Exhibition Catalogue ‘Arts Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance’ Albert Dock, Tate Liverpool 2003

“The visual arts are considered to be the breeding ground for ideas that push culture and society forward to greater invention, discovery and achievement.” However the problem that arises with performance art is that the current understanding of it is confined by the means available to exhibit it within museum walls. This in itself is a contradictory discourse Dock refers to as ‘the truth issue’ split between document, icon, simulacrum and live act. Dock uses photography as an example. Tracy Warr says, “The photograph as an icon is compromised and contradictory because it is both indexical (like the Turin Shroud) and documentary, so that it purports to show us something real and actual which in turn compromises its status as a manifestation of an unknowable to be believed. However the very incompleteness and paucity of photographic document enhances its iconic capacity encouraging the development of legend giving us enough but nothing definite.”

Warr uses Chris Burden’s documentation as an example of deliberate obfuscation through the cryptic nature of his texts and explanatory gap between the text and the image, which allows the viewer to co-create an ‘excess of meaning’. I was very much taken with this idea that the document, mirroring the performance itself can manipulate its audience into participation.