulting photographs have at least in part the status of performance documentation. 23 Within the image, we find an artist’s interpretation of a specific horrific act of violence and a confrontation between that artist and an absent but implied audience, alongside other resonances, like the crime scene photograph, that open the individual act to a wider context of systemic misogyny and legal injustice. The image is not reducible to any one of these but is rather a site from which all may be discovered. However, as the exhibition progresses, the appearance of Mendieta’s body shifts. Body Tracks (1974) is a photograph showing a large rectangle painted in red on a wall, recalling perhaps the monochrome abstraction of an artist like Ad Reinhardt. Mendieta is pictured kneeling in front of the rectangle with her arms pressed against its shape. The red is smeared in two vertical tracks indicating that the paint is wet and that Mendieta has dragged her arms through it. The photograph thus captures the aftermath of a performance intervention that punctures the abstraction of the geometric shape. Her 1982 Rastros Corporales, translated in the catalog also as “Body Tracks,” is a triptych of blood and tempera on paper. These comprise impressions of Mendieta’s arms in red on white paper, almost like negative outlines of the earlier photographic work. In this reiteration of the earlier act, the body is now gone and only the tracks remain. It is possible to imagine the very substance Mendieta presses and slides herself against in 1974 being transferred to paper nearly ten years later in a kind of time warp where the act of tracing exceeds temporal and spatial boundaries. It might be imagined that here, too, is where the work departs from performance to become more sculptural or painterly. On the other hand, we might see performance here as depersonalizing the body represented in the work while tethering it still to its contingent and located specificities. Abstraction has returned to the work but transformed.

218  Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley

While the term “traces” could indicate fragmentation, the overwhelming feeling is of an exhibition straining toward the comprehensive. Everything, everything, is here. It is an exhibition devoted to completion, even as the work consistently points to absent bodies. The space where visitors both begin and end is an extensive research area, comprising four rows of tables and hundreds of photographic slides. If we try to think ourselves back into the exhibition space, we are sitting at one of those tables, engrossed in these slides, perhaps for the rest of our lives. This gesture of completion is, in a sense, theatrical. The invitation to research, while technically sincere, is limited in scope. The sheer numbers of slides present in the research area exceeded the capacity of any one viewer. In-depth academic or enthusiastic amateur research is not truly accommodated within an exhibition space but is also not really the point. This is a demonstration of research, a provocation to research, rather than an occasion for research. Where does this need to demonstrate come from? Across the exhibition, but especially among the long tables, there is a sense of evidence being presented and a case put forward. The exhibition advocates: for the importance of Mendieta as an artist and for the place of Mendieta within an art historical canon. It may also be understood as a call for the recognition more widely of women artists, artists of color, artists from the Global South, and an end to the systems of oppression that marginalize certain subjects to begin with. It is clearly important when both curating and writing about Mendieta’s work to avoid a crass notion that her art recapitulates, prophetically, her death—a point made across the essays in the catalog. Nevertheless, the need for the exhibition to show and present everything, to include material in excess of what could physically be seen, is a kind of judicial act. Mendieta’s oeuvre is haunted by the idea of lost potential, of what she might have made had her life not ended so early and with such violence. The abundance of material in her retrospective exorcises this specter of absence through a process of evidencing not just of the arresting and perspective-shifting images and objects Mendieta produced but also the generative and proliferating mechanism at the heart of her practice. Acts of law are encounters between an impersonal system and an individual instance—both abstraction and circumstance constitute this encounter. Unlike state-sponsored legal action, however, the acts underpinning Mendieta’s work are not aimed at a set end point, a prosecution, but a continuous unfolding of a process of evidencing. Adrian Heathfield refers to the objects of Mendieta’s work as “visual artifacts” that do not finalize the acts from which they emerge but “gesture to future dissolutions or re-formations—an end is never seen.”24 It is because of this open-endedness and multiplicity that Heathfield argues, “[o]ne cannot locate Mendieta’s works, or think of them as autonomous objects.”25 And yet, location is everywhere in this work. To return to the 1975 iteration

Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta  219

of the Siluetas addressed above, both the rural Iowa landscape into which the central figure is inscribed and the London gallery space in which we encounter the image, as well as all the other contexts in which it has been or will be displayed, are implied by and help produce this figure as singular as its existence unfolds in time.

Rose English, A Premonition of the Act at Camden Arts Centre, London (2015–2016) At first glance, a premonition might seem to be the opposite of a retrospective. While a retrospective implies a historical and typologizing survey constructed with the benefit of hindsight, a premonition is futureoriented. According to the introductory wall text in the gallery, the event titled A Premonition of the Act displays objects, images, sounds and texts that represent the “vital components of a major yet-to-be realized performance that is heralded by this exhibition.” As a mode of artistic practice, this preemptive act of display raises a number of questions and propositions for performance and its curation. First, it connects to a history of performance-oriented visual arts practices that prioritize the presentation of process as performative. We might think, for example, of the action painters who “move the emphasis in visual art away from the quality of the completed art object toward the complex drama of the act of composition” revealed through the intersection of painting and photographic and filmic documents, as Peggy Phelan has articulated.26 With titles like Storyboard and Prototypes of Practice (2011), the multiform works presented in Camden Arts Centre stage a dramaturgical practice toward an act yet or never to be realized. Performance has long been distinguished from traditional sculptural works and figurative paintings in terms of staging a live unfolding of practice rather than presenting a previously made product. Instead of tracing an act of performative making, as the canvases of Jackson Pollock and others might be said to do, A Premonition of the Act stages a process toward the conception of an event of performance. Whether the proposed act to which this exhibition is directed represents a fictional framing device or a genuine artistic intention is perhaps not important. What is significant, rather, is the unique way in which this accumulation of research materials (annotated photocopies of catalogs and manuals, drafts of scores, videos of glassblowing), and the form in which it is staged within the gallery, makes an insightful and experimental statement about how document-based displays of performance function. Among this collection of memoranda, a pencil note, presumably written by English, observes that “[the premonition of the act] and the afterlife of the act [are one!]” What is displayed as the archival remains of an event are the very same documents that prefigure it. This multidirectional chronology is akin to what we found in the Ana

