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