Archaeologies of Presence

Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, Michael Shanks, Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, Michael Shanks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136458026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Archaeologies of Presence is a brilliant exploration of how the performance of presence can be understood through the relationships between performance theory and archaeological thinking. Drawing together carefully commissioned contributions by leading international scholars and artists, this radical new work poses a number of essential questions:

• What are the principle signifiers of theatrical presence?

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• How is presence achieved through theatrical performance?

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• What makes a memory come alive and live again?

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• How is presence connected with identity?

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• Is presence synonymous with 'being in the moment'?

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• What is the nature of the 'co-presence' of audience and performer?

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• Where does performance practice end and its documentation begin?

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Co-edited by performance specialists Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye, and archaeologist Michael Shanks, Archaeologies of Presence represents an innovative and rewarding feat of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Archaeologies of presence

Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye and Michael Shanks

This book is concerned with the location and speculation toward experiences and performances of presence. Posing the question of how, when and by which processes phenomena of presence are produced and received, this volume presents key analyses of the conditions, dynamics and dialectics that shape presence in – or in relation to – acts of performance. In so doing, this book approaches the theatrical performance of presence as both subject and framework. Addressing experiences of being there – and being before – the critical analyses of presence framed here engage firstly with dynamics fundamental to theatre, reflecting on relationships between actor and witness, as well as practices and concepts of ephemerality, liveness, mediation, and documentation. In turn, these theatrical practices offer lenses to approach and analyze acts of presence in which phenomena of self, other and place are defined.

Here, too, the critical examination of presence is approached in the convergence of performance theory and archaeological thinking. Occurring in relation to situated acts, ‘presence’ not only invites consideration of individual experience, perception and consciousness, but also directs attention outside the self into the social and the spatial, toward the enactment of ‘co-presence’ as well as perceptions and habitations of place. Presence implies temporality, too – a fulcrum of presence is tense and the relationship between past and present. In this context, the examination of presence and its performance is linked to inscriptions of the past into the present, even as performance theory may consider the cues and prompts in which a future sense of presence may come to be enacted. Here, then, speculations over a presence once performed (theatrically or socially), are confronted with questions over how we create relationships with that which remains. In this process, performance theory and archaeological thinking may productively converge in engagements with uncertainty, in documentation, and in the analyses of signs, remains and traces of dynamic and processual phenomena that once occurred in the consequences of an act, in recognition of otherness, or in the performance of specific configurations and ecologies of position, relation and place.

In turn, while relationships between performance theory and archaeology provide lenses to examine notions and processes of presence, so the concept of presence has also come to assert itself as a significant figure and question within these different fields.

In performance theory and practice, presence is both fundamental and highly contested. In theatre, drama and performance, debates over the nature of the actor’s presence have been at the heart of key aspects of practice and theory since the late 1950s and are a vital part of the discourses surrounding avantgarde and postmodern performance. These discourses concerning the performance of presence have frequently hinged on the relationship between the live and mediated, on notions and effects of immediacy, authenticity and originality. More widely, presence prompts questions of the character of self-awareness, of the performance and presentation of self and role. Presence also implies witnessing and interaction – a being before or being in the presence of another. Such dynamics are deeply inflected in theatrical process and practice, and lend themselves toward analysis through frameworks of performance and performativity. In theatre, performance and visual art, the experience of presence has often been linked to practices of encounter and to perceptions of difference and relation with something or somebody, as well as the uncanny encounter with one’s own sense of self.

At the same time, questions of presence have also gained ground in archaeological thinking, just as relationships between archaeology and performance have emerged as influential on performance theory and practice (Pearson and Shanks 2001). Archaeology is increasingly understood less as the discovery of the past and more in terms of different relationships with what is left of the past. This has foregrounded anthropological questions of the performance and construction of the past in memory, narrative, collections (of textual and material sources), archives and systems of documentation, in the experience of place. Concepts of ‘presence’, ‘aura’ and the ‘uncanny’ return of the past accompany an emphasis upon encounters with the cues or prompts of ‘site’ – with the sign or trace. Such thinking has led to radically new forms of archaeological investigation and documentation that draw on and advance theatre theory and practice.

