PHOTOGRAPHY & PERFORMANCE

Author(s): MARK ALICE DURANT

Source: Aperture , Summer 2010, No. 199 (Summer 2010), pp. 30-37
Published by: Aperture Foundation, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24473596

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 THEME-VARIATIONS
■•THEME-&- VARIATIONS

I will be shot with a rifLe at 7:45 P»M. I hope to have some good photos. —Chris Burden

PHOTOGRAPHY

PERFORMANCE

BY MARK ALICE DURANT

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 There is something iconic about the images of performance from The goal of much performance and Conceptual work of those
the 1960s and '70s. The photographic documentatiotn of fabled years was the dematerialization of art: an attempt to separate
Happenings and other actions—by the Fluxus artists, Viennese art from precious materials and pretentious institutions so that it
Actionists, Nouveaux Realistes, and individuals associated with could exist in more pure, less compromised forms. Photography
these groups, either closely or by influence: Joseph Beuys, Chris was understood and utilized as a functional medium meant
Burden, Marina Abramovic, Carolee Schneeman, Ana Mendieta, to produce an affectless record, without the taint of style or
Vito Acconci, Yves Klein, Adrian Piper, and others—may strike us authorship. That photography was a distinct discipline with its
today like rarified chronicles of some lost tribe's obscure rituals. own history and aesthetics was rarely considered; for many,
Wounded arms, conversations with dead rabbits, leaps into the it was seen simply as a means either to document transitory
void, self-inflicted bite marks, profane orgies, scrolls unfurling actions or to separate the viewer from direct engagement with
like viscera from the recesses of the body . . . such actions an object. (It is of course important to distinguish this utilitarian
have gained a prolonged life through photographs; they are now mode from the performance images by photographers such as
burnished in the imaginations of artists, critics, and art historians, Peter Moore and Dona Ann McAdams, who well understood the
to the point that at least some of them seem to be permeated by cultural significance of performance art and the necessity to
an unmistakable air of the sacred. document its events, personalities, and trends—and who did so
Photography serves performance in many ways: by saving the with rigorous creativity.)
ephemeral instant from disappearance, by composing a moment As curator Ann Temkin has pointed out, t
at its narrative and symbolic zenith, and sometimes by banishing and influence of Marcel Duchamp's 1917
from the frame all that may have distracted the actual witnesses transmitted through the images Alfred Stieg
of the event. "original" urinal. Beyond photography's documentary utility, its
Chris Burden's 1974 riff on Christian martyrdom, Trans-fixed, ability to distill and embellish
lasted barely two minutes at the Speedway Garage in Venice, reason photographs are essenti
California, and was seen by only a handful of people from across performance. Perhaps the days
the street. The image of the artist's body splayed over the roof of the past, but the documents of
a Volkswagen bug—to which Burden's hands had been nailed by from visual marginalia to images
an assistant—represents the masochistic excesses of body art for today's artists as the canvases of Jackson Pollock and Pablo
of the 1970s and has come to symbolize the violent ethos of its Picasso were for earlier generations.
time. Burden's subsequent ironic presentation of the hand-piercing So if photography has affected performance, how has per
nails in a glass-and-velvet vitrine, as in a saintly reliquary, has not formance affected photography?
diminished the legend or the conceit of extreme self-sacrifice in A performative attitude may be seen in the widely diverse works
the name of art. of Nikki S. Lee, Vik Muniz, Steven Pippin, and Katy Grannan, to
Ana Mendieta's performances seem to reference pre-Christian name just a few contemporary artists
iconography. Although the body and the earth were the sites of as if the word should be framed by
her actions, she relied on photography to frame and transmit her they embody an attitude toward pho
ideas. We are invited to imagine her actions as they unfolded, but by Conceptual art than by the line
in effect, for most of us today, the photograph is necessarily the Lee's case, it is impossible to peel a
prevailing work. Much of Mendieta's performance imagery is so its documentation. Whether h
straightforward and seemingly absolute that we do not envision conventional standards is more than
how or under what conditions they were made: it is as if the image quality of her pictures is es
came into existence as an apparition, or a kind of virgin birth. The establishing identity through the m
reality, of course, was less miraculous; just outside the frame of The distinction between the docume
Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul; 1973), for example, Mendieta's and of actions staged specifically for the camera is often
fellow graduate students at the University of Iowa were chatting deliberately blurry. Indeed, taxonomy begins to fail us as we
and keeping an eye out for security guards, while her teacher Hans
PAGE 30:
Breder danced around with camera in hand, taking multiple shots. PAGE 30: Chris
ChrisBurden,
Burden,Trans-fixed, Venice,
Trans-fixed, California,
Venice, April 23,
California, 1974;
April 23,1974;
PAGE 31: Melanie Bonajo, Furniture Bondage: Hanna, 2007; OPPOSITE:
Breder later said of this process: "Ana's work translates beautifully PAGE 31: Melanie Bonajo' Furniture Bondage: Hanna' 2007; 0PP°S'TE:
Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960.
into photography. The original action was not always riveting, but
Burden: © the artist/courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York; Bonajo:
Bonajo; courtesy the artist/P.P.O.W Gallery, New York; Klein:
the process of photographing transformed the work." © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS),© 2010
NewArtists
York/ADAGP, Paris/Metropolitan
Rights Society (ARS), Museum ofMuseum
New York/ADAGP, Paris/Metropolitan Art, ofNew York/Art
Art, New Resource,
York/Art Resource, New York
New York

