Starting points: The photograph as a performative object

Cindy Sherman, Play of Selves 2007

I've decided I should start blogging on my PhD research for two reasons. 1) To use it as some kind of 'mind dump' where I can lay all my current thoughts on the page and 2) so I can contextualise my current thinking and see where my project is going and – ultimately – what my question is (and anyone who is thinking of embarking on a PhD, be prepared for long sleepless nights wondering 'what is my question?').

So, as a brief introduction, when I was doing my MA I became interested in the issue of documenting performance as many live artists believe that documentation is never representative of performance. Performance exists in 'liveness', whereas documentation is removed from performance – it becomes something else; a different medium altogether. I was all for this at first, going on a "Liveness YAY" kick, that nothing could reproduce the experience of liveness and so in the first term of my second year, I set out to start an essay basically discrediting photography as a means of capturing performance, based on paper by Eriksson (1999), which talks about the advantages of using black and white photography as a 'reminder' of the performance.

However, the deeper I delved, I realised the relevant question was not 'if' we could document liveness: this question has been bandied to and fro, debated endlessly and I feel it's a very cyclical argument with very few 'breaks' in which progress has been made. Furthermore, because of the increasing practicality of documentation to the performance artist – nowadays, for funding applications or proposals a funder or producer will expect documentation as a bare minimum to support the proposal –  the question is, "If we start from the position that liveness cannot be captured by documentation, then how can we represent our performances in a different way? What – if not liveness – are we trying to capture when we produce documentation?"

Genital Panik, Valie Export

I then focussed my efforts on the still image and why photography might be more effective at capturing performance than another medium. On a personal note, I've found film to be quite limited and this is noted by Bay-Cheng (2007): film often inverts the performer-audience relationship, by making performance something that is 'peered into' by the viewer, rather than 'performed outwards' from the performer. In terms of angles, euphoric sense of audience 'togetherness' and instantaneous moments, it's all a bit lost in the moving image.

I realised that the reason this is the case is because film aims to be 'documentary' – that it aims to represent performance as it 'really happens'. However, performance in the first instance does not exist in the real. Performance exists in the Lacanian symbolic and imaginary orders, and if we look at life as a literal 'self' then life would be the non-performative – the unobjectified action. If performance mirrors life – or an aspect of it – then it immediately relates it to the Imaginary order through Lacan's mirror stage. So if we are to represent anything that is 'real' about performance through documentation, then the documentation must also be symbolic or imaginary.

So why photography? Well, live art and photography have been intertwined from its earliest origins. When Chris Burden nailed himself to a VW Beetle on the Venice Speedway in California for Trans-Fixed (1974), only a few people across the road ever witnessed this, but the photo document has since surpassed the performance as the performing object. On a similar note, Valie Export's Genital Panik (1969) is now a famous image, representing her performance in an adult cinema in crotchless trousers where she asked the men in the audience to experience 'the real thing' rather than the sexualised objectification of the woman on the screen. The documentation of this was taken years after the event, but survives as the only remnant of this intervention. In both cases, the document has become the performance, invoking this sense of presence-in-absentia (Jones, 1997) that spreads the word about the performance, validates its existence and re-performs the action each time the document is viewed.

Furthermore, the lines between performance document, performance and performance photography are similarly blurred. For example in Cindy Sherman's series Untitled Film Stills, she performs a series of different characters or selves for the camera and, though they are untitled, we impose a sense of narrative, place and context onto the image. The photograph performs these messages to us. Cleverly, Sherman also chooses to name them 'film stills', perhaps instilling a suggestion that the image is a freeze-frame of something that was once in motion – that this is a 'snapshot' from a overarching character performance. Jeff Wall also uses photography as a method of documenting through performance by re-performing to camera. In Mimic (1981), he re-stages for camera an encounter he witnessed on the street, where a man pulls slanty eyes to his girlfriend after passing a man of Asian origin. Likewise, in Volunteer (1996) Wall volunteered at a community theatre for a month, sweeping the floor every evening. He 'rehearsed' this action over and over until it turned into a gesture and then documented this 'performance' of cleaning the community theatre after everyone had gone home.

