Introduction

Ann Demeester

‘We should undo the anecdote of its negative connotations as a good anecdote is almost like an oracle’ was one of the remarks made by speaker Myriam van Imschoot on the second day of the ‘The Manifold (After) lives’ of performance, a conference dedicated to the (alternative) ways in which performances were and are being documented, preserved, conserved, mediated and represented. We do greatly underestimate the power of the anecdote. Anecdotes – despite their apparently trivial nature - can be excellent prisms through which to observe and analyse certain phenomena, despite their seemingly fleeting character they can be catalysts in complex processes of thinking. One such anecdote – masked or disguised as a coincidence- actually led to the realisation of the aforementioned conference.
De Appel, founded in 1975 as a centre for performance, never specialized in the art of forgetting and suffered from what one might call ‘archival fever’ since its inception. From the very start, every event taking place in and around its premises was meticulously documented. De Appel as an organisation almost behaved as Kabakov’s ‘Man who Never Threw Away Anything’. Sometimes however things did get lost, simply disappeared and as a result performances turned into myths, mere stories, rumours, shattered and fragmented and often conflicting memories from a few individuals. When I became director of de Appel in 2006 I was intrigued by the fact that despite the systematicness of these attempts to ‘fight ephemerality’ there were ‘black holes’ and ‘unidentified objects’ in our extensive tactile memory, an archive which consists of paper documents, video tapes, photographs, objects and films that on first sight seemed all-encompassing. However there were ‘absences’ and ‘voids’ in that archive as well. One of those ‘absences’ was the filmic documentation of an iconic performance executed by Marina Abramovic in 1976 entitled ‘Role Exchange’. The artist exchanged roles for two hours with prostitute Suze. While Marina occupied the prostitute’s place behind the street window, Suze was present at the opening of the exhibition at de Appel. The double event was captured by means of two 16-mm camera’s but throughout the course of time the celluloid tapes had mysteriously vanished. As if by miracle, our librarian Nell Donkers, rediscovered the tapes while scrutinizing a number of UFO’s in de Appel’s archive. Up till then only a limited amount of photographs functioned as ‘traces’ or ‘remnants’ of the event and even for the artist the performance had become an almost ‘mythical thing of the past’. Text, narration and a kind of ‘oral transmission’ have become key elements in the attempt to keep ‘Role Exchange’ alive after its execution. The visual was not primary in the recollection of the performance. The sudden rediscovery of ‘proof’, of moving images, prompted both the institution de Appel and the artist to reconsider and rethink the original piece but also the status of the film. Was it a work in itself or just a palpable ‘in memoriam’, a proverbial ‘left-over’?
Performance is a fluid medium and therefore the methods of documentation and registration used to capture it, are constantly mutating. In its early days and even adolescent years performance seemed to agitate against the parameters and codes of traditional theatre (the script/the repertoire), to revolt against commodification and seemed to insist upon the ephemeral and immaterial nature of performance, its uniqueness and unrepeatability. If we generalize, we can say that artists nowadays no longer feel the urge to stress that performance ‘is just once’ as Peggy Phelan would have it, just ‘for now’ and ‘just live’. They experiment with repetition and re-enactment, they work with actors and with scenarios, they carefully construct ways in which they can ensure a ‘second life’ for their performative work and keep it tangible for future audiences. A myriad of exhibitions and symposia such as ‘After the Act’ in Mumok, Vienna (2005) and ‘How to perform’ in Fridericianum, Kassel (2006) have examined this development and have asked ‘how and what to document?’, but I do think we need to ask this question again and again, repeat it over and over again, hopefully each time with more precision as performative practice morphs and changes at a rapid pace. This issue of HTV de IJsberg – partially dedicated to the left-overs of the conference ‘The Manifold (After)lives of performance’ – therefore tries to be as multifold and versatile as possible, its is manifold and multi-facetted. We hope that despite the fact that it consists of static printed text and image on paper, it will mutate and move in your hands as unpredictably as quicksilver.

[1] The conference ‘The Manifold (After) lives’ of performance was organized by STUK Kunstencentrum and de Appel took place on the 13th and 14th of November 2009 in STUK in Leuven and Frascati theatre Amsterdam. Speakers and peformers included: Peter Baren, Serge Delbruyère, Sophie Delpeux, Myriam van Imschoot, Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci, Scott de La Hunta, Eva Meyer Hermann, Sarah Vanhee, David Weber Krebs, Alexander Shellow, Annie Fletcher and Eric Mangion. Moderators were Eva Wittocx and Ann Demeester.

ANN DEMEESTER

Ann Demeester (Brugge,1975) is the director of de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam. She worked as an editor and art critic and as an assistant curator for Jan Hoet in the SMAK in Gent (BE) and Museum MartA Herford (GE). From 2003 till 2006 she was the director of W139 in Amsterdam. She is at the editorial board of the magazines A-Prior and F.R. David, and has recently curated the Baltic Triennial in Vilnius (with Kestutis Kuizinas).