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Toward a

Hermeneutics of
Performance Art
Documentation
From: Kunsten A Falle: Lessons in the Art of Falling, Ed. Jonas Ekeborg
(Horten, Norway: Preus Museum, 2009).

Philip Auslander

In an illuminating discussion of her practice as a performance documentarian,


the filmmaker and photographer Babette Mangolte refers several times to the
possibility that visual documentation of performance art can mislead its audience by misrepresenting either the artists style or intentions or the experience
of the performances original audience.1 The idea that performance documentation can mislead implies that there is a truth of the event against which the
accuracy of its representations can be measured. But where is this truth located
and how can it be accessed?
The traditional assumption is that the truth of performance documentation resides in its indexical relationship to the event it documents. In this view,
performance documentation provides both a record of the event through which
it can be reconstructed 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. While generally taken
for granted, this presumption of an ontological relationship between performance and document 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, quoting 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 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
The effect of trivial realism in performance photography is frequently enhanced by its casual quality and its lack of adherence to conventional standards
of composition, framing, lighting, and so on. Mangolte describes her sense
of urgency at capturing a performance on the fly: Getting it was better than
missing it even if technically it wasnt a good photograph. 3 The idea that the
performance photograph allows us to see lightning captured in a bottle is part
of what makes it seem authentically connected to the event. As with bootleg
audio recordings of rock concerts, the documentary images ostensible immediacy, signaled by its very lack of polish and technique, makes it seem that much
more genuine.
Amelia Jones challenges the ontological priority of the live performance by
positing the documentary photograph as a supplement to the performance (in

Leap into the Void, 5, rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, octobre 1960.


The title of this Yves Kleins work following his newspaper Dimanche 27 novembre 1960, is : Un homme dans lespace ! Le peintre de lespace se jette dans le vide!.
Artistic action. Yves Klein, ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Harry Shunk-John Kender.

92

1 Babette Mangolte, Balancing Act between Instinct and Reason or How to Organize Volumes on a
Flat Surface in Shooting Photographs, Films and Videos of Performance, in After the Act: The (Re)
Presentation of Performance Art, ed. Barbara Clausen. Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig,
2007, p. 35-50.
2 Helen Gilbert, Bodies in Focus: Photography and Performativity in Post-Colonial Theatre, in Textual
Studies in Canada 10-11, 1998, p. 18.
3 Mangolte, p. 38.

the Derridean sense) rather than a straightforward record of it. 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 This formulation undermines the performances status as the originary event by undoing the priority granted to the
performance and suggesting, instead, the mutual dependence of performance
and document (the performance is originary only insofar as it is documented).
Whereas Jones focuses on the relationship between the completed event and
its documentation, Frazer Ward questions the performances priority over its
documentation at the inception of their relationship. Writing of the work of artists such as Chris Burden and Vito Acconci, Ward points out, in each case, the
act of embodiment, the performance, is simultaneous with its own representation as public announcement or photographic record. The event takes place
in a private space but this becomes the site of publicity in the process of
representation. 5 The performance does not exist, qua performance, prior to its
documentation. Performance is always already documented, and the performance space is always already a space of representation.
Although some of the early documentation of performance and body art
was not carefully planned or conceived as such, performance artists who were
interested in preserving their work quickly became fully conscious of the need
to stage it for the camera and future audiences as much as for any immediately present spectators, if not more so. They were well aware of what Jones
describes as performances dependence on documentation to attain symbolic
status within the realm of culture.6 Burden, for example, carefully staged each
performance and had it photographed and sometimes also filmed; he selected
usually one or two photographs of each event for display in exhibitions and
catalogs. In this way, Burden produced himself for posterity through meticulously orchestrated textual and visual representations.7 As another example,
the European body artist Gina Pane describes the role of photography in her
work in the following terms: It creates the work the audience will be seeing afterwards. So the photographer is not an external factor, he is positioned inside
the action space with me, just a few centimeters away. There were times when
he obstructed the [audiences] view!8
It is clear, then, that such archetypal works of performance and body art as
Burdens and Panes were not autonomous performances whose documentation supplements and provides access to the truth of an originary event. Rather,
the events were staged to be documented at least as much as to be seen by an
audience; as Pane observes, sometimes the process of documentation actually
interfered with the initial audiences ability to perceive the performance. Over
time, the documentary image turns into the historical truth of the original
4 Amelia Jones, Presence in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation, iIn Art Journal
56.4, 1997, p. 16.
5 Frazer Ward, Some Relations between Conceptual and Performance Art, in Art Journal 56.4 (1997): 40.
6 Jones, Presence, 13.
7 Amelia Jones, Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform their Masculinities, in Art History 17.4,
1994, p. 568.
8 Quoted in Kathy ODell, Displacing the Haptic: Performance Art, the Photographic Document, and the
1970s. In Performance Research 2.1, 1997, p. 76-77.

