Be My Mirror: Performance and the Moving Image BY ROSELEE GOLDBERG
Until recently, photographs have been the predominant form of performance documentation and a key reference for historians attempting to cobble together the more than one hundred year history of performance art. We’ve learned to ‘read’ performance photographs, using some of the traditional techniques of art history-training to nail down certain facts, including the place and time, the dominant ethos and aesthetics of a period, as well as the individual iconography within each artist’s oeuvre. Whether in black and white or color, in situ or staged, performance photographs freeze a broad swathe of information about a particular moment into a tight photographic frame. As such, these photographs, which are remarkable for their unusual imagery, have been a touchstone for making a case about the importance of performance in the history of visual art of the twentieth century, and for disseminating vivid and compelling proof of the highly performative nature of new media art in the twenty-first.
Nowadays, film and video of performance, both historical and contemporary, is readily available. Previously inaccessible archives of mostly unedited documents, known to a privileged few writers and researchers, are being transposed to DVD, and suddenly, an entirely new element has been introduced into performance studies, as well as into museum display. We now get to watch a performance in real time that was originally intended for a live audience. This shift in perception is much greater than one would at first think.
Take a series of startling black and white photographs of Joseph Beuys’ I like America and America likes me (1974) for example. We know well the sequence showing Beuys, his head covered in a blanket, in a confined space, in close proximity to a coyote. We know too the near legendary story that goes with it; Beuys, as symbolic representative of the invading European, dedicating a work to the American Indian (symbolized by the coyote) in recognition of the decimation of a people by ferocious colonial excursions. The resulting still image is a deeply poetic, even iconic one, given that it stands for so much history. Its dramatic impact is assured by the shape of Beuys’ body, bowed over a stick which he holds in front of him to keep the animal at bay, but also in apparent supplication, while the small animal, ears raised and on the alert, which seems to gain confidence as he studies the quiet apologist in front of him, is a touching counterpoint to Beuys’ poised presence. Now see the film, which was recently screened at an exhibition (Art, Lies and Videotape, at Tate Liverpool in 2003, and can be seen on various websites), and a very different picture emerges. Reverence is replaced to some degree by absurdity, as we watch Beuys arriving at J.F.K airport in New York wrapped in his signature felt fabric, being placed by assistants in an ambulance, which is later stopped on the highway by police requesting a permit, and being led up the stairs of a building in SoHo, where he is introduced to the coyote with whom he will share the small gallery space for seven days. In some ways the elegance and stark eloquence of the still photograph are lost in the documentary footage of the event.
Anna Mendietta’s super-eight films on the other hand, each only three minutes long and many shot by her then lover Hans Breder, in the 1970s, when the two of them were alone in the remote landscapes of Mexico or Iowa, are fleeting glimpses of effectively private performances. They show Mendietta lying naked in a shallow grave covered by foliage, or standing against a large tree trunk covered in mud and twigs, or floating, Ophelia-like, in a flower-strewn stream. In their brevity, these films provide just enough pointers to trigger the viewer’s imagination’about the artists motives and mindset at the time of the action, of the meditative quality of her silent activities, of her visceral response to surrounding air and earth. Rather than drain the still photographs of their iconic impact, Mendietta’s films reinforce them. When transferred to video and installed recently as large, two -thirds life size projections amidst photographs and drawings of live events (at Mendietta’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum), these silent films were the visual equivalent of a sound track: subtle and beautiful, they enriched the aura of the space in which the work was shown.
The extraordinary variety of performance on film and video must from now on be carefully examined and the material critiqued for the treasure trove which it is. Taken off the archival shelves, some will be seen as unedited documents, as in Vito Acconci’s earliest actions, while others, like Marina Abromovic’s or Bruce Nauman’s, of endurance pieces from the seventies, show the editing and framing of shots, close up and in panorama, taking place in the eye of highly sympathetic cinematographer s, whose conceptual empathy for the work make these compelling and riveting films in their own right. In a very real sense, they insist that the camera lens is the first witness to history as it is being made. Some films are mere fragments of footage, lucky-to-be found shards of a mythological work, as is Chris Burden’s less than thirty second document of his infamous Shoot (1971) in a Santa Monica gallery. In this heartstopping work, in which the camera initially jammed, we see a black screen but we hear the sound of the artist giving directions to the gunman as to where to stand and when to fire, of a shot being fired, and of a bullet casing falling to the floor. Only then does the camera start to roll and Burden is seen in a flash, gripping his injured arm just below a trickle of blood which emerges from the point where the bullet penetrated.
Other artists have used the camera as extensions of their body, as a third eye, or as a conversation partner, to brilliant effect. Dan Graham, rotating and wrapping the camera around himself, as though asking us to believe that the body ’sees’ the world around it through its continuous surface of skin, also created works in which he stopped and replayed time at twenty second intervals, so that the layering of present tense and past became a visual and visceral conundrum for all who entered his especially constructed spaces. Joan Jonas integrated the equipment of camera, monitor and tripod into her work so that hardware and software became the equivalent of a pencil, a note pad, or a mirror for the daily musings that would eventually become a live performance. In Jonas’ case, in which every performance contained the video of its own making, she further layered the real and mediated paradigm by having renowned filmmaker Babette Mangolte shoot the work from within the frame of the performance itself.
As more and more artists create performance or performance-related work, more live events are programmed for the great halls of newly built modern museums around the world, and viewers increasingly respond to the call to attend these proceedings, for the close proximity to the artist and the glamorous art-world milieu which they represent, the process of recording the live event and giving it an afterlife, has become a sophisticated affair. The video of a performance has become a carefully constructed independent work, whose quality and effectiveness will be measured by a new set of criteria; the live performance it portrays, as much as the abilities of the video team and the final hand of the artist in editing and determining the size, scale, and mode of presentation. As is already apparent in the work of artists as diverse as Zhang Huan, Patty Chang, Carlos Amorales, Jon Bock, Pipilotti Rist, Francis Alys, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Erwin Wurm, Kim Sooja, Andrea Fraser and too many more to mention, there are a multiplicity of approaches to capturing one-time live events for historical record and exhibition. Such material calls on curatorial expertise to separate the highlights from hours of drifting images, and to structure ways of presenting the work so that it yet contains the energy and intent of the original.
RoseLee Goldberg
Copyright July 2004
New York City
From Don’t Call It Performance catalogue-Don’t Call it Performance on view at El Museo del Barrio 11/7/04.