[The writing is a part of "Persistence of memory: Methods and Perceptions in “Documentation”- Sustainability of the ephemeral" by Samudra Kajal Saikia]
From the very early stage
when I started doing performance art in the '70s, the general attitude - not
just me, but also my colleagues - was that there should not be any
documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no
documentation.
-Marina Abramovic
Documentation has
continued to be an issue that plagues live art and ever since Peggy Phelan
declared it a ‘betrayal’ of liveness it has been much debated academically if
documentation can ever be representational.
Allan Taylor[1]
Let us
proceed with views of two contemporary practitioners living in Delhi, Inder
Salim, the artist-became-institute for contemporary performance dialogues in
the city and Amitesh Grover, Assistant Professor of National School of Drama
and a practitioner of performer along with technological interfaces. It was strongly put forward by
Inder Salim that, a performance is a performance and a video is a video. Both
are two distinguished mediums. Not even in ignorance they could be replaced in
place of the other.[2]
"Are we still thinking of documented images of Performance pieces
as authentic representations? I guess, video is video and performance is
performance, both are autonomous in their respective domains. We can indeed
randomly mix anything, but not at the cost of innocence."
Then we come to Amitesh Grover another performance
artist who argues for a parallel sense of "reality" set across by the
digital world in contemporary times, which might alter the notion of "live"
or "live-ness" that we have been perceived so far.
"The phenomenology of body has gone through a significant
change. Technology has come and completely displaced the sense of 'live'ness
for us. And this divorce in spatial dynamics has completely changed the way we
look at the live body. This kind of a live-ness is asking us why it is
important to be physically present and be live. Why is it still important to do
a performance where the performer is physically present."[3]
With Grover's views of the new 'live'ness, we shall see
the analysis of Sarah Bay-Cheng, in her "Theatre Squared: Theatre
History in the Age of Media", where she says about the new
"geography", "With the affordability and flexibility of digital
recording devices and ease of distribution (e.g., web sites like YouTube and
MySpace), moving images are rapidly becoming the primary currency for artistic
exchange."
Allan Taylor
deals with the same problem, "As we move further and further in the
digital age, the issue of documentation has become a more prevalent and
practical issue. With the ability to capture work on photo and film at cheaper
and easier levels than in the 1990s and with the introduction of social media
like YouTube, Twitter and Flickr, performance artists are expected to have a
wealth of ‘proof’ that their work has existed before approaching a producer or
potential funding partners. Applications from artists who choose not to
document is often seen as low priority and occasionally discarded completely.
This shift in the applications of documentation means that we must also be
forward thinking in how we utilize it"[4].
Among the
diversified attempts within the art practices it is established that the
technological devices: camera, internet, computer, graphics-tablet and so on,
have not remained mere tools of 'capturing' for re-visionary looks. But at the
same time, by large those are tools for documentations as well.
"Supposedly, a photograph is always already a record, as it appears to
survive something that can be called the ‘live’ event- standing in as a trace
or document of something that ‘was there’ (as Barthes would have it) but ‘is’
no longer. Does this way of thinking about photography limit our access to a
photograph as event- as a performance of duration- taking place ‘live’ in an
ongoing scene of circulation, re-circulation, encounter, re-encounter, and
collaborative exchange with viewers, reviewers, reenactors, re-performers,
re-photographers?”[6]
Now the slippery surface occurs where a documentation tends to become an
artwork, and a work holds the sensibilities of a documentation. The threat in
front of the conventional understanding of the 'live' is much more severe
today.
"In
1964, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould quit live performance in favor of perfecting
recordings of his performances. In an essay published two years later, “The
Prospects of Recording” (1966), Gould explained his decision by predicting that
in the next century, the live concert would reach “extinction.” Citing the
example of Gould, Sarah Bay-Cheng points, "The end of the live concert may
never come, but Gould’s comments are eerily prescient of contemporary
performance and its reliance on recording technology: first film, then video,
and, more recently, digital recording. Much attention has been paid to the
impact of these technologies on live theatre production and reception, but
little criticism to date has considered the impact of recording technology on
theatre history, on the archive in the making. And yet, moving images on
screens have become a dominant, arguably the dominant, mode of viewing
throughout our increasingly mediatized culture. From portable DVD players to
video iPods to cellular phones, modern culture communicates onscreen..."[7].
The
crossover of work-to-document and document-to-work, and the circumstantially
increased spectatorship of the media-governed 'double' of the work becomes
problematic for the practitioners besides of the immense possibilities brought
by the same. " Amid the usual hand-wringing over aging subscribers and the
loss of young audiences to mass screen entertainment, live theatre is now
threatened by its own media double"[8].
on the documentary as documentary segment Inder Salim put forward his
articulation to this author in a personal mail[9]: "Beyond the known
purpose and meaning of term, 'documentation', if we attempt to understand it a
little deeply, we may first know what is Ontology. "In philosophy,
Ontology is study of what exists in general, and how things are related to each
other. Are physical things more real than immaterial things, are physical
objects like shoes more real than walking, and what is the relationship between
shoes and walking. Yes, Ontological Materialism tells us how material of a thing
is more real than mental perception of it, but ‘ontological idealism’ suggests
that reality is a construct of human mind and consciousness than the material
which apparently holds it ".
