Stills, Movement Images and Installations

Methods of creating order in work on and in the archive

Moving images in film and video – going by their superficial similarity here – are used in various functions to produce visual artefacts for the performance art archive. One possible method is the filmic representation of interviews, eyewitness accounts or the retrospective reflections of the artists themselves [9]. They allow the account’s expressiveness to be visualised just as they allow a dialogue situation as a form of contemporary appropriation of performance history to be made visible (as is the case in the above mentioned project by Heike Roms). At the same time they also rely on the authority of those who were present as the condition for the readability of historical events [10].

Film and video are used much more frequently to ‘record’ performances. I would like to come back to Babette Mangolte’s reflections – published here – and the differences she describes in work in photography and film. Photography, she says, “deals with how to compose a space,” [Mangolte 2005: 44] and it places the emphasis on the iconography of a performance work. It cannot communicate a concept of time or duration and necessarily suppresses the process character, one aspect of which is the relationship between performers and audience. Film, on the other hand, has to react with corresponding camera movements in order to be able to give an adequate impression of the movement in front of the camera. Mangolte elucidated this interaction in the context of working methods for her first dance film, the filmed version of Trisha Brown’s short solo Water Motor.

Movement is the essential connection between performance and film. For this reason, in Mangolte’s view, recording with a static camera does not give an adequate portrayal.

It is crucial for the readability of the audiovisual artefacts of a performance archive that the different media formats supplement and comment on each other. This brings us to the question of their arrangement in a presentation – of whatever kind – as contemporary appropriation, whether in printed book form or in the view of an exhibition. This arrangement must be able to portray contexts and movement, as the early example of chronophotography did, with individual pictures arranged and presented on panels in Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion [Muybridge 1979]. In this respect, film can also be understood as a special form of arrangement, portraying the duration and dynamics of a performance in a basically linear manner, even if it does involve montage, framing and changing camera perspectives [11].

Light is shed on the relationship between different forms of arrangement by another example from the work and comments of Babette Mangolte. Discussing Trisha Brown’s dance performance Roof Piece (1972/1973), Mangolte summarised the performance’s conception thus: “The dance tested the erosion of movement by transmission as in telegraphy. It was also about revealing the majesty and privacy of downtown roofs and the sculptural effect of its water towers.” [Mangolte 2007: http://www.babettemangolte.com/maps2.html]

The photo shown next to the cited text is one of those emblematic single images that have become inscribed in the history of dance and performance.

The urban space, its architectural peculiarities, and the broad range of the (camera’s) view dominate the picture and highlight the smallness of the figures. They by turn make something of the dimension of the dance performance visible. This photo creates a coherence of the performance space with a very striking pictorial quality. But the fundamental aspect of the performance’s experimental movement arrangement – the transmission of a movement across a great distance and what comes out of it – cannot be made visible. For this reason, Mangolte filmed three 16mm colour films from the start and the end of the transmission line and from a midway perspective, taking in very distant roofs, from a static camera position. With these films – compiled and presented in a certain order – it was possible to make visible what none of the viewers actually present could see: “There was no place from where you could see it all. Actually the dance piece could only be seen in retrospect through recording and replay.”     http://www.babettemangolte.com/maps2.html

How could the three fragments of the performance view subsequently be re-arranged in connection with one another; how could they be arranged so that they are readable in different ways?

A film version exists on DVD [Brown 2004], composed of parallel excerpts of the three films and corresponding with the length of the actual performance (approx. 30 minutes) – i.e. using only a third of the entire film material. Although this conveys an idea of the performance’s conception, it fragments the movement sequence. No image of a transference movement can be created on a linear film strip.

In the section Image as Icon of the above mentioned exhibition Art, Lies and Videotape, Mangolte arranged the three films and the much-cited photo of Roof Piece as an installation. The three colour films are projected alongside each other on three screens while on the opposite wall of the exhibition space there is a print of the photo as well as contact prints of the photos that were taken in series on the same day.

In the exhibition Live Art on Camera, also referred to above, Mangolte tried out other aspects of arranging photographs as an installation. The title of the installation Looking and Touching refers to two ways of approaching photographs.

Video and performance artist Joan Jonas, whose work formed the focus of the 2004 exhibition After the Act curated by Barbara Clausen, has pointed out the special possibilities of presenting artefacts from the performance archive in an installation context:

Installations of film and photographic works now constitute an independent format of artistic work in museums and exhibitions. The arrangements of archive materials discussed above rely on them. They not only allow viewing from different perspectives and connections to be made between different media formats. Close up or from a distance, the different formats in the space can also make visible the questions addressed here.