What Happens When Performance Becomes Print
Published on elephant.art.Hannah Arendt, in her 1958 book The Human Condition, distinguishes three elements of life: labour, work, and action. Labour, she writes, is the domain of life-preservation. These activities are repetitive and ceaseless – the feeding, the dishes, dragging the body from place to place, cleaning its teeth, washing its clothes, tending to its skin. No matter how well we do these things, they will need to be reproduced again and again for immediate consumption, with life itself at stake.
Action, meanwhile, is when life is not biological but immortalisable. Protesting, voting, flying to the moon – these are moments when people act together in a communal space and, as political theorist Bonnie Honig writes, “contribute to the world’s web of human relations and meaning.” But both labour and action, according to Arendt, are impermanent without the element of work, which produces objects that hold the memories created by action – sculptures and books, for example.
These exclusive categories have had their interdependence revealed by both artists and scholars for decades, as they spill into one another in situations that hover on the borders of labour, work, and action, as well as the public and the domestic. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, for example, created her Maintenance Art Manifesto in 1969, in which she declared maintenance labour and all corresponding found actions and quotidian activities as art – a form of action and also somewhat one of work, born from labour.
Fluxus was also active during this time – an international artistic movement that valued collaboration and playfulness, sought to integrate art into the everyday, and prioritised presence and creation over the final product. Fluxus artists created brief, simple event scores, such as Alison Knowles’s strange and delightful gigantic salad, that recontextualised and reenchanted otherwise forgotten mundane actions, ideas, and objects to encourage alternative interactions with and perceptions of the world. Meanwhile, other members staged long, complex happenings that – though coined by Allan Kaprow as “something spontaneous, something that just happens to happen” – were planned, complex performances that blurred the lines between performer, participant, and audience: “you will become part of the happenings; you will simultaneously experience them,” Kaprow explained. The activation of the public and the performer that occured here functioned in opposition to the passive spectatorial gaze and commodification that accompanied public engagement with art.
Performance art does not attempt to create high art. Instead, it often takes its inspiration from the private sphere, embracing what Julia Bryan-Wilson calls the “annexation of everyday life into the realm of art.” This approach has remained of interest to artists over the past six decades, who seek to demystify the traditional “artist” position and dismantle hierarchical distinctions between artists, subjects, and the public. A “happening” is how artist collective The Burrow has identified their recent performance, Monobloc, which saw Zander McKenzie hunched in a domestic doorway, deconstructing and reconstructing an MG F 1.8-litre K-Series car engine for eight hours straight, by rote. The durational act called into question how frameworks of labour shape human relationships with the built environment, set on the threshold between the public and the private.
The piece toured Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester, and London over the course of a week late last year and has now been released in publication form. Alongside four texts from writers who attended the performance in their respective cities, the book includes sixty-four hours of CCTV footage and a vast selection of Muybridgean film photographs of McKenzie in motion, captured by Callum Harrison. “Each bolt placed, removed, returned, each measured motion, a response to its internal logic, and in attending, as he only can, to its minutiae, he appears to fulfil the invisible rhythms that quietly produce our days, the circuits of labour, movement, and attention that persist whether we notice them or not,” Thomas King responds in his essay. What a pleasure to read these reflections, to indulge in a bygone moment that would have occurred regardless, though now felt less alone. “I am reminded of how much I enjoy watching people work, in an indulgent way that I don’t get to enjoy or observe in daily life, as I can’t stand and watch the butcher chop meat, or the shop assistant stack shelves, the mechanic changing oil or the nurse drawing blood,” Tara McGinn writes, bringing me almost to tears in Gail’s. “Public life is not a theatre or a display although it becomes the very matter that is recreated and represented across multiple art and cultural outputs.”
