The Fluxus photographer, Lisa Kahone, once said, “The performance is a distillation of a real life event, the act of photographing it distils it even further.” As a result she argues that the camera does not fetishise the performance/the spectacle/event, but the spectre/ghost and retains a mythological status. However the words spectacle, spectator and spectre all have the same etymological route – the act of revelation, ‘to behold’. Derrida wrote on, ‘Spectres of Marx’ saying, “The notion of the spectre is the visibility of the invisible. Invisibility, by its essence, is not see, which is why it remains… beyond the phenomenon or beyond being. The spectre is… what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see.”

In this respect the document can never become the act, which is why I believe that the point at which Francis Alÿs sold the documentation of When Faith Moves Mountains to the Guggenheim in 2002 as ‘the artwork’ – a three channel video installation with sound, the work became de-valued. It is almost impossible to exist as an artist and avoid documentation. Confusing the two however, places a work, with the premise of an absurd act of labour void of material form, back into a material form. Alÿs discusses this work in the context of a desire to create, ‘a collective hallucination’ that would exist as a fable or rumour outliving the event, fed by the imagination. Fables are kept alive by the act of telling but fables must be free to shape themselves along the way. When Faith Moves Mountains will never exist as fable when video installation is sold as the artwork.