The Performativity of Performance Documentation

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 incomplete¹ ) and evidence that it actually occurred. The connection between performance and document 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 signified 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 connected to the real world allows it to be treated as a piece of the real world, then as a substitute for it.'"² (In relation to Slater's notion that the photograph ultimately substitutes for reality, it is worth considering whether performance recreations based on documentation actually recreate the underlying performances or perform the documentation. Poor Theatre (2004), in which the Wooster Group recreates performances by Jerzy Grotowski and William Forsythe, and Marina Abramovic's reenactments of other artists's performances in Seven Easy Pieces (2005) are recent examples of work that clearly play with this slippery question.

Jon Erickson suggests that the use of black and white photography in classic performance documentation enhances photography's reality effect (for Erickson, color photographs assert themselves more strongly as objects in their own right). "There is a sense of mere utility in black-and-white, which points to the idea that documentation is really only a supplement to a performance having to do with context, space, action, ideas, of which the photograph is primarily a reminder."³ Amelia Jones takes up the idea of the documentary photograph as a supplement to the performance to challenge the ontological priority of the live performance. She offers a sophisticated analysis of "the mutual supplementarity of . . . performance or body art and the photographic document. (The body art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened; the photograph needs the body art event as an ontological 'anchor' of its indexicality.)"⁴ While this formulation questions the performance's status as the originary event by suggesting the mutual dependence of performance and document (the...