Vito Acconci, Trademarks, 1970, lithography on paper; 45/50, 20 x 20 3/16 in. (51.1 x 51.3 cm). Published by Lithography Workshop, Nova Scotia Col

Surrogate PerformancesPerformance Documentation and the New York Avant-garde, ca. 196474Philip Auslander

In an earlier essay, I argued that performance documents in all media are not justrecords of performances that happened but are themselves performative in J. L.Austins most basic sense:

Speaking of language, Austin calls statements whose utteranceconstitutes action in itself performatives (e.g., saying I do in amarriage ceremony). Distinguishing performative utterances fromconstative utterances, Austin argues that to utter [a performativesentence] is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in souttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. If I mayanalogize the images that document performances with verbalstatements, the traditional view sees performance documents asconstatives that describe performances and state that they occurred. Iam suggesting that performance documents are not analogous toconstatives, but to performatives: in other words, the act ofdocumenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it assuch. Documentation does not simply generate image/statements thatdescribe an autonomous performance and state that it occurred: itproduces an event as a performance. 1

The documentation of Vito Acconcis Trademarks (1970)exemplifies this eect. In Trademarks, Acconci produced worksof visual art through a process that became a performance in it-self by having been documented as such. The artists descriptionof the performance states:

Biting as much of my body as I can reach: turning onmyself, turning in on myself: performance aslocomotion across a boundary: connecting a region:absorption, by one organization, of a neighbouringorganization: self-absorption.Bite: getting to a point,getting through a point: brand of performance.Applying printers ink to each bite and making bite-prints: identity pegs: identifiers of a certain position Ihave taken at a certain time: TRADEMARKS (title ofthe piece; September 1970): performance as the shapingof an alibi.The bite-prints can be stamped on varioussurfaces (paper, a stone, a possession, another body):performance as opening a system, sharing a secret.

2

lege of Art and Design, Halifax. Collection WalkerArt Center, Gift of Dayton Hudson Corporation,Minneapolis, 1978, 1978.25.

The documentation of this event includes photographs of the naked Ac-conci sitting on the floor and biting himself in hard-to-reach spots, as well asclose-ups of the marks that he made on himself with his teeth. As the descriptionindicates, he also used the bite marks to produce prints by inking and stampingthem on paper and other surfaces. (A 1970 lithograph in the Walker Art Centerscollection, Trademarks, combines all these elements.) If viewed solely as a meansof making prints, Acconcis action could be seen simply as a highly eccentric stu-dio practice, in which case it would be sucient to identify the traces of his work-ing methods in the resulting images (for example, the way the prints made fromthe bites clearly image the impression of teeth on skin). But when the action itselfis recorded through written description (in which Acconci clearly frames what hewas doing as a performance that raised issues he wished to explore about what canbe achieved in and through performance) and photographs (as well as the prints ofbites that are the actions artifacts) and presented to an audience as an object ofaesthetic appreciation in itself, the act of documentation performatively frameshis actions as performance.

In order to better understand the performativity of performance documen-tation, we need to look more closely at what I originally called the act of docu-menting an event as a performance. This act does not consist simply of produc-ing a description or an image of a performance. Photographers, for example, havebeen shooting theater, dance, and other performances in one way or another sincethe 1850s, but only a small and relatively recent subset of this vast store of imagesis understood to be performance documentation. The identity of a descriptionor image as a performance document depends not simply on its subject matter buton the circumstances and context of its production and what it is seen as doing (itsperformativity, in short).

Performance documentation has a history: the idea of documenting perfor-mances, the thought that it was necessary to do so, and specific techniques of per-formance documentation all arose at specific moments. One of the archaeologicalsites on which to trace the emergence of performance documentation as a self-conscious practice is the New York art and performance scene of the mid-1960sthrough the early 1970s. This scene encompassed a wide range of emergent artforms and styles, including Pop art, Happenings, the beginnings of Conceptual Art,Minimalism, Process art, and so on. It also included the Judson Dance Theater andthe countercultural underground theater identified with the Living Theatre(whose members returned from self-imposed exile in Europe in 1968), the OpenTheater, the Performance Group, and others devoted to collective creation. Fromthis artistic ferment developed a particular way of thinking about the relationshipbetween performances and their documentation.

In choosing New York as the site of my excavation, I am not in any way im-plying that the particular evolution of performance documentation that I discussis definitive. The decade that I have identified was crucial to both performanceand its documentation not only in North America but also in the United Kingdom,throughout continental Europe, and in parts of Asia and Latin America. The storymight be significantly dierent if it were to focus on a dierent scene. Neverthe-less, it is particularly productive to pursue the question of performance documen-tation by looking at the New York art world in this period. This is partly because ofthe extraordinary amount of innovative and internationally influential artisticwork in a broad range of forms that took place there. But it is also because of thepresence on the scene of Michael Kirby, a sculptor, theater maker, editor, and aca-demic who saw the New York scene as akin to the European avant-garde move-

Michael Kirby, Happenings, New York: E. P. Dutton,1965.

PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION AND THENEW YORK AVANT-GARDE

ments of the early twentieth century and felt that the ephemeral work happeningthere needed to be preserved through documentation. Kirby was one of the first topractice performance documentation, beginning in the late 1950s with written ac-counts of Allan Kaprows Happenings. For Kirby, the performativity of perfor-mance documentation lay in its ability to capture the disparate performance prac-tices that made up the New York avant-garde and thus to lend coherence to thescene. He also was one of the first to theorize performance documentation as adistinct and self-conscious discursive practice. In the discussion that follows, I willexamine Kirbys ideas on performance documentation as an early theorization ofthe practice and look at how his ideas resonated with those of others involved inthe documentation of performance on the New York scene, including the photog-raphers Peter Moore and Babette Mangolte, the artist and anthologist Ursula Mey-er, and the scholar Ronald Argelander. I will also discuss the relationship of perfor-mance documentation as conceived by Kirby to its most important historical an-tecedent, the practice of theater photography. In conclusion, I will return to thequestion of the performativity of performance documentation.

