Marc Arthur News

The exhibition 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009), curated by RoseLee Goldberg and Klaus Biesenbach now on view at PS1, offers valuable insights on how to read performance art documentation.  When I first saw the show I was overwhelmed by the rows of TV monitors, wall texts and lengthy news clippings that dominate the exhibition.  As the daunting task of consuming 100 years of performance art weighed down on me, I was reminded that performance has transcended time not through physical art objects but via a diversity of documentation.  To uncover the unifying theme or linear history in this vigorous and colossal drafting of the genealogy of performance art, viewers must first betray the content of the exhibition all together and dedicate themselves to interpreting the formal mechanisms of documentation.

In the first piece of the exhibition, Le Ballet Mechanique (1924), we can see why documentation only constitutes one part in the constellation of a performances physical life.  This futurist film by Fernand Léger put to a score by George Antheil, is a project that expands beyond the physical media the more you learn about it.  The wall text for the film informs us that the accompanying soundtrack would later stand on its own in a performance whereby musician’s interactions with the instruments became the ballet itself.  The viewer must consider the film as only one part of the representation of this work and activate other incarnations of the ballet in their imagination, to render it a complete piece.  In the same room a variety of Futurist manifestos are displayed which further destabilize the film as the final work of art.  The writings of the Futurists we’re important and legitimate influences on Fernand Léger and George Antheil.  If we understand these manifestos less as a backdrop and more as formal contributions, then don’t they also constitute an essential element in the life of this film?

In a room spanning the 1960’s – 1980’s, we can track the differences between individual artworks through one medium rather than many documents.  As artists working in performance during this period tackled the new form of video, it was employed for a variety of different purposes.  By studying the varying perspectives produced in video documentation, we can gain information about the context of a performance and how the artist wanted it to be perceived.  For example, the raw black and white street documentation of Valie Export’s Tap and Touch Cinema (1969) is straightforward and unbiased.  While in a work like Joan Jonas’s Glass Puzzle (1973), the artist is clearly thinking about her relationship to the camera by performing for it.  Performance art from this period is often categorized in terms of the body or, like the group of teenagers who immediately rushed to Gunter Brus’s Transfusion (1965) thought of it, as blood and gore.   It is when we look back at the documentation and consider the negotiations between camera, performer and audience that we clearly see the varied practices of artists, and understand the nuances of how and why they perform.

We are now in an era when artists like Tino Sehgal or Andrea Frasure have made these issues of documentation central to their practice.  As this new generation of artists demand that history find new means of representing their modes of production, the formal continuity of documentation explodes.  In the final rooms that span the past 20 years, I found that reviews and exhibition announcements offered the most valuable information just by their descriptive nature alone.  Video and photographs only felt adequate for artists like Mathew Barney who consider documentation the end all product of the performance.  Surely a photograph cannot help me to understand the scope and politics of Felix González-Torres’s “Untitled” candy piece (a work that involves the gallery visitor taking a piece of candy from a large pile with them as the leave).  Fortunately this artwork is physically present, and fortunately there are also live performances programmed into the exhibition.  On the day I went, a crowd had gathered to see the experimental music band Shattered Patterns perform.  They swamped the galleries with ambient noise attesting to the fact that there really is nothing more valuable than witnessing a performance live.

Simply reading a wall text, looking at a photograph or watching a video doesn’t enact the live experience of a performance.  But, it does present evidence or at least a starting point in solving the mystery of the live act.  During a panel discussion on documentation and performance art RoseLee Goldberg said,  “We’re looking at a medium that needs a new approach in terms of history: yes it is documentation; no, I very often wasn’t there, but most of the time, very few other people were there either”[1].  If there is to be a new approach to understanding performance art through history, we must first become literate in the language of documentation.  This exhibition is the perfect place to start.