Presence in performance art and documentation

Presence in performance art and documentation

By Anna Stein Ankerstjerne Master thesis

Introduction This is a survey of presence in performance art and documentation, based on Marina Abramović and The Artist is Present.

In 2010, the performance artist Marina Abramović did an unusual performance at The Modern Museum of Art, MoMA, in New York. From March 14–May 31 she was seated 6 days a week, 7 hours a day on one of two chairs at a table in the museum’s atrium awaiting silent encounters with any person from the public who wished to sit on the chair opposite her and engage in an eye contact of whatever length desired.

Nothing else happened. The meeting would involve only eye contact and no verbal exchanges. No whipping, no cutting, no flagellation of the artist’s body which was earlier the hall mark of Abramović’s performance art. Her presence was all that happened and it was enough for many of the visitors to be moved and burst into tears. Abramović called it an ‘energy dialogue’, and what she created, a ‘charismatic space’. She sat for 716 hours and 30 minutes in ‘a three-­‐month long gravitational pull over the here and now’ and faced over 1500 people. 1 The Artist is Present is the title of a three monthly long MoMA exhibition and performance as well as a following documentary film (premiered in 2012) by HBO and producer Matthew Akers on the production of the show and on the Serbian performance artist, Marina Abramović (Yugoslav, b. 1946). The exhibition took place as a major retrospective, tracing the career of Abramović with approximately fifty works spanning over four decades. Five of her legendary performances were reperformed by a team of thirty-­‐six ‘reperformers’ who trained extensively with Abramović for this event, while video and photography documented her solo performances and her collaborative performances made with her former partner Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). The highlight of the show was the new performance piece performed by Abramović

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Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, exhibition catalogue, published by The Museum of Modern Art, NY (2010), ed. Klaus Biesenbach (abbreviated as exh. cat.); Marco Anelli (ed): Marco Anelli: Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović (Damiani Editore, 2012), p. 9; Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present , HBO documentary film (2012), directed by Matthew Akers.

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in the center of MoMA’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium during the daily opening hours. The performance The Artist is Present became a phenomenon2, and the public attention of both artist and performance, and of HBO’s documentary film production, has compelled me to take a closer look at the documentation, and how the artist is present in performance art documentation.

Performance art is intrinsically linked to their authors, to the artist’s subjectivity and ‘iconic presence’.3 Based on this premise, I will ask how Abramović is present(ed) in documentation, and what kind of artist figure is portrayed. How does her iconic presence ‘rub off’ on documentation? And how does documentation iconize her and establish her ‘performative selfhood’? 4 I want to unravel the source of affection.

I will include into my analysis the following documentary materials: The exhibition catalogue’s written, visual and audiovisual documentation, a second catalogue that documents the participating ‘sitters’ in Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović5 as well as the documentary film. My analysis will revolve around how the artist is present and presented, and how her presence is experienced in documentation.

This will allow me to discuss the notion of presence in performance and documentation, and the performative role of documentation.

My survey falls in three parts and an epilogue: The first part discusses the different experiences of presence in performance art and in documentation. It draws on German and US theater and performance theoreticians Erika Fischer-­‐Lichte, and Philip Auslander. Part 1 takes off with ‘performance art and aesthetics’– what it is and what it does in terms of presence, informed by Fischer-­‐Lichte’s The Transformative Power of Performance.6 This point of departure will allow me to ask, as the Danish art historian Camilla Jalving does: ‘what does an experience of a live performance entail that cannot be obtained from a document?’7 Fischer-­‐Lichte will give me a comparative reference to draw on, and an entrance to approach the experience of presence in The Artist is Present. From here I will focus on the exhibition catalogue’s written and visual way of portraying Abramović, before turning to the production of presence in documentation by analyzing, with Roland Barthes, French literary theorist and semiotician, how

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Klaus Biesenbach: “In the Presence of the Artist”, in Anelli: op. cit., p.9 Nancy Spector: “Seven Easy Pieces” (exh. cat.), p. 38 4 Matthew Akers, interview with BFI (The Artist is Present, DVD extra material); Nancy Spector, loc. cit..

5 Op. cit..

6 The Transformative Power of Performance: A new aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (Routledge, London and New st York, 2008/1 German edition, 2004) 7 Camilla Jalving: “Inventing Reality. On truth and lies in the work of Hayley Newman”, in Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media, eds. Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev (Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2005), p. 167 3

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the catalogue is experienced with Abramović’s voiceover on an accompanying audio track. Finally I will suggest that the relationship between viewer and documentation implies a performative play based on Auslander’s “Performativity” and “Hermeneutics” of performance documentation.8 In part 2, I will address a prominent discussion about whether performance comes into being through disappearance (argued by Peggy Phelan, US feminist performance scholar) or through documentation and archivation. Is presence a matter of time and space (be there or miss out!) but can it also be produced and infused through documentation and its performative qualifications? I will discuss this in relation to photographic performance documentation, and with US feminist performance theoretician Amelia Jones and UK theater and performance professor, Matthew Reason, propose that documentation does more than to record the event and to halt disappearance.9 Next, I turn to the documentation of the audience in Portraits – as a case that is revelatory when it comes to the aesthetic of documentation in The Artist is Present.

As a last documentary resort I will look at ‘reperformance’ as documentation in part 3 and how it is related to the artist’s iconic presence. I will introduce different aspects of the German literary philosopher, Walter Benjamin’s characterization of ‘aura’ as they apply.10 This leads me to a final point of interest in my survey, which I will include as an epilogue; namely the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘archive fever’.11 Since we cannot understand the archive without understanding its allure – this peculiar kind of fever called archive fever-­‐ I will suggest that if the artist’s presence ‘rubs off’ on documentation, the allure of the archive and its different documents rub back on the performance and the artist as well.

Derrida’s Archive Fever implies a theoretical turn to psychoanalysis that might seem off track, and yet its concern with origin(al)s and presence offers but another perspective on prior points.

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“The Performativity of Performance Documentation”, in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 84, vol. 28, no. 3, September 2006 (pp. 1-­‐10); “Toward a Hermeneutics of Performance Art Documentation”, in Kunsten A Falle: Lessons in the Art of Falling, ed. Jonas Ekeborg (Horten, Norway, Preus Museum, 2009) 9 Amelia Jones: “”Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation”, in Art Journal, vol. 56, no. 4, Winther 1997 (pp. 11-­‐18); Matthew Reason: Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, NY, 2006) 10 rd “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (3 German version 1939), trans. Harry Zohn, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations: Walter Benjamin (Schocken Books; Berlin, 1955/1968) (pp. 217-­‐51) (referred to as Artwork st essay); “Little History of Photography” trans. Phil Patton, in Artforum, vol. 15, no. 6, February 1977, NY (1 German edition in Die Literarische Welt, Nos 38; 39; 40, September 18; October 20, Berlin, 1931) 11 Jacques Derrida: Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (The University of Chicago Press, st Chicago & London, 1996/1 French edition 1995), originally presented as a lecture June 5, 1994, at a colloquium in London)

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The different parts are marked by numbers and roughly signify 1: performance art, 2: documentation, 3: reperformance. My argumentation is hermeneutically oriented, and offers to the reader a collection of knowledge about the field; a landscape of reflections, discourses, aspects and arguments about presence in performance art and documentation.

Note: I use the word reperformance rather than the more common term reenactment; a terminological choice that corresponds with Abramovic (et al.)’s own descriptions (exh. cat.) although it is not meant to imply a pursuit of contextual writing. I use the word reperformance to differ, in part 3, between performer and reperformer and to distinguish the reperformances of The Artist is Present from Abramovic’s original performance and her prior performances. As the subtle ‘re’ in reperformance suggests, there is a close connection between reperformance and performance. The term reenactment will also figure in this conversation but mainly as a comparative with more theatrical connotations.

The words ‘audience’ and ‘spectators’ are used interchangeably without differentiation.

The reading of this thesis will not only compel to anyone with an interest in the field of performance art but also to those who have an interest in the preservation of live arts in general, in the archive and in documentation and documentary aesthetics. And, to anyone who is intrigued by the notion of ‘presence’ as well as what it means that the artist is present.

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Performance art and aesthetics ‘What took so long?’ RoseLee Goldberg, US performance art historian, asks in an essay entitled “The Performance era is now”, published in her own Performa Magazine. ’The record performance-­‐heavy biennals, exhibitions and art fairs of the past five or six years– make it clear that as we move into the second decade of the 21st century[…] performance is indeed the art form of our times.’ So what took so long? As she ponders on this question, and comments on how, finally, more and more museums open performance art departments, she proposes an answer: The omission of performance might be explained by ‘the fact that the work was ephemeral and impossible to “museumify”, which was exactly the point of

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the artists who made the work in the first place.’ 12 Furthermore, she says, performance has ‘found a home in the modern museum’ because museums have changed radically ‘from places of contemplative study to cultural pleasure-­‐palaces’ in which live art has great public appeal. Finally, it took so long, because the 1970s are now history, and history, Goldberg states, tends to be reexamined with approximately a thirty years gab.13 These characteristics; ephemerality, museumification/archivation and reexamination are all points of interest in this survey – each relate to presence and will be addressed with analytical attention.

Meanwhile, let’s ask another basic question: What is performance art?

In Erika Fischer-­‐Lichte’s genealogy of performance art, ‘Western art experienced a ubiquitous performative turn in the early 1960s.’ This performative turn in the arts (Performativierungsschub) ‘led to the creation of a new genre of art’: Performance art. The work of art as artifact was replaced with temporal acts; ‘fleeting, unique, and unrepeatable processes [and the] artistic and aesthetic nature of performance would instead be derived solely from its nature as event.’14 The ‘eventness’ replaced the ‘thingness’ in art and the reason was ‘an urge to resist the production of artworks as marketable artifacts and commodities and instead replace them with fleeting events which nobody was able to buy and store away in a safe or display in their living room.’15 Adrian Heathfield, UK curator and performance and visual culture professor, describes it as ‘a shift to the live […] towards the condition of eventhood […] from the lasting to the temporary, from the optic to the haptic, from the distant to the close, from static relation to fluid exchange.’16

A performance is an event that occurs in space and in time; in a here and now. It takes place and it disappears –or endures in documentation. A performance is constituted by the physical co-­‐presence of one or more performers and one or more spectators. Their action and reaction, in what Fischer-­‐Lichte calls an autopoietic ‘feedback loop’, constitute the performance.17 Marina Abramović explains about the concept of a performance event that ‘Basically […] you create the space and time field. You announce the performance for a certain place and time. Then the public will enter. Everything else has to be energy dialogue.’18 What

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Performa magazine (http://performamagazine.tumblr.com/post/36016121020/the-­‐performance-­‐era-­‐is-­‐now) First published in The Art Newspaper, no. 240, November 2012 (http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/The-­‐ performance-­‐era-­‐is-­‐now%20/27883) 13 Loc. cit..

14 Fischer-­‐Lichte: Transformative Power, p. 162 15 Loc. cit.

16 Adrian Heathfield: “Alive”, in idem (ed.): Live Art and Performance (Tate publishing, London, 2004), pp. 7, 9 (original emphasis) 17 Transformetive Power, chapter 6. Autopoiesis is a term Fischer-­‐Lichte lends from the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela that describe how living systems operate and survive through self-­‐generation (p. 7); Idem: Ästhetik des Performativen (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2004), p. 61, note 4.

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Arthus C. Danto: “Danger and Disturbation: The Art of Marina Abramović” (exh. cat.), p. 35

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Abramović calls an energy dialogue can be considered as an equivalent to what Fischer-­‐Lichte calls a feedback loop, because, according to Fischer-­‐Lichte ,the feedback loop is the flow of energies that involves and unites everyone present into a temporary community; it is a ‘leibliches Spüren’ that flows back and forth between performer/s and spectator/s.19 Both terms, energy dialogue and feedback loop, are enunciated as constitutive features in performance art: In this exchange of energies lies The Transformative Power of Performance. This is the power to destabilize binary oppositions and divisions between subject and object, signifier and signified, and to engage everyone present as participants and co-­‐subjects of the performance. In other words, to make the experience of a performance event liminal, cathartic and transformative.

According to Fischer-­‐Lichte transformation, however, presupposes that co-­‐presence in performance is not mediatized. Her point of view is that incorporations of technological mediatizations (such as screen projections) invalidates the feedback loop, and ‘sever the co-­‐existence of production and reception.’20 With a Frank Castorf production of Idioterne as an example, she argues that the use of reproduction technology in the performance only stimulated the audience’s desire to experience the actors in direct unmediatized, physical presence:21 The use of video developed frustration and increased the spectators’ desire for the real bodies and for the intimacy that sterile video images simply could not give. The images interrupted the feedback loop and its mutual exchange and therefore, she says, ’the audience was granted an epiphany and realized that no matter whether and how a performance told a story, it is the bodily presence of the actors that affects them and sets the autopoietic feedback loop in motion. Therein lies the constitutive moment of performance.’22 To be returned to shortly, these aspects echo in verbalizations of presence in The Artist is Present.

Like many (or most) theoretical accounts of performance art and its aesthetics Fischer-­‐Lichte draws on linguistics to describe how performance art is transformative by referring to the enunciative theory of How To Do Things With Words (1962) by US linguist John L. Austin. 23 In this, Austin argues that speech can be performative; it can do something, provided the right relational circumstances and serious institutional

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Transformative Power, pp. 61, 68; Ästehtik des Performativen, pp. 99-­‐100

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Transformative Power, p. 68 Ibid.; see also Siemke Bönisch: “Feedbacksløjfer og henvendthed”, in Peripeti “Performative former”, eds. Janek Szatkowski, Erik Exe Christoffersen & Thomas Rosendal Nielsen, University of Aarhus, 2011, p. 84 22 Transformative Power, pp. 73, 74 23 Presented by Austin at The William James’ Lectures held at Harvard University in 1955. Referenced in Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev: op. cit., pp. 9-­‐10, 25; & in Fischer-­‐Lichte: Transformative Power, pp. 24-­‐29 21

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framings. Austin differentiates between ‘constative’ statements and ‘performative’ statements:24 The first involves descriptive utterings that can be judged as true or false, and the second; utterings that in their very enunciative act do something and change some relations in the social world. It is statements that act according to the related situation. The marital promise ‘I do [take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife]’25 is an example of words that do something; not as I write them here, but uttered in the right institutional framing (in a church with a priest). There they change a couple from fiancé and fiancée to husband and wife. Fischer-­‐Lichte explains: ‘Performative utterances are self-­‐referential and constitutive in so far as they bring forth the social reality they are referring to […] Speech entails a transformative power’26 –and because performance art is performative (it also involves a self-­‐referential feedback loop), she argues, it also entails transformative powers. As mentioned, this power is not only the power to destabilize dichotomous schemes of binary oppositions but moreover the ability to transform everyone who participates in a performance situation.27 To support her argument, about the performative and transformative power of performance art, Fischer-­‐ Lichte also turns to anthropology and seminal works on ritual in that field -­‐ a second influential source in performance theory and studies. 28 She argues that transformation occurs through states of liminality and that a performance can be regarded as a ritual in its liminal state. Performance changes some relations and constitutes some new relations; the spectators undergo a ‘rite of passage’ as they enter a different realm and become part of something else. 29 This ‘something else’ is the liminal experience that, allegedly, endows performance art with its transformative potential. Peggy Phelan talks about liminality as spaces of in-­‐betweenness30, and describes it as and the mutuality of a shared presence and state of mind. In a letter to Abramović, she writes: ‘I have just quoted you […]. You say ‘this is where our mind is most open’. I would have said, ‘this is where our minds are most open’ […]. Our mind conjures up an image of a shared mind.’31 With this grammatical description Phelan refers (like Fischer-­‐Lichte) to the collapse of distinctively different roles in performance art – subject/object become shared subjectivity. Phelan says: ‘Abramović’s

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Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev: op. cit., pp. 9; Solveig Gade: ”Playing the media keyboard”, in ibid., p. 26. A distinction, however, that Austin later on did away with: constative statements also perform, and performatives are also reliant on facts. Both are tied to the situation, and both are speech acts.

25 paraphrased from Fischer-­‐Lichte: Transformative Power, p. 25 26 Ibid., p. 24 27 Ibid., p. 25 28 E.g. Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage (1909). Transformative Power, p. 41; Peggy Phelan says: ‘The traditional understanding of the origin of theater is that it emerged from ritual practices.’ Phelan: “On seeing the Invisible”, in Adrian Heathfield: Live Art and Performance, p. 17 29 Transformative Power, pp. 175, 163, 67 30 ‘the space between breaths, the tiny pause when one is neither breathing in nor breathing out, neither kissing nor killing, neither writing nor reading, neither speaking nor listening’. Phelan: “On seeing..”, in Live Art, p. 21 (referring to Abramović’s performance The House With The Ocean View, 2002, Sean Kelley Gallery, NY) 31 Phelan: “On seeing..”, in Live Art, p. 21

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performances invite us to join her in a liminal space, rather than demanding that we choose one side or the other.’32 To illustrate where and how the transformative power of performance art is at work, Fischer-­‐Lichte exemplifies with ‘body art’ and Marina Abramović’s 1975-­‐performance Lips of Thomas.33 In this performance Abramović incised a pentagram onto her stomach with a broken razor blade, whipped herself on her back, and lay down on a block of ice until she was rescued by audience members that ended the performance.34 Body art uses ‘endurance and physical pain as primary tools for the exploration of a new practice predicated on exploring bodily limits’ and is a genre that has been the hall mark of Marina Abramović’s 1970s performances -­‐ ‘always exploring extremes.’35 Rhythm 5 (1974) is another example of a dangerous performance where Abramović lay down in a five-­‐pointed star lit with gasoline, lost consciousness because the flames consumed the oxygen, and was pulled out and rescued by audience members when her clothes caught fire. In Rhythm 0 (1974), she took ‘full responsibility’ for any actions that the audience desired to do to her with a selection of 72 objects from a table (feather, gun, bullets, grapes, razor blade, rose, knife, lipstick etc). RoseLee Goldberg has described how ‘viewers turned her around, moved her limbs, stuck a thorny rose stern in her hand. By the third hour they had cut all her clothes from her body with razor blades and nicked bits of flesh from her neck. Later, someone put a loaded gun in her hand and pushed its nozzle against her head.’36 Phelan says: Rhythm 0 demonstrated that what makes live performance a significant art form is that it opens the possibility for mutual transformation on the part of the audience and the performers. What distinguishes performance art from other arts, both mediated and live, is precisely the promise of this possibility of mutual transformation during the enactment of the event […]. Abramović had the capacity to allow her spectators to transform her intended performance to such a degree that they became co-­‐creators of the event itself.37

According to Fischer-­‐Lichte, the performative turn also brought about new articulations and new self-­‐ understandings of the artists. Artists were ‘No longer god-­‐like creators of the work of art […]. One might

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Phelan: “On seeing..”, in Live Art, p. 22 A recurrent example in both Ästehtik des Performativen and The Transformative Power of Performance 34 Allegedly Abramović did it to reach a higher spiritual level of consciousness. Fischer-­‐Lichte: Transformative Power, p.

17; see also Biesenbach: “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. The Artist Was Present. The Artist Will Be Present” (exh. cat.), p. 15; & Phelan: ‘Performance art, drug culture, and New Age investigations were motivated to explore alternative modes of consciousness.’ “On seeing..”, in Live Art, p. 17 35 The Artist is Present DVD, extra material: Interview with Klaus Biesenbach 36 Quoted in Phelan, “On seeing..”, in Live Art, p. 18 37 Ibid., p. 19 33

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even go so far as to say that these performances have propagated a new image of humans and society.’ 38 With the performative turn in the arts, art became democratic she argues: Due to the self-­‐referential or autopoietic feedback loop, and the mutuality of determination and co-­‐creation (both performer/s and spectator/s are ‘determining and being determined’), the notion of the sovereign subject (determining) as well as the passive spectator (being determined) could no longer be upheld.39 Consequently, binary oppositions, subject-­‐object and signifier-­‐signified relations that characterize a beholder’s examination of a work of art as object, were replaced by ‘oscillatory’ relationships. This means, according to Fischer-­‐Lichte, that in performance art roles are not clearly distinguishable and might even reverse, and dichotomies ‘more or less lose their “polarity” and “sharpness of distinction”.’40 As events, she writes, performances ‘do not exist on their own, that is to say, independent of their producers and perceivers. On the contrary, they only exist in the creative activity of the artist and in the experience of the observer, listener or spectator.’41

In Fischer-­‐Lichte’s account of the genre, the performative shift towards eventness changed the reception mode of the spectator, away from semioticity towards corporeality, from ‘understanding’ to ‘experiencing’.

She argues that the event is not a fixed artifact, a ‘work of art’, and therefore it cannot be interpreted as a condensed gathering of signs and put into signifier-­‐signified relationships because (Lips of Thomas) ‘What the viewers perceived affected them in an immediate, physical way. The materiality of her [Abramović’s] actions dominated their semiotic attributes [and] preceded all attempts to interpret them beyond their self-­‐referentiality.’42 In Marvin Carlson’s introduction to The Transformative Power of Performance, he explains this particular point and writes that ‘The central concern […] was not to understand but to experience it and to cope with these experiences, which could not be supplanted there and then by reflection.’43 According to Fischer-­‐Lichte this feature distinguishes performance art from object-­‐based works of art, as well as from its closely affiliated; theater: Interpreting what something might signify is, she says, what is at stake in theatre but not in performance art. In performance art the space is real and the body is real, and the performers use their own bodies instead of being ‘carriers of meaning tied to specific

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Fischer-­‐Lichte: Transformative Power, p. 164 Ibid., pp. 164-­‐65 40 Fischer-­‐Lichte: Ästhetik des Performativen, p. 29 41 Loc. cit.

42 Transformative Power, p. 18. For Peggy Phelan, the pure and raw and non-­‐signifying trait of performance art means that performance works with metonymical rather than metaphorical relations: by what is bodily present and co-­‐ present, and transmitted by physical proximity rather than pointed to by signs and metaphors (‘they [the spectators] saw blood flowing and imagined the pain on their own bodies’ she writes to exemplify how the metonym works).

