fb6Bve CHRTSTOPHER 10fDDOC A white (naked) middle~aged man (me1) grapples with something (silently) between his knees. You will never know2 what or its completion3 . The stage4 (if you can call it that) bears traces5 of some, or other6, gesture7. You (in space) ride over8 him. Your body draws him out; draws out his partness9. If this is 'l ive' it was not meant for public view10: his live body's documentation is Now11; its authenticity12 . ' In discussing the artist's body and modes of self-exposure, Amelia Jones stresses three key issues in her engagement with body art: " ... a performative conception of the artist/self as in process, [that this conception is] commodifiable as art object, and [is] intersubjectively related to the audience/interpreter" (1998: 12). As such, her emphasis marks an interdependence between artist, subject and audience located within a notion of performativity in which the meanings or readings of body art are " ... contingent on the process of enactment rather than attributing motives to the authors as individuals or origins of consciousness and intentionality ... " (1998: 10). This describes not only a contingency between subject and object , artist and spectator, but also a more complex notion of a subject as intersubjective in a process of self-exposure. Jones places particular emphasis on artists who, in photographing themselves, perform both author and object (1998: 10). 2 An emphasis on 'processes of enactment' is important to Gavin Butt as he outlines in The Paradoxes of Criticism the problematics of a notion of 'critical distance' as a legacy of the Enlightenment's positioning of t he critic or theorist as a judicious authority and interpreter of art and culture. He seeks out perfor,,.;ative approaches to criticism that resist the critic as positioned (authoritively) outside the 'text': "That is to say that the theorist, rather than being remote from t hat which he or she surveys, is ... enmeshed in the very, perhaps even 'creative,' production of the cultural fabric it self" (2005: 3). This is part of an ongoing and contemporary move to resist privileged modes of making, viewing and interpreting in favour of the operations inherent in the 'liveness' of performativity as reciprocal and ;\\ways in motion. In this light Jones' main motivation is to " ... re-embody the subjects of making and viewing art" (1998: 11). 3 A lack of completion is the kind of concept that Paul Schimmel pursues in relation to objects that result from performative action when he states that the performative act offers " ... the opportunity to unravel the systems and st ructures that provide a false sense of solidity in a world that is forever in fiux" (1998: 119). From the perspective of the 'auteur' in theatre Rebecca Schneider describes a shift from 'solo artist' to 'active agent' in a " ... slippage in genre boundaries together with a shifting of the site of art onto performance understood as an artist 's act" (2005: 41). She sees this as an 'unbecoming' of the solo performance by means of an 'act-based' art that is, in turn, recorded as a kind of archive that drives the ' live' moment. 5 For Schneider this 'act-based' art is all the more exacerbated by the archive/object of the photographs and videos as trace. In Schneider words, my body " ... gestures toward it s own excess ... " (2005: 42). ' Jones notes that the artist is " ... self-consciously performed through new, openly intersubjective contexts (including video or ironicized modes of photographic display) which insist upon the openness of this and all subjects to the other" (1998: 67 emphasis added). In her analysis of Jackson Pollock, where she coins the term 'Pollockian performative,' her specific concern is to " ... interrogate the normative values inscribed in the trope of the artist genius epitomized by the modernist Jackson Pollock ... " (1998: 103). She is interested in how Pollock 'gets performed' by an innumerable number of interpretive contexts such as artist, photographer, critic, historian and, over any period of time, contemporary and historical (1998: 268n41]. Like Jones, Schimmel emphasises that this notion of getting performed (Jones' term] also applies to the forms of mediated documentation that make certain performances visible and that construct their reception such as Namuth's photographs of Pollock as opposed to the actions of Pollock per se. Schimmel states in relation to Pollock that " ... each gesture 'animates' the subsequent moves, producing a non-narrative linearity that focuses t he viewer's attention on the performative dimensions of the act of painting." 7 As a number of writers have noted, Michael Fried's 1967 attack on Minimalism as linked to theat ricality (performative gesture) can be described as marking a shift from Modernism to Postmodernism. There are numerous critiques of Michael Fried's notion of theatricality. See Jones where she 'rereads' Minimalism via the works of Robert Morris and Tony Smith from a feminist phenomenological viewpoint prioritising interpretation as an ongoing process (1999).

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Christopher Braddock

See Hubert Kloeker where he writes that Vito Acconci, Morris, Nauman et al. are " ... a direct consequence of the performative gesture in the works of Pollock and Newman." These were the kinds of artists Fried named as 'literalists,' " ... in transfixing the moment of t ransformation from painting to object... as all encompassing ... the spatial, the performative and the concept oriented ... " (1998: 162--3). This is to describe a space not only of interdisciplinarity but also one in which there is a contingency between artist, spectators and objects. It is what provokes Fran~oise Parfait to deduce that video installation more than ever before permits the spectator to 'stand in the image' (2006: 63). 8 Comparing Pollock's production to David Siqueiros' 1936 production of protest banners in NYC on the floor of an industrial loft in which Pollock and his brother participated, Rosalind Krauss describes a plausible introduction to Pollock

