Performance Art and its Documentation

A Photo/Video Essay
Anne Marsh

In this paper I consider recent critical positions on performance art and its
documentation. The experience of a live event Jill Orrs She had long golden hair
(1980) is then used as a case study to explore the debates. I was present at the
performance and I have subsequently tried to reconstruct this experience for
students and the art public with the aid of photographs and video. My purpose
here is to think through the issues concerning the document of the event, the
event itself and the re-make for the camera. I have asked Jill Orr to respond to my
interpretation and to the issues concerning documentation. In this way I hope to
generate a paper that is both critical and reflective.

The theoretical case

Performance art has its genesis in the late 1950s. Although there are historical
precedents in Futurism and Dada in the early twentieth-century (Goldberg 1988),
the performance art genre as we understand it today emerged within a general
movement to democratize and dematerialize the arts (Lippard 1973 and 1984).
It was often associated with issue-based politics feminism, ecological and
anti-nuclear issues and time-based and process art practised by some of the
Conceptualists.
Video and performance art developed side by side and interacted from the
late 1960s onwards. Although these two mediums can be seen as separate, the
relationship between them is integral if any history of an ephemeral medium
such as performance art is to enter art history. Performance art in the 1970s often
stressed its liveness and immediacy but it was almost always mediated for a wider
audience via photography and video. The real time aspects of video were often
considered to better re-present the immediacy of the event. However, as Jill Orr
argues, the single camera view does not recreate the live experience: The cameras
viewfinder has no peripheral vision so it records a flattened reality . . . the time
based image becomes lifeless (Orr 2008).
The relationship between performance art and its documentation is fascinating
and problematic. On one hand it seems logical to simply argue that a live event
cannot be re-mediated. In 1993 I argued that: Performance art is a visual art

About Performance No.8 2008 15

Anne Marsh

practice which is located in a specific time and place and involves the presence of
the artist before his/her audience . . . (Marsh 1993). Although this is still true for
much performance art, it is also evident that mechanical means of reproducing and
re-presenting ephemeral events became extremely important.
The perceptual, phenomenological and aesthetic shifts that occur between a live
event and its representations present complex theoretical problems. How can the
live be reproduced? Surely this is a contradiction in terms. Photography and video
are mediated forms of representation chemical, digital and electronic recordings
that situate an event in time and place. A life/death paradox underlies analogue
photography and although photography in its digital mode can free itself from the
referent, most of the time it does not (De Duve 1978, Batchen 2001). Photographs of
performance art shot on an analogue or a digital camera are essentially the same, or
should I say they have the same intent: to capture the event as directed by the artist.
Current scholarship in performance art history is divided between those who believe
that it is necessary to have actually seen the performance event and those who believe
that the event can be interpreted and critiqued from surviving documents (Auslander
2006). Allan Kaprow, considered to be the father of Happenings, the precursor
to performance art, said that these events would be measured by the stories that
multiply . . . [a kind of] calculated rumor, the purpose of which is to stimulate as
much fantasy as possible (Kaprow 1966). Kaprows statement stresses the merger
between art and life that inspired his generation. Like John Cage, and, in Australia,
David Ahern, he was concerned with the concept of real time. Ahern said: One walks
into a set of situations (art) just as one walks down the street (life) (Ahern 1970).
These ideas enshrine the Zen philosophy of waking up to the life we are living and
can be seen clearly in Cages work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company
recently shown at the Melbourne International Arts Festival (2007). Experimental
dance and music present a germane comparator when considering performance art
documentation. John Cage died in 1992 but his music is still performed; even though
he wrote extremely abstract scores they are still interpreted by other musicians and
played to audiences. Merce Cunningham is now in his eighties and can no longer
perform but he still directs his dance company and he still uses John Cages Zen
techniques to inject an element of chance into the works. He has also experimented
with different ways of filming and video-taping the dance.
Dance is difficult to document but it can be performed over and over much like a
piece of music or theatre. Individual dancers and choreographers have experimented
from time to time with different ways of duplicating the effect or experience of
the dance. In Australia Jude Waltons Remembering is Forgetting (Performance Space
1988) was essentially a dance performed with her virtual self. Using a super-8 camera
strapped to her head she recorded what she saw as she danced in her own studio.
She then projected the film and performed live with this imagery. Interviewed in
1992 she said her work was about visual kinaesthetics [. . .] its what you see and feel
kinaesthetically (Marsh 1993, 205).

