Does it matter that we now

experience historical
performance works through
documentation such as
photographs or written
accounts?
Jolanta Cyrek

Performance:
Interdisplinary medium
reflected the anti-commercial values of mid-century alternative
cultures
ephemeral form, difficult to exhibit,
defies the status of artwork as an object,
time-based work of art, often engaging the viewers,
undermine mimesis, the primary communicative means of
traditional visual art.

Kazuo Shiraga, Challenging Mud,

1955

Four basic elements of performance

Time,
Space,
Performer's body,
or presence in a medium,
Relationship between
performer and audience
Presentational and
representational means.

Carolee Schneeman, Meat Joy, 1964.

Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Light/Dark, 1977.

The documentary account - photography.

Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Light/Dark, 1977.

The written account.
Abramovic/Ulay are sitting on their heels opposite each other, lit by
only two sources of light. The background is dark. They look at each
other and slap each other, at first slowly, then faster and faster, until
one of them stops after twenty minutes. The Performance was
presented to the public in 1977 at the Kunstmarkt Kln, but was
repeated once more a year later in Amsterdam to be captured on
film. If feelings of rage or aggression played any role in this almost
ritual action, they are mechanised in this Performance, demonstrate
the chain reaction of an increasingly violent quarrel. If one of them
hits out, the other does so as well, and there is no stopping until
they are exhausted or one of them interrupts the reaction by gets
out of the "game". Interesting is the psychological component that
people pay back in kind and even increase the force of the blow.
That also happens in this Performance: the slaps become harder,
more violent. Thus everybody can rediscover himself in this typical
human reaction.
Lilian Haberer

Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Light/Dark, 1977.

The documentary account - video.

Summary:
Documentary of performance art became over time a
part of the performance itself as medium-specific notion
Without the documentary performance art ceases to
exists, is erased from the history like it never happened
It modifies and changes the understanding of the
performance art: the present aspect is collapsed and
deferred when confronted by its pre-recorded past
Because performance documentary evolved along the
medium of performance therefore the transfiguration that
performance undergoes through videos or photographs
can be viewed as a continuation of the organic, engaging
characteristic of the medium.

Bibliography:
Goldberg, RoseLee 1979. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present
(London, Thames and Hudson)
New Media Encyclopaedia online. [accessed on 16.03.2013]
http://www.newmedia-art.org/cgi-bin/show-oeu.asp?ID=ML002608&lg=GBR
Perry, Gill. Wood Paul 2004. Themes in the Contemporary Art (New Haven
and London, Yale University Press).
Schimmel, Paul 1998. Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object,
1949-1979 (London, Thames and Hudson).
Wagner, Anne 2000. Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of
Presence, October, Vol. 91: pp. 59-80.