I propose that performance art not only can be a method or approach to conducting research but as a research paradigm, provides a non-captive, free-flowing, experiential and immaterial research paradigm where beliefs systems are between vapour – liquid – vapour.
The main objective of the blog will be exploring disparities between the live act, i.e bodies amongst other bodies and photography/written account.
Key Questions:
- Can research be free flowing, unbound by documentation? Not as a separate activity but the primary activity?
- Can it be an entity that lives and transforms within the viewer rather existing as an event after the fact through writing or static photographs, is performance art not the same as experience?
- What is at stake when live art is documented?
- Can new insights be produced without tying down performance? performance has the possibility to produce new openings that dismantle ideologies in the static, in representation –what is at stake when “documenting” the undocumentational (Phelan, 1993).
- If writing is necessary for a practice PhD, which personally I do not consider it is. Can performance produce new insights without betraying it’s ephemeral expression/strength in a non fixed, multi perspective openings and ever-evolving outcomes?
- Can video be more deceiving than photography or writing as it seems the closest to performance art yet it misses the smell the presence of bodies watching bodies, and actually being present in real time?
Starting statement
I often refer to performance art as ‘doing’, as I don’t necessarily see the work as a performance in the traditional sense, but rather gestures, movement, a dance with/in material that’s often not choregraphed. The location and settings are often premediated, for their pre-existing frame/context. The interventionist/ performance work aims to disrupt and contest pre-existing context and knowledge. There are new possibilities in the vulnerability of such acts that cannot be ‘corrected’, these possibilities offer openings for new discoveries for both the viewer and performer. The process embedded in my performative practice is experiential and shaped by an intuitive exploration of the external and the internal – simultaneously my own ever-changing interrogation of history and experience. ‘Nothing disappears completely, however nor can what subsists be defined solely in terms of traces, memories or relics’ (Lefevre, 1974, p.229). Lefebvre speaks of social space and the remanences that cannot be solely defined, implying that history isn’t fixed and it lives with and in a person and that it is ever changing. ‘Performance’s only life is in the present…performance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive. It is this quality which makes performance the runt of the litter of contemporary art’ (Phelan,1993 p.146-148). However, what may seem a threat to knowledge reproduction encapsulates a radical alternative to positivist thinking about knowledge and knowledge sharing as fixed and absolute. There is an intensity within performance due to its ephemerality, the spectator must be engaged in the present and that is part of its strength. As discussed by Phelan:
‘…[I]n performance art spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take everything in . Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present- and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control…The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to the laws of the reproductive economy are enormous. For only rarely in this culture is the “now” to which performance addresses its deepest questions valued’ (pg.149-147).
Performance is the only ‘artform’/expression that addresses knowledge in real time, it cannot be stored and put away. ‘Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies’(Phelan, p.149). A single gesture has the power to dis-locate knowledge, as illustrated through Kershaw’s examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein and P.Sraffa argument over ideas of Tractatus (Malcolm 1958, quoted in Mehta 1965:85) (2010, p.104).
As Phelan has pointed out, ‘To attempt to write about the undocumentable event of performance is to invoke the rules of the written document thereby alter the event itself.’(1993p.148) As a research practitioner I do share these anxieties, however, I do not accept text/writing as the event itself nor will I try and disguise it as so. Performance generates research and bridges the space between viewer and artist, a shared immaterial indwelling, which cannot be documented. It is arguable that you cannot alter something that cannot be documented. A memory or snapshot will never be the event. Memory offers a malleability to research to reform in many different an unexpected ways. The lived experience offers its witnesses an ever-evolving sculpture, that disperses and takes many shapes…an anti-positivist fluid movement.