Michael Kirby came to New York in 1957 and saw firsthand all thenew aesthetic alternatives that opened up in reaction to the dom-inance of Abstract Expressionism. He was a vociferous chroniclerand theorist of contemporary and historical avant-gardes 3who maintained a staunch commitment to the value of the newin art. He often compared artistic creation to scientific discoveryand insisted, in art, as in science, it is the new that gives thefield its significance. 4 Kirbys book Happenings, published in1965, is perhaps the first example of performance documentationper se, although he did not identify it as such. Kirby devotes hisintroduction to identifying some generic characteristics of theHappening as a form and providing it with a complex genealogyin the historical avant-garde and the work of more proximate fig-ures such as the composer John Cage and the dancer and choreo-grapher Merce Cunningham. There is no direct discussion of thepremises behind Kirbys approach and the books form, but it isimportant that the book is subtitled An Illustrated Anthology. It ispresented as a collection of Happenings rather than a book aboutHappenings. Included in the anthology are scripts for Happen-ings, statements and other texts by the artists responsible forthem, textual descriptions of the performances (presumably byKirby himself, who is credited as writer and editor), and pho-tographs of performances and rehearsals.

Although Kirbys anthology of Happenings was an earlyexemplar of performance documentation and his particular ap-proach to itas were some of the essays in his second book, TheArt of Time, published in 1968he did not theorize the practicein either book. This came a bit later, in a series of overlapping es-says published largely in the Drama Review (known as TDR and

Avant-garde,experimental

performance must bedocumented in order to

be known beyond itsnegligible initial

audience. In eect, itmust be documented to

exist.

later renamed TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies), a journalwith editorial oces at New York University, where Kirby wasteaching when he assumed the editorship in 1971. In these essays,Kirby grounds the necessity for performance documentation inboth the ephemerality of live performances and the often verylimited access to avant-garde performance work: Some impor-tant pieces are performed only once or twice to small audiences;even those presentations that tour internationally cannot hopeto have the attendance of the average commercial film. 5 Al-though Kirby was editing a journal with a long history of address-ing contemporary drama and theater, he redefined its brief morebroadly to encompass the kinds of performance that would beregarded as early examples of performance art. In an introducto-ry statement that outlined his editorial intentions, Kirby specifi-cally identified TDRs interest in performances done by artistsprimarily involved in other fields. The investigations of these in-ter-connections and influences among the arts is another way toexpand our view from drama to performance in general. 6He further states, in another text, Notice that our concern iswith performance as fine art. This means that we are dealing withonly a relatively small area of theatre [the term Kirby often usedfor performance]. Most theatre is commercial art, involving amass appeal to general popular standards. 7 Kirby impliesthat because avant-garde performance occupies so little space ina cultural landscape dominated by commercial art it needs tobe documented in order to have greater cultural presence. Main-stream performance does not require documentationit cantake care of itself, so to speak. But avant-garde, experimental per-formance must be documented in order to be known beyond itsnegligible initial audience. In eect, it must be documented toexist.

Lucas Samaras and Claes Oldenburg in Sports, 1962. Foreground, from left, Patty Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, and Claes Oldenburg (in green pants). The audience for this Happening included Andy Warhol (background center) and John Chamberlain(leaning on pillar). Claes Oldenburg; All rights reserved, Robert R. McElroy/VAGA, NY. Courtesy of Oldenburg van BruggenStudio.

Kirbys characterization of fine art performance as essentially a coteriephenomenon that could have greater reach only through documentation apparent-ly was shared by some of the artists involved in the production of the perfor-mances, including Happenings, that he covered as a documentarian and editor.Claes Oldenburg, for one, engaged a photographer, Robert McElroy, to shoot hisperformances. McElroys photographs appear both in Kirbys Happenings antholo-gy and Oldenburgs own book Store Days, published in 1967, which documents Old-enburgs environmental installation The Store and the Ray Gun Theater perfor-mances that took place there, performances that were also filmed by RaymondSaro. McElroys photographs are joined in the book by scripts, texts, and draw-ings by Oldenburg related to the production of the five performances that madeup Ray Gun Theater. Oldenburg includes the program for these events, repro-duced in facsimile, which makes it clear that each one was performed only twice,and by a dierent group of people each time. In a text titled Budget for Theater,which follows the program in the book and may be a proposal or a funding request(or perhaps just a statement of purpose by the artist), Oldenburg stresses thesmall scale of his operation: These performances would occur one time onlywith about 35 spectators each time. He also indicates that these performanceswere not so much directed at the general public as at other artists and connois-seurs interested in developments along this line. 8 Nevertheless, it seems thathe sought a larger audience for these coterie performances by documenting themin the book that contains this text.

In arguing for the need to document performances, Kirby looked both tothe present and the future: documentation makes current work accessible to a

larger audience and establishes a record for study in future times. 9 More-over, he stated: A concern for tomorrows past is one reason for documentationof contemporary performances. All current presentations will soon pass intohistory where they will be completely unavailable to direct experience. Anyone in-terested in theatre history should recognize the importance of documenting signif-icant contemporary works as completely as possible. 10 It is noteworthy thatKirby refers here to the present as tomorrows past. This makes it clear that per-formance documentation was to be addressed primarily to the future, not thepresent: it was to be directed to posterity and the historical record more than tocurrent audiences and publicity. It was a means of making performances availableto future audiences who would have no other access to them. From Kirbys per-spective, the crucial task for performance documentation is to allow the reader ofthe performance document to experience the performance itself. Acknowledgingthat no information about an experience is the same as the experience itself, henevertheless refers at one point to performance documents as creating surrogateperformance[s]. 11 The document, as surrogate, stands in for the originalevent for an audience to whom that event is no longer available. In Kirbys versionof surrogacy, it is the responsibility of the document to provide its audience withan experience as close as possible to that of the original event. This can be accom-plished only if the performance documentarian recognizes that a concern withhistory demands an accurate and objective record of the performance. 12 Kir-by readily admits that complete objectivity is impossible, not least because of theinevitable selectivity of any account or image, but insists that it remains a worth-while objective: To the extent that a writer consciously attempts to record ratherthan to evaluate or interpret, the performance will retain its own identity andthe reader will respond to the documentation in much the same way as he wouldhave responded to the performance. 13