More questions begin to arise about the purpose of the document: whether the photo document is a performance in itself or if it is an embodied trace of performance that has been. 

Photography is an inherently theatrical medium because it theatricalises the world it inhabits by making the everyday an object for study. Auslander also talks about the 'theatrical' in his 2006 paper on the performativity of performance documentation, recognising that images have a performativity of their own – perhaps that they are even a forum for performance.

Difficulties in capturing performance and motion in photography are described by Auslander as trying to capture 'lightning in a jar' – that 'flash' of inspiration that occurs only once. In the same way, Mary Ann Doane (2006) says that the instant must disappear in order for movement to emerge, and it is here that the tangible ability of photography to compress past and present into one image where a sense of performance arises. It is the suspense, the state of flux and the suggestive gesture of the still image that bestows something performative onto the photographic object.

Baudrillard talks about photography of the 'hyper-real': that it is a phantom onto which we render a subjective interpretation, usually one that is much more grand than the original circumstances of the photography. But perhaps this is the photography's main thrust of performance: that it can stage the symbolic and act as an intervention on the real – something that opposes what we know is physically possible, or takes this 'reality' and scrutinises it under the camera to highlight the absurdity of the everyday.

The still image as a document has been fraught with problems since photography first emerged. However, revising photography with this new application – still image as performative object – means that we don't have to aim for a 'real' or 'authentic representation' when we document by photograph. We are instead looking for the fantastic, the unusual or the hyper-real. We are looking for theatricality and – most importantly – a performance of context, place, space and meaning

'Automythography'

After going to see Curious' World's End at the Chelsea Theatre, I was really taken by Leslie Hill's use of greek mythology to bring to life various aspects of the performance, and it reminded me of various myths that I have wanted to create/perform/do something with at some point in the future. One of these was realised at the BAC Freshly Scrathced festival last November, where I used the myth of Cassandra to delve into fortune telling, and to explain how a lot of our current existence is actually based on trying to predict the future.

With this in mind, I wanted to create a past-present-future trilogy using figures from different mythologies. I am especially interested in Angus Og - the Celtic God of Love. He was conceived in a day and escaped death by his father's hand by asking if he could live by the river for a day and a night. But because in Celtic, there is no difference between 'a day and a night' and 'day and night', he was allowed to live forever.

I feel there could not only be a performance, but perhaps a photography project in this...

A postcard to my younger self

I thought I'd share this beautiful song, which sounds like something I wish I'd written from this point in time to a younger Allan

Digital traces

Anyone that knew me while I was studying my MA would know that documentation is a hot topic for me. I think it's because, personally, it extends beyond performance; documentation of live art represents the same debates that we have around documenting our own lives. We take photos, we write diaries (or blogs), we film things - all in a bid to capture the traces of life that we will never re-live or experience again. In many ways, I think documentation reminds us of how precious and fragile the passing of time is, and also how we frame these documents in order to remember the past times and to echo some kind of rememberance in the face of our mortality.

I have to say that I am a terrible documenter. And I think sometimes this is through choice. The reason being that occasionally I think life is meant to be lived in this manner, with only memories left at the end rather than bits and pieces of paper and film and photo. However, some nights I panic. I panic and I think about ll the ordinary, average days that I can't remember and have faded into oblivion and I want to reclaim all of them. I want to be able to recall any given date at any given time and yet my memory fails me. I just have flashes of things that seemed so poignant and alive at the time. I am saddened by the limited capacity of the brain and wonder what happens to all those lost days.

