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CHRTSTOPHER 10fDDOC
A white (naked) middle~aged man (me 1) grapples with something
(silently) between his knees. You will never know 2 what or its
completion 3 . The stage4 (if you can call it that) bears traces 5 of
some, or other6, gesture 7. You (in space) ride over8 him. Your body
draws him out; draws out his partness9 . If this is 'l ive' it was not
meant for public view 10 : his live body's documentation is Now11 ; its
authenticity12 .
' In discussing the artist's body and modes of self-exposure, Amelia Jones stresses three key issues in her engagement
with body art: " ...a performative conception of the artist/self as in process, [that this conception is] commodifiable as
art object, and [is] intersubjectively related t o the audience/interpreter" (1998: 12). As such, her emphasis marks an
interdependence between artist, subject and audience located within a notion of performativity in w hich the meanings
or readings of body art are " ... contingent on the process of enactment rather than attributing motives to the authors as
individuals or origins of consciousness and intentionality... " (1998: 10). This describes not only a contingency between
subject and object , artist and spectator, but also a more complex notion of a subject as intersubjective in a process of

self-exposure. Jones places particular emphasis on artists w ho, in photographing themselves, perform both author and
object (1998: 10).
2

An emphasis on 'processes of enactment' is important to Gavin Butt as he outlines in

The Paradoxes of Criticism the

problematics of a notion of 'critical distance' as a legacy of the Enlightenment's positioning of t he critic or t heorist as a
judicious authority and interpret er of art and culture. He seeks out perfor,,.;ative approaches to criticism that resist the
critic as positioned (authoritively) outside the 'text': "That is to say that the theorist, rather than being remote from t hat
which he or she surveys, is ... enmeshed in the very, perhaps even 'creative,' production of the cultural fabric it self" (2005:
3). This is part of an ongoing and contemporary move t o resist privileged modes of making, viewing and interpreting in
favour of the operations inherent in the 'liveness' of performativity as reciprocal and ;\\ways in motion. In this light Jones'
main motivation is to " ... re-embody the subject s of making and viewing art" (1998: 11).
3

A lack of completion is the kind of concept that Paul Schimmel pursues in relation to objects that result from

performative action when he st ates that the performative act offers " ...the opportunity to unravel the systems and
st ructures that provide a false sense of solidity in a world that is forever in fiux" (1998: 119).
From the perspective of the 'auteur' in theatre Rebecca Schneider describes a shift from 'solo artist' to 'active agent'
in a " ... slippage in genre boundaries together with a shifting of the site of art onto performance understood as an artist 's
act" (2005: 41). She sees this as an 'unbecoming' of the solo performance by means of an 'act-based' art that is, in turn,
recorded as a kind of archive that drives t he 'live' moment.
5

For Schneider this 'act-based' art is all the more exacerbated by the archive/object of the photographs and videos as

trace. In Schneider words, my body " ... gestures toward it s own excess ... " (2005: 42).
' Jones notes that the artist is " ...self-consciously performed through new, openly intersubjective contexts (including
video or ironicized modes of photographic display) which insist upon the openness of this and all subject s to t he other"
(1998: 67 emphasis added). In her analysis of Jackson Pollock, where she coins the term 'Pollockian performative,' her
specific concern is to " ...interrogate the normative values inscribed in the trope of the artist genius epitomized

by the

modernist Jackson Pollock..." (1998: 103). She is interested in how Pollock 'gets performed' by an innumerable number
of interpretive contexts such as artist, photographer, critic, historian and, over any period of time, contemporary and
hist orical (1998: 268n41]. Like Jones, Schimmel emphasises that this notion of

getting performed (Jones' term] also

applies to the forms of mediat ed documentation that make certain performances visible and that construct their
reception such as Namuth's photographs of Pollock as opposed to t he actions of Pollock per se. Schimmel states in
relation to Pollock that " ... each gesture 'animates' the subsequent moves, producing a non-narrative linearity t hat
focuses t he viewer's attention on the performative dimensions of the act of painting."
7

As a number of writers have noted, Michael Fried's 1967 attack on Minimalism as linked t o theat ricality (performative
gesture) can be described as marking a shift from Modernism to Postmodernism. There are numerous critiques of
Michael Fried's notion of theatricality. See Jones where she 'rereads' Minimalism via the works of Robert Morris and

Tony Smith from a feminist phenomenological viewpoint prioritising interpretation as an ongoing process (1999).

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Christopher Braddock
See Hubert Kloeker where he writes that Vito Acconci, Morris, Nauman et al. are " ... a direct consequence of the
performative gesture in the works of Pollock and Newman." These were t he kinds of artists Fried named as 'lit eralists,' " ...
in transfixing t he moment of t ransformation from painting to object... as all encompassing ... t he spatial, t he performative
and the concept oriented ..." (1998: 162--3). This is to describe a space not only of interdisciplinarity but also one in
which there is a contingency between artist, spectators and objects. It is w hat provokes Fra n~o ise Parfait t o deduce t hat
video installation more than ever before permits the spectator t o 'stand in the image' (2006: 63).
8

Comparing Pollock's production t o David Siqueiros' 1936 production of prot est banners in NYC on the floor of an

industrial loft in which Pollock and his brother participated, Rosalind Krauss describes a plausible introduction to Pollock