Kirbys notion that documentation can deliver something like the same ex-perience as the original performance goes against the grain of current ways ofthinking about performance documentation, which tend to emphasize the futilityof producing an adequate representation of an original live event. Nevertheless,his claim should be taken seriously despite its lack of qualification. There is noquestion but that the performance document becomes a surrogate for the originalperformance: we rely on documentation to provide us with information about per-formances that we have not seen, and we take the information to be about the per-formance, not the document. Many more recent commentators feel, along withCaroline Rye, that one danger of documenting ephemeral performances is thatthe record can all too quickly become a substitute for the live event it re-presents, a substitute that cannot provide evidence of exactly the thing it purportsto record. 14 As Matthew Reason points out, however, this position is ground-ed in a paradox: the evanescence that is said to be the defining characteristic oflive performance is the very thing that prompts performance makers and others towant to preserve it through documentation. 15 The result is that we demandthat performances be documented while simultaneously disavowing the connec-tion between the document and the original performance. Although Kirbys ap-proach may be reductive, it avoids this paradox. Kirby treats performancesephemerality not as its essential defining characteristic but, rather, as a limitingcondition that prevents avant-garde performance from having larger audiencesand greater historical and cultural presence. He implies that the value of preserv-ing performance for future audiences trumps the value of respecting its ephemer-ality.

Kirbys faith in objectivity is also controversial from the current perspec-tive, since we are now used to thinking of documentary objectivity as chimericaland recordings or documents as necessarily reflective of their creators biases, ifonly in terms of what they include and exclude. It is important, however, to under-stand that the crucial opposition for Kirby is not that between objectivity and bias.Rather, it is the dichotomy between two discursive practices that he sees as op-

posed: documentation and criticism. In a passage I quoted above, Kirby contrastsrecording performances to evaluating or interpreting them and strongly favors theformer approach over the latter two. As Martin Puchner has shown, Kirby imposedhis desire for a precise, descriptive, and analytical style on TDR during the peri-od in which he edited it. 16 Indeed, Kirbys call for objectivity in performancedocumentation is one manifestation of an implacable hostility toward criticism,which he identified with evaluation or interpretation, that recurs throughout hiswritingin one essay, he refers to theatrical criticism as a kind of intellectual andemotional fascism that imposes opinions and value judgments on its subjects andvictims. 17 In Criticism: Four Faults, his most sustained statement on thesubject, Kirby dismisses theater criticism as unnecessary, as well as being naveand primitive, arrogant, and immoral. It should be eliminated. 18 AlthoughKirby oers detailed arguments in support of this claim, they need not concern ushere. What is important is that he explicitly contrasts criticism with performancedocumentation, which he sees as embracing positive values that are antithetical tothose of the critic.

Performance is ephemeral. It disappears from history unless it isrecorded and preserved somehow. Thus, a concern with history demandsan accurate and objective record of the performance. To the extent thatthe record is complete and detailed, the performance can bereconstructed mentally. Values will take care of themselves. Sinceeveryone has values, they will evaluate the historical reconstruction. Ifthey have accurate and exhaustive information, their evaluation willapproximate the evaluation they would have made of the actualperformance if they had been in the audience. But history does not carewhether its data is liked or disliked; it is built only upon the quality andaccuracy of the data itself.

Thus, a fifth and final claim can be made against evaluativecriticism: it tends to work against and obscure vital historicaldocumentation. 19

Kirbys hostility toward criticism finds support in Susan Sontags well-known essay Against Interpretation (1964), in which she characterizes criticismas poison[ing] our sensibilities with an eusion of interpretations. 20 Son-tag focuses more on literary criticism than on the visual arts or performance, but anumber of her points anticipate Kirbys. One of Sontags objections to interpreta-tion is that it makes art into an article for use rather than something to be ap-preciated in and for itself. 21 Kirbys definition of art includes the stipulationthat works of art have no objective or functional purpose. 22

As we have already seen, Kirby shared Sontags distaste for critics whowould seek to impose their views on the work and its audiences. In practice, bothfavored description over interpretation or evaluation. 23 Sontag first proposedthat critical writing needs to switch its object of attention from the content ofworks (which is subject to interpretation) to their form, for which we need a de-scriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary. Still better, she suggests, would beacts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description ofthe appearance of works of art. 24 Although it seems unlikely that Kirby, whooften wrote in the detached style of an analytical observer, would have embracedSontags call for an erotics of art, it is apparent that both strongly favored a de-scriptive approach to writing about art over an interpretive one. 25

Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972.

Douglas Huebler, Duration Piece #15 (Global), September, 1969, 1969. Estate of Douglas Huebler/ARS. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

PHOTO-DOCUMENTATION

Although Kirbys position on performance documentationis tendentious and his expression of it frequently intemperate, hewas not alone in believing that art should be presented as objec-tively as possible rather than critically. For example, Ursula Mey-ers well-known anthology Conceptual Art (1972)which overlapsKirbys field of interest through the inclusion of documentationof performances by Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman,and Dennis Oppenheimreflects similar assumptions about thenature and purpose of such a book. Meyers claims regarding herapproach to assembling the book parallel Kirbys call for usingthe printed page to make the artwork itself as directly accessibleas possible. 26 She argues that Conceptual Art is best ex-plained through itself and goes on to say that this book is not acritical anthology but a documentation of Conceptual Art andStatements. Critical Interpretation tends to frame propositionsdierent from the artists intention, thus prejudicing informa-tion. 27 The books design reflects the eort at direct andobjective presentation of information. The index consists of analphabetized list of artists, last name only, in block capitals, andthe pages on which their work appears. Each artists work is rep-resented by texts written by the artist and photographs whereappropriate. Although Meyer oers some definitional generaliza-tions about the nature of conceptual art and its historical place-ment in her introduction, much the way Kirby does in the intro-duction to Happenings, the rest of the book is given over to art-work unadorned by further commentary. Although presentingunadorned information about art in the context of conceptualart, which itself often takes the form of unadorned informationabout art, 28 is arguably dierent from doing so in the con-text of Happenings and other performances, the intention to usetext and photographs as much as possible to give the reader a di-rect experience of the artwork, documented with as little criticalintervention as possible, underwrites Meyers project as much asit does Kirbys.

