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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),
We welcome manuscripts and Gallery proposals. Please send inquiries to
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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.
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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:
LEONARDO, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 147–152, 2008 147
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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]. Documents are the tures and encourages the production of desire for an original, expressed through fragments of that archive—individual his- documentation towards recovering a a fragmentary piece that signifies a whole torical accounts of loss. To document is mythic “original.” I will return to these original [13]. Identity is not mandatory, to emerge from and to continue to re- three problems in more detail below, prompting us to consider other factors produce loss. after first inflecting these questions that contribute to the impression of au- In its original instantiation, Nauman’s through the specific example of an artist- thenticity in re-presentation. Body Pressure (1974) was an installation: a created documentation project: Marina The medium of the documentation wall with an instructive-performative text Abramovic´’s November 2005 perfor- that Abramovic´ produces, authorizes or attached, beckoning viewers to interact mance series Seven Easy Pieces. uses is therefore part of a layered, knot- with the piece. The original piece was not ted set of materials all hovering around so much performed by Nauman as it was a the idea that some “original” precedes potential viewer-enacted performance in- ACTING OUT the current documentation. While her stigated by Nauman [18]. Interestingly, DOCUMENTATION own re-performances work as documen- what seemed to be crucial about Nau- Performed at the Guggenheim Museum tation, providing a more embodied rela- man’s work was the openness of his in- in New York, Abramovic´’s Seven Easy Pieces tionship with the audience than paper stallation, which prompted viewers to appropriated five other artists’ perform- documents might offer [14], the works physically engage with the wall by fol- ances from the 1960s and 1970s and in- she re-creates are also spoken of (in pub- lowing his detailed and provocative cluded two of her own works—one old licity and gossip), videotaped and pho- instructions (Fig. 1). Abramovic´’s re- and one new [10]. For Abramovic´, the re- tographed by the Guggenheim Museum performance consisted instead of a sin- maining documentation of Bruce Nau- (replayed during the week of the per- gular embodiment of the action, per man’s Body Pressure (1974), Vito Acconci’s formance on monitors in the museum Nauman’s instructions. Pressing her body Seedbed (1972), VALIE EXPORT’s Action atrium) and filmed by Babette Mangolte against a glass wall standing at the center Pants: Genital Panic (1969), Gina Pane’s (as authorized by Marina Abramovic´ for of a raised circular platform in the Gug- The Conditioning (1973), Joseph Beuys’s the purpose of creating a documentary genheim atrium, Abramovic´ responded How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare of the event) [15]. Documentation of to the commands that issued from her (1965) and her own Lips of Thomas (1975) performance art’s history in this case is own pre-recorded voice reading the Nau- failed to accurately or fully convey the ex- both performative—in the repetitive, man text. The performance repeated perience of the performance, motivating ritualistic gestures staged by the artist every 30 minutes for the duration of the artist to bring these works back to life each night—and a controlled, techno- seven hours. [11]. Indeed, such documentation had logically augmented affair executed by By repeating the gesture of the per- become iconic in its continued repro- both the museum and Abramovic´’s film formance, the pressing of a body against duction as complex works were reduced crew. These layers of documenting en- a wall, Abramovic´ sought to recapture the to singular images, belying the essentially courage consideration of how different essence of the original performance—a body-based actions that Abramovic´ un- methods of documenting relate to re- certain relationship between body and derstood to be at the heart of these six called originals. The technologies cho- architecture. In the process of reproduc- works [12]. Her reinterpretations play sen by Abramovic´ convey a great deal ing the work repeatedly, on a 30-minute with iconic images even as her manipu- about the artist’s assessment of what as- loop, the artist catalogued ways of press- lation of time, space and bodily presence pects of experience were essential to the ing the body against a wall. Each repeti- works against the flattening of these works in question. tion acted as a snapshot of one body’s works in art-historical memory. In the Here, I examine more closely two com- engagement with Nauman’s instruc- process of recuperating lost actions, ponents of Abramovic´’s performance tions. Marina Abramovic´ had specifically Abramovic´ engages not merely with the series, Body Pressure and Action Pants, planned and built difference into the performances themselves, but more (as which provide evidence of the extended work, having recorded in her voiceover Abramovic´ did not see the