Does it matter that we now experience historical performance works through documentation such as photographs or written accounts?

Jolanta Cyrek

Performance:Interdisplinary mediumreflected the anti-commercial values of mid-century alternative culturesephemeral form, difficult to exhibit,defies the status of artwork as an object,time-based work of art, often engaging the viewers,undermine mimesis, the primary communicative means of traditional visual art.Kazuo Shiraga, Challenging Mud, 1955

Four basic elements of performance Time, Space, Performer's body, or presence in a medium, Relationship between performer and audience

Presentational and representational means.

Carolee Schneeman, Meat Joy, 1964.

Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Light/Dark, 1977. The documentary account - photography.

Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Light/Dark, 1977. The written account. Abramovic/Ulay are sitting on their heels opposite each other, lit by only two sources of light. The background is dark. They look at each other and slap each other, at first slowly, then faster and faster, until one of them stops after twenty minutes. The Performance was presented to the public in 1977 at the Kunstmarkt Kln, but was repeated once more a year later in Amsterdam to be captured on film. If feelings of rage or aggression played any role in this almost ritual action, they are mechanised in this Performance, demonstrate the chain reaction of an increasingly violent quarrel. If one of them hits out, the other does so as well, and there is no stopping until they are exhausted or one of them interrupts the reaction by gets out of the "game". Interesting is the psychological component that people pay back in kind and even increase the force of the blow. That also happens in this Performance: the slaps become harder, more violent. Thus everybody can rediscover himself in this typical human reaction. Lilian Haberer

Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Light/Dark, 1977. The documentary account - video.

Summary:Documentary of performance art became over time a part of the performance itself as medium-specific notionWithout the documentary performance art ceases to exists, is erased from the history like it never happenedIt modifies and changes the understanding of the performance art: the present aspect is collapsed and deferred when confronted by its pre-recorded pastBecause performance documentary evolved along the medium of performance therefore the transfiguration that performance undergoes through videos or photographs can be viewed as a continuation of the organic, engaging characteristic of the medium.

Bibliography:

Goldberg, RoseLee 1979. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London, Thames and Hudson)

New Media Encyclopaedia online. [accessed on 16.03.2013] http://www.newmedia-art.org/cgi-bin/show-oeu.asp?ID=ML002608&lg=GBR

Perry, Gill. Wood Paul 2004. Themes in the Contemporary Art (New Haven and London, Yale University Press).

Schimmel, Paul 1998. Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 (London, Thames and Hudson).

Wagner, Anne 2000. Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,October, Vol. 91: pp. 59-80.