Kirbys quest for objectivity determined not only the way that he felt descriptionsof performances should be written but also how he felt they should be illustrated.In Kirbys view, performance photography should rely on the mechanicalandtherefore objective aspects of photography rather than its potential for express-ing the subjectivity of the photographer. 29 In this respect, he clearly partici-pated in the long history of understanding photography as primarily a mechanical

process rather than an artistic medium. Roland Barthess oft-quoted description ofthe photograph as a denotative message without a code (from The Photograph-ic Message, first published in 1961) is another significant point along this trajecto-ry (though arguably this is a reductive reading of Barthes). 30

The work of two prominent performance photographers active in NewYork during the period under consideration, Peter Moore and Babette Mangolte,constitutes a documentary practice that aligns with Kirbys project. Beginning inthe early 1960s, Moore captured images of Happenings, Judson Dance Theaterperformances, Fluxus events, and many other kinds of avant-garde performance.Excerpts from an interview with Moore were included in an essay by Ronald Arge-lander that was published in TDR in 1974, under Kirbys editorship. Theorizing theuse of photography to produce performance photo-documentation, 31 Arge-lander echoes Kirby in many regards. Two of the purposes that Argelander as-cribes to photo-documentation are to allow those who did not see the perfor-mance to experience it and to serve as a record for historians. 32 Also like Kir-by, he opposes documentation to criticism by contrasting photo-documentation tothe work of photographers whose selection of moments to capture from a perfor-mance is based primarily on [their] taste or esthetic judgment, accusing suchphotographers of adopting a critical attitude toward the performance. Thesephotographers are photo-critics rather than photo-documentarians. 33

Performances come to be represented by a very small numberof published images, or even a single image, which Barbara

Moore describes as a self-perpetuating misrepresentation sincethe publication of certain images increases interest only inthose particular images, which become divorced from the

performance as a whole while simultaneously representing it.

Peter Moore, Charlotte Moorman Performing NamJune Paiks Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes,1971, gelatin silver print, 10 x 16 in. (26 x 41.3cm) framed. Collection Walker Art Center, Gift ofBarbara Moore in memory of Peter Moore, Charlotte Moorman, and Frank Pileggi, 1994, 1994.152.Art Peter Moore Estate/VAGA, New York, NY.

Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975/2004,photograph, 40 x 60 in. (101.6 x 152.4 cm). BrooklynMuseum, Gift of Marc Routh by arrangement withthe Remy-Toledo Gallery, 2005.35.1. Photo: Anthony McCall Carolee Schneemann.

The idea that the photo-documentarians purpose is toproduce a record of the event as untainted as possible by person-al biases or preferences is taken up by Moore: I have always dis-sociated myself completely from making any critical comment,conspicuously, in a photograph. 34 He and Argelander fur-ther emphasize that a photo-document of a performance is arecord of the performers work, not an artwork by the photogra-pher. Moore compares performance documentation to reproduc-ing static artworks: There is a similarity in approach to docu-menting sculpture and documenting performance. What youretrying to do is to do justice, as much as you are able to, to the in-tent of the artist, rather than impose your own point of view onit. 35 Much of his conversation with Argelander, as well asArgelanders own ruminations, concerns technical issues that thephoto-documentarian must address, including what kind of cam-eras, lenses, and shots to use. Argelander asserts that photogra-phers who shoot only close-ups and medium views are not pho-to-documentors since the idea is to capture as much of the per-formance as possible and to remain faithful to a spectators vis-ual perspective. 36 This perspective is necessary to produceimages to function as the surrogate performances for whichKirby calls.

The idea of documenting performances in photographsdoes not emerge from Argelanders article as purely unproblem-atic, however. One of the issues that comes up can be called theproblem of the iconic image. In the interview, Moore and hiswife, Barbara, point to the way performances come to be repre-sented by a very small number of published images, or even a sin-gle image, which Barbara Moore describes as a self-perpetuatingmisrepresentation since the publication of certain images in-creases interest only in those particular images, which becomedivorced from the performance as a whole while simultaneouslyrepresenting it. 37 Barbara Moore mentions Yvonne Rainer inthis context; two of the many other performance artists whosework has suered this fate are Robert Morris and CaroleeSchneemann. Their collaborative performance Site (1964), whichwas photographed by Moore and also by Hans Namuth, is gener-ally represented in print by only two images, one of which hasbeen repeated so often that it has become the iconic sign for thewhole performance. The same is true of Schneemanns InteriorScroll (1975), which has long been represented by a single photo-graph by Anthony McCall. 38

Although Babette Mangoltewho came to New York inthe early 1970s and photographed avant-garde theater, dance (es-pecially Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer), and performance artbelongs to the artistic generation that came of age in the 1970srather than the 1960s, she retrospectively describes her work as aperformance photo-documentarian in terms that closely parallelKirbys and Moores. She writes of going to one of Richard Fore-mans theatrical productions in 1970: What I saw was ex-traordinary but only four other people were there to see it.Therefore recording it was an absolute necessity. Somebody hadto preserve [it] for posterity. 39 For Mangolte at this time:photography was not about passing judgment, on the contrary,it was about absolute objectivity. The justification for shootingthe photographs was solely that they should exist. How the pho-tographs would be used was left vague because they were made

Babette Mangolte, Trisha Brown Roof Piece, 1973, 53 Wooster Street to 381 Lafayette Street, New York City. 1973 and 2003Babette Mangolte, All rights reserved.

for others who would make sense of them, if not now then some-time in the future. Making the work visible for my contempo-raries was not my primary impulse. 40 To these ends, shedeveloped an approach to shooting performances meant to fosterautomatismshooting very quickly and giving as little consid-eration to choice of shot and camera setup as possible. Gettingit was better than missing it even if technically it wasnt a goodphotograph. 41 Kirbys sense of urgency around the need todocument the performances happening on New Yorks art sceneand his emphasis on objectivity and the preservation of perfor-mances for future audiences find sympathetic resonance inMoores and Mangoltes descriptions of their respective photo-graphic practices.