Phelan: “The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction”, in idem. Umarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, Florence, USA, 1993), pp. 150-­‐52 43 Ibid., p. 17 39

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dramatic characters.’44 Abramović also distinguishes performance art from theatre and insists that performance is ‘pure and raw’:45 In theater you repeat. Performance is real. In theatre you can cut with a knife and there is blood; but the knife is not real and the blood is not real. In performance the blood and the knife and the body of the performer is real […]. In acting there’s a danger that you become the character, that you lose yourself […]. In acting you create a distance that you don’t create in performance. In performance there’s no distance, you go to the balls.46 In Fischer-­‐Lichte’s performance theory the bodily ‘Ko-­‐präsenz’ of performer/s and spectator/s at stake in performance art (as in theater) is what constitutes the feedback loop and its bidirectional action and reaction. It is also what fuels performance art with a high level of unpredictability and contingency regarding the outcome of the loop since ‘all forms of physical encounter between people stimulate interactions even if their shape is not always plainly evident.’47 There is no such thing as no response she claims, backing herself up with Paul Watzlawick’s famous argument: ‘you cannot not communicate’ which she alters into ‘you cannot not react to each other.’48 Whatever goes on on stage will elicit a response that, in return, will impact what goes on, on stage. The response cannot be predicted, but the unpredictability of the feedback loop, the ‘Unverfügbarkeit’ is the thrill of it. 49 The difference, then, according to Fischer-­‐ Lichte, between theater and performance is the ‘Unverfügbarkeit’ of performance, or what Abramović formulates as the mantra: ‘no rehearsal, no repetition, no predicted end.’50 Even though this is not an art history of performance art, a brief historian glance at its frequently recalled affiliated can give a sense of the diversity of the field. Performance art, as genre, emerged in the 1960s and 70s, but it also reaches back, as Rose-­‐Lee Goldberg suggests in and with the title of now seminal Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (1979), to the historical avantgardes; Futurism and Parisian Dadaists.51 Fischer-­‐Lichte, in comparison, considers the summer of 1952, where John Cage (Rauschenberg, Tudor, Cunningham and more) did his untitled event at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, to be the

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Ibid., pp. 34, 35, 36 Quoted in Rebecca Schneider: Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge, NY, 2011), p. 15.

46 Symposium: “The Legacy of Performance”, June 2, 2010 http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/108; “Marina Abramović: What is Performance Art?” (video: http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/96/572); “Marina Abramović: Performance vs. Acting” (video: http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/96/592) 47 Transformative Power, p. 43 48 Loc. cit..

49 Rather than trying to control and organize the feed-­‐back loop to avoid ‘misbehavior’ in the audience, contingency became positively valuated with the performative turn Fischer-­‐Lichte says. Transformative Power, pp. 38-­‐39; Ästhetik des Performativen, pp. 67, 80-­‐81.

50 Transformative Power, p. 43; Nancy Spector & Erika Fischer-­‐Lichte (eds.): Marina Abramović: Seven Easy Pieces (Charta, NY, 2007); Danto: “Danger and Disturbation”(exh. cat.), p. 30 51

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offspring of the art52 -­‐ associating performance art with Fluxus (amongst many others – Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik) and what has later become known as the neoavantgardes.

One might also mention Situationalism, Pollock’ian action paintings, minimalism and pop-­‐art or 1990s relational aesthetics. But in spite of the heterogeneity in all of the above, the different foci that they have, on strategies of chance encounters, fluidity and exchange, inter-­‐activity –and subjectivity, and process more than Art-­‐object all suggests that they share some kind of drive to the live and the unfolding artistic act that implies a presence and co-­‐presence. “From its beginning in modernist movements such as Futurism, Dada and Situationism, to its emergence through Happenings and correspondence with Minimalism and Conceptual art, performance has consistently replaced or qualified the material object with a temporal act.”53 Another common denominator shared by some of the above is the emphasis on subversive potential towards capitalism, commercialism and elitarian fine Art and fixed categorization.54

Presence in The Artist is Present The Artist is Present is devoid of any flagellating actions, it is hardly dangerous, involves no blood or nakedness and no audience-­‐rescuings. Abramović was not inflicting any visible pain onto her own body -­‐ other than the pain of endurance that it is to sit on a chair for three months. Still, most of the exhibition catalogue’s contributors emphasize how the act of sitting is ritualistic and liminal, and how Abramović believe in the mythopoeic transformational power of art.55 Then what is the performance about? The answer is: presence. The artist is present, and her performance takes place through co-­‐presence – feedback loops or energy dialogues. According to Abramović, ‘It is based on energy values, and it is ‘very important that the public is present… . For me it is crucial that the energy actually comes from the audience and translates through me – I filter it and let it go back to the audience.’ In the end, ‘the public and I become a unit’56 –she says, answering to the oscillatory relationships that Fischer-­‐Lichte describes, and Phelan’s image of a shared mind. What does an energy dialogue look like? Phelan defines it as ‘an exchange of gaze between the artist and her spectators’, a momentary intimacy through eye contact.57 In The Artist is

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(Camilla jalvig, værk som handling p 31) – working with scores…jalvig points out that performance art begins in 1960s70s (p 32) 53 Performance brings the artworks in the direction of temporal form, the condition of eventhood. (Adrian Heathfield “Alive”, p. 8, 9) 54

Performance challenges categorization (Schneider p. 5)

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E.g. Biesenbach: “Marina Abramović..”; and Jovana Stokić : “The Art of Marina Abramović: Leaving the Balkans, Entering the Other Side” (exh. cat.), pp. 15, 27 56 Abramović: “Marina Abramović on Performance Art”(exh. cat.), p. 211 57 Referring to Abramović’s 2002 performance The House With the Ocean View.. “On Seeing..”, in Live Art, pp. 20-­‐21; Idem: “Marina Abramović: Witnessing Shadows”, Theatre Journal, vol. 56, no. 4 “Theorizing the Performer”, Dec. 2004, p. 574.

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Present this eye contact occurred 1545 times (the amount of people that participated in the performance) over a course of 72 days in what Abramović calls a ‘charismatic space’. 58 This eye contact was also practiced between Abramović and Ulay in their collaborative performance project, Nightsea Crossing (1981-­‐87) where they would seated silently at a table opposite each other and engage in a mutual gaze for long periods of time,59 as well as in Abramović’s The House With The Ocean View (2002), where she lived and slept in the Sean Kelley Gallery, NY, for 12 days and sporadically took eye contact to different audience members such as Phelan: ‘You asked us to enter the performance, to engage in an ‘energy dialogue’ with you. You asked me, a writer and a teacher, to give up talking, to meet you in silence, to become wordless…’60 In the film The Artist is Present, one can get a visual of how Abramović’s energy dialogues are frequently described: Between each new sitter she would close her eyes to ‘recharge’ her energy before opening her eyes and beginning a new session where she would ‘tune in’, translate and filter the energy anew.61 Trying to grasp what this ‘energy’ is about, the curator of the show, Klaus Biesenbach, writes that some kind of ‘gift’ is given and exchanged,62and art critic and Abramović-­‐expert, Thomas McEvilley, proposes: ‘Abramović describes experiences of enfolding energy, energy fields surrounding her and the audience, a trancelike state of attention, and energy that, emitted from her during performance, tangibly reshape the energy of the environment around her… not only her ability to connect with special high-­‐intensity modes of energy, but even more her desire to do this for a group of people who, without her presence, would themselves lack the ability.’63 I will return to these special skills that seem to be ascribed to the artist, but, in this context of energy, point to another aspect of Fischer-­‐Lichte’s characterization of performance art that also characterizes how The Artist is Present is described: The unmediatized aspect of the feedback loop – crucial to the transformative power of live performance. Echoing Fischer-­‐Lichte, Abramović says that when the object is removed between the spectator and the performer ‘there’s just a direct transmission of energy… shared presence… just a pure emotional rapport between them and me… . It is really very simple’ she says: ‘There is no objects between me and the spectators [sic]. It is just a kind of simple energy dialogue. For me this performance summarize all my experience as a performance artist. In one single act:

58

The Artist is Present DVD Paula Orrell (ed.): Marina Abramović + The Future of Performance Art (Prestel Publishing, Uk, 2010), pp. 19 (quote), 61; 60 Phelan: “Witnessing Shadows”, p. 569 61 E.g. DVD 4:16, 59:58, 1:11:00; and 1:08:00: ‘She is sort of cleaning, closing eyes, looking down, and then boom… she is like a magnet’; Described in Tove Vestmø, interview with Abramović in Peripeti “Publikum”, no. 18, 2012, pp. 123, 124; “Marina Abramović on Performance Art” (exh. cat.), p. 211.

59

62

Biesenbach: “Marina Abramović..” (exh. cat.), p. 15 Thomas McEvilley quoted in Biesenbach: “Marina Abramović..” (exh. cat.), p. 14

63

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being present. Here and now.’64 In the documentary film this unmediatized dimension of presence, as something that enables a better energetic flow, is emphasized when the decision is made to remove the table between Abramović and the participating sitters.65 The result of the energy dialogue is transformation; the transformative power of performance. At least according to how the performance is visualized (in portraits. I address that later) and verbalized in documentation. In the exhibition catalogue, the Serbian art historian Jovana Stokic writes that the ‘most defining and enduring quality of Abramović’s art, is the way in which it engages with, energizes, and consolidates her viewers with a temporary community.’66 Chrissie Iles, US art critic and curator writes that this engagement involves ‘some kind of exchange, and eventual catharsis’67, and Abramović’s gallerist, Sean Kelley, likewise asserts that ‘people are profoundly changed’ in the performance.68 In the documentary film, visitors’ emotional reactions correspond to these descriptions. They say: ‘The experience I’ve had here has truly and profoundly changed my life’; ‘What makes this space so interesting is that we are able to share a much deeper emotional tie’; ‘it goes back to your primer spirit of who you are deep within’; ‘There was this very magnetic attraction to you, I sat with you for the first time it was like diving into an ocean of light, I immediately felt comfortable with you, like I knew you… I felt transformed… like a healing experience, cleansing, it was always very luminous… It was Marina’s energy that felt like a magnet.’ 69 For Fischer-­‐Lichte, performance cannot do its transformative work – ‘Reversing roles, creating communities, or motivating physical contact’ -­‐ under the condition of mediatization. Performance requires pure bodily co-­‐presence.70 This ‘pure’ and undistorted presence seems to be the topic and concept of The Artist is Present with the frequent emphasis on how the performance practices being fully present, in the here-­‐and-­‐now ‘just ‘being in the present.’’ 71 In that sense it is an example of an enactment of the very

64

CD to exh. cat., track 45, referring to pp. 204-­‐209 (exh. cat., p. 15); see also Heathfield: “Marina Abramović Elevating the Public. In Conversation with Adrian Heathfield”, in Live Art, pp. 146, 147 65 The table is removed for the last month of the performance: ‘Once removed it is so much more direct’, Abramović says. DVD 1:18:43 66

Nancy Spector: “Seven Easy Pieces” (exh. cat.), p. 39 Chrissie Iles: “Marina Abramović and the Public: A Theater of Exchange”(exh. cat.), p. 41 68 DVD extra material: Audience reactions 69 Ibid.; DVD 1:13; Symposium “The Legacy of Performance Art” 1:13 70 Fischer-­‐Lichte: Transformative Power, p. 68. Fischer-­‐Lichte and Auslander battle back and forth in their theoretical writings, and argue in opposite directions with similar examples. According to Fischer-­‐Lichte the Castorf production’s use of screens (mediatizations) alienated the audience and increased their desire for the real. Auslander argues, on the other hand, that big screens at live events increase a sense of liveness and intimacy. Auslander: Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge, NY, 1999) 67

71

Janek Szatkowski: “Person og rolle”, in Peripeti “Performative former”, pp. 125, 126; “Marina Abramović on Performance Art” (exh. cat.), p. 211

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principle of presence as a temporality of live performance. ‘Marina is an artist that visualizes time, using her body, with the audience’ -­‐ she brings time in as a weight’ Biesenbach says in the film.72 In the catalogue Abramović explains: ‘I don’t want an audience to spend time with me looking at my work; I want them to be with me and forget about time. Open up the space and just that moment of here and now, of nothing, there is no future and there is no past. In that way you can extend eternity. It is about being present. There are so many different meditation traditions around the world that are concerned with this issue: how to get into that moment of now, that is always escaping us.’73 In this quote, Abramović points at how performances ‘often take time itself as the subject of their address’74 and how this subject, for Abramović, is also a matter of method to reach a certain state of mind; ‘how to get into that moment of now’ as she puts it. ‘Nobody in New York ever has time…Yet here Marina was…’ .75 The Artist is Present is about presence in more than one way. It is about the present-­‐tenseness of performance, the ‘performative now’76, and it is about presence as ‘A recurrent tactic is to slow things down’ also called ‘slow-­‐time aesthetics’ or ‘long durational performance’. 77 Phelan describes it as ‘a sensitivity of concentration in the actual moment. You are, by this time, so very close simply to being and doing.’78 In an interview with the art curators and critics Hans-­‐Ulrich Obrist and Paula Orrell, Abramović explains her conception of presence in performance art: I think it is incredibly important that the nature of performance is about the present, the here and now. It doesn’t mean that it excludes the past or future. It’s just that when the performance is happening in a particular time and space, the present should be the only thing we relate to at that moment. You actually have to block the reflections of the past and future and be aware of that moment of now. You can only have a full dialogue with the performance if you’re aware of now – otherwise you’re not completely there. The question is how you can be with your mind and your body in the same place when this moment happens.

You can very easily sit and look at the performance with your body, but your mind might be in Honolulu. The idea is for the performer to create a charismatic space, a kind of electricity in the piece that actually you can’t escape. You can’t reflect on your past, you can’t project your future. That moment now is the only

72

DVD 1:10:00 “Marina Abramović on Performance Art” (exh. cat.), p. 211 74 Heathfield: “Alive”, in Live Art, p. 10 75 Biesenbach: “In the Presence of the Artist”, in Anelli: op. cit., p. 9 76 Reason: Documentation.., p. 10 77 Heathfield: “Alive”, in Live Art, p.10 78 Ibid., p. 101 73

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moment you live when the performance happens. But the performer has the same problem. The performer can be physically in front of you performing, but his mind can be somewhere else. That’s the importance of long durational time. This allows you to get into the time of the present, because over a long period of time your body’s exhausted and you really have to be present to deal with the pain.79 In The Artist is Present, presence is not only an inevitable temporality –essential to live performance, it is also a ‘mode’ of that moment, and something that demands attention: A present-­‐tenseness and a present-­‐ mindedness. According to Biesenbach it is because of the ephemeral nature of the performance (regardless that it implied a ‘long durational’ ephemerality with a 716,5 hour pull over the ‘now’) ‘that the work command[ed] such presence and exceptional engagement.’ 80 The basic concept of an ‘energy dialogue’ in The Artist is Present can be understood with this attentive temporality: ‘being present’-­‐ a shared presence, carried out in mutual agreement of bonding and exchanging ‘energies’. These relational circumstances and their serious institutional setting (MoMA), made the performance performative, in J.L. Austin’s sense: Even though no words were uttered, people felt that the performance changed some relations and constituted some new relations that profoundly changed them. According to US art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto, it is also this characteristic of performance art that can almost seem religious.81

Why performances cannot be hung on walls Before moving from the basic concept of the performance on to the basic concept of the artist, I will pose some last remarks about performance art. Performance art is a live art. It happens, it takes place. This is why performance art is dependent on documentation. US art historian Martha Buskirk writes about different contingent objects of contemporary art and says: ‘Earth art and body art (with or without an audience) do not really have much existence as art without media transcription and distribution.’82 Performance art belongs to a spectrum of contingent art that, however diverse, share the common feature that can be formulated in the question: where is the art, the object, the form? Earth art will eventually wither away as nature takes its toll on it, and body art will disappear when the performer leaves and the performance ends. Public spaced art events, such as flash mobs, or socially engaged community art projects -­‐‘social works’-­‐, or 1990s ‘relational aesthetics’, are also examples of the spectrum of genres that best be

79

Paula Orrell: op. cit., p. 63 Biesenbach: “In the Presence of the Artist”, in Anelli: op. cit., p. 9 81 Danto: “Danger and Disturbation”(exh. cat.), p.34 82 Martha Buskirk: The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (MIT press, Cambridge Mass & London 2003), quoting John Perreault, p. 235 80

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characterized by their contingency or criticized by their lack of graspable form.83 In Danto’s words: ‘Performances themselves cannot be hung on walls.’84 Unlike painting and sculpture which stay put and can be returned to, and unlike the novel that ‘can be put away, taken up, reread’ performances occur under spatio-­‐temporal specific conditions. 85 Most often, performance art is intrinsically linked to the artist’s bodily presence, and in this regard the label ‘body art’ does not only refer to the performance art scene of the 1970s and artists’ flagellating practices. It also points to a general characteristic of performance art, namely that the (contingent) object is the artist’s own bodily presence, and that this bodily presence is the art. This makes performance as ‘body art’ an exception to the art norm: ‘As a general rule, artists are not present in the works they make.’86 In performance art the artist is present and the artistic medium is inseparably linked to that subjective bodily presence. This gives performance art a strong sense of immediacy and proximity to the artist ‘creator’. The question here does not only need to address how a performance can be (re)presented ‘when she whose performance it is, is no longer present,’87 but also how she whose performance it is, is represented in relation to her art. Since performance art involves the bodily presence of the artist, the artist subject becomes a significant aspect and part of the contingent object of her art. As ‘body art’, performance is always connected to the artistic self as an ‘integral component’ of what Amelia Jones calls the body-­‐as-­‐subject or the ‘body/self’: ‘I see body art as a complex extension of portraiture in general’.88 The artist subject is part of the package, and, as much as her art, in need of performance. Performance art is intrinsically linked to their authors and their iconic presence.89 Indeed this aspect of presence seems to be at stake in The Artist is Present, and it is a key, I will argue, in understanding why the artist is as much in need of documentary performance as her art.

Before I move on to the extension of portraiture, l will loop this discussion about performance art where I started out, with Performa Magazine: ‘We live in a time that is essentially awash with performance’90 but perhaps we rather live in a time that is awash with documentation: If the performance era is now so is the documentation era now, because the two are co-­‐existent – in fact, I wonder, which comes first. It is

83

Shannon Jackson: Social Works: performing art, supporting publics (Routledge, NY, 2011); Claire Bishop: “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, in October, vol. 110, Fall 2004 84

Danto: “Danger and Disturbation” (exh. cat.), p. 29; idem: ‘Whatever it was it was not something you hung on the wall’ (DVD 11:00) 85

Auslander: Liveness, p. 3 Danto: “Danger and Disturbation”(exh. cat.), p. 30 87 Loc. cit..

88 Amelia Jones: Body Art: performing the subject (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 8, 13 89 Spector: “Seven Easy Pieces”(exh. cat.), p. 38 90 Bree Richard: “Doing, Being, Performing”, in Performa Magazine, January 2013 http://performamagazine.tumblr.com/post/41227948102/doing-­‐being-­‐performing 86

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certainly through the HBO Hollywood film production that Abramović and her ‘presence-­‐piece’, as one might call it, first caught my attention, and compelled me to take a closer look at what kind of artist figure was present.

Marina Abramović – Portrait of the artist Abramović is ‘a self-­‐portraying “live artist”’ Biesenbach writes in the catalogue; ‘everything around Marina has this slight tendency to be like a legend or an urban myth.’ 91 Abramović is not only performing art. She is also performing herself. ‘Her larger genius is exactly the mythology she creates for herself. She knows how to project it, how to communicate it to the world’ her biographer, James Westcott, says.92 Outside the framework of natural science and Western logic, Abramović has found a place to think and work differently. When she recounts her memories of playing Russian roulette with a loaded gun at age fourteen, escaping Belgrade at the age of twenty-­‐nine, living with Ulay in a van, knitting sweaters for a living, spending many months with Aborigines in the Australian desert, walking the Great Wall of China, or working with Tibetan monks, her world seems extreme and imaginative93 These are Biesenbach’s introductory words which resonate throughout the catalogue’s articles about Abramović and set the line of a recurrent thematic imagery of her. The catalogue tells a story of martyrdom and heroism that recalls the retrospective feature of the exhibition as it almost seems to portray her in a post-­‐human fashion, as if she was a mythological figure of the past. In Biesenbach’s article about “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. The Artist Was Present. The Artist Will Be Present”-­‐ he gives a portrait of a seemingly omnipotent present Marina Abramović who has been quoted and memed in novels, in fashion, in embroidery, in virtual worlds, photography and artistic reenactments. ‘Like urban myths, these stories of her life circulate widely in many media, multiplying and evolving in their retelling.’94 The catalogue is, of course, one such medium, and its contributions are significant co-­‐producers of the myth and mythology of Abramović: The artist is in direct conversation with ‘art-­‐historical traditions informed by myth, religion, and ideology’ Biesenbach asserts,95 and certainly the catalogue puts her in that conversation. It provides a bibliographical characterization of Abramović with emphasis on how she evokes her Serbian and

91

DVD extra material: Interview with Klaus Biesenbach DVD extra material: Interview with James Westcott 93 Biesenbach: “Marina Abramović..” (exh. cat.), p. 12 94 Loc. cit..

95 Biesenbach: “Marina Abramović..” (exh. cat.), pp. 14, 17-­‐18 92

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Communist background and heritage in her art through ideological and religious iconography.96 What Stokic calls the ‘burden’ of Abramović’s heritage, 97 or what RoseLee Goldberg calls the ‘irritated scars’ of growing up in Yugoslavia,98 becomes an important aspect of how to understand Abramović’s performance works and her authentic artistic subjectivity, her ‘performative selfhood’.99 ‘I come from this Yugoslav land the Balkans, the bridge between Eastern and Western world’ Abramović says.100 It is ‘this Yugoslav land’ with terrible wars and Communism, and the burden from it that is read into Abramović’s artistic practice.

Biesenbach speculates: ‘The Serbian Orthodox heritage of self-­‐denial and suffering must also have helped to shape Abramović’s narratives and conceptual traditions of self-­‐flagellation, pain, and endurance.’101 As a metaphor of liminality ‘the bridge between East and West reveals the Balkan experience of in-­‐betweenness that is omnipotent in Abramović’s work’ according to Stokic102 (and in performance art in general according to Fischer-­‐Lichte and Phelan). When this liminal experience is also part of Abramović’s background it seems to have an authentic effect on her art. The story that is being told in the catalogue about Abramović is one of cause and effect. Abramović makes the art that she does because she comes from where she does and carries with her the ‘burden’ of her Balkan heritage.