pieces per- repetition and embodied documenta- variations in her reading of the text. This formed by Nauman, Acconci, VALIE tion that the artist stages. In both re- repetition with variation reflects her in- EXPORT, Pane or Beuys) with their doc- performances, the style and manner of terpretation of the openness of Nau- uments. Thus, as an author of new, per- the original performance bears on that man’s text. At the same time, her use of formative documents of these works, of its documentation. In each case, the sound recording alters the environmen- Abramovic´ is equally a reader and an in- pertinent questions of authorship, me- tal relationship of the viewers to the terpreter of other documents, staging dium and authenticity resurface. The performance. The single-sensory audio her own role as researcher of perform- constellation of documents that today recording both fragments (by breaking ance art’s history. surround these two works rehearse what up the experience of the whole work) These reinterpretations act as rever- is essential, while departing knowingly and multiplies the performance image, berations of single past moments rather from the past’s mythic hold, permitting acting as yet another performative doc- than as full re-embodiments of the works loss. As Johanna Burton suggests, Abram- umentation of Nauman’s text, albeit un-
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Fig. 1. 07-30-06 1407 (Daniela, Michael and Nathan reading and performing Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure [1974]), 2006. (Photo © Gordon Cieplak)
seen and displaced in time from what was larity of a performance concept. As this PORT had walked through the aisles of visually present at the Guggenheim. re-performance does not incorporate an art-house cinema, demanding that cin- Crucially, when presenting these mul- much repetition (Abramovic´ occasionally emagoers view the “real thing” by en- tiple variations of Nauman’s text, Abra- stands up and sits down, but the slow countering her exposed crotch instead movic´ primarily succeeds in moving the rhythm of this movement is not repeti- of representations of the female body on- performance toward stability. In one tive), Action Pants (2005) is more an ex- screen. The poster she made after the of his later talks, Derrida described the tended meditation on a single moment. performance recalled the frontality of condition of the book-cum-document as Abramovic´ sits, legs spread, in black her own gaze upon these predominantly a “stabilizing immobility” [19]. Here, he leather jacket with the crotch of her male viewers and asserted the potential expresses the document as engaged in pants cut away. Holding a machine gun, of the woman to deflect the objectifying the act of being saved, becoming fixed and pointed indiscriminately, she looks di- “male gaze” by looking back. Although institutionalized. Abramovic´’s perform- rectly at members of the audience, one VALIE EXPORT’s performance dates ance works well here in relation to this at a time. The artist uses documentation, from a moment prior to the opening of idea; while her actions continue to vary, as opposed to the performance itself, as discourse on the “male gaze” in film stud- the insistent similarity of form of her rep- the source for her re-performance. Her ies, the young Austrian performance etitions—always signified by the same costume and pose refer to a poster pro- artist was already prepared in the late body—leaves a single (almost stable) im- duced by VALIE EXPORT after the per- 1960s to mark and respond to this objec- pression of the work. Repetition acts as a formance of Action Pants (1969) (Fig. 2). tifying gaze. controlling, stabilizing mechanism. Al- The re-performance-cum-documenta- In her re-performance, Abramovic´ though her motions change according to tion therefore stages a document of a employed a “forced look” as a signifying a cycle, these movements are best un- document, neither of which fully repro- action referring back to the 1969 per- derstood as enduring, where Abramovic´ duces the original performance action. formance. In a public talk after the slowly continues to fix “the image of Abramovic´’s use of the poster helps performance series, she recalled how im- pressing very hard” [20]. emphasize what was at stake in this re- portant it was for her to “feel the public” As with Body Pressure, Abramovic´’s ver- performance: the gaze of the artist di- in a work that was “so much about the sion of VALIE EXPORT’s Action Pants: rected at the audience. In the original gaze” [21]. During the course of the per- Genital Panic also reproduces the singu- performance of Action Pants, VALIE EX- formance, Abramovic´ and one young
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of the performance, one arrives at a mise en abîme of the original idea of a woman facing us with a stony gaze and cocked gun per VALIE EXPORT’s poster. The seemingly endless multiplication of the image through various media is an effect of the desire to document the work. How- ever, rather than reproduce the image on
CONSERVING THE MEDIA ARTS the wall of a museum or through an or- ganized distribution, where a singularly authored work becomes available to mul- tiple users or owners, Abramovic´’s docu- mentation of Action Pants allows the work to circulate from multiple points of au- thorship through a variety of stable and unstable technological media with the aim of re-creating authentic experience from the sum of fragments.
