Performance and its documents
There has been a revival in performance art and ephemeral practices over the last twenty years and, as a result, we are seeing exhibitions in major museums and galleries across the world, which engage with performance and its histories.
The critical dialogue surrounding performance art’s ‘liveness’ has produced a compelling context within which to exhibit the ‘traces’ of ephemeral events. Scholarship in the field has been debating the insistence on presence, which dominated earlier manifestations of the genre. Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) curator, Bree Richards says: ‘It seems obvious with performance that “you really have to be there” to get the story right. Yet, if performance is only ever about “presence”, what are we to make of the traces it leaves behind?’ This is the crux of the debate that has been most lucidly played out between Peggy Phelan, who champions the ‘ontology of performance’ and Amelia Jones, who insists that we can read performance through its traces. The scholarship has inspired artists and curators to seriously consider the performance document and what it entails. In terms of history, the record of the event is what persists. These are the documents that future audiences and scholars examine in order to reconstruct the original event. But more interestingly, this reflection on the trace has generated works that investigate the notion of the document itself, and we are finding artists making traces of events that never occurred.
Bree Richard’s exhibition at GOMA brings together various forms of ‘documentation’ of site specific, performative and ephemeral practices from the gallery’s collection, some of which have not been displayed by the gallery before. Whilst there are some key American and European artists (Carolee Schneemann
Brown Council, This is Barabara Cleveland, 2013. Single Channel HD Video, 16'42". Written and directed by Brown Council. Original score by Lucy Phelan. Sound and video by Elliot Hughes.