Stokic’s contribution to the catalogue opens with a full-­‐page color photograph of Abramović suspended in midair with snakes in each hand – ‘an image of the artist as a snake goddess alluding to the female possessor of energy’103. The photograph is from a 2005 retrospective exhibition, The Bibliography Remix, and according to Stokic it sums up core features of Abramović’s artistic subjectivity and dedication to the calling of the artist ‘that stems from the Balkan ethos she grew up with; myth, heroism, sacrifice, risk, and discipline.’ It is the element of the artist’s own body being represented that becomes ‘the ultimate site for the construction of her subjectivity’ and the most intriguing part of her art, Stokic writes.104 In The Artist is Present, Abramović created a ‘charismatic space’, or at least a space that, in the words of Sean Kelly, ‘has allowed art throughout the ages to transform the museum into virtual places of worship.’105 Arthur C. Danto writes in his catalogued article that ‘presence almost belongs to the discourse of icons.

96

E.g. in Lips of Thomas where the Communist star is incised onto her stomach According to Stokić the ‘burden’ translates into authentic artistic existence. “The Art of Marina Abramović” (exh. cat.), p. 25 98 "Here and Now", in Chrissie Iles (ed.): Marina Abromovic: objects performance video sound (exh. cat.) (published by Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1995), p. 12 99 Stokić : “The Art of Marina Abramović”; Biesenbach: “Marina Abramović..” (exh. cat.), pp. 25, 17 100 Stokić : “The Art of Marina Abramović” (exh. cat.), p. 23 101 Biesenbach: “Marina Abramović” (exh. cat.), p. 16 102 Stokić : “The Art of Marina Abramović” (exh. cat.), p. 23 103 Loc. cit..

104 Ibid., pp. 23, 24 105 DVD extra features: Audience reactions 97

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Theoreticians in Eastern Europe used to speak of the mythical presence of the saint in the icon’, and although, he comments, artists are not icons ‘the question of their presence in a performance has at least a resonance in the metaphysics of art.’106 In visual documentary material of the performance, these para-­‐ religious undertones are evident in spite of, or maybe because of, the ascetic scenery of the performance.

Abramović sits in a white, a blue and a red dress (one dress for each of the performance’s three months) that covers her all the way up her neck and down in a train on the floor – very unlike her earlier almost always naked performances. Abramović is not a snake goddess but she certainly looks somewhat religious, or ‘regal’ as Biesenbach suggests, ‘like a priest’107

If the performative turn brought about new self-­‐understandings of artists away from ‘god-­‐like creators’ as Fischer-­‐Lichte suggests,108 it seems like Abramović has taken a different ‘performative turn’ since. In the late eighteenth century, the cult of the artist as genius took its first steps, 109 and even though that figure has been contested along the way (perhaps and likely even by Abramović herself in the 1960s and 70s), in The Artist is Present Abramović seems to reincarnate that figure with her ‘presence’. She might have been well-­‐known before, but the show (and the film) made her a super star. Tove Vestmø, Danish performer and writer, bluntly says: ‘Abramović has created a major reality show, where the reality star can be experienced close up, in real life.’110 Judging from the film, indeed this seems to have been the case: We see how the performance increased in popularity over the course of its three months; people spending nights outside MoMA (‘It is a great rumor that people wait all night’, Biesenbach says111), in lines, waiving their ‘visitor number x’-­‐tickets to the camera, ‘we were here first’, crying after their encounter with Abramović, MoMA setting a time limit on the tickets: 15 minutes with Abramović… 112 Abramović appears to have attained the status of rock-­‐star, the performance selling tickets like it was a popular live concert, her presence; the religion and herself, the icon (or idol) of worship.113

106

Danto: “Danger and Disturbation”(exh. cat.), pp. 29-­‐30 DVD extra features: Designing dresses 108 Transformative Power, p. 164 109 Ibid., p. 161 110 interview with Abramović in Peripeti, no. 18, p. 128 111 DVD extra features: Interview with Klaus Biesenbach 107

112

DVD extra features: Audience reactions In “An Artist’s Life Manifesto” Abramović, however, maintains: ‘An artist should not make themselves into an idol – An artist should not make themselves into an idol – An artist should not make themselves into an idol.’ Read aloud in the film (23:00), and posted e.g. on Face Book https://www.facebook.com/notes/marina-­‐Abramović/marina-­‐ Abramović-­‐an-­‐artists-­‐life-­‐manifesto/10150132364601354 113

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The staged and the ‘documentary’ According to Abramović, artistic ideals have changed since the 1970s from male to female, and her self-­‐ image along with them. Back then, she explains, ‘If the woman artist would apply make-­‐up, or put [on] nail polish, she would not have been considered serious enough.’ The ideal was to look more male than female, ‘no make-­‐up, tough’ because if a woman wanted to be considered a serious artist, it was necessary for her to dress like a man and act rough. 114 In 1988 Abramović and Ulay made their last performance together, The Great Wall Walk, where they walked towards each other for 90 days on the Great Wall of China until they finally met (their meeting was a symbolic farewell to 12 years (1976-­‐1988) of collaboration and love115). Abramović explains that after their walk, she decided to stage her life: ‘Until I walked the Great Wall in 1988, I wanted the public to see me only in one way, very radical, no make-­‐up, tough, spiritual. And after I went through that experience, and all the pain of separation, there was a moment when I decided to stage my life, and to have fun with it. I just said, Why not; let’s have it all.’116 This decision and way of phrasing it, ‘to stage’ her life, is an aspect that is evident in her documentation. Writing about a ‘staged’ photograph on the cover of the catalogue, Marina Abramović: Artist Body (1998). Phelan says: Abramović has been positioning herself for this kind of fame for some time now… .The cover of her extraordinary catalog, Marina Abramović: Artist Body, features a photograph of her romping on a beach holding a beach ball aloft. This same image adorns the espresso cups designed by Illy and sometimes now available on eBay. Posing more in the mode of a movie star than an ordeal artist… . Abramović’s fame and its ties to the market…sit uneasily with some of the premises of her art117 The point, here, is not to understand what Abramović’s idea about a shift from male to female is about (for although nail polish belongs, mostly, to the female sex, so does the nude female body in her 1970s performance art. In fact, is the nude female body not, in art historical terms, the ultimate site of gendered objectification?118) The point is that her decision to stage her life shows a self-­‐conscious choice about performing herself in a certain way which is reflected in a shift in the visual imagery of her from what Philip

114

Quoted in Stokić: “The Art of Marina Abramović” (exh. cat.), p. 25 The Great Wall Walk aka The Lovers: Originally Abramović and Ulay should have met to marry on the wall, but it took them 8 years to get visas, and meanwhile they split up – ‘an epic conclusion’ DVD 46:00 116 Quoted in Phelan: “On Seeing..”, Live Art p. 20 117 Phelan: “Witnessing shadows”, p. 569 118 In Abramovic’s 1975 –video performance Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful she repeatedly and manically brushes her hair until her scalp starts to bleed while repeating that ‘art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful’, according to Stokić , alluding to commodification and demands for female beauty in art and contemporary culture. Stokić: “The Art of Marina Abramović” (exh. cat.), p. 25. In Imponderabilia (1977), Abramovic and Ulay formed a naked gendered doorway to let the visitor decide which gender to confront when squeezing through.

115

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Auslander calls referential or ‘documentary’ to ‘theatrical’ or ‘staged’ for the camera. Like the cover of Artist Body, the front cover of the exhibition catalogue The Artist is Present, illustrates this (see title page) with a staged photograph of Abramović outdoors, in nature, holding a bunch of wooden sticks and starring into the horizon behind the camera’s lens – or ‘looking into the future’ as she puts it herself119 (what she sees, the rest of us mortals can only guess about). This staged photograph does not refer to a prior performance event presented to an audience; the document is the only place where the performance occurs and the viewer of the photograph is the only spectator.120 On the back cover of The Artist is Present-­‐catalogue there is a typical ‘documentary’ photograph (printed in red) of Abramović from her aforementioned 1974 performance Rhythm 0, in which she objectified herself (and staged herself as the passive female object of male desire?). In this photo, we see her with an empty, less heroic, stare with her bosom exposed. The photograph is one out of a bunch from the performance event, where, Phelan describes, ‘Abramović’s eyes are filled with tears and her face conveys a melancholy, to which part of her audience seems indifferent… .The photographer sees Abramović clearly, but those touching her seem blind.’121 These photographs on the hardcover of the exhibition catalogue, The Artist is Present, in black and white, and red (Abramović’s recurrent signature colors) shows two different images of the artist in two different documentation categories. Together these pictures from a portrait, and a way of portraying Abramović that is recurrent in the documentary material around the MoMA show: It is not only the juxtaposition of her performance art and her ‘subjective self’ as two converging sides of the same story, or a depiction of two sides of herself which she introduces in one of the film’s opening scenes, shot on a mountain viewpoint at sunset: ‘You are looking at many Marinas… one very vulnerable… another one very strong with spiritual wisdom. This is actually my favorite one. ‘122 It is also the juxtaposition of the staged and the documentary genre. The staged cover photographs from The Artist is Present and Artist Body, do not refer to or document neither a ‘wood-­‐collecting’ performance nor a ‘beach-­‐ball’ performance and would hardly be mistaken as such. Still, they appear in the context of documentation and intermingle with documentary materials, as a way of documenting and staging the artist as much as her art. As such they seem to suggest that a clear distinction between the categories is shaky, and that the artist figure is as much a part of the documentation as her performance art. This aspect is evident in the film as it portrays the ‘multiple Marinas’ – a performance artist with dangerous endeavors into the performance art scene of

119

Abramović voiceover on CD to exh. cat.., recalling the romanticist image of the artist figure, intuitively connected to both nature and endowed with transcendent hindsight. Like a Casper David Friedrich, Abramović is looking at something only she can see.

120 I. e. Auslander’s ‘theatrical’ category. “Performativity”, p. 2 121 Phelan: “On Seeing”, in Live Art, p. 19; Frazer Ward: “Abramović. You can stop. You don’t have to do this”, in idem.

No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (Dartmouth College Press, 2012), p. 124 122 DVD 5:50 – 6:23

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the 1960s and 1970s as well as an emotional vulnerable being (looking for the love than she was refused as a child123). Like the catalogue’s front and back cover images the film may be positioned somewhere in-­‐ between the slippery theatrical and the documentary – according to Auslander’s terminological categorization. ‘So what is the film? Is it documentation? Is it something else? We hope that the film is its own work of art’, the producer, Matthew Akers says. 124 In a scene with Abramović in the atrium she says: ‘I imagine it more like a film set’125– which also points at the fact that even though the performance was about pure unmediatized presence, it was also already made for filmatization. As Auslander says, ‘performance is always “at one level raw material for documentation”.’126 Performativity can be and has been applied to many phenomena; linguistics (Austin) and performance art (Fischer-­‐Lichte) for example. In its socio-­‐psychological application, it refers to how the subject performs itself, stages and (re)creates itself.127 As James Westcott says, this is Abramović’s larger genius and Biesenbach; ‘Marina she is never not performing.’ 128 The subject, and the performer, is in need of constant performance and this is, in both cases, where documentation -­‐ along with its performative powers -­‐ enters the scene. Auslander calls it “The Performativity of Performance Documentation”; the feature of documentation that it performs and is performative. Like Fischer-­‐Lichte, Auslander turns to Austin’s theory of How To Do Things With Words and summons that ‘the traditional view sees performance documentation as constatives that describe performance and state that they occurred.’ However what I will return to and apply is his view on documentation as something that ‘does not simply generate image/statements that describe an autonomous performance and state that it occurred: it produces and constitutes a performance ‘as such’129 – and, might I add, the artist figure that performs, as such. In other words; documentation is performative.

123

DVD 1:24:21 Eric Hynes: Interview at Sundance Film Festival: “In the Presence of the Artist: A Conversation with Marina Abramović and Matthew Akers”, Jan 28, 2012 (http://www.sundance.org/festival/article/in-­‐the-­‐presence-­‐of-­‐the-­‐ artist-­‐a-­‐conversation-­‐with-­‐marina-­‐Abramović-­‐and-­‐matt/) 125 DVD 18:47 126 Quoted in Page Benkowski’s article: ”Seeing the Unseen: Reading the Performance Document” (published online: http://pagebenkowski.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/page-­‐benkowski.pdf), p. 7 127 According to e.g. Judith Butler or Erving Goffman. Britta Timm Knudsen: “It’s live. Performativity and role-­‐playing”, in Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev: op. cit., p. 270 128 DVD extra features: Interviews; Biesenbach: ‘Marina seduces everyone she meets… but that the case for me because we went through the process and now we are divorced’(32:00) 124

129

Auslander “Performativity”, pp. 7, 5; Nathan Stith: “The Performative Nature of Filmed Reproductions of Live Performance”, in Theatre Symposium, vol. 19, 2011, published by The University of Alabama Press, p. 82

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Before proceeding to an analysis of the experience of presence in performance documentation, I would like to pose a methodological consideration about documentation. In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance Klemens Gruber, Austrian media theoretician, looks at performance documentation and says: But what do we do with this material? It is almost impossible to analyse the performance without looking at the mediated material, but does this mean that these documents should be looked at as actively as one would examine, say, Schlingensief and his comrades themselves? Whether these documents are in fact passive representations of the event, or – which is more likely – whether they have added and still add to the performance, is indeed challenging to decide upon, because it cuts through the hierarchy of artwork and documentation. One can hardly decide upon such an issue without methodological reflection.130

The performance The Artist is Present is based on co-­‐presence and participation; when the empty chair opposite Abramović is occupied by a sitter and the alleged exchange of energies takes place. Physical co-­‐ presence is the premise of Abramović’s piece specifically and the premise of performance art in general. So before proceeding I find it necessary to pose this question: How can I approach the performance, without having been there in person myself? ‘You had to be there’, Amelia Jones says in her “Presence in Absentia: Experiencing performance as documentation” while pointing out that she was three years old when, for example, Carolee Schneeman performed Meat Joy in 1964. Jones therefore responds to the ‘problematic of a person my age doing work on performances I have not seen in person.’131 Instead she has to study performance through its documentary traces and afterleavings; ‘not having been there, I approach body artworks through their photographic, textual, oral, video, and/or film traces.’132 However, as Matthew Reason points out, we are in fact ‘all persons of our age’ because it is only through documentation ‘that it is possible to know, question or see performance at all.’133 Jones’s point is that performance can be experienced as documentation, as the title of her essay “”Presence” in Absentia” suggests, and that neither the live nor the document provides a privileged access to the performance or the subjective self of the performer. This is, however, precisely what the documentation of The Artist is Present appear to be denying in its extensive documentation of the artistic subjectivity of Abramović and the transformative experience of those who were there. As I will return to, this is also what differentiates The Artist is Present as performance documentation, looking anything but a subtle trace that has been left behind. But for the

130

Gruber: “The staging of writing”, in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, eds. Chapple and Kattenbelt (Rodopi, Amsterdam & NY, 2006), p. 182 131 Jones: ”Presence”, p. 11 132 Ibid., p. 12 133 Reason: Documentation, p. 2

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following I join Jones’ approach in experiencing the performance through its documentation with an analysis of how the exhibition catalogue produces a performative sense of presence.

The experience of presence in performance documentation The first image that appears as one opens the catalogue is a two-­‐fold photograph of what looks like an elementary school-­‐class photograph. It is old, black and white, and somewhat grainy. A bunch of children are lined in rows, and a kid’s face, wearing a devil’s hood, is circled in the right hand corner. Next to the circle a white text informs: ‘Marina Abramović with her friends, Belgrade, 1950.’ Next to the text is a description by Abramović (emphasized with quotation marks): “For the first costume party I was ever invited to, my mother dressed me as a devil.”134 The question here is not why the devil costume is at all an issue, but rather: Why open a MoMA exhibition catalogue with a childhood photograph from a private photo booklet and a text that tells us about a costume party?! The answer, I will suggest, has to do with the immediate recognizability that this image evokes, recalling the specific photographic category of the photo book. Abramović’s description and circulation of what we see and her personal memory of the event, is typical for this genre (like the physicality of the analogue book-­‐medium, the catalogue, in which the photograph appears). The photo is recognizable not because the children are familiar but because the photographic category is familiar. Abramović shares something with us, the viewers, from her past, and creates, in the same breath, an instant sense of confidentiality to the viewer: In its indexical pointing, the photo book implies presence and intimacy.135 Opening an exhibition catalogue with a visual and written recollection of a childhood memory creates a sense of intimacy and presence that seems to be Abramović’s all-­‐encompassing goal. The photo not only creates a charismatic connection of potential cross-­‐photographic memory with the reader (oh, I also remember my first costume party), it furthermore creates a charismatic sense of familiarity as it invites us to have a relation to the book we are about to read similar to the one we have when we read a personal photo album. This is a relation that makes the viewer emotionally engaged in what s/he sees. The photo book’s ‘photographic presence’ is one that ‘implies an interactive processuality with the beholder [and] an active participation from the viewer.’136 The catalogue not only documents the MoMA retrospective and performance, it simultaneously does something in its attempt to make the reading an experience.

134

The Artist is Present (exh. cat.), p. 3 Mette Sandbye: “Performing the everyday”, in Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev: op. cit., p. 141 136 Ibid., p. 118 135

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Complementary to that, and to the catalogue, is a CD with Abramović’s voice in audio-­‐tracks that guides the reader through the documentary material of the catalogue. On this CD Abramović describes her performance: This is a new piece. It is the same title as the retrospective. It is a continuation in a certain way of Nightsea Crossing. Except on the other side of the table, on the chair, is not sitting Ulay but any person from the public. The piece is happening in the atrium. The atrium is an enormous space and a kind of a central space in The Museum of Modern Art. I wanted to have a very large square of light… . And in the middle of it, there is a tiny little table with two small chairs. So to create this intimate space, almost as a contradiction to such a huge public area. I want to be present. 600 hours, which equals the entire opening time of the museum.

And the other chair is for any person in the public who is willing to come, and sit, and look at me, and have a kind of non-­‐verbal contact. The person can choose to be there for one minute, three minutes, twenty minutes, ten hours, five days. There is no limit of time…137 The CD is part of the material of documentation, a supplement to the catalogue that makes it an audio-­‐ visual experience. It gives a voice to the visuals as Abramović guides and instructs one through the book with personal narratives, and, like the opening photograph, it creates an intimate and charismatic space around the reading experience. The atmosphere is one of confidentiality: ‘Until now, I didn’t tell that part to anybody’ she confesses at one point in her vocal story-­‐telling.138 The catalogue is an abundant archive of Abramović’s performance career, a long visual list of etceteras of performances that reflect the retrospective part of the exhibition. When her voice applies personal stories to the photographs -­‐ as if one was looking into her private photo book; what she experienced during that particular performance, how she felt, what happened just before and the like -­‐ it makes the photographic documentation relatable and implies a play, a performative play, between the book and the viewer.139As a personal imprint and attachment to the photographs, the unfamiliar documents become familiar through story-­‐telling which aids the possibility of relating to and remembering the different documents. Through her performative reading she does something in words – to recall Austin’s notion of ‘performatives’. She makes the documentation occur in time and adds to it an element of liveness and presence, offering the viewer to experience the documentation much like a performance. Even though her voice is recorded and not live, it is an index of her presence – even if it is a ‘presence in absentia’, to paraphrase Amelia Jones.

This changes the experience of the mute documentation and transforms the reader’s experience.

137

The Artist is Present (exh. cat.) CD track 45, pp. 204-­‐209 CD track 34 139 Sandbye: “Performing the everyday”, pp. 118-­‐119, 121, 127 138

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‘Sit back, get comfortable, take a glass of clear water with you’, her voice says on track 1. For the rest of the approximately 1 hour audio-­‐visually guided tour in the catalogue she asks us to turn the pages, and as we hear her do the same we get the feeling that she is looking in the catalogue with us – also sometimes sipping to her glass of water. Even though Abramović is bodily absent she creates an atmosphere of presence, giving the impression that the listener is in her co-­‐presence. ‘Performance is all about being present and creating luminous state of being’,140 she says with her grainy and unpolished recorded voice.

The grain of her voice In an essay “The Grain of the Voice” (1972), Roland Barthes describes two kinds of musical vocals; the ‘phenosong’ and the ‘genosong’ based on French literary critic Julia Kristeva’s theoretical pairing of ‘phenotext’ and ‘genotext’.141 With the grain of the voice I continue analytically with the audio documentation and the sense of presence that is produced by Abramović’s recorded voice. From text (Kristeva) to song (Barthes) I move to ‘voice’ with the extension ‘phenovoice’ and ‘genovoice’.

Appropriating Kristeva’s linguistics, the phenosong for Barthes is a way of singing that adheres to the all the standard rules: the technique of a given style is mastered with perfection, and the formal delivery is flawless.142 The phenosong resembles ‘all the features which belong to the structure of the language being sung.’143 For Barthes, though, this kind of singing lacks something in all its perfection; the material and corporeal aspect of the voice as it sings; what he calls ‘the grain of the voice’. The genosong has that: Rather than being flawless and with perfect diction, the genosong resembles the materiality and physicality in the singing voice – its ‘grain’ (the word is known to describe wooden textures). The grain of the voice is ‘the body of the voice’; you hear the tongue, the breath, the mouth and the throat, the teeth as they snatch together -­‐ it is ‘the body in the voice as it sings.’144 In the genosong you can hear ‘the timbre of the voice’; it is expressive and signifier is foregrounding signified, or at least it is placed somewhere in-­‐between signifier and signified, between linguistic and nonlinguistic, as a liminal aesthetics of the reception of the voice.145 The grain of the voice, in other words, has to do with its corporeality: its expression rather than its signification, its materiality dominating their semiotic attributes. In this way, the concept of the grain of the

140

CD track 38 which he applies to the difference in voices of the singers Dietrich Fischer-­‐Dieskau and Charles Panzera. “The Grain of The Voice” (1972), in Image, Music, Text selected essays and trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977) 142 Ibid.. (referring to Fischer-­‐Dieskau); Botticelli (opera) or N Sync (pop) by further exemplification 143 ‘skønsang’ in Danish 144 Loc. cit..