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 Performance Art and its Documentation: A Photo/Video Essay

The relationship between the camera and performance has often been integral to live
art because of the way in which the camera can capture time. However the camera has
been used in creative ways, both to enhance the performance event and to record it.
In Jude Waltons performance the camera is an extension of the body, a virtual dumb
body which is then incorporated via the screen into another event. In this case the
camera becomes part of the phenomenological experience both for the dancer and
the audience.
Although experimental dance and music embrace chance techniques, they are still able
to be re-staged, interpreted anew and experienced by different audiences in different
times and places. Waltons experiment could be re-made by another performer using
the same methodology.
The video camera and screen has been used extensively and in multifarious ways within
performance art. Jude Waltons No Hope No Reason (Deutscher Brunswick Street 1991
and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 2004) used the projection skills of
Ian de Gruchy to create screen like illusions within which the performers moved.
Lyndal Jones pioneered the use of video in performance art in the 1970s. Later her
Prediction Pieces (1981-91) utilised the video image in increasingly sophisticated ways.
In more recent, works such as Crying Man (2003), she clearly moves into a video
performance mode where the event itself is not performed for a live audience. It is
a performance for camera. The American artist Matthew Barney has popularised
this mode of performance for camera by creating spectacular surreal tableaux which
draw on body art, ritual and shamanism. In Australia Monica Tichacek, who studied
with Barney for a brief period, uses a similar, but arguably more edgy, approach by
melding body art action with cinematic spectacle in performance, photography and
video. Her series The Shadowers (2004-05) is presented across all three mediums.
In the 1970s and into the 1980s the video camera and monitor were often used as
mirroring devices, allowing artists to go face-to-face with their audience (Biesenbach
2002). Krauss considered this a narcissistic practice (Krauss 1976) but it is also a
confessional type of practice which underlines an intimacy. Bruce Naumans Self-
Portrait as Fountain (1966-7) and Vito Acconcis Seedbed (1972) utilise a confessional
mode. This has also been the case in recent work from Australia (Lyndal Jones Crying
Man 2003; David Rosetzky Maniac de Lux 2004; Catherine Bell Felt Is the Past Tense of
Feel 2006).

Although there is an obvious difference between a live event and its documentation,
some scholars have insisted that one can only experience the work truthfully if one
was there, present before the artist at the time. This was my initial description of
performance art in 1993 but recent scholarship which insists on the having to have
been there argument has made me re-examine this to a certain extent. The problem
is that if one insists on this the presence of the audience before the artist then
one is in danger of excluding scholars who did not see the performance from writing
about these works (Heathfield 2004). This forecloses on the history of the genre.
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Anne Marsh

How is it possible to contextualise and interpret live performances if one has not seen
them? This debate intersects with the area of documentation (video and photographs)
and the issue of presence and absence. Many art historians write about and refer to
paintings, sculptures etc. that they may not have seen in the flesh. The reproduction
of art works via photography and film is commonplace and integral to the discipline
of art history. Walter Benjamin famously critiqued the way in which the aura of
the work of art disintegrates through its reproduction through the photographic
image but his message was as much about the quasi-religious iconic status of the
original work of art as it was about photography. In fact, in some respects, he saw
mechanical reproduction as a form of democratization and an emancipation for the
arts (Benjamin 1992). Photography and film meant that art could be reproduced and
distributed to a much wider audience through publications and screenings. This
form of remediation is imperative for performance art because it is an ephemeral
medium. This is not to claim that a live performance can be seamlessly transferred to
another medium nor that the new medium will provide the same experience of the
work. There are obvious compromises the issue for performance artists who decide
to document or re-make their works in a photo-based medium is how best to do this.
There is a difference between a document and a re-make. The document is a record
of the real time performance whereas a re-make is a more considered approach to
remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1996; Auslander 1999).