In these contexts, recent theatre practice and theory has also come to re-emphasize the performance and experience of presence over its deconstruction and the associated tropes of postmodern theatrical practice (Kaye 1994). Within experimental theatre, such work can be configured as part of a broader response through ‘live’ performance to the growing ubiquity of technologies of presence, including virtual, augmented and mixed reality computing, as well as the increasingly common braiding of the live with the simulated, and the performance of personal and social presence, through network media. Coming to prominence from the mid-1990s in the work of theatre companies such as Forced Entertainment, The Builders Association, Blast Theory, 3-Legged Dog and Elevator Repair Service, among others, these generations of artists and theatre-makers have invested in the performance of presence as an integral part of their aesthetic. Thus Marianne Weems, artistic director of The Builders Association, for example, stresses that the company’s blending of live, mediated and recorded performance in increasingly complex ways supports ‘[t]he pleasure of staging the idea of presence […] how [the performers’] presence is either […] extended in some ways and amplified or compromised and endangered’ (Weems in Kaye 2007: 576). In this context, The Builders Association work explicitly to articulate the performance of presence across their multi-media theatre productions, as the signs of ‘performer-presence’ are overtly orchestrated through shifts across media and modes of representation (Kaye 2007). In this work, ‘presence’ is not associated with the unified occupation of a place or unmediated encounter, but is foregrounded in the self-reflexive construction of experiences of presence through multiple media, representational frameworks and performative lenses.

An analogous focus on ‘presence’ is evident also in recent live art installations, as well as events and performances in museum and gallery contexts. It is a tendency aligned, too, with a move toward the ephemeral that Adrian Heathfield identifies with the ‘live’ in art. Observing in 2004 that ‘many of the “troubling” currents in visual art practice’ are ‘more about the presentation of some phenomena rather than the representation of some thing,’ Heathfield observes and anatomizes a ‘drive to the live’ in ‘a hard to categorize space between sculpture, installation and Live Art’ (Heathfield 2004: 7). Exemplified for Heathfield in Damien Hirst’s installations combining objects, organic matter and living animals, such work confronts the viewer with their own presence before the ‘live’ phenomena of the work, so entwining their response and consciousness with that of the ‘object’ of their attention. In encountering Hirst’s The Pursuit of Oblivion (2004) Heathfield recalls: ‘A shiver runs through me. Facing this artwork time slides and I am gripped by an uncanny feeling. The sculpture is performing: the object is alive.’ (Heathfield 2004: 7)

Figure 1.1 Martin Creed, Work No. 850, Tate Britain (2008).

Photo: Hugo Glendinning

More recent work has extended this installation of ‘live’ presence within the museum. For Martin Creed’s Work No. 850 (2008), every thirty seconds during the opening hours of Tate Britain a person ran ‘as if their life depended on it’ through the 86-metre length of the neo-classical Deveen sculpture gallery. It is a run that continually repeats in alternation with caesura of equal time in which nothing is present. On this work, Creed comments that:

I like running. I like seeing people run and I like running myself … running is the opposite of being still. If you think about death as being completely still and movement as a sign of life, then the fastest movement possible is the biggest sign of life. So then running fast is like the exact opposite of death: it’s an example of aliveness.

(Creed 2008)

Work No. 850 exhibits the paradox and desirability of ‘presence’ – as ‘aliveness,’ as the ephemeral act and so that which continually absents itself. In the event, the work flickers between presence and absence, resting on the rhythmic pause between runners in order to amplify and articulate the calculated intrusion and shock of the runner as an inappropriate performer within the gallery. In this context, too, the further dissemination of Work No. 850 in video and photographic documentation complicates its assertion of the presence. Hugo Glendinning’s image of Creed’s work at once departs from its ‘liveness,’ yet participates in this work’s energy and will to ‘presence,’ catching the run in a frame and moment unavailable to the gallery visitor. Indeed, in Creed’s work neither the act nor the image can ‘claim’ the phenomena ‘presence,’ which is shaped palimpsestually in repetition, and so in absence; in the anticipation of the act, in its memory, and so also in its absence from the record and image of the ‘live’. The experiential and ideological implications for the visitor of such stagings and re-staging of ‘presence’ in the museum is a topic of Amelia Jones’ contribution to this volume, which engages with Marina Abramovic’s 2010 work The Artist Is Present, a new elaboration of her landmark durational work with Ulay, Nightsea Crossing (1985–89) and which rested on Abramovic’s continuous attendance in the work each day at MoMA New York over a four month period. This act and re-staging, which is related to Abramovic’s earlier Seven Easy Pieces (2005), in which she re-performed iconic and ephemeral performance art works by Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, Gina Pane and others at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, offer performances that play with the return or persistence of earlier acts, events and repetitions, as well as the economy of images and documentations by which they are known, and which become part of the fabric and claim to their ‘being present’ ‘now’.

Figure 1.2 Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present (2010).

Courtesy of Marina Abramović Archives. Photo: Marco Anelli.