145 Loc. cit..

141

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voice is very much in line with Fischer-­‐Lichte’s emphasis on corporeality, or ‘Körperlichkeit’, in performance art. To recall her point of view: A performance cannot be ‘understood’ with semiotics and condensed gathering of signs that fit into signifier-­‐signified relationships – the relationship between signifier and signified is in-­‐between and ‘oscillatory’.146 This perspective makes Fischer-­‐Lichte’s liminal aesthetics of the reception of performance art, and Barthes’ liminal aesthetics of the reception of the voice, compatible.

Abramović is not very good in English and speaks with poor grammatical correctness with a distinct Serbian accent. (Biesenbach says: ‘Raised in Belgrade with Serbio-­‐Croatian as her mother tongue but with a French-­‐ speaking nanny, learning Russian in school, and going on to live in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, Abramović commands language skills as unique as they are hybrid’147).Her voice is distinguishable and identifiable as an index of her self. Her vocal ‘grain’ is deep, somewhat rusty and rasp -­‐ as if all her life experience, and self-­‐inflicted performance pain, has taken its toll on it. Her tone emits a sense of nostalgia when she speaks about the memories she has of the photographs in the book – a nostalgia that is always luring around the corner of retrospective formats. ‘I remember this…,’ she says with small laughs and non-­‐ signifying sounds. The grain of her genovoice creates an atmosphere of authenticity; it is ‘pure and raw’ – like she says performance art is.

‘There is nothing more personal than a voice… .It is as if your voice were as private and vulnerable as your defenseless naked body.’ It almost seems to reveal ‘the inner secrets of our vocal parts’ UK historian and philosopher Jonathan Ree says in I See A Voice. 148 The voice is indicative of presence – ‘intrinsically connected with the existence of a self-­‐identical soul, spirit, or inward subjectivity.’149 Ree speaks about the live voice and expresses a point of view that has been contested (for example by Jones); namely that proximity and co-­‐presence implies privileged access to the ‘inner secrets’ of the subjective self, in this case, of the artist. Abramović’s voice is recorded but it still produces a sense of intimacy in its oscillation between its expressive grain and its archival signification – that is, the secrets and memories that she shares and confesses -­‐ and ‘didn’t tell’ before.

The performative presence and intimate effect of Abramović’s voice, due to its ‘graininess’ as a genovoice, points at how a sense of presence and ‘Körperlichkeit’ is reproduced through documentation. When Philip Auslander suggests rethinking liveness in terms of how liveness is experienced rather than how it fits into a fixated ontological formula, he therefore seems to have a point, my analysis of the audio documentation

146

Fischer-­‐Lichte: Ästhetik des Performativen, p. 29 Biesenbach: “Marina Abramović..” (exh. cat.), p. 13 148 Jonathan Ree: I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses (Flamingo, London, 1999), p. 1 149 Ibid., p. 6 147

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considered. ‘It may be that we are now at a point in history at which liveness can no longer be defined in terms of either the presence of living human beings before each other or physical and temporal relationships. The emerging definition of liveness may be built primarily around the audience’s affective experience’, he says.150 In an essay on internet romance, turned in to Auslander by a former student of his, the student offers the following wonderful confession: ‘[I] have a constant low-­‐grade fear of the telephone, and I often call people with the intention of getting their answering machines. There is something about the live voice that I have come to find unnervingly organic, as volatile as live television.’151 Auslander’s point is that ‘our current concepts of proximity and intimacy derive from television’, and that in our media saturated age, we derive our understanding of ‘live’ though mediatizations.152 In other words, for something to appear live and present to us, it does not have to be physically co-­‐present. Even a voice that is transmitted through the telephone can be ‘unnervingly organic’ and ‘volatile’. At the performance, The Artist is Present, Abramović was there but her performance was silent. On the CD Abramović is absent but her voice is present. Still, and even in its recorded version, the grain of Abramović’s voice creates a sense of intimacy and presence that seems unnervingly organic to linger in the ear. Therefore, in relation to presence and viewer activation, ‘we have to allow that performance art does not only happen when and where it happens’ in the words of performance art theoretician Frazer Ward. 153 Both the live and the recorded can stimulate and simulate presence and both are ‘performative’ more than ‘constative’: ‘A performative utterance, whether it be in word, image (gesture) and/or sound, is an act that constitutes what it presents.’154

The catalogue and its performative writing constructs Abramović with performative words and audio-­‐visual documentation, and does something to the viewer’s own hermeneutical processing and experience of the documentation, just like the viewer does something in return. If the experience of performance art involves a dialogue, so does the experience of documentation –both are intersubjective.155 The prerequisite relation in performance art is the relationship between performer and audience, but the documentation relation is prerequisite for ‘all persons of our age’ who experience the performance through its documentation. In fact, Auslander says, ‘the crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance but the one between the document and its audience. Perhaps the authenticity of the performance document resides in its relationship to its beholder rather than to an ostensibly originary event: perhaps its

150

Auslander: “Hermeneutics”, p. 94 Auslander: Liveness, p. 60 (former student: Meghan Daum) 152 Ibid., p. 159 153 Frazer Ward: No Innocent Bystanders, p. 14 154 Chiel Kattenbelt: “Theatre as the art of the performer and the stage of intermediality”, in idem Intermediality, p. 30 155 Jones: ”Presence”, p. 12 151

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authority is phenomenological rather than ontological.’156 Auslander’s point is that ‘it is not the initial presence of an audience that makes an event a work of performance art: it is its framing as performance through the performative act of documenting it as such’, which means that it is the documentation audience that the performance assumes responsibility for.157 Before proceeding to part 2 in this survey, on presence in performance documentation, I would like to pose some comments that reach back to where I started with Fischer-­‐Lichte.

Hermeneutics of performance (and) documentation

What is the difference between experiencing a performance and experiencing documentation? Surely the reception modes are profoundly different. Although Auslander argues that documentation is performative, he does not mean that it is cathartic and transformational, as Fischer-­‐Lichte does when she applies the term to performance art. Auslander’s point is that documentation is performative insofar as it does something which has a constitutive effect on the referent. For this constitutive effect to be effective it takes a viewer, a documentation audience. Fischer-­‐Lichte argues that performance events involve active ‘acting-­‐ subjects’ and ‘co-­‐creators’ that experience rather than understand, while static works of art involve passive contemplation. In this scheme the reception of documentation might seem to apply to the latter, since it involves signification and processes of interpretation. What I would like to call attention to is that according to hermeneutics and semiotics, one can also be a ‘co-­‐subject’, a ‘co-­‐creator’, or a ‘co-­‐author’ and ‘co-­‐ producer’ – the same terms that Fischer-­‐Lichte characterizes the active audience in a performance with.

Accordingly, a text or a work of art is not a fixed entity with only one true reading and understanding that can be falsely or correctly uncovered like Austin’s ‘contatives’. Meaning is mobilized by each reading and reader who is actively, not passively, engaged as a contributing ‘acting subject’. 158 According to Fischer-­‐ Lichte, this kind of intersubjective hermeneutical activity between a subject and a document does not apply to the aesthetical experience of a performance event or is, at least, delimited to a peripheral, or secondary

156

Auslander: “Performativity”, p. 9 Ibid., p. 7 158 Wolfgang Iser, e.g. (1974) “Die Appelstruktur der Texte – Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa”, in Rainer Warning. (1975) Rezeptionsästhetik. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Danish translation (1996) “Tekstens appelstruktur”, in Michel Olsen and Gunver Kelstrup (eds.): Værk og læser (Holstebro: Borgens Forlag); Roland Barthes, e.g. : ”The Death of the Author” (1967), in Image, Music, Text (op. cit.), Hans-­‐Gerog Gadamer, e.g.: nd Truth and Method, 2 rev. edn., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (Continuum, NY, 1989); Umberto Eco, e.g.: “The Role of the Reader” (1979), in Michel Olsen and Gunver Kelstrup: op. cit..; or idem: “The Poetics of the Open Work”, in The Open Work (Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1989) 157

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position. The performance is first and foremost experienced corporeally with the ‘Phenomenalen Leib’ of a ‘pre-­‐cognito’ (cf. Fischer-­‐Lichte) who is a co-­‐creator but not, primarily, or at least not until later, involved in the activity of interpretation.159 The experience of a performance, she says, is liminal and implies a temporary suspension of cognition. In addition to these general terminological similarities between the reception of performance art, described by Fisher-­‐Lichte, and reception theories, described by literary theoreticians, the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere addresses the reception mode of spectatorship, and argues, in The Emancipated Spectator (2007), that it is exactly the inescapable hermeneutic capability of any spectator, at a theatrical performance, that makes the spectator always-­‐already actively involved in interpreting the event. In this interpretative engagement lies what he calls the emancipatory potential – the potential that Fischer-­‐Lichte calls transformational, of the experience of a performance. In contrast to Fischer-­‐Lichte’s notion of how and when a performance is and isn’t transformative (visibly observatory from the behavior of the audience), Ranciere argues that any spectatorship always involves activity and transformational potential, and asks: Is there something more interactive in live performance/theater

than between individuals who watch the same show on TV at the same time? I think that this “something” is nothing more than the presupposition that the theater is communitarian in and of itself. That presupposition of what “theater” means always runs ahead of the performance, and predates its actual effects. But in a theater, or in front of a performance, just as in a museum, at a school, or on the street there are only individuals, weaving their own way through the forest of words, acts, and things that stand in front of them or around them.160

In contrast to Fischer-­‐Lichte who presupposes that everyone co-­‐present in a performance situation are actively involved because they experience rather than understand, Ranciere’s presupposes that everyone in a performance situation are actively involved because they interpret and understand. Active and passive is a matter of perspective: For Fischer-­‐Lichte passivity is nowhere present in the liminality of the entire event due to the domination of corporeality, and for Ranciere passivity is nowhere present due to the domination of semioticity because of ‘the power to translate in their [the spectators’] own way what they are looking at’ and this is the key to activity, and to the emancipation of the spectator:161 interpreting the world is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it. The spectator is active, just like the student or the scientist: He observes, he selects, he compares, he interprets. He connects what he

159

Fischer-­‐Lichte: Transformative Power, p. 17 Jacques Ranciere: “The Emancipated Spectator”, in Artforum, vol. 45.7, March 2007, p. 7.

161 Loc. cit..

160

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observes with many other things he has observed on other stages, in other kinds of spaces. He makes his poem with the poem that is performed in front of him.162 In relation to documentation this performative ‘weaving’ and re-­‐creative reading is also at stake. The act of documenting is performative, but so is the act of reading, viewing and imaginatively processing the documentation. In other words, our own performative recreation of performance through documentation, in our ‘own particular situation’ makes us into active interpreters of the event.163 Perhaps Fischer-­‐Lichte’s revised Watzlawick phrase, ‘you cannot not react’, can be supplemented by ‘ you cannot not process or try to process what you react to?’ Perhaps semioticity and corporeality can co-­‐exist in performance, and perhaps the one’s domination over the other could be individually mapped out more than generalized.

According to Amelia Jones ‘there is no possibility of an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product, including body art […] . While the live situation may enable the phenomenal relations of flesh-­‐to-­‐ flesh engagement, the documentary exchange (viewer/reader <-­‐> document) is equally intersubjective.’164(‘Having direct physical contact with an artist who pulls a scroll from her vagina canal does not ensure “knowledge” of her (as individual and/ or artist and/or work of art) any more than does looking at a film or picture of this activity, or looking at a painting that was made as the result of such action’ she says165). Experience and understanding are therefore perhaps not matters of before and after, active and passive, performance and documentation.

Perhaps Fischer-­‐Lichte’s more or less mutually exclusive reception modes might better be understood with Jones who says that ‘it is hard to identify the patterns of history while one is embedded in them. We ‘invent’ these patterns, pulling the past together into a manageable picture, retrospectively […], and this goes for those events I also experienced ‘in the flesh’; I view these, through the memory screen, and they become documentary in their own right’.166 This is to say that while the interpretive dialogue or poem, that Ranciere speaks about, begins with the experience of a performance, it continues to develop afterwards through the intersubjective imaginative play with traces of either/or memories and documents. 167 In other words the dialogue with performance documentation is performative and inter-­‐active rather than referential and passive. Auslander writes: ‘From the hermeneutic perspective, the truth of performance documentation does not reside in its indexical relationship to the event or in the verifiable accuracy with

162

Ibid., p. 6 Gadamer quoted in Auslander: “Hermeneutics”, pp. 95-­‐95 164 Jones: ”Presence”, p. 12; see also idem & Andrew Stephenson (eds.): Performing the Body/Performing the Text (Routledge, 1999), p. 1 165 Jones: ”Presence”, pp. 33-­‐34, talking about the illusion of the body as ‘an unmediated repository of selfhood’ (p.

34) 166 Jones: ”Presence”, p. 12 167 Ree, Jonathan: op. cit., p. 367 163

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which it depicts that event.’168 It is the result of the event that it is, to read or to view documentation; ‘understanding proves to be an event’169 more than a question of retrieving a prior truth about what actually happened.

2

Disappearance and documentation When Fischer-­‐Lichte tries to grasp ‘the specific aestheticity of performance since the 1960s’ it is an aestheticity that does not account for documentation –performance is exclusively an ‘Ästhetik der Präsenz’.170 According to Peggy Phelan this aesthetic of presence implies that performance should only have one life; in the present. It should not live on in documentation/archivation beyond its own limited duration. It is around this prominent ephemeral feature of performance that characterizes it as live art, regardless if it is short or long in duration, that the ontology of performance art has been determined. This ontology has been formulated and cited most distinctively by Phelan: Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being… becomes itself through disappearance.171 This ontological promise implies a positive valuation of the ephemerality of performance as a here-­‐and-­‐ now occurrence and traceless disappearance: Performance is that moment of now that characterizes how it passes as an audience watches it. Much like soap bubbles. 172 It ‘can have no independent life outside the

168

Loc. cit..

Gadamer quoted in Auslander: “Hermeneutics”, p. 95 170 Fischer-­‐Lichte: Ästhetik des Performativen, pp. 49, 59; idem: Transformative Power, p. 163 171 Phelan: Unmarked, p. 146 172 Reason: “Archive or memory? The Detritus of Live Performance”, in NTQ vol. 19.3, Geb. 2003, Cambridge University Press, p. 85 172 Ibid., 82 169

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event itself and no undistorted existence beyond the state of being that is the present moment of its creation.’ 173 According to US theatre and performance theoretician Rebecca Schneider, the definition of performance as something that is essentially transient has been a corner stone of Performance Studies since the 1960s174 -­‐ and according to both Philip Auslander and Matthew Reason, a corner stone of cultural dimensions when you think about the value that ‘live’ has today.175 Performance happens, disappears, and its only valid afterlife is in the memories of those who were co-­‐present as it took place. Why? I have wondered but Reason has an answer; ‘if you value live performance because of its liveness, then memory must be a more appropriate site for any trace or afterlife than the frozen and unchanging archive.’ This is because memory ‘is in this transformative, multiple, mobile nature closer to the essential identity of the live performance.’176 In other words, both memories and performances are remote and transformative. The archivist Terry Cook, talks about a ‘memory-­‐evidence tension’, -­‐ ‘a kind of fractured schizophrenia’177 about which ‘archive’ performance should be remembered in; the human memory or the institutional archive -­‐ ‘the repository of ‘that which will not go away’.’178 Countering and complementing this disappearance invested line of discourse is another thread that also runs through the live arts: The positive valuation of documentation as a desire to save performance from disappearance and oblivion. The fact that performance is live motivates the drive to documentation and archivation, Reason says.179 According to Andreas Huyssen’s research into memory culture, this drive towards documentation is only a symptom of a greater cultural obsession, ‘an archivist’s fantasy gone mad’.180 Through media of reproduction (photography, film, recordings – and reperformance, as I will add) ‘pasts impinge upon the present.’181 This second perspective articulates, Reason says, how ‘performance must be ‘saved’ or ‘rescued’; it is part of our ‘heritage’, our ‘legacy’ and must not be ‘lost’. As a moral endeavor, the documentation of performance needs no justification beyond these very aspirations.’182

173

Reason: Documentation, pp. 9, 11 Reason: Documentation, p. 9 175 Auslander: “Digital Liveness: A Historico-­‐Philosophical Perspective”, in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol.

34 no. 3, Sept. 2012 176 Reason: “Archive or Memory?”, p. 86 177 Terry Cook: “Memory, evidence, identity and community: Four shifting archival paradigms”, in Arch Sci vol. 13. 95 – 120, 2013, p. 95 178 Carolyn Steedman: Dust (Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 196 179 Reason: Documentation, p. 21 180 Andreas Huyssen: Present pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press, 2003), p.

15 181 Ibid., p. 1-­‐2: The past used to remain in the past as the ‘pastness of past’. Now the past is part of the present, transferable and transitory (p. 7).

182 Reason: Documentation, p. 36 174

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The first thread, the articulation of performance in terms of disappearance, argues that performance is in and of the present: ‘Performance is unrepeatable and it is fascinating because it is unique and ephemeral.’183 The second point of view is motivated by the first, and, as Reason notices, by all those people who has to speak about performance and live arts; historians, scholars, journalists, archivists, Amelia Jones, myself. ‘They all want something of it. Something material, some tangible trace’ that will allow them to access the past. These two perspectives form a twin discourse: ‘In the discourses surrounding live performance, ideas of disappearance and transience mark one set of recurring imagery, but they are accompanied by a mirroring, complementary, discourse of documentation’, Reason says.184 As Adrian Heathfield puts it, the live art and its ‘Eventhood allows spectators to live for a while in the paradox of two impossible desires: to be present in the moment, to savour it, and to save the moment, to still and preserve its power long after it has gone.’185 The photograph is one such medium of reproduction that demonstrates how the past impinge upon the present and it is the most common medium when it comes to performance documentation. ‘Performance art is generally experienced live, but what documents it and ensures its enduring life is, above all, photography.’186 The relations between forgetting and remembering, absence and presence, disappearance and documentation are also inherent in and addressed by the photographic medium because it functions as an indexical marker of a presence that is no longer there: of presence in absence. The photograph is a tangible trace of a performance, but a trace that points at what is no longer there. As such it is a protagonistic accomplice in increasing the valuation of the live. In the following, I will see what exists in the space between disappearance and documentation and argue that documentation not only halts performance from disappearing but that it makes disappearance visible -­‐that the double discourse seems to re-­‐double within the picture plane of the documentary photograph. Performance disappears but it also endures, and in fact it disappears through documentation. Reason says: ‘The transience of performance[…] is visible not only in the manner by which it disappears, but also in how it endures – in how it is repeated, re-­‐presented, re-­‐performed.’187

183

McAuley quoted in Reason: “Archive or Memory?”, p. 83.

Loc. cit..

185 Heathfield: “Alive”, in Live Art, p. 9 (original emphasis) 186 MoMA: “Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960” (http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1100) 187 Reason: Documentation, p. 20 184

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Photographic documentation the spectator’s primary action with respect to performance art is not the witnessing of the live event but the imaginative reconstitution of performances from images, whether held in memory (by those who attended the live event) or available through documentation.188 Documentation of performance art does not have a glamorous history. Abramović says: ‘The first performances in the early seventies were not even documented because most of us believed that any documentation – by video or photos – could not be a substitute for the real experience: seeing it live. Later on, though, our attitude changed. We felt the need to leave some trace of the events for a larger audience.’189 From the 1960s and 1970s, this ‘critical early period’190 in performance documentation, poor black and white photographs are the most common. Few photographs were taken of performances and many times only one was selected to document an entire performance. According to Phelan ‘performance artists of the seventies were working against the accumulative logic of capital’ and therefore attempted ‘to create art that had no object, no remaining trace to be sold, collected, or otherwise “arrested”.’ 191 Paradoxically, many of these singular photographs have later attained the status of canonical ‘original copies’ and authentic prints.192 Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) is an illustrative examples of early performance photography, where, from looking at the photographic document, we have little or no idea whether Burden is shooting or being shot (or indeed that someone ends up shot at all) due to the pore quality of the image. Artist Page Benkowski comments: ‘There is something deeply visually unsatisfying about Burden’s documentary photograph. Its blurriness suggests destabilization – movement – within the image.’193 It imposes, in the art historian Kathy

188

Auslander: “Hermeneutics”, p. 94 Marina Abramović: “Reenactment”, in Seven Easy Pieces (op. cit.), p. 9 190 Ibid., p. 11 191 Phelan: Unmarked, p. 148 192 Black and white photos ‘have acquired the status of originals’. Sven Lütticken: “Progressive Striptease”, in Amelia Jones & Adrian Heathfield (eds.): Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Intellect, Bristol UK, 2012), p. 191. In the documentary film Abramović’s gallerist Sean Kelly explains that ‘what we did was to select a photograph from each performance and then we made those into additions and we sold them and we made them in very small additions for 2000 -­‐ 5000 dollars each -­‐ this was 20 years ago, and now they are very sought off and sold for 25-­‐50.000 dollars each as original documentation’ (DVD 36:20). In contrast to Phelan (who says that artist were trying not to produce any documentation (Unmarked, pp. 146-­‐148 )), Auslander and Jones suggest that many artists were well aware of performance’s ‘dependence on documentation to attain symbolic status within the realm of culture’, and interested in preserving and documenting their work. Auslander: “Performativity”, p. 3; Jones: “Presence”, p. 13 193 Page Benkowski: op. cit., p. 15 189

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O’Dell’s words, ‘a willful blindness on viewers’194 and is so bad that one would usually toss it away. Yet, it has become iconic of his performance, and of early photographic performance documentation: Philip Auslander’s ‘documentary’ category. Many of Abramović’s early performance photographs also belong to this category (such as Freeing the Body 1975; Lips of Thomas 1975; Relation in Space 1976). The category has formed an aesthetic that seems authentically ‘documentary’, and, I will point out, in agreement with the positive valuation of disappearance: Phelan’s point that performance ‘plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present – and disappears.’195 A photograph is always a trace, an index, a re-­‐ presentation of presence, but in the documentary category addressed here, with Shoot, it also appears to be an aestheticity of documentation: The documentary photograph looks like a trace, it almost connotes absence, and its image appears to disappear.196 In blurry documentary photographs, the medium’s indexial quality seems foregrounded. ‘The image created in this way is of the ghostly traces of departed objects; they look like footprints in sand, or marks that have been left in dust’.197 The artist Janine Antoni has pointed out that there is ‘an allure’ to this kind of blurry documentary category. Speaking about how she came to know about works like Vito Acconci’s Following piece (1969) or Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975) she says: ‘I realized at a certain point that I know those works mostly through oral tradition, and through some blurry black-­‐and-­‐white photographs that don’t give me much information. I think I love this work so much because I’ve somehow elaborated on those stories and images in my imagination.’198 In regard to Abramović’s early documentary performance photographs her biographer, James Westcott says that ‘it was exactly the graininess of the photographs and the crappyness of the videos that were so incredibly compelling and attractive.’199 When the photographs do not reveal much about what has happened around the split second that the photograph was taken, the viewer has to use his or her imagination quite vigorously: Performance art history in photography is one that ‘flickers’ – O’Dell says, ‘one that causes the historian to shuttle back and forth between that which is seen and that

194

Quoted in Benkowski: Ibid., p. 8

195

Phelan: Unmarked, p. 148 Heathfield: “Alive”, in Live Art, p. 7 197 Rosalind Krauss: “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America”, in October, vol. 3, spring 1997, (pp. 68-­‐81), p. 75: The power of the photograph is ‘as an index and its meaning resides in those modes of identification which are associated with the Imaginary.’ Like an index finger that points at something, photographic documentation is indexical and referential, it points away from itself towards something else. Mette Sandbye: Mindesmærker: tid, erindring og fortælling i den fotobaserede samtidskunst (ph.d., Department for Arts and Cultural studies, University of Copenhagen, 1999), p. 81 196

198

Quoted in Benkowski: op. cit., p. 8 DVD extra features: Interview with James Westcott.