23

of a low cultured political activity that visually topples the verticality of mainstream production, but is nevertheless still
culture. Regarding Pollock's move in January 1947 to work on the floor she writes: " The floor, Pollock's work seemed to
propose, in being below culture, was out of the axis of the body, and thus also below form" (Bois and Krauss 1997: 97).
There were no run-offs as with the works of Willem de Koening or Robert Motherwell but only the " ... oily, scabby, shiny,
ropey qualities of the self-evident horizontal mark-that would pit itself against the visual formation of the Gestalt, thus
securing the condition of the work as formless" (Bois and Krauss 1997: 97).
' As a means of articulating a flow of events and their relationship to ritual contexts, Brian Massumi employs a parable
of the soccer match and sketches out the playing field as a force-field describing the players as part objects and the ball
as a part subject. He does this by defining the ball as " ...the focus of every player and the object of every gesture" (2002:

73). In this context the player is not the subject of the play but the ball. As he goes on to say: "Since the ball is nothing
without the continuum of potential it doubles, since its effect is depeni:lent on the physical presence of a multiplicity of
other bodies and objects of various kinds; since the parameters of its actions are regulated by the application of rules,
for all these reasons the catalytic object-sign may be called a part-subject. The part-subject catalyzes the play as a whole
but is not itself a whole" (2002: 73). In this way the body figures not as a whole body but as a part body: a foot that kicks
where the kicking is not an expression of the player inasmuch as a response to the ball 'drawing out' the kick (just as the
body/s of the audience might be viewed as part object/s (or part body/s) where their participatory agency is not so much
driven by intentional and directed 'viewing' inasmuch as drawn out by the part subjects of the Take series). And typical
of the unlimited contexts in which performativity might be articulated, the players are drawn out of themselves, looking
beyond the ball as they take in a myriad of external factors that might include, but are never exhaustive of, other players'
movements, the crowd, the extended TV footage.
10

Jones is, " ... interested in work that may or may not initially have taken place in front of an audience: in works... that take

place through an enactment of the artist's body, whether it be in a 'performance' setting or in the relative privacy of the
studio, that is then documented such that it can be experienced subsequently through photography, film, video and/or
text" (1998: 13). Jones introduces this argument in a previous essay where she says that her u ~e of the term 'body art' in
preference to 'performance art' " ...is informed by an embodied, phenomenological model of intersubjectivity... "
11

In Jacques Derrida's questioning of the 'now' there is never a 'live' moment as it is already encountered. He writes

that " ...the indefinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already inscribed there
t he space of repetition and the splitting of the self" (1976: 163). Every presentation is made possible on the grounds
of disappearance and something must be preserved for disappearance to happen. Once again, as Dl?\'ida w rites, " ...
this operation of supplementation is not exhibited as a break in presence but rather as a continuous and homogeneous
reparation and modification of presence in the representation" (1988: 5). And as Adrian Heathfield and Jones put it:
" The supplement, precisely that which exceeds signification and promises but forever fails to deliver presence, critically
dismantles this reliance [on the 'live' moment) by exposing its limits. All live art plays with or relies on the paradox of the
supplement (the way in which the live body promises something 'more' than representation but always already fails to
give that which can secure meaning (the real, or immortality) once and forever)" (2007: 3).
12

Philip Auslander argues for a distinction in performance documentation between the documentary and the theatrical

where the latter suggests performances staged solely to be fi lmed with no meaningful prior existence presented to
audiences (2006: 1). In introducing the idea of 'performative documentation' he proffers the notion of authenticity,
rather than the idea of the photograph, and its indexical trace to the 'real' event, as what governs the 'performance'
of documentation. And on this point he says that the relationship between the document and its audiences is crucial
in establishing authenticity. As Auslander writes: " 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" (9).

Christopher Braddock

References
Auslander, Philip (2006). "The Performativity of Performance Documentation," A Journal af Performance and Art 28 (3),

1- 10.
Bois, Yve-Alain and Krauss, Rosalind (1997), Formless: A User's Guide [New York: Zone Books).
Butt, Gavin (2005), " Introduction: The Paradoxes of Criticism," in Gavin Butt (ed.), After Criticism: New Responses to Art

and Performance (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing), 1- 19.

Derrida, Jacques (1976), Of Grammotology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press).
--- (1988), "Signature Event Context," in Gerald Graff (ed.), Limited Inc (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press), 1- 21.

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Heathfield, Adrian and Jones, Amelia (2007), " Draft for Circulation of the Forthcoming Book: Perform, Repeat, Record:
A Critical Anthology of Live Art in History," (University of Manchester and Roehampton University).
Jones, Amelia (1998),

Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

--- (1999), "Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning", in Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (eds.), Performing

the Body/Performing the Text (London: Routledge), 39-SS.

Kloeker, Hubert (1998), "Gesture and the Object: Liberation as Aktion: A European Component of Performative Art,"

Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles), 159-19S.
Massumi, Brian (2002),

Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press).

Parfait, Fran~oise (2006), "Installations in Collection," Collection: New Media

George Pompidou),

Installations (Paris: Edition du Centre

32~3.

Schimmel, Paul (1998), " Leap Into the Void: Performance and the Object," Out of Actions: Between Performance and.
the Object, 1949-1979 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), 17-119.
Schneider, Rebecca (2005), "Solo Solo Solo," in Gavin Butt (ed.), After Criticism: New Responses

to Art and Performance

(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing), 23--47.

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