Performance And Residue

Blown Magazine, [Currently Printing]

             A number of performance Art documentation images such as the photograph depicting a coyote tugging at a felt swathed Joseph Beuys or the one showing Carolee Schneemann reading a scroll unravelled from her crotch have become well known and well circulated over time. The value of these images comes through the importance of the performance they depict and their ability to archive the act for future reference. This is even though the disparity between the ephemeral and three-dimensional performance and the permanent and two-dimensional photograph means the images contain a narrative and aesthetic, that is a distortion of, if not completely alien to, the source performance.
             Over the last few years, I have come across a number of these images that I feel are more then simply prosaic documentation but are interesting in their own right. They are a montage of esoterically linked everyday objects juxtaposed with a performer, focused in their entirety on a single action, all frozen in a single unscripted frame. The photographs, with their distorted everyday actions and objects, come across as something anywhere between an uncanny distortion of the everyday and a gross and disturbing dream-like sequence. 
             My curatorial practice is led by an interest in testing the merit of these images as Artworks in their own right. This is attempted through taking them out of the books and exhibition catalogues were they are instantly recognisable as the documentation of an act and placing them in contexts were the viewer has no experience of, or information on, the source performance so that they can be appreciated for their own pictorial qualities. 
             

Carnival of the Animals Making Art, a Homage to Vito Acconci and Performance Art
Artist: Adina Bier
Image Credit: Paula Reissig