This focus on the staging and modulation of presence in performance is in marked contrast to the emphasis of overtly postmodern critical narratives directed toward media-based theatrical performance in the late 1980s and 1990s, where presence was configured in relation to the deconstructive turn in critical practice and so as a locus of authority operating in elisions of social, cultural and historical contingencies to be challenged and displaced (Auslander 1994). Indeed, Phillip Auslander has identified a valorization of ‘presence’ as that which ‘performance’ rejected in favour of its deconstruction in the historical move from modern to postmodern, and which he reiterates explicitly in From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (1998). It is a skepticism toward presence also reflected in Peggy Phelan’s location of the ontology of performance in its ‘disappearance’ and so in an eventhood and ephemerality that evades reproduction (Phelan 1993: 146–66). Yet in this very emphasis on processes of disappearance Phelan’s celebrated formulation also reflects the processual nature of both performance and presence, where the experience of theatre becomes defined in the falling away of performance from its material traces, its remainder, the documentary image, and memory itself. Where Auslander thus identifies the mediatized theatre and performance of the 1980s and early 1990s with an overturning of the 1960s and 1970s valorization of the ‘live’ body in performance, more recent media art, theatre and performance has re-focused on processual understandings and practices of presence, in assertions, explorations and simulations of the experiences of presence.

Correspondingly, more recent critical engagements with the performance, experience and trace of presence in theatre, performance and media-based and visual art have also marked a resurgence of interest in the return, persistence or the production of experiences of presence. It is in turn signalled in the influence of Rebecca Schneider’s implicit retort to Phelan that ‘Performance Remains’ (Schneider 2001a), as well as the function of documentation with regard to the ephemerality and persistence of performance (Auslander 2006; Kaye 2006). Similarly, the ‘value’ and transformative effect of ‘live’ theatrical and performed presence has been restaged in Erika Fischer-Lichte’s The Transformational Power of Performance (Fischer-Lichte 2008). Such perspectives are also elaborated in a range of other monographs exploring Presence in Play (Power 2008), which re-examines the theatrical literature on presence, Stage Presence (Goodall 2008), and Joseph Roach’s examination of charisma in It (Roach 2007). It is this new engagement with presence in theatre theory and practice, too, which Archaeologies of Presence works to reflect and capture, and to bring to this debate the processual character of presence, both in performance and its critical recovery.

In this re-focusing on presence in theatre theory and practice, questions over the tense of presence – and of the temporal ground, or flow, in which presence occurs have also come further to the fore. Indeed, throughout this volume, ‘the present’ is approached as always already subject to difference from itself, as the subject’s occupation of the ‘here and now’ is imbricated with phenomena of memory and anticipation. This complicating of the present tense and the present moment of experience is consonant with the broadly post-structuralist perspective which underpinned the approach to presence within performance theory in the 1980s and 1990s, and in which ‘presence’ was approached firstly as an ideological and performative claim rather than a state, quality or experience. Yet the performance theory and practice encompassed here tends to emphasize ways in which ‘presence effects’ or ‘performer-presence’ may gain ground in the performance of the present moment, or in the very ‘multipleness’ this understanding of ‘the present’ implies. This tendency is also reflected in the broader archaeological turn in contemporary performance practice evident in the growing ubiquity of site-specific and site-sensitive theatre and performance which invariably produce experiences of ‘presence’ by addressing the absences of place (Kaye 2000; Pearson 2010). It is an affinity between performance and archaeology also directly evidenced in new strategies for documentation which have increasingly come to emphasize the reader or viewer’s relationship with that which remains over the reconstruction of past events or the transparency of one medium, context and time to another (Auslander 2006).

This address to ‘presence’ through an engagement with ‘multipleness’ of time, place and performance is consonant also with radical earlier avant-garde practice, which frequently sought to interrogate and shape experiences of presence in the relationship between differing representational schemes and the ostensibly ‘real’ circumstances of their performance. Such theatre frequently approached the performance of presence through structures that were explicitly multiple, aligning the performance of presence with the articulation and crossing of thresholds and the doubling of the fictive with the real. Thus, Richard Schechner, in recalling his work with The Performance Group from 1967, remarks that:

[a] performance can run according to several schemes at once. It can tell a narrative, but part of that narrative can be gamebound. So you can use game structure some of the time or in part of the space, and narrative structure at other times and in other parts of the space […] The Tooth of Crime dealt with narrative structure, but also with performance in everyday life. That’s what Spalding [Gray] meant, that some of his ‘real self’ was engaged directly, not used as in character-actor training as...