Vienna. With »After the Act«, this symposium, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name curated by Barbara Clausen, immediately pointed to the complicity between time line and ontology, a complicity that the speakers mainly agreed in opposing. The classical ontology of the document tells us that the »event« - i.e., the sequences of actions, oscillating between everyday life, violence and spectacle, that take place with the artist’s personal participation and that since the sixties have been called »performance« - precedes its document, which, however, outlives the performance. Conversely, the document is only the index of the performance, and thus of any market value, when it can satisfy people that it refers back to the precursive performance whose place it is taking. For Philip Auslander and Christian Janecke, it was clear that the question of the authenticity or the falsity of the performance document is no longer pertinent in view of the priority now given to the role of the viewer. The viewers of the document, who make up a far larger audience than the contingent first visitors of the actual performance, shift the ontological question to the question of validity. But now, Christian Janecke, with his powerful polemics against those participative events of the past few years in which the art scene not only caters just to its own society by perpetually taking itself as its theme, but also signalises »You are the performance« to the audience by means of pudding distribution and faked demos, provided the best arguments against a premature dissolution of the eternal triangle of image, performance and viewer – especially as his examples also clearly demonstrated that it was the deliberately artistic frame that made the viewers realise in the first place that they are now the performers. More happens between the image and the event than the viewer framed as art event would think possible. Doesn’t the reviled belatedness of »After the Act« possess a certain criminalistic charm that turns the document into »evidence«, a clue to an alleged crime? Or is it post-coital exhaustion that lingers on in this »afterwards« - as Viennese Actionism suggested? In any case, the purportedly living performance and the purportedly static or at least artificial image – for in the examples shown at the symposium it was also the noble classic of black-and-white photography that reigned unquestioned - remain »partners in crime«. And those artists who carry out their performance with its documentation already in mind, which is then, in the process of its production, perhaps the performance, often give the viewers more to think about and more to enjoy than the joyful amazement at suddenly being the show themselves. This was the case with the simple, yet highly complex example of Vito Acconci’s »Blinks« (1969), a series of apparently architectural black-and-white photos of a deserted New York Street, in which one particular street is photographed again and again in a recognisable rhythm. The performance element would remain hidden if there was no instruction guiding the action: Acconci pressed the shutter release every time he had to blink. In this way, he developed a small, obsessive-neurotic exercise in attention to everyday life, which produced the document of its execution from its inner paradox. Whenever he felt an unconscious reflex, he carried out a technical act that serially became a reflex once more. Whenever he could not see for a moment, the camera preserved a picture. As Auslander remarked with scholastic perspicacity, these photos are the proof of the execution of a performance without documenting the performer while performing. But whether, in the end, the documents become a performance or whether the performance consists in the production of the document – the condensation together of a performance that already anticipates its own future history and a theory of the image extended to become a theory of media, supplemented by a theory of reception – is always left by the artistic production itself to theory, which always only begins its wise deliberations »After the Act«. For there has been little thought devoted to the question of how the frame of the document reflexively determines in the first place what will have been a performance; the theme was rather the status of the document, which was more doubtful than the status of the event. However, precisely the game of deferral is, for its part, reflexive. And in the end, Carrie Lambert’s extremely coherent talk »Time Management« about a canonic photograph of Yvonne Rainer’s »Some Sextets« (1965) by Peter Moore showed not only that the document is historical in its framing – for example, the preference for a wide shot that is oversized with regard to the performance space stands for a particular gesture of dance and performance history – but also that the units of measurement of temporality have their inner history. In this way, Rainer, probably without suspecting it, could have anticipated the portioning of the TV era in the 30-second rhythms of her piece composed of everyday movements, concrete action sequences and dance sequences.
Translated by Timothy Jones