93

Toward a
Hermeneutics of
Performance Art
Documentation

Philip Auslander

In an illuminating discussion of her practice as a performance documentarian,


the filmmaker and photographer Babette Mangolte refers several times to the
possibility that visual documentation of performance art can mislead its audience by misrepresenting either the artists style or intentions or the experience
of the performances original audience.1 The idea that performance documentation can mislead implies that there is a truth of the event against which the
accuracy of its representations can be measured. But where is this truth located
and how can it be accessed?
The traditional assumption is that the truth of performance documentation resides in its indexical relationship to the event it documents. In this view,
performance documentation provides both a record of the event through which
it can be reconstructed 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. While generally taken
for granted, this presumption of an ontological relationship between performance and document 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, quoting 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 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
The effect of trivial realism in performance photography is frequently enhanced by its casual quality and its lack of adherence to conventional standards
of composition, framing, lighting, and so on. Mangolte describes her sense
of urgency at capturing a performance on the fly: Getting it was better than
missing it even if technically it wasnt a good photograph. 3 The idea that the
performance photograph allows us to see lightning captured in a bottle is part
of what makes it seem authentically connected to the event. As with bootleg
audio recordings of rock concerts, the documentary images ostensible immediacy, signaled by its very lack of polish and technique, makes it seem that much
more genuine.
Amelia Jones challenges the ontological priority of the live performance by
positing the documentary photograph as a supplement to the performance (in

Leap into the Void, 5, rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, octobre 1960.


The title of this Yves Kleins work following his newspaper Dimanche 27 novembre 1960, is : Un homme dans lespace ! Le peintre de lespace se jette dans le vide!.
Artistic action. Yves Klein, ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Harry Shunk-John Kender.

92

1 Babette Mangolte, Balancing Act between Instinct and Reason or How to Organize Volumes on a
Flat Surface in Shooting Photographs, Films and Videos of Performance, in After the Act: The (Re)
Presentation of Performance Art, ed. Barbara Clausen. Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig,
2007, p. 35-50.
2 Helen Gilbert, Bodies in Focus: Photography and Performativity in Post-Colonial Theatre, in Textual
Studies in Canada 10-11, 1998, p. 18.
3 Mangolte, p. 38.

the Derridean sense) rather than a straightforward record of it. 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 This formulation undermines the performances status as the originary event by undoing the priority granted to the
performance and suggesting, instead, the mutual dependence of performance
and document (the performance is originary only insofar as it is documented).
Whereas Jones focuses on the relationship between the completed event and
its documentation, Frazer Ward questions the performances priority over its
documentation at the inception of their relationship. Writing of the work of artists such as Chris Burden and Vito Acconci, Ward points out, in each case, the
act of embodiment, the performance, is simultaneous with its own representation as public announcement or photographic record. The event takes place
in a private space but this becomes the site of publicity in the process of
representation. 5 The performance does not exist, qua performance, prior to its
documentation. Performance is always already documented, and the performance space is always already a space of representation.
Although some of the early documentation of performance and body art
was not carefully planned or conceived as such, performance artists who were
interested in preserving their work quickly became fully conscious of the need
to stage it for the camera and future audiences as much as for any immediately present spectators, if not more so. They were well aware of what Jones
describes as performances dependence on documentation to attain symbolic
status within the realm of culture.6 Burden, for example, carefully staged each
performance and had it photographed and sometimes also filmed; he selected
usually one or two photographs of each event for display in exhibitions and
catalogs. In this way, Burden produced himself for posterity through meticulously orchestrated textual and visual representations.7 As another example,
the European body artist Gina Pane describes the role of photography in her
work in the following terms: It creates the work the audience will be seeing afterwards. So the photographer is not an external factor, he is positioned inside
the action space with me, just a few centimeters away. There were times when
he obstructed the [audiences] view!8
It is clear, then, that such archetypal works of performance and body art as
Burdens and Panes were not autonomous performances whose documentation supplements and provides access to the truth of an originary event. Rather,
the events were staged to be documented at least as much as to be seen by an
audience; as Pane observes, sometimes the process of documentation actually
interfered with the initial audiences ability to perceive the performance. Over
time, the documentary image turns into the historical truth of the original
4 Amelia Jones, Presence in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation, iIn Art Journal
56.4, 1997, p. 16.
5 Frazer Ward, Some Relations between Conceptual and Performance Art, in Art Journal 56.4 (1997): 40.
6 Jones, Presence, 13.
7 Amelia Jones, Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform their Masculinities, in Art History 17.4,
1994, p. 568.
8 Quoted in Kathy ODell, Displacing the Haptic: Performance Art, the Photographic Document, and the
1970s. In Performance Research 2.1, 1997, p. 76-77.

