Performing the moment - Essay - photography and performance art exhibitions

* As the documentary role (or capacity) of photography continues

* to be debated, the relationship between performance art and

* photo graphic media continues to evolve. The advent of "new media" broadens the horizon of these discussions, particularly vis-a-vis the concept of telepresence.

* MARISA S. OLSON is a San Francisco-based artist, writer and

* curator whose temporary site-specific installations have been

* seen throughout North America and Europe. She is Associate

* Director of SF Camerawork and serves on several boards, including the SF MoMA Media Arts Council, Gen Art, and the EMMA Foundation. She has written for Mute, Wired, Rhizome, Camerawork and others.

In what is, perhaps, the most-quoted essay in the world of photographic arts, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin discusses the decontextualization of the work of art, as it is reproduced. By now, most of us are familiar with his passionate argument that the mechanical reproduction" of the work of art--as exemplified by photography--increases the "auratic distance" between the viewer and the "authenticity" of the work; its unique presence in time and space coupled with its historic testimony and place within tradition. Benjamin's argument hinges on the idea that the work, an experience as much as an object, comes into being as the product of ritualized behavior. Benjamin, then, ascribes performativity to work in all media. As the documentary role (or capacity) of photography continues to be debated, the relationship between performance art and photographic media continues to evolve. The advent of 'new media' broadens the horizon of these discussions, particularly vis-a-vis the concept of telepresence.

When Chris Burden carried out his performance 'Shoot' in 1971, only a handful of people were present. We are told that the event entailed a friend shooting young Burden in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle. The only remaining traces of this action are the scars on Burden's arm and the few photographs taken after the shooting. Ironically, the etymology of the word trace (a term we often ascribe to the documentary photograph) is rooted in the action of etching upon the body. The 1960s and 705 were ripe with instances of artists underscoring this double entendre, so much so that even the corporeal traces became more and more temporary, from Vito Acconci's shaved head to Dennis Oppenheim's sunburned chest.

The performance works carried out three or four decades ago seem now to be more action-oriented, with the photograph standing in only as document or "proof" of the action. Today, the term "action" seems to be employed more in the sense of the on-set utterance meant to mark the beginning of a performance for the camera. A new generation of artists claims to be more interested in carrying out an Intervention that will lend itself to the creation of a particular image. In the recent show, "Slowdive: Sculpture and Performance in Real Time," at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Tony Labat showed his "Hooters Project," a video installation based on a 1998 performance in the parking lot of the buxom restaurant chain. Labat hired four stuntmen to stage a violent fight and three videographers filmed the action: Labat, someone posing as a TV reporter, and a third cameraman posing as tourist. At Yerba Buena, the piece was installed on various screens within a four-part fence fashioned after the one i n the Hooters parking lot. The precise physicality of the installation reminded gallery-goers of the distance between the viewer and the original work, whether that work is located in the action or the various filmic incarnations of its documentation.

Similarly, the Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) treat Manhattan's 10,000 surveillance cameras like television cameras, before which they perform theatrical relics, like Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi," and stage protests. While the group is working primarily to protect the rights of Americans, outlined under the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, "against unreasonable searches and seizures" by the cameras and their keepers, they are also calling attention to the tailoring and context of a performance before a panoptic field of vision. Amateur video footage of the performances is currently installed in the storefront window of the New Museum in New York, as part of the show "Open_Source-Art_Hack." The manifold reproductions of these performances and related photographic images would certainly seem to increase auratic distance, yet the SCP says that their audience has now shifted from being primarily those eyes fixed on their target surveillance cameras to passers-by catching wind of their action; a point referenced in the main street, almost trans-museum, installation of their videos.

Such work comes at an interesting time in the history of photography. After fighting to be given credible art-world status, 'despite' its mechanical nature, work in photographic media is now being celebrated for its evidentiary role and the extent to which it questions the sense of reality in constructed representations. Nevertheless, there persists the issue of auratic distance. And, beyond this conceptual distance between a viewer and the work of art, new media are adding a layer of physical distance indexed in what some call "telepresence."

Roboticist Ken Goldberg's work is an excellent example of the conditions of telepresence, wherein a viewer is at once present and influential in the making of the work--by virtue of her use of telecommunications technologies--and absent. At last year s Webby Awards ceremony, a "human robot" circulated among the glittery crowd. Armed with a digital video camera and microphone, Goldberg's "tele-actor" took instructions from 1000 Web surfers watching to see that their choreographed instructions were carried out. Ironically, as the geographic distance between viewer and performer was increased, the conceptual distance between viewer and ritualized action was compressed, just as the authorship of the work came into question.

In the online exhibition "Do It" (www.e-flux.com), dozens of artists, from architects Diller + Scofidia and photographer John Baldessari to performers Gilbert 0 George, Paul McCarthy and Yoko Ono, have provided instructions for the execution of a work of art by visitors to the Web site. Again mixing questions of ritual, distance and authorship, the show even features the "participation" of deceased artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. This raises the important question of how a performative work is to be preserved and exhibited, beyond the context of its initial presentation--and particularly after the artist is no longer around to oversee the re-interpretation process.

In an effort to strengthen their archiving and conservation practices, the Guggenheim recently started a program called the Variable Media Initiative. The project has since paired with a number of prominent national institutions, but still holds as its goal the creation of a strategy to conserve and adequately re-present conceptual works in ephemeral media, including those of Felix Gonzales-Torres. Revolving around a questionnaire in which artists--or, in Gonzalez-Torress case, the managers of their estate--tell the museum how a work is to be recreated following museum accession or the death of the original author. Work from Gonzalez-Torres's site-specific, audience-depleted candy spills to Ken Jacob's audio-visual performances are catalogued and scored for migration, translation or reinterpretation. The organizers of the initiative liken these efforts to asking what object would have the same signification as the now-defunct fluorescent light tubes originally used by Dan Flavin in his installations From the 1960s. In many cases, Variable Media's curators and conservationists have not ruled out replacing originally intended media with new materials.

Of course, this begs the tautological question of the relationship between the performance and its materials. At times, the two go hand-in-hand, as in the case of photographers Gerald Slota and Dan Ragland, who both assault their negatives and even positive proofs in performative actions that include cutting, scratching, covering or layering their photos with toxic materials. Something about this work creates the illusion of a compression of distance, as viewers stand before a print, visually tracing scratches and varnish-strokes as they would before a painting. In Slota's and Ragland's non-editioned work, the artists have proven it possible to present performative photographs that defy arguments about deritualization as a result of reproduction.

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