Histories of Performance Documentation

Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices

Gabriella Giannachi, Jonah Westerman, Gabriella Giannachi, Jonah Westerman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317291848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Histories of Performance Documentation traces the many ways in which museums have approached performance works from the 1960s onwards, considering the unique challenges of documenting live events. From hybrid and interactive arts, to games and virtual and mixed reality performance, this collection investigates the burgeoning role of the performative in museum displays.

Gabriella Giannachi and Jonah Westerman bring together interviews and essays by leading curators, conservators, artists and scholars from institutions including MoMA, Tate, SFMOMA and the Whitney, to examine a range of interdisciplinary practices that have influenced the field of performance documentation. Chapters build on recent approaches to performance analysis, which argue that it should not focus purely on the live event, and that documentation should not be read solely as a process of retrospection. These ideas create a radical new framework for thinking about the relationship between performance and its documentation—and how this relationship might shape ideas of what constitutes performance in the first place.

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PART I

Interviews

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1

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Stuart Comer, Chief Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art; Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives; and Ana Janevski, Associate Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art

In conversation with Jonah Westerman, April 2015

What is the earliest presence of performance at MoMA?

Michelle Elligott: At the museum’s inception, Alfred Barr, the founding director, wanted to include not just painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, but also film, typography, design, theater arts, etc. The museum’s first brochure, which he wrote, was basically a mission statement. To me, this is the DNA of the institution. So, as he annotated by hand in his copy of the brochure, we had drawings and prints in 1929; architecture came along in 1932; photography in 1932; industrial design in 1934; film in 1935; and last but not least, theater and dance in 1940. In 1939, Lincoln Kirstein donated his personal archive, mostly about the history of dance, to MoMA, and that created our dance archive. By 1944, the dance archive was promoted, and it was given the status of a full curatorial department. That only lasted for four years, until 1948, but MoMA had a curatorial department called the Department of Dance and Theater Design even at that time. They were collecting items such as photographs of Isadora Duncan; watercolors of her dancing; photographs of Martha Graham; even a whole collection of American Minstrel performances. Additionally, in the 1940s, the museum did all sorts of radical programming with what we might now call performative elements. As early as 1941, we mounted an exhibition of American Indian Art. Native Americans were invited to create a sand painting in the galleries while museum visitors looked on. During World War II, the museum undertook programming in support of the war effort, and we held an exhibition of a diorama of battle troops, on the floor, and there was a ramp that people would ascend to gaze down upon the museum staff repositioning the ships to reflect the current progress of the battle. Because of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, this participatory activation of the museum space was very much in the air.

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Ana Janevski: The founding idea of the museum was that MoMA should encompass all arts, e.g. film, architecture, photography, painting, sculpture, including theater and dance. This inclusive definition of modern included for a short period a dedicated department for Theater and Dance. Afterwards, artists were invited to participate in different events or even exhibitions. In 1960, Jean Tinguely designed a self-destroying assemblage Homage to New York, with help from Bell Labs scientist Billy Kluver, which performed in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden. In 1969–1970, Franz Erhard Walther’s First Work Set (1963–1969) was activated in the museum’s lobby as part of the revolutionary exhibition Spaces. Performance and dance as live artworks in the museum happened later. Artists like Yayoi Kusama or Guerrilla Art Action Group used performance as a subversive element in the 1960s and 1970s. This ran concurrently to what was happening within the Summer Garden program, almost peripherally, and included different kinds of events—music, dance, and performance by artists like Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, John Cage, and Marta Minujin. MoMA photographers documented some of these, and the documentations are in MoMA’s archives. Peter Moore also documented them. You start to wonder: What belongs in the archive? What’s the documentation? Does this kind of documentation have a market value? Where should it sit? We are still discussing what this documentation is in relation to the subjects’ practice and to the status of photographers as producers.

How do you begin to work through those issues? Is it just that every case is different?