220  Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley

Mendieta retrospective, where tracing can be understood as a mode of working backward while traces also accumulate new shape and form over time. In her nuanced account of performance remains, Rebecca Schneider reminds us that Hamlet commissions a performance to “function as record”—in this case, of his father’s murder.27 By drawing attention to this canonical order of proceedings wherein performance is employed as evidence, Schneider deftly illustrates how the “live act does not necessarily, or does not only, precede that which has been set down,” and it certainly does not do so in scripted theatrical productions wherein the “live is a troubling trace of a precedent text.”28 In Schneider’s examples, as in A Premonition of the Act, documents foretell the event of performance. In the case of curated exhibitions of archival collections, the materials put on display are the same regardless of whether they are shown before or after the event to which they refer. This is what A Premonition of the Act demonstrates. Whether the performance has taken place or not (and whether it ever will) is immaterial. What English constructs is a retrospective in reverse wherein what is displayed has to do with foresight rather than review. The effect of this is the presentation of an unfolding of process—in this case, the artist’s work of preparatory research. A Premonition of the Act certainly appears as an exhibition wherein an artist accommodates, as performance scholar Bertie Ferdman states, the “curatorial process as part of their artistic practice.”29 It reads as an installation of materials ordered by English rather than a collection of artworks organized according to a curatorial design. This impression might be inaccurate and reflect what João Ribas defines as “mediation,” a key element of the solo exhibition wherein, as previously discussed, this form appears to directly represent the “artist’s voice” via a process of “curatorial selfeffacement.”30 Whether through artistic gesture or curatorial mediation (or an interplay thereof ), as visitors, we experience a sense of immersion, a light interactivity or invitation to think with the exhibition as we encounter its many parts. One large gallery is devoted to a multichannel sound installation, a recording of operatic work for many voices titled Lost in Music with libretto by English and score by Luke Stoneham. The gallery is dark, apart from tightly focused lights illuminating a series of documents pinned to the walls in a level row. The documents seem curious at first: photocopies from reference books placed alongside what appear to be process notes from the composition of the libretto. The digital copies and typed scores are annotated throughout with these incremental pencil additions, lyrical observations that open the material to further analysis and render drafted text provisional. The shifts are instrumental. One page of typed script reads “playing an object,” but a later inscription adds the preposition “to” so that the object is no longer the thing represented but the audience of the performance, which is now “playing to an object.” The documents are often exhibited in pairs, as if facing pages

Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta  221

opened on the gallery walls. This section of working text for Lost in Music accompanies a cataloged image of an ornate display of china in Cabinet des verres, Copenhagen, Castello di Rosemborg, circa 1708. This picture characterizes the sort of elaborate glasswork investigated, as well as the imbrication of the research process with skilled attention to the curatorial. There are also images of effects, of electric synapses and “laboratory lightning,” of glassblowing with a pencil note about “taking air.” Ideas of the “highly” or “overwrought” combine with notions of luminescence and fluorescence. Reading while listening, moments of synchronicity occur, with enigmatic phrases like “flagrant wisdom” and “ornamental happiness” doubled across page and voice. As eyes adjust to light, a circle of wooden chairs becomes visible, arranged in the center of the space and facing outward. At the end of the exhibition, there is a live performance of Music for Lost in Music in the gallery, the debut of the 72-minute chamber opera with chairs for contemplation replaced by singers and music stands. This culminating event does not, however, negate the idea of open chronology produced within the space of the exhibition. Indeed, the promotional materials for the live performance explicitly refer to it as the “musical element” of a “proposed future performance.”31 Further, of course what was being “debuted” was a piece of music that had already been recorded and exhibited across multiple weeks in a gallery. It is a live debut preceded by a recorded document, rather than the perhaps more expected reverse. “Debut” joins “premonition” and “retrospective” to suggest multiple directions and orientations, which do not in any way deny the particularities of gathering in a room to encounter physical bodies and virtuosic voices. Rather, here, the live is incorporated into a wider exposure of process where the before and after of preparation and aftermath creates not so much “liveness” as liveliness, not so much presence as propelling movement. Elsewhere in the gallery, we find a trestle table displaying glass objects arranged on top of further reference materials about histories and styles of glassblowing. There is a glass diabolo—a prop for juggling that might, except for the performer’s skill, be easily dropped— and porcelain plates for spinning. There is a suggestion here of the capacity for error so characteristic of the live. This assemblage indicates with its title, Prototypes of Practice, again the in-progress, the tension between completion and starting out or starting again. This tension is heightened in a series of video works showing Chinese acrobats moving with the same or similar glass objects, balancing one on top of another while contorting their bodies. We gasp and hold our breath. Then, the question of air and suspension is itself staged as we watch glassblowers at work alongside the acrobats, creating vessels for and with breath, the dangerous heat of the liquid glass making its manipulation possible. The titles of the video works (Ornamental Happiness and Flagrant Wisdom) cause jolts of recognition as we remember reading and hearing them voiced in the previous gallery. The virtuosic acts of acrobats

222  Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley

and glassblowers, captivating as spectacle, nevertheless do not fully resolve into event but rather prompt further acts of recall and anticipation, folding and unfolding. Spectacle is a key theme in the exhibition: acrobatic, operatic and theatrical. The currency of spectacle is attention, and one of the key infrastructures of attention in any exhibition is light. In an influential study from the early 1990s, New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt characterizes modern museum and gallery lighting as an “attempt to provoke or to heighten the experience of wonder,” which he defines, in turn, as “intense, indeed enchanted, looking.”32 Greenblatt contrasts this category of attention with “resonance,” wherein attention is directed out from an object or artifact toward its historically contingent context. If light is a mechanism for the production of wonder, the vitrine might be the tool museums often turn to for the presentation of resonant relations between objects and documents. In A Premonition of the Act, however, both of these approaches are subtly shifted. Instead of a vitrine, there is a trestle table, more associated with the workshop than the gallery. In the distinctive use of light accompanying the sound installation Lost in Music, the texts and images are tightly illuminated. As viewers, we are prompted to encounter these process-oriented and resonant documents with wondrous, “intense, indeed enchanted, looking.” Except that the lights are not tasteful pools of gallery illumination but more like theatrical spotlights. A spotlight is designed to focus attention not on a monumental object of entranced contemplation but on a moving spectacle. If wonder was produced, it may not have been Greenblatt’s absorbed marveling but closer to Sara Ahmed’s “critical wonder” that reveals the “surfaces of the world as made.”33 In A Premonition of the Act, we are invited to see events and objects in the process of being made.

