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ON THE PERFORMATIVITY OF DOCUMENTATION AND PRESERVATION
OF VIDEO INSTALLATIONS |
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Chapter
1 Performance art and
video-documentation Throughout the 1970’s, video was frequently used to document performances. As a relatively young technology (at least in terms of its accessibility and practical applicability), it was considered an excellent tool for capturing spontaneous actions and long-standing events. Film recordings had as a disadvantage that the material was expensive and the post-production time-consuming. In contrast, video was capable to deliver instant images and real-time accounts of what was taking place. However, whereas video had become a popular medium for artistic experimentation around that time (in terms of closed-circuit installations, medium-specific experiments and alternative television), performance videos did generally not qualify as works of art or performances in themselves. Artists applied video to document the event in different ways; sometimes in the most neutral way possible, recording with a static camera from a single angle, but in other cases more creatively, considering it as a possibility to reflect upon their work, recording from multiple angles, using more documentary-style editing techniques and voice-overs. However, in this context video appeared in any case as the “poor cousin” of performance art, having no characteristics of a performance by its own. This view, too, is based on the idea of a strict distinction between a primary event and secondary, supplementary documentation, in accordance with the assumption that performances are fundamentally unrepeatable events that cannot be documented without taking away its performative qualities.5 Scholars like Amelia Jones have challenged this perspective by stating that there is a “mutual supplementarity”: not only does documentation supplement the event that has taken place, but the event is also what supplements documentation.6 The event cannot be accounted for as event if there is no documentation, but the other way round, documentation cannot exist without an event having taken place. This approach, in turn, has recently been re-evaluated in an essay by Philipp Auslander, in which he states that is not even necessary for an event to have actually taken place for documentation to function as documentation. Auslander demonstrates that there are cases in which the only space where the performance occurs is the space of its documentation.7 The author refers here to the theory of performativity as formulated by John Austin, which is still an important frame of reference when discussing the notion of “performance” and “performativity”.8 For Auslander the real performative event is the act of documentation, functioning like the performative utterance “this is a performance.”9 At this point, Auslander’s reflections could also have led him to a series of additional conclusions about performance documentation, tied to the possibility of repetition (or the movement of continuous supplementation) being inherent to the notion of “performance” as such. In this scenario, the notion of “performativity” would not be determined by the idea of a fundamentally unrepeatable event, but by the possibility of an event being repeated. But how can a performance be repeated (whether in documentation or as re-enactment) without being changed into something different?10 The answer is: it cannot. This does not imply, however, that, if repeated, it would be changed into something totally different: we can still recognize a work of art as the work-as-performance and the work-as-re-enactment, for instance. This recognizability indicates that repetition does not have to be identical (which is impossible anyway), but has to be a form of repetition that includes the non-identical. Formulated in this way, there can even be repetition across media: a photographic document or video recording has enough similarities to the event it repeats to be recognized as the same thing. Simultaneously, this does not mean that there is no distinction between the two – instead, there are important differences on the formal, structural and experiential level. Talking about this inherent possibility of repetition necessarily includes the acknowledgment of dissimilarities in experiencing different media. For philosophers like Derrida, who also refers to Austin in his essay “Signature Event Context” (1972), iterability (the possibility of non-identical repetition) is exactly what constitutes the performativity of an event.11 In other words: an event has to include at least the possibility of being repeated and/or documented, otherwise it cannot be accounted a performance, as giving an account of something already includes repetition. Every repetition of a performance – whether in documentation or as a re-enactment -- is a re-iteration of that very sentence “this is a performance.” In that way, documentation becomes part of the performance, as it is a performative process in itself. Hence, video recording does not appear as the “poor cousin” of performance art any longer, but as a process that is co-constitutive of the event, rather than being a mere residue, an objective remainder. |