93

event, justifying Slaters claim that the photograph ultimately replaces the
reality it represents. Kathy ODell notes, the performance of an action and
its photographic image may be different in spatiotemporal terms, but the
former is ultimately defined by the latter.9 ODell elevates this observation to
the status of a general principle: performance art is the virtual equivalent of its
representations.10
If performances are made to be documented and are constituted through
documentation, and the original performance is not definitive but is inevitably
replaced by its representations, the spectators primary action with respect to
performance art is not the witnessing of live events but the imaginative reconstitution of performances from images, whether held in memory (by those
who attended the live event) or available through documentation. As Robert
Morgan puts it, The art is really about the process of mental reconstruction.11
Babette Mangolte cites Harry Shunks famous photograph of Yves Kleins
Leap into the Void (1960) as an example of a misleading document.12 With
all due respect to Mangolte, I argue that this photograph is misleading only in
the crudely empirical sense that it does not include everything that was on the
scene: the safety net into which Klein leapt as he vaulted out of a window was
removed in the darkroom. But the image of a man leaping into the unknown,
unprotected and at risk, is exactly what the artist wanted us to see; in this
sense, the photograph is not misleading at all. Kleins photograph, like all of the
images categorized as performance documentation, is best understood not as
a secondary representation of a prior event but as a performance in itself that
takes place in a representational spacein this case, the space of photography.
We become the audience for the performance by looking at the photograph
and experiencing Kleins act of leapingand our own cognitive and affective
responses to itthrough our act of looking.
I concluded The Performativity of Performance Art Documentation, an
earlier essay on this subject from which I have drawn here, by saying, the
crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance
but the one between the document and its audience. Perhaps the authenticity
of the performance document resides in its relationship to its beholder rather
than to an ostensibly originary event: perhaps its authority is phenomenological
rather than ontological.13 I have come to realize since that what is needed in
theorizing performance documentation is not simply a shift of emphasis from
the documents ontology to the audiences phenomenal experience of it but,
rather, a conceptualization of performance documentation that would emphasize the phenomenology of the audiences relationship to the performance
document while still honoring the documents relationship to the past. After
all, even if the performance document does not give us access to an originary
event that exists meaningfully apart from its representations, its connection to
9 ODell, p. 76.
10 ODell, p. 77.
11 Robert Morgan, Half-Truth: Performance and the Photograph, essay for the exhibition Action/
Performance and the Photograph, Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, City University of New York, 2000.
Available at <http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/mishkin/action/half-truth.html>.
12 Mangolte, p. 38.
13 Philip Auslander, The Performativity of Performance Art Documentation. In Performing Arts Journal 84,
2006, p. 9.