Concluding Contexts We opened this chapter with a definition of performance that foregrounds its capacity to put objects, practices and social dynamics into relation—that identifies performance with processes of contextualization and opening art practice out to the wider world. We noted Heike Roms’s astute observation that performance has a distinct lineage concerned with an “examination of transfers and connections across remoteness” that helps us emphasize the notion of process in thinking about performance as contextualization. 34 We have also been struck by Amelia Jones’s reassessment of the pleasures of physical proximity in the wake of COVID-19, which we take as a reminder of the fact that performance is practiced by specific bodies in particular spaces and that it occasions communities of people. Ultimately, then, by framing our inquiry through the question “where is performance?” and by bringing,

Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta  223

in part, a formal lens to this investigation, we are interested in reconciling the idea of performance as context with the strategies, skills and inventive acts that artists and curators bring to bear in the creation and display of performance works. This is not to reify performance as a category or insist on ideas of medium specificity but to argue for the importance of accounting for performance as a range of existing practices and possibilities. It is for this reason that we have chosen to focus on the retrospective, a form that has developed in order to make accounts of artistic practices and artistic lives, and to consolidate the position of particular artists within wider conversations. We are aware of a prevailing tension here: on the one hand, the retrospective can be seen as part of a mechanism of hierarchical evaluation that is always inflected by social bias and ideological underpinnings. On the other hand, we have seen art institutions deploy the retrospective as a way of revising certain canonical boundaries, which helps us to understand art history itself as dynamic and contentious. Our focus on London institutions is in part a way of emphasizing this tension, even as the three institutions we address do represent different modes of exhibition practice. The Camden Arts Centre is significantly smaller than Tate Modern, for example, and so more limited in terms of resources, and perhaps more flexible in terms of display strategies. It is important to situate ourselves in relation to the tension just described—white academics working in UK higher education institutions with access to globally prominent art exhibitions. We are interested in probing the retrospective as a form, and part of this is to articulate the challenges it poses. Another part of our inquiry is to test the limits of the retrospective and consider how performance in particular helps us to do that. We have stretched the definition of “retrospective” in our study. The Rose English exhibition in particular does not fit the conventional structure of a retrospective, and it is worth noting that another significant London exhibition of English’s work at the Richard Saltoun Gallery in 2019 took a more historical approach to the display of this work, focusing on early projects and documentation. This exhibition offers valuable insight into English’s milieu and the length and breadth of her career. However, we felt that A Premonition of the Act offered a different perspective on what a retrospective might be. It transposed a particular performance strategy—the exposure of an unfolding of process—into an exhibition space, and in so doing, made an account not just of the contents of English’s oeuvre but of the mechanisms that characterize this oeuvre. The exhibition gives the overarching contextual form of “toward” but also assembles signifiers of performance. The unfolding of process that we recognize here is thus importantly also a reconfiguration of the chronology of act and artifact, where document might anticipate event and vice versa. By proposing the premonition as

224  Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley

retrospective, we suggest that performance strategies allow for the status of the object and the live action to remain in animated relation. The Ana Mendieta retrospective too makes use of strategies of working backward and forward, as the exhibition assembles traces and prompts acts of tracing that have something in common with forensic investigation. We have argued, however, that the inquiry at the heart of the exhibition is not aimed at a final outcome but rather evidences Mendieta’s concern with open-endedness and multiplicity. Through the mechanism of iteration at play here, we find emerging a notion of singularity, and more precisely, a singular body—both a physical body and a body of work. This body is in a sense depersonalized but nevertheless absolutely conditioned through its position both in the landscape of its creation and its place of reception. It is a body that is distinctive in its contextual relation, and it is in this situatedness that we find performance emerge. Questions of context in the Mona Hatoum exhibition are also staged as a kind of reversal. We have considered how Hatoum’s practice of decontextualizing objects acts to generate other kinds of contexts, both political and performing. This strategy is reflected again in the curatorial logic of the exhibition, where practices of detachment—of object from its typical use, archival document from its iteration in another medium, or artifact from its historical referent—inform the modes of display in ways that seem aimed less at explicating Hatoum’s artistic context and more at demonstrating how Hatoum puts context to work. We have argued, too, that we find in this exhibition literal expositions of performance ontologies, with experience made and unmade before us. This literalness is itself a complex negotiation of abstraction and material conditions, underlining how performance practices enable shifts in perception and relation. In contrast to chronologies that situate performance as a medium used by Hatoum in her “early” practice, performance emerges through this retrospective—as we account for it in these reflections—as central to Hatoum’s artistic practice more broadly.35 Everywhere in these exhibitions, things move, are on the verge of movement or have just come to rest. The steel bar rotates continuously in + and –. Acrobats and glassblowers variously execute virtuosic motions in Ornamental Happiness and Flagrant Wisdom. More abstractly, Mendieta’s Siluetas unfolds across geographical locations, Hatoum’s Grater Divide and Daybed see household objects move outside their domestic setting, and English’s texts are transformed from written notes to printed titles to vocalized lyrics. In identifying strategies for answering the question “where is performance?,” we have had to account for movement or the possibility of movement. Over their oeuvre, as it is curated in these retrospective exhibitions, each artist develops a distinctive way of rendering performance that is played out and formed across distinguishing acts of and approaches to contextualization. Performance thus allows us to trace contexts and it also helps us understand how context shifts and changes,

Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta  225

how it is coproduced, and how it leaves openings for new emergence. The aim of the retrospective may be to take a definitive stance, but we have found more useful the notion that it is one configuration through which performance may be found.

