Documenting Performance Art

PERFORMATIVITY OF DOCUMENTING

I have a hard time agreeing with Philip Auslander's opinon that theatrical performance is as much a performance as the traditional documented performance. It doesn't make any sense to me that someone could create a false photo and call it performance art. A great example of this is Yves Klein's work, in which he staged jumping out of a window. Sure, he created the art-this doctored photo of him jumping from a window-but he did not actually DO it, so how is it performance art? How is this not simply photography? Many people create photos like this and it is always considered photography. I do not like his comparison to the Beatles, either. How is this argument relevant? Recording music is so very different from live performance that I have to shake my head at his obvious loss of arguement. Sure, the Beatles sang the song, but it was recorded separately; this is what recording is, recording each voice separately. But did they "perform" it? No, they sang their parts. They only "perform" it when they are live on stage, singing together and interacting with the audience. Performance is all about working with the audience! Another work I have a problem with is Vitto Acconci's "Photo-Piece". (below) The author himself says, "Acconci was making art out of nothing, an art without content." Honestly, I've never heard of such a dumb art concept. Basically all he is doing is thinking about how often he blinks. He is essentially becoming self-aware. This would be great for a science project or a personal interest piece, but how is this a performance piece? How is it art at all? If I decided to do this also, perhaps some kind of spin off of his piece, would I also be considered a performance artist? Because perhaps being an artist is easier than I thought...according to this reading I could basically think of something blane and boring, do it with a photographer watching and taking pictures, and then send it to artists and say I just did a performance piece. I understand that "art is in the concept" but some things people call art is ridiculous. Most especially when it comes to performance art, I think lines are being crossed the more people do it. Performance to me should always involve an audience. If it meant for the ending photo, then it is a photography piece, not a performance.

CONNOTATIONS

I like this article because it shows how performance art is reliant on the documentary image to "prove" that it happened, and how that image can be easily faked. Anyone can say they performed a performance art piece, when all they really did was stage a fancy photograph that makes it look like a performance was done. I like how "Smoke smoke smoke" as a live performance ended up with a low resolutioned poorly taken photo as a document, and the staged photo was well taken and in higher resolution; yet, the staged photograph "masked the party atmosphere". If it's a staged art work, it is going to feel that way. The live version of "Smoke smoke smoke" was apparently performed after the staged photo was taken for Connotations. If I had to pick one for myself, I'd say I like the staged photo myself, simply because it sounds like it has a commercial feel to it, with the higher resolutions and well placed and lit smoke. But once again, this is not performance art, but photography. If I went to a performance of "Smoke smoke smoke" I'd probably prefer to see the grainy and realistic photo because it would remind me of being there. I think the photo as a document has become too much of a focus in performance art and it is drawing us away from what performance art started out as.

Vito Acconci

I've decided to do my project on Vito Acconci because in past video classes I've seen his video work, and found him creepy and disturbing. When I saw him on the list I thought I'd see what kind of performance works he's done.

VITO ACCONCI

Vito Acconci, born in in 1940, started his art career as a poet. He is quoted in the book American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980, saying: "I think that when I started doing pieces, the initial attempts were very much oriented towards defining my body in a space, finding a ground for myself, an alternative ground for the page ground I had as a poet." Even though he had started as a fiction writer, Acconci crossed over to poetry after seeing a painting by Jasper Johns, which was a piece that started with something normal and forgettable and then was manipulated, and the art critic Kenneth Burke, who mentioned the importance of the viewer in any art piece and how they influence the outcome (Jackson). After this, Acconci chose to persue poetry, and in so doing, learned the value of space on a page. He become more interested in the space than the words, creating finally a piece called "DROP (ON THE SIDE/OVER THE SIDE)" which is a page of a thesarus, but with the words removed from the center, focusing the viewer onto the space within it instead of the words on the page. (pictured below)

