In 1997 Amelia Jones wrote her article ‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation for Art Journal. This can be found on http://art.usf.edu/File_Uploads/Presence.pdf

While I agree with most of Jones’ points – particularly that immediacy is, precisely, a modernist (and also clearly avant-garde) dream within the cyber age, I cannot agree wholly with her belief that a live audience is a non essential factor, that the photograph is the necessary component to prove something has happened. Of course words like’ truth’ and ‘reality’ can no more liberally be thrown around within a live performance than when viewing a photograph of said performance, but live time does not cloud comprehension within histories/narratives/processes, it offers an alternative. Why should a live act trigger fewer associations than a document and what privileges something that can be packaged neatly into an art historical framework over something potentially breaking away? The camera was developed into a transportable device early in the twentieth century; it is a medium that will be tied to an era as a result, tied to the speed of its technological advancement. The live performance on the other hand has an endless future potential bound to but not reliant on a materiality.

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.

“The more we interrogate the embodied consciousness with technology the more aware we become of its impenetrability.” Tracey Warr in Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance Tate Liverpool 2003

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.

Last week I was given the very exciting opportunity to visit Edinburgh’s Clinical Research Facility at the Royal Infirmary. I am always looking for starting points for my drawings and work to develop, particularly the points where man and machine meet. This ambiguous juncture between man and machine is a particular symptom of our age which is why I find it so fascinating – our lives are governed by the technology we can create, obsolete before it has time to reach the mass market. The clinical research facility offered me new material on two levels. Firstly the ultimate point at which the brain meets the machine – I discovered how a body scan can be taken on a scanner and, within minutes, transferred to a computer, animated, spliced into sections, viewed from every possible angle. Secondly, and the part I was not expecting was the process of entering the facility itself. Airport style security and endless forms to fill out create an exaggerated state of our understanding of surveillance and control within our own society. A facility where, from the moment you are buzzed through the door, you are on view both inside and out.

Thursday 25^th February I went to view a seminar by the renowned author and critic Jonathan Harris (author of ‘The New Art History a Critical Introduction’. The lecture was called Globalization and Contemporary Art and was an overview of the topic of his new book however, what I really took away from the experience was his delivery. Verging on performative, the way the lecture was presented summed up the content of the lecture itself. While a rolling projection of images of big, blockbuster shows at the Tate Modern’s Unilever series flashed by on the screen, punctuated with rough texts from Harris’ book, Harris talked over, not referring to the images at all but bombarding his audience with information about recession, the spontaneous public mourning at the death of Michael Jackson and the speed of air travel infection of swine flu. What better way to make people aware of the effects of globalization and technology than bombard them with visual imagery, stats, figures and cameras.