To access these pages, however, the reader must unscrew two M6 bolts from the front cover, insert them through the inner pages, and re-tighten the nuts to secure the pages and access the book. The directness of this interactive binding mechanism saves it from becoming a mere Fluxus pastiche, an Egyptology-esque gimmick, or an object weighed down with the complication and sacredness of a Duchampian Boîte-en-valise. Monobloc’s design materialises the principles of McKenzie’s performance into book form; it places the reader in a small recreation of the performance – disassembly and reassembly – without yet giving them access to that knowledge. The publication, the collective’s founder Harry Boulton stresses, functions not as documentation but as an extension of the performance itself: it unifies the work “across time and place, while reflecting the distinct identities of each intervention.”
To present a physical manifestation of performance art, however, could be to belie one of its central requirements: the refusal of the commodification of the work. Performance emphasises process over product as opposed to capitalism’s inclination for the contrary, often resulting from, Andrea Fraser writes, “a self-conscious artistic critique of the cultural commodity” and the renunciation of the “exploitation of art for economic and symbolic profit.” Presenting such projects as physical commodities which engage with the commercial art system undermines the anti-commercial and democratic motivations of performance art – a bookshop, or indeed a gallery, is a place to sell things after all.
But despite its contradiction of performance practice’s principles, publishing otherwise ephemeral artworks is nonetheless beneficial for the extent of their impact on the public. The materialisation of the work within a relatively accessible space – the book is available at London’s Plaster Store and Reference Point, Glasgow’s Burning House Books, Tokyo’s Takayuki Kobayashi, Paris’s Cahier Central, and will be with Intermission Books at kurimanzutto’s Index Art Book Fair in Mexico City.
The publication of Monobloc imparts tangible form to its inherent formlessness, and a definition to its initial undefined nature, allowing those who were not present for the performance itself to, to a certain extent, engage with it. The same can be said for countless other artworks-turned-publications, such as Jenny Holzer’s Trace, whichcollects poetic and provocativephrases from three of her pioneering text series – Truisms, Living, and Survival. The ethereal smudges of graphite on tracing paper allude to the drawings she has used to create her stone benches, and thus the book marries the private moments of preparation before the works become concrete and situated in public space. But while these marble seats can be touched and trodden on, Holzer’s letters, traced by fingers with no consequences, must be handled with care.
The catalogue for Diagrams – a recent exhibition by AMO/OMA, the studio founded by Rem Koolhaas – was designed as a cardboard box, its pages untrimmed proofs that are closed on the sides and must first be torn open using the supplied tool. Without a table of contents, reading the catalogue involves a process of trial and error: leafing through the pages and searching. The texts are literally hidden amongst the illustrations, pictures and diagrams. This, they attest, is one of the characteristics of our present: the vast amounts of data means that the most important insights must be laboured for and discovered.
Meanwhile, Sophie Calle’s catalogue raisonné de l’inachevé puts to paper her unfinished projects, documenting them in elegant hardback with equal respect as her most seminal works, which deal with coincidence, chance encounters, failure and incompletion as an ending in and of itself. The opening of the publication is not unlike the uncovering of an archival folder, brown and official and embossed with gold letters. “But when everything comes to an end,” she writes, “what will become of the ideas that went nowhere, that were biding their time in boxes, in coffins? Before we die, we must catalogue our attempts, our first drafts, our abandoned projects, and give life to our intentions.”
The presentation of Monobloc’s performance as a book highlights the complexities of documenting and publishing performance art, prompting us to consider ways in which artwork can be presented to benefit the project and the public without compromising the genre’s fundamental qualities: action which is independent of material production and therefore cannot be transacted as a product. But the incongruities of presenting performance art on the page are compensated for by the discussions and the creation of relations between people beyond the original parameters of the project; the bookshop visitor flicking through the publication becomes just as important and engaged as the passer-by, perhaps more so as they disassemble and reassemble the object. The shop becomes the street and the bookshop visitor the flâneur. Art books – regardless of their various points and purposes, from documentation to experimentation to being hurled through police station windows – are multidimensional products of labour, work, and action that reassert a human need continue to create objects that merit attention, admiration, and affection.