199

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which has to be imagined.’200 The ‘documentary’ category seems to manifest this ‘flicker’ and point at the reductive translation of photography –that the photograph is a split frozen second in a temporal succession. In artist Page Benkowski’s words, the documentary photograph ‘becomes the signifier of a greater narrative, but a narrative comprising moments not captured through the camera’s lens, and thus a narrative that is in effect lost.’ As a result, performance becomes myth and the photographical document, an index of what is lost. 201 Every photograph, Roland Barthes says, is ‘a certificate of presence’ but it is a presence that is no longer there. It ‘is never metaphoric’ because its emanation shows something ‘That-­‐ has-­‐been’ and ‘is no longer’:202 The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here… . A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.203

As such, the photograph shares its basic premise with performance art: co-­‐presence. Both performance and photographic documentation basically exist through physical presence because in the photograph, ‘something has posed’ and someone ‘has seen the referent… in flesh and blood.’ 204 What the blurry black and whites seem to emphasize is the loss of that presence, the ‘has-­‐been’ of the photographical delay, the irrecallable moment of the performance as a greater but flickering narrative that we can only guess about in our imagination: ‘One can always dream or speculate on this secret account… .But of the secret itself, there can be no archive, by definition. The secret is the very ash of the archive.’205 The photographic document might save performance from oblivion and disappearance but it also, in the same breath, or snap, points at the absence of presence – the moment that is no longer there. In this sense the ‘documentary’ photograph is performative not because it constitutes the performance as such, as Auslander says, but because it constitutes its disappearance as such. Therefore, as much as the performance ‘needs the photograph to confirm its having happened’ 206 it also needs the photograph to confirm its having disappeared. Performance photographs reproduce the ontology of performance:

200

Benkowski: op. cit., p. 15 Ibid., p. 6 202 Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Vintage , London, 2000/1980), trans. Richard Howard, pp. 76-­‐80, 87 (original emphasis).

203 Ibid., pp. 80-­‐81 204 Ibid., pp. 79, 80: Regardless of how ‘fuzzy, distorted, or discolored’ the photograph is, it shares ‘by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction.’ André Bazin quoted in Krauss: op. cit., p. 75 201

205

Jacques Derrida: op. cit., p. 100 Jones: “Presence”, p. 16

206

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‘Performance’s being… becomes itself through disappearance’ with the paradox that disappearance becomes itself through documentation. Or in the words of Rebecca Schneider: ‘performance becomes itself through messy and eruptive reappearance’.207

Writing about old black and white photographs Barthes explains his unease about colored ones because the color, he thinks, looks like a cosmetically applied artifice, ‘a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-­‐and-­‐white photograph.’208 What Barthes alludes to is the idea that black and white photographs appear authentically documentary and true –that photographic documentation is but a record or reminder of a performance that has to do with context, space, and action.209 In archival theory, UK historian Carolyn Steedman has pointed out, the assumption is that the archive provides an authentic access point to historical truth. Steedman’s point is that the archive always entails limitation and fabrication, is constructed and incomplete. The archive ‘emerges in fragments’, she says, and the researcher is always also constructing when finding something in the archive.210This means that the archive and its documents -­‐ just like memories stored in the human psyche, to recall Matthew Reason– also do not contain ‘truth’ but are performative and transformative when (re)visited.211 Auslander and Jones (explicitly in agreement with each other) argue that ‘there is no original gesture toward which the index simply directs us’ and the performance ‘does not exist, qua performance.’212 Both question the ontological priority of the live performance over the documented performance with direct address to Phelan, and argue instead for a mutual supplementary relation between performance and documentation. ‘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’, and neither the live nor the document provide privileged access to the performance or the subjective self of performer.213 Body art shows that the body is in need of contextualization and documentation, Jones says, and ‘the photograph of the body art event or performance could, in fact, be said to expose the body itself as supplementary, as both the visible proof of

207

Quoted in Jessica Santone: “Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation Strategies for Preserving Art’s History”, in LEONARDO, vol. 41, no. 2, p. 151 208 Barthes: Camera Lucida, p. 81 209 ‘There is a sense of mere utility in black-­‐and-­‐white.’ Jon Erickson quoted in Auslander: “Performativity”, p. 2 210 Quoted in Reason: “Archive or Memory?”, pp. 84-­‐85: ‘you cannot be shocked at its exclusions’ 211 The archive illuminates ‘that enunciative field’ that it is itself part of. Foucault quoted in Mogens Jacobsen & Morten Søndergaard: Re-­‐action: the digital archive experience: renegotiating the competences of the archive and the st (art) museum in the 21 century (Museum of Contemporary Art, Aalborg University Press, 2009), p. 25 212 ‘Performance is always already a space of representation.’ Auslander: ”Hermeneutics”, p. 93 213 Jones: “Presence”, p. 16 or as Falk Heinrich says: ‘My thesis is quite simple: bodies cannot speak for themselves’, in: ”Kroppens tavshed: Refleksion over performativitet”, in Peripeti, no. 6, Aarhus University Press, 2006, p. 48 (own translation)

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the self and its endless deferral.’214 As a contingent object of contemporary art, body art, like earth works, relies on documentation.

In the exhibition catalogue The Artist is Present, the visual documentation of Abramović’s performances is chronologically arranged with The Artist is Present at the very end: It documents her early solo performances, 1968-­‐1975, her collaborative work with Ulay, 1976-­‐1988, and her latest solo works, 1995-­‐ 2010. From the catalogues total of 224 pages, visual documentation of her retrospective performance pieces takes more than half the amount of available book space. Compared to the other catalogue, Artist Body -­‐ that also documents in retrospective (1969-­‐1998) many of the same performances, but with a slightly bigger photographic selection -­‐ it is evident that the best and least blurry documents have been selected. Black and white and colored photographs mingle throughout the catalogue, but with a slight qualitative betterment from 1968 to 2010, that excludes the most ‘flickering’ and includes the more colored and staged. This latter characteristic shows an increase in focus, from 1968-­‐2010, on the importance of producing documentation proper, and provides a visual history of Abramović’s performance career that gives the impression of a long temporal stretch from past to present. However, the logical chronological development is not completely thorough, and it is worth noticing how photographs of Abramović performing The Artist is Present appear in black and white instead of in color. These photographs seem to ‘quote’ the ‘documentary’ tradition of performance documentation, and to refer inter-­‐visually to the some of the flickering black and whites of Abramović’s early performances. The choice shows an awareness of black and whites to connote authenticity, to appear documentary (already a future past), and to produce myth and mythologies around the artist.

The photographs show Abramović in a classical portrait manner with the atrium as backdrop. A series of six photos of Abramović next to six different sitters look like the same photo of her that multiplies, but at closer look, small insignificant ticks around her eyes perhaps differ (or is it an illusion -­‐my own vision that flickers -­‐created by the juxtaposition of different sitters?) to imply that the photographs represent a small collection of eye-­‐contacts, taken in-­‐the-­‐action. The backdrop is devoid of any spectators which indicates that the photo(s?) might have been in staged for the camera occasion – or that the audience, that framed the performance in a 360-­‐degree square, has been photo-­‐shopped away. As a result, the simple black and white portraits of Abramović appear to be more concerned about communicating the concept of the performance than to be purely documentary. They recall the simplicity of the performance (‘It is just a kind

214

Jones: Body Art, pp. 34-­‐35

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of simple energy dialogue’215) and its minimalistic setting. Moreover, the photographs are not the least blurry, or flickering, but ultra-­‐sharp and ‘flawless’, which somewhat increases their theatrical effect and artificializes their monochrome black and white representation (which, in this case, becomes the applied ‘color’ or cosmetic coating).

From Abramović’s early solo performance pieces, 1968-­‐1975, ‘authentic’ black and whites of the flickering ‘documentary’ kind, function as visual supplements to the story that is told in the catalogue’s written articles; also performing a narrative around Abramović and visualizing, literally, the ‘irritated scars’ of her flagellating performances. These physical scars, indexical traces of different performances, have also been captured in close-­‐up by the photographer Marco Anelli. They depict, like photographs of earth works, the site-­‐specific scars on the landscape of the body, and visualize a history of flagellating performance art, or what Jones calls the ‘body-­‐as-­‐trace’216 As visual ‘certificates’, the documentary photographs of Abramović’s early performances, that often depict her naked tortured body, are auratic contributors to the greater narrative about the artist figure. At once, Benkowski asserts, ‘something that emphasizes the lost immediacy of the past performance (the unseen) and… reinvents it (the seen).’217 Arguably they belong to the category that more or less self-­‐consciously seem to be staging themselves as traces that tricker our imagination of what they leave out. This is indeed their allure: not what they do show but what they don’t show – the gabs or the ‘Lehrstellen’ that they leave up to viewers (such as Janine Antoni) to fill out. As we shall see, Anelli’s portraits of the sitters have another effect, and are characterized in terms that altogether deny the inevitability of any gabs, or Lehrstellen. I will get to that after commenting on the role of performance audiences in documentation.

Audience relations If documentation of performance art does not have a glamorous history, neither does documentation of performance audiences. Performance art is about co-­‐presence, but mostly it is about the co-­‐presence of performer/s and audience. Abramović suggests that ‘At its [performance art’s] core there are typically four

215

CD track 45; exh. cat., pp. 204-­‐209.

Jones: Body Art, p. 31 217 Benkowski: op. cit., p. 13 216

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variables: time, space, the performer’s body, and a relationship between performer and audience.’218 Co-­‐ presence of performer and audience is the all-­‐exclusive relationship in performance art and the premise that has to be there in order to discuss if ‘you had to be there’, as Jones does. Pointed out also by Jones, performance art is, however, not generally experienced live, because it holds true only for the limited audience that was there, but, for most and herself, through documentation.

In the documentary film, The Artist is Present, audience responses are thoroughly documented. As verbal documentation such ‘witness’ accounts contribute to constitute how the performance is thought of; ‘discussion too is a substantial part of repeating the original, through rumors and word-­‐of-­‐mouth.’219 The performance increases in value when it is verbalized with value. This could be called the performativity of langue, and is what discourse analysis is also about.220 However, the tradition of visual performance documentation has been to document the performer and the action, and not the audience and even less their emotional reaction. In Chris Burden’s Shoot we have no idea that a few friends witnessed the performance from looking at the photograph. This case is, again, illustrative of audience absence as a common denominator in documentation from the 1960s and 70s. ‘It is very rare that the audience is documented at anything like the same level of detail as the art action’, Auslander says.221 Thomas Rosenthal Nielsen, Ph.d. in theater and performance, suggests that the co-­‐presence between audience members witnessing a performance is a significant but overlooked part of the feedback of co-­‐presence in live performances. One might wonder what happened to the relationship of co-­‐presence between audience members and how they affect each other’s reactions to a performance, he says. 222 Auslander argues that the relation between documentation audience and document (more than document and performance) is an important overlooked relationship. And within that relation I wonder if the relation between the documentation audience and the performance audience – as they encounter each other in the document –

218

‘Relationships between performer/audience and time; Relationships between performer and audience; Relationships between performer and him or herself; Relationships between performer/audience and environment; Relationships between performer/audience and art medium; Relationships between performer/audience and the body.’ Abramović: “WHAT IS PERFORMANCE ART?” Marina Abramović Institute: http://www.marinaAbramovićinstitute.org/mai 219

Santone: op. cit., p. 150 Matthew Reason: “Theatre Audiences and Perceptions of ‘Liveness’ in Performance”, in Particip@tions, vol. 1, issue 2, May 2004 221 Auslander: “Performativity”, p. 6. Witnessing Abramović’s reperformance (2005) of Gina Pane’s The Conditioning (1973), at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, Sandra Umathum says: ‘It is an incredible image… Nonetheless, the camera focuses on the performer alone, rigorously ignoring the audience. What a waste, I think.’ “Beyond Documentation, or The Adventure of a Shared Time and Place. Experiences of a Viewer”, in Seven Easy Pieces (op. cit.), p. 52 222 In Thomas Rosendal Nielsen: “The theatre of emancipation and the theatrical attribution of guilt” (under publication, Aarhus University Press, 2014) 220

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is not also worth considering. If an audience appear, alongside the performers and the action in the document, will it not affect our relation to the documentation by offering, to the documentation audience, a point of identification and focalization as an alternative to the camera’s perspective?

In an interview with Abramović, art curator and critic Hans-­‐Ulrich Obrist refers to her past performances and their audiences: ‘More people saw them than has been reported. What I always find amazing about the performances in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were fifty people or seventy people there, but at least a thousand people claim to have seen it; the audience increases with time.’223 His comment points to the value of the live and of being part of that. For this reason it seems odd that documenting the audience has had a minor role in performance art’s documentary tradition. According to Auslander, anthropological and sociological traditions of observing and documenting performances have a different tradition of paying close attention to the participators, but in the art-­‐context, ‘The purpose of most performance art documentation 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.’224 In that sense, Auslander argues, performance art documentation ‘participates in the fine art tradition of the reproduction of works rather than the ethnographic tradition’.225 Taking into consideration that the definitive characteristic of performance art is, argued by Fischer-­‐Lichte, its co-­‐presence and the temporary community it constitutes, it is striking that the audience has often been excluded as a focus of documentation. Even though performance art has been inspired and informed by ethnographical traditions and works on rituals in that field, their documentary traditions have apparently not been co-­‐opted.226

Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović In contrast to obscure black and white performance photographs stands Marco Anelli’s photographical portraits of every single sitter from the performance, published in Portraits in the Presence of Marina

223

Marina Abramović, Thomas McEvilley, Bojana Pejic, Toni Stoos et. al. (contributors): Marina Abramović: Artist Body: Performances 1969-­‐1998 (Edizioni Charta, Milano & NY, 1998), p. 42.

224 Auslander: “Performativity”, p. 6 225 Loc. cit..

226 Much documentation ‘fails to capture the… interaction between audience and performer(s) that is crucial to, if not definitive of, contemporary performance art.’ Santone: op. cit., p. 151

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Abramović (2012).227 Anelli shot each and single sitter with a telephoto lens from a distance, in the crowd, in order ‘not to disturb his subject’228 (and the feedback loop of unmediatized and undistorted presence).

He was present in the atrium for the same duration as Abramović to capture all the 1545 faces, and to do so ‘only in the precise moment when the tear drop reached the cheek and caught the light.’229 The result is an unusual body of performance documentation, in Chrissie Iles’s words; ‘an unprecedented relationship between two polar opposite genres’ -­‐ photographic portraiture and performance documentation.230 The appeal of the photographic portraits is not what they don’t show, but what they do show, with immense detail and clearness.

The portraits give a frontal and closely cropped framing of the face engaged in the mutual gaze, with an angle that is slightly askew from the subject . Unlike early performance photography where elements on the photograph are often more or less blurred, which indicates movement of the camera or the action, the portraits are completely clear and still. Audience members in the background have been blurred but it indicates that the photographs are all taken in situ. This blurring eliminates any movement and external stimuli from the entire visual field. Devoid of ‘distracting’ elements or background ‘noise’, each portrait is foregrounded and fixated in a way that seem to imitate the static stoical seated position of the sitter and, Iles and Biesenbach both emphasize, ‘the sitter’s visual experience of sitting with Abramović, in which the process of prolonged gazing rendered everything except her face blur.’ They both argue that the portraits communicate the experience of the performance; they ‘are filled with a brightness and presence that conveys, with light, the prelocating energy that characterized the performance’s unique setting.’ 231 What the photographic portraits, with this analogy, seem to convey is the photographic quality of the entire performance and the mute dimension of the transfixated mutual gazes. As Abramović says: ‘Photography is about stillness. The work, The Artist is Present is about stillness and immobility.’232 (This stillness of the performance and of Abramović’s sitting is evident in the film not only because it makes an effort to show how physically demanding her sitting is, but also simply because the film is a temporal medium – we see the sittings and the stillness of sitting in time). According to Iles, the portraits mediate between ‘internal emotion and external expression’233 because the face, the gaze and the photograph can all be regarded as

227

Including well-­‐known persons like Isabelle Hupert, Alan Rickman, James Franco, musicians like Bjork, Antony, Rufus, Martha Wainwright, Patti Smith and Michael Stipe, and artists like Ulay, Joan Jonas, Matthew Barney, Valie Export, Dara Friedman and Andreas Serrano (DVD; Iles: “Marina Abramović and the Public” (exh. cat.), p. 20) 228

Abramović: “The Artist is Present, Photographer is Present”, in Anelli: op. cit., p. 7 Loc. cit..

230 Chrissie Iles: “Marco Anelli: Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović”, in ibid., p. 14 231 Iles: “Marco Anelli..”, in Anelli: op. cit., pp. 18, 19 232 Abramović: “The Artist is Present Photographer is Present”, in Anelli: op. cit., p. 7 233 Iles: “Marco Anelli..”, in Anelli: op. cit., pp. 17, 21 229

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recording surfaces. ‘If consciousness could be described as a sensitive recording surface on which experience becomes imprinted… . Anelli’s camera… captured the traces of those imprints at the moment that they re-­‐surfaced, creating another form of imprint’, she writes. 234 Performance documentation might share some performative dimensions with the live performance to which it refers, but so might the performance, at least in this case it seems, share with its documentation some of the features of the photographic medium in which the documentation occur.

In contrast to early ‘documentary’ photographs that reveal little about the performance and even less about the audience, Anelli’s portraits create an illusion of access to the sitting subject and thereby to the experience of the performance -­‐ bridging ‘the gap between presence and absence on which performance is predicated’ Iles writes.235 The portraits are described in terms of transparency that deny the act of mediation or in terms that emphasize how they are shot and cropped to better communicate the cathartic effect of the performance on the sitters. ’Anelli’s portraits evokes photography’s nineteenth century role as a record keeper’, Iles says,236 which is to say that the photographs merely ‘record’ the effect of the event, and authentically and truthfully communicate the experience. This point of view on documentation expresses the more general ideology of photography, namely the illusion of ‘trivial realism’; exact correspondence between signifier and signified, or what Barthes has called a ‘message without a code’.237 Where the ‘documentary’ genre claims authenticity by pointing to its own lack of polish and finish, the portraits (described by Iles et al.) claim authenticity because of their lack of blurriness and distortions: They are supposedly ‘uncoded’ in their correspondence to the signified person that they depict. If blurry black and writes call attention to themselves as traces, the portraits give the illusion of granting undistorted access to the sitter-­‐subject which allows the ‘inner emotional experience to be registered.’238 Iles also compares Anelli’s camera to the role of the psychoanalyst and writes: ‘The resulting experiences captured

by Anelli’s lens could be compared to the transference that occurs in psychoanalysis, in which hidden secrets and unconscious emotional states are encountered to rise to the surface and become expressed.’239 In other words, that the virtual remote, the psychic archive, from which psychoanalysis can encounter memories, is captured and visualized in the portraits and that the portraits therefore achieve an undistorted reproduction of the experience of the transformative power of the performance. This illusion of access is the illusion of the photographic medium, and of documentation in general, as a record keeper

234

Iles: “Marco Anelli..”, in Anelli: op. cit., pp. 14, 17 Ibid., pp. 20-­‐21 236 Ibid., p. 19 237 Auslander: “Hermeneutics”, p. 93 238 Iles: “Marco Anelli..”, in Anelli: op. cit., p. 13 239 Ibid., p. 17 235

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that is capable of delivering an unmediated truth: That we might actually see through the medium and, Iles suggests, further on through the subject into its inner emotional inscription because the sitters were caught, as mentioned, in that very moment where a secret and remote emotional state corresponded with a tear drop on the chin.

According to Walter Benjamin, who has written extensively about photography, and other media of technical reproduction, ’photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things.’240 By fixating the fleeting and ephemeral in split seconds – not only the performance but the emotional reactions of the sitters in the performance – Anelli’s portraits seem to answer to what Benjamin has detected long ago; a desire to bring the smallest things closer. ‘Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret’ he writes.241 Like Iles, Benjamin turns to the analogy of psychoanalysis when he says: ‘It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.’242 Before rounding off this section with the gaze and the documentary film, l will call attention to a few more of Benjamin’s points (and return to him again later). For Benjamin, who otherwise famously argues that the aura of a thing is what withers in the age of reproduction, ‘For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.’ 243 Benjamin refers to early photographic portraiture (he gives examples from the 1840s and 50s) and writing in 1931, this shows not only that he also found an allure in older photographs (old is always relative) like Janine Antoni did with photographs from the performance art scene of the 1960s and 70s. It also shows that there is something about the human face and gaze in portraits that seems to emanate aura – that ‘strange weave of space and time, the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be’244 which seems to penetrate the medium, in spite of reproduction.245 For Benjamin, the long exposure time of early photography explains this strange weave of space and time, and why this particular photographic genre is auratic: In that early period of photography the subject must have been seated so still for so long as to almost grow into the picture -­‐ ‘the very creases in people’s clothes

240

Benjamin: “Little History” (op. cit.), p. 512 Ibid., p. 510

241 242

Ibid., p. 512 The photographic portrait is, for Benjamin, the only media whose aura is not destroyed with mechanical reproduced. It retains the cult value, ‘the cult of remembrance’ as ‘a last refuge for the cult value of the picture.’

