Performance Art, Pornography, and the Mis-spectator: The Ethics of Documenting Participatory Performance

When it comes to documenting participatory performance, what ethical concerns do performance artists face? How can we consider consent in situations like this? In part one, I engage Nicolas Ridout’s figure of the mis-spectator, to examine the ethics of documentation using Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present as a case study. Here, the participant-body is conscription as an object—a product—that performs as an extension of the artist’s body. The notion of “static consent” that undergirds archival logic, upon which the art market rests, is unethical and I propose, instead, that an emphasis on a dialogical culture of care could allow for more ethical forms of consent. In Part two, I examine an instance in which my own documentation of a naked performance art piece was appropriated unconsensually to pornography websites. Examining the complicated relations of power at play, I ask how we might do things differently.