Recently, I went to the end of my sent e-mails and they started in 2002. I re-read a few choice ones and I laughed - remembering that day I thought I had forgotten, but was stored somewhere in my cranium. And then suddenly I thought about all the tweets I'd ever made, or comments on Facebook, or on threads on internet forums and I thought about all of our digital traces embedded in the internet. It's like we all have an ethereal digital soul floating around in the binary world and yet, if technology keeps up to date with the ability to archive this, it seems a bit more concrete and solid than the memories that pass us by.

Whether we like it or not, we're all scattering our digital traces through the world every day and, by default, it seems a more consistent way of documenting one's life than any other.

Contractual obligations

For some reason, when I have been talking with other artists recently, the subject of audience participation has come up quite frequently. I always think participation is a delicate issue and, as an artist, one has to negotiate this by an implicit contract before the audience members enter the space.

Firstly, do the audience know what they're getting into? If the answer is no, the participation becomes a difficult task. It may, at times, be forced, abrasive and unwanted for some members of the audience who want to be 'passive'. In fact, would they even visit the event if they knew participation was involved? The more informed they are, the more enthusiastic - and less surprised - they will be by participation.

Secondly, is it clear what they have to do? If it isn't, or if it is too complex, the audience are going to be hostile towards participating. Keeping actions limited to clear, concise interactions lessens the personal risk factor of involvement.

Thirdly, are the audience safe in your hands? An audience needs to be reassured they won't be the victim of ridicule or rejection if they participate, so open, encouraging approaches are much better than fixed ideas and gestures aimed to victimise the audience.

The house where the universe ended

I've recently developed a bizarre interest in quantum physics, largely because it is a science that seems to explain how we still know relatively little about this universe. I mean stuff we can actually touch or see only accounts for 0.4% of the total stuff that makes up 'space'. And we don't know this because we can see the particles of this 'other' matter. We know it because of the effect it has on the matter we can see.

Anyway, as a consequence I've recently been researching the ultimate fate of the universe and there are three ways that we could go. The one I found most interesting was 'heat death'. It is the theory that everything in this universe will eventually die – every planet and every star will in billions of billions of years eventually die out leaving a 'dead universe'. What I found so fascinating about this idea is that it is so... Comforting. That there is a shared fate for everyone and everything regardless of how big you are or how much energy, or even how long you exist for.

But don't let it start you on a depressive spiral about how futile everything is. Instead, I really find it's something that should be embraced. Live, do what you have to do and know that no matter how many books you write, songs you sing or pieces you paint, one day they'll be part of a world of lost knowledge. Then breathe a sigh of relief, and stop being so hard on yourself.

Pleasure and Pain

A student e-mailed me the other day with some questions about my artistic practice, which is always really great in the way that I could talk about myself and what I do forever, but it's always better when someone invites that dialogue. Anyway, one of the questions was about live art and why people would choose to cut themselves under the bracket of 'performance art' and defy natural instincts of not cutting oneself.

Before I go any further, I wouldn't like to say I am advocating self-harm. I have never judged anyone for their desire to self-express inside or outside of the context of 'art', BUT I proposed those artists who are actively engaged with pain do so because the aesthetic of performance art lies within this dilemma. Live art's aesthetic lies in that relationship between pleasure and pain in order to achieve beauty.

My conclusion was "To bring it to a more down to earth everyday level, when you really love someone it is the best feeling in the world and yet it hurts so much at the same time. That is what true beauty is all about - feeling pleasure and pain simultaneously."

For some reason these words came back to haunt me tonight when I listened to 'Summer In Siam' by The Pogues. It is a song that reminds me of someone I loved. It is a song that reminds me of falling in love on a warm summer's day. And yet the lyrics simply state "When it's summer in Siam, then all I really know is that I truly am in the summer in Siam." It makes my heart ache because of the simplicity of the words mixed with the memories.

I have avoided listening to this song for such a long time until tonight. And I felt it: it was a small reminder of what love is, what beauty is. An indescribable joy mixed with a pointed melancholy. The pleasure that seems to fill you with mindfulness, with wanting to be right there in that moment, and yet seems to ache only in your heart.