It’s time to draw some of the various strands together, at least for now, and put down a few thoughts that have accompanied me during this research. It is clearly not the final word, I still have a lot of viewing and thinking to do and then some practical experiments of my own as well. A few things have struck me all the same.
The first is that Dance-for-the-camera is a big thing, indeed it has been for several decades. Why has dance spawned a hybrid film genre in a way that performance art has not? I don’t mean to suggest there are no performance artists working in film and video, of course there are and I talked about a few of the more famous ones the other day, but somehow I don’t see it as having created its own centre of gravity in the way that dance film has.
As genres of performance there are significant differences. Perhaps one that is most pertinent here is repeatability. When making a video it is often advantageous to film several takes of the same scene. It is then possible to either pick the best of them or to edit the different videos together. With a single action that is performed just once this is not an option.
With a single unrehearsed action there is also greater unpredictability, particularly from the point of view of the spectator: the boundaries are unclear and things might well go awry. Watching a video is a more predictable experience, it is going to remain safely on the screen (unless it is The Ring!) and not spray you with water, make you move out of its way or get stopped by the police. The video will be the same no matter how many times you watch it. It has a fundamentally different presence.
A further feature of much performance art is that it happens in so called “real-time.” There is usually no fictional time whereby the action jumps from one point in time to another. In performance art what the spectator typically sees is a process unfolding in the shared time and space of artist and audience. Within this, the lulls are often just as important as the moments of tension and release because they offer the spectator time to reflect upon the work and possibly reposition themselves both physically and mentally in relation to it. Films that function in ‘real time’ like Empire (1964) of Warhol are neither common nor particularly watchable.
With a tightly rehearsed show the audience is usually carried along at the pace of the show and these lulls are eliminated. When this is transferred over into video where we are more accustomed to editing, lulls will often come over as simply dead time. If you start to edit the video and remove them, however, you can quickly distort the performance and end up with a highlights clip.
Performance art videos, often therefore, tend to take the status of documentation, rather than possessing a life quite independent of the live event. This goes to the heart of the notion of authenticity, much valorized in performance art, which can be seen as being undermined when the video intervenes to too great an extent. Of course some styles of performance survive this transfer of media better than others.
So there are plenty of exceptions and it is perhaps these which I will be studying over the next few months. Historical ones like Jack Smith’s Faming Creatures looks like a happening that has been filmed and edited together with the logic of an experimental film, while Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen is a direct to camera style of performance. In many ways I prefer this to having a decorative audience present whose principal function is to make the performance appear more important and more real, whatever that is. Filming in public space is different, there the audience gives a context but if it is just to include 20 people in black turtlenecks lurking around the edge of the frame, I don’t need them.
So that’s it for now. Time to get viewing more, filming more and most importantly, spend more time going over my clips and editing them. Once I have made one or two video experiments, I’ll post them here but for now: THAT’S A WRAP!