94

the past remains important and is probably what prompted our interest in the
document in the first place. When I look at photos and films of Robert Morriss
well-known movement piece Site, as I have been recently, it matters to me that
the document represents a performance that took place in New York City in
1965, at a specific venue, within a particular art world context, and so on, even
though I also realize that I cannot recover these things from it.
My initial inspiration for theorizing performance documentation along
these lines came from a relatively neglected passage in Walter Benjamins The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Speaking of the change
wrought by the technical reproduction of art works, he states,
Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway be it in the
form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to
be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in
an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room. [. . .] And in
permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.14
Benjamin suggests here that reproduction, of which performance documentation is a variety, does not enable us to visit the original object in its own context by traveling through space or time. Instead, it brings the object to us and
reactivates it for us to experience in our time and place, our own particular
situation. Looking at images of Morriss Site, I am not transported to a theatre
in New York City in 1965. Rather, it is as if Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann were performing the piece for me, in my study, as I imaginatively recreate
the performance from its documentation. The performance I thus experience
unfolds in my present (even as I remain aware of its historical status).
This passage from Benjamin is both poetic and provocative but it is only a
starting point, in part because Benjamin focuses more on the spatial displacement of the reproduced art object than on its temporal displacement, which is
at least as important when thinking about documented performances, and also
because he does not address in detail what is involved in the reactivation in our
particular situation of something that originated in a different situation. To
develop this account further, I turn to the German philosopher Hans-Georg
Gadamers hermeneutics.15
Speaking of her own efforts to reconstruct from documentation performances she has not otherwise seen, Mangolte states, You have to fight the
documentation in order to rethink the performance and imagine what they did
and why.16 Mangoltes use of words like rethink and imagine accords with what
I am suggesting here: that a phenomenology of the spectators relationship to
the performance document must account for the spectators reactivation in a
new context of a past performance. I prefer Gadamers characterization of our
negotiation with a text from the past as a conversation to Mangoltes more agonistic image of a fight, however. For Gadamer, as Jeff Malpas indicates, under14 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. by Harry Zohn, in
Illuminations. New York, Schocken 1969, p. 220-1.
15 For a more extended discussion of Benjamin and Gadamer, see Philip Auslander, Reactivation:
Performance, Mediatization, and the Present Moment. In Interfaces of Performance, Digital Research
in the Arts and Humanities Series, ed. Janis Jefferies, Rachel Zerihan, and Maria X (Aldershot: Ashgate,
forthcoming 2009).
16 Mangolte, p. 45.

standing is necessarily historical in nature: understanding and interpretation


always occurs [sic] from within a particular horizon that is determined by
our historically-determined situatedness.17 Our engagement with texts from
the past is therefore a dialogue between two entities that exist in relation to different horizons. This dialogue takes place in the present and is always oriented
to present concerns and interests, as Malpas saysthose of the art historian or
the art lover, for example.
Whereas Benjamin seems to treat reproduction as a transparent means of
conveying the object to us, Gadamer emphasizes the alterity of the text we seek
to understandthe differences between its horizon and ours. Because we have
no choice but to achieve understanding against our own horizon, it is not possible for us to understand the historical document purely on its own terms. This
does not mean, however, that we are free to attribute whatever meanings we
wish to it. In order to engage in the hermeneutic dialogue we must accept that
the text makes a truth claim upon us, and we must take that claim seriously,
even to the point of allowing our encounter with the text to change our minds.
We must recognize and respect that the text is a product of a horizon different
from our own and try to find common ground with it. Gadamer calls this common ground the fusion of horizons and describes it as a partial rapprochement between our present world, from which we can never hope to detach
ourselves, and the different world we are seeking to appraise.18
Even more important, understanding something does not consist of revealing an objective truth inherent in it, waiting to be discovered. Rather, understanding proves to be an event,19 something that emerges through dialogue. In
this sense, our imaginative recreation of a performance from its documentation
is not a process of retrieving information about something that took place in the
past but is itself a performance in the present, in which we take part. As such, it
is not static and is never exhausted. This process of horizonal engagement is an
ongoing one that never achieves any final completion or complete elucidation
(Malpas)each time I reactivate a particular performance from its documentation there is the possibility that a fresh dialogue with it will disclose something
unforeseen. Andrzej Wiercinski summarizes this aspect of Gadamers thought
by saying, participating in the event of understanding, we testify to the ever
new horizons for understanding that open up and disclose new possibilities of
interpretation.20
Benjamin argues that reproduction severs the work from its history.21 In this
context, it is difficult to know what he might mean when he remarks that the
reproduction allows the object to meet the viewer halfway. Somewhat speculatively, I suggest that Benjamins rather cryptic reference may parallel Gadamers notion of the fusion of horizons (and thus open a fissure in Benjamins

17 Jeff Malpas: Hans-Georg Gadamer, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), ed.
Edward N. Zalta. Available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/gadamer/.
18 Gadamer, quoted in Linda ONeill, Gadamer and the Game of Truth: Frames and Fusions, Philosophical
Studies in Education 38, 2007, p. 65.
19 Hans-Georg Gadamer: Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., trans. rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall New York, Continuum, 1989, p. 309.
20 Andrzej Wiercinski, Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Truth of Hermeneutic Experience, Analecta
Hermeneutica 1 2009, p. 7.
21 Benjamin, p. 221.

