Paul Clarke
Contribution on Bristol Day: Live Art Oral History, 30 April 2007

Uninvited Guests at www.uninvited-guests.net
Live Art Archives at www.bris.ac.uk/theatrecollection/live-art.html



Archiving Events and Eventful Archives

Introduction

We’ve all caught a special case of “archive fever”, taking our perverse pleasures in trying to prevent work defined by its very disappearance from disappearing without trace.

Let’s imagine possible archives; both appropriate contemporary systems (rather than models) and archives open to multiple versions, rather than aspiring towards authentication. Let’s imagine what a postmodern archive might look like, open to the ephemeral and indiscrete. Let’s consider where such an archive can be located. I’d like to ask some questions: How can the remains of events that constitute performance archives continue to happen, hold onto some eventhood as well as being placed and held for the future? In order to be stored for posterity, performance tends to be transformed into documentary objects, how might performance interventions transform such archived objects into events, or make something happen between them again? Is the act of archiving a procedure for forgetting events? Does the archival urge work against itself, producing the loss of its objects & events, rather than memorizing, as Derrida (1995) suggests.

I am interested in what remains of performances, where these residues remain and how they might be both retained and distributed. How might archiving avoid the categorical selection and exclusion that would canonise The Live Art Archive? How might archives hold ephemeral rumours, which spread word-of-mouth, and those embodied residues of collaborative experiences, held in the bodies of performers and spectators as shifting memories? Are there roles to play for re-enactments and re-performances, as acts of remaining and means of reappearance?

An anecdote: I am reminded of a conversation with Brian Haw last weekend, whose demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament has now been drastically limited, in a particularly violent act of curating by the police. Asked what he made of Mark Wallinger’s documentary representation at Tate Britain, he was positive that this record of what was there would remain present into the future, but commented that Wallinger’s re-staging is a snapshot of his work at a particular time. It is a fixed memorial, which does not evidence the eventhood of the exhibition of protest art he was curating. Almost every day someone would offer him a new work to display.

The Fellowship: Performing the Archive: the Future of the Past

From September I will be taking up a Great Western Research Fellowship, working on a 3 year research project entitled Performing the Archive: the future of the past, around the Live Art Archives in the University of Bristol Theatre Collection and the live art archives of Arnolfini Gallery. The other partner is Exeter University and I’ll be working closely with those currently digitising, cataloguing and enhancing the Live Art Archive through an AHRC grant.

I’d like to use this opportunity to discuss how I plan to approach this research, to receive some feedback on my propositions and open-up conversation around the project. Speaking here will enable me to rehearse some of the ways of subjectively curating, intervening in, animating and re-performing the holdings of the Live Art Archive, which I proposed in my presentation at the interview for the post. I’ll also describe the relationship with a series of Uninvited Guests’ works.

I’ll begin by outlining the structure of the Research Project as described by Simon Jones in the GWR bid.

Simon Jones’ proposal structures the research around a number of “dialogues”: between the idea of the archive and the material fact of it; the live performance and the document; the artist and the scholar; the producing venue and the museum-status collection; the professional academic or practitioner and the student or member of the public; past work and future commissions. The intention is that the research explores the potential of the archives to impact both on current scholarly practice and also on developments in the field of professional performance practice.

- By collaborating with practitioners and producers of innovative performance, the project aims to identify best practice through compiling case studies in effective documentation.
- The fellowship aims to develop appropriate methodologies and taxonomies for engaging with archives of contemporary experimental work. This will necessarily involve new digitally-based and user-generated patterns of knowledge formation.
- The fellowship will investigate how the Bristol-based archives can be made available as a resource for professional practitioners and scholars in the field, how further knowledge exchange can be generated and enhanced between practitioners and scholars through engagement with the archives and ideas around archiving.
- The project will work towards a conference and performance festival, exploring the theme of “reperformance”, “revival” or “reconstruction”, based on new commissions which draw-on, re-stage and repurpose documentary materials from the archives.

From this dialogue, I would be interested in gathering your thoughts on how best to approach the aspects above and possible collaborative initiatives.

Part 2: Proposed Approaches

In order to maintain the Live Art Archive it must continue to be a practised space and not become a static place. Otherwise it may languish and disappear from the cultural field. In light of the 20th Century’s critique of historical fact and art-historical grand-narratives, the materials and classificatory systems of this postmodern archive should remain in question and process. Unauthorised and open to ongoing curatorial or performance interventions, the Live Art archive could be re-imagined as many possible archives – multiple subjective versions. The performance works held in the archives, which we attempt to save something of, must be enacted and re-enacted if they are to remain live and not be consigned, like ruins, to history.

