V

Looking at the photographs of the happenings staged by Allan Kaprow and Robert Whitman in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we see an undistinguishable mix between participation and spectatorship. Participation was what the work was all about. In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, Lygia Clark developed a type of performance that refuses spectatorship and was only about sensorial participation. The only way to produce convincing documents to represent Lygia Clark’s ideas behind her work is to combine photography and text.[17] Because her work was about being inside a sensation and not external to it, the image produced by the photo or film camera, which is always outside the body, misrepresents the work. It is about a sensorial change inside the body that literally defies representation, but can be written about.

Now in view of the importance of the image as a locus for the publicity of the work, the rapport background-context / foreground-performance is still as important as ever, but the aesthetics of the 1970s was about bridging art and life so the background was part of the work. Currently it the opposite is the case. For example, just look at the publicity photos of the Matthew Barney performance and film work used by the Guggenheim Museum New York for his retrospective in 2003. There is no context. Matthew Barney’s definition of his work is contained in an iconography that avoids all contexts.

Today you could say that performance photography is used for selling the work as an art logo and is unable to represent anything that helps understand the work. But in the 1960s and 1970s I think photography could at least represent the importance of the architectural design or displacement where the actions or events took place. It could also show the use of public space and the by-standing audience that was central to performance at the time. The photograph could represent how to look at the performance. A performance work like War by Yvonne Rainer was staged on two floors in 1971 in the NYU Loeb Student Center. Photographing War could make the complexity of the space and the multiple choices of the spectator totally obvious with only a couple of photographs, while filming it was enormously difficult. Why? Because the photograph doesn’t necessarily imply spectatorship but it can represent the act of looking, while the moving image always presupposes a spectator. The spectator who watches the film is not necessarily in the same position as the spectator who was present and watched the actual performance.

For the filmmaker who wants to film performance, the big question is how to go about it? Documents versus staged reconstitution, direct address, and Brechtian distance versus immediacy. Is the “mise en scène” of the performance “a must” when producing a valid document? My own experience says yes: anything is better than a straight, so called objective camera position, to produce a film or a video that could pass as a valid substitute for being there if you yourself couldn’t be there for the “real thing.” “Mise en scène” means staging as well as setting and is used in film and critical studies to address the fact that both directing and aesthetics matter. But the term particularly applies to performance art, as performance is one of the few genres that is not based on stereotypes and preset codes of spectatorship and image making. That is why performance films made by filmmakers who do not understand the performance work per se are so often irrelevant. The filmmaker must bring the perspective needed to comprehend a performance work that is ground breaking in its principles. He/she should not apply the conventions of his/her own medium to filming the performance. Therefore he/she has to invent new rules for filming the performance work. Camera movements could mislead by highlighting the performer’s own movement or by canceling it out. Other decisions like the use of long shot or close ups can produce very different version of the same moment in the piece and in certain cases totally subvert the work, bringing value from the commercial and advertisement world to a performance that is at odds with those values. You end up with slickness instead of authenticity.

In the 1970s, performance was anchored by a specific sense of time that now in 2005 we have lost, but studying works from that era can reconstitute that sense of time.[18] Every period has a set of assumptions that are somehow so familiar that they are unseen by the participants and the viewers because they are perceived as the norm. But norm changes and the filmmaker documenting or reconstructing performances several decades later has to make obvious those unseen set of assumptions that justify the work and somehow explain them to an audience from another era.


September 2005–January 2006