LAYERING DOCUMENTATION: HIERARCHIES OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE? During a talk at the Guggenheim sym- posium Re-Presenting Performance, conser- vator Carol Stringari asked, “Is there a hierarchy of documentation?” [23] Strin- gari’s own practice being informed by archival studies of artworks in their af- terlives, her question prompts an impor- tant connection between artistic and curatorial or conservation practices. Within studies of preservation and con- servation, authenticity—the claim of the document, reproduction or emulation (computer driven or analog) to a strong relationship with an original—remains the goal of efforts to save the past [24]. What, however, does authenticity mean in the context of a re-performance proj- ect such as Seven Easy Pieces? How is au- Fig. 2. VALIE EXPORT, Action Pants: Genital Panic, silver gelatin print mounted on thenticity complicated by variations in aluminum, 65 × 48 in, 1969/2001. (Photo © Patrick Painter, Inc.) authorship and medium within the lay- ers of documentation? Finally, how do woman in the audience experienced an tive felt by a witness to a moment that, these layers of documentation work to- intense hour-long eye-locked encounter, briefly sustained, is now past. gether? an occurrence that generated much dis- The encounter with the young woman I would like to suggest that, in works cussion after the performance. This was equally the focus of filming the per- like Seven Easy Pieces—and in other ex- discussion too is a substantial part of re- formance at that point in the evening. amples of artist-produced documenta- peating the original, through rumors The Guggenheim Museum’s archival tion projects—“authenticity” acts as a and word-of-mouth. Spectators and art video of the piece shows two film cameras structuring mechanism. Each document critics have commented on this en- shifting around Abramovic´’s platform organizes itself around the idea of an counter as one of the most intense mo- during the evening. When the young “original experience.” The drive to pro- ments of the seven night series. Johanna woman began her face-off with the artist, duce documentation stems from a need Burton writes, for example, “those pres- the two cameras assumed positions fo- to produce a truer account of the past, a ent were held captive by a nearly hour- cusing directly on: (1) the face of Marina more complete history of what happened long, wordless exchange between the Abramovic´, gazing intently down to her and how something was perceived. How- artist and a young woman brave enough right and (2) the face of the young ever, the layers of documentation around to inch up to the closely guarded plat- woman, aimed up to meet the artist’s the idea of an original, around a frag- form. After both parties succumbed to stare. These cameras form the image of ment or single moment of the thing it- tears, Abramovic´ released her gaze, the documenting (captured by yet another self, cannot be thought of as nested girl departed” [22]. The prose of this crit- document—the videorecording) as a hierarchically in terms of value. Each doc- ical review reflects and multiplies the multiplication of the gazes of the women ument touches at its root the idea of the event of the encounter, making the per- performing. original, and then moves out from there, formance available as a personal narra- From this layering of documentation diverging in various ways, connecting to
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other documents, and producing an ac- reappearance” [27]. Marina Abramovic´’s How can one usefully compare this cumulation that is best understood col- re-performances work on this model, mode of documentation to the institu- lectively. offering repetitions of fragments of tionally sponsored documentation prac- Generating this multiplicity of frag- the original performances as messy but tices at stake in contemporary projects ments is a multiplicity of authors. Crucial fruitful reappearances of the historical like the Documentation and Conserva- for understanding how documentation works. Re-performance proposes a dy- tion of Media Arts Heritage (DOCAM) works in relation to an original is an namic, living document as a solution to [30]? It is helpful to think of the myriad appreciation for the specificity of au- the past’s disappearance; it allows a re- ways that creative documentation proj-
thorship of each document. How and at experiencing of the work in a time-based, ects highlight loss, absence, fallibility and CONSERVING THE MEDIA ARTS which historical moment a document is body-based, ephemeral medium and technological mediation as inherent and produced influences the character of the makes available new experiences of mem- productive aspects of documentation in document. To imagine a document that ory and the slipping of performance into general. They remind us of the “found, has authority over all other documents— loss. yet constructed” quality of both archives because it entailed more research in its However, the reliance on other docu- and documents. They encourage perfor- production or was closer to the time of ments, fragmentary and inconclusive, re- mative and critical responses from us the first instantiation of the work—re- iterates the fact of loss of the original. By as we contemplate new documentation stricts the memory of the work to a sin- producing more technologically medi- strategies. gular perspective, discounting the variety ated layers of documentation, artists or of ways it was and continues to be en- conservators recognize the potential for countered. Instead, each individual doc- future loss and aim instead at an ever- References and Notes ument adds to the archive of the work. stabilizing memory. One viewer of Seven 1. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall Although the multiplicity of authorship Easy Pieces writes of the works as “con- 2004) pp. 3–22; p. 5. is clear in works such as Seven Easy Pieces, sensual failures” based on fragmentary 2. Foster [1]. institutional producers and collectors of documentation and memory; conse- 3. This analysis emerges from the research program documentation must also account for the quently, “in the remembering of the orig- Documentation and Conservation of Media Arts specificities of different authors of docu- inary events—I know them so well that I Heritage/Documentation et conservation du patri- moine des arts médiatiques (DOCAM), sponsored ments. forget I didn’t actually see them myself— by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Like the specificity of the author of the the contradictions entwined in the Council of Canada and La Fondation Daniel Lang- lois pour l’art, la science et la technologie. This proj- document, the medium of documenta- (re)performance become the excuse not ect aims to analyze and propose practical solutions tion also factors into an understanding to watch, become permission to leave be- for preserving “new media art,” characterized here of the document’s “authenticity.” Here cause an intact, documented memory by a common reliance on 20th-century technologi- cal innovations that quickly become obsolete as well the threat of a hierarchy of documenta- will still exist” [28]. The presence of the as by similarities in terms of instability, variability, tion is most apparent; some media are film crew produces not just a record of ephemerality and multiplicity of form, formats and thought to better capture the “experi- the performance but an excuse not to authors. One proposed solution is to develop a co- herent, comprehensive strategy for documenting ence” of a work of art. To record time- watch with the comforting knowledge work before it becomes obsolete, including what is based artwork like performance in a that someone (or something) else will needed to record or capture these works of art. A more critical set of questions must be addressed con- static medium such as photography is watch for us. currently: How does documentation change our widely regarded as insufficient. In some relationship to the original work? What attributes cases, such documentation is thought can certain forms of documentation preserve and CONCLUSION: how? The discourses on media art preservation to work against the very essence of the DOCUMENTATION and performance art history both maintain loss and performance itself [25]. Recording per- AND PRESERVATION disappearance as their prime adversaries (or co- formance in film or video, although sub- conspirators). To address the documentation and conservation issues at the core of the DOCAM re- stantially more successful at conveying That’s such a delicate thing, how far you search project, the DOCAM Alliance has created a the action of performance, also fails to can go in the compromise without chang- seminar for M.A. and Ph.D. students, beginning in winter 2006. This seminar will continue until the capture the presence of the performer’s ing the meaning of the work, and how project’s conclusion in 2009. DOCAM created the body and, more importantly, the inter- much living artists have to be aware of seminar with the aim of allowing partner universities action between audience and perfor- that and give as close instructions for in this project to develop it into a permanent com- ponent of their curricula. mer(s) that is crucial to, if not definitive preservation of that kind of work as pos- of, contemporary performance art [26]. sible. What is our responsibility once we 4. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Perfor- mance (London: Routledge, 1993), especially pp. Mediating works of art—even for the pur- are not there? 146–166; Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a pose of documentation—is thought to —-Marina Abramovic´ [29] Mediatized Culture (London, New York: Routledge, create distance from the original; the 1999). more elaborate the mediation and the Intensely focused on documentation 5. See, for example, Carrie Lambert, “Documentary more different from the original in terms as preservation in her performance se- Dialectics: Performance Lost and Found,” Visual Re- sources 16, No. 3, 275–285 (Summer 2000); Henry M. of temporality and spatiality, the less au- ries, Marina Abramovic´ produced a work Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant- thentic the “reproduction.” that uses repetition to generate docu- Garde Since 1970 (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1989); Anne Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the But one can imagine a different rela- mentation. Variation and change within Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (Winter 2000) pp. tionship to mediated artworks. Rebecca her repetitions signal not only unique 59–80. Schneider discusses the historical repeti- authorship and creative interpretation, 6. Amelia Jones, “ ‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experi- tion of performance as producing a but also irretrievable loss. Through encing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal kind of counter-memory—a different way Abramovic´’s play with repetition of a sig- 56 (Winter 1997) pp. 11–17; p. 12. of knowing history than traditionally nifying mark and her mediations on sin- 7. While Phelan [4] writes of performance as disap- understood from archives. She valorizes gle past moments, she points to the pearing (p. 146), Jane Blocker discusses performance as producing loss: Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: repetition, writing that “performance be- collaborative work of documents in re- Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis, MN; comes itself through messy and eruptive membering the past. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Jones
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elaborates on the mediation of performance in Cullen et al., Authenticity in a Digital Environment formance Symposium (New York: Solomon R. Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Min- (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Infor- Guggenheim Museum, 8–9 April 2005) [video neapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). mation Resources, 2000). recording: 9 April 2005, tape 2].