Notes

226  Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley





Bibliography a-n News. “A Q&A with... Jenni Lomax, outgoing director of Camden Arts Centre.” 16 January 2017. https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/a-qa-with-jennilomax-outgoing-director-of-camden-arts-centre/. Adewole, Funmi with Jareh Das. “Curating Performance from Africa on International Stages: Thoughts on Artistic Categories and Critical Discourse.” In

Retrospective Remarks on Rose English, Mona Hatoum and Ana Mendieta  227 Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice, edited by Dena Davida, Marc Pronovost, Véronique Hudon, Jane Gabriels, 46–56. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Against the Body: Interpreting Ana Mendieta.” In Traces: Ana Mendieta, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal, 26–37. London: Hayward Publishing, 2013. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Camden Arts Centre. “Postscript: Rose English and Luke Stoneham: Music for Lost in Music (1).” Accessed 8 July 2022. https://archive.camdenartscentre.org/ archive/d/postscrip3. Ferdman, Bertie. “From Content to Context: The Emergence of the Performance Curator.” Theater 44, no. 2 (2014): 5–19. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43, no. 4 (1990): 11–34. Guy, Georgina. “Staged Installation, Reported Speech, and Syndemic Images in Blindness and Caretaker (2020).” Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, no. 24, special issue on Aural/Oral Dramaturgies (2021). Guy, Georgina. “Theatre as Installation in the Syndemic Architectures of Rimini Protokoll and Battersea Arts Center.” Theatre Journal, 74, no. 3 (2022): 277–301. Guy, Georgina. Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation: Displayed & Performed. London: Routledge, 2016. Heathfield, Adrian. “Embers.” In Traces: Ana Mendieta, 20–24. London: Hayward Publishing, 2013. Linsley, Johanna. “Stupid, Paranoid, Wonderful: Staging Non-knowledges in the Pedagogical Encounter.” Performance Research 17, no. 1 (2012): 59–67. Perrot, Capucine. “Mona Hatoum Born 1952: Performance Still 1985–95.” Tate, accessed 8 July 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/ performance-at-tate/perspectives/mona-hatoum. Phelan, Peggy. “Shards of a History of Performance Art: Pollock and Namuth Through a Glass, Darkly.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, 499–514. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005. Ribas, João. “Notes Towards a History of the Solo Exhibition.” Afterall, no.  38 (2015). https://www.afterall.org/article/notes-towards-a-history-ofthe-solo-exhibition. Roms, Heike. “Training for Performance Art and Live Art.” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 11, no. 2 (2020): 117–125. Rosenthal, Stephanie. “Ana Mendieta: Traces.” In Traces: Ana Mendieta, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal, 8–19. London: Hayward Publishing, 2013. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011. Smith, Isabella. “Protestors Demand ‘Where Is Ana Mendieta?’ in Tate Expansion.” Hyperallergic, 14 June 2016. https://hyperallergic.com/305163/ protesters-demand-where-is-ana-mendieta-in-tate-modern-expansion/.

228  Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley Tate. “Art Term: Performance Art.” Accessed 8 July 2022. https://www.tate.org. uk/art/art-terms/p/performance-art. Tate. “Mona Hatoum.” Accessed 8 July 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/ tate-modern/mona-hatoum. Tate. “Mona Hatoum: Room Guide.” Accessed 8 July 2022. https://www.tate. org.uk/art/artists/mona-hatoum-2365/exhibition-guide. TDR Editors. “Forum: After COVID-19, What?” TDR 64, no. 3 (2020): 191–224.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abramović, M.; Abramović–Ulay 81, 94, 137, 174 Acconci,V. 3–4, 27, 107–109, 137–138 Action Art 4, 7, 28, 31–32, 52, 62; see also Akční umění Actionism 32 activism 39, 43–49, 51, 57–59, 64–67, 179 Ad Reinhardt see Reinhardt A.D.F. Adewole, F. 211 Ahmed, S. 222 Akční umění (Action Art) 32 Aktionskunst 32n37, 62 Albrecht/d. 143 Alga Marghen 145 Alÿs, F. 108 Ammann, J.-C. 62–63 Anderson, L. 137 Ant Farm 94 Anthology Film Archives 161 Antik, A. 27 Antin, E. 3–4 antipolitics 33 Apple, J. 137 archeological 127; acoustic archeology 146 Archey, K. 175–178 archive 6, 85–86, 89, 95, 100–102, 138, 189–202, 211; the apparatus of the a. 86; archival artifact 119; archive–building 123, 127; body as a. 197; books as a. 115–116; box 173; collection 137, 220; constellations 118–120; counter-models 193; documents 8, 92–93, 214–215, 224; materials 106, 119–120, 125, 165; performance 141; processes 113, 189, 193; remains 219–220; sources

55–56, 58–61, 66; space 115–116, 122, 127–128; photographers 114; self-archivization 6, 21–22; sonic 11, 137, 141–145 Arikan, B. 89 (art) collection 85, 92–93, 95, 115–116, 174–183, 189–190 artifacts 8, 88, 104, 106, 113–116, 119–120, 210; archival 119; (the) artifactual 101; the chronology of act and a. 223; detachment of 224; disturbing 50; juxtaposition of 120; material 189; of performance 14, 100; symbolic 87; visual 218 Artist Archives Initiative (AAI) 12, 155–159 Artist Materials Archive 93 assemblage (agencement) 9, 85–96, 216, 221 Assmann, A. 196–197 Assmann, J. 56–59, 64 Audio Arts 144–145 Aural History of Performance Art 11, 134, 137–139, 142, 145–146 Auslander, P. 10, 135, 140–146 authenticity 10, 100–109, 135, 156–159; certificate of 173, 179; claims of 193; outsourcing 182; paradigms of 182; preservation of 179 Ay-O 137 Baca, M. 169 Badovinac, Z. 28 Balanchine, G. 190 Baldacci, C. 193 Balla, G. 78 Barberio Corsetti, G. 74 Barbican (London) 210

230 Index Barilli, R. 74 Barthes, R. 50 Bartolucci, G. 73–74 Barzdžiukaitė, R. 174 Bátorová, A. 6, 32–33 Bausch, P. 190 Baxmann, I. 197 The Beatles 106 Beat ’72 Theater (Rome) 78 Bedford, C. 135–139, 145–146 Benjamin, W. 64 Bereś, J. 24, 29, 30, 33 Berg, C. 65 Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive 158, 160, 161 Beuys, J. 62, 91, 137, 143–144 Bither, P. 182 Blaney, J. 168 Bockstecherhof 64 body art 32, 135, 138 bones 92, 100, 102 Bonito Oliva, A. 75 Bovenschen, S. 66 Bowie, D. 62 Brach-Czaina, J. 30 Braque Prize 1968 43–44 Brătescu, G. 26–27 Breakwell, I. 137 Briet, S. 128n3 Briskeby 194 Brisley, S. 145 Brock-Nannestad, G. 141 Brown, L. B. 141–143 Brown, T. 190 Bryan-Wilson, J. 216 Bucher, H. 178 Buchloh, B. 116–117 Burden, B. 134 Burden, C. 11, 103, 106, 134–137, 145–146 Bureau of Activities, Documentation and Dissemination see PDDiU Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions see BWA Bürger, P. 21 Buskirk, M. 107–109 Butler, J. 63–64, 216 BWA (Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych) 23–24 Camden Arts Centre (London) 210, 212, 219–223 canon 50, 174, 193, 197; art historical 189, 218; canonical 138, 211, 220, 223; of performance art 21, 28, 66,