(Jackson)
From his poetry, Acconci began moving more and more into performance works, feeling restrained as he did by the size of the page. As he says in The Believer, "I was starting to recognize a corner I was driving myself into: that all writing could do was refer to things that had already been written. I’m making the margin, but the margin of a book that already exists. I was having this exhilaration at, but at the same time horror of this recognition that I’d driven myself into the world of only books. This is a world of the previously written, and maybe I don’t have to add to it, maybe all I can do is measure it." Once he realized that writing was restrictive, he began branching out into performace, but still using his poetry. In one piece he read lines of the poem while following a person with a typewriter, who wrote what he said, and another time he did a poetry reading where he said one word at a time, crossing the room once per word read. More and more his art inched off the page and into the spaces of the world itself (Jackson).
One of Acconci's first performances that truly broke from poetry into real space was "Following Piece". In this work, Acconci followed passers-by in New York, without them knowing he was doing it. The idea was to show the relation between public and private space, since although he was on a busy street in New York, he was singling out one certain person, following their every whim and making it his own. He was in a sense, showing how each person, though part of the masses, has their own life, their own agenda, and their own separate thoughts and feelings which drive them. All these separate lives are usually lost in the bustle of crowds, but Acconci was pointing them all out again. He followed people every day for a month, recording the events through photographs and writings and then sending them to artists in his area (Zbikowski). (Pictured below)
(Jackon)
Acconci's work did not stop with "Following Piece." His many performances after it were all based around the tumultuous times, and many of his works were controversial. One piece, called "Pull" consisted of himself and a woman, and all he did was circle her while eyeing her, and she him. The idea was to reflect the rise of feminism during his era, and how the male figure is threatening to women even though he is just a man sexually drawn to a woman and it should be a normal thing to be expected (Larson). Works like "Seedbed" in which he masterbated under a bridge while speaking out loud his sexual desires about and to the audience, continued to observe the difference in public and private spaces (Larson).
Vito Acconci has proven himself to be an extremely versatile artist. Starting off as a fiction writer, branching into poetry, and finally deciding to observe different spaces, he has made himself into a well-known and respected artist. He now works with installation pieces and architectural spaces, making as he says, "alternate worlds." (Jackson)



WORKS CITED
1.Johnson, Ellen H. American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980. Westview Press, 1982. Pg. 232.
2. Jackson, Shelley. The Believer. "Shelley Jackson Talks with Vito Acconci." Dec 2006-Jan2007 ed. Sept 17 2008.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200612/?read=interview_acconci.
3. Zbikowski, Dorte. Ctrl[space]. "[text]Vito Acconci."
http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/d/texts/01?print-friendly=true.
4. Larson, Kay. The New York Times. "ART IN REVIEW; Vito Acconci -- 'Performance Documentation and Photoworks, 1969-1973'." 9 Feb 2001. 17 Sept 2008.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE2D71531F93AA35751C0A9679C8B63

A Life More Photographic

Throughout this article, an argument is slowly built that the modern digital "snapshot" has lost the indexical quality of photography, because the physical photo to paper has been replaced by digital pixels. In this loss, the snapshot has lost identity as a piece of artwork, and has become instead forgettable and unoriginal, generating a new identity as a type of "stock photo" in which tags have led to each new snapshot becoming just like another before it, a way of communicating between the picture creators through tags and comments rather than a new piece of art.

Personally I am seeing this as a bias from a writer that has studied photography in London College of Printing (1) and though he has done research in new media, he is older and out of touch with the changes in media that someone more my age would see. Growing up in this new culture, I see digital art as a new type of photographic media, not forgettable at all, and certainly not, like a stock photo, just like all the other digital snapshots before it. Rubinstein is seeing this new wave of photography from his basis in fine art photography and assuming that new art photography should be tied back to old art photography in order to have worth. While it is true that digital photography has lost indexical quality in the sense that physical light no longer reacts with paper, the camera is still seeing light to create a picture, whether there is a physical chemical reaction or not.
My further reasoning leads me to believe that why should this be necessary at all? In this new digital age, why can't the idea of the photo in the old sense die, and this new digital identity become a new way of creating art? Just because it is easier to snap a photo does not mean it is no longer art to create it. Anyone can pick up a pencil, but not everyone can draw, and the same goes for digital art. So there are a few people that have digital cameras just for the immediacy of creating memories...so what? There are many more artists that have digital cameras and are using them to create real art. In a few years there may not be such a thing as a dark room any longer. Does that mean that phototgraphy as an art has died? No, I say it has been recreated, and indeed, improved. Photography has always been on the rise with technology. It was a huge discovery in the past age when it was first created, and it took a long time for a photographer to learn how to use the bulky cameras. Does this make him more of an artist than currnet digial artists, just because it took him longer to learn how to use a camera? Certainly not! Technology has improved, and photography as a medium has changed, and evolved into something new and fresh. I don't think we can look at photography in the same way as we did before. This new medium is much more exciting and has many more possibilities than it did before, because we are no longer restricted by bulky new technology. Now anyone can create a picture, anywhere at any time, and art can take on a new face because more people now have access to it. Who knows where photography will take us in a few more years? A whole new, interactive art has emerged, and I think we are yet to embrace it properly.







Works Cited
1)London South University. 14 March 2008. 12 Sept 2008.
https://phonebook.lsbu.ac.uk/php4/curriculumvitae.php?id=4556&template=ahs&divtemp=aam