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Seven Easy Pieces LEON4102_pp145-152.ps - 3/17/2008 12:46 PM CALL FOR PAPERS Lovely Weather: Artists and Scientists on the Cultural Context of Climate Change Leonardo Special Section Editorial Committee: Julien Knebusch, Ramon Guardans, Annick Bureaud, John Cunningham, Andrea Polli, Janine Anderson, Jacques Mandelbrojt Leonardo seeks to document the ways in which artists and scientists are addressing climate change in a cul- tural context. As contemporary culture grapples with this critical global issue, this 3-year project will docu- ment cross-disciplinary explorations by artists, scientists and engineers, working alone or in teams, addressing themes related to global warming and climate change. Partial list of Leonardo articles and projects concerned with global warming, climate change and related issues: George Gessert, "Gathered from Coinci- Andrea Polli, "Atmospherics/Weather Janine Randerson, "Between Reason and dence: Reflections on Art in a Time of Works: A Spatialized Meteorological Data Sensation: Antipodean Artists and Cli- Global Warming," Leonardo 40, No. 3, 231-- Sonification Project," Leonardo 38, No. 1, mate Change," Leonardo 40, No. 5 (2007). 236 (2007). 31--36 (2005). Ruth Wallen, "Of Story and Place: Com- Julien Knebusch, "Art & Climate Change," Andrea Polli, "Heat and the Heartbeat of the municating Ecological Principles through Web project of the French Leonardo City: Sonifying Data Describing Climate Art," Leonardo 36, No. 3, 179--185 (2003). group Leonardo/Olats (l'Observatoire Change," Leonardo Music Journal 16 (2006) Leonardo pour les Arts et les Techno- pp. 44--45. Angelo Stagno and Andrea van der Sciences), <http://www.olats.org/fcm/art- Straeten, "0-24 Licht: A Project Combining climat/artclimat_eng.php>. Andrea Polli and Joe Gilmore, "N. April Art and Applied Research," Leonardo 40, 16, 2006," LMJ16 CD Contributor's Note, No. 5 (2007). Julien Knebusch, "The Perception of Leonardo Music Journal 16 (2006), pp. 71-- Climate Change," Leonardo 40, No. 2 72. (2007) p. 113. We welcome manuscripts and Gallery proposals. Please send inquiries to <[email protected]>. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon.2008.41.2.147 by guest on 29 September 2021 LEON4102_pp145-152.ps - 3/17/2008 12:46 PM Special Section Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Guest Editors: Jean Gagnon and Alain Depocas This special section of Leonardo documents the work of a vast research alliance headed by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology (Montreal, Canada) on the documentation and conservation of the media-arts heritage. This research project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the Daniel Langlois Foundation. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon.2008.41.2.147 by guest on 29 September 2021 LEON4102_pp145-152.ps - 3/17/2008 12:46 PM Marina Abramovic´’s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation Strategies ABSTRACT This essay raises issues of for Preserving Art’s History authenticity, authorship and medium in a discussion of CONSERVING THE MEDIA ARTS performance, documentation and re-performance. Its object of analysis is Marina Jessica Santone Abramovic´’s 2005 performance series, Seven Easy Pieces, including her re-performances of Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure and VALIE EXPORT’s Action Pants: Genital Panic. Seven Easy Pieces strives to document the past through manipulation n his essay “An Archival Impulse,” Hal Foster de- umentation is not a new issue. of repetition and temporality; I Abramovic´’s re-performances scribes a trend in contemporary art to produce works that re- Having originated in a debate on act as performative documents semble collections of data. He writes that archival art “not only the role of technology, specifically of the past performances she draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and video, in a body-based practice and cites. Lessons learned from a does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival ma- the possibility of reproduction by close analysis of re-performance terials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet technological means [4], the pros- and performance documentation private” [1]. Foster’s reading develops an analysis of works that can provide useful insights for pect of experiencing a mediated and promote critical thought “call out for human interpretation” as he emphasizes the performance has troubled perfor- about conservation strategies processes of memorializing and history-making so important mance art scholars for the past 15 for time-based art. to early 21st-century culture [2]. While Foster’s “archival im- years [5]. What is at stake is whether pulse” in contemporary art is easy to detect, I want to point in- a performance produced solely for stead to a variation on this trend—the drive to produce an electronic recording medium documentation. can be evaluated in the same way as a live event. As Amelia Although similarly concerned with re-creating the past, Jones so aptly pointed out in 1997, for young scholars today artists interested in producing documentation have a sense