134; of performance artists and works 5–8 care: of contemporary art 12; for memory 67; of performance art 1, 12, 176, 182–183, 192 Carella, S. 74, 78 Carlson, M. 72 Carnevale, G. 43 Carreira, R. 44 Castellucci, R. 79, 125 catalog 93, 118–123, 127, 191, 219; essays 27; exhibition 28–30, 114–115; notes 143; Transformer 63 censorship 23, 40–43, 193 Centre Chorégraphique National de Rennes et de Bretagne 191 Centre Pompidou (Paris) 176–177, 212 CGT 48–49 CGT de los Argentinos (CGTA) 40–48 Chalupecký, J. 29 Chamblas, D. 195 Charmatz, B. 14, 189–196, 200–202 Cholette, D. 63 A Choreographer’s Score 11, 116, 126–128 choreography 123, 127, 160, 162, 190–191, 200 Chow, R. 146 Christiansen, H. 143 Classen, B. 66 Comer, S. 92–93 Connerton, P. 196 conservation 155–156, 174, 177; the act of 197; artist involvement in 163; decisions 156; effort 178; idea of 13; of performances 179; practices 85; reports 157; research 167; sound 141 Constructivist activity 32 contestation 32 Contextual Art 30 contextualization 120, 137, 14; artist 161, 209, 212, 224; historical 211; performance as c. 222 continuum theory 95–96 Corner, P. 137 corporeal 101, 198; corporeal memories 192, 197 Cramer, F. A. 113 Crimp, D. 91 Cunningham, M. 190, 195 Cvejić, B. 11, 116, 126–127 d’Amburgo, M. 74 Dada 4, 29, 32 Damengöttinnen am Äquator 8, 56, 64–67

Index  231 database 156–159, 169, 179–180; challenge 157, 166–167; documentary 167 Davies, D. 107–109 de Bruijne, E. 181 de Keersmaeker, A.T. 11, 116, 126–128, 190 De Palma, B. 103 Debord, G. 200 dé-collag/age 143 DeLanda, M. 86–87 Deleuze, G. 9, 85 Demarco, R. 27 dematerialization 42, 117, 201 Dercon, C. 189 Devynck, D. 3 Dhillon, A. 165 Di Tella Institute (Buenos Aires) 39–44 Die Schwarze Botin (West Berlin) 66 Dillier, M. 64–66 Dipple, K. 88–89 documentation 2, 8–11, 85, 115–117, 155, 175; alternative d. practices 177, 181; audio 139, 156, 181; audiovisual 134; for conservation 174, 195–196; contemporaneous 22; Documentation and Conservation of Performance 179; forbidden 191; hypertrophic 201; immaterial 199; intermedial 126; material 193, 199; participatory 14, 60; performance 67, 86–96, 100–109, 135, 144–145, 190–192; performance art 8–9, 22, 106, 136, 141; photographic 135, 176, 217; process-oriented 122; relational model of 89; sound 11, 134, 138– 145; strategies 174, 183; techniques 176; theatrical 135; video 65, 94, 140, 156, 181, 195; visual 141–142, 156 Donald Hess Collection 88 drag 64 Duchamp, M. 29 Duncan, I. 193 Dunlap, B. 137 Dutch theater sound archive 141 Dziamski, G. 24–25, 29–30 Dziennik Łódzki 31 Dziewior,Y. 118–119 The Eastern Bloc, also the Bloc 26, 28, 30, 31, 33 Edge, N. 90 Edition Block 145 Edition Schellmann 145

Elizalde, R. 43 Elligott, M. 95 embodiment 61–62; processes of 195– 196; radical 193; representations of 64 Eng, B. 164, 164 English, R. 14, 210–211, 219–223 Eno, B. 62 ephemera 9, 91, 95–96; art 25, 174–175; art practices 182; in the body 197; Collecting the Ephemeral 13, 173, 174; ephemeral 2, 9, 100–101, 121, 162, 192–194, 213; ephemerality 22–23, 100–102, 140, 182, 189, 193 Erdélyi, M. 29 Every house has a door 141 eyewitness accounts 55, 106, 127 Fabre, J. 79, 80, 125 Fales Library and Special Collections 156 Falso Movimento 74 Farina, R. 91 Fassbinder, R.W. 78 Favario, E. 43 Federici, S. 58 feminism; feminist 7, 55–58, 64–67, 216 Ferdman, B. 220 Ferrari, L. 44–47, 50, 52 Filliou, R. 137 film 8, 55, 60, 100, 103–104, 191; avantgarde 25; circulating photographs 92; documentary 114; documenting 45, 78, 94, 106; film art 120; film artist 117; film(ic) document 136, 219; as influence 66; long exposure 30; material 123; as medium 161; preserving what is important 109; projections 161; protocol form 126; script 121; 16-mm 139; Super-8 134; transformations 126 Finbow, A. 200 Finn-Kelcey, R. 145 Fish Story 123, 124 Fleck, R. 26 Fluxus 137, 145 Foellmer, S. 198 Fondazione Bonotto 145 Forti, S. 92, 117, 210 49 Nord 6 Est — FRAC Lorraine 173–174, 180 Fotobild 62 Foucault, M. 193 Fox, T. 137 FRAC Île-de-France 181