Writing about the need to document performances, Kirby once remarked,We have not yet reached the point where allor even the most significantthe-atrical presentations are recorded on film or videotape, implying that audiovisualrecords would be the ideal means of preserving performances. 42 He neverthe-less devoted most of his attention to the written word, supplemented by pho-tographs, as the primary medium of performance documentation. 43 Followingits introduction in 1967, the Sony Portapak, the first consumer-level portablevideo-recording system, was quickly adopted by artists. Although this eventuallyled to the widespread practice of documenting performances on video, the fact

that Kirby does not discuss audiovisual documentation is understandable given hiscontext. He wrote about documentation primarily as the editor of a print journaland addressed the forms of documentation that he was in a position to produceand publish. Also, he began documenting performances with Happenings in thelate 1950s, when writing and photography were the most practical means available.In fact, photography, not video, continues to be the most important and accessiblevisual medium for documenting performances. As Adrian George puts it, the pho-tograph, above all other media, has become crucial in the historicisation of perfor-mance, while Reason points to the enduring importance of still photography,which remains the most frequently used and seen representation of performance.

44

Additionally, Mangolte, who was trained as a cinematographer in Francebefore coming to the United States, points out that the early video technologyavailable to artists was somewhat useful as a rehearsal tool, recalling that thechoreographer Twyla Tharp was one of the first to use video this way in the early1970s. Its quality, however, was not good enough to show fully what had gone onto an audience that hadnt been there. 45 More interesting is her discussion ofwhy she documented performances in still photographs and chose (with very fewexceptions) not to use film or video, despite her background in film and lack oftraining as a still photographer. Her argument is that photography could be moreautomatic and spontaneous (and therefore more objective) than filmmaking:Photography was immediate and reactive. Film had to be pre-conceptualized be-fore shooting. 46 Whereas Mangolte felt that a reasonable degree of objectivi-ty in documentation was attainable through photography, she also felt that to ren-der a performance in an audiovisual medium was inevitably to produce an adapta-tion of it rather than a record of it:

A series of photographs could provide a chronology of the iconography ofthe piece, some sense of the makers intentions and aesthetics, andtherefore be informative and worthwhile. Film was almost doomed tofail if you couldnt restage the action for the film camera, and that wasneeded to make an interesting film work. If I had to summarize theessential dierences between film and photography in documentingperformance, I would say that, for better or worse, the motion picturecamera can mislead while the still camera can be mute. 47

Mangolte explicates her resistance to the idea of using film or video asmeans of documentation in ways that align with the values that Kirby espoused. Aswe have seen, Kirbys concept of performance documentation is grounded in astraightforward ontology: performances happen, and documentation preservesthem in forms that will allow future audiences to experience them. Because thesedocuments present the performance as objectively as possible, future audienceswill be in a position to arrive at their own interpretations and assessments, muchas they would have had they seen the original event. From Kirbys perspective asan early theorist of performance documentation, the relationships between theperformance and its documentation and between the document and its future au-dience are clearly defined and uncomplicated. Over time, however, it has becomeclear that the reality of performance documentation is considerably messier thanKirbys fairly cut-and-dried approach suggests.

Mangolte, in some of her recent work as an artist (rather than a documen-tarian), addresses the complexity and untidiness of performance documentation.One of her contributions to the exhibition Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Perfor-mance (a title that in itself suggests how far away we now are from Kirbys confi-dence in the objectivity and surrogacy of performance documentation) at the TateLiverpool (20032004) was an installation juxtaposing her well-known photo-graph of Trisha Browns Roof Piece (1973) with the contact sheet showing all theblack-and-white shots that she took of the performance. Facing the photographs

THEATER PHOTOGRAPHY

were video monitors showing the three reels of color motion picture film that shealso shot that day (which were originally projected as three images side by side).

48 In the installation at the Tate, the glow of the monitors, reflected in theglass over the photographs, created a forced contrast between still and moving im-age, color and black-and-white, isolated moment and more complete record. Man-golte raises questions but provides no answers: she leaves the viewer of her instal-lation to sort out the relationship of these multiple modes of representation to theabsent event and the question of how (or if) a single static image documents anevent that unfolds in time.

It is important in this context to contrast the approach to the visual documenta-tion of performance represented by photo-documentation to other practices, par-ticularly those of conventional theater and dance photographers. This is partly be-cause theater photography is the most significant historical antecedent to earlyperformance documentation and is the practice in relation to which performancephoto-documentarians implicitly or explicitly defined their own. It also returns usto the premise that performance documents can be understood as performativeutterances. To paraphrase Austin, this is a matter of doing things with pictures.As I suggested in the introduction, to make an image of a performance is not sim-ply to record its occurrence: it is to bring the event into being in a particular way.It is therefore necessary to consider what theater and dance photography does andto compare and contrast these doings with those of performance documentation.

Napoleon Sarony, Joseph Jefferson as Rip van Winkle in Rip van Winkle, 1870s (1869), albumen cabinet card. National Portrait Gallery, London, NPGx18859.

Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham Letter to theWorld, 1940. Barbara Morgan Archive, courtesyof Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NY.

As David Mayer has shown, theater photography becamea regular practice from the late 1850s on. However, these earlyphotographs were not intended as image[s] of performance;rather, they were images of performers that participated in thetradition of photographic portraiture. 49 If these portraitsappeared to depict scenes from plays, the scenes were simulatedin the photographers studio. The primary function of these pho-tographs was promotional, but because the photographs them-selves were considered collectible commodities, their marketingfunction was complex: the portrait photograph marketed theplay and the performer, and the play and the performer marketedboth the performer and the photograph. 50 The photos werethus intended exclusively for consumption by a contemporaryaudience, with no view to preserving the events for future gener-ations. After 1901 photographs of actors were taken on the stageson which they performed but generally during specially arrangedsessions for which the actors would strike poses from specificmoments in the play rather than at actual performances, a prac-tice that continues to this day and that Argelander decries asmisleading. 51 Early photographs of stage plays were them-selves theatrical (in the sense of being staged and simulated)rather than documentary in ambition. 52 These images wouldbe posted in theaters to serve as advertisements and previews forthe performances on oer.

