Vienna. The exhibition »After the Act. The (Re)presentation of Performance Art«, small by MUMOK’s standards, was accompanied by a text that revealed at least two clear ambitions: »To examine the relationship between performance art and its documentation and receptive history (from the singular moment to a cultural asset)« and, secondly, to show works by contemporary artists that reinterpret the history of performance art by means of »the representation and presentation inherent to performance art«.
The first topic is very relevant to our time, if we recall how, over one or two decades, 16-mm and 8-mm film have fallen into decline, magnetic tapes have sunk in playback quality and negatives have been lost. Even digital technology is incapable of preserving the ephemeral elements that find their way into performance art and other time-based artistic genres, or of providing enough »history« to which we can refer. Apart from the preservation of visual material, the traditional way out of this situation lies in the primitive« written script developed in theatre and, to a certain extent, in the field of music. Chronology, score, conceptual framework, instructions and the impressions of the audience are written down and documented. The commentary of »After the Act« managed, in an interesting way, to eliminate this characteristic medium of performance art, or at least to push it to the outer margins. Daniel Guzman and Luis Filipe Ortega’s restaging of the performances by Bruce Naumann and Terry Fox were supplemented by chronologically appropriate pictures of the original performances, but at the same time toned down the force of the »performance instructions« that were written and published by the »concept« generation - despite the fact that these mostly short, universally applicable and widely known instructions were at the centre of the construction of that which formed the imaginary attention space of individual enthusiasts who were prepared to follow them from their publication. The prejudice that the visual has priority over the text was seen in »After the Act« in the documentation of Joan Jonas’s performances, whose hihglights were the photo-documentations of »Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll« and »Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy«, organised on aleatoric principles but placed in frames.1 In contrast, a copy of the detailed text for these works as well as notes and drafts by the artist waited for readers at a side stand in a rather restrained and disconnected fashion.
Here, it is less a matter of denouncing conventional museum practice or bolstering contemporary art with established avant-garde values or a corresponding legacy than of the willingness of the museum to turn away from the static, visual »art object« and reflect the history of time-based, interdisciplinary art practices – for example, by carrying out processes flexibly, a more comprehensive documentation and different strategies of distribution.
»After the Act« showed an interesting shift in the meanings of the reproduction or »(re)presentation« of performance. By virtue of the fact that mechanically produced images, easily reproduced these days by digital means, are framed and put behind glass, they become fragments of an evidential archive that shows a mythical event and is ready to enter the cycle of the art market. On the other hand, the artistic gesture and behaviour have long been the objects of remakes and copies. Although an »inverted« state of this kind was postulated and a critical standpoint espoused with regard to the »commodification« of documents, »After the Act« did little towards finding alternatives. Instead of being treated as reusable material that could help in the reconstruction of a performance, the »originals« of the photos remained static and mute icons of a fading legend. Certainly, profit could be derived from such an approach when well-known examples are in question, but in the case of complex multimedia scenarios (like those of Joan Jonas), it must inevitably fail, even though these latter have already become very remote owing to various information gaps and time lapses.
In the attempt to open up a critical debate on the representation of performances, »After the Act« seems to have not really done justice to this complex state of affairs. Paradoxically, the exhibition itself became the illustration of a »framing« or »reframing« of the temporal frame of performance on and for static museum walls. The main subject seemed to have been lost between creative reinterpretations of historical performances by young artists and attempts to show historical or archive material. So the exhibition can be seen as an experiment, as long as it is not forgotten that it concentrated on the arguably best-documented (and most-collected) part of performance history – Viennese Actionism and the New York performances of the sixties and seventies. However, there seems to be little reference to the growing information desert of performance history that now exists around these now old-established oases.
Translated by Timothy Jones