PAJ 

About: PAJ is an academic journal published by The MIT Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Dance & Art. It has an ISSN identifier of 1520-281X. Over the lifetime, 929 publications have been published receiving 4786 citations.

The Performativity of Performance Documentation

Abstract: Consider two familiar images from the history of performance and body art: one from the documentation of Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), the notorious piece for which the artist had a friend shoot him in a gallery, and Yves Klein’s famous Leap into the Void (1960), which shows the artist jumping out of a second-story window into the street below. It is generally accepted that the first image is a piece of performance documentation, but what is the second? Burden really was shot in the arm during Shoot, but Klein did not really jump unprotected out the window, the ostensible performance documented in his equally iconic image. What difference does it make to our understanding of these images in relation to the concept of performance documentation that one documents a performance that “really” happened while the other does not? I shall return to this question below. As a point of departure for my analysis here, I propose that performance documentation has been understood to encompass two categories, which I shall call the documentary and the theatrical. The documentary category represents the traditional way in which the relationship between performance art and its documentation is conceived. It is assumed that the documentation of the performance event provides both a record of it through which it can be reconstructed (though, as Kathy O’Dell points out, the reconstruction is bound to be fragmentary and incomplete 1 ) and evidence that it actually occurred. The connection between performance and docu ment is thus thought to be ontological, with the event preceding and authorizing its documentation. Burden’s performance documentation, as well as most of the documentation of classic performance and body art from the 1960s and 1970s, belongs to this category. Although it is generally taken for granted, the presumption of an ontological relationship between performance and document in this first model is ideological. The idea of the documentary photograph as a means of accessing the reality of the performance derives from the general ideology of photography, as described by Helen Gilbert, glossing Roland Barthes and Don Slater: “Through its trivial realism, photography creates the illusion of such exact correspondence between the signifier and the signi fied that it appears to be the perfect instance of Barthes’s ‘message without a code.’ The ‘sense of the photograph as not only representationally accurate but ontologically

Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective

Abstract: When revising my book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture for the second edition that appeared in 2008 (the book was originally published in 1999) one of the things I wanted to emphasize was the historicity of the concept of liveness, the way that the idea of what counts culturally as live experience changes over time in relation to technological change.1 When I was invited to consider the specific question of digital liveness for a presentation at Transmediale 2010 in Berlin, however, I found I was no longer satisfied with one conclusion I had reached, partly because of my own shifting intellectual commitments. My review of the history of liveness from the early days of analog sound recording up to the advent of the digital initially led me to the conclusion that our experiencing digital technologies as live is a function of the technologies’ ability to respond to us in real time. I now wish to interrogate my own position in an effort to outline a phenomenological perspective on digital liveness, defined very broadly.

The anti-aesthetic : essays on postmodern culture

Abstract: ft is now common knowledge to say that in _ these eclectic post-modern times it is getting increasingly difficult to tell a radical from a conservative. For better or worse the illusion of a single unifying vision of progressive culture has been shattered and in the wake of this cultural fragmentation the nature of authority (and audiencel becomes an issue. Not only 1s the reality of the modern presently under attack from all sides but also the reductive and 'correct' view of history which has led up to it. These days it is hard to decide whether a 'traditional' form is being brought back from the grave, radically, to cause doubts about a merely func­ tional world or simply as a wilful denial of contemporary history and a conser­ vative assumption of continuity. Many· artists today ·have re­ discovered the single most important lesson of modernism (and the driving force behind it) that meaning is not inherent in an object and that 'mean· ingfulness of meaninglessness' is the result. This and the fact that they are exploiting the ambiguity of the art­ work m such a complex cultural mo-