argument through which the reproduced objects historicity might seep back
in). We must, indeed, meet the text halfway between our horizon and the one
against which it originated. In the case of performance documentation, our imaginative restaging of the performance in the present, Benjamins reactivation,
is at once the means by which we arrive at an understanding of the performance and the product of this understanding.
Mangolte provides an example when she notes,
In the 1970s, performance was anchored in a specific sense of time that
now in 2005 we have lost, but studying works from that era can reconstitute
that sense of time. Every period has a set of assumptions that are somehow so
familiar that they are unseen by the participants and the viewers because they
are perceived as the norm. But the norm changes 22
The different temporalities Mangolte attributes to the 1970s and the early
21st century are aspects of the respective horizons of these historical moments.
As she suggests, the norms of an earlier time become visible in retrospect. But
there is a subtle difference between Mangoltes idea of reconstituting an earlier
sense of time by studying performances from the 70s, as if it is a truth waiting
to be discovered in the record and recovered from it, and Gadamers concept
of the hermeneutic dialogue. The distinctive temporality of the 1970s is not
an objective characteristic of that era to be revealed through investigation. It
becomes visible only against the horizon of our now different sense of time, and
we understand it only in that relation. And since this is a dialogue, the reverse
can also happenthe norms that define our horizon come into view against the
foreign horizonand that relation may make our current sense of time and its
manifestations in performance more perceptible to us. Linda ONeill glosses
Gadamer, As our horizons (pre-understandings, possibilities and perceptual
limitations) are brought more clearly into seeing distance or hearing distance,
they may be revealed as something other than what we previously believed
them to be.23
From the hermeneutic perspective, the truth of performance documentation does not reside in its indexical relationship to the event or in the verifiable
accuracy with which it depicts that event. Wiercinski states, A hermeneutically
informed notion of truth, liberated from its traditional epistemological paradigm, helps us to understand that the experience of truth cannot be verified
empirically. [] Hermeneutic truth is a lived experience of a merging of horizons 24 From this perspective, it is not meaningful to say that performance
documentation can mislead, for there is no way of measuring its faithfulness
to an originary event. A hermeneutic view of performance documentation sees
it not as a tool of positivist inquiry that will help us discover the truth of what
happened historically but as texts from which we can imaginatively reactivate
historical performances in the present, allowing us to understand experientially
both the past and our present as they are disclosed in and through an ongoing
dialogue with one another.
Philip Auslander is a Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US.
22 Mangolte, p. 48.
23 ONeill, p. 65.
24 Wiercinski, p. 8.

95

event, justifying Slaters claim that the photograph ultimately replaces the
reality it represents. Kathy ODell notes, the performance of an action and
its photographic image may be different in spatiotemporal terms, but the
former is ultimately defined by the latter.9 ODell elevates this observation to
the status of a general principle: performance art is the virtual equivalent of its
representations.10
If performances are made to be documented and are constituted through
documentation, and the original performance is not definitive but is inevitably
replaced by its representations, the spectators primary action with respect to
performance art is not the witnessing of live events but the imaginative reconstitution of performances from images, whether held in memory (by those
who attended the live event) or available through documentation. As Robert
Morgan puts it, The art is really about the process of mental reconstruction.11
Babette Mangolte cites Harry Shunks famous photograph of Yves Kleins
Leap into the Void (1960) as an example of a misleading document.12 With
all due respect to Mangolte, I argue that this photograph is misleading only in
the crudely empirical sense that it does not include everything that was on the
scene: the safety net into which Klein leapt as he vaulted out of a window was
removed in the darkroom. But the image of a man leaping into the unknown,
unprotected and at risk, is exactly what the artist wanted us to see; in this
sense, the photograph is not misleading at all. Kleins photograph, like all of the
images categorized as performance documentation, is best understood not as
a secondary representation of a prior event but as a performance in itself that
takes place in a representational spacein this case, the space of photography.
We become the audience for the performance by looking at the photograph
and experiencing Kleins act of leapingand our own cognitive and affective
responses to itthrough our act of looking.
I concluded The Performativity of Performance Art Documentation, an
earlier essay on this subject from which I have drawn here, by saying, the
crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance
but the one between the document and its audience. Perhaps the authenticity
of the performance document resides in its relationship to its beholder rather
than to an ostensibly originary event: perhaps its authority is phenomenological
rather than ontological.13 I have come to realize since that what is needed in
theorizing performance documentation is not simply a shift of emphasis from
the documents ontology to the audiences phenomenal experience of it but,
rather, a conceptualization of performance documentation that would emphasize the phenomenology of the audiences relationship to the performance
document while still honoring the documents relationship to the past. After
all, even if the performance document does not give us access to an originary
event that exists meaningfully apart from its representations, its connection to
9 ODell, p. 76.
10 ODell, p. 77.
11 Robert Morgan, Half-Truth: Performance and the Photograph, essay for the exhibition Action/
Performance and the Photograph, Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, City University of New York, 2000.
Available at <http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/mishkin/action/half-truth.html>.
12 Mangolte, p. 38.
13 Philip Auslander, The Performativity of Performance Art Documentation. In Performing Arts Journal 84,
2006, p. 9.