232 Index Franzen, R. 141 Free International University project 143 Frieling, R. 94–95 F-Space gallery 134, 146 Furlong, W. 144–145 Gabriele Mazzotta Editore 145 Gajewski, H. 25 Galeria Adres 31 Galeria Labirynt 6, 23–25, 28, 30 Galerie Stampa 59, 63 Galliera, I. 33 Getty Research Institute 93, 142, 169 Ghilioni, E. 43 Giannachi, G. 9–10, 196, 198 Gilbert & George 29 Glass, P. 62 Glusberg, J. 50, 51–52 Goettle, G. 66 Goldberg, R. 24, 29, 58 Goldstein, J. 137 Gordon Craig, E. 73 Graham, D. 117 Graham, M. 190, 193 Grainytė,V. 174 Greenblatt, S. 222 Greenfield, L. 104 Grigorescu, I. 26 Groh, K. 29 Grotowski, J. 74–76 Guattari, F. 9, 85 Guggenheim Museum (New York) 1, 176n13, 182n29 Guibert, M. 3 Gusman, T. 140, 144 Haacke, H. 117 Hajas, T. 29 Halbwachs, M. 57 Handke, P. 78 Hansard Gallery 114 Hantelmann (von), D. 190, 198, 201 happening(s) 4, 32, 40, 42, 51, 78, 137, 142–143 Hartenstein, G. 90 Hartog, F. 196 Hatoum, M. 14, 210–215, 224–225 Hayward Gallery 14, 210, 212, 216 Healy, T. 164 Heathfield, A. 218 Hentz, M. 64 Hershman Leeson, L. 87–88 Heyward, J. 90

Higgins, D. 137 historiographies: historiographical approaches 7; integrating countermemories 67; margins of 1; multilayered 163; official 7, 196; of performance art 6–7, 15, 21, 34, 58, 113, 165; practices of 5; reappraisal 174; theatre 8, 72; writing 6, 21–23, 29–31, 60 Hoffmann, J. 190 Holliger, H. 66 Hölling, H. 89 Horizontal Art History 29 I AM — International Artists’ Meeting 25 icon 7, 21, 27–29, 42, 51, 56 identity: of the artwork 174–181; changing 179–180; collective 198; constructions 3; defining i. of performance art 12–15, 73, 107, 177; historical 87; national 28; preserving 175–177; queering 64; separate 143 If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? 194–196, 200–201 Il Carrozzone 74, 76–77 Imesch, K. 64 Imhof, A. 174 immediacy 159 individuelle Mythologien 62 Information Action 91 Insolent Art 30–31; see also Partum Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia) 91 intangible 12, 15, 173, 192, 200 intermediality 126, 196; intermedial 126 interview: artist 52, 155–159, 173, 178; mimeographed 47; as oral history method 31–34, 55, 59, 127; relation with the artist 58; as source 90, 94, 124–127, 143, 163, 165; videorecording 7, 31, 56–58, 61, 64, 67 Irigaray, L. 66 Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin) 179 Italian New Theater 72–73, 79 Itinerary of ’68 7, 40, 44, 48–52 Jacoby, R. 41, 44, 50, 51 Janevski, A. 92 Jonas, Joan 11, 12–13, 91–92, 116, 118– 124, 157–163, 168; In the Shadow a

Index  233 Shadow—The Work of Joan Jonas 118, 120–122; Joan Jonas Knowledge Base (JJKB) 12–13, 157–170; Joan Jonas: Light Time Tales 158, 162; Joan Jonas: Performance/Video/Installation 158, 161; Joan Jonas:Works 1968–1994 158, 161–162 Jones, A. 135, 210, 222 Josse, B. 173 Joyant, M. 3 Judd, D. 117 The Juniper Tree 91–93 KADIST foundation 180–181 Kalb, A. 165 Kantor, T. 33 Kaprow, A. 27, 29, 137, 142–143 Kaye, N. 108 Keane, T. 145 Kemp-Welch, K. 33 Kihm, B. 181 Kim, J.H. 165 Kirby, M. 29 Kirchhofer, M. 65 Klein,Y. 103, 106, 108–109 Knížák, M. 137 Koller, J. 33 König, K. 11, 116 Kostołowski, A. 31 Kosuth, J. 30, 81 Krakowski, P. 29–30 Kroesen, J. 90 Kulik, Z. 22; see also KwieKulik Kunsthalle Basel 58, 60 Kunsthaus Bregenz 118–119 Kunstmuseum Bern 178 Kwiek, P 22–23 KwieKulik 6, 22–25, 28–29 La Gaia Scienza 74 Labirynt Gallery see Galeria Labirynt Lachowicz, A. 25, 30 Lang, C. 63 Lapelytė, L. 174 Laurenson, P. 95, 176, 179–180 Lauwers, J. 125 Laysiepen, F.U. 94, 145 Le Roy, X. 190 LeCompte, E. 124 Lehmann, H.-T. 72, 79–80 Lehmann,V. 65 Lenbachhaus (Munich) 176 Lepecki, A. 193, 197–198 LeWitt, S. 30, 118

LIMA (Amsterdam) 10, 85, 90, 94 Linked Open Data (LOD) 165, 168–170 Linsley, J. 14–15, 140–141 Lippard, L. 51–52, 117–118, 201 Lissoni, A. 162 Live Art 22, 26, 29, 55–56, 105, 178, 214; Live Art on Camera 114 Live List 179 liveliness 174, 221 The Living Theatre 73, 76 Lomax, J. 212 Lombardi, S. 74 Lord, C. 94, 95 Lucas, G. 94 Lucerne Art Museum 62 Lüthi, U. 64 Lutjeans, A. 134 Lütticken, S. 200 LWL Museum of Art and Culture (Münster) 177 Mäder, F. 58 Majewska-Güde, K. 31 maps 32–34, 55, 58–60, 89–90, 100, 163–165, 179 Marchán Fiz, S. 51 Marjanić, S. 32–33 Marranca, B. 73 Martone, M. 74 Masotta, O. 51 Mass Art 143 Mathis, M. 55, 61, 64 Maude-Roxby, A. 114 Mayakovsky,V. 78 McLean, B. 137, 145 Męderowicz, J. 25 Media Art 40, 45, 50, 94, 158 mediality 113–117, 122; see also intermediality Meinhof, U. 66 memory 91, 127, 189, 191, 195, 196–202; audience retained 100; autobiographical 117, 198–199; collective 55–67, 102, 161, 183, 199; communicative 55, 56–60, 67, 198; counter-memories 60–61, 67; cultural 56, 196–198; of dance 14, 194; declarative 198; embodied 7, 57, 100–102, 190, 192–193, 197, 199; episodic 198; flawed 34; functional 197; holistic approach to 34; institutional 100, 179; kinesthetic 198, 201; layers of 193, 201; living 60,