studying early performance art, we can only know historical not of the past as incomplete, as in Foster’s account of the performance through documentation—-and, more impor- archival impulse, but of history as incomplete. That is, these tantly, “there is no possibility of an unmediated relationship artists are not interested in adding contemporary ideas or to any kind of cultural product,” including performance art structures to objects from the past; instead, they seek to con- [6]. Whether one understands performance as always disap- tribute to the narrativized and/or mediated understandings pearing, endlessly mediated (technologically or socially), or of the past that already come after an originary moment. Their perpetually repeating scenes of loss, the question of inter- production of materials is not archival in the sense of creat- preting not the performance itself but its documentation ing an ordering or logic to a set or collection, but instead com- continually comes to the fore [7]. With this reliance on doc- prises work that repeats and multiplies an historical idea, umentation come attendant questions on the media of those inflecting its image through a nostalgic lens. documents. Documentation is here understood as a mode of produc- Issues of authorship, medium and authenticity pose prob- tion of contemporary art and a mode of critical interpretation; lems in discussions of performance art documentation. Each these practices mutually inform each other and should be of these concerns stimulates the drive to produce, through brought to bear on one another [3]. Problems raised by the repetition and multiplication, a host of materials related to a existing discourse on performance documentation provide so-called “original.” Authorship comes into question because, the grounds for the present investigation and offer points of like the archival impulse, the drive to produce documentation connection between artist-initiated, creative documentation is also conditioned by a relation to materials that are both practices and institutionally sponsored documentation of con- found and constructed—-and thus by an individual who both temporary time-based media arts. Indeed, the ephemerality manipulates existing documents and produces new docu- and interactivity (qualities also attributed to media arts) of ments. One must account not only for the perspective of the performance art pose substantial problems for conservation documenter (occasionally elided when the document is pre- and preservation. Likewise, time-based media arts are fre- sumed to be objective), but also for his or her engagement quently preserved through some means of documentation that with the performance and the degree of subjective selection in turn is often described as performative—-that is, something apparent in the documentation. that must be replayed, reread or reinterpreted in order to Secondly, one must address the medium and style of the be experienced. A theoretical exchange exists between per- documentation. Although scholars such as Peggy Phelan sug- formance, documentation, preservation and media art. gest that the documentation properly “belongs” to the medium In the field of performance art studies, the problem of doc- used and not the medium of what is documented, a broader approach addresses the variety of ways that documentation is Jessica Santone (researcher), Department of Art History & Communication Studies, only partly contingent on the technological medium selected McGill University, 853 Sherbrooke Street W., Montreal, PQ H3A 2T6, Canada. [8]. In either case, the medium matters, demonstrating how E-mail: <[email protected]>. artists and art professionals think about documenting as well LEONARDO, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 147–152, 2008 147 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon.2008.41.2.147 by guest on 29 September 2021 LEON4102_pp145-152.ps - 3/17/2008 12:46 PM as how they understand documentary in question. They offer a view of docu- ovic´ accepts “the condition of attempting style and its relevance to their practices mentation that is caught up in a game of to experience histories as they disappear” [9]. The technology employed by this repetition and image reproduction. Au- [16]. In Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, chosen medium consequently affects our thenticity in this case means copying the he argues that an archive produces itself understanding of how and what the work signifier of the original. Although digital at the moment of its own forgetting, in means. preservation specialists define authen- the space of its own loss—an archive is Finally, the authenticity, reliability and ticity in terms of identity and integrity— creative, opening to additional reading sufficiency of documentation remain in a record’s archival bond to an original and interpretation, and destructive, al- CONSERVING THE MEDIA ARTS question. The idea of a moment of pure and its uncorruptedness—what is at stake ways at the point of disappearing or be- presence set somewhere in the past struc- in this case of documentation is more the ing forgotten [17].
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