The experience and the document

Jill Orrs performance She had long golden hair was performed at the Experimental
Art Foundation (EAF) in Adelaide in 1980. I was in the second row watching the
performance in real time. I remember the lead into the performance as one of the
most dramatic parts but this has never been documented. The performance venue
was in the basement of an old jam factory and Orr entered from behind the audience
to a soundtrack which began as a chant: Witch, bitch, mole, dyke; witch, bitch, mole,
dyke; witch, bitch, mole, dyke. A litany of words commonly used to verbally abuse
women was chanted by a male chorus as Orr slowly walked into the space. She was
dressed as a young woman from the 1950s with a full skirted dress and perfectly
groomed long red hair.
It was 1980. The audience was uncomfortable. The EAF was, at that time, the kingdom
of the male avant-garde and it was only slowly coming to terms with the experimental
work of women. When Orr got to the stage area, which was marked only by small
chains hanging from the ceiling, the sound track turned into her own voice narrating
stories of women having their hair forcefully cut. In part the script read:

From the tower, I lowered my hair to the ground

My lover climbed to meet me at midnight.
I used my long golden hair to cover my body.
I rode through the town on a tall white stallion.

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 Performance Art and its Documentation: A Photo/Video Essay

Jill Orr , She had long golden hair

Photograph: Elizabeth Campbell

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Anne Marsh

Jill Orr , She had long golden hair

Photograph: Elizabeth Campbell

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 Performance Art and its Documentation: A Photo/Video Essay

My hair was a golden light.

The colour of the wheat fields.
My blood was red and pure.

They shaved my hair to make me different

They shaved my hair to give birth to my child
They shaved my head because I had lice, they had syphilis.
Before I could do Gods work, they shaved my head.

When I came home late last night my father was furious, he cut my hair.

Im proud of my shaven head.

They were soldiers, or mothers; women of the Amazon.

They bound their hair in single plaits
They removed one breast

They made me what I am.

They raped me, bashed me and shaved my head.

They made me what I am.

Slowly Orr tied her hair to the small chains hanging from the ceiling so that eventually
her head was held fairly rigidly in place by six chains. I cant remember who made the
first cut but presume that Jill Orr organized this beforehand because the person who
made the first cut then handed the scissors to the audience and one by one people
volunteered to cut her hair. The sound track continued to tell stories of abuse. Once
all the hair was cut Orr made a sensuous gesture by rubbing her hands through her
hair and then shaking her cut hair free.
As with most performance art events cameras were clicking away and a video recorded
in real time. Jill Orr like many artists has tried to control the photographic
documentation of her work. Its a tricky business but history suggests that it is not an
impossible project. To professionalise the documentation of her work and to attempt
to control its distribution, Orr established early on that she would be the prime
director of the performance photographs and she prefers to do photo shoots without
the audience present; She had long golden hair could, however, only be performed once
since it entailed the cutting of a full head of hair.
Most people know the performance from a series of carefully selected still images
taken during the performance. In fact three images in particular: 1) where she stands
with her hair in chains, 2) where a woman makes the second cut, and 3) where she
shakes her head and the camera captures the motion.

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Anne Marsh

In the still photographs the lighting dramatizes the shadows behind the performer
creating a repetition and a ghostly other body which is ephemeral and fragile. In
later works Orr drew her audiences attention to this shadowing which is used to
metaphorical effect to represent the disappearing body.1
Having been at the performance these photographs act as prompts and allow me
to recall all the other aspects of the performance. But when I show these images of
the performance I need to tell the experiential story so that those looking at the
photographs for the first time understand that there was more going on. The point
is that the photographs read out of context and without embellishment dont convey
the depth nor the context of the event. This is an issue that plagues performance
art.
The video of this work is a real time dumb witness set up by people at the EAF. Unlike
the professional photographs, it presents a grainy picture from one perspective.
Theres no directorial hand evident and the video quality is poor. The video was part
of a documentation tape that the EAF made of their Performance Festival as part of
the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1980. Jill Orr, as a participating artist, got a copy but
remembers that even at the time it was difficult to play because it was in an obscure
format that her video machine could not play. When Matthew Perkins and I began
work on the Videoartchive, an on-line video data bank of Australian performance
art and video, we had the tape conserved (Marsh, Perkins, Galimberti 2008). The
tape was unplayable in its original form and needed to be plunged into a bath of
chemicals to separate the tape from itself. In Roland Barthess terms the sticky film
that captures the referent had captured itself (Barthes 1981). In pedestrian terms the
tape was stuck up. The chemical procedure was half successful and afterwards the
tape could be played. But it didnt play a true straight documentation of the real time
performance.
Writing about the tape recently, Jill Orr said:

I have always tried to separate the format of presentation. To try to create

an essential something that will carry the idea across the mediums.
That means that the documentation is not necessarily an accurate
representation of the live work. That has never been my concern. I am
concerned with creating images that can be distilled and read as a single
framed photographic moment or video footage edited with a rhythm
dictated for the viewing audience. . . I was not interested in the early use
of video from the 1970s where the single camera view was determined
by a gap in the audience, like the original footage of She had long golden hair
because it cannot capture the vibratory exchange of the live performance.
However the video footage of this work has been reclaimed by nature, time

1 In more recent works Orr has used phosphorescent painted screens that allow her to stand in front
of them whilst a bright light shines and then to move away and turn off the light. As a result of the
phosphorescence a body shadow remains for a short period of time on the screen. This was par-
ticularly dramatic in the performance The sleep of reason produces monsters, 2002, Sydney: Artspace.
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 Performance Art and its Documentation: A Photo/Video Essay

and chemical processes acting on the tape. Part of the reason the footage
remained in my archives for years was that I was not interested in such
bland recording and eventually the technology was redundant and the
work remained unseen. Little did I know that the work was still cooking
another layer.
In this case the damage has re-energized the work and edited it creating
a random rhythm relevant to the medium. It has gone through a process
where the organic action of air and chemicals acting on the videotape are
similar to gestural painting and other process/action oriented works that
rely to a degree on chance and random exchange... Nature has provided
the select moments as if it is remembering. Some moments are intact
and others blurred. The recorded dialogue also affected by the chemical
interaction through time leaves an essential dialogue intact. This is
similar to the working of memory (Orr, 2008).
Jill Orr has always worked in close association with professional photographers
who have been hired to photograph the work. This accounts for the dynamic and
photogenic shots of the performances, many of which have become iconic moments.
This itself is contra to photographys postmodern claims to appropriation and the
simulacrum. In this performance record Orr used photography in a Modernist way
to capture decisive moments (Cartier-Bresson 1952); her aim was to select iconic
moments that held the aura of the performance. Interviewed in 1987, Orr said that
in her performance works she tried to capture an image she had imagined. After
following Orrs work for many years I think this is correct. She literally dreams or
imagines an image and then she creates it. And she relies on the still photograph
to capture this moment. The photographic process allows her to stage and pose
the picture she has imagined whereas the performance itself is in time and does
not freeze the moment. In the process of the performed action, the iconic is lost in
time, it becomes just another fleeting moment. The performance has ritualistic and
shamanist attributes. The audience are taken into the event as if conspirators in the
ritual which is experienced in time as an ephemeral event. Orr says that she believes
that performance art has its roots in the ancient oral cultures (Orr 2008).
The photographs of She had long golden hair do capture a moment but having seen the
performance they dont re-present the event. The video tape goes further but this was not
a tape that Orr directed. It was the EAF coordinators who set a dumb video camera up as
witness to the event and Orr got a copy for her archives. Years later the tape is restored.
Whats interesting about the tape is that in its faults, in its would-be restored state, it
actually replays over and over the punctum of the event witch, bitch, mole, dyke; witch,
bitch, mole, dyke, a nd the faults in the video transfer, duplicate and repeat over and over
the tying and untying of the hair to the chains and the cutting of the hair by the audience.
And the more the tape disintegrates, the more that the video noise occurs the incessant
flickering the more the real performance comes through. In this way the bad real time
video tape tells us much more about the performance than the selected photographic
stills chosen by the artist to represent the event.
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Anne Marsh

When I asked Jill Orr to respond to this article and think about the documentation of her
live performances she made several points concerning medium specificity. She argued
that the performance is made to be received experientially and that any translation of
that experience is bound to fail. However she does not believe that it is impossible to
critique the event without being there. She says: In broader cultural and historic terms
events are analysed well past the event . . . There are no living witnesses to the crucifixion