234 Index 201; (mis)memories 201; ontology of 202; oral 7, 100, 190, 192, 197, 201; of participants 25; plural 8; politics of 2, 12–13, 197; procedural 197–199; storage 197; visual 190, 199, 201; written 192, 201 Mendieta, A. 14, 210–213, 215–220, 224 metadata 177 Michels, D. 94 Mignot, D. 161 Migros Museum (Zürich) 177 Minujín, M. 51 mixed reality experience 88 Mlčoch, J. 29 Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza (Youth Publishing Agency) 30 Mlynárčik, A. 32 Mnemosyne Atlas 58 Moderna Museet (Stockholm) 190 Mœglin-Delcroix, A. 115 MoMA PS1 210 MoMA see The Museum of Modern Art (New York) Moore, P. 92 Moormann, C. 137 Morganová, P. 6, 31–34 Morgner, I. 65–66 Moten, F. 142 Mroczek, A. 23–24 Mroczek, T. 24–25, 30 Mühl, O. 137 Müller, J. 65 Multhipla 143, 145 multimedia 12, 127, 158, 160–170 Murak, T. 30 Murch, W. 104 Musée de la danse (dancing Museum) 191–192, 194, 202 Museum der Moderne (Salzburg) 210 The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York) 1, 10, 85, 88, 90, 92–93, 95, 162–163 narrative 2, 5–6, 91, 117, 163–170; on the artists’ work 127; background 8; biographical 59–60; collective 57; elements 126, 136; fragments 121; historical 189, 191, 211; mythical 39, 50; ordered within 118; performative-narrative act 198; readable 115; self-colonizing 29; traditional 201 Neagu, P. 27

Nengudi, S. 176 New Art 29–30 New Theater 8, 72–73, 79 Newman, H. 106 Niggli, C. 63 Nijinsky,V. 190, 193 Nikkels, W. 115 Niklaus, S. 65 Nitsch, H. 137 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) 11, 116 Nova Scotia Series (or Source Materials of the Contemporary Arts) 116 O’Dell, K. 135, 145–146 O’Shea, H. 145 Odin Teatret 76 Oliver, C. 27 Olympiastadion 78 One Ten Records 145 Ono,Y. 137, 139 ontology: of the assemblage 87, 95; ephemeral 213; of memory 202; of performance 9, 14, 145, 192, 209– 210, 213; relational 199; viral 135 oral history: advantages and disadvantages 34; against romanticizing 34; dependence on 21, 31–33; interviews 34, 55, 57, 127; method 7, 55–57, 59; sources 66; specific approach to 58–61, 67 ORF 137 Ottinger, U. 66 Paik, N. J. 137 Paksa, M. 44 Palazzo dei Diamanti (Ferrara) 88 Palazzo Reale (Milan) 3 Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe (State Scientific Publisher) 30 participatory 14, 33, 89–90, 174, 189, 198, 201 Partum, A. 25, 30–31 Partum, E. 29, 31 Pascali, P. 78 Patterson, B. 137 Paxton, S. 78 PDDiU (Pracownia Działań Dokumentacji i Upowszechniania) 22 Pearson, M. 196 Penrose, R. 88 Perceval, L. 125 Performance and Body festival 24–25

Index  235 Performance Chronicle Basel (PCB) 7–8, 55–67 Performance Group 103 performative act 60–64, 78, 107, 138, 182 performative theater 8, 72–73, 79–81 performative-theatrical productions 122–128 Perjovschi, D. 27–28 Phantasma 24 Phelan, P. 6, 27, 145–146, 209, 219 photographs: as access to performance 10, 107–108; black-and-white 60, 134–135; blown-up 46, 48; as documents of performance 45, 140, 145, 159; iconic 3; indices of performance 135–136; multiple status of 86, 92, 104; as part of installations 161, 216; as performance documentation 1, 8, 23, 58, 60, 119, 217; performance p. 114, 122, 136; as performance remains 85; seminal 113; staged 108–109 photography: constituent component of performance art 61; documenting work 87, 104; journalistic 48; minimal documentary role 107–109; ocularcentrism 142; performative 58, 62; primacy of 11, 140 Pintilie, I. 25–26, 32–33 Piper, A. 3–4 Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milan) 158, 162 Pirici, A. 177, 180, 182 Plate, R. 41–42 Polesello, R. 43 Pollock, J. 29, 219 Poor Theater 74, 75 Poor, K. 165 pop art 40 post-avant-garde 8, 72–75, 78–81 Premio Ver y Estimar 40–41 premonition 213, 219–223 presentism 196 preservation: digital 95, 167; via documentation 85, 86, 181; of experimental art 22; expertise needed 13; long-term 170; in museums 191–192; of performance works 9–10; policies 189; value 92 Printed Matter, Inc. 118 props 90, 91–93, 120, 161, 173 Pulfer, R. 59

Quadri, F. 72 queer 7, 55–57, 61–67 Quick, A. 11, 116, 123–125 Racine,Y. 65 Radio Bremen 137 Radio Nacional de España 137 Raleigh Yow, V. 57, 59 Rau, M. 79 reactivation 2, 9–13, 58, 174–179, 182, 190 recordings 103, 114, 122; accessibility 113, 125; archiving 144; commercial 103; diversity of 124; documentary 141–142, 164; to experience performances 104; filmed or videoed 55, 59, 137; of performance art 2, 141–145; of presentations 173; sound recordings 8, 103, 137–145 records 60, 85–96, 113; audio 11, 138–139, 142, 144; file 173; internal 156; of a performance event 9–10; photographic 117; visual 134 reenactment 9, 78, 193, 201, 212 Regn, C. 55 Reich, S. 77, 117 Reina Sofía 95 Reinhardt A.D.F. 217 relics 63, 161, 181 remains: 41–42, 85; archeological 100; archival 219; material 9; material and immaterial 192; ontological status of 199; performance 101–102, 143, 193, 220; tangible 200 remembrance 56, 64, 189, 198–202 Remont Gallery 25 Renzi, J.P. 44, 45, 50–52 reperformance; reperformed 9, 155, 173, 175, 178, 180–181 repertoire 100–101, 192, 193, 195, 197 repression 42, 46, 48–49 resistance 181, 192 resonance 138, 217, 222 Restany, P. 32 retrospective 14, 88, 158, 160–162, 174, 209–225 rhizomatic 85–86, 90, 196 Ribas, J. 211–212, 220 Richard Saltoun Gallery 223 Rimmaudo, A. 176 Rizzo, M. 175, 178, 182 Roberta Breitmore 87–89, 93 Robinson, T. 164, 164 rock music 62, 140

