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Chapter
7 Conclusions In contrast with Sacrifice and Ritual, The Unified Field was presented in an almost identical manner in both exhibitions. Although the exhibition space itself had a different size, which slightly influenced the distance between the speakers, for instance, one can still say that the work consistently appeared as the same work, with no room for any doubt about this fact. Which is to say that The Unified Field was not that variable yet, and it almost seemed as if its performativity was not so much based on the possibility and necessity of variation, but on other characteristics, as for example on the way the work stimulates the bodily movement of “spectator”, who actually becomes a “performer” within the setting of the installation. This is actually the way the “performativity” of installations is generally described, as they seem to ask for participation in a similar way as many of the performances realized in the 1970’s, blurring the boundaries between active performance and passive spectatorship. Simultaneously, the fact that the work thematically addresses the idea of non-identical repetition, i.e. the intertwinement of sameness and difference across cultural contexts, makes that the idea of iterability remains present as a kind of conceptual “background noise”. Even more so, as the trajectory of the audience is literally determined by the repetitive patterns of differentiation and unification the work lays bare. In itself, The Unified Field is already an open system or “infinite totality”, and as such it can be experienced. In this way, The Unified Field remains committed to a notion of performativity that is based on the possibility of repetition, while, at the same time, it translates this notion to the level of concrete experience. In that respect, one could say that it is exactly in multimedia installations like these that iteration becomes evident as a characteristic of the work, becoming manifest as immanent repetition and transcendent variability. Hence, the performativity of this type of installations can be described in a two-fold manner: 1. by the performativity of their experience, as they are processual and time-based, facilitating audience participation and laying out choreographies as well as trajectories, and 2. by the fact that they are iterable beyond their initial occurrence, as they can be repeated in the future. Any attempt to confine the work to a certain state must always reach a limit. The performativity of installations challenges preservation in quite fundamental way – not only due to the idea that they are tied to something as unstable and intangible as “experience”, but also considering the fact that variability is often part of what they are. What conservators ought to preserve is the very possibility of variation. That is, preservation, aiming at the possibility of re-presentation, should facilitate variation, understood as changeability, without loosing a sense of what type of event the work actually is. And to analyse the event, it is necessary to have special attention for the way the work functions, what actually happens in the situations it occurs. In this way, analysing an installation in the context of preservation does not imply a fixation of an unchangeable concept, meaning or essence, but an understanding of its dynamics. It means to unravel its history from the perspective of temporal change rather than a-temporal stability. With
many thanks to Peter Bogers for providing important insights into his work,
and to my colleagues Gaby Wijers (conservation specialist) and Annet Dekkers
(curator) for their critical comments and the interesting discussions I had
with them, which mark the differences between their professional backgrounds
and mine, as I am writing from the perspective of art history and theory,
rather than preservation and presentation. |
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ON THE PERFORMATIVITY OF DOCUMENTATION AND PRESERVATION
OF VIDEO INSTALLATIONS |