It is worth noting that the founding procedures of theaterphotography that Mayer describes have remained firmly in placein a variety of contexts, although not always for the same purpos-es, for more than a century. For example, Martha Graham collab-orated with the photographer Barbara Morgan between 1935 and1941 on a series of images eventually published in 1941 as a booktitled Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs. The pho-tographs in the book reproduce moments in Grahams dancing;however, they were not taken during performances but were shotin Morgans studio under exacting technical conditions de-signed to capture the most profound and most crucial momentof the dance. 53 Morgan did not photograph full perfor-mances; rather, Graham repeated specific movements until Mor-gan felt that she had achieved the images she wanted. Askedmany years later about whether her photographs were intendedto re-create performances, Morgan retorted: Hell, no! I paid noattention to the stage. I wanted to show that Martha had her ownvision. That what she was conveying was deeper than ego, deeperthan baloney. Dance has to go beyond theatre. I was trying toconnect her spirit with the viewerto show pictures of spiritualenergy. 54 Morgan conceived of her images not as a meansby which a viewer might experience Grahams performance butas distilling the truth of Grahams dancing, implicitly (and inter-estingly) suggesting that her carefully posed images could getcloser to that truth than photographs of actual performances,which are inevitably compromised by the baloney that sur-rounds performances as social interactions. Morgan suggests, infact, that her carefully staged studio images convey the underly-ing spiritual truth of Grahams dancing in a way that no photo-graph of an actual performance could.

The Performance Group, Dionysus in '69, directedby Richard Schechner. Photo: Max Waldman MaxWaldman, Archive USA, All rights reserved.

The Living Theatre, Paradise Now, 1967. Photo: Gianfranco Mantegna. Gianfranco Mantegna Papers,Special Collections, University of California, Davis,D-191.

In [theater photography], the spontaneity at issue is not theperformers but the photographers, and the theater

photographs of the early 1970s often say more about thephotographer than they do about the performance, capturing

the photographers engagement with the event rather than theevent itself.

The early 1970s saw a resurgence of interest in theaterphotography on the heels of the notoriety of an undergroundtheater scene populated by groups engaged in forms of collectivecreation that resisted or eschewed the theaters traditional rela-tionship between text and performance. Books documentingsuch productions in photographs and text that appeared aroundthis time include Dionysus in 69: The Performance Group (1970),with photographs by Max Waldman and Frederick Eberstadt;Waldman on Theatre (1971), a collection of Waldmans work; Par-adise Now: Collective Creation of the Living Theatre (1971), withphotographs by Gianfranco Mantegna; and Alice in Wonderland:The Forming of a Company and the Making of a Play (1973), withphotographs by Richard Avedon and text by Doon Arbus.

As Natalie Crohn Schmitt observes about this work in anessay published in 1976, this renaissance of theater photographyreflected an emerging theater aesthetic in which the essence ofthe production was thought to lie not in the script being per-formed but in the performance itself: Theatre reveals an in-creased concern with process rather than product. The plays mayhave no ongoing life apart from their performance. The dramasexisted in their processes, the momentary personal interactionsof actor, role, and audience, which the script does not expressbut which the photographer can capture. 55 For an increas-ingly visually oriented theatrical avant-garde, photographyseemed to provide a more meaningful record than could the writ-ten word, for the photograph records the language of silence.

56

Although Schmitt makes a compelling case for seeingthese photographs as participating in the new theatrical aestheticthat they also record, it is equally important to emphasize thatthey maintain continuity with the tradition of theater and dancephotography sketched here. For one thing, both Avedon andWaldman shot the performers in their respective studios, not inperformance, seeking to re-create striking images from the pro-ductions in a manner akin to Morgans work with Graham. Ave-don and Waldman were also portraitists, some of whose subjectswere actors (sometimes in character, in Waldmans case). Bothworked largely in close-up or medium shot, the shots Argelander

Alice in Wonderland, directed by Andre Gregory,performed by The Manhattan Project, New York,19701971. Photo: Richard Avedon The RichardAvedon Foundation.

Alice in Wonderland, directed by Andre Gregory,performed by The Manhattan Project, New York,19701971. Photo: Richard Avedon The RichardAvedon Foundation.

CONCLUSION: THE PERFORMATIVITY OFPERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION,

REVISITED

consigns to the photo critic rather than the photo-documentari-an. In these respects, their work is completely continuous withthe history of theater photography and at odds with the ambi-tions of performance documentarians like Moore and Mangolte,with whom they were contemporary. As Mayer says of the earli-est examples of theater photography, these are images of per-formers, not performances.

Avedons and Waldmans images are of performers asseen by a particular photographer at a particular moment.Schmitt defines the aesthetic of the 1960s theatrical avant-gardeas emphasizing momentary personal interactions and arguesthat Waldmans photographs do the same: He interacts as audi-ence member and the photo can express that interaction andprovide, then, one spectators experience of the performance,that persons sense of what it was like to be there. Waldmansphotograph, then, is a record of an interaction, not of the play initself. 57 Waldmans emphasis on his own subjectivity ratherthan the performance itself runs directly counter to Moores andMangoltes respective eorts to avoid subjectivity in their perfor-mance work, marking the dierence between his theater photog-raphy and the kind of performance documentation that Kirby,Argelander, and others were conceptualizing at the same time.

Discussing the role of spontaneity in Waldmans carefullycomposed shots, Schmitt notes that the photographs make usaware that Waldman might not be able to get a picture quite likethat again. 58 In other words, the spontaneity at issue is notthe performers but the photographers, and the theater pho-tographs of the early 1970s often say more about the photograph-er than they do about the performance, capturing the photogra-phers engagement with the event rather than the event itself.Morgans earlier images of Graham were not as directly about thephotographers subjective experience of the performance, butthey are about photography as a means of accessing an aspect ofGrahams dancing that ostensibly could not be accessed throughthe theatrical experience or its direct representation. Althoughthese photographers certainly produced images of performersand performances, sometimes performers from the same avant-garde circles as those photographed by Moore and Mangolte,their work is quite distant from the self-conscious aspiration ofperformance documentarians to produce objective, self-eacingrecords in words and images that could serve as means by whichfuture audiences might access the ephemeral performance itself.

