Performed Photography: A Perspective

“Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that photography touches Art but by Theatre.”
(Barthes, Camera Lucida)

Performed photography itself as I have developed it, both in practice and in theory is a fully coherent inter-disciplinary genre that highlights the relationship between the performative act/event and the act/event of photography. It involves the re-consideration of the photograph as the trace of an act, a trace that becomes part of an expanding notion of event and not the purposeful and fetishised making of a significant trace from a rapidly disappearing referent. Crucially this involves a movement from stasis (spatial) to the conception of a time-based act (temporal), as well as a shift from the descriptive to the performative, incorporating a new emphasis away from picture and toward event (process over object).

By concentrating and promoting the inherent act of performance implicit in all photography it is hoped that the medium can be re-invigorated as a signifying process, and the balance between the spatial and temporal concerns of photography can be readdressed. For too long now we have been exhausting the medium in it’s potential to make sense of the world by insisting on a pre-occupation with spatial concerns, and the pictorial, at the expense of a proper critique of time and the temporal, and the full recognition that the medium is absolutely a spatio/temporal concern in equal measure.

In order that we can set a framework for a proposed re-alignment of photography it is essential in my opinion to reinterpret the photographic act as a time based medium. This is in fact relevant across photographic practices but helpful never-the-less to make manifest in a more obvious way, hence the promotion of a theory of performed photography.

The premise of performance and performativity has always existed in photography and many practitioners throughout its history have instinctively utilised performative strategies but so far a unifying theory and coherent set of parameters have yet to be realised.

There are many levels and definitions of performed photography but I would like to describe here my conception of perhaps the purest and simplest form. A lot of my experimental work regarding this research has been involved directly with the act of performing photography, and this means forgoing the usual process of photographing, editing, printing and display/publishing, the usual point of spectator contact being at the end, in the gallery or publication – straight to archive. When performing photography the point of public contact is at the photographing stage or more properly during the act of photography. In the classic conception an audience may experience the work or process ‘en passant’. To entail audience satisfaction this often means working with new media or instant materials. The emphasis on process brings the experience of live art into play with photography, and hence an element of time based media too, whilst at the same time replacing artefact with process, also a current theme in other art practices. The ‘audience’ then get to experience the act of photography rather that just to observe the results – there are perhaps subtler and alternative ways of getting to this point other than always having direct audience involvement and both ‘Life is Perfect’ and ‘Disappeared’ for instance involve no direct witnesses to the practice.

The photographer him/herself makes a subtle and also contemporary shift towards intervention and fiction and away from the phenomenon of empirical observation. Because of the designing and setting up of situations, observation becomes ‘provoked’ in the sense of true experimentation rather than the mainstream empirical practice. Photography also has a crucial new relationship to the notion of event; because the event is constructed as a vehicle for the subject matter or area of inquiry of the artwork, so the event can be perceived to be ‘folded’ around the act of photography until the two are inseparable as utterances. The photograph itself also has a new relationship with the world in its role as testimony, for now it testifies from within. In terms of conventional live art the photograph was always a record that an event had happened, utilising the familiar contract of documentary photography. In performed photography the notion of record is blurred with the creative act, fact and fiction blur together in testimony and this allows the medium freedom from its old servitude. Instead of a concrete and objective document we have the possibility of a ‘drifting’ uncertain document tied to experience in a much more subjective manner.

There is also another perceived benefit in re-aligning photography in this particular way with current contemporary thought involving temporality, and that is that the process becomes purely conventional (in its proper sense) and this goes some way to un-harnessing photography from its indexical relationship to nature and a perceived reality. It becomes possible perhaps to utilize a more complex meaning system where meaning becomes supposition upon supposition, engaging the as if of a ‘pataphysical world (imaginary) over the as is of the metaphysical world (reality). Fiction resumes its rightful place alongside description in the act of witness and testimony.

One may look to Arthur Rimbaud’s maxim, “I is another [somebody else]” in that in performance one is aware of the self thinking or acting, prompting the interesting philosophical question of multiple or fractured selves in opposition to the usual third person perspective. Performed photography intentionally blurs third and first person perspectives.

Within Performed Photography the photographs are not merely a record of a live action, but the performative act (event) and the record are collapsed into a single utterance and are indistinguishable as separate parts of the work. There is a ‘singularity’ about them rather than the cool dispassionate and distanced binary relationship inherent in mainstream documentary practice. The photograph should not be seen as a record of an event, nor is the performative act privileged as an event worthy of record.

