Abstract

Performance art has its genesis in the late 1950s. Although there are historical precedents in Futurism and Dada in the early twentieth-century, the performance art genre as we understand it today emerged within a general movement to democratise and dematerialise the arts. 2 It was often associated with issue-based politics – feminism, ecological and anti-nuclear issues – and time-based and process art practised by some of the Conceptualists. Video and performance art developed side by side and interacted from the late 1960s onwards. Although these two mediums can be seen as separate, the relationship between them is integral if any history of an ephemeral medium such as performance art is to enter art history. Performance art in the 1970s often stressed its “liveness” and immediacy but it was almost always mediated for a wider audience via photography and video. The “real time” aspects of video were often considered to better represent the immediacy of the event. Collaboration between artists could be said to take various forms. I am interested in the borders of collaboration and how documents of ephemeral art enter the world. Much contemporary performance art, performative photography and video art is collaborative by degrees and much of it is entangled in the politics of production. Performance photographs directed by the artist as auteur have on occasion opened up a dialogue about authorship. I am thinking particularly of the ways in which artists such as Jill Orr have consistently hired professional colleagues to document their work. Orr’s case stands out but it is probably not unique. In fact she is one of the few performance artists to consistently acknowledge her photographers. Elizabeth Campbell’s photographs of Bleeding Trees have become iconic images, one might say signature works, in Orr’s oeuvre. However, like many of Orr’s performance photographs, they are not strictly speaking photographs of the performance. In Bleeding Trees they are photographs shot in the natural environment and used as projections in the performance, but they are also the images which represent the performance. 3 Interviewed in 1987, Orr said that her performances appear to her as images she has imagined, glimpses of pre-conscious thoughts, and it is in the photographs that we see these images captured. 4 In this case, the work is assisted by others but not conceptually driven by them