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The Photographic
Legacy of Post-Object Art...continued
Christina Barton
If being there actually witnessing
the performance, encountering the work was thought
to be vital, if the audience had to be a participant
(as Bruce Barber preferred) then what becomes
of the work in its historical aftermath? Should
we view the fact that documentation now functions
like a surrogate art object and therefore is
capable of being valued as a precious artefact,
as proof of the 'failure' of conceptual art?
Or is its relocation as an image a refusal of
categorisation, museumification, an effective
form of ongoing resistance? Despite claims otherwise,
I believe documentation has always been critical
to post-object art and that photo-documentation
serves a particular purpose in the critical
and reflexive methodologies of conceptual artists.
It is more than a secondary supplement that
does not attempt to replace the absent (and
therefore privileged) original, but rather seeks
to interpolate itself in an active and self-critical
fashion into the discursive framework. Furthermore,
I would argue that, meta-discursively, the photo-document
serves to chart a gradual shift, as we move
from the 1970s to the 1980s, away from the primacy
of the live event and its material and experiential
actualities, to a growing investment in and
ultimate deferral to its secondary textualisation.
This may be post-object art"s fate but it is
also its legacy. Briefly, and to conclude, I
want to offer three examples to explain this
point. In 1974, Billy Apple undertook an important
tour of New Zealand, executing a number of installation
works in various venues around the country.
These consisted of "subtractions" or "alterations"
of actual spaces and posed a radical alternative
to conventional notions of sculpture. At the
Auckland City Art Gallery he executed two works
in the two adjacent galleries on the first floor.
In one of these he removed the wax polish from
an 8 x 8 square of floor tiles and in the other,
he painted the requisite number of floor tiles
along the far wall to make it appear to a viewer,
able to see both galleries simultaneously, that
the two spaces were of equal dimensions. This
radical emptying of the gallery must have had
a disorienting effect on visitors who would
have had to spend some time there literally
looking for the art. I can imagine a confused
milling or tentative foray or even an ignorant
and un-seeing passage through the space. The
works were recorded by the gallery photographer
(John Daley) and published with documentation
of a number of other works Apple undertook,
with a commentary by Wystan Curnow in an issue
of the Auckland City Art Gallery Quarterly.[15]
These photographs, while not formalist, do however
fix the view. The orderly geometry of the architecture
and the relentless grid of the floor tiles are
reproduced in the photographic images in strict
symmetry, their point of view relentless in
its replication of an ordering, optical perspective.
Here then, the temporal experience of being
in the space was replaced by the fixity of a
single instant. Set on the page, text and image
replicate the geometrical grid that organises
the space. No doubt on the artist"s instruction,
the photographer has chosen to present us with
an ideal view. This makes legible the work"s
allegiance to a minimalist aesthetic and procedure.
Accompanied by an expository essay, the documentation
functions conventionally as text and illustration
whereby the text establishes a suitably objective
vantage point from which to view the work. Thus
the ordered stasis of the perspectives organised
in the photography serves as a visual equivalent
to the critical distance evident in the writing.
Both seem to confirm the logical separation
of art and commentary and the priority of the
live event in light of its subsequent explication.
However, this is complicated by the fact that
the work itself only survives as documentation.
This is no conventional reproduction. It does
not illustrate some absent real object. Indeed,
set amongst the conventional art historical
essays also included in the journal, these images
are somewhat troubling. In their problematic
standing-in for the original, the photographs
here function like some uncanny double with
their own supplementary meaning. For the removal
of the floor wax, which typifies Apple"s ambition
to make work out of the givens of the situation
has an indexical relation to the space similar
to the photograph"s indexical relation to the
work. Both are granted meaning that is contingent,
both therefore refuse autonomy and the distance
between art object and documentation begins
to blur. Moving to the early 1980s and the performance
work of Peter Roche and Linda Buis we find a
somewhat different order of documentation. Their
performances were structured around the dynamics
of their physical and psychological interaction,
and their negotiation of the relationship between
performers and spectators. Each work was undertaken
over a particular period of time and acted out
within the confines and at times, in relation
to the limits, of an actual context. If the
accounts of those exemplary witnesses, Tony
Green and Wystan Curnow are anything to go by,
these were no comfortable affairs. For the repetitive,
arduous and at times emotionally charged interchange
was designed to make the audience think: about
their role as observers and how they might or
should respond. But in their documentation,
which is some of the most visually arresting
of the period, the duration of the event and
the endurance it required were replaced by single
images of particular moment.[16] Though Roche and Buis
used film in their work they seem to have preferred
still imagery as the primary form of its documentation
and distribution. Photographs of performances
were taken by friends and fellow artists, in
particular Ron Brownson and Greg Burke. The
photographs often distilled the essential charge
of the event, hypostasised the occasion. The
single image serves a different function to
that of the actual event, then. Its focus on
and capture of a moment or series of moments
accords meaning that is both part of the action
but separate from it. Being the work of an unnamed
third party, given the freedom to document as
they saw fit, it shifts the usual relation of
the photograph to the artist as author of their
work, to a second order of significance as a
commentary or mode of interpolation. The photograph
is what the work meant to this invisible collaborator.