Artwork essay, p. 226 244 Benjamin: “Little History”, p. 518 245 Ibid., p. 517 243

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have an air of permanence’. Subject and technique were congruent, he suggests,246 in much the same way as the long durational sitting in The Artist is Present and its photographic documentation can be characterized in terms of congruence.

The mutual movie gaze In the documentary film, both Abramović and the sitters are documented and filmed in close-­‐ups during the performance. The aesthetic applied here is comparable to Anelli’s portraits: a sense of proximity and transparency is working to reproduce the experience of the mutual gaze. The obvious difference is that the tear drops are sat in motion. Abramović’s gaze is filmed with the recurrent close-­‐up shot of her eyes as they ‘connect’. They are closed to begin with (‘recharging energy’) before they slowly open somewhat red, somewhat wet, to begin a new sitting session – but this time with you; the movie sitter: Abramović looks directly into the camera with a look that appears to looks back at us looking at it. The close-­‐up is not staged but recorded and zoomed in on while she performed in the atrium, engaged in a mutual gaze with a sitter.

The camera frames her upper body, her face or her eyes in the act, looking at the people sitting on the chair opposite her at the performance –a chair we now occupy and is focalized to identify with, as if the performance happens in the present tense of the movie-­‐moment in front of our very eyes. Focalization is a term introduced by the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal to describe ‘the relationship between the “vision,” the agent that sees, and that which is seen.’ 247 It describes our relation to the narration, ‘the point from which the elements are viewed.’ This point can lie ‘within a character (i.e. it can be an element of the fabula) or outside it, but when the focalizer coincides with a character, Bal suggests, that character will have an advantage over the other characters.’ 248 Watching the film, that character is the sitter and as viewers, we watch with that character’s eyes and are inclined to accept the vision presented from there.

The ‘charismatic space’ seems to be extended into the space of the living room, or cinema, beyond the screen where ‘I’ am sitting. In spite of both spatial and temporal distance an effect of proximity and presence is created. It is, of course, a faux sense of intimacy because unlike the actual sitters, the movie sitter is a voyeur that is disposed to look without being looked back at. Nonetheless an illusion of access and intimacy is created to the performance audience and to Abramović herself. ‘Can a reproductive media create the charismatic space?’ the producer Matthew Akers is asked in an interview with BFI, to which he

246

Ibid., pp. 514, 517, and talks about ‘an unruly desire’ to know the photographed person (p. 510). ‘We were abashed by the distinctness of these human images, and believed that the little tiny faces in the picture could see us’ (p. 512) 247

Mieke Bal: Looking in: the art of viewing (Routledge, London & NY, 2001), pp. 43, 46 Ibid., p. 47

248

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answers: ‘It can heighten the experience by using film tools to give you something similar. People come up to me and say “I felt like I was there”, and that’s our goal.’249 Akers also says: ‘Unless you are there you don’t experience the transformative power of it so it has to be something else’,250 and the effect of focalizing the movie-­‐sitter is part of that ‘something else’. It gives us the imaginary chance to sit where the sitters sat; to coincide with that character, and to view the performance (as an element of the film’s fabula) from there.

In terms of aesthetics, the documentary film is as polished as Anelli’s portraits. It far from resembles typical grainy video footage of early performance works, but presents to the viewer not only a seamless collage of scenes that navigates in and out of the MoMA show and earlier documentary materials (photos and videos) of Abramovic’s performances, it also structures these materials chronologically in a proceeding story line with a sense of journey to unfold. Like Anelli’s position ‘as a removed observer of his subject’251 the movie camera is a fly on the wall (remarkably invisible compared to the effort paid in documenting how well other parties are documenting the show to indicate its publicity). The documentary does not reproduce the ontology of performance-­‐as-­‐disappearance by pointing to itself as a trace, applying ‘documentary’ aesthetics. It chooses instead another strategy but with the same valuation of the ‘live’, namely to present the film-­‐sitter with an experience that comes as close to the real thing as possible so that one might say ‘I felt like I was there’. In that way the film demonstrates the documentary drive to reproduce and save performance from disappearing and the scopic desire towards proximity and intimacy (which we currently, Auslander argues, ‘derive from television’252). The effect, described by media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, is an impression of access and absorption without interruptions from the mediating source.253 The logic of immediacy, as they call it, is one that strives to foster a sense of presence in a ‘ruptureless’ field of vision in order to satisfy the desire to ‘get closer’ to the real or in this case to the ‘live’ of what is represented. However, the trompe-­‐l’oeil of immediacy is doomed to fail (a total denial of whatever mediation at stake is impossible) and where it fails a contrary logic succeeds, one ‘in which the subject becomes fascinated with the act of mediation itself’254 – enough to look at instead of through the medium.255 This second logic is at stake in the documentary when the viewer is confronted with the representation of documentation of documentation: Photos and video clips of earlier performance pieces

249

DVD extra features: Interview Loc. cit..

251 Iles: “Marco Anelli..”, in Anelli: op. cit., p. 15 252 Quoted in Martin Barker: “Crash, theatre audiences, and the idea of ‘liveness’”, in STP, vol. 23 (1) 21-­‐39, Intellect, 2003, p. 37 253 Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin: Remediation (Cambridge: MIT press, 2002) 254 Ibid., p. 340 255 Ibid., pp. 321, 322, 325 250

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that intermingle with new ones, Pix II’s and other news-­‐media’s rapports, posters, bill boards, adds in Time’s Square, Art News magazines covers and so on and so forth that all pop up on the screen in juxtaposition throughout the film. These ‘layerings’ seem to visualize the desire to document and to re-­‐ create a sense of the authentic experience from multiple documentary fragments. Both logics ‘are opposite manifestations of the same desire’ Bolter and Grusin say256-­‐ the desire to approach the real, and the real ‘defined in terms of the viewer’s experience[…] that which evokes an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response.’257

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Reperformance in documentation In the performance The Artist is Present, Abramović was embodying one of the most important traits of performance art through her presence in flesh and blood that the rest of the exhibition documented in retrospective media of her earlier performance art; presence. The entire show consisted of these two parts: the live performance and the retrospective part that each referenced and contextualized each other. The retrospective consisted of ‘remnant and relics of Abramović’s history in performance’258 – mostly video and photographs, but also living bodies, ‘reperformances’. Reperformance is, defined by US art historian and critic, Claire Bishop, the act of hiring others to ‘undertake the job of being present and performing at a particular time and a particular place on behalf of the artist, and following his/her instructions.’259 In the following I will look at reperformance in documentation and reperformers as documentation. This will allow me to approach the specificity of Abramović’s iconic presence.

A team of 36 (casted out of 500 applicants260) reperformed five of Abramović’s well-­‐known performances; Imponderabilia (1977) where she and Ulay formed a naked doorway in the main entrance of the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, forcing visitors to squeeze through; Relation in Time (1977) where they sat 16 hours back to back with their hair braided together; Point of Contact (1980) where they stood and pointed at each other; Luminosity (1997) where Abramović hung naked on a gallery wall and Nude with

256

Bolter & Grusin: op. cit., p. 330 Loc. cit..

258 Danto: “Danger and Disturbation”(exh. cat.), pp. 34-­‐35 259 Claire Bishop calls it ‘delegating performance’; outsouring actions. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, London & NY, 2012), p. 219 260 Symposium: “The Legacy of Performance” (loc. cit.)

257

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Skeleton (2002-­‐5) in which Abramović lay naked on the floor with a skeleton on top. Documentation of these all appear in the catalogue in multiple sharp-­‐colored photographs next to one singular ‘original’, more or less blurry black and white photograph of the reperformed piece –the original photograph.

Although each cluster consists of the same chorographical pose, the photographs appear with different reperformers doing the action, because the team of thirty-­‐six reperformers worked in shifts. This element detaches the performance from the specific body of the performer. The reperformers appear interchangeable, and as viewers we are not looking at any particular ‘author-­‐body’, but at illustrations of Abramović’s original performances –or rather, at illustrations of original documentation. Because the composition of the singular original document is mimicked in the photographs of the reperformances it seems like documentation has modeled. This juxtaposition moves the discourse of relation between performance and documentation into the realm of documentation: The relation between original documentation and reperformed documentation. In positive terms, the images seem to answer to a ‘slippery question’ put forth by Auslander, of ‘whether performance recreations based on documentation actually recreate the underlying performances or perform the documentation.’261 As such, the reperformed photographs confirm that documentation is the final product in which a performance ‘will be circulated and with which it will inevitably become identified’, perhaps even replaced by -­‐ at least if you ask O’Dell: ‘performance art is the virtual equivalent of its representations’ she says.262 Auslander similarly argues that the original performance never is definitive and that ‘the documentary image turns into the historical truth of the original event’.263 The photographs of the reperformances from The Artist is Present show the performative dimension of documentation as they perform the original documentation.

It may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity… 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.264 Abramović’s reperformce-­‐series of Seven Easy Pieces (2005) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY – where she reperformed seven of the ‘most ‘difficult’ performances from the 1970s’, by Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, VALIE EXPORT, Joseph Beuys, and herself -­‐Lips of Thomas, is another illustrative case. This project was premised on 1970s performance art history’s flickering photographs and scarce

261

Auslander: “Performativity”, p. 2; Spector: “Seven Easy Pieces” (exh. cat.), p. 39 Quoted in Auslander: “Hermeneutics”, p. 94 note 10. (The artist, Hayley Newman’s fake performance series, Connotations, is an illustrative case of this. See e.g. Camilla Jalving: “Inventing reality. On truth and lies in the work of Hayley Newman”, in Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev: op. cit., pp. 145-­‐180 263 Auslander: “Hermeneutics”, pp. 93-­‐94 264 Auslander: “Performativity”, p. 9 262

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documentation that ‘does not fully convey the experience of the performance.’265 In a conversation with Abramović, the curator, Nancy Spector explains the difficulties they had to confront in deciding how to reperform, for instance, VALIE EXPORT’s original ‘Action Pants: Genital Panic’ (c. 1969) as part of Seven Easy Pieces – and says ‘we couldn’t even confirm the year it was performed. There have been various years cited for the piece, and very different descriptions about what actually happened – whether there was a gun. For instance, since she posed in a photograph after the fact with a gun… so, in a way, you performed the photograph of the piece’ and disregarded, Spector says, ‘the conventional hierarchy between the lived and the recorded.’266 In this case, it is obvious how the performance archive ‘emerges in fragments’, as mentioned with Steedman, and how documentation is more than a constative and secondary supplement to a prior ‘truth’: A photographic comparative of EXPORT’s original and Abramović’s reperformance of it shows how the photograph has been reperformed.

Reperformance – Acting out documentation According to Abramović: ‘The only real way to document a performance art piece is to re-­‐perform the piece itself.’267 The insertion into the otherwise standard retrospective show of living bodies to reperform pieces from Abramović’s past comes with the mission; ‘to demonstrate that it is possible to preserve performance art, an ephemeral medium, through live re-­‐creations in a museum setting.’268 Her training and education of a younger generation of artists to carry on the legacy of performance art and to reperform her historical pieces, is symptomatic of this mission -­‐ of halting the disappearance of herself and of the ephemeral medium of performance. ‘It is my task to make history straight’ Abramović says in the film, because ’performance has never been a real form of art’269 and in an interview, that she has to ‘take charge of the history of performance’ – to give performance ‘a stable grounding in art history.’ 270 Her Seven Easy Pieces

265

Paula Orrell: op. cit., pp. 7-­‐8, 17 Spector: “Marina Abramović Interviewed by Nancy Spector”, in Seven Easy Pieces, p. 22.

267 Abramović: “Reenactment”, in Seven Easy Pieces, p. 11 (the title Seven Easy Pieces refers to musical scores: e.g.

Easy Pieces by Beethoven, Bartok, Stavinsky… (p. 40)) 268 Holland Cotter: “Performance art Preserved, in the Flesh”, The New York Times, March 11, 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/arts/design/12abromovic.html?_r=0 ), p 2 269 DVD 13:50; 8:50; also described in Orrell: op. cit., p. 17 270 Quoted in Carol Kino: “A Rebel Form Gains Favor. Fights Ensue”, in The New York Times, published March 10, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/arts/design/14performance.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; Abramović: “Reenactment”, in Seven Easy Pieces, p. 11 266

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series contributed to the mission of ‘saving’ the legacy of performance art, by examining the possibility of preserving performance by way of re-­‐doing it, or, as she says, to become a museum herself. 271 In order to demonstrate that performance can be preserved through reperformance, Abramović proposes that performance can be replayed and treated ‘as one would a musical score’.272 In that way it can be preserved and reperformed in museum settings by new generations of performance artists. According to Nancy Spector who ‘approach this point as a curator’ if performances exist as scores, they are easier to collect, curate and borrow by museums. Abramović says: ‘I think there is a huge work to be done – it is almost archeological. Sometimes we can go backwards and find out information, even if the artist is dead, and see if we can come up with a set of instructions.’273 Seven Easy Pieces ‘spoke to the fact that performance only makes sense if it is live, and we have to establish some kind of framework about how it can be done in a way that’s true to the original work.’274 Abramović’s mission, as an ‘archeologist’, is to preserve and conserve the transitory medium of performance by ‘digging’ it up from the past and bringing it back to life through reperformance (preferably, in the future, based on ‘performance scores’).

Reperformance, US performance art historian Jessica Santone says, ‘proposes a dynamic, living document as a solution to the past’s disappearance; it allows a re-­‐experiencing of the work in a time-­‐based, body-­‐ based, ephemeral medium and makes available new experiences of memory and the slipping of performance into loss.’ 275 According to Fischer-­‐Lichte, who has commented on this point of view, performance cannot be treated like a musical score; performance is ‘a living organism that is in a permanent state of becoming; that is in a permanent process of transformation.’276 In terms of disagreement she argues that, first of all, ‘the traces and documents on past performance are not comparable to a score[…] by no means do they serve as instructions’ and secondly: ‘The body of the performer is the existential ground in which the performance is rooted[…] the performer does not create a work of art whose copyright he owns, but an artistic event that ends when the performance is over.’277 The problem, for Fischer-­‐Lichte, about performance-­‐scores is that performances would be able to be preserved, they could more easily be ‘collected’ and ‘arrested’ (with Phelan’s words) and handled like ‘works of art’.

271

Biesenbach: “Marina Abramović..” (exh. cat.), p. 18 It says on the press release from Seven Easy Pieces . Umathur: “Beyond Documentation..”, in Seven Easy Pieces, p.

40. Abramović’s proposal to preserve performance as score is, perhaps, the result of the difficulties she faced in Seven Easy Pieces with the reperformance of Genital Pants. See Mechtild Widrich on this topic: “Can Photographs Make It So? Repeated Outbreaks of VALIE EXPORT's Genital Panic Since 1969”, in Perform, Repeat, Record, p. 93; & “Marina Abramović Interviewed by Nancy Spector”, in Seven Easy Pieces, p. 23.

273 Ibid., p. 21 274 Ibid., p. 19; Santone: op. cit., p. 151 275 Umathur: “Beyond Documentation..”, in Seven Easy Pieces, p. 47 276 Fischer-­‐Lichte: “Performance Art. Experiencing Liminality”, in ibid., p. 41 277 Ibid., p. 41 272

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Writing about Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces, Fischer-­‐Lichte says: ‘She performs on seven days and for seven hours each day. In fact, the ironic allusion to the Genesis, recounted in the Bible (Moses, I and 2, 1-­‐4), is obvious.’278 Fischer-­‐Lichte’s interpretation of irony in this respect has to do, once again, with the ephemeral ontology of performance that resists and subverts the ‘Creation’ of works of art similar to the way ‘He created the world as a perfect and self-­‐contained work.’279 Fischer-­‐Lichte argues that Abramović’s reperformances were more original than documentary because Abramović, with her body, ‘brought forth another, original performance […] Marina Abramović created a completely new, original artistic event, which, in some respects, referred to performances of the past, but by no means repeated them[…] It was a new structure, an original artistic event that came into being, in which the performance of the past resonated.’280 In that sense, if Seven Easy Pieces were about some kind of demystification of past performances, Abramović simultaneously made original performances and laid the ground for future mythmaking. 281 This aspect of originality is also, ironically, implicit in Fischer-­‐Lichte’s point of denial about performance as score because the fact that Abramović, with her body and bodily creation, brought forth another original itself alludes to Genesis and Creation.

In the aforementioned conversation with Abramović, Spector wonders about Abramović’s point of view about preserving performance art through reperformance and treating it like musical scores because it implies a change in attitude towards her prior manifestal statement ‘no rehearsal, no repetition, no predicted end’: ‘When you began creating performances, you claimed, almost like a manifesto, that there would be no rehearsals. Was this to differentiate yourself from conventional theater, which is scripted, directed, and produced?’ Spector asks and Abramović answers: ‘Yes exactly. And in the beginning we even decided that we wouldn’t make any documentation of our work. It would only exist afterward by word of mouth… now I am doing just the opposite of what I had said about no repetition.‘282 Abramovic’s revised view on performance and repetition seems to position the concept of reperformance somewhat closer to theater considering her (and Fischer-­‐Lichte’s) characterization of theater as something that involves repetition and is ‘tied to specific dramatic characters’ (Fischer-­‐Lichte’s words); ‘something that you learn

278

Fischer-­‐Lichte: “Performance Art. Experiencing Liminality”, in ibid., p. 42 “Performance Art. Experiencing Liminality”, in ibid., p. 43 280 Loc. cit..

281 ‘The idea of a moment of pure presence set somewhere in the past structures and encourages the production of documentation towards recovering a “mythic” original.’ Santone: op. cit., p. 148; Umathur: “Beyond Documentation..”, in Seven Easy Pieces, p. 50 282 “Marina Abramović Interviewed by Nancy Spector”, in ibid., pp. 16, 20 279

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and then act, playing someone else’ (Abramovic’s words). 283 With this description, can the carefully rehearsed reperformances in The Artist is Present not be characterized as theatrical reenactments? The reperformers as theatrical characters playing the role of Abramović and sometimes Ulay? What is the difference between different reperforming bodies? – Abramović performing with her body, and someone else reperforming Abramović’s body? What do we make of the reperformers’ bodies when they are not intrinsically tied to their own subjective self and their own iconic presence? How should they be understood? Are they performers or documents or something in-­‐between?

Embodied documentation Prior to the show at MoMA, the team of reperformers were trained by Abramović in a workshop at her Hudson Valley residence entitled ‘Cleaning the House’ which is documented in the film: Scenes show reperformers doing exercises, in the river, out in nature, hugging trees, yelling, crying, sorting wild rice and doing other simple meditative things.284 This extensive training with Abramović was mounted at preparing them physically and mentally to reperform Abramović’s pieces and to do this as faithfully as possible in relation to how they were originally conceived of. This gives the reperformances an aspect of being ‘made by’ Abramović through apprenticeship, which, I assume, makes them more authentic and reliable – as ‘manual reproductions’. The training not only points out that Abramović’s performances are demanding -­‐ not everyone can do them, it takes practice and a certain mental mind set, a performative mode. It also implies a difficulty in approaching the authentic original moment and to decrease the distance to how it was done in the past. The advantage here is the body; the live-­‐to-­‐live reference and medial correspondence between human bodies as a means to better approach an idea about how the original unfolded. As a result, an imaginary opportunity is created for the spectator watching a reperformance, to identify or imagine, through bodily co-­‐presence, with how the original was experienced. In the context of performance art, authenticity is a term that is mostly applied to performance pieces where an original performer and an original audience are present.285 In the case of reperformances both parties differ, but the advantage

283

Fischer-­‐Lichte: Transformative Power, p. 35; Quoted in Betty Nigianni: “Marina Abramović Presents: Architectural Experience as Critical, Self-­‐reflective Practice”, conference paper, Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, 27 February 2010 (http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/marina-­‐Abramović-­‐presents-­‐architectural-­‐experience-­‐as-­‐ critical-­‐self-­‐reflective-­‐practice/ ) 284 DVD 13:24; 15:33 285

Denis Dutton: “Authenticity in Art”, in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Oxford University Press, New York, 2003), p. 15

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seems to be the possibility to identify with the ‘authentic’ original performance through the same premise of shared bodily presence. Biesenbach describes Abramović’s reperformers as ‘embodied documentation’, and in the following I will try to understand them as such.

As a type, therefore, of documentation, the media of living human bodies diverges from more common photographic or filmic forms of performance documentation, usually seen in museums. In contrast to common storage media, this embodied form documents in the same medium as they refer to, a body. As argued, the photographic documentation of the reperformances in the exhibition catalogue refers to the original documentation that they are printed next to and are related to within the same photographic medium. Understood as embodied documentation, the reperformances similarly refer to the experience of the original embodied performance, and act as performative documents of the past performances they cite. Like the original performance they rely on bodily co-­‐presence and take place as performance events.

The difference between the original and the reperformance is the latter’s documentary and referential function that makes them something other or in-­‐between. Reperformances are not self-­‐referential and if they are they have failed their job, so to speak. Taking into consideration the importance of the self-­‐ referential feedback loop in the transformative power of performance art, according to Fischer-­‐Lichte and her logic, I wonder (but will leave the question hanging) if the referential function of reperformance invalidates the possibility of transformation.

Abramović’s performances are bound up with her artistic self and iconic presence. Her subject is an integral component of her art, which is evident in the documentation of The Artist is Present. It is this subjective dimension that the reperformers seem to lack as they anonymously shift around and replace each other in the same reperformance. They lack the signature of the artist body, the ‘I’ of the artist. The difference then, between an Abramović performance, and a reperformance seems to be a difference in terms of embodiment between the body-­‐as-­‐subject and the body-­‐as-­‐document. The reperformers’ interchangeability (untitled 1-­‐36?) suggests that they have a primary referential function. In spite of their immediacy to what they represent in terms of materiality, flesh and blood, their lack of artistic subjectivity is what makes them capable of documenting where Abramović, in Seven Easy Pieces, failed (by producing new original works). In one of a series of Performance Workshops, continuously hosted by MoMA (and broadcasted online)286, Iles said: ‘To my mind you can’t recreate performances that rely on the power of

286

Number 8, resumed in Carol Kino: op. cit..