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seek to peg certain works under identifying rubrics: the elaborate (An Aid to Melancholia) (1998), was purportedly created over
tableaux imagery—curator Jennifer Blessing terms it "performed the course of about a year, during which the artist traveled by
photography"—of Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Robert and Shana public transportation in England and Germany while wearing
ParkeHarrison, Roger Ballen, and Cindy Sherman, among others, dark glasses equipped with a pump system to deliver a constant
for example. But clearly these photographers' works have more stream of tears trickling down from beneath the lenses. The work
in common with both the legacy of fine-art photography and the was actually photographed (by Newman's collaborator Casey Orr)
narrative concerns of theater and cinema than with the visual over the period of a week, but by utilizing varying cameras and
archive of performance art. photographic materials, and supplying the work with evidentiary
Parallel to the growing ambition and ubiquity of narrative- texts in which the dates, locations, and circumstances are
scenario photography over the last couple of decades has been fabricated, the artist creates a seemingly larger performance, in
an incremental (but significant) shift away from the "heroic the vein of those by Adrian Piper and Bas Jan Ader. Here, the
gesture" in performative imagery toward something more relaxed document is unreliable evidence, a masquerade on at least two
and playful. Most contemporary artists do not appear to aspire counts: this is neither a woman truly weeping on the subway nor

unclear whether the arrangement of violation. Yoko Ono's Cut Piece comes
objects within the frame is the result of the artist's intervention to mind (a Happening f
or if he is just the luckiest and most sharp-eyed flaneur in the members were asked to jo
world. His shuffling of products in the supermarket, where cat- clothing with a pair of sc
food cans balance on watermelons, for instance (Cats and performances, in which viewers were invited to interact and even
Watermelons' 1992), is sweetly hilarious, showing just how violate the artist's body with an assortment of implements. By
easily the categories of the prosaic world can be undermined contrast, with Manchot's works, although we may experience a
and reimagined. And the humbly elegant Extension of Reflection visceral reaction to the intrusion, the event is enacted solely for the
(1992), which depicts the transient marks of a bicycle's tracks camera and not for a live audience: the viewer is thus never personally
through a pair of puddles, is astoundingly economical in its implicated in the breach of the artist's physical boundaries,
evocation of things both earthly and celestial. To paraphrase Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the body does not occupy
Intrigued by the canonical status that many performance images space like an object or thing, but instead inhabits, animates, or
have attained, and by how these often chaotic and impromptu even haunts space. In Erwin Wurm's "one-minute sculptures,"
events had been formalized through photography, Hayley Newman the body performs or experiences a slapstick rebuke of personal
created a faux archive—she calls it an "aspirational portfolio"— space and social etiquette. Wurm cloaks his Conceptualism
for a nonexistent performance career. One action, Crying Glasses behind the deadpan nature of the snapshot in pictures such as