Inder continues, "Well, this way we may say that
documentation is something which walks all along with the action(s) that occur
in 'the present' of a performance art piece. We are free to filter out what
looks like archival material later and what we remember as pure action. Something
was indeed destined to face evaporation
of sorts and something certainly accumulates
into our bones. We are residues of our own behavior and thought
processes at every moment of time. As performance artists, we have perhaps chosen to accept the fact that documentation tool , say a camera enters the
performance site and plays its roles like another spectator, active in its own
singular way. We do meet images later the way we meet the people who happened
to be part of that moment of Harkat/performance."
"Perhaps, time has come when we nit-and-rip all these terms and
categories with some love and rebel, to discover ourselves upon some imagined
carpet for a new flight. I don’t see documentation of a performance extraneous
to what is happening elsewhere. A camera is finally a tool to think body and
myriad subjects that surround it all the time. And above all, the body too is
finally a line-work between many constructs and materials that exists
effortlessly within the spinning realms of realities and fictions around it.
Likewise, we do occupy a space at a given point of time, and that time, that
time when we begin to notice the elements that go into the making of that
particular present, we automatically cross from one category to another through
a given porosity of walls between this and that. Different thinkers around this
subject have much lucidly explained the
exiting ‘order of things’ in a very beautiful and expressive language, and we
feel connected to their thoughts because the fluidity of thoughts never ceases
to flow, therefore, this present , river like."
So it is to be realized that when someone promotes the 'live' against
the 're-takes' or post-live 'documents', it is not that the post-live life is
ignored or opposed. By practice Inder Salim tries to keep himself much closer to the liveness of performance as body-art: by
keeping the stretched body as a measure of work, by sustaining the "nudity"
a device of protocol, reinstating the vulnerability of the socially and
culturally inscribed body, and at the end of all, putting much attention into
the act and the dialogue instead of the mise-en-scene (in its regular sense).
"His name is itself intended to provoke and reconcile: he changed
it from Inder Tikku to Inder Salim[10]" and here raises a
different mode of documented "live" which seeks severe attention.
At the same
time there is a considerable amount of efforts seen in the country where
artists are engaged into the scopophilia, the media-intervened 'live', and "document-turned-into
origin" sort of practices.
[to be continued in upcoming updates...]
[1] Allan Taylor, "Documentation
of (Mis)Representation: Towards An Archival Future of the Performative
Photograph"
[2] following a debate on the post-event
discussions through Facebook after the event "36 Hours". "Besides my little act on Modi Mask, Suhail ( if i remember the
name correctly ) did a wonderful poetic performance. He said, “ I reveal, I
take it back, I reveal , I take it back” He revealed his body in parts. It was
precise and genuinely poetic indeed, The organizer wanted to project the video
of it and have a discussion. Now, if it was not sufficient , how will the video
of it would be? Are we still thinking of documented images of Performance
pieces as authentic representations? I guess, video is video and performance is
performance, both are autonomous in their respective domains. We can indeed
randomly mix anything, but not at the cost of innocence." Inder Salim,
36hours, June 15 at 1:08PM.
[3]
Amitesh Grover as told to the author, inserted in the teaser on
"Understanding Performance", May, 2014, NSD Campus.
[4] Allan Taylor, "Documentation
of (Mis)Representation: Towards An Archival Future of the Performative
Photograph"
[5]
Rebecca Schneider deals with similar anxiety in her "Cut, Click, Shudder:
The ‘Document Performance’
[6]
Rebecca, continues: “… Why can a performance not take place as a photograph? We
are habituated, for example, to thinking of the ‘present’ as singular,
unfolding a linear temporality that is, to my mind, problematic. Given my
trouble with linear time, I have been very interested in the fact that
theatricality demands a simultaneity of temporal registers – the always at least ‘double’ aspect of the theatrical,
about which Gertrude Stein remarked that the “endless trouble” of theatre is
its syncopated time. To this end I have been looking for what Homi K. Bhabha
has termed “temporal lag”, and which Elizabeth Freeman has spun to “temporal
drag”. These tropes have lately afforded me a productive set of tools to apply
to the effort to articulate the longstanding interinanimation of live
media (such as performance) with media of capture, or media-resulting documents
or objects or images (such as photography).
[7] Bay-Cheng, Sarah, "Theatre
Squared: Theatre History in the Age of Media", Theatre Topics, Volume 17,
Number 1, March 2007, pp. 37-50 (Article)Published by The Johns Hopkins
University Press, DOI: 10.1353/tt.2007.0001
[8] Ibid
[9]
Through a dialogue in gmail: Thurseday, April
17, 2014 at 9:36 PM
[10]
GEETA KAPUR ( from 'The Art Cities of the Future' , 2Ist Century Avant Gardes.
PHAIDON )
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