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the presence of that artist’-­‐ because they will not catch ‘the power of their [Abramović and Ulay’s] particular physical bodies’.287 But perhaps, that is the point with embodied documentation.

In Seven Easy Pieces Abramović interpreted other artists’ performances anew, but, as Spector has suggested, with no sense of ‘revisiting the past. Rather there was an energy, a surge of vitality, that made it feel as if the piece had been entirely reinvented for the occasion.’288 In The Artist is Present, the reperformances were clearly not meant as autonomous reinterpreted versions, in their own right, and the reperformers were likewise not indicative of a unique presence of the subjective self of the person reperforming. They were, as Biesenbach suggests, meant as documents, and as documents they were, however, highly performative: They did exactly what Auslander argues that performance documentation can do when he writes about the performativity of performance documentation and says that ‘the act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such.’289 That is to say, that the act of reperforming a performance has a constitutive effect on the original performance and performer. At a symposium at MoMA with the title ‘The Legacy of Performance’, Abramović answered to the question ‘is it still your pieces?’ and said: ‘They should all refer to the original’.290 This is exactly what the reperformances seem to do: They re-­‐actualize the originals as originals – worthy of reperformance in MoMA and, recalling Reason, worthy of being ‘part of our ‘heritage’, our ‘legacy’ and must not be ‘lost’.’ 291

As media, the reperforming bodies demonstrate the desire for immediacy – the desire to get closer to the real thing itself without mediation: As 3dimensional bodies they had not been reductively translated into typical 2dimensional storage-­‐based documentation. Understood as signs, the bodies were in great correspondence in terms of iconicity; they looked like bodies, because that is what they were, and they referred iconically to Abramović and Ulay’s bodies. However, in contrast to typical performance documentation they were not traces or physically related after-­‐leavings of their referenced performances.

This means that the reperformers’ referential function cannot, in terms of semiotics, be explained as indexical – as the physical mark or trace (like footprints in sand or scars on the body) of some particular cause.292 Lacking this indexical dimension of sign signification, the reperformers also could not possess the allure or aura of indexicality; the trace-­‐likeness of typical documentary media – the ‘having been there’

287

Loc. cit..

“Marina Abramović Interviewed by Nancy Spector”, in Seven Easy Pieces, p. 17 289 Auslander: “Performativity”, p. 5 (original emphasis) 290 Symposium: “The Legacy of Performance”, time: 28 291 Reason: Documentation, p. 36 292 Krauss: op. cit., p. 70 288

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element of photographs.293 Even though the reperformers were acting as ‘real’ bodies in a ‘real’ space, they did not present to the viewer the original moment of the performance or the original body of the artist figure that they represented.

How about understanding them as mediatizations then? In Fischer-­‐Lichte’s Castorf case the use of mediatized body images increased the spectators’ desire for the real bodies.294 Perhaps the reperformers also increased the desire to experience the ‘real’ thing – the ‘undistorted presence’ of Abramović’s embodied self? This is where the concept of aura re-­‐enters the scene. For according to Walter Benjamin ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence in the place where it happens to be.’295 Aura is the quality of the singular, unique and authentic thing ‘itself’, ‘the quality of its presence’296 in the here and now of its original existence. In relation to performance art, this place seems to be the original performance moment and its original site; the performer’s unique and singular body. The most perfect reproduction in this case would seem to be the reperforming body, but even so it will lack the aspect of aura attached to the original site-­‐ specific body, the artist’s own presence.

Aura and reproduction According to Benjamin, aura has to do with a notion of ‘distance’ because the original work of art exists in only one place, ‘the place where it happens to be’ in time and in space. In the disappearance invested thread of performance discourse, this distance is manifested in the disappearance of the performance: Phelan’s point of view is that reproduction ‘betrays’ disappearance which is the very essence of live performance art;297 it compromises the uniqueness of the moment and its aura. Matthew Reason briefly touches upon these converging conceptions, aura and disappearance, and says: ‘In discourses of performance, the idea of ‘disappearance’ directly parallels that of ‘distance’, with the valuation of ‘live’ (standing in for ‘aura’) seen as a function of ‘disappearance’. Consequently, any eroding of disappearance

293

Or relics carrying ‘the aura of having been used in performances’ Danto: “Danger and Disturbation” (exh. cat.), p.

29 294 Fischer-­‐Lichte: Transformative Power, pp. 73, 74.

295 Benjamin: Artwork essay, p. 220 296 Ibid., p. 221. The undistorted presence of Abramović in The Artist is Present seems to answer to what Benjamin expects from art as ‘an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment… that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.’ The performance also commanded a concentrated state of mind and attentive engagement from the sitter, which also answers to Benjamin’s characterization of the mode of relation that works of art demand. Ibid., pp. 239, 241, 234 297 Phelan: Unmarked, p. 146: ‘To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.’

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erodes the ‘live’.’298 According to Benjamin, reproduction erodes distance and therefore the aura of art, and according to Phelan, reproduction erodes the aura of disappearance.

Benjamin’s concept of aura has undergone much critique, and a significant point of disagreement has been the relationship between original and reproduction in terms of aura, disappearance and distance. The German philosopher Henning Ritter argues that the ‘here and now’ of the original is not devalued by reproduction: ‘Precisely the opposite is true: the “here and now” experiences an increase in value’ and ‘gains tremendously in importance.’299 In other words, the authenticity of the original increases with reproduction because ‘The spread of mechanical reproduction leads to the cult of the original and authentic.’300 In “How to Make Mistakes on So Many Things at Once – and Become Famous for It”, the French sociologists Antoine Hennion and Bruno Latour argue along the same lines when they point to how copies have come to define the original, and how ‘originality and authenticity presuppose, as sine qua non, the existence of an intense technical reproduction[…]. In fact, the concept of authenticity is a late by-­‐ product of the constant activity of reproduction.’301 In relation to the discourse about disappearance and documentation, Reason comments that ‘retention heightens perceptions of ephemerality’.302 This means that between performance and documentation, documentation does not erode or compromise the existence of the original performance event, its aura or its disappearance: On the contrary, documentation produces the performance ‘as such’, it gives value to the event and to the live, and it endows both the performance and the performer with immense auratic authenticity. This is the performative qualifications of performance documentation, and qualifications that also count for the relation between reperformers and Abramović. According to Hennion and Latour, ‘Technique does not suppress distance: it creates distance’ – in much the same way that documentation does not suppress or halt disappearance, presence or liveness, it constitutes it and makes it all the more valuable, desirable and auratic. As argued, the ontology of disappearance is constituted in documentation. The desire for the real thing, the original moment, and the original, singular and unique body, is a desire that is produced and enhanced through documentation. Aura is created exactly in the space, in the distance, between performance and documentation, artist body and embodied documentation.

298

Reason: Documentation, p. 25 Henning Ritter: “Toward the Artwork Essay, Second Version”, i Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan (eds.), Mapping Benjamin (Stanford University Press; Stanford, 2003), p. 204 300 Ibid., p. 205 301 Hennion, Antoine & Latour, Bruno: “How to make mistakes on so many things at once – and become famous for it”, in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht & Michael Marrinan (eds.), Mapping Benjamin: the work of art in the digital age (Stanford University Press; Stanford, 2003) 302 Reason: Documentation, p. 25 299

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In the film it is shown how Abramović’s performance became a phenomenon of cultic dimensions, and in the exhibition catalogue it is described how Abramović figures like an ‘urban myth’. Both media visualize and verbalize how the ritualistic sitting and setting, and Abramović’s iconic presence, made her an icon of worship, and how MoMA, the temple of high art, became the place to be. Abramović says: ‘For me, museums have become modern temples. We don’t believe in temples anymore, but the museum can serve this function now.’303 The way that the film documents the publicity of the performance as much as it documents the performance itself, shows an awareness of how reproductive media lead ‘to the cult of the original and authentic’304-­‐ to the cult of Abramović. The quasi-­‐religious and ritualistic emphasis in the documentary materials help to produce an aura around the artist; to make her into an ‘urban myth’ and an icon with a performance and a presence that, as quoted with Danto, ‘resonance in the metaphysics of art.’305 According to Ritter, the cult of the original and authentic bears the traits of mystification306 -­‐ a mystification that is easily recognized in the documentation and its auratic cultification of Abramović and her presence piece. As Benjamin explains the concept of aura, it is related to the ‘cult value’ of the art work’s original ritual function: ‘We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.’307 The aura of origin, of being embedded in the fabric of tradition, of belonging to a place and of serving some ritual (be it a Greek statue or an altar piece) is, in Benjamin’s point of view, what is lost from the work of art when it is withdrawn from its original site to serve consumerist, reproductive, and exhibitionistic purposes. In relation to Abramović in The Artist is Present, the cult value was extremely high not in spite of but because of the performance’s consumption, reproduction and exhibition value.

In performance art and body art, the original site and the place where it happens to be is the artist body.

Body art, like earth works and site-­‐specific land art, marks the site-­‐specificity of the body. The aura of this unique and singular site, the body, is embodied by Abramović in The Artist is Present. And if, as Benjamin’s critics suggest, aura and authenticity are by-­‐products of reproduction, then it seems that her placement in the midst of her own archive -­‐ the retrospective exhibition -­‐ must have endowed her performance with an intense auratic effect, in much the same way that public media publicity, at the time, and film production, subsequently, have made her into the grand dame of performance art, that she desired to become.308 The

303

“Marina Abramović Interviewed by Nancy Spector”, in Seven Easy Pieces, p. 30 Ritter, op. cit., p. 205 305 Danto: “Danger and Disturbation” (exh. cat.), pp. 29-­‐30 306 Ritter: op. cit., p. 205 307 Benjamin: Artwork essay, pp. 223-­‐224 308 E.g. pronounced in the film 304

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aura of her presence was furthermore emphasized by the mise-­‐en-­‐scene of her sitting in a square of light, and by the fact that she was so intensely guarded over at all times: audience ‘misbehavior’ and creative inputs were strictly forbidden (documented in the film). In fact role reversal, rescuing and unpredictability, Fischer-­‐Lichte’s ‘Unverfügichkeit’, were, in this case, radically limited. According to the film any kind of diverging input was put under strict control. As it turns out, this aspect -­‐ the strict control of misbehavior in the feedback loop -­‐ might also have helped to increase Abramović’s status as an auratic icon, because (in the words of Vito Acconci); ‘‘aura’ is constituted in its unavailability[…] no matter that she is close.’ 309 This unavailability and unapproachability, is not only clear (from the film) through the intense presence of life guards, it is also emphasized by Abramovic’s regal dress that veiled up the site, the body, that has previously been so exposed.

As I have argued, with Jones, reperformance easily ‘get caught up in the discourse of authenticity and genius, ultimately resting on an impossible (yet still intransigently common) notion of retrievable original meaning and artistic intentionality’ as she puts it.310 Yet, as Jones also points out, reperformance or reenactment (she prefers) can question the live event itself because ‘the point made by re-­‐enactments, whether this is the intention of the re-­‐enactor or not, is that the past is impossible to retrieve as it existed in the past (that in fact the event is already “over”).’311 As has become clear by now, this last point is marked by The Artist is Present’s reperformances.

Performance art and critical discourses The body in body art, Jones stresses, can never stand by itself to emit a singular, unrecallable presence. The body needs the documentary traces; the photographs, the writings, or the other reperforming bodies to instantiate its authenticity. This is what the documentation of Marina Abramović and her performance, in its various media, does best. In that sense, The Artist is Present applies to the body-­‐art discourse that Jones puts forth. However, when it comes to Jones’s more general point about how body/performance art itself subverts discourses of originality, ‘presence’ and authenticity, Abramović’s performance deviates significantly. When her reperformances in Seven Easy Pieces end up mostly as original and self-­‐referential performances, it illustrates that these are terms that Abramović has difficulty escaping. What Jones argues (with Interior Scroll and other body art) is ‘that body art instantiates a radical shift in subjectivity from a

309

Quoted in Nick Kaye: Multi-­‐Media: video -­‐ installation – performance (Routledge, London & New York, 2007), pp.

101-­‐3 310 Jones: “The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History”, in Perform, Repeat, Record, p. 16 311 Ibid., p. 17

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modernist a postmodernist mode’.312 That is a mode that provides a subversive resistance towards notions such as originality, presence and authenticity and other subject-­‐centered discourses (for example the romanticist artist-­‐as-­‐Creator one that Fischer-­‐Lichte characterizes performance art in opposition to).

Drawing, instead, on poststructuralist and postmodernist critiques of the Subject, understood in Cartesian terms, Jones proposes that body art is ‘specifically anti-­‐formalist’, enacting the subject as representation, which makes the genre capable of challenging modernist models about author-­‐ship and presence. Body art, Jones argues, is ‘radically postmodern’ in its self-­‐exposures. 313 Her critique is aimed at ‘heroic claims’ about how performance art guarantees an artist’s direct unmediated ‘real-­‐life’ presence where (quoting Catherine Elwes, UK artist and performance art theorist, in disagreement) ‘Nothing stands between spectator and performer.’ Jones says: ‘I have already made clear that I specifically reject such conceptions of body art or performance as delivering in an unmediated fashion the body (and implicitly the self) of the artist to the viewer.’314 Instead, and in contrast to what for example Elwes argues, body art, according to Jones, exposes the impossibility of attaining some higher truth and full knowledge of the self through bodily proximity. Body art finally, shows that the body can never be known ‘purely’ as a totalizable, fleshly whole that rests outside the arena of the symbolic… through its very performativity and its unveiling of the body of the artist [body art] surfaces the insufficiency and incoherence of the body-­‐as-­‐subject and its inability to deliver itself fully.315 Body art, Jones proceeds, furthermore dislocates ‘the modernist assumption of authorial plentitude […], flaunts the body itself as loss or lack: that is, as fundamentally lacking in the self-­‐sufficiency (claimed by Elwes et al.) that would guarantee plentitude as an unmediated respository of selfhood.’316 Phelan describes performance art in those same terms when she says: ‘Performance uses the performer’s body to pose a question about the inability to secure the relation between subjectivity and the body per se; performance uses the body to frame the lack of Being promised by and through the body’ (although, unlike Jones, Phelan clearly does not view documentation as a supplement to that lack).317

312

Jones: “Presence”, p. 12 Jones: Body Art, pp. 5-­‐9, 10 314 Jones: “Presence”, p. 13 315 Loc. cit..

316 Jones: “Presence”, p. 14 317 Phelan: Unmarked, pp. 151-­‐152; Jones: “Presence”, pp. 12, 13-­‐14: ‘To the point, I insist that it is precisely the relationship of these bodies/subjects to documentation (or, more specifically, to re-­‐presentation) that most profoundly points to the dislocation of the fantasy of the fixed, normative, centered modernist subject and thus most dramatically provides a radical challenge to the masculinism, racism, colonialism, classicism, and heterosexism built into this fantasy.’ pp. 12, 13-­‐14 313

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In “On Performance and Performativity: Women Artists and Their Critics”, Catherine Elwes answers to Jones’ critique about regarding the live experience as something that ‘constitutes an unmediated and authentic encounter between an autonomous artist and an audience.’318 Elwes references how Jones ‘sees the performance itself as secondary to the proliferation of documentation – the photos, videos and texts that it generates’ and proceeds to argue that documentation leaves out ‘the best part of our senses… . A kind of paired-­‐down vision is at play but the registration of temperature, the senses of smell, taste, touch, hearing, and that illusive sixth sense that picks up ambience have to be reconstructed in the imagination rather than experienced somatically.’319 In agreement with Phelan (who most fiercely rejects reproduction) and Fischer-­‐Lichte, Elwes says: It is not possible from these reconstructions to properly gauge the immediate social and geographical space of a performance. It is through spatial awareness, the motion of the body in relation to other bodies within a specifically delineated space, that the impact of the performance environment and the psychodynamics of the ensuing interactions are understood… when it comes to a live event, in order to properly understand what it was that happened, you had to be there.320 Jones’ skepticism about ‘presence’ as a privileged somatic experience is evident when she asks (about Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Schroll 1975 in which Schneemann pulled a long line of paper from her vagina)321: ‘Would I have been able to experience her sexed subjectivity more “truthfully” had I been there (to smell and feel the heat of her body)?’According to Elwes, however, such suspicion towards presence only points at critics’ own unease or jealousy about the live and the living body: ‘So what do they [critics] do to compensate for that loss? They invent ‘performativity’. They try to endow critical writing with the invested, embodied qualities previously associated with making and participating in art events.’322 As interesting as such correspondences are I better pose my point. The point here is that Abramović’s performance does not make a claim to be about postmodern fractured subjectivities that put forth and enact their lack through body art. If body art -­‐ by Schneemann, Sprinkle, and Abramović in the 1970s -­‐

318

Catherine Elwes: “On Performance and Performativity: Women Artists and Their Critics”, in Third Text vol. 18, no. 2, March 2004 319 Loc. cit..

320 Loc. cit..

321 Jones: “Presence”, p. 13 (original emphasis) 322 ‘critics have got themselves in a conceptual tangle that breeds a kind of self-­‐consciousness in their writing and unnecessary doubt and anxiety in artists, particularly those working with the body… . When she [Jones] witnesses an Annie Sprinkle performance in which the artist executes a magnificent and very public orgasm, Jones’s first thought is that Sprinkle must be faking it … .The writer is now jealous of the artist’s freedom from determining structures of the academic disciplines that must be espoused to become what Jones describes as ‘a trained historian’.’ Elwes: Loc. cit.. (original emphasis)

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radically dislocates ‘the fantasy of the fixed, normative, centered modernist subject’ and dramatically challenges ‘the masculinism, racism, colonialism, classicism, and heterosexism built into this fantasy’, The Artist is Present does not apply. On the contrary, it seems more modernist than postmodernist as it puts forth, most of all, Abramović, in a highly subject-­‐centered fashion. In the exhibition catalogue Abramović is portrayed in manners that recall the artist as genius, endowed with extraordinary spiritual skills (to recall Biesenbach: ‘[…] without her presence, [the spectators] would themselves lack the ability’323). Her religiously dressed and concealed body seems moreover to fit the dominant high modernist classification ‘which veils the body of the artist to occlude its supplementarity’324 – the classification that Jones repeatedly characterizes body art in opposition to. Even in its very title, The Artist is Present alludes to an all exclusive notion of artistic ‘presence’ and of ‘being there’, being present. Abramović seems to embody, rather than to subvert, the subject-­‐centered discourse, with her iconic presence that is so intrinsically bound up with her (mythological) self-­‐hood. She appears to be the perfect illustration of the body-­‐as-­‐ subject that Jones declares body art a challenge to. The seemingly omnipotent present Marina (as Biesenbach puts it) in different media, on different interfaces, and the way that she seems to multiply rhizomatically in documentary media, where she is visually, linguistically and discursive constructed325 is the closest to postmodern we get.

If 1970s body/performance art was avantgarde in its way of critiquing structures of selfhood and authorship, works of art, and commodification certainly Abramović’s The Artist is Present is not very avantgarde, and indeed her current project about preserving performance art would be difficult to carry out if she refused to indulge in market structures and documentation. In regard to Seven Easy Pieces, her reperformances were explicitly gestured towards other great artists and their pivotal past performances, but as it is now being framed in (performance) art history, the pieces that she re-­‐did are viewed, as Jones writes, as ‘a set of “original” acts, pivoting around the name Abramović’326 and thereby certainly not challenging any modernist conceptions of authorial plentitude. In Jones’s words: ‘Such works point to the way in which cultural value is ascribed in relation to embodied acts of doing – always already (and to some degree unavoidably) overdetermined by the marketplace.’327

323

Biesenbach, quoting Thomas McEvilley. “Marina Abramović..” (exh. cat.), p. 14 Jones: “Presence”, p. 14 325 Phenomenological experiences, Heathfield says, can never and do never stand separated from ‘their linguistic and discursive construction.’ “Then Again”, in Perform, Repeat, Record, p. 31 324

326

Jones: “The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History”, in Perform, Repeat, Record, p. 17 Loc. cit..

327

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The act of hiring reperformers to perform her own seminal pieces in The Artist is Present likewise brands her name, Abramović, not the reperformers’ names. Hardly can the reperformances be interpreted as avantgardistic anti-­‐capitalist gestures – exposing exploitative dynamics of the labor market as, for instance, Santiage Sierra does when he hires and pays drug-­‐addicted prostitutes with drugs to get a line tattooed across their backs, or pays immigrants to have their hair dyed blond.328 When, by further comparison, Kristian von Hornsleth pays an entire African village in pigs for adopting his last name, it is a completely different way of branding a name.329 Compared to ‘social works’ like this330, The Artist is Present appears hopelessly non -­‐antagonistic, and devoid of the critical ethical dimension that characterizes Honsleth’s and Sierra’s projects –or, according to Fischer-­‐Lichte, characterized Abramović’s earlier performances such as Lips of Thomas or Rhythm 0 or 10 where audience members, by ethical conviction, ultimately put an end to the performances. As mentioned in relation to The Artist is Present, such role reversal and audience intervention was at no time an option.

If, as US art historian Kristine Stiles suggests, performance from the 1950s-­‐1970s was ‘the most forceful opposition to capitalism in the visual arts’, trading in the ‘object’ for ephemeral action as a means to subvert the art market,331 The Artist is Present conversely signals institutionalization. The Hollywood production of the film hits hard if one (Phelan) insists on performance art’s anti-­‐commercialization. Rather than clogging, as Phelan says that performance art does, ‘the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital’ Abramović keeps it running and does far from attempt, as Phelan states in her seminal book Unmarked, to create art with ‘no remaining trace to be sold, collected, or otherwise “arrested”.’332 If Abramović’s mission and current agenda is to establish and preserve performance art and herself as an art genre, she has certainly succeeded but with highly capitalistic means. Her currently founded Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) for the preservation of performance art in New York has been founded by an extensive ‘Kickstarter’ campaign that has radically capitalized not only her preservatory mission but also her ‘Abramović Method’: The ‘Kickstarter’ campaign

328

See e.g. http://www.santiago-­‐sierra.com/index_1024.php Hornsleth: “Uganda project” or “We want to help you, but we want to own you”. See http://www.hornslethvillageproject.com/ 329

330

Shannon Jackson: op. cit..

