Remediating Performance Art Into Video
Performance art and video have had a close association since they emerged as popular contemporary art media in the 1960s. From the very beginning one of the key issues regarding performance art was the ways in which it was disseminated to a wider audience. This gave rise to a critical discourse that dissected the differences between the performance itself and the remediated version of it via video. This was the premise for the exhibition PP/VT (Performance Presence/Video Time) curated by Anne Marsh for the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF).1 Marsh contends that the debate under investigation is whether or not a live action can create a presence in its absence, and this is the ‘glasses’ the exhibition’s viewers wear as they navigate the work of some twenty-five artists. In this essay I will focus on three ways in which video and performance art intersect in PP/VT: One: video used as a pure document of performance; Two: performance undertaken specifically for the camera; and Three: performative cinematic works.
Context
For Marsh’s exhibition a number of works were performed by artists other than the originating artist, among them Jill Scott’s Taped which was delegated to Mira Oosterweghel to perform inside the gallery. In the original 1975 performance Scott was literally taped onto the side of a building in San Francisco; any audience who saw the performance was simply by chance. The documentation was then exhibited with the alternative title Stick Around. Recognising the essential differences between performance art and its remediated form, Vito Acconci referred to videos of such events as only a ‘sign of the performance’.2
On the opening page of Understanding Media (1964) Marshall McLuhan famously... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Catherine Bell, Felt is the Past Tense of Feel, 2006. Performance for video. Photograph Christian Capurro.
Brown Council, This is Barbara Cleveland, 2013. Stills. Single Channel HD Video, Sound. Image courtesy and © the artists.