236 Index Rodriguez, S. 88 Romero Brest, J. 41–43 Roms, H. 10–11, 56, 210, 222 Rosenthal, S. 212, 217 Ross, D. 94, 161 Rossenova, L. 169, 170 Roth, D. 137 Ruano, E. 40–41, 44 Saemann, A. 55 Samadhi Records 143 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 10, 85, 90, 93–94 Sanders, J. 90–91 Sant, T. 86 Santantonín, R. 51 Sayre, H. 102, 103 Schaller, E. 65 Schechner, R. 76 Schneemann, C. 27, 210 Schneider Willen, N. 177, 182 Schneider, R. 9, 85, 101–102, 105, 220 Scholte, T. 89 Schuppe, M. 59 Schwarz, A. 88 Schygulla, H. 78 scores: ambiguous status 143; artistauthored 155; drafts 219; in exhibitions 120; by participants 124; performance 125; as performance art documentation 8–9, 114, 117; sonic documentation 138; typed 220 scrittura scenica 73 Second Life 88 Seedbed 27, 138–139 Sehgal, T. 14, 178, 182, 189–194, 199–201 Serra, R. 121 Servillo, T. 74 Shanks, M. 196 Shoot 11, 103, 106, 134–137, 139, 145–146 Sieverding, K. 63, 64 Silber, A. 8, 56, 59, 61–64, 67 Simon, J. 118, 120–121 Smigiel, F. 93 Smith, B.T. 134 Smoczyński, M. 30 Snow, M. 117 Sobre 50 socialism 33 Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio 75 Solari, M. 74

sound 8, 11, 134–146, 160, 167, 219; art 143, 144, 145; multichannel s. installation 220, 222; overflow of s. and choreography 162; part of memory 34, 57; placement of s. equipment 179; (re)use of s. 120–121, 124; soundscape 138; soundtrack 78, 92 Sound Collection Guy Schraenen 145 SPARQL 169–170 Stanford University Libraries 88 Stärkle, L. 64–65 State of Concept (Athens) 181 Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) 158, 161–163, 175, 178 Stein, G. 80 Steintrager, J. A. 146 Sterrett, J. 93 Stigter, S. 89 Stiles, K. 87, 137 Stipančić, B. 29 Stiven, F. 27 Stoneham, L. 220 Stravinsky, I. 78 Studio Gallery 31 Suarez, P. 41, 44 sustainability 163, 165, 170, 173–174 Sweeney Astray 162 Świdziński, J. 30 Szeemann, H. 62 Szentjóby, T. 33 Tatarczuk, W. 30 Tate Archive 92, 145 Tate: acquisitions 91–92, 179, 191, 194; archive 92, 145; documentation 10; on performance art 1, 88, 209; performance events 14, 91, 189–202, 210–225; research 89–90, 182, 190; restaging 161, 199; Tate Britain 89, 191; Tate Live Performance Room 101–102; Tate Liverpool 89–90; Tate Modern 14, 161, 189–190, 194, 199–201, 210, 212–214, 223; Tate Triennial 191;YouTube channel 195; website 209 Taylor, D. 9, 100–101 Teatro Studio 74 temporality 11, 12, 105, 115, 139 terrorism 62, 66 Thaler, J. 119–120 Theater Basel 59, 64–65 Theatre of Images 73, 75–76

Index  237 Tiezzi, F. 8, 74, 76–77 Till, E. 142 Till-Mobley, M. 142 Tolmie, P. 196 Tót, E. 33 Toulouse-Lautrec, H. 3–5 traces 91, 113, 192, 197, 200–201, 216–224 transavantgarde 75 transmission: body-to-body 101; care and t. 12, 57; models of 14; part of artist practice 120, 161; policies of memory t. 12; strategy of 2, 13, 183 transnational 1, 5–6, 8, 179 Tucumán Arde 7, 39–40, 44–52 Turbine Hall 194–195 Ulay see Laysiepen, F.U. The Unilever Series 194 University Art Museum (Berkeley) 158, 160, 161 Valageas, C. 173 VALIE EXPORT 11, 114, 116, 118–120; Archiv 119–120 Valk, K. 124 Valusek, B. 27 Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) 95 Van Assche, C. 212 van de Vall, R. 89 Vansina, J. 57 Vanzi, A. 74 Vaughan, D. 194 Vedute di Port Said 77, 80 Venice Biennale 1, 174, 194 VIA Studio 55 video 86, 101, 104, 124, 159; art 55, 118–120, 168; clandestine 191; documentation 55, 65, 94, 114, 140, 181, 195; interviews 7, 31, 56, 58–67; manipulation 108; performance 32, 121; as performance remains 85; as research material 100, 156, 159, 219; tutorials 170, 179; videotape 1, 8, 10, 90–91; work 91, 160–162, 221 Vietnam War 39, 41, 62, 135 Villez, É. 180–181 Violeau, A. 173 violence 39–43, 45–48, 66, 214–218

visual artifacts 218 Vostell, W. 137, 143 Vreme, S. 25 Wahbeh, F. 179–180 Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) 88, 182 Wallis, C. 212 Walser, A. 65 Wan, K. 212 Warburg, A. 58 Ward, F. 102 Ward, K. 104–105 Warpechowski, Z. 24, 29 Weilemann, R. 65 Westerman, J. 2–3, 90, 200, 209 Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) 10, 85, 90–91, 162, 179 Whitworth Art Gallery 88 Wijers, G. 94 Wikidata 166, 168–169 Williams, E. 137 Wilson, R. 62 Wojnarowicz, D. 157; David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base 157 Wood, C. 2–3, 91 Woodstock 103 Wooster Group Work Book 11, 116, 123–128 Wozniakowski, J. 25, 30 Wüthrich, H. 63 Young, L.M. 78 Zappa, F. 62 Zemp, M. 65 Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) (Karlsruhe) 88 Zentrum für Künstlerpublikationen (Bremen) 145 zero degree 75–78 Zevi, C. 3 Zickendraht, K. 63 Zimmer, P. 65 Ziranek, S. 137 Zona Festival (Performance Festival— Zone of Eastern Europe) 6, 23, 25–28, 32 Zumsteg, J. 65 Zwick, S. 55