Raconter la performance

Sophie Delpeux

Excerpt from the lecture by Sophie Delpeux at the conference “The Manifold (after) lives of Performance” on 14th of November in Amsterdam.

For more than ten years, I have focused my researches on performance documents, especially photography. My intention is to study the uses of these images, by artists, but also by art historians and critics. The making of this iconography and its divulgation are crucial for the knowledge of these events and I wanted to make their status clearer. Working on this PhD subject, I asked artists how they constituted the photographic documentation of their works, for example: how did they choose their photographers, what was their relationship with them and what were their expectations? And, after the performance, were the photographs retouched? I also interviewed photographers who worked with performers, people who participated or witnessed performances. It was often with suspicion that my inquiries were welcomed, mostly from the artist’s part. What seemed important to them was the performance by itself and its representation was obviously trivial. There was always that misunderstanding: my point was not to claim that performance art is another representational medium —sometimes it is —, I was just trying to understand what kind of documents I was facing. Working previously on the myth created about the photographs of Rudolf Schwarzkogler I knew that images are never transparent, quite the contrary. I discovered that some performers were taking great care of the way their works were photographed, even if it was to make one feel these images were poor. Chris Burden’s example seemed typical, he disliked talking about photographs, an unessential subject from his point of view. Yet, during his performance years he exercised full control over his documentation. It seems normal that a performer wants to keep a record of his work that won’t betray it. Because when a performance is given to its audience, its representation doesn’t entirely belong to the performer. Burden has systematised the way his performances were evoked, by only one photo and a short text. Some of these images belong to what Marshal McLuhan has described as a ‘hot type’ of press photography: their low definition increases their power of evocation: something happened in a sudden manner and needed to be clarified by a caption. I think that it was, from Burden’s part, a significant choice to make this documentation so similar to news item. I have often read descriptions of performances that seemed wrong, that were partly based on their author’s projections. Those kind of myths generally have a good posterity, are repeated, amplified, as for example the Rudolf Schwarzkogler autocastration’s one. The myth was born because of the exhibition of the photographs of Schwarkogler’s actions at Documenta 5. Despite that rumour has been denied categorically, the myth seems useful to indicate, sometimes denounce how performance art is defined by excess and violence. I am fascinated by the performance’s power to make one’s imagination blow up. Historical performers and their performances have generated an interpretation grid based on the authenticity of this art form, while some artists use — and abuse— it. This interpretation grid can be summarized in two statements: what is done during a performance is real and photographs of it carry that reality.

At one point I found myself writing about performance and its definition as a historian, evaluating how mythology is a large part of it, and I began to think of a way to work on this subject without stating all the time: ‘it is not true, this is not how it happened…’. I wanted to create room for the way people reconstruct a performance with their own descriptions. There is something fascinating that brings the performance alive while reading or listening to the fantasies it caused. These fantasies reflect the personality of the writer, but also the historical moment when this interpretation was made. For example, it is during the Vietnam war that an American critic, Robert Hughes imagines Rudolf Schwarzkogker penis amputation and published his view on it in Times magazine.[1] Now I consider this interpretational delirium as a full part of performance art, its propagation wave in space and time. In thinking so, I’ve been influenced by Allan Kaprow. In Happenings in the New York scene in 1961 for example, Kaprow concluded his article with the idea that happenings will be in the future « like the sea monsters of the past or the flying saucers of yesterday », because they will be commented and described by people « who have never seen our work ».[2] For Kaprow, all ephemeral artwork descriptions are intended to be part of the bunch of stories one tells to impress certain people, because this type of a story always has a strong effect on its audience. Kaprow was protecting his work from upcoming fame and from institutional appropriation. I for one now believe that performances have something in common with aquatic monsters and flying saucers. Performance remains in documentation but also in what it does to bodies, spirits and how it sticks to the mind in a very personal way. To create a space for these stories, I had to find a place and a plan. With kind permission of art space La Maison Rouger in Paris I staged a series of encounters whereby I asked people to describe a performance as if it was an adult bedtime story. The series named Raconter la performance is still going on: once per month two guests are invited to describe the same performance. They could have witnessed it or not and they are entirely free of their choice and of the way they decide to talk about it. In their form and content, some of the descriptions are disjointed, full of anecdotes where others are poetic or literary attempts. What happens each time is that stories raise a lot of questions from the audience. It seems that this situation creates curiosity and involvement. During the last evening with Suzanne Doppelt and Gilles Tiberghien, for example, nobody believed their stories, everybody thought that the real performance was Doppelt’s and Tiberghien’s story telling, their attempt to make us believe that the performance they evoked had really existed. I had to swear it was real, to give proofs, and I think there are still some sceptics. The way people who have witnessed a certain performance describe it often gives the impression of imprecision, they themselves confess that their memories fail. Their account seems less definite than the ones of art historians. That demonstrates what Amelia Jones describes in an article “Presence in absentia”.[3] For Jones, to be able to write history, both witnesses and historians have to study performance documents thoroughly. The fact of having been a witness doesn’t give one more credibility than a historian. Next year there will be three evenings at Maison Rouge, that thrive on phenomena of digestion, transformation and popularization. Next to that, I want to enlarge the collection of ‘story telling’ by making an assemblage that functions as a non-conventional history of performance’s reception — a very permissive one — that complements and nourishes my research.

[1] Sophie Delpeux, “L’imaginaire à l’action. Infortune critique de Rudolf Schwarzkogler”, Études Photographiques, n° 7, mai 2000, p. 108-123.
[2] Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York scene”, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003, p. 26.
[3] Amelia Jones, “Presence in Absentia”, Art Journal, n° 4, vol. 56, winter 1997, p. 11-18.

SOPHIE DELPEUX (FR)

She has a doctorate in art history from the University of Paris and is now an associate professor there. Her academic work bears on Happenings, Performance Art, and Body Art from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s and on how a memory of these art forms is constructed.