Having presented a brief but, I hope, fairly full picture of the eorescence of theidea and practice of performance documentation on New Yorks experimental artscene from about 1964 through 1974, I return to speech act theory to propose a

more refined concept of the performativity of performance documentation than Isuggested at the outset. To enrich my analogy between documentation and speechacts, I will enlist John R. Searle, one of Austins successors, who made the salientpoint that while all utterances, in their performative aspect, exert force on theworld, they do not all do so in the same way or with the same type of force. Hetherefore proposed a taxonomy of illocutionary acts. Searle distinguishes declara-tions from other performative speech acts primarily in terms of what he calls thedirection of fit between words and the world. Some illocutions have as part oftheir illocutionary point to get the words to match the world, others to get theworld to match the words. Assertions are in the former category, promises and re-quests are in the latter. 59 Declarations are distinguished by their dual direc-tion of fit: While the words of a [declaration] do in some sense fit the world they also constitute it, so that by their very utterance the world is also made to fitthe words. 60

Searles dual direction of fit provides a valuable heuristic for thinkingabout the world-making abilities of performance documentation as envisionedand practiced by Kirby, Moore, Mangolte, and others. With respect to performancedocumentation as a discourse, Kirby clearly wanted the words to match theworld (literally in written documentation, metaphorically in photo-documenta-tion) in that he wanted documentation to produce as objective, literal, and accu-rate a record of the performance (an event in the world) as possible.

But the practice of performance documentation that Kirby envisioned wasalso world-making. Searle points out that declarations require the authority of anextra-linguistic institution (not just linguistic competence) to be successfullyperformed. 61 Kirbys status not only as an artist active in both the visual artand performance scenes in New York but also as editor of TDR, a well-establishedand respected journal, and as a professor at New York University provided the in-stitutional authority that endowed the documentation that he published therewith illocutionary force. Discussing Kirbys editorship of TDR, Puchner defines hisproject as that of creating a contemporary avant-garde in New York. 62 Bydocumenting disparate performance practices by visual artists, dancers, theatermakers, and others in the same pages, the journal brought the New Yorkbasedavant-garde that it sought to describe objectively into being as a coherent scene.Simultaneously, it helped to create a discursive category of performance thattranscended individual genres and art forms but implied an overall experimentalattitude and membership in an avant-garde. As both Kirbys focus on tomorrowspast and Mangoltes statement that she was photographing so that an unknownfuture audience might better understand the work documented suggest, perfor-mance documentarians created an archive of significant work whose significancewas asserted through the act of documentation rather than established prior todocumentation: these works were not documented because they were significantbut became significant because they were documented.

Certainly Kirby and those who participated in his project considered theperformances that they documented to be significant. But as we have seen, theyundertook to document them largely for a future audience and could not haveclaimed to know what that audience would find to be significant. Whereas Kirbybelieved that the availability of objective records of these performances would al-low later audiences to make their own determinations about them, the reality isthat the availability of these performances in documentary form is a major reasonthat later audiences have found them to be significant. In these respects, perfor-mance documentation brought the world it described into being through its owndeclarations.

Philip Auslander, a professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication of

ENDNOTES

1. Philip Auslander, The Performativity of Performance Documentation,PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, no. 28 (September 2006): 5, citingJ. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1962), 6.

2. See Vito Acconcis statement about Trademarks, Collections, Walker ArtCenter, http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/trademarks).

3. Although Kirbys work on the historical avant-garde lies outside the scopeof the present discussion, it is worth noting that one of his majorcontributions was Futurist Performance (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), astudy of performances created by Italian Futurists that is continuous withhis work on the documentation of contemporary performance in that it isprimarily an anthology of scripts, manifestos, and photographs rather thana critical history.

4. Michael Kirby, The Art of Time: Essays on the Avant-garde (New York: E. P.Dutton, 1969), 57. For a fuller version of Kirbys comparison between artand science, see ibid., 5558. It is important to stipulate here that Kirbydid not intend his claim that only the new can be significant as a valuejudgment. For one thing, he argued, the new is not good merely becauseit is new (ibid., 42). For Kirby, newness was a necessary condition forsignificance but not a sufficient condition. For another, he characterizedthe significance of art as objective because it is based in culturalconsensus, not individual evaluation: Shakespeare and Picasso are great,whether or not I care for them (ibid., 58).

5. Michael Kirby, preface to The New Theatre: Performance Documentation,ed. Michael Kirby (New York: New York University Press, 1974), unpaged.

6. Michael Kirby, An Introduction, Drama Review 15, no. 3 (1971): 6.7. Kirby, preface, unpaged.8. Claes Oldenburg, Store Days: Documents from The Store (1961) and Ray

Gun Theater (1962) (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), 79.9. Ibid.

10. Michael Kirby, Documentation, Criticism, and History, Drama Review 15,

the Georgia Institute of Technology, writes frequently on performance, music, media, andvisual art. His books include Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and CulturalPolitics in Contemporary American Performance (University of Michigan Press,1992); Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge, 1999; second edi-tion 2008); and Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music(University of Michigan Press, 2006). Auslander has been a regular contributor to Art-forum and other publications, and edits The Art Section: An Online Journal of Artand Cultural Commentary (www.theartsection.com).

no. 4 (1971): 3.11. Ibid., 4.12. Michael Kirby, Criticism: Four Faults, Drama Review 18, no. 3 (1974):

66.13. Kirby, preface, unpaged. Kirby takes up the question of how writers may

avoid value-laden language in the service of objective description inCriticism, 6668.

14. Caroline Rye, Incorporating Practice: A Multi-Viewpoint Approach toDocumentation, Practice as Research in Performance, Department ofTheatre, Film, Television, University of Bristol, 2003,http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/s_cr.htm.

15. Matthew Reason, Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representationof Live Performance (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 24.

16. Martin Puchner, Entanglements: The Histories of TDR, TDR: The Journalof Performance Studies 50, no. 6 (2006): 18. See 1518 for a discussion ofKirbys editorship of TDR, which lasted from 1971 to 1985.

