Archive Review Learning Performance by Doing Archiving Performance Linda Cassens Stoian
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Archive Review Learning Performance by Doing Archiving Performance Linda Cassens Stoian Digital Archive of Swiss Performance, 1990+ and also at the same time just be themselves? In the email: [email protected] near future, performance archive-users, Stelarc- like, with their nerves hooked up live to the data What – if anything – can one bank, will be able to navigate in a sea of sensations. learn about performance But even then performance will remain, separate through archiving performance? unto itself, a thing without correspondence. If one After one year of working on the digital archive of believes, however, like Paolo Bianchi (1999a), that Swiss Performance Art 1990+ we raise our heads the fundamental condition of the archive is and take a brief break. Covered with the digital dirt movement, is process, not product, performance of CD-ROMs, Zips, emails, scans and video stills, might turn out to be one of the most difficult not to mention the spiderwebs off old postcard things to archive because it is most like the archive invitations, programmes, photos, statements and itself. press reports of forgotten works and events of the Gerhard Dirmoser’s and ASA-European’s (i.e. last decade, we ask ourselves: ‘What is the sense of Boris Nieslony’s) labyrinthine ‘diagram’ Perform- doing all this?’ The nearly 1000 painstakingly ance-Art-Context (Performance Research 6: 2), a accumulated entries of the fresh archive flicker dis- scheme of mapping performance art, demonstrates sidently at us from the flat monitor screen. the difficulty of setting up ground rules for even Theatre has its script, dance its Laban notation, deciding what performance is, a prerequisite to music its score, while the documents of perform- going out there collecting its materials. Developed ance lack the ability to gather, represent and over a number of years, their research has included thereby conserve the genre’s own quintessence. performance materials and views on performance What would be required is not only a translation of since 1948, with some material going as far back as the visible and the durational into words, but new Futurism, Dada, etc. The result of this research is devices to capture and replay the experience of available as a poster-size diagram (240cm ϫ smell, touch, taste and other senses of dimensions 180cm), which can be downloaded from a website. not yet identified. That is to say, enigmatically, even The diagram is split into 4 parts with a total of in the digital age, performance seems to continue to approximately 32 categories of performance resist being represented in the archive. ordered according to its context, e.g. live, social Unable to conserve the live, data chips provide a relations, society, humanities, philosophical compact repository for dead documents, a genre in relations, personal identities, body examinations, itself which tells its own story. A perfect archive of etc. Illustrating these contexts are 90 definitions of performance would need to be a kind of time performance art and performing arts, at least 900 machine – or, rather, isn’t the festival the true Wun- names of artists and 400 names of theorists, titles derkammer of performance, sufficient for our need from exemplary books, etc. This diagram could be to collect things so that these things can be seen interpreted as a map of the landscape that any together, where they can become new and unusual serious performance collector needs to cover. One 128 Performance Research 7(4), pp.128–134 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2002 definition of an archive is that it has to be a unity ‘music’, etc. If we explore this notion further, for which includes everything. Yet the performance example in the case of collecting and sorting archivist, setting out to gather just one specimen of performances by costume, at one extreme would be the categories outlined in this map, might easily ‘0’ with everyday dress, and at the other extreme – become disheartened. The Performance-Art- at ‘10’ or even ‘100’, depending on the desired Context chart suggests the state of disorder that extent of the range – could be forms such as can be expected in a system in which every single Kabuki or Kathakali. Of course, this would imply a performance forms its own category, and where the Sisyphean task of gathering and registering works. diversity of the contents dissolves any unity of the Before even beginning, one would need to define collection. the various semantic elements of performance and Another kind of set up proportional guide for archiving Schema for Archive Data Input (steps 0-7) scales. But more in relation to Museum Plus Mask & Internal Links performance could be fundamentally, Allan Kaprow’s dissected into its 0/5 Ground Zero: The address Point of Entry: strategy of negation. Adresse serves as the ultimate source Received materials separate parts – e.g. [Address] reference for archived data are logged in and also as