no. ! (■)<■) aperture / 33

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 Looking for a Bomb (2003), in which a kneeling man reaches Joseph Beuys is said to have consciously drained his per
deep into another man's pants; Inspection (2002), in which a formances and installations of color in order to distance his work
woman sits with a friend in a restaurant while stoically enduring a from real life, desaturating his actions to make them more like
man's head thrust deep into her blouse; and the self-explanatory black-and-white photographs. Beuys understood the photographic
Spit in Someone's Soup (2003). These rude interventions in the document not simply as a necessary footnote to the main event;
everyday are part of Wurm's larger project Instructions on How to rather, the image had the talismanic authority to transmit his
Be Politically Incorrect. disembodied power through time. Nonetheless, viewing the
If all we saw of Lilly McElroy's work was a single photograph of iconographic record of 1960s and '70
a young woman frozen in midflight, we might construe it as simply a sneaking sense that if you wer
an embarrassing moment of drunken excess. But the cumulative absent from a hallowed event—y
effect of her series / throw myself at men (2006-8) transforms water because you were too young, no

landscapes in the social-humanist tradition before deciding to in the humor of dispirited futility
spend more time in front of the camera than behind it. Crediting and Martha Rosier, Bonajo's Furnitu
Roman Signer's "action sculptures" as a catalyst, Lamson now presents an array of young women, trussed to the saddest
works in sculpture, video, and performance, as well as photography. assortment of generic domestic items. Unencumbered by any duty
His performance-inspired photo-series Intervention (2007-8) could to the heroic, yet still capable of provocation, Bonajo's photographs
be described as documents of temporary urban earthworks. As if present a cruel joke, as if Ikea had promised salvation but delivered
to convince us that the world is full of these lesser epiphanies if we only unrelenting boredom. We laugh, and then an uncomfortable
would only open our eyes to see them, Lamson's simple and direct shudder of recognition chills our bones.©
photographs allow us to imagine stumbling upon random poetic
THIS PAGE:
collisions of materials, such as a helium-filled balloon strategically THIS PAGE: Ana
Ana Mendieta,
Mendieta,Imagen de de
Imagen Yagul (Image
Yagul from
(Image Yagul),
from 1973; 1973;
Yagui),
OPPOSITE, TOP: Melanie Manchot, Gestures
Gestures of
of Demarcation
Demarcation II,
II, 2001;
2001;
placed to blind a surveillance camera; a ladder made of twine and
BOTTOM: Lilly McElroy, I throw myself
myself at
at men
men #14,
#14, 2008.
2008.
bananas, scaling a tree; a discarded mattress pinched into a bald
Mendieta: © Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection/courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York; Manchot: courtesy Robert Goff
tire like an elderly man squeezing into his old military uniform. Gallery, New York; McElroy: © the
Gallery, New artist/courtesy
York; Thomas Robertello
McElroy: © the artist/courtesy Gallery,
Thomas Robertello Gallery,Chicago
Chicago

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 no. !(■)(■) aperture / 35

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 THIS
THIS PAGE,
PAGE,
TOP: Erwin
TOP:Wurm,
Erwin
Inspection,
Wurm, 2002;
Inspection,
BOTTOM: Gabriel
2002;Orozco,
BOTTOM:
Cats and Watermelons,
Gabriel Orozco,
1992; Cats and Watermelons, 1992;
OPPOSITE: William Lamson, Intervention 11/14/07, 2007.

Wurm: courtesy Xavier Hufkens, Brussels: Orozco: courtesy the artist/Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Lamson: courtesy the artist

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