It is not only then a picture of the
work but a picture about the work. When
placed in the context of a journal article these
photographs continue to function discursively,
but now as one order of sign amongst others.
This is the case in 'Peter Roche/Linda Buis.
A Gathering Concerning Three Performances' a
piece compiled by Wystan Curnow and published
in Parallax in 1983.[17]
Here a sequence of first-hand accounts by Curnow
and Green, of three performance works are interspersed
with recollections and commentaries by the artists.
These run alongside un-captioned documentary
images whose scale and presentation mirror the
textual page layout. The piece functions as
a non-linear, first person, multi-voiced narrative
that endeavours to offer a written and visual
record of past work. It does this not by assuming
the critical distance of objective interpretation,
but rather by a process of experiential montage
and compilation. Here images and words function
as equivalent 'texts'. There is an attempt to
re-present the performance in a manner that
refuses the functions of interpretation, but
which does not deny the problem of narrativisation.
In its shifts from live action to recollection;
from the movement of actual bodies to the stasis
of single images; in its slippage from linear
time to the shifting temporal zones of memory
and intention; and in its multiple and proliferating
viewpoints this text declares itself of a different
order to the live performance, but also to the
usual formats and expository styles of the scholarly
journal. The piece does not assume that the
object of art can be fixed and anatomised, granted
a single meaning, indeed it does not have a
single author. Crucially, it works in acknowledgement
of the problems of representation, of the likelihood
of different interpretations, faulty memory,
misplaced emphasis. It is not surprising then
that it appears in a journal of postmodern literature
and art (indeed the first of its kind in New
Zealand). Here, perhaps for the first time,
an intertextual reading of a work is postulated.[18] My final example refers to post-object art
but is of a different order. It is a recipient
of that history and a commentator on it, operating,
I think as a potential valedictory. This is
an installation by Julian Dashper: Motorway
Schools, first staged at 100m2,
one of New Zealand's first alternative art spaces,
in 1980. This work has been re-presented on
a number of occasions in the form of documentation
and, in this capacity, I consider it to be one
of the first examples of post-conceptual art
to be undertaken in New Zealand. It is of particular
interest in this context because it is a temporary,
site-specific work in which photography plays
a key role. But also because, in its after-life,
it is a self-conscious example of conceptual
art as documentation. The exhibition
consisted of a sequence of four sets of three
polaroid photographs of a generic institutional
building, a typical 'Nelson Block', which was
the school of the title[19] and a soundtrack of motorway traffic. As Tim
Walker wrote in Art New Zealand this
was one of the best uses of this particular
space, which had previously functioned as a
small, inner-city factory and warehouse.[20]
Perhaps this was because the artist had spent
a week sitting in the space before deciding
what to do and because the minimal intervention
Dashper eventually made served to reinforce
or draw out the inherent meanings of the site.
Although the show was only on for five days
it not only generated the article by Walker,
but also two short reviews by fellow students
at Auckland University where Dashper was still
at art school. These corroborate Walker's assertion
that the work functioned as a critique of the
instituitional and technological infrastructures
within which we operate. One author recalled
bored moments at school when she, as a kid,
was physically present but mentally absent,
and the other imagined the motorway as a metaphor
for the 'fast-lane' onto which we are all meant
to embark.[21] Subsequently, however, on at least three occasions
(1989, 1994 and 1999),[22]
Dashper has re-presented the work, not in its
original configuration for the space has long
since been demolished but in a vitrine. Here
he has laid out the polaroid snaps, the cassette
tape of the recorded sounds, and the original
signage, with professional photographs of the
installation (taken by Peter Hannken), together
with a copy of Art New Zealand open to
the pages of Walker"s article. Self-consciously,
then, Dashper makes us aware of the fate of
site-specific work and of the operations of
primary and secondary documentation. His work
is no longer about schools and motorways and
their effects on our lives, it has no bearing
on that social circumstance. Nor is it really
about the ephemerality or resistance of such
installation practice. Rather it is about the
process of inscription of artistic acts as texts
and of their eventual institutionalisation and
historicisation. In its quotation of conceptual
art documentation this is a postmodern work.
By accomplishing its own critical self-reflection,
Motorway Schools is rendered impermeable
both to the social realm of which it was once
a part and to its critical or discursive milieu
where commentators once effectively collaborated.
It seems to await acquisition by the museum,
its ultimate mise-en-abyme. Dashper has
thus shifted the tense of his practice from
the "present-ness" of post-object art to one
of "past-ness", which is of course postmodernism's
condition. We are witnesses to a subtle slippage,
a waiving of the potential of post-object art;
a knowing deferral to the power and pervasiveness
of the frame, of the distancing effects of art
as representation. It may have been this that
I refused when I embarked on my research in
the first place. Now I can (or must) appreciate
the significance of the various ways such works
fold their meanings into their mode of re-presentation
and of the role photography plays in this process.
For it is a condition from which there is no
escape, a fact rendered visible by post-object
artists, and made their business. Critically,
knowingly, resistantly engaging this intertwined
nexus of events, images and texts, post-object
art not only challenged the autonomy and status
of the art object but also tested and teased
its discursive spaces. It is in this inter-textual
domain that such work continues to operate,
charging the art historian to reconsider the
nature of their objects and to question the
limits and shape of their discipline.
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