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of a low cultured political activity that visually topples the verticality of mainstream production, but is nevertheless still culture. Regarding Pollock's move in January 1947 to work on the floor she writes: "The floor, Pollock's work seemed to propose, in being below culture, was out of the axis of the body, and thus also below form" (Bois and Krauss 1997: 97). There were no run-offs as with the works of Willem de Koening or Robert Motherwell but only the " ... oily, scabby, shiny, ropey qualities of the self-evident horizontal mark-that would pit itself against the visual formation of the Gestalt, thus securing the condition of the work as formless" (Bois and Krauss 1997: 97). ' As a means of articulating a flow of events and their relationship to ritual contexts, Brian Massumi employs a parable of the soccer match and sketches out the playing field as a force-field describing the players as part objects and the ball as a part subject. He does this by defining the ball as " ... the focus of every player and the object of every gesture" (2002: 73). In this context the player is not the subject of the play but the ball. As he goes on to say: "Since the ball is nothing without the continuum of potential it doubles, since its effect is depeni:lent on the physical presence of a multiplicity of other bodies and objects of various kinds; since the parameters of its actions are regulated by the application of rules, for all these reasons the catalytic object-sign may be called a part-subject. The part-subject catalyzes the play as a whole but is not itself a whole" (2002: 73). In this way the body figures not as a whole body but as a part body: a foot that kicks where the kicking is not an expression of the player inasmuch as a response to the ball 'drawing out' the kick (just as the body/s of the audience might be viewed as part object/s (or part body/s) where their participatory agency is not so much driven by intentional and directed 'viewing' inasmuch as drawn out by the part subjects of the Take series). And typical of the unlimited contexts in which performativity might be articulated, the players are drawn out of themselves, looking beyond the ball as they take in a myriad of external factors that might include, but are never exhaustive of, other players' movements, the crowd, the extended TV footage. 10 Jones is, " ... interested in work that may or may not initially have taken place in front of an audience: in works ... that take place through an enactment of the artist's body, whether it be in a 'performance' setting or in the relative privacy of the studio, that is then documented such that it can be experienced subsequently through photography, film, video and/or text" (1998: 13). Jones introduces this argument in a previous essay where she says that her u~e of the term 'body art' in preference to 'performance art' " ... is informed by an embodied, phenomenological model of intersubjectivity ... " 11 In Jacques Derrida's questioning of the 'now' there is never a ' live' moment as it is already encountered. He writes that " ... the indefinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already inscribed there the space of repetition and the splitting of the self" (1976: 163). Every presentation is made possible on the grounds of disappearance and something must be preserved for disappearance to happen. Once again, as Dl?\'ida writes, " ... this operation of supplementation is not exhibited as a break in presence but rather as a continuous and homogeneous reparation and modification of presence in the representation" (1988: 5). And as Adrian Heathfield and Jones put it: "The supplement, precisely that which exceeds signification and promises but forever fails to deliver presence, critically dismantles this reliance [on the 'live' moment) by exposing its limits. All live art plays with or relies on the paradox of the supplement (the way in which the live body promises something 'more' than representation but always already fails to give that which can secure meaning (the real, or immortality) once and forever)" (2007: 3). 12 Philip Auslander argues for a distinction in performance documentation between the documentary and the theatrical where the latter suggests performances staged solely to be fi lmed with no meaningful prior existence presented to audiences (2006: 1). In introducing the idea of 'performative documentation' he proffers the notion of authenticity, rather than the idea of the photograph, and its indexical trace to the 'real' event, as what governs the 'performance' of documentation. And on this point he says that the relationship between the document and its audiences is crucial in establishing authenticity. As Auslander writes: "Perhaps the authenticity of the performance document resides in its relationship to its beholder rather than to an ostensibly originary event: perhaps its authority is phenomenological rather than ontological" (9).

Christopher Braddock

References Auslander, Philip (2006). "The Performativity of Performance Documentation," A Journal af Performance and Art 28 (3), 1- 10.

Bois, Yve-Alain and Krauss, Rosalind (1997), Formless: A User's Guide [New York: Zone Books). Butt, Gavin (2005), " Introduction: The Paradoxes of Criticism," in Gavin Butt (ed.), After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing), 1- 19. Derrida, Jacques (1976), Of Grammotology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). --- (1988), "Signature Event Context," in Gerald Graff (ed.), Limited Inc (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press), 1- 21.

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Heathfield, Adrian and Jones, Amelia (2007), "Draft for Circulation of the Forthcoming Book: Perform, Repeat, Record: A Critical Anthology of Live Art in History," (University of Manchester and Roehampton University). Jones, Amelia (1998), Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). --- (1999), "Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning", in Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (eds.), Performing the Body/Performing the Text (London: Routledge), 39-SS. Kloeker, Hubert (1998), "Gesture and the Object: Liberation as Aktion: A European Component of Performative Art," Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), 159-19S. Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press). Parfait, Fran~oise (2006), "Installations in Collection," Collection: New Media Installations (Paris: Edition du Centre George Pompidou), 32~3. Schimmel, Paul (1998), " Leap Into the Void: Performance and the Object," Out of Actions: Between Performance and. the Object, 1949-1979 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), 17-119. Schneider, Rebecca (2005), "Solo Solo Solo," in Gavin Butt (ed.), After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing), 23--47.

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