17. Kirby, Documentation, 5.18. Kirby, Criticism, 65.19. Ibid., 6566.20. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, in Against Interpretation and Other

Essays (New York: Dell, 1969), 17.21. Ibid., 19.22. Kirby, Art of Time, 23.23. Reason was first to note the connection between Kirby and Sontag. See

Documentation, 197.24. Sontag, Against Interpretation, 22.25. Ibid., 23.26. Kirby and Meyer traveled in some of the same circles. Like Kirby, Meyer

was a sculptor who taught at a university in New York. Their work wasshown together on at least one occasion, in 1967 in an exhibition at theFinch College Museum of Art titled Schemata 7. They also shared apublisher in E. P. Dutton, which published Kirbys Happenings and hiscollection of essays The Art of Time (1969), as well as Meyers anthologyand a host of other books chronicling the art and performance of theera.

27. Ursula Meyer, introduction to Conceptual Art, ed. Ursula Meyer (New York:E. P. Dutton, 1972), viii.

28. Examples in Meyers anthology of conceptual art that consists ofinformation about art include, among others, essays on conceptual art byTerry Atkinson and by Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden presented as works ofconceptual art in themselves; John Baldessaris painting A Work with OneProperty (196667); and Douglas Hueblers immaterial works whoseexistence can be deduced only from their documentation.

29. Kirby, preface, unpaged.30. Roland Barthes, The Photographic Message, in Image / Music / Text,

trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 19. See also AnneMarsh, The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire (Melbourne,Australia: MacMillan, 2003), 9398.

31. The Walker Art Centers collection includes two of Moores photographs,both of the cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman.

32. Ronald Argelander, Photo-Documentation (and an Interview with PeterMoore), Drama Review 18, no. 3 (1974): 5152.

33. Ibid., 54.34. Ibid., 51.35. Ibid., 52.36. Ibid., 56.37. Ibid., 5758.38. Although this is an issue that lies outside the scope of the present essay,

it is important to point out that while the reduction of a performance to asingle still image is clearly problematic, so is the assumption that a singlestill image cannot adequately represent a performance. Consider thefollowing passage by Matthew Reason, in which he discusses the work ofphotographer Lois Greenfield: 'It intrigues me, writes Greenfield, 'that in1/500th of a second I can allude to past and future moments even if theseare only imaged [sic]. In this manner, the images are interestingembodiments of Henri Cartier-Bressons thesis that by capturing the'decisive moment the still photograph can be representative of themissing whole. They also match what Anthony Snowdon describes as theambition of his theatre photography, to 'sum up a moment more than thatmoment. Here the decisive moment seeks to lead the viewer intocontemplation of movement, reading a narrative of time into the stillfragment. Documentation, 137.

39. Babette Mangolte, Balancing Act between Instinct and Reason or How toOrganize Volumes on a Flat Surface in Shooting Photographs, Films, andVideos of Performance, in After the Act: The (Re)Presentation ofPerformance Art, ed. Barbara Clausen (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst,Stiftung Ludwig, 2007), 35.

40. Ibid., 3637.41. Ibid., 38.42. Kirby, preface, unpaged.43. Kirbys emphasis on written description as the primary means of

performance documentation provides a context for considering the workof Tino Sehgal, whose This objective of that object (2004) was acquired bythe Walker Art Center. As has frequently been noted, Sehgal seeks tomake art without producing any physical artifact of the events that hestages in galleries and museums as a gesture against what he sees as theexcessive proliferation of objects in the world. As a review of theperformance of This objective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts inLondon notes, the space contained only actors, and the work is not

documented in any way because Sehgal forbids its audiovisualreproduction. Catherine Wood, Tino Sehgal, Frieze, no. 91 (May 2005),http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/tino_sehgal1/. Sehgal does notdiscourage people from writing about his work, however; in fact, it issurely intended to generate critical discourse. The claim that his work isnot documented in any way is therefore false: the very review in whichthese words appear documents the performance by describing it andmakes the work available to someone (such as myself in this case) who hasnot experienced it. Seen through the lens of the history of performancedocumentation, Sehgals work reveals that we have become so used tothe idea that performance documentation is visual in natureandconsequently neglect the presentational qualities of writing (Reason,Documentation, 183)that we blithely consider a work to beundocumented because there are no pictures of it even when there arecopious written descriptions. The irony is that because Sehgal explicitlyprohibits self-conscious documentation, it is the critic, whom Kirby sodetested, who assumes the task of documenting Sehgals work.

44. Adrian George, Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance, in Art,Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance, ed. Adrian George (Liverpool:Tate Liverpool, 2003), 14; Reason, Documentation, 6.

45. Mangolte, Balancing Act, 43.46. Ibid. Some conceptual and performance artists who used film echoed

Mangoltes perception of the medium. Meyer notes: Film as a mediumdoes not hold the same interest for Conceptual Artists as it does forfilmmakers. Said Acconci: 'Most of us are not interested in film as film. Ipersonally do not care for setting up scenes and editing. Meyer,Conceptual Art, xiii.

47. Mangolte, Balancing Act, 4445.48. Babette Mangolte, Installations, BabetteMangolte.com,

http://www.babettemangolte.com/install2004.html.49. David Mayer, 'Quote the Words to Prompt the Attitudes: The Victorian

Performer, the Photographer, and the Photograph, Theatre Survey 43,no. 2 (2002): 227.

50. Ibid., 231.51. Argelander, Photo-Documentation, 54.52. I discuss the distinction between the documentary and the theatrical in

performance documentation at greater length in The Performativity ofPerformance Documentation.

53. Barbara Morgan, Permanent Collection, Museum of ContemporaryPhotography, http://www.mocp.org/detail.php?t=objects&type=all&f=&s=barbara+morgan&record=29.

54. Barbara Morgan, quoted in Curtis Carter, review of reissue of MarthaGraham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, Dance Dimensions 8, nos. 12(1981): 41.

55. Natalie Crohn Schmitt, Recording the Theatre in Photographs, TheatreJournal 28, no. 3 (1976): 377.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., 378, 382.58. Ibid., 381.59. John R. Searle, A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts, in Language, Mind, and

Knowledge, ed. Keith Gnderson (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1975), 346.

60. Kira Hall, Performativity, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 91, nos. 12(2000): 185.

61. Searle, Taxonomy, 35960.62. Puchner, Entanglements, 16.