Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Performative Work on the Performance Archive

 

 

 

Which documents and statements, traces and media artefacts can the history (and histories) of the performance arts use? What are the guides – scenarios, notes, musical scores, photographs and moving images, descriptions and reviews – on which re-enactments can (and would choose to) be based?   

With her project Seven Easy Pieces, first shown in the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2005, Marina Abramovic proposed a way to interpret this history anew and differently. She perceives her re-enactments of earlier performances by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, VALIE EXPORT, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and herself as a form of re-appropriation which should follow certain rules.

 

I feel the need not just to personally re-experience some performances from the past, but also to think about how they can be re-performed today in front of a public that never saw them. In this manner, I can open a discussion about wether we can approach performance art in the same way as a musical composition. Can we treat the instructions of the performance like a musical score – something that anyone who is properly trained can re-play? I also want to open a discussion about how performance can be preserved. What is the right way of documenting it? How can it be shown in museums after the event? And in what kind of conditions can performance be repeated?
[…]
By performing 'Seven Easy Pieces', I would like to propose a model for re-enacting other artists’ performance pieces in the future:
     Conditions
     Ask the artist for permission.
     Pay the artist for copyright.
     Perform a new interpretation of the piece.
     Exhibit the original material: photographs, video, relics.
     Exhibit a new interpretation of the piece.
This proposed new model could give performance art, which started as a transitory movement, a stable grounding in art history. It would lead to better dialogue between different generations of performance artists and would guarantee a clearer position for performance as a more artistic discipline. [Abramovic 2007: 3]


Yet the question remains of how to take up re-enactments in the performance art archive. Babette Mangolte composed a 95-minute film from Abramovic’s seven, seven-hour long performances, which will now circulate the art world both as a secondary archival artefact and as an artwork in its own right. The method borrowed from oral history of recording interviews with eyewitnesses and artists can also be regarded as a form of performative work on the archive, i.e. on a collection of statements and archival artefacts. Heike Roms makes reference to this in connection with her project on the history of performance art in Wales.[2] In her work she highlighted this performative aspect:

What distinguishes my oral history from other, similar projects is that the conversations were staged as public events in front of a live audience, often involving witnesses of the works in question […]. By doing so, I also wanted to call attention to the particular manner in which oral history produces historical evidence, and how it performs itself as a scene of evidence. [Roms 2008: 75]

 

 

 

[2] The project What’s Welsh for Performance – Performance Art in Wales is documented in detail at: www.performance-wales.org 

 

 

Artikelaktionen
Weiter: Current Considerations for (Future) Performance Archives Pfeil nach rechts