8. Phelan [4]. 14. T. Nikki Cesare and Jenn Joy write that Seven Easy 24. Luciana Duranti, “La conservation à long terme Pieces was “as much a means of remembering these des documents dynamiques et interactifs: Inter- 9. For new media art, this question is particularly rel- pieces through an embodied documentation (a re- PARES 2,” Document numérique 8, No. 2, 73–86 (2004); evant, as practices like emulation and migration are membering, if you will) as it was a new work in itself.” InterPARES: International Research on Permanent Au- proposed to re-create works no longer available be- T. Nikki Cesare and Jenn Joy, “Performa/(Re)Per- thentic Records in Electronic Systems (Vancouver: Inter- cause of the obsolescence of their media or compo- forma,” TDR/The Drama Review 50, No. 1, 170–177 PARES, School of Library, Archival and Information nents. See Howard Besser, “Longevity of Electronic (2006) p. 170. Studies, University of British Columbia), CONSERVING THE MEDIA ARTS www.interpares.org>, (21 November 2007); Pip Lau- ICHIM01: International Cultural Heritage Informatics 15. Babette Mangolte’s film Seven Easy Pieces by Ma- renson, “The Management of Display Equipment in Meeting: Cultural Heritage and Technologies in the Third rina Abramovic´ premiered in February 2007. It was Time-Based Media Installations,” in Ashok Roy and Millennium, Vol. 1 (Pittsburgh, PA: Archives & Mu- not available at the time of this writing, but must be Perry Smith, eds., Modern Art, New Museums: Contri- seum Informatics; Milan, Italy: Politecnico di Milano, accounted for in future analyses of this work. Babette butions to the Bilbao Congress (London: The Interna- 2001) pp. 263–275. Mangolte, Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic´, script tional Institute for Conservation of Historic and and performance by Marina Abramovic´, HD Cam Artistic Works, 2004) pp. 49–53. 10. I was able to witness live the opening night of tape 5.1 sound, videorecording (93 min.), 2007. Abramovic´’s performance series. I viewed other nights’ performances, including the artist’s per- 16. Johanna Burton, “Repeat Performance,” Artforum 25. See Carrie Lambert, “Moving Still: Mediating formance of Action Pants, on video, courtesy of the 44, No. 5, 55–56 ( January 2006) p. 55. Yvonne Rainer’s ‘Trio A,’ ” October 89 (Summer 1999) Guggenheim Museum archives. 87–112. 17. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impres- 11. Nancy Spector, Jennifer Blessing and Joan Young, sion, Eric Prenowitz, trans. (Chicago: University of 26. Jones [6]. “Marina Abramovic´: Seven Easy Pieces,” exh. guide Chicago Press, 1996) pp. 11–12. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 27. Rebecca Schneider, “Archives Performance Re- 2005). See also Nancy Princethal et al., “Back for One 18. Such a reading of Nauman’s work points to mains,” Performance Research 6, No. 2, 100–108 (2001) Night Only!” Art in America 94, No. 2, 90–93 (Febru- Abramovic´’s role as archivist of these historical per- p. 103. ary 2006). The article’s subhead reads: “Her Goal: formances and is confirmed by contemporary schol- Securing a Future for an Ephemeral Form of Art.” arship on Nauman. See, for example, Janet Kraynak, 28. Cesare and Joy [14] p. 175. “Dependent Participation: Bruce Nauman’s Envi- 12. Marina Abramovic´ describes how How to Explain ronments,” Grey Room 10 (Winter 2003) pp. 22–45. 29. Marina Abramovic´, “Pure Raw: Performance, Pictures to a Dead Hare is envisaged as “like a 20th- Pedagogy, and (Re)presentation,” interview by Chris century Pietà,” recalling the pose of its most repro- 19. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, Rachel Bowlby, Thompson and Katarina Weslien, PAJ 82 (2006) pp. duced photograph. To recapture the fullness of trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005) p. 7. 29–50. the performance action, Abramovic´ drew on video 20. Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure, © 2002 Bruce Nau- owned by Beuys’s widow. Adrian Dannatt, “Back to man/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Pub- 30. See Note [3]. the Classics [Interview with Marina Abramovic],” Art lished on “manual text,” [1974] 152 Santone, Marina Abramovic´’s Seven Easy Pieces Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon.2008.41.2.147 by guest on 29 September 2021