Quoted in Sven Lütticken: “Progressive Striptease”, in Perform, Repeat, Record, p. 187 332 Phelan: “Witnessing Shadows”, p. 570. Even though Phelan cannot deny that performance art has been coopted by the art market and hardly longer can be situated “beyond” or “outside” of it, she does, however, maintain her belief that live art, if it is radical enough, is a resistance to the commodity form. (Ibid., p. 571) Referring to Adrian Piper who writes about the ‘artist as parasite’, reliant on the art market and the gallery as ‘host’, Phelan writes that “The connection between the parasite and the host… has only gained in power as art and capital have become ever more intimate (ibid., p. 570) 331

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has been running to raise 20 million dollars through donations333, and, as a perfect illustration of how experience –or service economy works today, different amounts of donations has been encouraged in exchange for different kind of performative gestures given by Abramović: Pledge 1 dollar and Marina will personally thank all those who contribute to the creation of MAI by hugging every backer of this Kickstarter at a live event called THE EMBRACE. This event will be held in two undisclosed locations, one in New York City and one in Europe, with exact dates and times to be announced Pledge $25 or more: Marina will teach the Abramović Method WATER DRINKING exercise via live stream.

Receive exclusive access to this event. You, Marina, and the other backers at this level will then perform your exercise SIMULTANEOUSLY, creating a large public performance that occurs at the same time in different locations all over the world. You may document your performance and opt to include it in MAI digital archives. Estimated delivery: Mar 2014 Pledge $25 or more: Marina will teach the Abramović Method eye gazing exercise via an exclusive live stream. You will find a friend or stranger whose eyes you would like to gaze into. You, your partner, Marina, her partner, and the other backers at this level will then perform this exercise SIMULTANEOUSLY, creating a large public performance that occurs at the same time in different locations all over the world. You may document your performance and opt to include it in MAI digital archives. Estimated delivery: Mar 2014 Pledge $100 or more: You will receive a set of never-­‐before-­‐seen video materials. This includes extracts of five of Marina's most difficult pieces, rare videos of Marina discussing these works. Estimated delivery: Dec 2014 Pledge $1,000 or more: Marina will perform the Abramović Method eye gazing exercise with you via webcam… Estimated delivery: Mar 2014 Pledge $5,000 or more: Have a movie night with Marina at an intimate home theater in New York City, during which you will watch one of Marina's favorite movies. Afterwards, you, Marina, and other backers at this level will discuss this film while consuming ice cream and coffee. Estimated delivery: Dec 2014 Pledge $10,000 or more: Marina will choose an event to attend with you and four other backers, after which you'll all have lunch in New York City. Estimated delivery: Aug 2014

333

http://www.marinaAbramovićinstitute.org/get-­‐involved/donate ; https://www.facebook.com/MAIhudson?fref=ts

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Pledge $10,000 or more: A dinner night with Marina during which she will teach you and other backers at this level how to cook a series of traditional soups, which you will all enjoy together. The night will end with the making of a golden ball, a recipe given to Marina in a Tibetan monastery. Marina will bring to this dinner a Spirit Cooking memento for each backer to keep. Estimated delivery: Dec 2014 … Please become a supporter of MAI's unique vision and commitment to establishing roots in Hudson and the international community. 334

Let me comment with German art critic and historian Sven Lütticken who says: ‘performance art is far from being an attack on capitalism: after all, performance seems to bear a similar relation to the modern art object as service do to goods… dematerialized art is as much a part of the capitalist economy as any other kind.’335 The Artist is Present ‘took time itself’, perhaps the most valuable ‘commodity’ in today’s experience-­‐based ‘Erlebnisgesellschaft’, as its subject. This aspect has made the whole show a topic in the frequent debates about the role of museums as ‘pleasure-­‐palaces’336 providing entertaining spectacles – to sell tickets like rock concerts. When Lütticken argues that ‘performance art has never been a real threat to the spectacle’, in contrast to what Fischer-­‐Lichte and Phelan insist on, he seems to have a point; 337 The Artist is Present became a spectacle of magnitudes. Both capitalism and the art institution have coopted and commodified/museumified the ‘live’, and the ephemerality of performance art has definitely been disarmed from its subversive potential (if it ever had it). But then again, why should performance art necessarily be alternative or subversive? -­‐ ‘I’m 63, I don’t want to be alternative anymore’ Abramović says in the film.338 What Abramović wants is institutionalization of herself and of performance art. Granted.

334

http://www.marinaAbramovićinstitute.org/get-­‐involved/donate

335

“Progressive Striptease”, in Perform, Repeat, Record, p. 189 RoseLee Goldberg: “The performance era is now” 337 “Progressive Striptease”, pp. 189, 191 338 DVD 10:43 336

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Epilogue: Archive Fever

‘Let us not begin at the beginning’ Jacques Derrida begins his Archive Fever– ‘nor even at the archive. But rather at the word “archive”.’ 339 With this word Derrida meditates on beginnings, starting points and the search for those. He defines the word in terms of its Greek root, ‘arkhe’, because the concept of the archive in itself shelters this memory of the name arkhe, as he puts it. He defines the word as at once ‘commencement’ and ‘commandment’-­‐ there where things commence (the beginning or origin), as well as there where things command. 340 This place, the archive, was initially a house; the address or residence of a publicly recognized authority that both preserved and guarded the official documents and had the hermeneutic rights to interpret them. It was in that residence that documents dwelled permanently and were put under ‘house arrest’. 341 To begin at this beginning, museums can be and have been characterized as archives of art. Indeed works of art are ‘put under house arrest’ and commanded over. In relation to performance art (and art history, even history in general) this dedication of power to the institutions in control of the archives is not hard to recognize. As archiving institutions (also always containing archives consisting of artworks not on display and documentations of ephemeral pieces) museums preserve and communicate through exhibitions, catalogue texts and events, what will be remembered in the future and which artworks will translate into the ongoing creation of art history. Only a small percentage of works survive this selection process, the rest disappears into oblivion. So, when it comes to the creation of art history and collective cultural heritage the museum takes on a leading role. This reference is relevant and intriguingly difficult exactly when it comes to ephemeral art such as performance art that lacks the materiality of the artistic artifacts that the museum usually stores. The discourse has concerned exactly this institutional ‘house arrest’ opposed by those in favor of performance’s disappearance with ‘no object, no remaining trace to be sold, collected, or otherwise “arrested”.’342 Since performance art is characterized by its very (a)liveness, the act of documenting it not only makes it collectable and arrestable, it also makes it into ‘something other’, as Phelan says, than what it really is, which is ephemera. In this inevitable transformation that is part of documentation and archivation, the event is never only a record because of the institutional power to

339

Derrida: op. cit., (Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne), p. 6 Ibid., note p. 2 341 Loc. cit..; ‘There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.’ Kate Dorney: “Archives”, in Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 23:1, no. 8-­‐10, 2013, p. 7 342 Phelan: “Witnessing Shadows”, p. 570 340

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interpret as much as to store, to be performative as much as constative, or as Derrida says it: ‘The archivization produces as much as it records the event.’343 In the context of the art museum, this feature is prominent because the museum produces what it arrests as Art and at the same time makes its arrests into history of art -­‐ collecting and in that very move making the collectable past.344

As it turns out in Archive Fever, Derrida’s archive is not a house (or a museum), but a metaphor of the human psyche and memory -­‐ the psychicoanalytic archive. He refers to Sigmund Freud and his concept of the ‘psychic archive distinct from spontaneous memory’ which Freud has compared to acts of inscription and printing: as an internal inscription in the mind, virtually remote, but from which psychoanalysis can gather ‘documents’ and traces of the past, as the products of a successful psychoanalytic session. 345 The full story of the event – the origin and inception of the psychic ‘documents’ (e.g. trauma) -­‐ can never be entirely retrieved by the psychoanalyst (you had to be there), but from all the traces that he can collect from his psychoanalytic sessions, he might be able to resemble something of the event. Freud used the ‘Wunderblock’ (the mystic writing pad or magic slate346) as a metaphor of this: One can draw something on the pad, then shake it and it will disappear, but small traces or ‘Spüren’ of the image will remain. This is why the archive can be described as spectral, Derrida writes, ‘neither present nor absent “in the flesh”, neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met…’347 The archive fever that Derrida sees in Freud’s writing, is a desire to recover those moments of inception and inscription; ‘to find and possess all sorts of beginnings’ or just, ‘to be there, in the first place.’ 348 To explain what archive fever entails, Derrida turns to the tale of Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy by German author Wilhelm Jensen (1918); a novella about the archeologist, Norbert Hanold, and his quest to trace and find a long deceased Pompeian girl. Fixated upon a bas-­‐relief portrayal of her, he searches the place where the ‘trace no longer distinguishes itself from its substrate’ -­‐ the place of the original moment, ‘the unique

343

Derrida: op. cit., p. 17 Boris Groys: “On the New” (2002), in idem: Art Power (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2008), p. 24 345 Derrida: op. cit., p. 19 346 Freud: Notiz über den Wunderblock (1925); In Jens Scröter’s words, the mystic pad ‘ermöglicht die Speicherung von Information, er ist sofort wieder löschbar – und das ist die Pointe an Freuds Überlegungen, er lässt Spuren der Aufzeichnung trotz der Löschung zurück. Für Freud konnte dieses Phänomen der Remanenz als Metapher des Unbewussten operieren – Derrida pointiert dies in seiner Freud-­‐Lektüre mit dem Satz: „Die Wachstafel stellt in der Tat das Unbewußte dar.’ Schröter: “Notizen zu einer Geschichte des Löschens”, in idem & Gregor Schwering (eds.): Fragment und Schnipsel (Marburg, Schüren, 2006), pp. 33-­‐37 (http://www.theorie-­‐der-­‐ medien.de/text_druck.php?nr=51 ) 344

347

Derrida: op. cit., p. 84 Ibid., pp 3, 5; Steedman: op. cit., pp. 1-­‐2

348

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instant where they [the trace and the person] are not yet distinguished the one from the other’.349 For Derrida, Hanold’s quest resembles a desire to get close to the origin, the commencement, of the archive through traces of the now dead living girl –a quest to uncover an archeology that is, of course, quite impossible. Derrida explains how Hanold had traveled to Italy searching for traces of Gravida, ‘had come to Italy and had traveled on to Pompeii, without stopping in Rome or Naples, in order to see whether he could find any traces of her. And ‘traces’ in the literal sense [im wörtlichen Sinne]; for with her peculiar gait she must have left behind an imprint [Abdruck] of her toes in the ashes distinct from all the rest.’350 Does Hanold the archeologist ever find the living girl? Derrida’s reading never tells, but the answer is less important than Hanold’s feverish desire to trace her, his archive fever or ‘mal d’archive’.

Archive fever is something else than to suffer from sickness. It is to burn with passion. It is never to rest from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there's too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. 351 Hanold’s quest is impossible because that is what nostalgia is; a desire for an origin that is impossible to return to and to attain. But more than that, archive fever means to have a somewhat destructive desire for the impossibility in itself and for itself. It is to desire the quest itself rather than the finitude of that quest.

In Derrida’s words, the fever resembles ‘an impossible archeology of this nostalgia, of this painful desire for a return to the authentic and singular origin, and for a return concerned to account for the desire to return: for itself.’352 In relation to performance art, archivation and documentation, it is the ‘raison d’être’ of the archive that something or someone is absent. The presence of a document in the archive implies an absence of ‘the real thing’. Indeed this is the allure of the flickering documentary photographs and their indexical trace-­‐looking quality; that imprint of footsteps in sand or toes in ashes that, like a Wunderblock, depicts only a trace or a small spur of that unique original moment of the performance. As part of the MoMA retrospective, as documents in an archive, such flickering performance photographs, video footage and relics point at this presence of absence that characterizes the impossible archeology of the archive, and the aura of distance and unavailability. Like Hanold’s bas-­‐relief, the blurry documentary photographs seem to point at themselves as traces of a distant and absent origin, at the eyes that can never be met, inherent in the notion of archive fever. Because the archive is a selected part, something we don’t know of will

349

Derrida: op. cit., p. 99 Derrida: op. cit., p. 99 (original parenthesis) 351 Ibid., p. 91 352 Ibid., p. 85 350

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always be left out, burned, lost, remain unselected. As quoted: ‘One can always dream or speculate around this secret account… But of the secret itself, there can be no archive, by definition. The secret is the very ash of the archive.’353 We might gather up traces to approach the commencement, the performance event, but it will never be fully present. This is indeed the allure of the archive and of performance documentation, and the fever that Hanold suffers from in his fixation on traces.

Archive fever is a concept with which to pose the question of how the document performs the origin, how it gives a life and presence to the original event, or person documented. Along this line the retrospective way of reperformance illustrates the opposite manifestation of that same desire; to experience that unique instant where they [the trace and the person] are not distinguished from each other. Abramović’s desire to be reenacted or reperformed, in The Artist is Present, and to reperform other artists’ performances, in Seven Easy Pieces, is symptomatic of this ‘repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive’354 -­‐ of her quest to preserve and to halt performance from disappearing; to fixate the ephemeral where it slips away. Like Hanold, she suffers from an immense archive fever – a fever to trace down the past and to bring it to life by renewing its presence. In regard to Seven Easy Pieces, the repetition of past performances, that ‘irrepressible desire to return to the origin’, 355 and the desire to repeat them as truthfully as possible to how they originally occurred,356 was challenging (esp. with EXPORT) because of the spectral quality of the archive; its unselected secrets that has been lost, burned or left out. Even though Abramović put herself in the role of the archeologist (‘it is almost archeological’ to dig up the secrets of the past357) her quest, to trace the history of performance art back to its pivotal original moments, resembles that ‘impossible archeology’ of archive fever. This is quite evident when her own reperformances turned out to be more original than referentially understood.

The desire to experience, as closely as possible, the original and authentic, is, in relation to the retrospective part of The Artist is Present, played out with the insertion of real bodies into an ordinary documentary show. Because the reperformances embody the body, so to speak, they appear to better approach (than a bas-­‐relief or a photograph) the sense of immediacy where the medium of representation seem to erase itself to create or simulate an unmediated access: An indistinguishment between trace and embodiment. Since reperformance represents some of the most fundamental aspects of performance art (real space, real bodies, real presence) this format seems more capable of revisiting the past, of re-­‐

353

Ibid., p. 100 Ibid., p. 91 355 Ibid., p. 91 356 “Marina Abramović Interviewed by Nancy Spector”, in Seven Easy Pieces, p. 19 357 Ibid., p. 21 354

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producing or resurrecting that original unique presence where the origin ‘speaks by itself’.358 This desire for presence is indeed also what the performance The Artist is Present appears to be about in its simple setting of the simplest communication between human kinds, co-­‐presence. The documentation of it, in portraits, strives to communicate the experience of that presence: the illusion that we might actually see the virtually remote, the inner emotional inscription – the psychic archive – as the result of Anelli’s successful photographic sessions. The portraits, to recall Iles, ‘could be compared to the transference that occurs in psychoanalysis, in which hidden secrets and unconscious emotional states are encountered to rise to the surface and become expressed.’359 The catalogue and the film furthermore make a retrospective connection between the artist persona and her art. Both media try to uncover the commencement, those moments of inception that put into relief such a simple act of just ‘being present’. The film is not only structured like a retrospective quest, it also tries to uncover and gather all those ‘documents’ or moments of inception, that might be meaningfully reflected into The Artist is Present. Those documents are visualized and verbalized in the form of physical and mental ‘irritated scars’ – that are correlated: Abramović makes the art that she does because of the burden of her Balkan heritage (sounds like a psychoanalytic resonation). Her inner, scarred, emotional inscription is expressed in her flagellating body art where it is ‘printed’ as fleshly scars on the surface of her body, and furthermore onto photographs. The film traces in rewind her life and her art in a supplementary manner that intrinsically and causally links the two into what Jones calls the ‘body-­‐as-­‐subject’.360 The archival quest of the documentary film makes the climax of it – the opening of the show The Artist is Present – emotionally engaging because the ‘selfhood’ of Abramović’s iconic presence has been subsequently accounted for, and can be read, or focalized, into her performance. Similarly, because a love/art story with Ulay has been traced from beginning to end, their sitting at the opening can be interpreted as a ‘reconciliation-­‐sitting’-­‐ a return to the archaic place of commencement; Nightsea Crossing.

All together, the documentation of The Artist is Present makes up an abundant archive that produces as much as it represents Abramović’s presence. The way it produces presence is by creating an archive that makes the impossible archeology appear possible. At stake is an immense archive fever but also the illusion of its cure; the impression of access to the authentic selfhood of the artist and to the experience of the performance. In the context of the retrospective exhibition, the cure, of course, was the very presence, in the midst of the archive and its documentary traces, of the source and origin itself in flesh and blood.

Unlike Gradiva, the artist was present and her eyes could be met.

358

Derrida: op. cit., p. 98 Iles: “Marco Anelli..”, in Portraits, p. 17 360 Jones: “Presence”, p. 13 359

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Conclusion In 2010 Abramović participated in the performance project The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow.

The title means to question the relation between performance, today, and documentation, tomorrow; is it the living pig of today or the dead ham of it, tomorrow, that makes up the pig? Is live art dead tomorrow, and does it need to be dead to be consumed?361 Some (Phelan, Fischer-­‐Lichte and Elwes) fancy the living pig, and, like some vegetarians, they oppose slaughtering it, making it into something other than a pig and consuming it as ham. Others (Auslander and Jones) argue that the pig does not make much sense by itself, without ham. Either way, ham calls attention to the presence of a pig, and without the presence of a pig, no ham. The relation between live performance and documentation is redundant, and perhaps: ‘It is far more rewarding not to set a performance and its document in opposition to one another, but, instead, to view them as working in tandem.’362 In this survey I have looked at how Marina Abramović is present and presented performance documentation. Presence is a core concept in performance art, according to Fischer-­‐Lichte’s aesthetics of the genre, and The Artist is Present was a performance that enacted the basic principle of co-­‐presence. The documentation of the performance tries to approach the experience of it as closely as possible and to communicate the transformational power of the performance with the key concept of an ‘energy dialogue’.

This is how the documentation deviates from the typical ‘documentary’ category, described in terms of ‘flickering’ photographs. In documentation of The Artist is Present, Abramović’s mythological selfhood is accounted for, and aura and iconicity ascribed to her ‘presence’. In contrast to how Phelan would have it, she does not appear to disappear but to remain, and, in contrast to how Jones would have it, she does so in a highly subject-­‐centered fashion. The performative role of documentation in this case is the way it does something with words and voice, still and moving pictures that constitutes the artistic subjectivity of Abramović and the experience of her iconic presence.

The premise in performance art is that ‘you had to be there’. Presence is not only a matter of time and space, it is also a particular sensitivity towards being there in the moment, in a ‘charismatic space’. I have suggested that audiovisual documentation of The Artist is Present produces a performative sense of presence that creates a charismatic space around the catalogue and extends it beyond the screen. I have used Fischer-­‐Lichte as a theoretical foundation and as a comparative to semiotics and hermeneutics of spectatorship in performance and documentation, and suggested that the act of interpreting is also a

361

Paula Orrell asks (op. cit., p. 19)”The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow”, in op. cit..

Benkowski: op. cit., p. 14

362

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performative and intersubjective event. Abramović makes a performative presence in documentation, and this is reflected in the ‘staged’ and the ‘documentary’ mixture of documentation. With these terms I have tried to approach the specificity of the documentary material around The Artist is Present, and characterized it in relation to a documentary desire, an archive fever, and a desire for transparency and proximity to the experience and the artist.

Throughout the survey I have weaved my way in and out of discourses concerning performance art and documentation, and different perspectives on whether documentation produces or compromises presence.

In performance art discourses the notion of presence appears with emphasis on different aspects; as a disappearance invested valuation, as a communitarian facilitation, as an aesthetics of liminality and transformation, and as the particularity of embodied artistic presence. I have addressed the interesting concept of reperformance as a form of embodied documentation and tried to understand it with some of the same terms that apply to other documentary and storage based media. The advantage is the correspondent media of the body which seems capable of reproducing without invalidating some of the core features that characterize the ontology of performance art; presence, bodies, space and time, and pointed out that the particular presence of a ‘body-­‐as-­‐subject’ seems to be a significant missing link.

Abramović’s current focus on reperformance and preservation takes part in some of the discourses about institutionalization and capitalization and how such processes affect the ephemerality of the genre and the subversive potential that some ascribe to it. As such discussions are often encountered in relation to performance art and documentation, I have chosen to include them into this thesis.

My intention was to research the notion of presence in performance art and documentation. I have done that by means of aesthetical analysis of some of the documentary material from The Artist is Present, and by mapping out some of the discourses that are prominent in the theoretical field. I have refrained from final recipes of producing performance documentation, from joining one side or the other in the double discourses for or against documentation, and from determining definitive reception modes. I have suggested that documentation is also an intersubjective encounter, performative rather than constative, and that it involves active spectatorship and interpretation. Abramovic has made an interesting case, especially in regard to different strategies and media of documentation.

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Hynes, Eric: Interview at Sundance Film Festival: “In the Presence of the Artist: A Conversation with Marina Abramovic and Matthew Akers”, Jan 28, 2012 http://www.sundance.org/festival/article/in-­‐the-­‐presence-­‐ of-­‐the-­‐artist-­‐a-­‐conversation-­‐with-­‐marina-­‐abramovic-­‐and-­‐matt/ Marina Abramovic Institute: http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org; http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org/get-­‐involved/donate

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MoMA Web

Symposium: “The Legacy of Performance”, June 2, 2010 (online: http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/108) “Marina Abramovic: What is Performance Art?”; “Marina Abramovic: Performance vs. Acting” (online videos: http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/96) “Marina Abramovic. Watch Behind the Scenes. Teaching the next generation” (http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/marinaabramovic/retreat_marina.html) “Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960” http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1100

Other Web: http://www.hornslethvillageproject.com/

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