Performance As Score

These days I am missing an IMPORTANT series of performances by Marina Abramovic
at the Guggenheim,
where she replicates a few landmark pieces of performance's young history.



My schedule is tight, I've had things to do here, and now
I'm rushing to get a place to stay in New York to see if
I can catch the end of that series.

Tonight I am missing a legendary reprise of the Beuys piece
"How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare" (1965).



My big consolation is not so much that there will be a book
and video published about this event, but that Marina
made me realize one thing, that performance
art, really like theatre, can be performed again and
again by whoever feel the need to perform them.
That instead of watching Marina doing it, I can
just go and start talking to dead hares myself.


In fact, Diane Borsato herself rendered her homage
to the famous Beuys piece recently.



I am astonished to hear that some performance
artists refused to Marina the right to replicate their pieces.
Apparently, the artist didn't even need those rights, but
insisted upon them considering she was going to stage them
in a major institution, and publish a book about it.
She insisted that the original artists get the money from
the publishing of the book. (read the interview yourself,
here)



I don't think anyone should own copyright to actions.
I think performance, like theatre or ritual, is
an art of the social, that it should belong to everybody.
Its history, linked in great part to the Fluxus movement,
specified from the beginnings the ideal performance
as being a score.



For an author, the act of writing a theatre
piece is an act of abandon of authorship.
You are committing, as a writer, to let your piece
unfolds and transformed by the various interpretations that
other people will eventually make of it. This is the essence and
beauty of this craft.


Performance artists like to think that they
come from the visual art sphere, but truth is
that they share a lot with theatre.
Most of the time. performance is a spectacle, to be seen
by a public or through the screen of documentation.

It is perhaps much more close to ritual than
theatre, but theatre actually evolved from ritual,
and rituals, though usually directed by a cast
of initiated, are also performed from generations to
generations through a process of tradition.


If you want to nail yourself to a car tomorrow and
pay homage to Chris Burden, I don't see why you can't do
it. I don't see how performance can, or should be,
copyrighted.


On the other hand, if you start selling pictures
of the performance as art pieces, than you are objectifying
your actions, and in visual arts you can get problems
for replicating another person's work.


For example, in a perfect world, someone could replicate
a Vanessa Beecroft, for a couple nights events, but
selling the pictures of that as art would become problematic
(t any rates, these laws are so complex and shift so much
from countries to countries, you could as well
move to a place where laws aren't too rigid and do the heck you want.).



But to ensure the viability of performance art I think is truly
to understand that when it can, it should be re-interpreted over
and over again.


And that is where lies all the splendour of the Abramovic "festival"
in that it will upheave a great misunderstanding within the field.

That human experience, finally, is more important than the tagging
of documents, objects, and egos.


Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com