Jill Orr She had long golden hair

Frames from video recording made by Experimental Art Foundation

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 Performance Art and its Documentation: A Photo/Video Essay

of Christ, and, whether this occurred or not, the image still lives and the biblical stories
told of supposed first hand accounts still have powerful sway (Orr 2008). On some levels
Jill Orr agrees with Allan Kaprow. But unlike the father of the Happenings, she engages
in a process of re-makes for the camera so that her ideas can be conveyed across various
media.
Performance art which is not documented can circulate as rumour. In fact it may well
be possible to circulate rumours about performances that never happened. When a
performance event is documented via a camera, whether on video, film, photographic
surface or digital screen, it enters into a relationship with another medium. In doing
so it becomes a remediation. Jill Orr understood this early in her career. She knew
that she needed to transport the idea across other media. The archive of photographs

of Orrs performances are strong testaments in themselves that remediation works.

Pain Melts, Bleeding Trees, Lunch with the Birds (all 1979) all photographed by Elizabeth
Campbell are iconic moments in the history of Australian performance art. These
photographs are not records of a live event as such, they are photographs made to carry
the idea of the performance, to capture what Orr imagines as the decisive moment
often the image she had dreamt or imagined that sparks the idea for the performance
in the first place. In her response to this article she said that the audience or performer
are subservient to the over riding concept and image driving the process. In one
sense the final photograph and/or video mean that it is a very long process to take a
photograph (Orr 2008). I have often sensed this when watching Orrs performances.
She is acutely aware that within the live event there are individual moments that will
create great pictures.

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Anne Marsh

The damaged tape of She had long golden hair is fascinating and intriguing. If it had
survived in its original form, as a dumb witness tape, it would not be compelling. But
as a wrecked video that has come back after years of neglect via chemical assault, it
represents aspects of the live performance that the photographs cannot. Its not really
a document because it wears its instability on the screen, it breaks up, it fumbles, it
repeats. It is and is not a remediation. Orr puts this down to the foibles of nature. I
like to think of it as the ruin of technology, the stained record, the hysteria of video
noise.

Jill Orr, Lunch with the Birds

Photograph Elizabeth Campbell

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 Performance Art and its Documentation: A Photo/Video Essay

Jill Orr, Bleeding Trees

Photograph Elizabeth Campbell

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Anne Marsh

Works Cited
Ahern, David. 1970. Notes on Expansion. Other Voices Aug/Sept: 34-35.
Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediated Culture. London and New
York: Routledge.
__________. 2006. The Performativity of Performance Documentation. PAJ A
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Barthes, Roland. 1984. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Fontana.
First published in French 1980.
Batchen, Geoffrey. 2001. Post-Photography. In Each Wild Idea: Writing Photography
History. Cambridge, Mas.: MIT Press, 108-127.
Benjamin, Walter. 1992. The Work of Art in the Art in the Age of Mechanical
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French 1936.
Biesenbach, Klaus. Barbara London and Christopher Eamon. 2002 Video Acts: Single
Channel Works from the Collections of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and New Art Trust. New
York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
De Duve, Thiery. 1978. Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox.
October 5 (Summer): 113-125.
Goldberg, RoseLee. 1988. Performance Art from Futurism to the Present. London: Thames
& Hudson.
Heathfield, Adrian. (ed). 2004. Live Art and Performance. London: Tate Publishing.
Jones, Amelia. 1998. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota.
Kaprow, Allan. 1966. The Happenings are Dead: Long Live the Happenings.
Artforum 4 (7): 36-39.
Krauss, Rosalind. 1976. Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism. October 1: 50-64.
Lippard, Lucy. (ed).1973. Six Years: The De-materialization of the Art Object. London:
Studio Vista.
__________. 1984. Get the Message: A Decade of Art for Social Change. New York:
Dutton.
Marsh, Anne. 1993. Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969-1992. Melbourne:
Oxford University Press.

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Orr, Jill. 2008. She had long golden hair 1980 EAF. Response to Performance Art and
its Documentation: A Photo/Video Essay by Anne Marsh. Unpublished e-mail
correspondence with the author.
Warr, Tracey. and Amelia Jones. 2002. (eds). The Artists Body. London: Phaidon.
Marsh, Anne. and Matthew Perkins with Elena Galimberti. 2008.
www.videoartchive.org.au

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