possible source here first. As combined artist and for future material. body, image, Learning Performance art historian he movement, space, pursued his own sound, smell, etc. – 3 1/6 creative work through KuenstlerIn Literatur and laid out next to [Artist] (author, [Document] (source setting it in opposition institution) reference of material) each other with their to the traditions of art labels, would such an – first painting, then archive of perform- theatre. Eventually, ance really yield up with the anti-art any secrets? Grouped 2 4 Sammlung Veranstaltung object, he ended up [Work] (performance, [Exhibition] (festival, according to common text, festival, event, event, program, etc.) cancelling his own video, etc.) features and thus work. The Kaprow already completely archive would be the The potential for split-second links hinting at new analysed, nothing ways of putting things next to each other might space of an empty be expedited through the programming of the would be left but digital archive. Nonetheless, the ‘making sense’ mind. Richard 7 labour of the archive user still remains as the names. Michel stubborn resistance of digital information to Schechner could be Foto yield up what one is looking for. This resistance is Foucault (1970) [Photo / Video Image] no less than that of dusty parchments or silent another guide. Even objects. explains that such a more inclusive than method came into Dirmoser and •Swiss Performance Digital Archive, 1990+. The archive was created by Performance Index as contracted by being with the perforum (Seedamm-Kulturzentrum) and will be presented on-line at http://www.perforum.ch/ Copyright Nieslony/ASA, © 2002 Performance Index Enlightenment when Schechner has no the circular procession problem putting a football game alongside a of the theatrical ‘show’ was replaced with the Catholic Mass next to Internet sex games. Politi- arrangement of things in a ‘table’. cally correct, inter- and multidisciplinary, humanis- One problem with archiving performance then tic, and broad, but practical? Another possible seems to be a lack of manageable principles that reference point could be Michael Kirby. Informed could help one in deciding what is worth gathering by his involvement with formalism and semantics, and keeping, and what belongs where. According to his more reductive approach makes it initially seem Bianchi (1999a), this is a problem which is already easier to sort performance in terms of singular inherent within the process of archiving itself. It elements, such as ‘acting’, ‘costume’, ‘movement’, may be helpful in this context to remember that 129 Katharin von Alexandria (d. 307) is the patron saint for the archive. We also took the opportunity to Cassens Stoian of archivists, philosophers, speakers and the gather everything we had ever worked on, although drowned alike. this would probably be considered a violation of the International Council on Archives’ Code of Ethics, *** which specifies that ‘archivists should be impartial’. The initiative for the Digital Archive of Swiss Our ideology for digitally sorting and storing the Performance Art 1990+ began with a commission material was largely determined by pragmatic through perforum,a special division of the necessity. Our sponsor, the Charles and Agnes Seedamm-Kulturzentrum in Pfäffikon/SZ, Vögele Foundation, provided us with a lump sum Switzerland. The utopian aim was to collect every- plus an option to temporarily use and minimally thing to do with performance art realized in adapt a software normally used by institutions for Switzerland since 1990. The digital archive was to archiving art objects, Museum Plus. The gift of the be a complement to perforum’s basic body of Foundation included technical support provided by research material, the legendary Schwarze Lade the software-creator Zetcom, which coached us in (Black Kit), a unique collection assembled over using the program and minimally adapting it to our many years by Boris Nieslony (see Allsopp 1998). aims. In this initial phase we decided that develop- This collection had been donated to perforum in ing a new software was beyond the limits of our 2000 and includes documents, manuscripts, audio budget and, frankly, our expertise. We decided to materials, images, videos and publications, covering risk ‘learning by archiving’, i.e. to stay more-or-less performance art from 1975 right through to the within the given structure of Museum Plus, before 1980s. It also features some materials from the deciding in a second phase whether we needed a 1990s, which we digitalized and used in our new different program. At least 40 hours were required archive. initially for figuring out the existing set-up alone As well as incorporating material from the and rethinking what kind of terminology would be Schwarze Lade,we started our gathering process useful for us. It became necessary not only to based upon our previous experience and activities change the terminology of the program, but to as Performance Index: somehow adapt the implicit ideology behind the masks and internal sorting functions.