In this way it is possible to start to see the benefits of gaining new access points for knowledge and the conveyance of meaning via photography, from inventing new methodologies and strategies such as performed photography and other non-specific hybrid mediums.

The Drifting Document

PAUL+A

Performed for the first time at LOCWS INTERNATIONAL (Swansea, Wales, Sept. 2002) this work is loosely based on the ‘Situationist’ theory of the ‘derive’, or drift, and consists of two elements, a 24hr ‘drift’ around the city, followed by a museum installation of the artefacts and records generated.

Drifting is the practice of the arbitrary navigation of a city in the pursuit of anarchy, play and poetry. The aim; to reclaim the city for subjective experience and pure pleasure. Dressed by top fashion designer, Hugo Boss; Paul+a become lost and intoxicated by the city, slowly rubbing away the veneer of civilisation in order to expose the ‘poetry of the everyday’. The ‘situations’ encountered/manufactured were “documented” by Paul on a hand held 5 X 4 field camera on Polaroid type 55 film and by T. Dillon on a Nikon digital coolpix, with movie clip. The result of this interventionist strategy is a subjective snapshot of the city over a 24hr period providing a contemporary enigmatic document of the city of Swansea generated from a series of performative escapades.

Essentially a poetic game, the idea is to rediscover the experience of being lost and intoxicated by the ‘city’. The derive is the practice of disorder, and disorientation of the subject in the city, based on arbitrary taxi rides, instinctual or snap decisions, and the pull of certain areas or places. As Guy Debord has said the purpose is to negate the purposeful structure of the modern city, and create poetry out of existing conditions.

Staying as faithful as possible to the spirit of the ‘Situationist International’, our aims are particularly concerned with the concept of ‘psycho-geography’, ie: the imaginative mapping of the city based on subjective experience rather than the commercial rationale of town planners. It is envisaged that an enigmatic and existential document will be produced from these performative encounters, although it is impossible to predict the precise nature of the images. The properties of the photographic document are by necessity subverted by these radical strategies and the notions of objectivity, truth, and rationale are unhinged from the photographic project. Crucially though the concepts of witness and testimony remain, albeit now aligned to a more contemporary subjectivity.

This ‘drift’ was over a 24 hr period from 6pm, 23rd Aug. 2002 and was carried out by Paul Jeff and T. Dillon.

PAUL+A.

Drifting Timeline

August 23rd 2002, Session 1, 
18.00 – 24.00

Swansea Institute, Townhill
, Uplands Tavern, 
Bar Reef, 
Kingsway
, Wind St
, No Sign bar
, La Cantina, 
Queens Hotel
, Pizza Express

August 24th 2002, Session 2, 
24.00 – 6.00

Monkey Bar, 
Castle St, 
Wind St
, Kingsway
, Top Banana, 
Mozart’s

August 24th 2002, Session 3, 
6.00 – 12.00

Sizzlers, 
Beach, 
Costa Coffee, 
Oxford St

August 24th 2002, Session 4, 
12.00 – 18.00

Plantasia
, High St
, Taxi Ride
, Eleo’s
, Carnival
, Kingsway
, Bar Reef
, Swansea Institute, Townhill

Introduction

This site is a showcase for the photographic experiments of Paul Jeff who as PAUL+A, and in collaboration with featured artists, is attempting to re-invigorate photography as a time-based medium. Bored of the ‘spatial’ picture making that has thus far mainly defined photographic practice PAUL+A aim to develop a practice of ‘Performed Photography’.

The work on this site demonstrates an attempt to formulate a time-based conception of photography, in response to a particularly held perception that the ‘world as picture’ has been more or less exhausted. The alternative assertion here is that photography should be interpreted in its complex relations to the concept of event, rather than its reified and literal manifestation as picture.

This means shifting allegiance from the current spatialised system of representation that it resides within, and a quantitative philosophical framework as bequeathed by the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. In contrast to this status quo it is suggested that photography can utilise the dynamism, flow, mobility, and multiplicity of interpretation posited principally by three uniquely modern thinkers, Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Using what has been termed ‘new Bergsonism’ as a methodology, it is my assertion that through a re-alignment of its spatio-temporal constituencies to a more even degree, then photography, especially in its interpretive possibilities, can be re-invigorated with new potentialities.

Vital to the Paul+a project is Bergson’s credo of thinking in terms of time rather than space, and with the inception of a new temporalised medium there is a necessity to interrogate the legibility of photography as it resides in a new qualitative moment. The practice attempts to formulate both a compliment to the spatial ‘decisive moment’ of Cartier-Bresson, as well as a possible time-based practice based on the energising effects of performativity, and termed here ‘performed photography’.