94

the past remains important and is probably what prompted our interest in the
document in the first place. When I look at photos and films of Robert Morriss
well-known movement piece Site, as I have been recently, it matters to me that
the document represents a performance that took place in New York City in
1965, at a specific venue, within a particular art world context, and so on, even
though I also realize that I cannot recover these things from it.
My initial inspiration for theorizing performance documentation along
these lines came from a relatively neglected passage in Walter Benjamins The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Speaking of the change
wrought by the technical reproduction of art works, he states,
Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway be it in the
form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to
be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in
an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room. [. . .] And in
permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.14
Benjamin suggests here that reproduction, of which performance documentation is a variety, does not enable us to visit the original object in its own context by traveling through space or time. Instead, it brings the object to us and
reactivates it for us to experience in our time and place, our own particular
situation. Looking at images of Morriss Site, I am not transported to a theatre
in New York City in 1965. Rather, it is as if Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann were performing the piece for me, in my study, as I imaginatively recreate
the performance from its documentation. The performance I thus experience
unfolds in my present (even as I remain aware of its historical status).
This passage from Benjamin is both poetic and provocative but it is only a
starting point, in part because Benjamin focuses more on the spatial displacement of the reproduced art object than on its temporal displacement, which is
at least as important when thinking about documented performances, and also
because he does not address in detail what is involved in the reactivation in our
particular situation of something that originated in a different situation. To
develop this account further, I turn to the German philosopher Hans-Georg
Gadamers hermeneutics.15
Speaking of her own efforts to reconstruct from documentation performances she has not otherwise seen, Mangolte states, You have to fight the
documentation in order to rethink the performance and imagine what they did
and why.16 Mangoltes use of words like rethink and imagine accords with what
I am suggesting here: that a phenomenology of the spectators relationship to
the performance document must account for the spectators reactivation in a
new context of a past performance. I prefer Gadamers characterization of our
negotiation with a text from the past as a conversation to Mangoltes more agonistic image of a fight, however. For Gadamer, as Jeff Malpas indicates, under14 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. by Harry Zohn, in
Illuminations. New York, Schocken 1969, p. 220-1.
15 For a more extended discussion of Benjamin and Gadamer, see Philip Auslander, Reactivation:
Performance, Mediatization, and the Present Moment. In Interfaces of Performance, Digital Research
in the Arts and Humanities Series, ed. Janis Jefferies, Rachel Zerihan, and Maria X (Aldershot: Ashgate,
forthcoming 2009).
16 Mangolte, p. 45.