Ana Janevski: Yes, every case is definitely different, there is not one protocol or template, and sometimes it goes beyond documentation. Take the Simone Forti Dance Constructions that MoMA has recently acquired. Dance Constructions are set dances based around ordinary movement, chance, and simple objects like rope and plywood boards. MoMA acquired the rights to perform the dances and a set of instructions, which we developed over the course of two years. The resulting constellation of materials—ranging from teaching videos to sketches, historical photos, notebooks, and recorded interviews—extensively document previously performed versions and, crucially, offer precise instructions for future dancers. In addition, we would like to organize workshops with groups of dancers and teachers to communicate the dances to new generations of performers and participants. So far there are only a few dancers, Sarah Swenson and Claire Filmon among them, who can teach the Dance Constructions. It is about a kind of preservation carried through person-to-person, a set of instructions, a network of conversations and relationships.

Another example in terms of presentation of the work is James Lee Byar’s 1001 Mile Paper, which is a performable sculpture that Lucinda Childs performed in 1965 at the Carnegie. There are written instructions and James Lee Byars instructed her one afternoon. The work had never been shown, never been performed again. As it is part of the MoMA collection, we invited Lucinda to look at an exhibition copy of the work. It was not possible to manipulate the work, and we did not want her to redo the same work. In the end, she instructed her dancer and followed James Lee Byars’s instructions, which just said: make a square, make a circle, make whatever you want, so just interpret the score itself in order to do it. We have many examples of works like this, and there is some kind of institutional responsibility to display them, which is challenging and opens a space for creativity in terms of documentation, preservation, conservation, and transmission.

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How has the institution understood that responsibility over the years? The word ‘performance’ was only added to your department’s title in 2009—before that it was the Department of Media, right?

Ana Janevski: Right. The Department of Media was established in 2006, by Klaus Biesenbach, and it changed its name to Media and Performance Art Department in 2009, to better reflect the department’s exhibition and acquisition strategy in collecting, displaying, and preserving time-based art. Together with Sabine Breitweiser, who succeeded Biesenbach as a chief curator in 2010 until 2012, and now with Stuart Comer, we have been paying close attention to artists working across media, from performance to moving image, and all of the many permutations in between, and the way they reshape artistic practices, both contemporary and historical. As I mentioned before, historical performances, they often pose important questions in terms of their legacy, permanence, or assimilation into the existing institutional context. There are differences in how artists deal with history, and the institution should remain pliable to accept that for an ‘intellectual gift’. As much as the term performance is often under discussion and it encompasses many diverse art forms, it is sure that live art has an impact on the institution. It alters the time-space coordinates of the exhibition apparatus, it shifts the relationship with the public, it brings another idea of authorship, it challenges the established economy, and it exposes the museum’s human infrastructure and relationships. Working in a Department of Media and Performance Art, and in a relatively young department compared to the others within the museum, my colleagues and I are facing those issues on a daily basis.

Stuart Comer: For a long time, I have not seen a hierarchy between a work and the archival document, particularly in performance-related work. Is a photograph an archival index or an artwork? I would prefer to keep that rule totally indeterminate and let it be free and circulate throughout all kinds of platforms, exhibitions, publications, websites, films. Photography is very promiscuous, and so is performance, and so is film. I would not want to ring-fence them too much. We do, however, need to identify what value they have in terms of constructing narratives that are useful to positioning time-based arts centrally in the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I do not actually see a radical difference in terms of the indexicality of a photograph of a dance or a performance, versus a Jackson Pollock painting or any other number of ways that movements are traced and recorded. But we ascribe a very different set of values to all of those different kinds of images, even though they all bear a direct relationship to direct action. I think the performativity of images now, particularly photographic and filmic images, is so rampant, and so fluid and exciting, and I think that will also change, particularly for museums, for publishers, for magazines, etc., as we go further and further into an online world. People like Charles Atlas or Babette Mangolte, who were conventionally seen as documentarians, are now seen emphatically as artists. Those films and videos and photographs now have a very different status and function in the art world. And so that raises a whole other set of issues, like, can they be accessioned or made part of a Collection with a capital C? Should they be? Would that give them more gravitas or would it inhibit their use? Because the moment something like that becomes part of a collection, it becomes subject to nine-month loan request deadlines, and that arguably inhibits its ability to enter the world. Whereas if it is part of the archive, anybody can see or hire it. So, I am very interested about just how the museological structures that have always regulated these things can be questioned and changed, and just create more and different kinds of access.

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Very practically, then, in terms of the museum’s own bureaucratic structures, what is the difference between an object’s being a document of an artwork or being an artwork in its own right?

