Lecture VI
Schneider, R. (2008). The Document Performance. In: Brine, D. The live art almanac.
London: Live Art Development Agency. pp. 117-120.
Reason, M. (2006). Documentation, disappearance and the representation of live
performance. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 8-27
Phelan, P. (1993). The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction.
In P. Phelan (ed.). Unmarked: the politics of performance. London: Routledge, pp.146- 166.
Auslander, P. (2006). The Performativity of Performance Documentation. PAJ 84. pp. 1-10.
Schneider, R. (2001), Archives Performance Remains. Performance Research 6 (2). pp.100–
108
CONCEPTS
Liveness
Documentation
Ephemerality
Archive
Doumentary/Theatrical
THEORISTS
Philip Auslander
is an expert in the field of performance studies. He has widely published on aesthetic and cultural performances as diverse as theatre, performance art, music, stand-up comedy, robotic performance, and courtroom procedures.
Rebecca Schneider
Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, teaches performance studies, theater history, and theories of intermedia. She is the author of Theatre and History (2014), Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011), and The Explicit Body in Performance (1997).
Peggy Phelan
is an American feminist scholar whose work is primarily concerned with the investigation of performance as a live event. While most of her initial work was rooted in feminist post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, her more recent work is concerned with media, photography, and visual arts. Her most widely recognized essay is "The Ontology of Performance," originally published in Unmarked: the politics of performance (1993).
ARTISTS
Yves Klein
(28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962)
was a French Conceptual artist with a wide-ranging and highly influential practice. The artist cofounded the Nouveau Réalisme movement in 1960, the same year he produced his hallmark work Leap into the Void. Klein’s blend of mysticism and performance art contrasted with the Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art sensibilities of the time.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
is an American artist and filmmaker. Her work combines art with social commentary, particularly on the relationship between people and technology. Leeson's work in media-based technology helped legitimize digital art forms. Leeson's work has as its themes: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. Her work grew out of an installation art and performance tradition, with an emphasis on interactivity.Her projects explore technology in digital media and science. Leeson was the first artist to launch an interactive piece using Videodisc, a precursor to DVD (Lorna, 1983–84), as well the first artist to incorporate a touch screen interface into her artwork (Deep Contact, 1984–1989). Her networked robotic art installation (The Difference Engine #3, 1995–1998) is an example of her tendency to expand her artwork beyond the traditional realms of art.
Tino Seghal
is a Berlin-based artist who constructs situations that challenge conventional art-and-spectator relationships, focusing on the fleeting gestures and social subtleties of lived experience rather than on material objects. Sehgal's practice has been shaped by his formative studies in dance and economics, and uses the museum and related institutions—galleries, art fairs, and private collections—as its arena. He refuses documentation of his work through photographs, film, or video—mediums that would reify his work's ephemeral situations and result in ancillary material products that could potentially be bought and sold.
DARC Collective
is an interdisciplinary collective of five international artists working on alternative and collective modes of documenting performance. Tara Fatehi Irani, Ernst Fischer, Holly Revell, Manuel Vason and Jemima Yong bring together their mixed backgrounds and expertise in performance, visual arts, photography, writing and documentation. Through practice-based research projects, DARC is exploring the notions of documentation and the archive in performance. They approach the documentation of artists’ work as a creative act in itself, not solely meant for preservation purposes. They produce collective and admittedly incomplete records of live events. Through a process of creative alteration and transformation they aim to reflect an essence of the live experience and its often neglected aspects. Their practice is a collaborative process, a dialogue, a hyper-attentive presence, a responsibility and an art form of its own. (LiveArtUK)
Chris Burden
(April 11, 1946 – May 10, 2015)
was an American artist working in performance, sculpture and installation art. His controversial works of art often involved putting himself in physical danger or extreme discomfort. Though he continued performing for much of his career, his later works often consisted of kinetic sculptural elements and mechanized toys.
Tehching Hsieh
is a performance artist. Beginning in the late 1970s, Hsieh made five One Year Performances and a Thirteen-year Plan, inside and outside his studio in New York City. Using long durations of time as context for the work, making art and life simultaneous, the first four One Year Performances made Hsieh a regular name in the art scene in New York; the last two pieces, in which he intentionally retreated from the art world, set a tone of sustained invisibility. His pieces are explorations of time and of struggle. A little after 1999, he declared he was no longer an artist. He has however, continued to give interviews to an art audience.