The form of Live Art itself is characterised by resistance to categorisation and canonisation and continues to take new positions within the contemporary scene. In light of this, it seems essential that the archives are open to adaptation, to the inclusion of new performance inventions, practical knowledges and forms of documentation. It seems inappropriate to produce a singular and fixed memorial to a historical movement. New forms of Live Art and Performance continue to emerge and hence the archive, as a system, should remain open to their inclusion.

In attempting to preserve some traces of works that are defined by their very liveness and disappearance, it is necessary to explore modes of documentation that have some of the qualities of such time-based events, and that we consider the eventhood of the archive itself. How might the archives and the documents they hold, work for their users in ways more closely related to the way performance events affect their audiences? Does this involve narrowing the distance between the trace and the event that has “disappeared”, or creative and interactive documentation that is further mediated or at a greater distance from its referent?

What seems key is how an archive might both contain mnemonic spurs or triggers to memory and be performative, in terms of catalysing the production of new performance actions for current makers.

Charles Merewether (1997) suggests that, what passes leaves a trace of what has past. An event must pass on, into the past, in order to produce a trace. Whilst the trace remains, the event has passed and is no longer.

In order to be archived, live performance disappears and is transformed into something other than itself, documentation in other forms, re-stagings on the page, screen or as audio recordings. It seems wholly appropriate that the fellowship should conclude with the curating of a series of commissions that will re-stage archived materials in the form of live events, transform the documents into performance again, make some of the remains of events housed in the archive appear again and produce new traces of documentary events.

The Case Studies will enable us to re-think documentation as a creative art in itself, part of each Live Artist’s work and responsive to their practical context, rather than set apart and isolated as a documentary object. Such documentation might provide a critically-reflexive lens through which to re-view their performance events and a generative source of new moves in the space of performance.

In a section entitled ‘Performing the Archive’ in her article, ‘Archives: Performance Remains’, Rebecca Schneider (2001) asks whether ‘the logic of the archive […] demands that performance disappear in favour of discrete remains’ (102), transformed into materially traceable objects that can be located and housed in a museum.

How might the project of archiving survive if it admits that performance ‘does remain’, that although they might not be visible, ephemeral events do ‘leave residues’. These residues are held in ephemeral states:
- Located in the collective memory of the body of people present at the event; performers and collaborating spectators.
- in the memories of each spectator, re-played differently and shifting in the memory theatres of their minds, relative to contingent, contemporary circumstances.
- in the body memories of performers, in the palette of practical knowledges they accumulate.

An interruption: The other day, David Williams said to say hello to you Claire [MacDonald] and hoped you were doing well. He said that you were limping because of an injury sustained in The Carrier Frequency (1984) – a trace still held from that seminal show.

- Residues are also saved as rumours, filtered, condensed and distorted through time and through the agency of those who pass them on. Circulating from one generation of performers to another like oral history.

A performance is only completed in collaboration with an audience, in the event of its reception, when viewed. Each audience – especially when a work travels between contexts - completes a new version of the work. In such cases, which is the authoritative version that would be selected for recording? Each spectator sees a different work, depending on the perspective they are viewing from, on their contingent circumstances, the knowledges of spectating they carry with them and which seat they are sitting in. Hence the value of the information provided by oral stories of spectators’ subjective experiences. I am reminded of the Mass Observation Archive, approaching historical events through local experience and personal anecdotes, told in individual styles.

The remains of performance events are not solely documentary objects. Memories and spoken stories are not objects, but are shifting and unstable and always in a process of adaptation, as they are passed-on from person to person and through time. We might argue that memory or oral storytelling have closer ontological resemblances to performance than video or text, and therefore, that these are more authentic ways of saving the liveness of performance from disappearance.

Can body memories be appropriate ways to document performance? Ways of practising, knowledges embodied through performing and spectating particular events? Memories of performance distributed in and through practice. Can oral histories and rumours be appropriate forms of documentation in themselves, without being transformed?

How might these be recorded and archived, without producing a set of authorised versions organised in an institutionalised form. In order to value them within the academy, library or museum, will we transform them into static recordings, eyewitness facts, testimonies, as supporting evidence for particular performance histories? Transformed from “live memory” into what Plato condemned as “artificial memory”. Speaking of mnemonics, Plato suggested that as people learn this method 'it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory' (cited in Ulmer 1985:68 - 69).

Certain documentary publications, like Bodies in Flight’s Flesh and Text (2001) and Gob Squad’s The Making of a Memory (2005), have presented diverse perspectives on their work, including the subjective, fading and sometimes distorted memories of audience members. I am interested in the idea of producing multiple subjective versions of the archives, composed according to different personal and cultural thematics and systems of classification. Associative routes through the archive, taken by a number of users from different groups, might be made public online and used as ways of browsing, more valid than arbitrary alphabetical or chronological orders. Different collections or distributable publications might be curated through artists’ residencies – “mystories” (see Gregory Ulmer, 1989) of Live Art, which articulate the works contained in unexpected ways. Collaborative authoring software, like that used for Wikipedia, might be employed to write networked, changing, anecdotal accounts of performance events. An digitised, online archive could be organised into “playlists”, favourites and “neighbouring” artists, who could be connected-up by users’ choices (as exemplified by the music file-sharing site, Last fm). As users read new “desire paths” between materials they might write these narratives for future users of the online resource.