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Stuart Comer: Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing is as much a performance as is a Dada cabaret. That moment in conceptual art was a watershed moment for performance, especially in New York. It shows how an image can be an archival thought, it can be an action, it can occupy different registers of time. The same work takes multiple forms throughout its history. A Babette Mangolte photograph can be very fluid in terms of whether it stands on its own as an image, or as a document of a particular moment in time—whether it is seen as a means of illustrating, for lack of a better word, a dance. It is going to have different kinds of use value, depending on the context of presentation. She and Charles Atlas were particularly visually articulate about how to shoot performance and dance. It does transcend mere documentation. It was a very heavily researched, very thought-through dialogue with the artists who were performing, particularly around the Judson period. It went beyond intermedial, it was just a really fluid moment when the boundaries were totally being dissolved. So why would you want to fix one value on any of those images? At the Tate, Catherine [Wood] and I were working separately as the curator of film and the curator of performance, but we were working together on a number of projects, and we saw a lot of value in thinking about performance through its mediation, because we work in a museum. I think the infrastructure of every single museum is still entirely based on paintings and objects. In terms of how the registers are constructed, in terms of how art handling is organized, in terms of how exhibition schedules are organized—generally in three- and four-month blocks, rather than like a two-week festival, marketing as well, just all of the different systems in museums are still largely organized around things that are not actions or events, but things that are circulated. So the more that these images that may be part of the archive become part of that system, the more museums need to challenge them, but also be responsible to them. So there is a kind of paradox, I guess. The other thing I’ve been interested in for a while, and I have not really had time yet, is to really focus on the audience as an archive. I think the encounter with the work and how that is articulated and documented through an audience experience is really important, and, certainly in the area of social media, it takes on different possibilities. I know Rhizome recently started a project on how to archive social media as well, and I think this is something a lot of museums will start to take seriously. There has been a lot of academic writing about the importance of gossip as an alternative historical record, and I think social media is critically important. Its intentions may be diametrically opposed to the artist’s intentions, or to the curatorial intentions of a project, but I think it’s still a pretty accurate capture of how people encounter something. Capitalism is about movement, it’s about circulation. Our museums are beginning to reflect that logic much more. I remember when I first started at Tate and the head of the collection said if it was on a wall, and it moved, then it wasn’t art. Now, we’re defining so many art forms by their ability to change over time.

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Michelle Elligott: For me as an archivist and art historian, everything is about context, it is about the package. A single item might be important and compelling, but it is really meaningless when you rip it outside of that sort of wrapper. It is really about the systems that these documents communicate and travel within. To me, that is where the history is made and where it resides. And so, in response to requests to transfer items out of the archives into the MoMA collection, I reiterate: let’s be careful we don’t miss the point here, because then we’re going to lose all of this really important context. Think of the Van Abbemuseum documentation center, or the Reina Sofía—Manolo Borja-Villel’s conceptualization of the museum space as the archives of the commons, the idea of reclassifying the museum collection when possible, erasing the classification of ‘work of art’, and reclassifying everything as archival. From what I understand, Whitechapel Gallery, Van Abbe, and Reina Sofía are really using the archives to think about how objects mean different things over time, and how this affects their mission. I am interested in the life of objects, and the life of ideas, and I think the archives, the documents held there, can help stimulate those dialogues. As far as the archives of the future, over the last couple of years, I have been investigating and attempting to establish an electronic records archive. We just selected a platform, and we will transfer all the letters, the emails, the checklists—all of those documents that are now being born and managed digitally. First, we need to aggregate these materials, because no one is taking care of that yet, and they are at risk of just disappearing if a staff member leaves the museum or they get misplaced. Once we get that under control, then I would like to start accessioning certain materials, such as audio, video, and photographic documentation of museum events and performances, from the digital asset management system, or DAM. The DAM is an internal access vehicle, but it is not a preservation tool. The electronic archive system that we are using helps us automate the preservation. So, going forward, that will be a repository for permanent records. Incidentally, it is the same system employed by the UK National Archives. With our mission, research and education go hand in hand, and the archive plays into both of those. MoMA was integral to creation of the historiography of twentieth-century art. The archive is key for that understanding, as well as for tracing the future evolution of art and society.

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