INTERFACE

REVIEW

Documenting Live

Published by Unbound, London
1 August 2008

Reviewed by: mary kate connolly »

 

How does one capture the live, the ephemeral and the fleeting? With all live performance there is an element of loss at the very moment of its realisation. The performed moment can never be recaptured in precisely the same way. It can however be documented: written about, photographed, filmed, and talked about. With Documenting Live, the Live Art Development Agency in association with curator David A. Bailey, and Project Director Rajni Shah, have set about creating a resource which incorporates all of these elements, in order to do just what its title implies: to document Live Art. 

As described by the Live Art Development Agency, Live Art is often ‘an interdisciplinary, itinerant and ephemeral area of contemporary arts practice’. In response to the inherent challenges of documenting such an evolutionary art-form, and with particular focus on Live Art practices that are informed by questions of cultural identity, Documenting Live seeks to create ‘an archival and critical document that maps a history; marks a territory; and looks to the future’. Lofty sentiments perhaps, but ones that are fulfilled happily by the simple and brass-tacks practicality of Documenting Live’s structure.

A DVD which contains introductions to the work of thirteen artists from the 1990s and 2000s, spanning various areas of practice, and further documentary footage of roundtable discussions between the artists sits neatly in one side of the Documenting presentation folder. The other side is filled with biographical postcards created by the artists, which detail their background and practice, and on their reverse side, contain images relating to the artist’s work. Artists include among others, Harminder Singh Judge, George Chakravarthi, Sonia Boyce, David Medalla, and Yara El-Sherbini. Finally, Notes on Documenting Live: Performance-Based Art and the Racialised Body, is an extensive essay written by curator David A. Bailey and published in booklet form, for the project. Charting a progressive artistic line from the UK in the 1950s and 60s, Bailey provides a succinct and thought-provoking mapping of the various cultural, social and artistic arteries which have fed into the rich bloodline of Live Art in the present day. 

There is a palpable sense with Documenting Live, of making up for lost time, and desperately attempting to lay foundations for a documentary process, in the face of a muscular form, ever in flux, and often sidelined into the undocumented minority. If these elements have fed into the brevity and punchiness of Documenting Live, it is all the better for it. Interviews are kept succinct and pithy, the postcards afford the reader an aesthetic window into an artist’s practice, whilst also providing some salient, biographical details, and the essay is informative and contextual. 

If, by its very creation, Documenting Live highlights the growing gap whereby mapping and documentation is fast being out-paced by the speedy trajectory of the art-form itself, it has already succeeded in alluding to the disappearance and loss of history which has gone before, and of the potential loss of work still to come. It succeeds on many more levels than this however – through retrospection, it begins to join the historical dots of Live Art’s roots, and as a result equips a new generation of artists, writers, critics and curators with a culturally contextualised map, by which to navigate forward, into new, uncharted territory.

Writer detail:
Mary Kate Connolly is a freelance writer and movement practitioner based in London

mary11378@yahoo.com

Venue detail:
Published by Unbound

www.thisisUnbound.co.uk 

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