standing is necessarily historical in nature: understanding and interpretation


always occurs [sic] from within a particular horizon that is determined by
our historically-determined situatedness.17 Our engagement with texts from
the past is therefore a dialogue between two entities that exist in relation to different horizons. This dialogue takes place in the present and is always oriented
to present concerns and interests, as Malpas saysthose of the art historian or
the art lover, for example.
Whereas Benjamin seems to treat reproduction as a transparent means of
conveying the object to us, Gadamer emphasizes the alterity of the text we seek
to understandthe differences between its horizon and ours. Because we have
no choice but to achieve understanding against our own horizon, it is not possible for us to understand the historical document purely on its own terms. This
does not mean, however, that we are free to attribute whatever meanings we
wish to it. In order to engage in the hermeneutic dialogue we must accept that
the text makes a truth claim upon us, and we must take that claim seriously,
even to the point of allowing our encounter with the text to change our minds.
We must recognize and respect that the text is a product of a horizon different
from our own and try to find common ground with it. Gadamer calls this common ground the fusion of horizons and describes it as a partial rapprochement between our present world, from which we can never hope to detach
ourselves, and the different world we are seeking to appraise.18
Even more important, understanding something does not consist of revealing an objective truth inherent in it, waiting to be discovered. Rather, understanding proves to be an event,19 something that emerges through dialogue. In
this sense, our imaginative recreation of a performance from its documentation
is not a process of retrieving information about something that took place in the
past but is itself a performance in the present, in which we take part. As such, it
is not static and is never exhausted. This process of horizonal engagement is an
ongoing one that never achieves any final completion or complete elucidation
(Malpas)each time I reactivate a particular performance from its documentation there is the possibility that a fresh dialogue with it will disclose something
unforeseen. Andrzej Wiercinski summarizes this aspect of Gadamers thought
by saying, participating in the event of understanding, we testify to the ever
new horizons for understanding that open up and disclose new possibilities of
interpretation.20
Benjamin argues that reproduction severs the work from its history.21 In this
context, it is difficult to know what he might mean when he remarks that the
reproduction allows the object to meet the viewer halfway. Somewhat speculatively, I suggest that Benjamins rather cryptic reference may parallel Gadamers notion of the fusion of horizons (and thus open a fissure in Benjamins

17 Jeff Malpas: Hans-Georg Gadamer, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), ed.
Edward N. Zalta. Available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/gadamer/.
18 Gadamer, quoted in Linda ONeill, Gadamer and the Game of Truth: Frames and Fusions, Philosophical
Studies in Education 38, 2007, p. 65.
19 Hans-Georg Gadamer: Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., trans. rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall New York, Continuum, 1989, p. 309.
20 Andrzej Wiercinski, Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Truth of Hermeneutic Experience, Analecta
Hermeneutica 1 2009, p. 7.
21 Benjamin, p. 221.

argument through which the reproduced objects historicity might seep back
in). We must, indeed, meet the text halfway between our horizon and the one
against which it originated. In the case of performance documentation, our imaginative restaging of the performance in the present, Benjamins reactivation,
is at once the means by which we arrive at an understanding of the performance and the product of this understanding.
Mangolte provides an example when she notes,
In the 1970s, performance was anchored in a specific sense of time that
now in 2005 we have lost, but studying works from that era can reconstitute
that sense of time. Every period has a set of assumptions that are somehow so
familiar that they are unseen by the participants and the viewers because they
are perceived as the norm. But the norm changes 22
The different temporalities Mangolte attributes to the 1970s and the early
21st century are aspects of the respective horizons of these historical moments.
As she suggests, the norms of an earlier time become visible in retrospect. But
there is a subtle difference between Mangoltes idea of reconstituting an earlier
sense of time by studying performances from the 70s, as if it is a truth waiting
to be discovered in the record and recovered from it, and Gadamers concept
of the hermeneutic dialogue. The distinctive temporality of the 1970s is not
an objective characteristic of that era to be revealed through investigation. It
becomes visible only against the horizon of our now different sense of time, and
we understand it only in that relation. And since this is a dialogue, the reverse
can also happenthe norms that define our horizon come into view against the
foreign horizonand that relation may make our current sense of time and its
manifestations in performance more perceptible to us. Linda ONeill glosses
Gadamer, As our horizons (pre-understandings, possibilities and perceptual
limitations) are brought more clearly into seeing distance or hearing distance,
they may be revealed as something other than what we previously believed
them to be.23
From the hermeneutic perspective, the truth of performance documentation does not reside in its indexical relationship to the event or in the verifiable
accuracy with which it depicts that event. Wiercinski states, A hermeneutically
informed notion of truth, liberated from its traditional epistemological paradigm, helps us to understand that the experience of truth cannot be verified
empirically. [] Hermeneutic truth is a lived experience of a merging of horizons 24 From this perspective, it is not meaningful to say that performance
documentation can mislead, for there is no way of measuring its faithfulness
to an originary event. A hermeneutic view of performance documentation sees
it not as a tool of positivist inquiry that will help us discover the truth of what
happened historically but as texts from which we can imaginatively reactivate
historical performances in the present, allowing us to understand experientially
both the past and our present as they are disclosed in and through an ongoing
dialogue with one another.
Philip Auslander is a Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US.
22 Mangolte, p. 48.
23 ONeill, p. 65.
24 Wiercinski, p. 8.

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