(Re)Performance at the Guggenheim
Rodrigo Tisi
Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Photo from Performance on Nov. 26, 1965. Abramovic will re-perform this work at the Guggenheim in October.
Re-presenting performance, a symposium that took place at the Guggenheim in New York in April 2004, was organized by the self-proclaimed "grandmother of performance art," Marina Abramovic, to discuss what could be a painful and productive episode in the development of performance art: the idea of re-performance.
The starting point of the symposium was Abramovic’s project Seven Easy Pieces, scheduled for the Guggenheim’s rotunda in October this year. Abramovic will re-perform seminal works from the golden era or performance art, the 1970s, by Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, Bruce Nauman, Gina Pane and herself (one will be an old work, another will be a new work). Abramovic was sure to get permission from each of these artists before she re-performs their work, thus avoiding copyright issues.
What motivated the project? Abramovic is wondering whether a piece of performance art can be treated in the same way as the script for a play or a musical score: something that can be re-performed and re-interpreted by anyone with the right training.
This is a difficult idea to swallow: a panel with performance theorists Peggy Phelan, Amelia Jones, Rebecca Schneider and Jane Blocker discussed the founding importance of ephemerality and transience in performance art?two central characteristics that seem to be under threat from the idea of the re-performance of old works.
One might say that a performance can be re-enacted but not repeated. The response of the audience is what makes performance an experience of the moment. With Phelan’s idea of a unique moment and Jones? theory of a representational body, the most important aspect of performance art is considered to be a tension between audience and performer. As a result, acts and experiences have always been more relevant than their documentation. Photography of a performance raises many problems: which is the correct point of view to capture the performance? Who decides the angle and the distance of the composition of the photograph? Do these photographs belong to the performer or to the photographer?
Museums and galleries can’t preserve performance. They can keep an archive with traces that talk about what had happened, but many layers are omitted. The white space where these photographs are normally displayed de-contextualizes the space of the original performance, so the meaning and the reading of them change. A photograph somehow demands a different level of consciousness than a performance, and a different kind of viewer-participation.
But performance artist and panelist Tehching Hsieh showed how documentation and performance are not necessarily antithetical. In one of his legendary one-year performances in the early 1980s, he lived in a single room and took a photograph of himself every hour for 365 days. The documentation here is inherent to the performance and also indispensable for our understanding?no one could watch a performance for a whole year.
Many performances are only known to art history because of a single photograph, however grainy or blurred, and no matter how it might fail to completely capture the original experience of the performance. Still, it’s better than nothing, isn’t it? RoseLee Goldberg, the curator of The Kitchen in the 1970s and a historian of performance art, is all in favor of a more rigorous and imaginative documentation of performance art. Perhaps re-performance is another, more radical part of this process, melding the idea of the archive with the importance of physical presence.
In the early days of performance art there was resistance to the idea of documentation, since the presence of a camera would rub up against the sacred fleeting moment of the event. But just as that pious attitude has faded, so too might the resistance to the idea of re-performance, and the merger of performance art with theater. There is a kind of brutal unsentimentality in the prospect of re-performance: performance art must admit that it is already a codified genre, without the marginal charm it once had. It’s not a young discipline any more; it has to decide how it wants to grow up.
Abramovic’s move suggests a certain level of impersonation (but not in the traditional sense). The re-performance is problematic and much more complex than a regular performance. The repetition of these seminal performances will address aspects of the original artist, and the context of the original piece. But set on a stage in Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda, the context will also be completely different. While there are vast realms of possibility opened up by the idea of re-performing classic works, there is also a risk of ending up with a product that betrays the original. Abramovic’s proposal is controversial because it might expand the boundaries of performance art into uncomfortable, but certainly fertile territory.