In response to my introduction, Angela Piccini emailed me about ‘performance documents recorded as digital media, distributed via a web-based database’. She suggested that in this case, ‘rather than holding and replaying media as an archival problematic, the purpose would be to provide a resource that freed up the media for reuse in other artistic practices’. A sort of live mixing of digitised media would become possible, driven by a database narrative. The creative production, transformation, relocation and loss of media become part of the practice.

I am interested in the role of re-stagings, reenactments and re-performance in archiving. As well as Stan’s Cafe’s reconstruction of Impact’s Carrier Frequency (1999) from video, I’m interested in The Wooster Group’s approach to Forsythe and Grotowski’s materials in the ‘series of simulacra’, Poor Theatre (2004), and Goat Island borrowing from Pina Bausch. In particular I’ve been thinking about Ian Forsythe and Jane Pollard’s unfaithful attempts to represent significant past events, from The Cramps’ gig for patients at Napa Mental Institute, to works by Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, re-performed by an R&B dancer and a young MC and shot in the style of urban music videos. Likewise, Paul McCarthy’s re-contextualisation of a series of Vito Acconci’s works, performed by porn stars in a Hollywood mansion also comes to mind. My interest is in considering the archive as a resource of performance “texts”, parts of which might be collected, collaged and recomposed into new works by commissioned artists. In addition to faithful reconstructions we might consider transforming the material held in the archive by re-performing in new contexts or in contemporary performance styles. This might serve a critically reflexive function.

Rebecca Schneider (2001) suggests that re-enactment (and she is writing about the derided, popular form of battle re-enactment), performs the act of remaining and is a means of reappearance. Although they cannot claim authenticity, or to be the original performer, the performer’s body in a re-enactment becomes a kind of archive, one of the remains of a historical event, and a host to collective memory.

Part 3: Uninvited Guests

As director of Uninvited Guests, I have described some of our works as performance archives. We often carry out research through documentary interviews and the shows are re-stagings of these oral histories – both personal and cultural testimonies.

For example, whilst developing Schlock (2003) we asked people to speak about accidents and violent attacks, which they had either witnessed or been involved in. We also asked interviewees to describe their experiences of representations of violence in horror movies. These were conjured-up in the show, simply by speaking, and reconstructed through performance. Schlock became a collective autobiography of violent events, a cultural traumatology.

Uninvited Guests’ work is often de-centred and transformed between a number of media and disciplines. Each new outcome in this ongoing practical enquiry around cultural trauma documents the preceding work, though it is now difficult to place the original. This is an approach that might be explored productively through the Case Studies during the research fellowship.

Schlock began as a touring theatre work, before being transformed into a radio piece, which was broadcast on Resonance FM, then a durational performance, Aftermath (2006) for Arnolfini’s Inbetween Time. Towards the end of this 6-hour event, fake wounds were made-up on audience members, traces of performance actions that were carried out into the streets by visitors to the gallery, artists multiples and documentary evidence that gradually deteriorated.

Aftermath was the source of a photographic collaboration with Manuel Vason, for Encounters, which will be exhibited at Arnolfini and published soon. The photographs are both independent art objects and represent the past performances as documentation.

Manuel’s exhibition and book can be seen as a photographic archive, a collection of performance documents – but these are not attempts to exactly duplicate or capture performance events through another medium. The real events do not vanish behind these images; instead there is a productive distance between these traces and the performance works that triggered them. The photographs are collaborative responses, new works for the lens, which might capture and re-produce the affects of the performances or “speak of” related ideas through another form.

As Schneider states, historically, archives and museums have wanted to hold the originals, which is rendered impossible in the case of performance. It can be argued that a performance is always a reconstruction, which cannot achieve ‘the pristine sameness of an “original”. If no two performances of the same work or action are identical, why should a performance archive be invested in identicality or in saving the original? In a sense performance can be perceived as an act of remembering and documents itself.

References

Derrida, Jacques (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merewether, Charles (1996) ‘The Work of Relocation’, in Susan Meiselas, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, Houston: The Menil Foundation and Fotofest.
Schneider, Rebecca (2001) ‘Archives: Performance Remains’ in Performance Research 6(2): 100-108.
Ulmer, Gregory (1985) Applied Grammatology, London: John Hopkins Press.
---. (1989) Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video, London: Routledge.